Obama on faith & values

It is so refreshing to have a US President who isn’t under the cosh of Christian fundamentalists, or indeed of religion in general. The Heresiarch has written an excellent piece analysing and contrasting the speeches of Messrs Obama and Blair at a recent event; it is long but well worth the effort. It is great to see that not only does Obama make a point of reaching out to all faiths, he explicitly and repeatedly includes humanists in his comments and explicitly acknowledges that a decent moral code does not require a religion.

Clearly it is still very early in the process, but could Obama’s election possibly mark the being of the end of the period (short in the history of mankind) during which religious delusionists have been the major force in the world? We can only hope so.

Summers will never be the same again, again

For those of us of a certain age who spent our school summer holidays listening to Test Match Special one of the last links with those days has been broken with the quite sudden death of the Bearded Wonder. The commentary might have been from John Arlott or Brian Johnston, and the “expert analysis” from Fred Trueman or Trevor Bailey, but the person who kept them all on the straight and narrow for more than 40 years when it came to facts and statistics was Bill Frindall.

Ignorance is no defence

Evidence that the UK is going “tit’s up”, part 73…