Did the earth move for you, darling?

There are times when these stories just write themselves and this, as you can probably guess, is one of those occasions.

A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

Where do I go from there? This is a part of the world where a woman revealing any part of her barnet is tantamount to the scandal which would be created in Western society if a stripper decided to receive the Body of Christ in Church by smearing it on her erect nipples. And yet these whores are now responsible for tectonic plate movement?

Hands up, I'm an atheist. There is little one could do to convince me of some great and wondrous being short of actually proving it and it's fairly simple to correlate any religious fundamentalism with the restriction of freedom of speech and the freedom of women in particular.

But it's a sad state of affairs when people are taken seriously for this kind of nonsense:

"A divine authority told me to tell the people to make a general repentance. Why? Because calamities threaten us," said Sedighi, Tehran's acting Friday prayer leader. Referring to the violence that followed last June's disputed presidential election, he said: "The political earthquake that occurred was a reaction to some of the actions [that took place]. And now, if a natural earthquake hits Tehran, no one will be able to confront such a calamity but God's power, only God's power ... So let's not disappoint God."

Why hasn't the centre of SoHo been hit with some calamity, aside from litter and drunken tourists? Given the propensity of crotch-skimming skirts and boob tubes, shouldn't the businesses there be struggling to get insurance given the number of divinely driven disasters which rock the streets in outrage at the blatant two fingers to the strict moral code of religion?

Why are the bars serving anything but communion wine, I ask myself.

We are heading straight for a disaster and it's all the fault of underwired bras. And hormones.