Pancakes For Atheists

This morning I didn’t write a blog, I’m supposed to be responding to Tom Pride’s comments on yesterday’s blog so I shelved the idea and just tweeted the rough idea:

I was going to write a blog about how atheists should leave the pancakes alone, but I’ll leave them to their hypocrisy. Heathens.

I could construct a blog along those lines.  Point out that Shrove Tuesday (the real name for pancake day) is a period of festivity prior to Lenten fasting and thus it’s very existence is reliant on belief in Our Lord Jesus Christ and the period he spent in the desert before his return to his disciples, Palm Sunday, Easter, his death and rebirth to live everlasting and so on.  To celebrate bits and bobs of the Christian tradition is to show a profound disrespect for their own rejection of that faith.  It would also give me a chance to have a moan about Quorn bacon and sausages.

Vegetarians and vegans give up meat.  They eschew it.  Why then do they go out and invent a product that looks, feels and tastes like bacon and sausages while it is not bacon or sausage?  Either you’re a veggie or you aren’t.  Celebrating Shrove Tuesday is to Atheism what Quorn Sausages are to Vegetarianism.  A pox on them both.

And if you wanted further proof that I wasn’t entirely serious I’d have ended with something along the lines of:

What next?  Will they be celebrating Christmas?  Joining us at the confessionals?  Taking Communion?

Just to hammer it home that I am in fact joking.  Everyone should eat pancakes.  But Quorn sausages are a curse on the planet and must be eliminated.

But I didn’t do that, I just did the tweet.  So two other twitter users (and later a third), who I have never seen before (talk about looking to be offended … sheesh) started to question me on the stance I’d appeared to have taken.  I played along until it got a bit ridiculous and pointed out that I was winding them up.  One of them, the overtly Australian one, took it all in good grace but we expect that of the Aussies, lovely people, go drinking with them, I have family over there.

But getting to the point … because there is one.

If you see someone say something on the internet (or anywhere) and you think it so absurd that the person saying it can’t be serious ASK THEM.

I sometimes think there should be an equivalent of a driving licence before people are allowed on the Internet.  Seriously … well semi-seriously.