It's been quite a week for moronic fundamentalism.

It all kicked off (this week, I mean, fundamentalism has been around since the Catholic Church decided that it's the One, True whatever, if not before) when that idiotilc redneck Terry Jones decided that it would be a good wheeze to burn the Holy Koran. More precisely, to say he was going to, because he didn't, eventually. It being summer and all that, the 24/7 news-media had nothing better to fill up the waves, so the fool was given enormous coverage.

Which then led to other moronic fundamentalists, this time not rednecks but ragheads (to use the SAS appellation, which is not precisely politically correct but I don't give a damn) to start jumping up and down and screeching "Death to America". So peeved were said ragheads by the idea that someone was going to do what they love doing (in their case, it's burning the Stars and Stripes) that even when the idiot pastor backed down, they carried on jumping up and down and screeching.

Which then led to their less hysterical but no less fundamentalist counterparts on the other side of the equation to start getting all hot under the collar about how the Muslims were going to burn Bibles and how Christians were living in fear.

Which then led to even more 24/7 coverage and so on and so forth.

A few people were moved to use Facebook to publicise their phobias, and what with FB being somewhat less used by your average jumping up and down and screeching Islamic Fundamentalist than by your average Christian Fundamentalist, the latter got more exposure than the former by a long shot, presumably leading plenty of people to conclude that the barbarians were at the gate and that we'd better start boiling the oil and sharpening the stakes.

Oh dear, oh dear, how prejudice and bigotry take over when calm reasoning and liberalism stand down. Just because it's completely OTT for the ragheads to threaten to blow up the world because some barely-sensate pseudo-Christian makes some fatuous remark and is taken seriously by an equally fatuous media, this doesn't mean that it's OK for the (self-proclaimed) civilised world to start getting equally hysterical.

In fact, a sensible Muslim would look at that Jones creature and shake his head in pity, wondering how it was possible for so many aeons of evolution to end up with this sorry excuse for a human being. This is very much the same way that I look at suicide-bombers whose brains, such as they were, have been given a good scrubbing by some loony Imam who, conveniently, sends these poor creatures off to sow the seeds of the Imam's ineffectualness.

I remember listening to a talk-show on LBC some time ago during which the presenter, one James O'Brien, remarked that if these idiots (both the Imams and their senseless tools) would get themselves a girl-friend, we'd all be so much happier.

To be sure, that really is the solution: if these serial misogynists would actually start trying to accommodate the views of someone else in a serious (or even a casual, for that matter) relationship, rather than existing on the premise that the sun shines out of their fundament, then they wouldn't be obsessed with going around trying to blow up anyone with whom they don't agree. Or with sending off young men and women to blow people up, either.

And before the people on "this" side of the equation start getting all holier than thou and smug, let me just remind you that inter-personal relationships and generally accommodating other people's ideas is not exactly the most prevalent strand of the philosophies that have underpinned society.

Tolerance of other ways of life and acceptance that maybe, just maybe, not everyone subscribes to precisely the same way of thinking are not features of many aspects of Christian (hence European for many centuries) thought.

Look at the way the divorce debate has developed, if you would allow me to use the word "developed" in this context, the more appropriate word being "regressed". We're now being regaled with the spectacle of a barely coherent quasi-religious bloke who seems to be a few stigmata short of an outright sainthood (to put it charitably) telling us what the fruits of his imagination is telling him is the position we have to adopt on this Satanic idea that the State should have in place a system that allows those whose personal beliefs allow it a means to dissolve their marriage.

You know, the way the State already recognises such dissolution when it has taken place outside these Christian shores.