Who's got the ball?

D'you think any of the various brands of mystics talking tolerance up at Waitangi today gave any thought to the idea that if any one of them is actually right about their particular imaginary friend, then all the others are wrong.

They can't all be right, now can they. So how would any of them judge? How would they be able to tell, for example, that it wasn't Brian who is really the Messiah?

Just asking.

UPDATE 1: Great comment on Brian's protest over at Frog Blog:

Tamaki is a Protestant Nonconformist. Several hundred years ago, when they *had* established churches in European countries (Catholic/Anglican) Tamaki would have been burnt at the stake. Especially for usurping the title of Bishop. It’s only the religious tolerance that he protests about that allows his church to exist.

Don't expect Brian to be bothered by the contradiction. If contradictions really bothered him, he'd have a different day job .. and maybe a better hobby.

UPDATE 2: This seems an appropriate moment to post this observation, from Christopher Hitchens' new book: "There are," insists Hitchens, "four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking."

UPDATE 3: A colleague makes this point:

I don't think this conference was so much about separation of church and state ... as much as it was about protecting primitive belief systems from criticism. I'm waiting for the push on hate speech laws now.