Blair’s speech on faith and globalisation looks set to be a bit of lulu, if this quote from the Grauniad are anything to go by:

“Faith is reduced to a system of strange convictions and actions that, to some, can appear far removed from the necessities and anxieties of ordinary life,” he will say.

“It is this face that gives militant secularism an easy target. It mocks certain of the practices and traditions of organised religion which they define as ‘faith’. ‘Faith’ is to be found in the cassocks and the gowns and the rituals.”

I see Blair’s bought into the ‘militant secularism’ straw man but that’s as nothing to the straw man of all straw men that follows. Yes, folk, us secularists are not only ‘militant’ but we’re also too stupid to understand the difference between a misguided and possibly delusional belief in the existence of a non-existent, onmipotent, omniscient, incorporal being/intelligence and a bunch of middle aged men running around in frocks and mumbling incantations over miniature chapattis.

But, fuck me, I’ve been mistaken all along. It’s not the irrational belief in a supreme being and all the trappings that go with it that I find objectionable, not the absurd belief that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, or the trenchant homophobia, or even the higher than average ratio of morons and sanctimonious arseholes that religion seems to generate. (And if any of that isn’t you then consider yourself exempt for those remarks).

Noooo, of course not, its just that I secretly find the clerical classes penchant for cross-dressing a bit off-putting, that’s all.

The man’s a complete and utter cunt, no question about it.