I'm a tolerant man...

...I don't have any religious believes and i think if people have a religion they should be allowed to practice it. I think they are fucking daft but they have the right to be so. Obviously if your religion involves human sacrifice that would be a no no, but as far as i can see christians, jews, muslims, hindus, sikhs, buddhists and whoever else despite differences of faith should be able to coexist, the basic pricnciples often seem to have things about being nice to other people.

Sure there is some smiting of infidels talk, but on the whole most people that practice a faith do nothing more annoying than knock on your door, or prattle on using a loudspeaker at busy town centres.

That said i think state institutions, government, schools, social services, police etc should all be secular. We all have basic human rights, I don't see that the church and religion should have any say in how the world is run. You have your believes and the people who follow act on them.

Sometimes though we get friction as religious believes collide with the way society as a whole is developing, and sometimes there is no way to reconcile the two.

Adoption by gay couples is the latest issue. A local councillor in my area actually quit the labour party in dismay at their moves on this issue. I find that truly depressing that legislation designed to forbid discriminating against people on their sexuality can be considered an outrage but the same person didn't feel quite as morally bound by say a decsion to illegally invade a foreign country leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and destabalize the middle east even further.

How does this guy reconcile the two. I have some sympathy if he follows his faith, homosexuality i believe is considered a sin. I don't agree there myself but you have say better to be wrong than a hypocrit. However i'm sure there have been other gay related issues in the past, that the same councillor also didn't stand down over.

Apparantly about 75% of british people believe if some kind of god, albeit only about
3% feel the need to worship them on a regular basic. I'm sorry there maybe a lot of latent vague fuzzy belief but we live in an essentially secular country. I think it's long past time we formalised that and getting a two for price of one deal removed our monarchy and church from running of the state. I'd also like a new written constitution, been reading Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man recently, talked a lot of sense that lad. He also wrote the Age of Reason, which i struggled to find in bookshops but found easily enough at amazon, which more pertinantly questions the role of religion and christian believes in our society. Not bought or read that yet, but will get round to it.

Our political process is shite in essence, time we wiped the slate screen and started again. Wandered a bit there, but what the fuck.