In which the pond has a premature Sunday meditation with a worthy Shanahan, resulting in many ejaculations and multiple deities ...

It's a little early for a meditative Sunday, but can the pond help it if the reptiles rush out Angela Shanahan on a Saturday?

As usual, the pond starts behind the eight-ball when confronted by this sort of splash. The pond is always snookered by the notion of "speakers of religious truth".

Are we talking of angry Sydney Anglicans and their complimentary women? Or are we talking of that gigantic whore of Babylon - well, so some evangelicals would term the Holy Roman Catholic Empire of lost souls? Or are we perhaps thinking that Islamics, moderate or extreme, are the speakers of religious truth? What about the Hindus? Whither the religious truth of the cow? And what of the pond's meat-eating sins? Are the L. Ron Hubbards of the world the real speakers of religious truth? Can we even hear it for spaghetti or reptiles?

Yes, it's an old riff, but the pond never tires of it ...

Okay, with everything as clear as Colonel Mustard doing it with a lead pipe in the outside toilet, it's time to get on with the meditation ...

Now this is such a ripe brew of paranoia and repression that it hardly needs any exegesis or commentary by the pond ...

Here, have a few more gods instead ...

Are you aware that the first recorded evidence of induced abortion is in the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus in 1550 BC?

The pond wasn't, but thank the long absent lord it has no fear of stray walri up from the south and found it here.

Since then there has been a lot of backyard abortions and deaths of women persecuted by repressive bigots of the fundamentalist kind, but let's not brood, let's get on with the meditation ...

Indeed, indeed. Lyle Shelton is a model citizen, and let's face it, poofter is just another word for Nazi ...

Sorry Godwin - how did you end up with a name with "God" in it? - but the pond has to announce an epic fail ...

Your mistake was thinking that glib crypto-fascists of the Franco-loving kind could think, let alone think a little bit harder about the Holocaust or why they hate those who are different from them, though ostensibly involved in religions that theoretically preach love in the abstract, but love hate more in their narrow, tiny, repressive, bigoted worlds ...

The pond rarely visits the Fairfaxians these days, but happened to read here ...

"I get criticism from all sides, from conservative Muslims who tell me I should be wearing the headscarf, to anti-Muslim activists. When I get those emails, read those hateful things on social media, I see how the same attitudes to women are shared by jihadists and white supremacists. Women should be at home, making dinner for their husbands and having babies."

Well let's not leave the fundamentalist Catholics and evangelicals out of the fundie mix. And this ...

Feminism isn't only the prerogative of the West, she argues, pointing out there are many women fighting hard for greater rights throughout the Middle East. Nor is Aly a fan of Saudi-style Wahabist Islam, one of the most punitive forms of the religion. She finds the rise of Islamist fundamentalism in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the recent spate of murders of secular bloggers there, deeply troubling.

Ah, the fundamentalist gene, and how it makes all the fundamentalists sound alike, from the Wahabists to the Shanahans, when it comes to gays, women, women's right to control their bodies, creationism, a flat young earth, and all the rest of it assorted gods keep trotting out to the faithful ...

It's one of the greater mysteries, up there with transubstantiation resulting in a deep affection in the faithful for cannibalism, and all the pond can do in response is run the usual intertubes memes ...

And that's why the pond loves a meditative moment with Angela Shanahan. One moment you can be deep in paranoid repressive gibberish, and the next you can be off with Godwin's pixies ...