1. Fiction or prediction?

Comment #77911 by jonecc on October 11, 2007 at 5:02 am

Religions developed as defences against the virus of chance. Prayer had so often proved a false hope, destroying rationality. When the Romans left these shores, the inhabitants killed off all cats, suspecting them to be companions of witches. Rats multiplied. Rats brought in the Black Death. Thousands died. Thousands prayed. Cats did not return.

2. Logical Path from Religious Beliefs to Evil Deeds

Comment #75273 by jonecc on October 2, 2007 at 8:05 am

The problem with religion as a basis for ethics is that the most important relationship isn't between people, but between people and the divine. This is true of religious 'moderates' as well as of 'fundamentalists'.

When the hypothesised divine will directs believers in a direction which happens to coincide with human happiness, good can result, but good could equally have resulted from a secular ethical analysis. When it directs believers the other way, the results are worse than a secular ethical analysis would have produced, because by definition secular ethics are focussed on human welfare.

3. Honest Mistakes or Willful Mendacity

Comment #68181 by jonecc on September 6, 2007 at 9:52 am

I think something slightly subtler may be going on.

There was a cleric whose name I'm afraid I forget, who gave some sermons a few months ago against RD that were reproduced in here. In one of them, he said that the religious experience was less like science than like literary analysis. I think he used the specific analogy of Shakespeare. It struck me at the time that this is a useful insight into the religious mindset.

When religious people think, particularly the less literal kind that we often label moderates, they don't seem to analyse as such. Instead, they weave dense webs of allusion in which anything can mean virtually anything else, and the experience of saying it or thinking it is of more interest than its truth value.

They imagine that we are incapable of weaving such webs, which is the basis of suggestions like the one made by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown the other day that we simply don't see the beauty in a seascape. What they don't understand is that actually we can weave them perfectly well, but we choose to keep the techniques of literary criticism for literary criticism. When we want to establish what is true, we use the techniques of establishing what is true, and when we want to watch the sea we probably do something fairly similar to what she does, but without the tooth fairies.

When RD argues, he means something precise by everything he says. His clarity of exposition had a profound effect on me when I first read The Blind Watchmaker twenty years ago. People of a spiritual bent just don't see that precision, which is the mark of a mind which has been through a certain kind of training, any more than you can just intuitively get car mechanics if you've never stuck your hand under a bonnet.

They grasp onto RD's words as if they were lines in a play, and throw them into a big melting pot, from which they pull them out as required. They do this to his words because they do it to everybody's, including each other's. We see straw men, and mendacity, where there may only be inadequate training in the rigour of proper argument.

Or maybe he's just a big lying liar, of course.

4. What do these atheists understand of religion?

Comment #67333 by jonecc on September 3, 2007 at 4:38 am

We can pick apart the arguments, and you all have. What really bugs me about this kind of thing is the arrogant claim to a richer inner life. They say things like

Faith is the light of the moon above and that light in the sea, reality and spirituality, both making you tremblingly conscious of forces vast and beyond words. Impertinent scientists cannot know what they speak of.

5. Gene regulation in humans is closer than expected to simple organisms

Comment #66561 by jonecc on August 30, 2007 at 12:26 pm

I'm kind of an enthusiastic amateur myself, Corylus, but as I understand it you're correct. DNA is kind of like a computer program, where operations are handled by subroutines, and the 'control' code, like control genes, says which subroutines are run, what order they're run in, how many times they're repeated, and so on.

This doesn't of course help the ID position, because an intelligent designer would design more often from scratch, rather than editing subroutines or control patterns from previous programs. The fact that we share so much of our DNA with yeast could in itself be offered as evidence for evolution through natural selection.

Which is a bit like saying that the physics of lightning is an argument against the existence of Thor. It's true, but meteorologists would find it tiresome to have to keep saying so. The persistence of ID is such a nuisance mainly because it distracts from the really interesting stuff like this.

6. Gene regulation in humans is closer than expected to simple organisms

Comment #66550 by jonecc on August 30, 2007 at 11:35 am

Well I thought it was fascinating. In particular, the conclusion.

... the most basic underlying principles and strategies used by the genomes of higher organisms to regulate gene expression are quite close to those used by simple organisms like bacteria and yeast.

