'Bah' Says Archbishop

The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, Archbishop Vincent Nichols has accused social networking sites such as Facebook of killing young people, claiming that teenagers - misled into accumulating "transient relationships" where quantity is more important than quality - can be forced to commit suicide when all their Facebook friends remove them because they failed to put an emoticon after the ironic comment they made about the BNP.

In an interview in the Sunday Times, the Archbishop of Westminster also took the opportunity to disapprove of every single aspect of life in the 21st century.

The Archbishop's views in full:

Clarification of assisted suicide laws: "Particularly worrying"
Footballers who transfer for higher salaries: "Mercenaries"
Mobile phones: "Dehumanising"
Facebook: "An invitation to your own funeral"
The internet: "Satan's sticky web of deceit"
MP3 players: "Like having the Gadarene swine running about in your head"
Freeview+: "Recording without tape is witchcraft"
Pop-up toasters: "The fiery pit of damnation in your own kitchen"
Sexual abuse by priests: "Courageous in facing up to their crimes, and we shouldn't overlook all the good they also did"

An increasingly purple-faced Archbishop Nichols also said that he found the rise of individualism in modern society to be particularly worrying.

"Individuality is a wicked myth propagated by the Prince of Darkness, which leads inexorably down the slippery slope to Protestants, Methodism and touching other men's bottoms," shuddered the 63-year-old primate, shaking his crozier in righteous indignation. "God created man for one purpose only - to cram themselves into churches and chant meaningless slogans in unison, preferably in a dead language they don't understand, while an elderly virgin tells them what to think about everything."

Some damned atheists have suggested that if the Archbishop wants to call people mercenaries, he might cast a critical eye at the swarms of 'private security consultants' operating above the law in Afghanistan and Iraq, instead of a fairly harmless bunch of overpaid dullards who occasionally kick a ball around a field in between visits to nightclubs.