Secret Satan

I’ve just seen Satan packing bags for kids charities at a supermarket.
He was easy to spot. Cheery old bloke with white whiskers, said ‘Ho, ho, ho’ a lot and kept wishing people Merry Christmas.
‘This buffoon’s confused or dyslexic’, you’re thinking, ‘he clearly means Santa’.
No, I mean Satan. I know the man concerned as he’s a fellow member of a group who (local godbotherers earnestly assure not only each other but also their friends who live in government broomcupboards) are either Satan made flesh or at the very least his little helpers.
Not only that but he’s also a dangerous sectarian. And you can take that from sensibly shod jam-makers who feature prominently in Manx government disaster plans (which scares the daylights out of me, as has meeting similar socially privileged but intellectually challenged dingbats who might take life or death decisions in such emergencies).
I am absolutely serious. A few months back the local WI were, as ever, short of good speakers and it was suggested that it would make sense to add Isle of Man Freethinkers to the ‘minority religion’ speakers invited to dispel common Christian myths which in the past, unchecked, led to things like the Holocaust.
Amazingly, the jammy bodger management seem to have decided that this can’t happen because sectarian groups aren’t allowed to preach at WI hen parties, and humanism (I know not how they decided this) is sectarian.
I asked two humanist friends in Northern Ireland what they thought about this. You’ll agree, I think, they might know a thing or two about sectarianism.
The noise at the other end of the phone, the wife of one informed me, was her husband lying on the floor, bent double laughing while rubbing his buttocks, which he had bruised after falling off his chair, which was now in pieces.
But, hey, what would they know compared to godfearing, upright Manx ladies who sometimes read nearly half the Daily Mail without professional help?
Well, one has a George Cross for pulling rather a lot of civil servants out of a building the IRA had just bombed. The other spent getting on for two decades, outside of his ‘real’ job at Belfast’s only state school for kids from both communities, as a voluntary mini-bus driver running families of both Loyalist and Republican prisoners to the H-Blocks every weekend.