If your feet smell, don't go to a mosque. And don't even bother with spicy food if you're thinking of worshipping the mighty bearded one. How do we know? Muhammad said so, that's how:

Whoever eats onions, garlic or leeks, let him not approach our mosque, for the angels are annoyed by the same things that annoy the sons of Adam.

Obviously, if you come out of a pub having had several pints, go round the corner for a donner kebab, smoke a pack of 40 Marlboros, and get a bit of a sweat on by walking a couple of miles to the mosque, you're probably not going to get past the bouncers on the door.

But something tells me that the above description rarely fits any of the Muslims I've seen, and those who do that kind of thing are much more likely to be praying to the great god Ralph (or Huey) on their knees before the great, white, porcelain telephone.

I'm still looking for the hadith on farting in the mosque, by the way. All that nose-to-tail genuflecting is sure to mean that one or two sneaky windy-pops are unavoidable. The secret is to breathe out through the nose when your head is down, in through the mouth as you rise up. Muhammad said that too. Probably

I've read a few comments lately where Christians condemn the decadent nature of the Roman Empire and its 'heathen' ways: its pagan values led to its fall, and good riddance to those nasty people who killed Christ and fed Christians to the lions.

So how did it really happen, and who was in charge of Rome when the Roman Empire finally collapsed?

I'll give you three guesses. All of them begin with 'C'.

Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus came to power as Emperor Constantine in AD 306, and in 312 he converted to Christianity, becoming the first Christian Roman Emperor. Prior to that Christians had been persecuted and many of them martyred, but the religion was now tolerated in the Empire.

Constantine's conversion to Christianity is often attributed to a dream, which influenced him to march into battle with Christian symbols painted on his soldiers' shields. He won the battle, attributed it to divine intervention, and the rest is history. Without that dream he would probably have won the battle anyway, perhaps not become a Christian at all, and the whole course of religious history might have been different. 'Might have', however, is never written in the history books.

Despite this 'tolerance' of Christians, it was only in 391, during the rule of Theodosius I, that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. By 476 the Empire had fractured into two parts and the last emperor of the western Roman Empire, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed. The eastern Roman Empire, which later came to be known as the Byzantine Empire, continued for a further 1000 years, but what we know as 'The Roman Empire' ended in 476.

Christianity was in power when Rome fell. And it only took 85 years for Christian rule to wreck a civilisation which had been founded in 753 BC, some 1200 years earlier. Let it never be said that Rome fell because it was an evil, cruel empire, ruled by pagans who persecuted the Christians. In fact, when it stopped condemning Christians, and was in fact ruled by them, it all fell apart.

Before Christianity, Rome tolerated any and all gods, and allowed their followers to worship as they pleased (except for some really weird, sicko cults which were banned). You could worship your gods so long as you recognised everyone else's gods. The rule of thumb: be tolerant of all other belief systems.

Of course Christians didn't like that. With their one god they refused to accept the worship of other gods. They refused to tolerate other gods. They wanted everyone to worship their god and abandon all the others. Sound familiar? Wonder why they were persecuted? Because they themselves refused to tolerate other religions.

This is not the whole story, of course. The fact that tribes such as the Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, and, most famously, the Huns (under Attila the Hun) weakened the fabric of the Empire, was key to its eventual end. But Christianity was in power when all this happened. Christian rulers could do nothing to stop it. The Christian God did not save the Roman Empire.

And then, of course, 200 years later, came the Muslims, who ended up slaughtering half of Europe and eventually putting an end to the eastern (Byzantine) Empire too. But that's another story!

There are some Christian groups who claim that Christianity can 'cure' homosexuality. This story suggests that they do far more damage than good:

Ex-Gay Recovery

When you've read that, take a look at the whole site. They are few and far between, but it seems that there are at least some Christian organisations which do not condemn homosexuality and, in fact, want to include GLBT people in their communities.

Of course, if they dropped the belief in God they would earn even more of my respect, but given that homosexuals are condemned by most Christian denominations, this one is actually doing some good, at least in terms of acceptance that these are not 'choices', and that sexuality is as much a part of people as is the colour of your eyes.

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Footnote: This blog was not written at gunpoint. I am not being held hostage by militant Christians!