Better Off Without Religion?

Strange calendar quirk today. It's Mr Keith's birthday (hurrah! cake!) but this evening we're off to one of those Intelligence-Squared debates, which was a christmas present to me from Mr Keith in the first place. Anyway it's quite exciting as it's called "We'd be better off without religion" and speaking for the motion is Richard Dawkins, while against it is Roger Scruton, who are two people I can both froth with pleasure agreeing with and two minutes later shout with anger at the level of my disagreement. I seem to have travelled full circle from my kneejerk, teenage "all religion is shite" feeling, through a genuine love of gentle Anglicanism, only to hit my head against a couple of things: the church's recent decision to make a name for itself by being shitty to gay people again, and the scientific training I can't get away from (Dawkins fuels this of course). In this current state of mind I'm in no mood to listen to someone like Roger Scruton telling us that we have to respect religious belief because it's been around for a long time (like the cold virus? Another link to Dawkins!). So I'll probably vote for the motion. I think Mr Keith will vote against so not for the first time we'll cancel each other's votes out. These debates are fantastic.

Last night we went to see Boeing-Boeing at the theatre off Haymarket.

I never learn, do I? Just because every newspaper review gave it top marks and said it was the funniest thing ever seen, just because it's populated by people revered as great actors, just because I'm sat in an auditorium filled with middle-class people laughing their guts up, doesn't mean that the entertainment will raise as much as a flicker of a smile on my stoney hard face. It was dreadful, absolutely awful. Don't waste your money on west end theatre ever Graeme. Until the next time I read a sequence of fab reviews and think I should go.