One of the most heartening facts about the fortunes of the church in the modern UK is the reality that for more than half a century its attendence figures have been on a permamnent slide to the point where there really seems to be little sense in maintaining the delusion that we have a state religion at all. Much like the irrelevance of the royal family to everyday life, the Church of England has withered and become outdated to the stage where it has more in common with the image of the UK portrayed in Agatha Christie novels than reality, occupiying a mythical world of village greens and summer fetes where everyone is polite and ever so middle class with it.

Of course the slide away from a religion that has had its time in the sun and can really offer little to a modern person save for a collection of wooly stories and happy-clappy nonsense based on the traditions of a bronze age tribal culture is pretty much inevitable no matter what its faithful might want you to think.

But as with most long and painful deaths, there is are always a few lingering spasms and rattles from the carcass of a creature that just hasn't realised that it's dead yet. And so we have the "Back to Church Sunday" looming very low on the horizon this weekend when your local church is determined to prove to you that they do in fact have something to say that might interest you after all.

Perhaps in light of this event the news that the Bishop of Reading has made commnets to the effect that Jesus was the kind of guy who would have been seen shopping in Aldi or Asda rather than M&S has somehow made it into the national media this week. He was of course trying to claim that the actual core values of the church mean that Jesus would have been a man of the people rather than an elitist and combat the image of the middle class church-goer.

Seems to me that what with his preaching about the discarding of personal wealth and all that wandering about from place to place with his band of followers, Christ would have been more likely to be a new age traveller given to the "freegan" habit of scavenging in the bins of said supermarkets for the food that they throw away every day.

But on a more serious note, the bishop made the statement that people think you have to be: "...highly educated or suited and booted..." to attend church and that the situation frustrated him. Now this reminds me of the old Monty Python song "Every Sperm is Sacred" in which the Catholic infatuation with unprotected sex is lampooned and the line: "you don't have to be a six-footer/you don't have to have a great brain" describes the fact that most organised religions care not one jot about the type of people they attract so long as they sit in the pews and soak it up.

Now please don't think that I'm down on the stupid and brainless here, I'm just sure that the morons of this nation could be better served without having the small portion of thier brains that function to some degree crammed full of religious bollocks.

So there you have it, come to the Church of England this Sunday. They don't ask any questions and they don't care what kind of a person you are so long as you'll bow your head and follow the rest of the sheep. They won't stop priests from molesting children or praying on vulnerable parishoners, they have an element that still hate the gays and some are still smarting over the fact that women can now wear the silly robes and be a priest to!

Give it another fifty years and they'll be even furhter up shit creek.