My father, who art in hospital

I was on a train yesterday morning when one of those public transport preachers you encounter from time to time got on. "Just five minutes of your time," he assured the carriage, before starting his efforts to save our souls with the words "The world is around 6,000 years old now." This piece of folly so startled me that I genuinely didn't take in much of the rest of what he said because I was going over in my mind ways to politely suggest to him that he may waste less of his time and better engage more of us non-believers if he didn't start with such a bizarre statement of 'fact'.

I did no such thing, of course. I did what everybody else did, what everybody else always does - I waited him out in silence before he finished up and moved to the next carriage. I do remember some of what he spouted over the next few minutes - stuff about babies not needing to be taught to lie, that we're all born into sin, that the world is full of murder, paedophiles etc. The usual mix of preaching and Daily Mail style hysteria.

Why have I brought this up now, after months without a blog entry? It's not as if there's been nothing to write about - take your pick from corruption in sport, the Russian jet, Paris, Kenya etc. There's been plenty of stuff worthy of saying at least something here. So I don't know. But this is nothing if not a personal blog, and it's personal stuff that's brought me back here. Standing on the train listening to this fellow, I wasn't doing the usual commute into work. I was actually heading south, to meet my brother and my mother, in turn to head off to Eastbourne to see my father, who's in Intensive Care in the hospital there.

My dad has just had a major operation - they've taken out a major organ, a bit of something else and the cancerous tumour that put him in there in the first place. That's why I was heading down there and not into work. What has this got to do with the preacher?

Well the surgeon who assisted the op spoke to us before we went in to see Dad, to tell us what to expect when we saw him, what had gone on in theatre etc. He was honest with us, as both Dad and we had asked him to be, and one of his questions was whether we're religious. None of my family are - my parents left my brother and me to decide these things for ourselves, neither stopping us attending church nor suggesting we should. It simply didn't come up during our youth. The surgeon, learning this, said that he wasn't either, he merely 'didn't want to close off that source of support'.

There is, on the same floor as the ICU at Eastbourne, and at the Royal Sussex County where both my parents have spent time recently, a chapel and a chaplain for people who do take comfort from their faith at times like this. Part of me envies the succour they must get from it, but this wouldn't be my blog without the words 'wind me up' in it, and the greater part of me is indeed wound up by this juxtaposition of church and medicine.

Where was God last Thursday week in Paris, when innocent people were being slaughtered in his name? Where is he for my mother who, having suffered a stroke which almost killed her in November 2013, now has to hobble to the hospital to see the very man who's cared for her at home during her own rehabilitation? This woman, so full of compassion and love for others, so completely selfless, who better exemplifies the qualities to which we're all urged to aspire in various holy texts than anybody else I know, would certainly deserve better in any world in which people get what they deserve.

They don't, though, do they? Much of the stuff I could have written about these past few months serves only to illustrate that fact all too clearly. So she sits watching over a husband she's doted on for the best part of fifty years while I contemplate if the always-empty chapel next door couldn't better be used as a bar, frankly. Watching and hearing the reactions of the other loved ones sharing both a waiting room and a waiting game with us, each with their own stories, their own hopes and tragedies unfolding in front of us, I don't think I was alone in feeling more like a pint than a prayer.

An offer you can refuse. But don't need to.

The Catholic Church seems to have been sending some rather mixed messages in 2013. Forgive me being rather late to this but I don't keep that close an eye on the goings-on at the Vatican so didn't catch this at the time. It seems that in May the Pope, in a quite startling departure from accepted tenets, came out with this in an open letter to La Reppublica.

It's not exactly a once-in-a-lifetime offer - the head of a Church you don't belong to reassuring you that a God you don't believe in will forgive you and allow you a place in a Heaven which doesn't exist if you 'follow your conscience' - but from any secular viewpoint it's certainly a positive sign of moderation and modernity from the Pontiff. Any kind of recognition, especially from the Catholic Church, that atheists can be good people, is to be welcomed. It suggests at least a man who recognises the shape of the wider world in which his Church's followers live. The Church of which he's nominal leader, though, moved quickly to disavow any such notion.

