Hey I feel marginalized and neglected and I yearn – I yearn, I tell you, I yearn and burn and pine – to be understood as a community. Won’t someone please understand me as a community? It would make me so happy. Just once in awhile? On weekends maybe? Or during the World Cup?

Hindus…feel neglected and marginalised and yearn to be understood as a community…[They] do not want to be described as “Asian”, according to a big study of the community…The report, Connecting British Hindus, to be published in the Commons today, was funded by the Government and carried out by the Runnymede Trust and the Hindu Forum.

Connecting British Hindus. Connecting them to the community. The … Read the rest

The Front Page ‘discussion’ with Norm and Nick is hilarious in a sad sort of way – sad if only because of the waste of time and effort and attention. Norm and Nick might as well have conversed with two nice four-foot lengths of solid brick wall, for all the good it did them.

Here’s FP’s Jamie Glazov starting things off, for instance:

The Left has a long, depressing, ugly and blood-stained record of worshipping the most vile and barbaric tyrannies of the 20th century, including Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam and Castro’s Cuba…But if you are on the Left, are you not part of an ideology that holds that human redemption, accompanied by human equality

I was discussing religion and related subjects with an acquaintance yesterday, and he said I have a lot of secular religious or quasi-religious beliefs. I was skeptical of this claim, and we wrangled a bit, but didn’t have time to wrangle thoroughly. So I’ll talk to myself on the subject here, and you can listen in.

The argument was that I (and most people – it’s a general point) hold certain beliefs in a quasi-religious way: moral beliefs for instance. I think murder is wrong, and I believe it’s true that murder is wrong, and that is a commitment without reasons, hence religious. But I dispute all of that. All of it. For one thing, I don’t really think it … Read the rest

What a lovely morning. I woke up far too early (anxiety, no doubt), I spent most of an hour deleting spam from the comments database, then I got an email from a helpful reader (it is just barely possible that some of you can guess which one) who was worried that I might not realize that the signatories of the letter about ‘Christianophobia’ in the Telegraph were loopy. Apparently this reader, who reads B&W regularly and often and has done so for a longish time, thought that perhaps I posted that link because I approved of the letter and the signatories, or that while I might be a little doubtful about their stance I was perhaps not doubtful enough – … Read the rest