Australia Needs To Have A Superficial Conversation About Religion.

The people of Australia need to put aside their differences and come together on common ground. Especially at this crucial moment in our history. How better, I ask, to achieve this goal than to engage in an inconclusive, protracted, ignorant, and superficial examination of the issue of religion?

Forget that old refrain about not mentioning politics or religion at the dinner table, emotive asseveration is all the vogue.

Before we get started though, I think we need to set a few ground rules. First of all, let's be really drunk and loud, and only get started at about 3am. Sobriety and appropriate courtesy are the twin killers of any incoherent, boorish argument. Interrupt as often as possible. Every time your opponent verbally completes a train of thought, baby Jesus cries. Crucially, the personal enmity grounding this vitriolic nonsense should centre (at least at first) on mistaken identity, where the semiconscious mind of a juvenile inebriate projects the hebephrenic pro-fascism of one drunken idiot onto another (drunken idiot). The fact that a certain disliked character in "Die hard 4" bears a passing resemblance to your adversary cannot be brought up enough.

After we've interrupted the other side's facile, vapid nonsense, we need to replace it with our own; pick out the most irrelevant part of their ill-considered diatribe and argue on a complete tangent. Allow the conversation to oscillate randomly from religion to the War on Terror. No rejoinders please, that would get uncomfortably close to a logical debate. The format should be assertion, interruption, rebuttle, personal attack. In fact if at all possible, we should maintain logical coherence only at the level of the individual sentence. Contradict ourselves as often as possible. Confuse male circumcision with castration. One person who thinks the US government organized the September 11 attacks should use it as evidence of the absence of a benevolent creator, the other side should recycle half remembered BBC documentaries that fail to address the question, and then claim that no one in Afghanistan supports Al-Qaeda.

During an intermission, we should play drinking games, but even then, residual nastiness is key. When playing "I never" (normally a way to discover the other's adventurous side) we should declare "I never met a supervisor of Kim's that I respected."

On the pro-religion side, we need to make liberal recourse to the "appeal to consequences" fallacy. Let's insist on the existence of local metaphysical truths applicable to the whole universe, which vary from person to person depending on mood and circumstance. Deny the atheist's right to an opinion; assume their lives lack personal tragedy, and argue that as a result they are too shallow to think about this.

For the anti side, 2 simple words; Scientific Chauvinism. Deny any possibility of being wrong, even the solipsistic one intrinsic to all empirical observations.

Only by opening an embarrassingly one- dimensional dialogue on the most simple and wholly ignorant level can we ensure that we, as a nation, never get down to the deeper issues about religious identity that truly threaten to tear this country apart.

Who's with me?

With apologies to the onion.