Verbal

It did. Goodness, there was me thinking only my family were in the house.

sorry?

As the programme said, 80% of Islamic faith schools are Deobandi. Deobandism is, broadly speaking, pretty extremist - so how come it dominates so much in schools when it's a relatively minority sect in the community? The reason is that, just as in Pakistan, the madrassas are funded with considerable amounts of Saudi money. Unfortunately the programme didn't ask questions about funding, which is a shame, because by the simple expedient of cutting out this source of income, the mad mullahs and thugs in that film wouldn't get the chance to brutalise and brainwash so many young minds.

The Ealing bomb shook my house in Chiswick. THAT was a bomb.

Isn't that what you fully paid-up neo-Cons are supposed to call the Big Society?

LG make some good stuff. I've just watched Inception on Blu-ray and the colour reproduction is very good, especially in the default 'cinema' setting.

Johnny, are you serious? If so, you're turning into delldays. Brokeback is the name of the mountain, by the way.

It's really hard to have an argument with someone who shifts the ground every single time they post. I'm not arguing that Hitler and Goebbels were driven by 'strong' faith - merely (as this point has developed in this thread) that they were raised and stayed within a religion and yet committed horrendous acts. Christian (Catholic) values would have been inculcated during their upbringing, and they not once renounced their religion - yet did what they did. Can you please tell me how you came to the bizarre conclusion that I am 'bigoted' against christianity? I happen to think the founders of Christianity - which was at the time a small Jewish sect committed to pacifist resistance against a colonial aggressor - came up with some startlingly wonderful ideas (social equality and a campaign against exploitation, a refusal to respond in kind to extreme violence, etc). How far are the ideals these men and women lived by from the Spanish Inquisition.

Can you please rearrange the above into four vaguely connected sentences?

As to your first question, there's a very easy answer, because in Germany, including its Nazi phase, everyone paid a Church Tax, and for that, you had to declare your faith. Hitler and Goebbels, for example, were Catholic. Neither refused to pay their taxes. As for the rest, I suggest you go back and read your own post - you seem to have misunderstood yourself.

Leaving aside the demonstrable nonsense that Nazis were not religious, you seem to have self imploded. If religion created tribes, and religiously-founded tribes led to conflict, you end up with the statement that religion is therefore the source of all human violence. Did you mean that? And you finish as you started: with some gibberish. Religion does not exist if nobody interprets it.

I think you have to enter it for anyone to embrace it. Droning on about the crimes of Nazi (and highly religious) and communist leaderships is completely beside the point - and in any case subject to the usual (equally off-the-point) retort that murder and abuse in the name of religion is as common as muck. Watch Dispatches on C4 if you'd like a little insight into that. With our without religion, bad things happen; with or without religion people develop shared ethics.

I think you're missing the point by about a million miles. Never mind.

It's much more chicken-and-egg than you think. Morals, as you call them, are really a kind of social contract that communities of a certain size need to survive and develop. The collective impulse to develop these rules is arguably a source of religious ideas, not the other way around. Monotheistic religion is not by any means the only place that people go to get their 'morals'. People in the eastern bloc didn't have access to religions, but no matter how awful and deadening their regimes, they were no less 'moral' than you. Of course, the fall of the Berlin Wall led to an upsurge in religious activity, but that was because it had been so ruthlessly suppressed. Bot not everyone rushed into church - not even a majority - yet somehow no one has successfully portrayed the hundreds of millions of citizens from the former Soviet bloc as individually or collectively immoral.

Is that you?

Better copy TDD in on this memo.

Or forget the dumbass books and do what most people ACTUALLY do and judge by the religious creeds themselves (which aren't ALWAYS set out exclusively in 'the Book"). Christianity, in its original form, was a small, anti-colonial pacifist resistance movement, not unlike Gandhi's in India (although much smaller-scale) Most active and reasoned Christians I know here subscribe to something like the ideas found in that original form (and Christianity in schools here tend to be taught that way). Values of tolerance certainly come from that, among other sources. But in the US, for example, it's a different matter: the majority are, literally, Bible thumpers, and are much keener on the punitive violence that can be found in the Old Testament. Hellfire and damnation are completely absent in the New Testament. As for Marx, I didn't have you down as a Marxist - but welcome to the fold. His 'opiate of the people' remark is really aimed at state religions, although he would have regarded pacifism as abhorrent. 'Live and let live' is a classic early-sect Christian value, as is 'turning the other cheek', etc. The Commandments, on the other hand, are a kind of penal code for the masses. As Mr Le God points out, they aren't anywhere near as virtuous as you seem to believe.

I don't know what conclusion we're supposed to draw from your naming characters from a myth - unless you're going the whole way with this guff, and arguing that the world was indeed created in seven days, and dinosaurs were put on earth by god to fool people.

Your bottled up rage leads you into an awful mess logic-wise. The whole point about the principle of 'live and let live' is: I may not choose to live that way, but for whomever does, it's just fine. I don't want to swallow swords for a living, but I'm not going to condemn those who do.

As I say, you won't take my word for it. You'll just have to disagree with historical scholarship on this. That's fine - so long as you recognise you've entered the world of religious myth. There's no other way to justify your argument. There's arguably an even bigger problem with Islam. Islamic scholars have written screeds about the origins of the religion in Mecca and Medina. There is precious little historical evidence that any of that is true. Religious people make stuff up. It goes with the territory.

Paul didn't write it.

He didn't write the books that now exist in the Bible. They are not first hand. You are confusing two things. Religious beliefs - which are what you are talking about. And historical scholarship - which in this case has LONG held that the Bible was conceived, written and edited to underpin a new state religion in Rome. It's one of the reasons - if not the main one - why the Dead Sea Scrolls are so important: they give a much more contemporaneous account of what was happening in the founding years of Christianity.

Nope.

Wrong. You clearly won't take my word for it. So do a bit of research if you're genuinely interested. None of what I've said is remotely unorthodox among historians - in fact, there's wide consensus on it.

Who gave 'first-hand accounts' exactly? Be specific - I bet (for very good reasons) you won't be able to name one first hand account in the Bible. Of course, all the Old Testament stuff was swiped from Jewish texts.