In 1968 the sociologist Peter Berger famously predicted that in the 21st century, religious believers would only be likely to be in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture. In 1710 Thomas Woolstan predicted that religion would be gone by 1900. And many other thinkers (Voltaire, Jefferson, Marx, Engels, Freud) have all anticipated the collapse of religious faith. To the delight of the faithful, and to the chagrin of the faithless, they have all been wrong.
It is interesting to contemplate why religion hasn’t disappeared. Why, in roughly 10,000 years of history, have humans created roughly 10,000 different religions and 1000 gods? It is well known that religion leads people to fly planes into sky scrapers, to shoot staff at abortion clinics, to fracture governments in Northern Ireland, and that it has caused endless wars. Religious societies have higher crime rates than secular ones and pay a huge economic price for their faith. And religion in its fundamentalist form has held back cognitive evolution for thousands of year - we can only guess how much further science and technology would have advanced worldwide today without it. (We can only dread what will happen if the current attempts to prevent the teaching of evolution in various parts of the world are successful. See here, for example.) Why do we go on, century after century, skating on the thin ice of a system that is so evidently false and self-contradictory?
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Although it is nearly 24 hours since I watched the first in Channel 4’s new series, 
It is now over 18 months since I first got her - ‘it’ seems way too impersonal for an object which has become an almost indispensable part of my life. I have blogged before about the first love, about speaking to her so that she never forgets (
When you stand back and think about it, it’s really strange. I mean, it may have some side benefits, but the primary activity is odd.
There is a sick theme running through all of this - or at least a clear attempt to involve some form of mental illness, and an attempt to bring in the people in white coats - well, at least psychologists if not psychiatrists.
Apologies for my absence. I’ve been pre-occupied over the ‘holidays’ with a couple of other writing tasks that I needed to complete. Having finished them today I found myself with a few idle hours before returning to work tomorrow and started amusing myself with dreadful similes to tweet.
You had to be there to feel the menace!
I think that people are sometimes snobbish about language. For me, words and phrases are like clothes in a wardrobe. In terms of linguistic benefits, there are at least two possible results of having an education: you have more clothes in your wardrobe to choose from; and you may choose your garments with greater care and avoid embarrassment like turning up to a funeral in a swimming costume. Although using words inappropriately can jar, for example, using slang in a formal context or using the informal language of speech in formal written prose, there is nothing wrong with the words themselves. Swimming costumes are just swimming costumes, though convention dictates that they are best worn near water. 
I have long thought that it seems ridiculous that hospital chaplains should be funded by the NHS - not least because all other NHS care is allowed because of its evidence base and scientific sense, and because the religious bodies should pay the wages of their own staff. I recently wrote a piece expressing my frustration that £300,000 of public money (i.e. taken from your taxes and mine) should be spent on providing a religious space in a hospital (see 
The Merseyside Skeptics Society have produced the following 
