Yesterday I found a new way to shut street preachers up: I just have to start talking to them. If I engage them in conversation, it stops them spouting their religious bullshit to the general public. Yesterday morning, for example, I was in Woolwich and I came across a guy talking nonsense about how the world was about to end. I wasn’t in any hurry so I decided to try to talk some sense into him. The thing is, using my iPad I don’t talk very quickly, so conversations are often long and slow. I got the guy’s attention and asked him to stop trying to brainwash people. What followed was a fairly lengthy conversation: to be honest I was rather agitated to begin with, but I gradually calmed down. The discussion didn’t get very far – the man kept spouting biblical gibberish along with the odd cherry picked scientific anomaly that he obviously didn’t understand and calling it evidence – but it lasted about half an hour, during which time at least I stopped him trying to brainwash people. Perhaps I was wasting my time and being too optimistic in trying to get him to think rationally, but the way in which these people try to impose their beliefs onto the public as if they outweigh all other views and opinions, simply because they come from an ancient, thoroughly debunked book, really annoys me.