I was chatting with a friend of mine the other day and he made the comment, "I'm 100% against religion - I think it has done more harm throughout history than just about anything else."

Well - this may or may not be correct, but I think the question is not quite as simple as it at first appears. One of the main problems is that religion, when it does harm, tends to do it in a 'clumped' and thus noticable way, but when it does good it tends to be much less obvious in that it is spread thinly over a much wider area. To see what I an getting at here you only have to consider the millions, perhaps billions of people throughout the course of history who have taken solace in the difficult periods of thier lives from the spiritual beliefs that they hold. If we are to do a 'tally sheet' of good vs evil when it comes to religion then this must be added into the columb on the good side. In addition we must accept in all likelyhood, the general 'goodness' of the society we live in is in the main the product of generation after generation where it was peoples spiritual belief that mediated thier behaviour, and that we are in effect living in the 'afterglow' of that spirituality. How will our society be when generation upon generation of atheism has taken it's toll and people live in the clear understanding that this is it - there will be no bill of reconing to settle at the end and 'looking after number 1 may be the most sensible life strategy to adopt.

Richard Dawkins was on the television last night beating his usual drum (incidentaly - I read 'The God Delusion' and I have never come across a more poorly argued and logically inconsistant piece of work in my life. That an academic could produce such tosh beggars belief. If you are going to challange religion and belief then at least have the taste to do so in an erudite and logically consistant way). Toward the end of the program (very modestly entitled 'Beautiful Minds') he said words to the effect that we should all revel in the privelage of being given the chance to exist as opposed to not, and that in the light of this we should go through life observing and marveling at the wonder of it all. Why did he keep up his proseletysing when he could happily sit back and enjoy the fruits of his sucess away from the spotlight "Well it's like being in love - when you're in love you want to tell the whole world about it. Similarly for me with the marvel of existance - I want to tell the world about it."

This is all very good as far as it goes. but the problem it fails to adress of course is that not all lives are bathed in the warm glow of sucsess that Dawkins experiences; existance is by no means a 'gift' to all on which it is conferred. For many across the aeons of time and indeed into the present day on the contrary it is a curse to be endured. there are many for whom the sun will never rise on a bright new day. For these benighted individuals Dawkins' rose tinted atheism has nothing to offer. For them, the only thing that might make each day tolerable, might just stay thier hand from terminating an existance that has brought them nothing but pain and fear, is the thought that just possibly there is something more. Just possibly there is some purpose, no matter how indecipherable or far away, that gives meaning to thier suffering, that gives cause to thier continuing existence even in the face of the stark horror of their lives. This Dawkins and his ilk would take away. From the complacency of their satisfaction with life they would lecture to those to whom life has not been so kind and take away that small solace that belief even in a fairy tale may give. I believe they would be better to rest quietly in the satisfaction of their own belief rather than foist it on to others for whom it may do a far worse job of 'fitting the bill'.

I'm not much of a religious person myself - I've not been to church in years and i don't kneel at the end of the bed each night; but I do think that religeon seems to be getting a pretty bad press at the present time and not all of it deserved. In the light of our materialistic science and technology driven society it's always going to be hard for religeon to hold it's own - but make no mistake the alternative is not what Dawkins et al would have us believe. Theirs is a doctrine where life is shriven of meaning and justification. In a world of random existance and certain ultimate oblivion any atempt to inject meaning or purpose is to run in fear from the logical end point of your philosophy where in the words of Arthur Balfour "nothing matters very much and most things not at all." The existential nihilism that is the only logical place for the fundamentalist aetheist to reside is perhaps best summed up by Donald A Crosby in the following statement, "There is no justification for life but also no reason not to live. Those who claim to find meaning in their lives are either dishonest or deluded. In either case they fail to face up to the harsh reality of the human situation."