A religion can be defined as the public affirmation of a system of beliefs held by a large group of people. Smaller groups within the main religion are sects, eg Sunnis and Shias and much smaller groups are usually rather extremist eg. Wahabis.

A belief is any idea or concept not supported by evidence or rationality, ie. we do not believe the Earth is round, we know it is round.

Atheism as espoused by Dawkins et al. is an argument about belief and therefore has no merit since belief cannot be argued.

I must stop here because I have other stuff to do and anyway the word limit would be a cut-off.

The current cover of the New Yorker is an in house joke for the cognoscenti. Among the general population it will be taken at face value. High satire it may be but satire must be made in context, so the cartoon should be inside the magazine with appropriate commentary. Very poor editorial judgement .

White people compared to who? This concept is similar to the U and Non U kerfuffle caused by Nancy Mitford's essay about the British aristocracy and its middle class aspirants in 1950. That debate centred upon linguistics whereas this 'whiteness' thing revolves around behaviour. It is all about class, and in America class is based on colour. All good for a giggle, just depends on what colour you are.

I have been driving a 2006 smartfortwo for three years in Canada mainly in and around Vancouver. My urban mileage is about 60 /gallon or as we say here, 4.3 litres/100 km. This is using low sulphur deisel fuel. This is the same car that has been proved in Europe for 10 years.

The 2008 model designed expressly for the US market was downgraded to suit Detroit's fear of fuel efficient foriegn vehicles. Made larger and longer, the car now suffers from a 1 litre petrol engine from Mitsubishi, not the 799 cc deisel by Mercedes, as used in the original older model. This engine also demands expensive premium petrol and then only gives the owner 40mpg !

As fuel economy is the major purpose of the smartcar I can say that the US market for the European smartcar has been manipulated on behalf of the Detroit moguls who are now reaping their reward for wasting fuel and other raw materials for the last 80 years.

The current 2009 iteration of the Mercedes Deisel for the smartcar gets an amazing 85.6 mpg with an increase in performance. You guys have been had royally.