One of the more controversial pieces of legislation that the UK government is attempting to push through at the moment is a bill to outlaw "incitement to religious hatred". Like a lot of issues where other people have searingly sharp opinions one way or another, I find myself conflicted on this one.

On one hand, we are talking about inciting hatred. That's strong stuff. Causing someone to hate another group of people is something that society should at least try to prevent.

At the moment, in the UK, it is illegal to incite hatred on racial grounds, and rightly so. Racism bubbles at low level in a lot of people, and deliberately inciting that leads to racial tension and violence. It destroys the multicultural society that exists in large parts of Britain.

But incitement of hatred on religious grounds is not currently illegal, and that allows the racists a back door. If you can attack, for example, Islam rather than people of Pakistani origin, then you can get away with it. Yet, for racists, these two groups are synonomous. The exemption for inciting religious hatred gives a back door to racism.

On the other hand, there is a real danger that this legislation may be taken beyond where it is intended to go. It could be used by religious groups to suppress criticism. That would be severely wrong. Religions should be criticised. Religions, like any large organisations, have a tendency to attempt to suppress criticism, to hide abuses. The painfully long legacy of child abuse in the Catholic church and the role of the church in covering it up is well known. The reaction of parts of the British Sikh community to a play that alleged abuse in Sikh temples is another example.

Anyway, I was listening to the radio this morning, and there was an item on a competition being run by the Christian website Ship of Fools (who are opposed to the new law) to find the ten funniest and most offensive jokes about Christianity. One assumes their contention is that these jokes could be outlawed. Some of the jokes were read out on the radio, and my favourite was this one:

Jesus came upon a small crowd who had surrounded a young woman they believed to be an adulteress. They were preparing to stone her to death.

To calm the situation, Jesus said: "Whoever is without sin among you, let them cast the first stone."

Suddenly, an old lady at the back of the crowd picked up a huge rock and lobbed it at the young woman, scoring a direct hit on her head. The unfortunate young lady collapsed dead on the spot.

Jesus looked over towards the old lady and said: "Do you know, Mother, sometimes you really piss me off."

I suspect the radio avoided the most offensive jokes, but I thought this one was funny anyway.

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Steph and I had a big writing day yesterday. Neither of us have been making much progress recently, for one reason or another, so we wanted to kickstart things. Steph managed about 6 pages of new stuff for her brilliant new novel, Congress of Shadows. I am still revising The Sleepers, and I managed to type in about 50 pages of revisions. At last I'm caught up with them and can revise the last quarter of the book. My goal today is to revise everything up to the climax. The climax itself needs some considerable expansion, so that may take a little longer, but the end is seeming close. Then one more draft, a tidy up and I can finally send it to my agent again, with fingers crossed that she likes the revised version