OKAY: Here's what else I have to say regarding making movies about ISLAM:

I have never TRIED to make a movie.
The movies youve seen WROTE THEMSELVES. I've never sat around trying to think up a good idea for a movie - the ideas truly occur to me absolutely unexpectedly, I have no say in when or why they'll arrive in my mind, and the writing process is simply a matter of shaping the idea, adding to it, shaving bits off it, building it up and feeding it almost as if it's its own entity.

I've been sent scores of suggestions, and have never made one of them, simply because they just don't grow in my mind when I contemplate them, despite some of them being very very funny and insightful. If they don't take root and grow of their own accord, then they die off like an unsuccessful species.

And guess what - no ideas about Islam have ever come up for me, because I wasn't brought up in that religion, I'm not intimately familiar with its theology - and TRYING to become familiar with it in order to make movies about it would go completely against everything that I've ever done in making these youtube movies.

I receive a fair amount of email about this, people seem to have the idea that I'm in some way single-handedly responsible for ridding the world of every religion out there. Ummm - no. I never signed up for that. Just as Pat Condell never signed up to make cartoons, Don Exodus never signed up to fight 9-11 conspiracy theorists, or Mister Deity to rail against post-modern deconstructivist feminism.

I do this in my spare time, it's a hobby, it's an expressive outlet, it's my creative enterprise - and frankly if it ever begins to feel like an obligation, then that's when I turn it all off and go do something else.

I really think that there won't be any movies from me about Islam, so please stop asking. I KNOW it is a terrible religion. I KNOW it is a threat to world peace and even world survival. I KNOW it is a much, much, much, much worse problem than christianity. I KNOW ALL OF THAT. I am sickened to hear from Pat Condell what Britain is beginning to look like under Islam.

But here's the most important point:

I think that perhaps we, in the west, will be in a better position to criticise Islam, when we have cleaned up our own back-yard, so to speak. We, as the "christian" west, would be MUCH better off if we could approach the Islamic world and say "Look, guys, we've come out of OUR culture's legacy of believing ridiculous ancient texts, and look at how much better off we are for it. We invite you to really question, as we have done, whether or not basing societies upon centuries-old desert-superstitions is really the best approach to life".

Atheism, or secularism, is a growing movement around the world, with a HUGE variety of people taking a HUGE variety of approaches to the issue of the dominance and problem of religion. I'm fitting into this spectrum EXACTLY WHERE I SHOULD, thanks, and I don't really like being told what to do. I'm doing just fine, thanks very much. I'm doing what everybody should do - contributing what I can to this as best I can.
There is no compulsion in nonstampcollecting.

Thanks for reading this rant.