7. The Politics of God

Comment #64904 by jonecc on August 22, 2007 at 9:15 am

Veronique:

As your brother rightly says, Europe's religious wars have been unjustly neglected. Part of the problem is that in the English speaking world German history is absurdly focussed on the period of Nazism. I wanted to read a book about the general history of Germany, so I went to my local bookstore. The German history section was 90% about that period, with a few books on the first world war or East Germany under the communists. In the end, I bought one from Amazon. Now the Amazon personality profiler has me down for German history, and continually offers me new books about Hitler.

hungarianelephant: As you say, it's hard to draw definite conclusions, and there's probably a pushmepullyou kind of effect going on. I have often argued on this site that this is a subject we need to understand better. If there is a book out there which collates existing data on the relationship between religious belief and social and economic factors, I would love to read it. I would write it, but I don't have the skills, resources or leisure time. Many books seem to touch on it, but I've been unable to find a concise summary. Does anyone have any suggestions?

8. The Politics of God

Comment #64883 by jonecc on August 22, 2007 at 7:27 am

It was a very interesting piece. I thought he was correct to argue that there was no inevitability to secular progress, but undervalued the importance of social and economic factors.

For instance, he talks about Nazism almost as if it was a theological event, appealing to Germans for religious reasons. In 1928, support for the Nazis was limited to a few per cent of the German population. Then the Depression arrived, millions of Germans lost their jobs, and Hitler came to power as a result.

Across the world today, there is a clear negative correlation between religious observance and economic wellbeing, education, political freedom and so on. If we want to make a secure secular world, then we have to arrange things so everyone gets a slice of the good life.

Of course, that isn't the whole story. Islam, for instance, has evolved (I think it's reasonable to use the E-word) the ability to pass down from parents to children by undermining the child's ability to think for themselves before social forces can act. Other religions also do this, of course, although it's arguable that Islam is the most successful. Thus we see doctors and the like strapping bombs on and hurling themselves (rather incompetently) at British airports.

If we want to erect a wall of separation where it doesn't exist and protect it where it does, then we need a two-pronged approach. We need to make it as hard as possible for one generation to prevent the next having a free choice, whilst making secular prosperity and security accessible to as many as possible.

9. Sikh girl will convert for a place at Catholic school

Comment #64439 by jonecc on August 20, 2007 at 5:08 am

The truly shocking thing is the way that church and state work hand in hand. Because the church pays for a small proportion of the cost of education, they're allowed to run these discriminatory policies.

10. Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years

Comment #64432 by jonecc on August 20, 2007 at 4:02 am

We've been off on a bizarro diversion on the subject of evolution, but it's vitalism which would be wounded by a successful result.

Scientists take chemical building blocks, they do their stuff, and a living being results. At no point was any kind of vital spark added. Therefore, there is clearly no need to add a vital spark to create life. As Janus said, "Biology reduces to chemistry, chemistry reduces to physics."

When it comes to evolution, we have other evidence.

11. After 60 Years, Will Pakistan Be Reborn?

Comment #63650 by jonecc on August 15, 2007 at 7:58 am

If you're interested in the history above, Salman Rushdie's novel "Shame" tells it very movingly.

12. Why Richard Dawkins is right on alternative medicine - but not when it comes to religion

Comment #62531 by jonecc on August 10, 2007 at 3:43 am

Not only are the nice liberal vicars unrepresentative of religion in the world, they're fairly unrepresentative of the Church of England.

Remember, this is an almost completely top down organisation where all decisions are made by the powerful few at the top, which still struggles over gay and women priests, and which manages to find space for Protestant sectarians, Evangelists and the like.

13. Curriculum for Baptist School

Comment #62310 by jonecc on August 9, 2007 at 8:34 am

I thought it must be a joke as well, but if it is it's an elaborate one.

Their website is appallingly laid out. Half the pages (including the one above) link to no other page, including the home page, and it's littered with spelling errors. If it was a spoof, you'd expect higher design standards.

14. Leading Article: Divine inspiration

Comment #61644 by jonecc on August 6, 2007 at 4:40 am

This isn't a measure of what MPs are reading, it's a measure of what they want their constituents to think they're reading.

Which makes it even better news. They know that the majority of the people who elect them aren't religious.

15. New age therapies cause 'retreat from reason'

Comment #61488 by jonecc on August 5, 2007 at 10:56 am

drive1:

I'm not sure that this TV piece is a part of the New Atheist movement as such. Isn't it more something RD would be doing as part of his Simonyi remit to improve the public understanding of science? Or just because he felt like it? If I was in his position, I could well imagine feeling that way.

