A small church in Florida, which deserves no further publicity, has decided to set fire to a pile of Qur'ans to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers and two targets in Washington, one of which was hit.

What do I think about this? I think it is a very bad idea. There are two reasons for this. The first is the rather obvious one that Muslims around the world will spill onto the street like ants, shouting, screaming, making that insane keening noise and setting things and people on fire. There will be dozens of people killed. Maybe hundreds. Probably half of them will themselves be Muslims, it is highly unlikely that any of them will belong to the church in question.

The second reason is that desecration is always stupid. Only religious people really get off on desecration. The Soviets might have razed a few churches to the ground but they would not have crapped on the vestments and wiped their arses with icons, or vice versa. To do that sort of thing requires a belief in an alternative magical being. The Qur'an belongs in a museum, not on a bonfire. It is a thing of curiosity and historical interest. It is not an object of evil magic.

If you want to do something symbolic to a Qur'an, and you have bothered to get hold of a copy rather than just reading it in the form of a free download (it's less than one megabyte in pdf and there are lots of free versions you can download) I suggest that you laugh at it. Reading it first can help.

Holy books don't deserve any special respect but burning any kind of book is just not on. By that I mean symbolically burning it. When I was at school my religious education teacher was an atheist, he asked some boys to throw away some really old battered bibles, and they didn't want to do it. Come on guys. If they've fallen apart they are no use as school text books, put them in the bin, the school will buy new copies that are not falling apart and held together with yellowing sellotape.

Books represent human knowledge, to consciously destroy them is an act of barbarism.

What should the US government do? Absolutely nothing. It would be completely outrageous for the President to have supported the Ground Zero mosque and then condemned this act of free expression. In a free country people are allowed to express themselves, they are allowed to follow their own religion and they are free to be total fuckwits. Any attempts to stop the church making this protest would be unconstitutional. Of course members of the government are free to give their own opinions. I think they should say that this is more offensive than the Ground Zero mosque because it is just an act intended to outrage, but that mosque is offensive too.

I hope you can see that my views here are consistent, not that consistency is the paramount virtue, these people have the legal right to be offensive, and we have the right to tell them that they are wrong to be doing it. Just because you have a right to do something it doesn't make that thing right.

My plea to this nutty pastor is to see reason, call off this provocative event. Spare the bloodshed, send the Qur'ans to the nearest paper recycling centre instead, but don't apologize for your beliefs.

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