That religion stuff, and what I meant to say about it

It won't have escaped your notice that I started to write a comment piece on this news story but my blog client (which I really do need to write something about in the not-too-distant future since it's something that I've written and could possibly turn out to be quite useful to a fairly small subset of the Open Source community) fell over. Before it retired to that great stack trace in the sky, however, it managed to vomit up the beginnings of my post onto the internets (a fact about which I have filed a bug) and as a result managed to make me look like both a bit of an idiot and a bit of a bigot. I'm used to the idiot part. I don't like looking like a bigot.

Anyway, since it had made it onto my blog (and I never bothered to check that it hadn't, it also ended up propagating across the interwubs to LiveJournal, where a good friend of mine commented:

Interesting case. If they were only leafleting, though, I can't see the harm, and even if they were preaching in the street, I think asking them to leave was a bit severe. People can quite easily walk past and seal up their ears (as we do every day to resist free newspapers being thrust into our hands) - and Jehova's Witnesses have been door-knocking for years without being asked to leave certain streets. The "Be a winner, not a sinner" man who yells his (Christian) faith down a megaphone in the middle of Oxford Circus every single day is seen as a local landmark, if a slightly irritating one once he starts going on about how buying stuff on a Sunday is a highway to hell.

I don't believe in thrusting religion down people's necks, but we accept the marketing of coffee, newspapers and shampoo samples readily enough on the basis that people can take it or leave it, so why ban people expounding on their religion in the same way, as long as they're not being aggressive or harrassing people?

On a similar theme, I got handed a flyer today about a man who's riding a horse from Texas to Jerusalem (the tricky bit with the ocean wasn't explained) in the name of Jesus, to spread the Gospel. Fair dos, I thought, before turning my thoughts to how he was going to get the horse across continents.

All of which, plus the fact that it was late and I was tired and lacking in the brain power necessary to sling a sentence together, let alone make a point about religion, left me thinking that I should probably re-write the post, or at least some of the post, and actually make clear my thoughts on the matter, which, exploding blog clients aside, I'd hitherto failed to do.