Having said that, there is of course an intellectual coherence to putting the two together. Religious evangelists and astro-homeopathic types both typically ascribe their beliefs to personal experience which goes beyond rational analysis, and when I find myself arguing with either type it's useful to be able to point out that both they and the other type make mututally exclusive claims on similarly subjective grounds.

Once I've pointed out the massive range of weird and wonderful things people are prepared to believe on the basis of subjective, anecdotal experience, I then go on to argue that evidential analysis is the only tool we have to transcend this subjectivity.

They really hate it when I do that, which isn't by any means the worst part of it.

16. New age therapies cause 'retreat from reason'

Comment #61431 by jonecc on August 5, 2007 at 6:20 am

I went through an 'alternative phase' twenty years ago. It only lasted a few years, fortunately. The conclusion I came to about the therapies I tried was this.

The people who practice it are genuinely caring people, who give you their full attention for the session (typically an hour). Very few of them make the kind of money people like Chopra make, and in their heads they're doing their bit to make the world a better place. This is unfortunately a delusional belief, based on a misunderstanding of their results.

They are a self-selected group, as people who are unable to generate results through the placebo effect are selected out, and abandon that line of work. Similarly, patients are a self-selected group, as those who are unresponsive to the placebo effect stop going.

With two self-selected groups, you would expect to get exactly what you do get - superficially impressive anecdotal evidence, which can't be reproduced under rigorous tests which follow proper procedures.

Whilst there are charlatans involved, the majority are simply people with untrained minds who get fooled, and then fool others in their turn. Just like with religion.

17. Atheists of the world: unite!

Comment #61427 by jonecc on August 5, 2007 at 6:00 am

Russell:

It happened to me the first few times, but then stopped. I guess maybe you get moderated for a short probationary period, then passed (or not, presumably).

Two slightly annoying things - you can't comment within 30 minutes of your previous comments, and you can't edit comments, as you can in here. It's good discipline, I guess, and forces you to check your comments thoroughly.

BMMcArdle: what's your objection?

18. They let anybody onto the faculty at Oxford nowadays

Comment #60712 by jonecc on August 2, 2007 at 6:12 pm

v4ri4bl3:

If you're not familiar with PZ Myers, it's well worth checking out his blog.

It's a mixture of science, secularism and Internet gossip, usually about the first two. Oh yeah, and he has this weird thing about squid. Mind you, since I started going there, so do I.

19. The Out Campaign

Comment #59926 by jonecc on July 31, 2007 at 6:15 am

Something we could push for, as part of our campaign:

Even in America, there are more atheists than there are Jews or Muslims. In the UK, we are the majority.

Wherever we are, if they get some bishop or pastor on TV or radio to comment on an issue, and they add a rabbi or an imam for balance, they should add an atheist as well. Either a well-known face like Richard's, or someone from a humanist society or the like. If they argue that humanist figures don't represent many atheists, we can argue back that rabbis and imams don't represent every one they claim to either.

20. The Out Campaign

Comment #59835 by jonecc on July 30, 2007 at 7:24 pm

Bonzai:

As I understand, it isn't that gay people have higher incomes, it's that because that they're on average less likely to parent, their disposable incomes are higher.

The gay thing here isn't a parallel, it's a metaphor. Atheists are coming out like gay people, that's the similarity. I wanted to point out a few ways in which the metaphor works. What you've done is find one way in which it doesn't. Metaphors are always like that. If I jumped out of a plane, I would fall like a stone, even if I wasn't small, round and shiny. Love is not precisely like a red, red, rose, but both have beauty and thorns.

Politics is like this. You find symbols, metaphors, dramatic ways to make a point. Even if you think the metaphor is crass, or the logo is banal, you wave the banner anyway, because that isn't what's important about the banner.

21. The Out Campaign

Comment #59822 by jonecc on July 30, 2007 at 6:35 pm

At last, a proper political campaign, and some inspiring words to get us going. Oh, it's not the end, it's not even the beginnning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning...

I think the gay analogy works quite well, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's probably the case that atheists, like gay people, are on average better off, whereas for women and black people discrimination is most crucially experienced in the economic arena. Secondly, atheists in religious families often have to go through a process of coming out, as do gay people in straight families. Thirdly, many superficially religious people aren't actually quite as religious as they make out. Doubt, like gayness, is often experienced as shame in repressive environments.

Of course, as said above, atheism is a choice rather than an orientation, but otherwise the analogy holds.