So much for modernising - central tenets are going to take rather longer to change, it seems, than even the Pope may prefer. There are, though, some areas where the modernising momentum is clear. Check this out.

This is one of the most bizarre examples of mixing old and new I've ever seen; the Catholic Church showing that they can be both thoroughly modern on the one hand and simultaneously archaic on the other. It seems that the Church is now on Twitter [it probably has been for some time, but I'm a) not on Twitter and b) in any case extremely unlikely to 'follow' a religious Twitter feed, so was unaware of this]. I wonder how many aggregate years in Purgatory were saved overall as a result of this offer to the contrite. And who keeps the numbers, if anybody? Is there some celestial logbook somewhere, in which a heavenly functionary marks the time off for those eligible with a Godly pencil, or has that too been modernised, computerised even? I'd love to ask this Sacred Apostilic Penitentiary how they track these things. (Who appointed them, by the way, thereby giving them the authority to pronounce on these matters? Shouldn't they regard this as the exclusive right of God?)

Anyway, the Pope and his modernist tendencies. He may, to use The Tablet's Vatican correspondent's words, be 'seeking to have a more meaningful dialogue with the world', but there's only so much he can do, no matter how determined he may be. This is, after all, a 2000-year-old institution with some 1.2 billion members and a multi-layered, complex organisational structure. His job must be like trying to steer the largest ship on a gigantic ocean - no matter which way he's looking, or which way he turns the helm, the thing changes direction so slowly that it's imperceptible. Any changes he tries to make now are not likely to make the slightest difference until he has, in the eyes of his Church's members, long joined all those good atheists upstairs. Oh, hang on, that was one of the things that hadn't in fact changed after all, wasn't it? Oh well. Never mind.

Scouts' honour

A welcome bit of news to update a piece I wrote a few weeks ago about George Pratt, the eleven-year-old thrown out of the Scouts for being an atheist.

It seems the Scouts are reconsidering their position, and are thinking about amending their pledge to recognize that some kids have no religious affiliation. I applaud their willingness to at least talk about it, and can only hope the change is pushed through. I'd be very happy to withdraw my criticism of any organisation that shows right-mindedness in this regard, and open their doors to everybody. Fair play to them.

Let's see if it actually happens - perhaps Master Pratt would do them the honour of rejoining, if, ironically enough, he can practice one of what is supposed to be the main tenets of Christianity, and forgive them what they've done.

Not all are equal in His sight, apparently

It may be a recurring theme on these pages but there was, in the news this week, yet another example of religion being used as a discriminatory tool. George Pratt, an eleven-year-old who'd been a Scout for some ten months, has basically been thrown out as a result of his atheist beliefs.

I happen to disagree with the premise of Ally Fogg's otherwise excellent article in the Independent on this matter - I do think this is a call for faith rather than a call for obedience. His refusal to take the Scouts' oath on the grounds that it requires duty to be sworn to God seems to be the sole reason for his exclusion. This after ten months with the organisation with no reported trouble. I accept that people may ask why he'd seek to join a body whose aims and values he does not share, but the fact is, he does share many of the values of the Scouts, or he wouldn't have been with them for ten months.

In response to asking why he'd want to join, all the other shared values would seem sufficient to me. A modicum of flexibility on the part of the Scouts may be in order, too, if they want to admit kids who are genuinely keen to join. But this one value seems to be the one which matters more than all the others. No matter how well he's done, no matter what he's brought to the group and they to him, out he goes.

And on that flexibility; the Scouts allow children of other faiths to take an amended version of the oath, replacing 'God' with 'Allah', for example, for Muslim children. Fair play, so they should. The fact is, though, that they would not dare exclude somebody on the basis of their religion. Religious kids are protected from such discrimination, while atheist kids are not. So faith, any faith, gets you in - or simply being prepared to stick your hand in the air and lie while you take the oath, pledging to do your duty to a God you don't believe in. That'll get you in too. It seems the Scouts would rather take a chance on having a kid like that in their ranks than let somebody in who has the principles not to take their oath under false pretences.

