And this, from one who irrationally follows a different god, tells me it's time to leave the conversation.
Think I'll have curry for me tea.

That's no way to talk about your god.

It's not his god, that god changed, Barry the rabbit told him in the garden one afternoon.

The funny thing, theologically speaking, is his lack of understanding. If Kirkstaller believes in the idea of the Trinity, then he believes that Jesus and God are one and the same. So claiming that he worships Jesus but not Allah is nonsense, since he also worships God, and the Christian god is one and the same as Yahweh and Allah, the Jewish and Muslim versions of god.

If Kirkstaller doesn't believe in the Trinity, then he (presumably) believes that Jesus is the son of God and, but a separate entity. In which case, it would be an odd form of Christianity if he didn't also worship God the Father as well as the son. And, as before, Jehovah is the same as Yahweh and Allah.

His comments about Jesus make no theological difference to the god he worships – unless he really is on a fringe the like of which I haven't heard of before.

This explains it perfectly.

The story is nonsense, even for the Wail, since no dinner lady is in any way concerned with the contracts to supply meat to a school. No dinner lady would have any way of knowing whether any meat was halal, mental or call-me-al. Any dinner lady, to the extent she ever thought about it at all, could only conclude "well, it is an all-halal-dining room, so any meat must be halal, unless the suppliers are doing a Tescoburger on us".

So by definition the Wail story is omitting crucial detail.

In my time, I've eaten a lot of curries and they are all halal meat. I have a strongish objection to the unnecessary cruelty of non-stun halal meat production, and while I can tolerate some religious foibles, in this case given that a large proportion of muslims do NOT insist the animal can't be stunned, I consider it should in this country be illegal to slaughter without pre-stunning. But apparently it's not. Therefore the powers-that-be must be happy enough with the method used so as not to ban it. As I assume I am eating meat slaughtered in a legal way I therefore shrug my shoulders and eat the curries without more ado.

I would not actually buy meat which was advertised as non-stun, but that's about as far as my objections go, it's not a huge issue for me. I have been to slaughterhouses and there is no good way to go and I have slaughtered chickens and shot wild boar and rabbits myself without pre-stunning, not to mention eaten probably tons of fish and seafood that was removed from its element and simply left to die. I have also personally probably killed trillions of living organisms during the course of (for example) boiling vegetables, so it would be a tad hypocritical of me, not to mention purely size-ist, to be too pernickety about the fate of halal meat.

What I do find astonishing is that one religion has been allowed to dictate and impose on ALL students this aspect of their beliefs. Very clearly, those parents who do NOT want their children to be fed halal meat should have that option. I can only presume that they are made aware of the halal-only policy when seeking to enrol their children, and have no objection to it.

But going back to the "dinner lady", very clearly the Wail aren't telling the whole story so there's no point in even commenting.

Yes it is, the slaughterman has to say the magic words every time prior to despatching the beast.

So traders were labelling halal food in Paul's time, eh?

It's a bit unlikely, given that Paul lived (approximately) from AD 5 to AD 67.

While Mohammed is reckoned to have lived between AD 570 and AD 632.

So even by Kirkstaller's standards, claiming that Paul had anything to say about Islamic practices is plain daft.

Do you think he is the only one?

Hello minty. I understood it that kirky was taking what Paul said and using it in a different context. Showing when people were meant to have been born has nothing to do with anything in this instance.

I'm not religious, but I understood that.

I object. This is pure discrimination. Durham Giant has repeatedly diagnosed me as a basket case, yet nobody has expressed the slightest worry about it. This is unfair, why is kirkstaller so special that you are worried about him, when you aren't worried about me?

What does God do when he's annoyed? I'm vaguely familiar with the wrathful, plague and pestilence type stuff, which I assume is what he does when he's really hacked off, but how does his minor irritation manifest itself?

The amusing thing here is that Kirkstaller has managed to state that his own god is a 'false idol'.