22. Don't eat at the Outback Steakhouse on Route 3...

Comment #58959 by jonecc on July 26, 2007 at 6:50 pm

On their website, they have issued a challenge to anyone who can refute the Bible, which they claim to be inerrant.

This seems on the face of it to be a rash claim, and I've emailed to accept their challenge. I'm waiting to hear back from them, so I'll keep you posted.

23. Fewer Muslims 'back suicide bombs'

Comment #58743 by jonecc on July 26, 2007 at 3:04 am

Perhaps we should have a survey to find out what percentage of westerners support killing half a million Iraqis to steal their oil.

24. Red Mosque Fueled Islamic Fire in Young Women

Comment #58299 by jonecc on July 24, 2007 at 9:36 am

I'll do my best.

25. Red Mosque Fueled Islamic Fire in Young Women

Comment #58296 by jonecc on July 24, 2007 at 9:21 am

No thongs? How about a nice cassock?

26. Red Mosque Fueled Islamic Fire in Young Women

Comment #58290 by jonecc on July 24, 2007 at 8:56 am

Gay crabs, serpents, lasers, beneficence, what's not to worship? When do I get my special thong?

27. Red Mosque Fueled Islamic Fire in Young Women

Comment #58281 by jonecc on July 24, 2007 at 8:38 am

Wow, that's a proper religion. So which do you hate more, Spaniards or pigeons?

28. Red Mosque Fueled Islamic Fire in Young Women

Comment #58279 by jonecc on July 24, 2007 at 8:18 am

Quetzalcoatl:

Just to clear up the argument, what is your position on human sacrifice? I don't have a sword, but should I be sharpening my kitchen knives? I don't have any prisoners of war either, so will my students do instead?

29. In defense of dangerous ideas

Comment #58270 by jonecc on July 24, 2007 at 7:48 am

Actually, I myself live in an area which is roughly evenly split between black, white and Asian. The picture people like you paint is nothing like the reality I live in.

I live here because I prefer it. I haven't heard people arguing as you argue in years. Powell was a bigot, and his passing was not greatly lamented, outside the far right and apparently the Netherlands.

30. Red Mosque Fueled Islamic Fire in Young Women

Comment #58250 by jonecc on July 24, 2007 at 6:31 am

There is an interesting clue to the motivation of these young women in the middle of this piece. One of them says, "My contact with books is gone. At home the only thing for me to do is take care of my parents. I clean the house. I cook."

Often, the Islamists are the only people offering any education to girls at all. Because their funding is Saudi, they teach the most unpleasant version of the religion in the modern world.

We won't defeat these ideas until a secular education is available for everyone in the Islamic world, especially girls.

31. In defense of dangerous ideas

Comment #58249 by jonecc on July 24, 2007 at 6:26 am

Well I went to bed. Either Pewkatchoo and Damien White are discussing events several time zones away from where they actually live, or they're a pair of insomniac night owls.

To answer the points raised about Enoch Powell and Asian immigration: firstly, black and Asian people were invited into the UK in the fifties because there was a labour shortage, and the government wanted someone to do the shit jobs. Powell knew this perfectly well, because he was in the Cabinet that decided the policy, but he knew he could win votes from racists by making the stance he did.

Secondly, Asian immigration into the UK has been a roaring success. The small number of deaths caused by Islamist terrorism does not change this. The major causes of murder and other preventable deaths in the UK are drink and drugs, and Muslims are under-represented in these areas.

I don't like Islam, because I'm an atheist and because I object to many of its claims and practices, but to judge by some of the comments we get in here you'd think it was the UK's major social problem. It is not.

32. In defense of dangerous ideas

Comment #58150 by jonecc on July 23, 2007 at 5:17 pm

Enoch Powell was a spiteful bigot, and has not been proven right. He argued that different races would be unable to live together without descending into a state of permanent conflict, and the history of the last twenty years shows him to have been dead wrong.

33. Religion beat became a test of faith

Comment #57849 by jonecc on July 21, 2007 at 3:35 pm

In my experience, most believers are like this. They have a powerful moral sense, a need for answers and no powers of rational analysis at all.

To read this is to feel a strong sense of empathy for a decent human being struggling to reconcile the irreconcilable, yet also to wonder why anyone would ever let their beliefs be determined by such vacuous crap. He drifts into religious belief with no evidence, and drifts out again with no coherence.

