Author: Ophelia Benson

Catherine Bennett is amusing.

It is strange, isn’t it, to think that this fine-looking couple, recently seen experiencing spiritual ecstasy in East Grinstead, presumably believe in Scientologist founder Ron L Hubbard’s story of Xenu, the galactic tyrant who froze his victims and stored them in the Earth’s volcanos?

Yeah? I didn’t know that. I don’t keep up with Scientology (too busy keeping up with Feng shui, I guess), and I didn’t know that. The galactic tyrant! Froze his victims! Stored them in earth’s volcanoes. Very cool. Almost as cool as playing football in pyjamas with no goal and no crossbar and no hugging.

If, as Madonna says, she has been ridiculed for professing her beliefs, her best expedient would be to stop professing them, at length, to a British public that is already wearied by haranguing, complaints and demands from rival believers whose only common ground is their indifference to the fact that most other people don’t share their faith…Concerning religion, we can only hope she soon alights on the joys of trappism, and subsequently takes all the other faith communities in this country with her.

Just so. There has been a hell of a lot of haranguing, complaints and demands from rival believers lately, hasn’t there, as well as lashings of indifference to the fact that most other people don’t share their ‘faith’. We get the same thing here, of course, multiplied by approximately 500. It seems to be creeping across the Atlantic. We’re all doomed.

Was there really a time, not so long ago, when Thought for the Day, with the Rabbi Lionel Blue maundering about his mum was the most egregious irritant to this country’s non-believers? If so, it is fast taking on the look of a golden age of secularism, when one likes to think that Tony Blair, had he shared his vision of a new medieval country in which no one spoke ill of religion and where state schools would be handed to unyielding members of mutually contradictory faiths, would either have been escorted to Hyde Park Corner or locked up as a danger to himself and others.

And another thing. It’s this Lewis ‘Tricycle’ Libby thing. What’s up with that?

Mr Libby, who was chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, faces five counts of perjury, making false statements and obstructing justice…Mr Libby faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted but it is widely believed that, if jailed, Mr Libby would be pardoned by President George W Bush when he leaves office.

Is it. Why would that be? Because they’ve done it before, no doubt. Because Republican presidents have a history of pardoning other top Republicans. So…why are Republicans supposed to be the party of ‘values’ then? Seriously. I don’t understand that. Because they get all tied in knots about HoMoSekShuals but are serenely unworried about little things like perjury and obstruction of justice? Well, yes, I suppose that must be it. But…it seems strange. Even stranger than Xenu the Galactic Tyrant.