I was talking via email with an American friend the other day – and this was someone I already knew to be a conservative Republican – when he threw me by saying that he ‘really feared Obama’. And the ‘really’ was capitalised. We don’t usually talk politics and I am not about to do so with someone who does not want to but I would have liked to have heard just what the basis of this ‘fear’ is. There have been, and still are, people who get themselves into power and damn well should be feared. Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin and, more recently, Sadam and Mugabe are just the tip of the iceberg. But Barack Obama? What can be so scary about him? Bush is scary. Cheney is scary. But Obama? I don’t get it.

If you really need someone scary then look no further than Sarah Palin, VP running mate of the not really that scary John McCain. This is one scary woman. This woman is so delusional that not that long ago she would have been locked up.

The vast majority of Americans are ordinary people. They live normal lives, they work, they raise everyday families and are, on the whole, decent people just living their lives. Politically they might lean towards the Democrats or sway a bit more right towards the Republicans and that’s all good for the mix. Many of them are members of their local church and follow a Christian path and there is nothing wrong with that.

Then there are the right wing fanatics who may call themselves Christians but are disowned by the majority of Christians around the world. These people, these vicious, nasty people are extremists of the worse kind – often racist, often advocating violence – they have taken the Christian message and distorted it beyond recognition to the point where if Jesus Christ himself were to return and wander into one of their church meetings he would be lucky to escape with his life. Exactly what motivates these people is beyond me although I suspect an enormous feeling of insecurity and a low IQ both play a big part which leaves them vulnerable to being sucked in by one of the hate-mongering, evangelical ‘Christian’ corporations.

Their God, and apparently, Sarah Palin’s God, tell them things that He doesn’t tell other, ordinary believers. For the majority of Christians the world over, the message is about peace, tolerance, love and respect. It is about living a good, honest and productive life, about helping those less fortunate, about fairness and selfless behaviour. For Palin and others like her, their religion is about hatred and intolerance, about war and conquest, about loathing those that are different and about money. In short, it is built on outrageous hypocrisy. These people sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a “task that is from God.” And it is, apparently, “God’s Will’ that a gas pipeline be built across Palin’s state of Alaska.

Anyone that believes their God cares about such things as a gas pipeline is either seriously deluded or, as I suspect, is using the name of God to claim a moral high ground to sucker these fanatics into a vote. And to suggest that the Christian God of peace and tolerance personally directed the USA to invade another country is just an attempt to use religion to mask something rotten and sick within the core of the current American political administration.

Bush is scary because he has proved himself inept, corrupt and quite plainly fairly stupid. Cheney is scary because, at the end of the day he is little more than a political thug in the pocket of corporate America. I now find McCain scary for the simple reason that at his age, if he dies in office he will leave the White House in charge of someone who is, perhaps, scarier than all of them.

The only reason I can see that people would fear Obama is the very reason he would make a good choice to heal the self-inflicted wounds of the Bush years. And this is that he is a highly intelligent and honourable man with a strong set of moral values that the Christian extremists claim as their own while proving, with their every action and incantation of Gods name, they are actually completely bereft of.

I have had my knuckles rapped by none other than my wife. She feels that in that last piece I got carried away and have caused offence to the worlds catholics. She gave me a good telling off I can tell you! She particularly felt that calling for the citizens of Vatican City to be hauled into St. Peter’s Square and burnt at the stake was one sentence too far and didn’t believe I had made it clear that this was just a metaphorical burning and not a real one.

So – to be fair – let me state right out that I have nothing against catholics. I think you’re wrong but I have nothing against you. I have had many, many catholic friends over the years and, as with every walk of life, there are good catholics and there are bad catholics. My argument is not with you – it is with the way your organisation has behaved over the last two thousand years, – especially the first one and a half millennia – and, I suspect, wished it still could.

From the earliest days of the intentional corrupting of the teachings of Jesus, to the final act of the Inquisition (1858) I do not know how many people have been slaughtered for their beliefs; how many wars have been waged in the name of God; how many people have been tortured into false confessions of their imagined heresy; how much land and property has been stolen to fill the church coffers; how many people have been forced into a life of poverty; how much earlier the catholic dominated world would have progressed in the areas of science and art and literature and music had these not been repressed… I do not know. But I do know that just one, single life, taken in the name of Jesus invalidates everything he stood for and corrupts beyond redemption his teachings.

This does not mean I despise catholics. I do not understand how anyone can happily belong to such an organisation but that, as they say, is between you and your God. I do not judge people or choose my friends based upon their religion.

