Just in case there was any doubt, Obama assures us that religion is indeed mandatory in the US. Just in case we had any hope that the relentless ‘faith’-mongering would go away when Bush went away, Obama tells us it won’t. Just in case people who don’t consider ‘faith’ a cognitive virtue were feeling at all optimistic, Obama goes after the godbothering vote in a hail of ‘faith’ language.

“Now, I know there are some who bristle at the notion that faith has a place in the public square,” Mr. Obama intends to say. “But the fact is, leaders in both parties have recognized the value of a partnership between the White House and faith-based groups.”

Thanks; that’s a … Read the rest

I took a dislike to Cristina Odone years ago, some time when B&W was very young. She hadn’t commissioned a hatchet profile on me as she did to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, she’d merely said something narrow-mindedly faithy, perhaps even overtly Catholic, which got up my nose. (Why ‘even’? Because she doesn’t always admit [to put it mildly] that that’s where her narrow-minded views are coming from, and I suspect that she prefers to leave that out of the picture when she can get away with it.) I can’t remember what it was, or when, but no matter, her unpleasantness now gives us more than enough to scowl over.

Ed Balls began his witch-hunt against faith schools last spring, unleashing informants

Bernard-Henri Lévy spells out the perverse and tragic effect of three great ideas.

[W]e are here facing a sort of perverse effect of three great modern ideas. A sort of paradoxical and counter-effect of three great ideas, which are: anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and the fight against imperialism, three great ideas—among the best which have been produced in the 20th century…[Y]ou have a huge part of the population in America and in Europe, who believe, as a sort of Pavlovian reflex, that these sort of murders, these sort of genocides, can only be committed by ugly, stupid, white men…[W]hen a country of the third world which was colonized (as was Sudan), commits such bloodbaths, commits such crimes, to stop this, to try