well it's getting towards the time that my snooty-teacher-housemate moves out and I will no longer feel like a guest in my own home, and I won't have her boyfriend struggling to hide his irritation that I'm sitting in my sitting room watching my telly... we have come to develop a slight rapport, usually revolving around guinea pigs (pets are great ice breakers). (Did I mention that I found one of them lying dead in a puddle a few weeks ago? She'd left him there and gone to work - she didn't murder it by the way, it was just old and with dodgy kidneys). There's going to be so much room when she moves our her mountains of stuff.

Tonight she mentioned that she's reading The God Delusion by (militant atheist) Richard Dawkins - in which he preaches to the choir about how religion is a terrible thing. I mentioned that I'd read some of his books and that he makes a fine scientist but a lousy philosopher and she more or less said back off or we're going to have an argument and you don't want that... which is fair enough. It's not polite to discuss politics or religion unless you're close. It seems like non-atheists are the new paedophiles these days (not that I'm especially sympathetic with paedophiles mind you) the way that people instantly have a hateful knee-jerk reaction if you profess to a belief in God, and that seems to be the acceptable and morally just reaction with people today. If someone would actually learn about religion and understand all the philosophical and spiritual arguments and reasons that people believe in it, and then still argue against it, then their argument would be worthy of so much more respect. Instead all you get is lot of ignorant and simplistic and blinkered ranting which never really addresses the issue on a deep level and just goes to perpetuate prejudice, in my humble opinion....'tis a shame but you probably know by now it's one of my pet subjects. Anyway it's not as if religion is going to go out of style any time soon though I think the thought police in the secular west might try to put a stop to it, ho hum!

sorry that was a bit of a ramble, but I wanted to get it off my chest...