Their loss, as far as I'm concerned. They've lost a bright, obviously intelligent (other interviews with him reveal he's thought about this carefully, having been left to make his own mind up by his parents), morally upright kid and made themselves look like an anachronistic, discriminatory laughing stock in the process.

Shades of Gray

An interesting piece of utter nonsense on the Beeb's website at the moment. This is one of the more bizarre treatises on the theological/atheological question that I've ever seen, if indeed that's what he's trying to do. It's difficult to tell what his reasons for writing it were, because it's an oddly-structured thing, which bounces from one idea to another a bit, so you'll forgive me if my response to it necessarily does the same.

If you can be bothered to read the whole thing, you'll see that he uses Graham Greene's apparently unusual conversion to Catholicism as his starting point, saying that Greene could not be particularly bothered to remember why he converted, but continued to accept Catholicism anyway. He says that this was partly brought about by 'the challenge of an inexplicable goodness' Greene found in a priest he'd got to know. He doesn't mention if Greene had anything to say on the goodness he encountered in atheists he met, but anyway, we'll leave that for now.

Gray's piece, perhaps in an effort to understand Greene's seemingly odd position, rather meanders on to how it's in fact science, not religion, that's full of myth (on which I'll respond in a mo) and then, bizarrely, this:

"In most religions – polytheism, Hinduism and Buddhism, Daoism and Shinto, many strands of Judaism and some Christian and Muslim traditions – belief has never been particularly important. Practice – ritual, meditation, a way of life – is what counts. What practitioners believe is secondary, if it matters at all."

If it matters at all??! What a piece of complete tripe that is, and it's roundly contradicted in many of the 400-plus responses to his piece, by people to whom belief is a fundamental and extremely important part of their theism. And try telling this to the 'martyrs' who kill themselves and others in the name of Islamic fundamentalism, for example. His next paragraph is also alarming:

"The idea that religions are essentially creeds, lists of propositions that you have to accept, doesn't come from religion. It's an inheritance from Greek philosophy, which shaped much of western Christianity and led to practitioners trying to defend their way of life as an expression of what they believe."

Writing as an atheist myself, only an atheist could produce such a piece of tosh as this. Of the countless billions of people all over the world who practise a religion, how many of them would even be aware of this 'inheritance'? I rather suspect that most people's religion comes from within themselves, an innate feeling of what's right, or is passed on from believing parents, without the slightest knowledge of the history of scholarly input into the belief system itself. They simply believe, because it feels right to them. It fits. I strongly suspect, for example, that if the Archbishop of Canterbury announced that the existence of God was merely a 'proposition you have to accept', his Church and its followers would be utterly startled at the suggestion that it was anything other than a fundamental truth.

Gray then goes on to basically turn his guns on science. He says that it's a 'vehicle for myths', that humans 'can't overcome the fact that they remain animals', and that 'however rapidly our knowledge increases, we'll always be surrounded by the unknowable'. Well that's the bloody difference between science, and religion, isn't it? How many religious tracts did you ever read which accept that we're animals? Contrast the idea that we're made in God's image with Desmond Morris's work The Naked Ape, for example, which very vividly and readily accepts that we are animals. I have often said during discussions with friends on this stuff that I think we're just 'apes with big brains'. I think he's completely mistaken to believe that humans can't accept this – plenty of us do.

And what kind of 'vehicle for myths' would adopt the fundamental standpoint of 'we don't know, so let's study it and see if we can become any more enlightened one way or the other', which is how I view science? Surely any 'vehicle for myth' would adopt the starting point of certainty and work backwards from there, filling in the back story as it went?

