NO VOODOO

My title might be ever so slightly insolent and I suppose I'd better prepare an overnight bag for when the Police come knocking at my door, to feel my collar for daring to try to be facetious about religion.

I'm kidding, but not very much.

After all, some court or other, according to the news updates I get via Twitter, recently handed down a punishment of imprisonment for blasphemy and where does the line get drawn between blasphemy and Michael extraction?

The Court wasn't the Gozitan one, in case you were wondering. It was in Teheran or some such centre of progressive thought.

You might be wondering what has brought on this religious train of thought.

Well, it's like this. Of late, we've been having a bit too much piety and a smidgen of excess in the holier than though department.

This is a secular state, albeit with a Catholic tradition, and there are limits to the extent to which, with all due respect, religious sentiment should be allowed to insert its oar into national policy.

The brewing controversy over IVF and related scientific achievements is one such example.

Leaving aside my difficulty with the way the Church Organised has decreed that the scientific knowledge that (according to their own definition) comes from God can't be used because, in some way that I can't comprehend, it offends God, where is it written that the policies of a secular state are to be established by reference to religious tenets?

And why are the only "experts" who are so keen to give us the benefit of their deep knowledge always priests? At least, that's what it feels like: it's as if we've regressed to the Middle Ages, when the only people with access to knowledge came from the seminaries.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that if a priest proposes a course of action or conduct, I will adopt a diametrically opposite one, as a matter of principle.

I know this is a facile and uneducated generalisation, but the more these guys lay down the law, the more I'm going to kick against the trend.

Remember, we had that Friggieri person telling us what plays we can and can't watch, with various types chipping to support this assault on my freedom to receive information.

Read my lips: I'm perfectly capable of making up my own mind, I am an adult, I do not need anyone to impose her own morality on me, with or without the support of priests, however philosophically qualified they are.

Then we had that PR-disaster in the form of the condemnation from on high of the Nadur Carnival, of all things, for all the world as if the Established Order was about to come crashing down around our ears.

Now it's ordained that procreation shall be sought exclusively by male and female interaction, presumably only within the bounds of sanctified marriage, not to be getting more graphic about it.

In the meantime, Catholic Malta lurches more and more towards xenophobic bigotry with not exactly deafening condemnation coming from where it should be.

Priorities skewed or what?