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Miche Doherty

Listed below are comments made by Miche Doherty between Monday, 17th November 2008 and Sunday, 22nd November 2009.

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The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial 6:23pm on 22 Nov 2009 H. L. Mencken covered the Scopes trial, not exactly impartially, and the collection of his reports is well worth reading:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Religious-Orgy-Tennessee-H-L-Mencken/dp/1933633174/
Anyone for a debaptism? 1:39pm on 09 Jun 2009 "The most obvious thing to do, I would have thought, is just get over it: accept that it happened, and also accept that, for the adult atheist, it meant nothing, it implies nothing, it imputes nothing, and it amounts to nothing."

Quite so. I was baptised when I was too young to have an opinion on anything, and confirmed when I was too young to have any autonomy. I don't need to have the baptism and confirmation undone; it's enough that I reject them.

The ceremonies don't matter. Being lied to and frightened about hellfire at an impressionable age - that matters.
Poetry launch cancelled after Christian protest 07:33am on 17 Nov 2008 I read the poem for broadcast. I'm sorry that you, or your producer, decided to fade out rather than include the line "then they shall all be f---ing saved", which is pretty much the point of the poem. You could have bleeped it.

My job as an actor is always to serve the writer. I read it without any editorialising, without any inflection that revealed my own opinions. Now that it's done, though, and having heard the conversation on your programme, I feel free to say that the poem is hopelessly naive. The assertion that the disappearance of religious faith would mean an end to war ("could this be how the shelling stops?") is a stupidity.

So, on the one hand you have a poet who seems to think he has discovered atheism (has he never heard of Shelley?) and, on the other hand, a man who claims the Lord Jesus Christ as a personal friend. Hint: it's OK to have an invisible friend when you're five; not so much when you're a grownup. It wasn't a very edifying conversation.

[Edited to censor the word your blog didn't want to accept.]

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Miche Doherty