Anyway - Gray is not finished yet. His most bonkers statement, 'humanity doesn't exist, there are only human beings, each of them ruled by passions and illusions that conflict with one another and within themselves', is startlingly odd. Of course we're all filled with such conflicts, but that doesn't mean there's no such thing as 'humanity'. If that were so, nobody would bother with scientific endeavour, or with religion for that matter. We'd all be living solipsistic lives where nobody ever did anything for anybody else, regardless of motive, unless it also directly benefitted them to do so. What a bleak world that would be. Fortunately we don't live in such a place. One thing I do know is that, regardless of whether it's driven by religious belief, innate goodness or whatever, there's plenty of 'humanity' in most people – it's just difficult to define it simplistically. That does not mean it doesn't exist. You see it readily enough when people rally to help strangers in times of crisis, natural disaster etc, where empathy for the suffering of others is felt by atheist and believer alike. What is that if not humanity?

Last point on what he's written.

"Evangelical atheists who want to convert the world to unbelief are copying religion at its dogmatic worst. They think human life would be vastly improved if only everyone believed as they do, when a little history shows that trying to get everyone to believe the same thing is a recipe for unending conflict."

Quite so. But most of us are not doing that. I certainly don't go around knocking on people's doors trying to 'unconvert' them, or whatever you'd call it, in stark contrast to Jehovah's Witnesses, for example. I merely seek to live my life free of the influence and direction of the Church, be it Christian or any other, and have all children left free to decide for themselves rather than be taught any set of religious beliefs as fact during their education. That's not the same as some kind of atheist imperialism.

And Graham Greene? His Catholicism which John Gray finds so difficult to comprehend, and on which he misses the likely reason so completely? I rather suspect that his desire to marry Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a Catholic convert herself, was behind it. An all too human exigency which he himself acknowledged when he said he, "…ought to at least learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held." But that's clearly too difficult for John Gray to comprehend, so he comes up with this piece of negative drivel in which he both dismisses religious belief and scientific endeavour at the same time. Some achievement, that, Mr Gray.

Odd where you find things that wind you up

It was no surprise to me to receive at Christmas two copies of The Queen's English, and how to use it, a book titled in such a way that nobody could be in any doubt as to its subject matter. It's a handy guide to correct grammar, punctuation, clarity, brevity in English, you know the drill. The sort of thing I'm happy to see on bookshop shelves.
(I also strongly recommend Lynne Truss's excellent Eats, Shoots and Leaves, in a less formal but equally informative, similar vein).

Within its pages, though, offered as an example of excellent use of English, with which I have no argument, there was a passage extracted from an angry Reverend Doctor Peter Mullen's letter to the Daily Telegraph, in which he rages at the beaurocracy foisted upon him by the Church of England. In it, he says,

"I am trying to be a priest, but I haven't time. When I was first appointed vicar... the diocesan annual returns were on one side of A4. Nowadays, the annual returns are a foot thick and a bundle of perfidious obscurity, hedged about with health and safety and absurd questions about light bulbs, and serious enquiries as to what the PCC is doing to reduce our carbon footprint - all because the Church has taken up the pagan fantasy of global warming."

I suspect regular readers (Fred in Cheltenham, if I can steal from Les Dawson), will know which bit of this I have a problem with. I don't, as I've said, have any argument that it's well written, but the gall in a representative of the Church calling global warming a 'pagan fantasy' is so outrageous I haven't quite got the words to adequately describe it. Just to be clear, you think an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity created the universe and everything in it in six days (He had a rest, remember). That He sent an angel to tell a virgin that His son was coming to Earth through her, a son who performed miracles like raising the dead and rising from his own grave, and then ascended to Heaven, and will yet return. I could go on - you get the whole faith idea, no doubt.

However, the scientific reality of the slow (but accelerating) rise in global annual mean temperatures - a pattern which has been, and is being measured and tracked as a fact - and the overwhelming evidence of changing weather patterns, a retreating ice shelf, melting glaciers and everything else, that's a fantasy? Fucking hell. Perhaps my definition of faith is awry, but I had rather hoped that a religious faith would not blind people to scientific reality, still less persuade them to dismiss other people's beliefs as 'fantasy'. Pot, kettle, black.

I sincerely hope he's just enjoyed the coldest December Britain has had since records started being kept of these things, which will in no way be related to climate change, of course. I've probably said before in these pages that atheists are frequently portrayed as arrogant in their certainty. I would present Reverend Doctor Mullen's letter as evidence that this criticism can equally be levelled at the theologists.

