Someone wrote a few posts back that a good reason not to ridicule religion, even if one thinks it a ridiculous concept, is that it would not be 'polite' to do so. Can none of you lot recognise that as the con-trick that it is?: if we question your tenets you come over all wounded, as if we had said we think your wife is ugly and your children boorish and stupid; we are made to feel we have committed an error of taste and etiquette. That is not fair dealing.

Why, please, has "God" got so many things manifestly wrong? Take that concept you all came up a few years ago of "Intelligent Design", which was supposed to be another name for God but one that wouldn't offend us. When I pointed out that the phenomenon of childbirth in its present form [which thank providence I shall never have to undergo], or the necessity for all of us creatures of whatever degree of sentience or development to piss and shit regularly, however disagreeable, inconvenient, or worse, the circumstances, all point rather to Unintelligent Design, I would generally get looked at, and the subject would change, or my interlocutors would go away.

~Michael~