If I gave offence then yes – I am sorry to hear that. But at the same time, I would urge you to delve into the history of your church.

There is a promotional ‘ad’ seen often on BBC News 24 where the Vatican correspondent makes the statement that the Vatican ‘works in centuries not in years’ and if that is indeed the case, then the current papal incumbent will not have been at all surprised to have just been served with a lawsuit pertaining to events 700 years ago. Must seem like only yesterday in fact.

I have to admit the news that The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ have filed a lawsuit to have their good name reinstated by the Vatican is one of those news items that gave me enormous pleasure. The Association’s members are, they claim, the rightful heirs to the famed Knights Templar.

In 1307, the King of France – Philip IV – had bankrupted his treasury waging wars and had borrowed heavily from the Templars. Following unsubstantiated rumours of heresy and ‘ungodly’ practices within the order, he saw having it outlawed a way out of his financial difficulties and persuaded the Pope – Clement V – to do just that. On Friday 13th October, in a well organised Europe-wide operation, Templars were rounded up, arrested and their lands and wealth confiscated. Hundreds were tortured to force admission of heresy and many were executed – most usually by burning at the stake. The Vatican always did have a thirst for blood-letting in imaginative and inhuman ways but of course, I am sure God instructed them to do this so it’s all right then.

The lawsuit, while claiming that it is the good name and reputation of the Templars that must be exonerated, also calculates that the value of land, money and possessions that were seized by the Vatican 700 years ago is, today, worth some 79 Billion UK Pounds (100 Billion Euros). I like that bit!

Bearing in mind I am just talking about the leadership here and not the millions of Catholics across the world who practice this cursed religion – but I’d like to see the modern day Templars storm the Vatican and burn everyone within out in St. Peters Square. The world would have been a better place over the last 2000 years without this evil spreading it’s hatred, intolerance and vile doctrines.

Good luck to them I say. But I would still go after the money – they have an excellent case.

I learned on the BBC news website yesterday that the blasphemy laws are likely to be repealed. This news came as quite a shock to me as I didn’t even know we still had blasphemy as an offence. It’s just so Dark Ages!

I don’t know why it is but whenever I hear the word ‘blasphemy’ it instantly and automatically conjures up an image in my mind of the Reverend Ian Paisley dressed in witch-finder black, arm outstretched, pointing finger, screaming ‘blasphemer’ in that strident voice of his. Mind you, he belongs in the Dark Ages as well so I guess it’s not an unreasonable association.

Fellow Witanagemot member, L’Ombre de l’Olivier has bought to my attention a debate taking place in the Washington Post between Michael Gerson and our old friend Christopher Hitchens on the nature of atheism. I am not about to quote any of these articles but they are all worth a read.

What really rankles with me is this old hogwash perpetually pedalled by the religiously inclined that an atheist cannot possibly have a strong set of moral values and that only an adherence to a religious faith can provide the moral platform, teaching and structure that we all need to live a peaceful, law-abiding and productive life. Far too many people implicitly believe this bullshit and far more are taken in by it and are ready to shout ‘I believe’ to show the world they are grounded in religion and therefore must be ‘good’. And compared to those people I am more honest. I am an atheist. It’s not something I am proud of and it’s not something I preach – I just am.

I am an atheist on two counts. The first, and the major reason, is that I have never been presented with any compelling argument to believe in what Hitchens calls the ‘Heavenly Dictatorship’ whereas I have been consistently presented with arguments that make common sense, have scientific evidence to back them up and that do not rely on a far-fetched belief in the supernatural or ethereal. And I feel in absolutely no way diminished by this stance. The second reason, of course, is having been bought up in a predominantly Christian tradition, any research into the history of this established religion makes it obvious to me that it is not a club I wish to belong to. It is, in short, morally corrupt. It is, in fact, more corrupt than any atheist I have ever met.

In the last week alone we have seen the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Church payout $660 million dollars to the victims of priestly abuse and a wave of Christian protest because a Hindu chaplain said a prayer at the opening of the US Senate session. Abuse, lies, violence and intolerance. And these people have the nerve to be critical of atheism. We all know that if Jesus turned up in Bible Belt America he wouldn’t last five minutes before, at the best, being run out of town but at the worse seriously assaulted and probably shot. And Christians are not, of course, alone. Muslims slaughtering fellow Muslims is daily news around the world.

Groucho Marx once famously quipped that he’d rather not belong to any club that would have him as a member. In the opposite way, I don’t want to be a member of any club that has those Los Angeles and Boston priests – or the repressed bible thumpers – claiming the moral high ground because I’d pitch my own set of moral values against theirs any day.