Goodwill to all men

Because I was feeling pissed off at something else entirely, the dropping through my door of an otherwise innocuous religious leaflet created an exaggerated sense of indignation this evening. I was going to e-mail the man responsible for the leaflet's production and ask him (politely) not to put any further missives through our letterbox, but since he's from the church literally across the road and our little triangle of streets have formed a small, friendly and quite tight community which is rare in London, and in which my girlfriend plays an active part, (though not through the church of course), I thought better of it.

That doesn't stop me taking out my frustrations on you though, dear reader. It seems, from the wording of the leaflet, that I 'need' God to have a fulfilling Christmas, and that I can't find peace at Christmas without Him. Well, excuse me for thinking the love, company and happiness of my friends and family would be enough. It's always been enough to help me struggle through Christmas before, having instead to get my enjoyment of the season from the very real and human interaction with those same people, the exchange of gifts, the odd glass of ginger ale with a dash of lime and a pressie or two.

Now I'm aware of the contradiction inherent in my enjoyment of the gifts in particular, given what the Church would like you to believe are the original reasons for gift giving at Christmas, but what the hell - I still get a kick out of giving presents to people I care about and, yes, receiving them. I get a bigger kick from being surrounded by people I care about deeply and having the opportunity to spend a bit longer in their company than is usually the case. In short, you enjoy Christmas your way, Mr Vicar, and I'll enjoy it mine. The difference being that I don't shove leaflets through your door telling you that the way you do so is hollow and inadequate.

What if I did, though? Some kind of atheist polemic, urging them to forget the Church's definition of Christmas and revel in the more human (possibly pagan in origin, it's all a bit muddled) way of going about things this December, printed up and posted through his letterbox, maybe? Perhaps, if he had kids, one of them may pick up said document and ask him about its contents. It may be that, while respecting my opinion, he wouldn't be too happy to have it pushed through his door. Funny that - if that's how he'd feel, then we'd agree on one thing this year at least.

Religion? Shit it.

Forgive me quoting a sweary Stephen Fry as a title, but I saw something on the Beeb last night that made me incandescent with rage at the cruelty of religious dogma. A programme called 'Limbo Babies' related the experiences of a group of Catholic women in Northern Ireland the mid/late 20th century who'd given birth to dead babies. Traumatic, straight away. Worsened, considerably, by the fact that those babies were taken from their mothers literally immediately and buried in a swamp in unconsecrated ground next to their church graveyard. The reason? Unbaptised. Therefore not allowed in a Catholic graveyard.

The suffering of these poor women of losing a child, something unimaginably horrible and traumatic to anybody but those who've experienced it, was made much worse by this insult to their children's memories. The Catholic faith carries with it the concept of Original Sin. We're born with this, and only baptism can eradicate it. If you're not baptised, you can't get into Heaven, and that's it. If you die unbaptised and you've led the life of a saint, or too brief a life to have committed sin in the first place, you go to a place called Limbo. Forever.

Though the Church's position has supposedly softened on this since these outrages, of which more in a moment, at the time this was an absolute position. One woman, clearly still desperately upset about the loss of her child 50 years on, related how, on asking the priest why she couldn't have her baby buried alongside her grandparents, said, "I spoke to the priest, and he said, 'You couldn't have had that anyway, because the baby wasn't baptized. And she'll be in Limbo now, until the end of time.' " A priest, a man supposed to bring the comfort and love of the Church to people, said that to a woman who had, just days before, lost her child.

I don't suppose it helps of course that the Catholic clergy is entirely populated by men, so there's not a single member of it, from the Pope himself to the newest inductee, who could possibly even begin to relate to the suffering of a mother who's lost her child. But this cruelty, this twisting of a knife into a mother's already suffering heart, beggars belief.

Despite their Church telling them otherwise, some of the women displayed a much more thorough understanding of what a faith should, I think, if you're to have one, be all about. A woman, frail and elderly now but still crying for her child of almost 70 years ago, said, "He shouldn't be in that ground. What did the wee baby do? Nothing. Nothing. They're all innocent, and not only mine, like. All of them that was buried there." She clearly understands the reality of sin far better than her Church.

