I signed a few of the petitions on the Number 10 site/ One of these called for a ban on government-funded faith schools. 3191 people signed it and now you can read the response. Basically, they dismiss it.

I am increasingly of the opinion that religion should be kept out of schools. We can't stop it in homes, but the government should not be encouraging the isolation of children from society in general. By all means teach them what the various faiths are about, but also teach them about the wonders of science and give them a chance to make up their own minds.

A quote I've seen used by Richard Dawkins is repeated here:

"good people tend to do good, evil people tend to do evil, but for a good person to do evil–that takes religion."

Sounds about right to me. I won't bother quoting the obvious examples from just about any faith. I'm sure most religious people are good, but you can be good without believing in fairies or whatever.

It seems you will never stop people believing in fairies, but it's frightening that some of them have the political and financial power to build a whole museum to push their beliefs. People are spending a lot of time trying to make the facts of our world fit a story in an old book. Judging from their displays they don't think much of 'human reason'. So how do they reason out their theories?

The internet is full of this sort of thing. Some of it makes for amusing, if disturbing reading.

For a bit of fun I spent a while on a Does God Exist discussion. The believers trotted out the same old stories, but I got bored with it after a while. Much as I'd like to make them see sense, I don't have the patience.

I heard a story on the radio news whilst away about a fake psychic conning people out of their money. Could give those real psychics a bad name. I would expect better of the BBC, but then Steve Wright gives over a fair bit of his show to an astrologer. Meanwhile, loony preachers condemn mathematics as non-Christian. That's the attitude that held up human development for a few hundred years. Mind you, the muslims, hindus and other 'heathens' invented a fair bit of mathematics.

Whatever happened to the Age of Reason?