Comment 8 by Metamag :

Who did not sneak into the country but were groomed by it thanks to intellectually and morally bankrupt lefties and failed permissiveness of multiculturalism.

And your evidence that they were:

1. Groomed by lefties
2. That said lefties are intellectually and morally bankrupt.

If you are American then I think you might be better posting on a Faux News site, here in the UK you might try the Daily Mail.

And another one

Incidentally, another incident to add to the list.

Comment 131 by Grizwald Grim :

As I suspect many Atheists have never experienced the comfort from a religion that others do, it seemed a mother would be the best comparison to aid in understanding the emotional reaction that results from having one's religion mocked.

You are wrong. There are many posting here who used to be members of a religious community. Steve Zara was a Catholic as was I.

Comment 17 by epeeist :

Click on Denis Alexander's picture or name at the top of the article. This gives a very brief profile. The one thing that is missing from it is that he is on the board of advisors for the Templeton Foundation.

And while I think on (slightly dimmed by the Christmas cheer). I find it interesting that the sub-editor who in all probability commissioned this piece, Andrew Brown, is a Templeton journalism fellow as is another writer in the belief section, Mark Vernon.

Something to remind its readers of if more Templeton fellows turn up to write columns.

Click on Denis Alexander's picture or name at the top of the article. This gives a very brief profile. The one thing that is missing from it is that he is on the board of advisors for the Templeton Foundation.

Comment 5 by drumdaddy :

I'd walk my dog by there at least three or four times daily.

And allow it, nay encourage it, to cock its leg at the appropriate location.

Reading some of the epitaphs and comments on them it becomes apparent that while some (many) may have disagreed with his politics or his way of life that it is the comments from Christians that are the most vile. The sheer vituperation and glee that he is dead and the gloating on his possible punishment by their god leaves one sickened. Really, religion does poison everything.

Comment 267 by Ignorant Amos :

Comment 253 by Mark Jones

Is this the right room for the wanking symposium?

Been to a few of them in my time Mark....but we're not allowed to talk about it.

Old Bernard Manning joke:

Doctor: You'll have to stop masturbating

Bernard Manning: Why, am I going blind?

Doctor: No, but you are upsetting the rest of the people in the waiting room.

Comment 229 by Tedilasllaves :

The Marxists and users of contraception are not following what the Catholic Church teaches. As far as I'm aware not a single 'ex cathedra' teaching of the Catholic Church has ever changed and this is what informed Catholics are talking about when they speak of Catholic teaching.

You do realise that the Pontifical commission on birth control produced a majority report which stated artificial birth control that was not intrinsically evil and that Catholic couples should be allowed to decide for themselves about the methods to be employed. According to the majority report, use of contraceptives should be regarded as an extension of the already accepted cycle method.

However, it was vetoed by the then pope Paul VI who accepted the minority report.

Comment 18 by MichaelE :

If their dream is to refute Darwinian evolution, it may help to have at least a basic understanding of the theory first.

Let's assume that one of these students comes up with a killer experiment that shows the TofE is false. All that this shows is that the TofE is false. What it doesn't do is provide validation of any other hypothesis.

Comment 12 by Atheist Mike :

Gotta love the labour party, we have our own little saudi arabia now thanks to them.

You presumably also blame the Labour Party for setting up the Forced Marriage Unit, and for MPs like Ann Cryer for speaking out against forced marriage and honour killings.

Comment 14 by susanlatimer :

It was the strangest thing. I didn't go in with a chip on my shoulder but I left with one. I was there to honour a great man and all they talked about was how great Jesus was.

My father and his family were Catholics and I have had to attend a number of Catholic funerals. My experience in each case has been the same as yours. Little mention of the person whose funeral it was except for their contribution to the church and the rest of the service being a hard sell for Catholicism.

My father had ceased to be a Catholic by the time of his death but we still had a Catholic funeral for him so as not to upset my grandmother. The priest took great delight in attacking my father's politics and his atheism, it was all I could do to stop myself hitting him after the service. As it was it turned me from being apathetic about religion to realising what a malign influence it has on society.

Forget the service, remember your uncle as he was.

Comment 9 by Extreme-Madness :

Why is Stephen Hawking does not commit suicide! Sick joke, but unfortunately some people think seriously. I just read an article in a Croatian weekly political magazine "Objektiv". Author of the article is obviously wonder why Stephen Hawking does not commit suicide because he does not believe in God,

It was only after people started to commit suicide in order to get to heaven earlier that it was declared a sin.

Comment 30 by decius :

Also, the strong support the catholic church offered to both Hitler and Mussolini should account from something.

Let's not forget that the Vatican as a "state" was established by the Lateran treaties, signed while Mussolini was in power.

But how about Franco, or Pinochet?

Comment 293 by Bill23 :

Geodel's theorem proves that to be impossible because any TOE will be incomplete or inconsistent, and so cannot both correctly model every real world event and at the same fail to make false predictions.

Gödel's theorems are standard mathematics and logic and hence are deductive in nature. Science is inductive and abductive. I am not sure how the former has any impact on the latter.

On top of that science is concerned with observations which are particular, contingent and probabilistic rather than the universal, necessary and certain.

