Comment 14 aquilicane,

On Easter Monday night Q & A will host a two-man debate between evolutionary biologist, author and retired Oxford Professor, Richard Dawkins and outspoken Australian theist, George Pell.

Absoulutely. It sounds like 'this big-shot, eminent man, who is this, and that, will be talking to some silly old atheist fart'. You are so right. Shocking bias, apart from anything else. How do we complain to Australia's 'Offcom'?

Loonies in dresses really shouldn't be allowed to speak.

I do adore Dame Edna though. At least she is more herself, rather than being like a guy in a heritage village, such as New Lanark, dressed to the tens, and paid to stay in character, and programmed to answer visitors' questions, or field them, in a particular way. That's clergy - characters from history, interfering with now.

Maybe RD meant 'militant atheist' in the same way as Pat Condell embraces the word 'islamophobe'. Shouldn't we each be militant against child abuse - in Bertrand Russell's words, 'a fanatic against fanaticism'? It's right to fight against something which mis-shapes children's pliable minds and blights the lives of millions. I think the word 'atheist' is the problem, rather than the word 'militant'.

Okay, 'Agnostic' sounds wishy-washy, as if you have nothing to say - a fence-straddler, chewing a piece of straw which fell out of your own brain. Ooh, no. 'Agnostic' sounds as though you're abstaining from voting. How about 'militant secularist'? Nah, that sounds as if you want more state power. Freedomer? Too much suggestion of anarchy. 'Militant thinker?' No! Okay, it's actually both words which are the problem. How about 'Freethinker'? Thought can be militant without requiring bombs. I'd wear a teeshirt saying, 'Freethinker'. Preferably with a Siamese cat on it.

I do feel sorry for Rowan Williams though, because he at least often has the decency to seem deeply embarrassed. I'd love him to come over to our cause (secularism for all) and explain that people have the right to believe their own thing, without imposing it on others, who have that same right. Wouldn't that be great? He doesn't need any more money.

I think he knows it makes sense. Maybe once he steps out of character, peeling off the eyebrows like Dustin Hoffman's eyelashes in 'Tootsie', he'll do a Mike Yarwood (UK impressionist) and say, at the end of the show, 'This is me.' It's hard to want Rowan Williams's guts for garters. I want his hat for a handbag (fumigated for holy dandruff). Now that would hold everything, like Mary Poppins's.

Aye, hope dies hard. As they say in Glasgow, 'This is me since yisterday'. The yesterdays all join together, but, even if you've no food, there's something of comfort in the thought that we can change our minds, and still be us. Religious people - let's all be ourselves and let others do the same.

Just wakened, reading through the posts in the ethical ether, on this barometer of world thought. I'll be back... ps Crookedshoes - where are you? I've missed you recently.