From today, if you want to criticise religion in Ireland in a way that its adherents choose to find offensive, you might find yourself paying 25,000 euros for the privilege. To highlight this regressive new blasphemy law, the Atheist Ireland blog has posted a list of 25 blasphemous quotes and asking bloggers to republish them. So here we go.

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The story of a group of people in Boston, in the US, who faced the closure of their Catholic parish church and began a pretty much spontaneous vigil to ensure the local archdiocese isn’t able to shut it for good and sell off the land. What’s so interesting about this is the positive effect that this adversity has produced.

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Being an atheist with no close family, who is old enough to know my own mind, I’ve developed the freedom over the last few years to dispense with the most regrettable customs surrounding the close of December and to do the things that I think are appropriate instead – making a series of small charitable donations in response to the rampant consumerism going on all around me.

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John Cleese, asked what he thinks of Sarah Palin, bursts out laughing. He then says: “It’s like a nice-looking parrot.” Watch him on YouTube and share the laughter.

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An excellent piece in today’s Guardian by Philip Pullman, author of the wonderful His Dark Materials trilogy, debunks censorship during the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week (it’s important to point out that they celebrate the books, rather than the censorship).

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An inspirational interview in Salon that has me eyeing the disused planters at the end of a neighbouring street. Here’s an excerpt but reading the whole thing, which includes a Q&A with ‘guerilla gardener’ Richard Reynolds, is very much recommended.

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It’s a fine moment when cult TV from your childhood and cult comics artists from your teens and 20s come together. It’s just regrettable that the Beijing Olympics are also involved.

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This blog and its management have always been extremely interested in the conspiracy theory phenomenon. Here’s an interesting link to an article by Frank Furedi on Spiked Online analysing the subject. In it he claims that the whole thing stems from anti-intellectualism and a return to primitive beliefs in evil forces beyond the control of humanity but still able to control their fate.

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How young Saudi women succeed in subverting the rules they are made to live by. From the New York Times: At Prince Sultan University, where Atheer Jassem al-Othman, 18, is a first-year law student, a pair of second-year students recently spent a mid-morning break between classes showing off photographs of themselves dressed as boys. In [...]

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Here’s a quote from a story in today’s Independent talking about the problems experienced by satirists in Putin’s Russia. It’s an interesting read – and one sentence in particular stood out.

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