My first thought upon hearing of the death of Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs this week was not that the world had lost an inspirational thinker and visionary who fundamentally changed our relationship with technology (that thought was in there – it just wasn’t my first); I didn’t even leap, as I ordinarily would, straight to the cynical and anti-corporate, “Oh no, who’s going to come up with ideas for what Chinese children should build next?” (although that thought was in there too). No, my first thought was, given Jobs’ extraordinarily high-profile as CEO of the biggest tech company on earth, how long would it be before the Westboro Baptist Church crawled out of the festering gutter they lurk in to announce they were going to protest his funeral? As it turned out, “less than a day” was the answer and, when their infamous tweet came rather ironically via an iPhone, prompting a torrent of amused derision, I started to wonder why theists ever bother to go anywhere near the internet when they so regularly, and completely, get their arses handed to them every time they do.

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