Proof that there are no bigger nuts than religious nuts is that the occupants of Reeves, Louisiana, have for years been desperately trying to have the prefix 666 removed from their phone numbers. After lobbying from both of their state senators finally succeeded in bringing about a change from 666 to 749, the Mayor of the town made the ridiculous statement that the phone company's decision was 'divine intervention'. No, you dipshit, it was the people who asked the phone company over and over and over which made the phone company change its mind. No God required. And no brains required either, by the looks of things. It's just a number. Get over it.

US town escapes 666 phone prefix

Although this happened a few weeks ago, the news that Tony Blair, Britain's former Prime Minister, converted to Catholicism, is described in the following particularly interesting article from the Chicago Tribune:

Britain groans as Blair converts
General unease with religion surfaces as ex-PM quite publicly goes Catholic

The article gives some insight into the differences between Britain's general apathy with religion (only 8% church attendance) and the USA's far less secular position (44% church attendance). It still amazes me that a country with separation of church and state embodied into its constitution is far, far more religious than my own, which has an official state religion. It just shows that having that separation of church and state is not actually the cure (or the cause) of religious intolerance in any given country.

One of the other points of note is that although the UK's state religion is Anglican, more Catholics than Anglicans now attend church in the UK. But still, on the whole, we just don't 'do' religion here. Which suits me just fine, thanks very much.