But it seems to me that if God had intended for you to cover your face then, in His wisdom, He would have provided you with a flap of skin for the purpose.

Q: Prove God doesn’t exist. A: That’s a tough one. Show me how it’s done by proving Zeus and Apollo don’t exist, and I’ll use your method.

The fact that a Jewish state needs to exist at all - and it does need to exist - is an indictment of all humanity, and especially the Catholic Church, whose centuries-long programme of aggressive Jew hatred has been ingrained right into the European psyche so that it takes almost nothing to bring it out.

Freedom requires religion like a slug requires salt

On the other hand, and let's face it, there's always another hand, unless you're a Saudi Arabian shoplifter of course, hurt feelings can be quite traumatic. I've heard that it can take seconds, sometimes even minutes, to get over it.

Here in the UK, we've now got an evangelical television channel - it's the kind of thing that will be very familiar to everyone in the United States, especially if you've ever turned on your TV set on a Sunday morning, and seen one holy man after another, urging you to send money so that Jesus can buy a new cadillac. Apparently, Jesus can't save the world until he's been properly kitted out with a million-dollar mansion, and a private jet - some small print in the Gospels that we must have missed.

People keep framing this as a religious freedom issue, but there's a difference between practising your religion - which everyone has the right to do - and rubbing your religion in people's faces as a triumphalist political statement, which is what's happening here.