I'm an irreligious Calvinist.
But in much of Africa, Asia and the rest of the world, they serve not only to silence irreligious utterances but, along with other limits on free speech, to ensure that hardline religious leaders support incumbents and to silence political opponents.Even laws introduced to tamp down the most poisonous utterances can end up as a tool of repression.
"In an irreligious world, brands provide us with beliefs," says Mr Olins.
To the objection that irreligious fascists and communists found plenty of non-religious reasons for murder in the 20th century, Mr Hitchens retorts that these beliefs were types of secularised religion, and as such do not count.What is missing from the book is much sense of what a world without religion, or one that had not had religion in it, might look like.
He called for children to spy upon their parents, prostitutes to be chastised, sodomites burned alive and irreligious frivolities prohibited.
Karen Armstrong is a good blender, which has made her a successful ambassador of religion in a generally irreligious age.
Kuwaiti members of parliament have called for temporary bans on supposedly irreligious forms of entertainment, such as belly-dancing.
In the Muslim world the repression is sometimes by theocracies (like Iran or Saudi Arabia), against irreligious sorts, such as adulterers, heretics and homosexuals.
The world's religious make-upRELIABLE data on the age and whereabouts of the religious and irreligious are hard to come by, which makes a new report on the topic from the Pew Research Centre welcome.
Religious and irreligious alike have been warned.The risk will presumably be worse if a future President George Bush expands "charitable choice".
Prominent figures including the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the current defence and home ministers, plus the chief minister of Karnataka state, are cheerily irreligious.