Comment 192 by Schrodinger's Cat :

Again...come off it. What the feck else can 'scientific explanation' mean other than that something has been scientifically explained ? I don't see 'possibly scientifically explained'. I don't see 'possible hypothesis'. I see 'scientifically explained'. Most rational people would take 'scientific explanation' to be a statement that a phenomenon has been explained.

Scientific explanation is a fairly tricky concept, you really need to do some reading to get an understanding of it.

Ooh, I see that article isn't open for comments. Otherwise the more ultramontane Catholics who post on the site would be down on it claiming that "it was nothing to do with the current or previous popes" and that "it was just knee-jerk anti-Catholicism" and "there is no organisation in the world that provides better child protection than the church" or the classic "how many scout masters and teachers abuse children?" (tu quoque much?).

Comment 19 by Letsbereasonable :

Comment 14 by Steven Mading

Well I think the article makes it clear that the churches dotting the English countryside are preserved as beautiful buildings more or less by default, since hardly anyone ever goes in them, except tourists and those wishing to preseve the quintessential Englishness of the distant countryside vistas, and very nice they are too.

Except of course that fewer tourists are going as well. I was in Lincoln recently and wanted to go to the cathedral to look at its copy of the Magna Carta. However given the entry fee of £6 I, and seemingly many others, just turned around and walked away. At that sort of price I would rather visit somewhere like Tattershall castle or Clumber park

Comment 13 by Marc Country :

Guardian link bait... horrible writing by nobody at all that mentions Richard Dawkins at some point. This stuff is their bread and butter.

Untrue of the Guardian, definitely true of Andrew Brown and a couple of other contributors, namely Mark Vernon and Theo Hobson. You should note that the first two are recipients of the Templeton journalism fellowship.

Comment 121 by James Moors :

"We are required by law to provide worship, twice a day." she said, with rather more smugness than the situation perhaps warranted. I didn't push her any further because she promised to excuse my children from worship, but it did occur to me that she could not possibly have been correct about the requirements of law to provide religious worhip.

Not my understanding. An assembly based on "broadly Christian principles" is all that is required by law. Ask her to give you a reference to the law in question.

Comment 65 by Robert Howard :

Even in the UK, with an established religion, there are now more non-religious than religious.

Is this true or is it just wishful thinking? I don't know if the results of the most recent census have even been published yet, but if they have, do they really reveal that atheists outnumber theists?

Have a look at the British Social Attitudes Survey, a summary of the finding on religion can be found here.

Comment 435 by JHJEFFERY :

The word salads tossed by CC seem unnatually strained, as if sometimes he promotes ideas that he does not understand himself.

Fixed it for you.

Comment 428 by Ignorant Amos :

Fixed it for ya.....but don't be telling the holy rollers they are common, they think it's unique......well, except for Lazarus. I often wonder about the Lazarus yarn, it's even more bizarre.

Hey, it isn't just Lazarus

51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split

52 and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.

53 They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

Matthew 27:51-53

Comment 422 by Quine :

Post hoc stories, not even written by first hand witnesses, are not necessarily factual, they are, stories. They are not historical evidence. We have just as much evidence that Muhammad ascended on a flying horse, or Krishna performed miracles.

Bollocks. Resurrection is common, look at the textual evidence for the resurrection of Apollonius of Tyana, Nero and Julius Caesar for example. And if you live in Britain then we all know that King Arthur will be resurrected when we need him. I am sure Scandinavian readers of this site can't wait for Baldr to be resurrected after Ragnarok.

Comment 62 by Stevehill :

You're winding me up aren't you : 0)

Moi? As if I would I do such a thing.

Comment 41 by Simon Templar :

From your (and indeed my) POV it is conjecture but I'm merely suggesting that being a bishop he would have access to the population figures for the C of E based on Church records which possibly or even may I dare say probably shows around 71% of the current British population are shown to be baptised into the C of E.

FFS, does nobody read my posts.

From this page

'What is your religion?', the question in the 2001 census used in England and Wales gave a far higher figure for ‘Christian’ than all other surveys. The 'Christian' box was selected by 71.74% of respondents in England and 71.90% in Wales. The Scottish figure, where respondents were asked about the religion they were brought up in, as well as their current religion, showed significantly fewer respondents ticking 'Christian': 65.08%

Comment 43 by Stevehill :

I wonder how high the number would be if the question were rephrased to something like "would you like to see compulsory worship dropped in order to make way for more time spent on teaching modern languages, music, or other "minority" subjects"?

Would you want to lose school assemblies? Are these not a means of generating a school community? An assembly each day might be rather too many, but one a week would probably be useful.

Comment 35 by shemonster :

71% 'broadly Christian' will possibly refer to the estimated figure from births, marriages and deaths records of which a percentage will practice or be active and again a further mix of lapsed believers, Atheists and agnostics

That's pure conjecture. Where did he pull that actual figure from ?

The 2001 census as I noted above. And inaccurate and misleading as I also noted.

Comment 24 by Jos Gibbons :

Not having group worship daily in assemblies was the only aspect of my school Ofsted complained about.

Got to get that box checked on your Ofsted inspection. I suspect that is the reason that some schools stick with practice.