Odd where you find things that wind you up

It was no surprise to me to receive at Christmas two copies of The Queen's English, and how to use it, a book titled in such a way that nobody could be in any doubt as to its subject matter. It's a handy guide to correct grammar, punctuation, clarity, brevity in English, you know the drill. The sort of thing I'm happy to see on bookshop shelves.
(I also strongly recommend Lynne Truss's excellent Eats, Shoots and Leaves, in a less formal but equally informative, similar vein).

Within its pages, though, offered as an example of excellent use of English, with which I have no argument, there was a passage extracted from an angry Reverend Doctor Peter Mullen's letter to the Daily Telegraph, in which he rages at the beaurocracy foisted upon him by the Church of England. In it, he says,

"I am trying to be a priest, but I haven't time. When I was first appointed vicar... the diocesan annual returns were on one side of A4. Nowadays, the annual returns are a foot thick and a bundle of perfidious obscurity, hedged about with health and safety and absurd questions about light bulbs, and serious enquiries as to what the PCC is doing to reduce our carbon footprint - all because the Church has taken up the pagan fantasy of global warming."

I suspect regular readers (Fred in Cheltenham, if I can steal from Les Dawson), will know which bit of this I have a problem with. I don't, as I've said, have any argument that it's well written, but the gall in a representative of the Church calling global warming a 'pagan fantasy' is so outrageous I haven't quite got the words to adequately describe it. Just to be clear, you think an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity created the universe and everything in it in six days (He had a rest, remember). That He sent an angel to tell a virgin that His son was coming to Earth through her, a son who performed miracles like raising the dead and rising from his own grave, and then ascended to Heaven, and will yet return. I could go on - you get the whole faith idea, no doubt.

However, the scientific reality of the slow (but accelerating) rise in global annual mean temperatures - a pattern which has been, and is being measured and tracked as a fact - and the overwhelming evidence of changing weather patterns, a retreating ice shelf, melting glaciers and everything else, that's a fantasy? Fucking hell. Perhaps my definition of faith is awry, but I had rather hoped that a religious faith would not blind people to scientific reality, still less persuade them to dismiss other people's beliefs as 'fantasy'. Pot, kettle, black.

I sincerely hope he's just enjoyed the coldest December Britain has had since records started being kept of these things, which will in no way be related to climate change, of course. I've probably said before in these pages that atheists are frequently portrayed as arrogant in their certainty. I would present Reverend Doctor Mullen's letter as evidence that this criticism can equally be levelled at the theologists.