It made me glad, once again, of my atheism. Somehow, despite its supposed role in life, the Church had found a way to make atheism look like the more comforting belief. These women suffered so profoundly already. Losing a child and then wracked by guilt, they genuinely believed that their children were in Limbo. Had they been atheists, at least they'd have been spared that further agony.

I mentioned earlier that the Catholic Church had softened its position somewhat in what should be more enlightened times now. This, for example, from the International Theological Commission in 2007: "We may hope for the salvation of the children who have died without baptism. The reasons for that hope are very great indeed." While better than the absolutist brutalism that the mums were faced with during their youth, this is basically a fudge. They can't back too far away from the basic concept of Original Sin completely because it's too far entrenched in the Catholic belief system, as this very modern quote from a Catholic priest on the same programme demonstrates: "Baptism was necessary because humanity had fallen away from God. There was the fall, we often speak about Original Sin. And everybody was born with Original Sin, baptism corrects that, and baptism then becomes the gateway to everlasting life, and the vision of God."

So all they can basically do is 'hope' that, in the face of that all too human dogma, some leeway is allowed by the man upstairs. I only hope that these poor women eventually find comfort. After a long campaign by some of the mothers, and siblings who never got to meet their brothers or sisters, the ground in which their children were dumped, (literally unceremoniously, having been denied even the sacrament) has been re-consecrated so they can draw some succour from that. But unless the Church changes its position on one of the most fundamental tenets of Catholicism, they'll go to their own graves believing their children are in Limbo.

Like I said. Religion? Shit it.

Opening eyes

Because of the strange hours I work, I often finish a shift after the point at which it's possible to get public transport home, in which case I'm entitled to a cab. I therefore spend several late evenings, often after midnight, talking to cabbies about whatever's on their mind. I've had some extremely interesting coversations with some of these lads but, perhaps because many of the drivers are Muslims and their faith is important to them, the most frequent topic of discussion seems to be theology, or the relationship/debate between theology and science.

These discussions have, without exception, been friendly, mutually respectful and interesting, however strongly each speaker may have held their beliefs, but something I learned the other night nonetheless left me saucer-eyed with surprise. A chap driving me home had never even heard of the theory of evolution. It wasn't that he didn't believe in it, or had been taught some other theory, he had literally never heard of it. Only by talking to me did he learn that not everybody thinks that God, or Allah, or whatever you call your deity of choice, made animals and plants exactly as they are now. I had to explain how the theory works - what evolutionists think happened (and is happening, of course). He asked the same questions that everybody who doesn't subscribe to evolutionary theory thinks, though in his case he asked out of a detached interest in my beliefs rather than to try to refute them.

He asked: If Man came from apes (a simplistic explanation given the likely tangled routes of our hominid evolutionary past but the best I could do to explain it to somebody who had never even heard the theory before), what was before the apes? And what was before that? And before that? And where did it come from in the first place?

Why aren't apes still evolving into humans? (A question I've heard before, but one which so completely misses, or misunderstands, the point that it's hardy worth answering).

Why aren't we, and all other plants and animals, still evolving?

I answered as best I could but I'm not an evolutionary biologist, my grasp of divergent evolutionary theory is not sound enough to be thinking about passing it onto other people and the cab ride was only 25 minutes.

For his part, his biggest surprise was that, just as he's completely committed to his beliefs, so am I to mine, despite that fact that mine contains bits marked 'I don't know'. For him, the central beliefs by which he lives his life are utterly certain. Mine are not, and he couldn't reconcile what he saw as a contradiction between my committed atheism and belief in science, and the fact that science is full of uncertainty, indeed built upon it. There are gaps in our understanding of the origins of the universe, and of life on our planet, but I'm as committed to my beliefs as he is to his. For me the beauty of science is that it's principal position is 'we don't know'. It's still capable of new revelations, of new beauties, of changing a position you believed in completely before with some startling new piece of knowledge.