34. Face to faith

Comment #57810 by jonecc on July 21, 2007 at 7:44 am

Judging by his website, the University of London agrees that he's a sociologist. He does though say of his research that "recent and current topics include spiritual discourses in post-rave culture, the theology of Marilyn Manson, and video games as a source of moral education".

Quoting that on its own is a bit glib, of course. He seems to be mainly interested in people who have abandoned traditional religion, and the difference it makes in their lives.

I was actually thinking more of research into social and economic indicators for religious belief.

35. Face to faith

Comment #57808 by jonecc on July 21, 2007 at 7:14 am

Thanks, Logicel, he does indeed.

The link to it is http://one.revver.com/watch/334943, which is as you say the Q&A to his reading at Kepler's. It's about 14 minutes in.

If anyone is attending the big conference in September, the need to collate existing research and carry out new studies to fill in the gaps would make an excellent topic for debate.

From what I've read, I suspect that secularism thrives in societies with a decent standard of living, political freedom, good quality free education, a decent welfare state and a high level of geographical mobility. It would be nice to have this confirmed or refuted.

36. Face to faith

Comment #57794 by jonecc on July 21, 2007 at 3:20 am

I think some commenters may be muddling theology with the sociology of religion. The latter is obviously tangential to the question of whether or not there is any truth to religion, but is surely relevant to the study of its consequences.

Social science is a form of science. It is not identical with Derrida-style rambling, but involves proper research and reasoned argument. When it doesn't, it can be challenged on those grounds.

It's vital for us to engage with this study. We can point out the logical flaws in religious belief until we're blue in the face, but if we want to make a difference we have to understand why it succeeds. For instance, there are reasons why religion succeeds in the US much better than it does in northern Europe, although the two societies are superficially similar, and we need to understand them.

37. Before the New Atheists: Confessions of a Lonely Atheist

Comment #56496 by jonecc on July 16, 2007 at 3:29 am

I'm sorry, it is indeed a prequel. I would say that made her the theists' Phantom Menace, but there's nothing mediocre about her.

38. Before the New Atheists: Confessions of a Lonely Atheist

Comment #56489 by jonecc on July 16, 2007 at 2:56 am

What a star!

I think we may have found the sequel to the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens trilogy.

Has she been invited to the September conference?

39. An Atheist Responds

Comment #56257 by jonecc on July 14, 2007 at 4:25 pm

Hitchens had a very similar argument with his brother Peter recently on the radio, which was linked to from here (I can't find it - can anyone else oblige?). His brother, an extremely vain, shallow and annoying man, argues that permissiveness in the Sixties has caused a moral decline, due to the undermining of 'absolute' moral values, as supplied by the Church. Hitchens C carved him up and served him with fava beans and a nice chianti, as you might expect.

Whether you think morality is absolute or not, only a fool would think it was easy. It's the struggle of a lifetime to understand the ethical import of one's actions. Gerson claims that atheists have no answer to the question of how to do this without God, without considering any of the huge amount of secular ethical arguments accumulated over the centuries.

40. Borehamwood eruv granted planning permission

Comment #56077 by jonecc on July 13, 2007 at 3:43 pm

It occurred to me during a previous eruv controversy that on the surface of an approximate sphere such as the Earth any eruv boundary could be considered to enclose either the small area 'inside' it, or the whole of the Earth's surface outside it, since if you were to declare that larger area an eruv the boundary would be identical.

Looked at in those terms, any Jewish 'congregation' who chose to erect such an eruv would create a 'safe zone' for Jews covering very nearly the entire world, a poetic kind of liberation for a frequently persecuted group, freeing them from the limitations of their cult while asserting their right to be anywhere on the Earth.

There would have to be some area, however small, for the area 'outside' the eruv. This could be used to commemorate the history of monotheism, and all the petty tyrannies it leads to.

I did suggest this in an email exchange with a London rabbi at the time, with no success. The particular appeal of the idea to me is that it solves a religious problem by thinking in one more dimension than religious people habitually think in.

41. A force for good?

Comment #55129 by jonecc on July 10, 2007 at 4:37 am

It could do, but it's very noticeable that since World War II the number of casualties in most conflicts has declined. Wars are generally fought for economic reasons, and to unleash modern weaponry in its full power is economically unproductive. Even governments that use the rhetoric of religion to keep their population on their side normally seem to realise that. America, for instance, has been obliged to seek out non-nuclear battlefield solutions, and the ayatollahs, for all their tub-thumping, have never actually invaded anyone.

