What’s the best way to win an argument?

You might think it would be to discredit your opponents’ facts or undermine their logic but, in fact, the best way is simply to deny them a voice in the first place.

Although few people openly seek to silence their adversaries, when those adversaries happen to be religious (as has often been the case with the HFE bill this week), it is so much easier to deploy the “religion is private” card than actually to engage with their arguments. Hence Jackie Ashley in Monday’s Guardian: ‘There is no sensible conversation between the opposing views to be had… live according to your beliefs, but don't try to impose them on the rest of us.’

This will not do. Christian and other religious opinions should be permitted to engage in public debate, no matter how fruitless some people think that debate is. Moreover, who is the ‘us’ here? If Jackie Ashley imagines the rest of the population thinks the same way she does, she should think again.

God, according to Alastair Campbell’s diaries, is a political ‘disaster area’.

‘British people are not like Americans,’ he wrote on 20 March 1996, who ‘seem to want their politicians banging the Bible the whole time.’ In Britain, by contrast, those ‘who didn't believe didn't want to hear it; and the ones who did felt the politicians who went on about it were doing it for the wrong reasons.’

This can be frustrating for those British Christians whose faith leads them into politics. But before we start yearning for a culture in which we can talk openly about God in public, we should read Jim Wallis.

Richard Dawkins has long been recognised as Britain’s grumpiest atheist, our very own Darwinian Victor Meldrew, screeching ‘I don’t believe it’ at anyone who will listen. Readers of his recent God Delusion will have enjoyed him harrumphing his way through modern religion, vanquishing the faithful by the power of ridicule and rhetoric alone.

Is there an English philosophy? Do the English see the world in a particular way?

These were the questions that the philosopher Julian Baggini set out to answer in his book Welcome to Everytown. Identifying the most typical postcode in the country – that is, the one that most accurately reflected its demographic and economic mix – he ended up going to live in S66 in Rotherham for six months.

Are you feeling frustrated? Listless? Despondent? If the answer is ‘yes’, it’s possible that you have contracted the affluenza virus.

Affluenza is the subject (and title) of the psychologist Oliver James’s new book, which charts the ills of modern, ‘Western’ culture. It’s defined on the cover as ‘a contagious, middle-class virus causing depression, anxiety, addiction and ennui’.

Why would anyone become a Christian in Britain today?

Why, when God is dead, religion a cause of global conflict and the church inflexible, illiberal and irrelevant, would anyone in their right mind embrace the Christian faith?

Rarely has such a silly film been so clever.

For the uninitiated, Borat is a ‘mockumentary’ charting the journey across America of the Kazakhstani TV reporter Borat Sagdiyev (played by the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen) in pursuit of ‘cultural learnings’ – and, latterly, Pamela Anderson.