1) Much (but by no means all, or even most) so-called ‘alternative medicine’ is actually effective. Conversely much (but by no means all, or even most) conventional medicine is pseudoscientific quackery.

… which is a really dangerous point of view, creating equivalence between medicine and bullshit. Bullshit medicine cures bullshit illness and little else.

2) Government intervention in the economy can often be a good thing.

Sorry Andrew, you’re wrong. Everything the Government does has knock on consequences that it cannot predict, and it’s constantly chasing it’s tail trying to correct the imbalances their actions create – they cannot do it – it’s an infinite cycle of breaking the economy while trying to fix it.

3) Art should be measured primarily by how novel the ideas it communicates are, secondarily by its moral tone, and lastly by the technical skill with which it communicates them. By this measure the works of Jane Austen, for example, are of considerably less merit than even most potboiling bestsellers.

Which, I think proves that you need to go back and rethink how you evaluate the merit of art.

5) The scientific method is the single most important thing children could possibly be taught, and should take priority over everything else.

That’s what I’d teach my children, sure – it would be nice if all children were taught it too. Whether or not we have the right to dictate to everyone else what their priority should be? And how do you reconcile point 5 and point 1?

6) That said, spelling and grammar *matter*. The written word is a means of information transfer, and bad spelling and grammar add noise to the signal. Linguistic rules are arbitrary, but that doesn’t matter – what matters is that everyone abides by the same conventions.

Depends what you mean by conventions, doesn’t it? Language is organic – it’s not something you can set in stone forever.

The term ‘free will’ is literally meaningless, and the hoops physicists jump through in order to reconcile it with experimental and theoretical results are ridiculous.

Are you saying you believe in destiny? That the future’s already set? Cos, you know, I’m going to really disagree with that one.

9) The ‘new atheism’ of Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. is dangerous. It is entirely possible to hold religious beliefs and be a rational person (though probably not to be a dogmatic follower of any major religion while doing so). The battle they should be fighting is not religion vs atheism, but dogmatism vs secularism – a battle on which many religious people of goodwill would be on their side.

No, it’s not possible to hold religious belief and be a rational person. Any belief that depends on faith rather than evidence is the abandonment of reason. There’s nothing rational – at all – about accepting that one of Earth’s religions has more basis in reality than any of the others. They’re all garbage. You can be a nice person. You can be an intelligent person. You cannot, however, be a rational person without stretching the meaning of the word ‘rational’ so that it includes things that aren’t. Like religious belief, for example.

10) The lending of money at interest is immoral.

Right. So, I’m assuming you’ll accept that without being able to make a profit from lending money, no-one’s going to lend money, right? Is that what you hope to achieve?

My friend wants to borrow some money off me. For me to lend them money, I will have to go without it. I will also have to risk never seeing it again. While they have the money, inflation will mean that even if I got it all back I’d still have lost money.

Why should I give money I have to someone else? The obvious and only answer is that I’d do it because I could make a profit. What’s immoral about it? I get something I want, they get something they want – everyone’s happy, right?

In fact, say you managed to ban interest because it’s ‘immoral’ then you’re effectively signing the complete total collapse of the economy. The Government, any and all businesses and any and all individuals would suddenly find themselves unable to buy money for money – they’d have to buy money for favours or for goods or for something else. Loans would go underground, into the hands of the loan sharks – who, because they’re now engaging in criminal activity would charge astronomical rates of interest. Imagine the credit crunch except permanent and forever, with every business slowly crashing, and no-one other than those with inherited wealth or enormous salaries able to get the capital together to start their own business.

Interest is immoral? You’ve got to be joking, right? Right?