For Berg read berk!

Only a religionist could tar us nonbelievers with the same brush as he or she would unreasoning jihadists.

No, scrub that. There are some decent religionists about.

Let's say only a raving pillock of the highest order could do it in the way the Rev. Thomas V Berg has managed it over in the States.

You'll be either enranged or amused to read here how he has compared the "unreason of hate-filled jihadism, which fosters mindless submission to Allah" to the "sterile, severely impoverished rationalism of the secularists, who suffocate in their reduction of reality to the level of mere matter".

Wow! Heady stuff. If this is the Rev. Thomas V Berg who is executive director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics, "a conservative Catholic research group", according to the New York Times, then everything fits into place.

Right, have a stiff drink and read on.

"Only a true believer can make a dirty word of 'rationalism'," says the article's author, "but then, reason is the natural enemy of faith. It gets in the way of acceptance that a stale wafer is the body of Christ; that Jesus was both God and his own son; that Mary conceived him without benefit of earthly spermatozoa."

He goes on, clearly warming to his attack on the Rev. Berk – er, Berg:

However, to compare terrorist jihadists to secular humanists, as the Rev. Berg does, is at once vicious and ludicrous. The secularists of my acquaintance pay taxes, attend school board meetings, vote, separate their bottles and newspapers, take care of aged parents, contribute to charities and political parties, keep up their properties, volunteer, and nurture their children. I assume Berg would prefer any of them as neighbors to a fundamentalist bomb-thrower. He cannot then equate the two.

Further, Berg is on shaky moral ground, given that he represents a church that treats women as less equal than men and has sheltered hundreds of pedophile priests who have ruined the lives of unknown thousands of innocent children. This is hardly the pulpit from which to lecture the rest of us. Look to your own glass cathedral.

Yeah, go and throw a stone at yourself through the windows, Bergy, you nutcase. And, while you're at it, go unfrock yourself.