It's going to be interesting to see how Western religions react to their new Third World pastors when the supply of locally-born clergy runs out. Personally I doubt whether the growing churches in developing countries can reliably produce doctrine or personnel acceptable to the more enlightened West. It may simply drive more people away.

But Mark is quite right in general: as any ideology declines in popularity the ones who remain tend to be the more extreme. Given what we know about of religion I suspect they will also be the less well-educated and the more inflammable. No doubt they will do their best to seriously damage our society: so we must be prepared to keep them in check.

What I would like to know is why a clearly dwindling demographic gets so much input into government policy?
It seems whenever fundamentalist Christians on the fringes (just like cyclists on the fringes) want something, the government swings into action it would never normally do to pander to their (often outright unreasonable) demands.

When the Catholic Church nominated Sydney for World Youth Day, what did each of the three levels of our government do?
Bend over and rolled out the welcome mat AND a temporary army for good measure.

An interesting article but I find it a little hypocritical. At first the author is saying that Christians are trying to take away the rights of others and then in the same breath says that Christians right ot free speech should be taken away. We live in community, and that means accepting all those within it - weather we accept thier veiws or not. If you do not like what someone is saying then don't listen, if you believe that someone is getting to much poitical power then do something about it like put your own hat in the ring. But don't just complain and point fingers.

How dishonest can an author be. He writes
'Christians and other religious groupings regularly describe Gay people as depraved, deviates, intrinsically and objectively disordered. ;

No they describe their behaviour as depraved and deviant. Just like adultery, fornication and other sexual sin.

The truth is that the loud militant homosexual lobby backed by a media full of deviance wants acceptance of the unacceptable. Not happy to sexualise young girls and boys and promote immorality among teenagers the media want to back the screams of god defying arrogrance of those wanting to promote deviant lifestyles.

Stop trying to promote a deviant lifestyle on the rest of the population and you will hear a lot less.

This article is nothing but a Christian bashing (particularly Catholic) exercise. Why no mention of Islams response to those practicing homosexuality? Usually because the gutless media won't go their. It seems universities won't either. What hypocrisy.

Fancy the learned Dr teaching a Christianity and its impact. What a distorted view one will have to take to get a pass mark.

I had a laugh at Mark Johnson's claim that "the language of Human Rights" is being used to "deny human rights".

Well, ya see John, Human Rights deal in moral absolutes, and those absolutes are contradictory. You can not claim a "right to religion" and then claim that a religion has no right to condemn behaviour which its own God has very pointedly proscribed.

Personally, I think it is rather poetic that the Catholics are using the contradictions in Human Rights declarations to attack those (so called) Human Rights which it opposes. It seems that the disciples of God are a lot smarter than the modern disciples of Human Rights who think that their own particular dogma is infallable.

Sorry, Runner, but experience shows that giving way to fanatics -- be they religious, Green, Nazis or Communists -- simply encourages them to press their claims further and further. Your attempts to intimidate people who oppose your bigotry and hatred need to be exposed for what they are, and ordinary theists need to realise that by sitting back and allowing extremists like you to dictate policy to them will simply bring them into disgrace and disrepute.

If your God wants gays persecuted, then let him do it himself, without our help, or yours. After all, he's powerful enough -- isn't he?