But I started this post really not to write about my bumbling efforts to explain evolutionary theory to a man interested in hearing it but absolutely 100% committed to a different belief, but about my shock at the fact that there is anybody out there, anybody at all, living in a Western culture in the modern media age, who's never even heard of it. I find this so staggering that I just had to put it down here.

Infiltrate! Infiltrate! Infiltrate!

Oh, the joys of the papal visit. "They're standing 20, 30 deep to catch a glimpse of the Pope," they tell us on the Beeb. Well, possibly most of them, but I seriously doubt the bloke with the sign reading 'The Pope is the Anti-Christ' was there for that purpose. In a move which highlights one of the many absurdities of religion, this made me laugh out loud. "My religion's the right one." "No, mine is." "No, mine - your religious leader's actually the devil. See how far up you've let him get in your heretical 'church'?"

What a job on the part of Satan that is, if he'd actually managed to sneak in and rise to the rank of Pontiff. You'd have to applaud his audacity and, given some of the homophobic, misogynist, anti-family planning messages coming out of the Vatican, the loon with the poster has got plenty of 'evidence' to back up his claim.

Thankfully, of course, there's no such entity. The ammunition which the poster-carrier sees as the machinations of the anti-Christ is of course a result of all too human failures. Blinded by faith and desperately allying with each other against what they can see is a hugely secular tide washing over this country in particular, they are modern day Cnuts, I hope. They're wasting their time. The freedoms, tolerance and understanding of ethnic minorities, other sexualities and, yes, the freedom to practise religion of any colour, are born out of this country's secular humanism. They want to be careful what they wish for - if they win their supposedly holy campaign to turn us all back to spirituality, how long would it be before the more zealous among us started burning each other at the stake?

Knock knock knocking on atheist doors

So a representative of some religious order knocked on my door this morning, as happens from time to time. He was a very nice chap but I pointed out that he'd really knocked on the wrong door. My house contains, when everybody's in, two atheists, a buddhist and a fourth bod, whose views I'm unaware of, and who's rarely around anyway. So, to use a cricketing analogy, I played the usual dead bat straight away and we ended up chatting about Brighton & Hove Albion, as often happens when people talk to me for any length of time. To his credit he took no for an answer and went on his way, but these encounters always leave me wondering what they get out of spending their time going round knocking on doors when they have no idea what lies behind them.

How many people can ever, in the history of any one door knocker's door knocking, ever have been converted this way, or even been given pause to think properly on the matter when they hadn't been before? Surely anybody with anything about them would already have given these matters some thought and come to a conclusion of their own? What can a stranger on their doorstep say to anybody with a brain in their head that they've not already considered? And how would I be received at their house if I went round trying to persuade them to recant their theological beliefs?

There's always the possibility of course that they could call on some boggle-eyed psychopath and end up finding out what lies beyond rather sooner than they'd anticipated. Or a Muslim/Sikh/any other faith house where even they must be aware that they're wasting their time completely. I am, at least, always polite to anybody who comes calling in such circumstances, but leave them in no doubt that they're wasting their time in the hope they won't return. It was not always thus. When I was still living at home, when I was about 16 I think, Jehovah's Witnesses came calling during the Cup Final. My parents were out so I reluctantly went to the door to be confronted by two JWs who clearly had not the slightest idea that anything was going on that people may not wish to be interrupted from. So I told them I was a practising Satanist and shut the door, so I could get back to the game.

This was clearly the wrong approach as they must have gone away worrying about my soul. They came back one evening the following week armed with considerably thicker literature in much greater quantity, but had the misfortune to have the door answered by my mother, who is a small but formidable woman, and she didn't take too kindly to having her preparations for dinner interrupted by them. She shut the door on them in a manner than ensured they did not return.

So save your time, lads 'n lasses. I'm not buying and I'd be stunned to learn that anybody else is.

