Tom Estes, Crumb is faithfully illustrating the events narrated in the Book of Genesis. If Crumb's book is porn, then so is the Bible.

Oh, and remember you are a guest on this blog. So keep a civil tongue in your head or you will be banned.

Great post, as usual.

I should caution that the Lord Ahmed/10,000 Muslims claim traces back to Mad Mel in the Spectator - and no further. Ahmed himself denied it.

Note the bruise on his forehead. Ahmad is just another horrible example of the danger of butting the rug too hard for too long: dead braincells.

Agreed, tony e - and that arrogance is doubled in cases such as Pattison's because you can be sure that she hasn't even troubled to watch the movie before pronouncing it unsuitable for the general public. She knows best, you see.

Tom, firstly there is nothing intellectually dishonest about reporting scholarly opinion.

Secondly, the argument that a proposition can't be right because that would mean lots of people have been wrong for many years does not stand up to scrutiny. You think about it - how many times has this happened in the past?

I'm not arguing for or against this new hypothesis. I'm just saying your reaction to it is ill-considered.

I hope Creteil Bebel will understand when other football teams refuse to play with them because they "don't agree with their philosophy" of religion-sanctioned bigotry.

This is an interesting chart which has provoked much good discussion. But I think the problem you point out when you say "When talking about different gods that people believe in, we could pick different positions on the graph" is a bigger problem than it first appears.

Without a proper definition of "god", I do not know where I would fit on the graph.

Are we talking about obviously made-up, logically contradictory constructs such as Yahweh or Allah? I think it's possible to know that these gods don't exist, and I definitely don't believe in them. So that would put me somewhere near the bottom left (truncated) corner.

Are we talking about a deistic "prime mover" without human characteristics, which created the universe and is now, as Ali G put it, "just chilling"? We can't really know whether such a thing exists or not - it isn't self-contradictory like Yahweh - but I still don't believe in it. So that would put me near the top left.

Or are we using a pantheistic definition, where god is nature? If we accept such a definition, I think we can pretty much know that "god" exists, and I believe in it. So that would put me down at the bottom right.

Which brings us to the problem of the "quirk box", where two different types of god suddenly make an appearance. God-type cannot be determined by the sum of your atheism + agnosticism, because your atheism/agnosticism is determined by which type of god you are talking about!

Even on its own terms, the quirk box doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. It is perfectly possible to think you can know for sure that personified, interventionist god exists (I have met many people who think this), which would put you at the extreme bottom right. Equally, you might well think that you can't really know about a "mysterious higher power", but still believe very strongly in it, which would put you in the top right.

The song dates back to 1924. Who says Muslims are quick to take offence?

Godless and gormless, it appears that bitter personal experience has led you to swallow whole the paranoid Jihad-Watch ideology of imminent Muslim invasion and takeover, where \"even\" (!) Hizb ut Tahir are seeking to sow division. I could spend a lot of time telling you exactly why this is bollocks, but your propensity to go off on wild tangential rants is indicative of a mind that is set in its own irrational ways, and experience tells me that it is really not worth the effort.

So I will limit myself to saying that yes, your words are acutely embarrassing, and your lack of personal insight only serves to make them more so. For future reference, phrases of such ignorant bigotry and hatred as \"Muslims are barbaric. They are happiest when they are killing\" are not acceptable here. I am the administrator of this website, and if you come up with any more shit like that, you will be banned. Got it?

You make good points, Ian. "Embarrassing" is the best word to describe the level of debate here sometimes. There is a case to be made for more hands-on moderation of comments. I will discuss this with Barry and the board.