What is worrying is that weaponry may be seized by religiously motivated factions, with appalling consequences.

42. A force for good?

Comment #55112 by jonecc on July 10, 2007 at 3:29 am

Also, with regard to the figures for ideological murder, they are useless as presented, because the examples of secular murder come from recent historical eras, where the population was much higher.

To take the English Civil War, for instance, which was in part religious, an estimated quarter of a million people died as a result, either directly or through the resulting social turmoil. The population of England at the time was only five million, so that's one person in twenty. An equivalent slaughter today would take three million people.

43. A force for good?

Comment #55109 by jonecc on July 10, 2007 at 3:24 am

The author argues that actively religious people are more charitable than others. Even if the figures he quotes are correct, it's a false comparison.

The actively religious are very often so precisely because they genuinely believe that their religion is an ethical project. It is pointless to compare them with the general population, because that includes all the people who haven't chosen to get involved with moral projects. A more meaningful comparison would be with active secular humanists, for instance, or with any non-religious group with ethical goals.

Religious people are often decent and kind. This is beside the point. The point is whether the world would be a better or worse place if decent and kind religious people chose to involve themselves in secular movements rather than religious ones.

There are many reasons why we would argue that religion is ill-suited for the purpose of harnessing the energies of decent and kind people. For instance, in its daily practice it is chained to holy texts whose decency and kindness are undermined, to say the least, by the cruel outbursts they are peppered with.

Also, and crucially in my view, human happiness is not religion's primary goal. The primary goal is the individual's relationship with the divine. When the divine is asking them to be charitable, humanity benefits. When it is asking them to persecute gay people or treat women as second class citizens, humanity loses.

Secular humanism is not hobbled by holy texts or by divine irrationality, and to that extent is a better basis for ethical activism.

44. Unorthodox Atheist

Comment #54093 by jonecc on July 5, 2007 at 10:13 am

reedbraden:

Welcome home. Even if you're surrounded with godbotherers in the physical world, there's always solace in cyberspace.

Being lucky enough to move in a largely secular environment, I'd figured this site was just here for discussion. I'm coming to realise that one of our most important functions is to be a refuge of sanity for people who get grief for their secular views in their everyday lives.

45. Unorthodox Atheist

Comment #54075 by jonecc on July 5, 2007 at 7:58 am

The message I get from this is: if you're a school administrator or a parent of a child, don't mess with the atheist kids. They won't rave or bluster, they'll just quietly expose you as a clunking idiot, for all the world to see. Excellent stuff from the lad. If they have citizenship classes at his school he could hand this in as an assignment.

46. At a Theater Near You ...

Comment #53947 by jonecc on July 4, 2007 at 10:39 am

Geckoman

As you say. It's a bit like football hooliganism. The hard core crews mainly got locked up, or got exclusion orders against them, and were policed out of the game. The field was then left to the enthusiastic amateurs.

Part of the problem for English terrorists is that they just don't get the practice. It doesn't matter how hard you pray, growing up in Bradford or London just isn't like growing up in Grozny.

47. At a Theater Near You ...

Comment #53941 by jonecc on July 4, 2007 at 10:02 am

There's been an interesting debate at the Guardian website here.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sarfraz_manzoor/2007/07/reclaiming_our_religion.html

The thing that strikes me from a purely "military" point of view is that the old Al Qaeda, the one that knocked down the twin towers and blew up a Spanish train and a Balinese nightclub, knew what they were doing. This new lot are rubbish. Bombs that don't go off, or go off too early, bombs that fizz visibly in car parks, Molotov cocktails instead of bombs. It's the worst British military performance since Singapore. Fortunately.

48. The new age of ignorance

Comment #53481 by jonecc on July 1, 2007 at 3:49 pm

The article implied that the Angier book hasn't been released in the UK. I've just ordered it from Amazon UK, and there was no indication of any problem.

49. The Panel

Comment #53472 by jonecc on July 1, 2007 at 3:20 pm

I would have liked it if they'd asked the same panel some wider questions. It would have benn interesting to see if they could put the names of artists to Renaissance artworks, or place South American countries on a map. I suspect that Will Self would have come out as the polymath.

50. Floods are judgment on society, say bishops

Comment #53468 by jonecc on July 1, 2007 at 3:07 pm

Why is God picking on Yorkshire? I've been sinning like a bastard to try and deflect some of his rage, but the worst I've had was when the wind got up my umbrella the other day.