On the surface it may look as though nothing has happened on this webpage for a while, but behind the scenes I've been trying to fix some of the many, many problems that have stopped the site from working properly following the work of some rather intrusive spammers. Here's what's what:

* You should now be able to comment without any problems, though you still need to answer the anti-spam question.

* You can now register your username when entering a comment to save you entering your information all the time.

* The right hand column of the front page now displays a list of the most regular commenters and their URLs.

* The comment form will now remember your details if you choose the option "remember personal info." It never worked before. 

* I now have time to actually write something for the website rather than just tinkering with it. Yay!

It seems that whoever messed up my webserver did more damage than I first thought. All the PHP stuff was wrecked so none of the stats work, but more importantly the comments weren't working either and if you've tried to comment recently you'll have been redirected to an anti-spam website and a picture of someone sticking their middle finger up at you. There's nothing I can do about this at the moment but it should be fixed in the next few days. Comments have been reactivated, so you should be able to comment now - just remember to answer the anti-spam question!

It feels like a long time since I blogged on here, and technically it is. I have about half a dozen blog posts sat waiting that I need to finish, but I'm so short of time lately that they're not getting done. I don't get home from work until late and I'm always way too tired to write anything that requires brain power. I have managed to read a lot though, and my current selection of books have a distinctly atheistic flavour about them. I've finished Sam Harris's The End of Faith and also Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity.

Next up is Richard Dawkins' latest offering The God Delusion. It's always interesting to read atheist authors, and while they come across rather impressively whilst trashing creationism and a lot of other Bible-belt fundamentalism it is all too often clear that they either do not engage with or do not understand more serious theology and tend to flounder a little. Both Harris and Dawkins are fundamentalists too of course, just with a different set of beliefs.

See Dawkins interviewed by Jeremy Paxman here. It's not very often you see Paxman look this uncomfortable.

In other news, I've decided to shelve my plans to do postgraduate study abroad for the time being and am going to apply to the University of Durham to pursue New Testament studies. Do any readers of this blog have experience of Durham Uni? If so what did you think of it?