I get the feeling I may be a blogging 'black sheep'

I've just hit the 'Next Blog' button on here, and kept doing so, until I eventually came across something I could read which was not actively plugging Christianity. I don't know if the 'choices' the button makes are in any way affected by the labels I place on my own posts, but it took 21 hits of the button before I came to a blog not actively pushing the Christian message. I counted them, yes, I'm that dull.

I feel I may not have chosen the best medium for what may occasionally be anti-theological postings! I can, for my own part, only recommend that anybody searching for meaning or some great truth beyond their own mortality would do well to read anything written by Carl Sagan, a man who evidently knew where to find awe, wonder and beauty in the real and whose writings I've only just become aware of through reading Dawkins' latest atheist tract while on holiday. (Oddly preachy in places, since you ask, but passionately and intelligently argued of course). He quotes Sagan often, and it's inspired me to get hold of some of his work and read it. My favourite quote of Sagan so far? This, on the idea of an afterlife;

"The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides."

Given the nature of most of my posts so far this may seem as something rather out of context, but I've been thinking about this stuff as a result of reading Dawkins' God Delusion and having seen the Milky Way for the first time in a dark, clear Galician sky on Friday night, unpolluted by the light from any city, and being overwhelmed with a feeling of utter insignificance, awe and wonder, all at the same time. Sorry to be all thoughtful and introspective, and stray from the footy for a bit! Normal service will doubtless be resumed in due course when some transfer news or friendly result or something trickles through from the Albion.

Humanity, humility

My girlfriend's gran, on whom she doted, passed away last week. I'll say a word about the lady herself in a moment, but something I was told about what followed has prompted me to write a bit about the Church. I should warn you, if you're a Christian and you're offended by anti-Church sentiment, not to read this post any further. I am keen to express my strong views on this matter, but I'm not seeking to offend or upset anybody for their beliefs.

So, my very upset girlfriend takes a flight to Spain at about 6 hours' notice, to attend a funeral I was regrettably unable to make because of work. Her gran, a naturally and devoutly religious woman but not a church-goer (this is not something in which I see a contradiction, by the way), had told her what she wanted to happen when she passed. Part of the instruction was that she did not want a service with a priest, least of all one who never met her. However, this being Spain, I suppose it's not that surprising to know that a priest was indeed involved as things turned out. Early in the service, I'm told he crossed himself, an act which was repeated by the entire congregation. Except, that is, my girlfiend, like myself zealously atheist, and her sister, whose views I've never sought on this.

The priest clearly took this quite badly as, following this, he evidently issued a sermon which addressed the fact that non-believers are destined for hell, and looked firmly at my g/f and her sister. This went on so strongly and so pointedly, that barely any reference was made to the woman for whom everybody was gathered there. Now I appreciate that the man may have believed he was making an effort to save two souls, but to use this opportunity, while the bereaved people he was addressing sat there mourning a beloved grandmother, epitomises all that I can't stand about the Church. Where was his common humanity, to think not of their spiritual souls but of their very real and human grief, and to address that? In Spain, old people are treated with a respect, even a veneration, that's often lacking in Britain. He decided to throw that convention out of the window to preach a religious dogma at people who were not there for him, or themselves, but for their gran. How arrogant, how presumptious, and above all how disrespectful to a much loved 97-year-old woman who deserved better. And may indeed, given her instructions on what she did or did not want for her own funeral, have had the prescience to see something like that coming.

Such occasions make me glad of my atheism but despair that people can't mourn or celebrate a loved one out of the pure and simple humanity of their own hearts without having a religious message shoved down their throats. As for gran herself? A tiny little bundle of love and happiness, who had lived through a civil war which forced her husband to flee to France for his own life, and hardship that most uf us could not begin to imagine from the comfort of the 21st century, however hard we may think we have it now. She loved to dress smartly and go into town to exchange gossip, and listen to people tell her how beautiful she still was, even in her nineties. Fastidious, house proud, loyal to her family, she carried the old-fashioned Spanish values of frugality, loyalty and respect for others lightly, and was adored by her daughter and grand-daughters, who cared for her right to the end. The world is worse off to the tune of a 4ft Spanish matriarch. Rest in peace, Maura, reina. You've earned it.