“When there’s mass extinction, all bets are off and anything could happen,” said Australian palaeobiologist Dr John Alroy at the weekend.

Although it’s hard to contradict this gentleman, there is a certain unconscious silliness to the statement. For example, I don’t think you can have mass extinction: it’s akin to having multiple variety – a species is either extinct or it isn’t. But pointing out that all bets are off is the part that tickles me. With nobody left, there’s nobody to either make or take a bet. ‘Anything could happen’ is in turn an affirmation of the inevitable obvious. If an asteroid hits the Earth, anything could happen. Put Harriet Harman in charge of the Treasury and anything could happen. Give Guido Fawkes the keys to the brewery and anything could happen.

Put spin doctors in charge of very bad news, and anything could happen. ‘Subdued reassurance’ was how the Obamites described last Friday’s US jobs data. It’s one of those American ‘friendly fire’ oxymorons – albeit more moronic than oxygenated or useful: like a singing telegram bringing news of a close relative’s death.

Allow pc feminism into Christianity, and anything will happen. Thus gender-bias is being expunged from the Church’s output. A new form of worship, which removes words such as “Lord, he, his, him” and “mankind” from services, has been written by the church in an attempt to acknowledge that God is “beyond human gender”. Does this mean God is a hermaphrodite? A cross-dresser? A sexless shop-window dummy? No, I suspect this just means that fluffiness has gained the upper hand in the C of E. It’s been a long, slow, huggy, I’m-OK-you’re-OK journey, but the happy-clappy mob have finally triumphed.

There’s less evidence of this in the Church of Rome. The pontiff is not at all OK with brutality in the name of religion. ‘Pope may appeal in Iran stoning’ suggested the BBCNews website. This headline gave me the feeling that God’s messenger on Earth wanted to watch the action replay to see if any of the throwers had broken the rules: no half-bricks, no chucking beyond the crease and so forth. But it turned out to mean that the Pope thought a sentence of death was a tad over the top.

Anyway, his view has prevailed. Her sentence has been commuted to a mere 99 lashes. One needs very long arms to reach out to Islamism. And even then, they’re quite likely to chop off your hands.