I was just watching ‘the big questions’ – one of these debate shows where a studio audience discuss the topics of the day. They were talking about whether the disaster in Japan was a reason not to believe in god. as anyone who has seen me watching such a thing knows, pretty soon I was hurling abuse at the telly: it gets to me that people can go on there, defend a bronze-age superstition and an invisible being for which they have no empirical evidence, and then accuse sceptics of being arrogant and aggressive. Even more frighteningly, I learned to day that there is a ‘centre for intelligent design’ in Britain – I thought that bullshit was confined to America, and had died out after Michael Behe took the stand in Dover.

This has, of course, nothing to do with the thrust of this blog, but it’s impossible for any blogger not to say how horrified they were at the images coming from Japan. I’ve never seen anything more terrible. Yet, it strikes me that, just two days after the event, we have a TV program with a studio audience discussing whether it was the work of some Sky Fairy or not. It’s crass, puerile, and makes me very angry…and somewhat scared.