Young men at the Darul Uloom Haqqania madrasa spend their time memorizing all 77,701 words of the Koran.

Some people call it the University of Jihad. The fact that some of Haqqania’s graduates go on to become Taliban fighters and suicide bombers isn’t the school’s concern, said Syed Yousef Shah, the head of the 3,000- student madrasa. “One person may become a journalist, another a driver,” he said as he reclined on a pillow in a small meeting room in the school. “We can’t control what people do afterward.”

Well that’s bullshit. Granted, a madrasa can’t control directly what its graduates do later, but any school naturally shapes and influences what its graduates do later, by means of what … Read the rest

Mark Vernon at Hay.

[N]ew lines are being drawn in the debate between belief and non-belief. In short, the initial dispute appears to be exhausting itself and in its place, a more subtle discussion is emerging. The question is no longer simply, Does God exist? That has never admitted of a final answer anyway. Instead, it is this: What would it be like to live in a world without God?

Oh please. That’s not a new line, for god’s sake. It’s not as if nobody has wondered or discussed what it would be like to live in a world without God until now! The question has never been simply ‘does God exist?’; who said it was? On the other … Read the rest

Oh come on – get serious.

A family breakfast turned into a religious experience when they spotted what appears to be the face of Jesus in the lid of a Marmite jar.

Look at the damn picture! It looks like what you’d expect on the lid of a jar of brown goo: some brown goo and some jar lid.

Not to mention the fact that nobody has the faintest idea what Jesus looked like anyway. ‘The face of Jesus’ of course just means some sleepy amalgam of various modern images of Jesus which are vaguely derived from earlier images of Jesus which are derived from more of the same which ultimately derived from whatever people thought Jesus ought to … Read the rest

Jeezis, what a morning. I feel almost a kind of nostalgia for the old calm placid normal-pulse days before last Friday. Ever since then things have been frantic and franticker – but yesterday and then this morning they were frantic cubed. But in a good way. You’ll see why, soon. (When I say frantic – all I mean is that I had to write something quite complicated in a very short bit of time, and that there were other items coming in at two-minute intervals, and that the picture kept changing. I don’t mean invasions or sudden bankruptcy or an army of stockholders coming to tear my liver out. Compared to CEOs of car companies my life is placidity itself.)… Read the rest