There's a very revealing comment from 'Carniphage' on my 'little anti-religious martyrs' post. I wonder how typical it is of the anti-religion school. Carniphage clearly believes that the natural human condition is atheism - that religion is something loaded on to a child 'from outside' as it were, whereas left to its own devices it wouldn't be religious. Let's leave aside for the moment the question of the impossibility of any child being born outside a human culture (the only way that could be achieved would be by immediately putting the child in a darkened sound-proof box - but even that, clearly, would be imposing something).

Carniphage is coming from the exact opposite end of the spectrum from me. It seems evident to me that religion and religious behaviour is intrinsic to human nature. Only yesterday, down at the Cowley Carnival, a DJ (dressed as Doctor Death) was dispensing shots of Bourbon whisky to punters who came down the front - by pouring it straight down their throats! (Was this an *intentional* imitation of a Christian eucharist?) The struggle is not between religion and no-religion but between bad religion and good religion. Atheism has its value as a corrective to some forms of bad religion, to be sure, but it even defines itself in relation to religion, and it has no coherence, single focus or common language in itself. Christianity is probably a dynamic balance of at least five 'religious understandings' which are mutually contradictory at many points, but at least it maintains (though it's a struggle) a common theological language, and has a clear focus : Jesus of Nazareth.

Therefore the idea of treating religion as if it were a single thing, imposed upon naturally non-religious subjects is grossly mistaken. If public policy were shaped by people who think like this (and there are plenty of them in the media), the actual effect will be to exaggerate the more fundamentalist forms of religion. Certainly Richard Dawkins is at a loss to know how to deal with Christians like me. All he can do is define me as a 'sexed-up atheist'. The trouble is, to do that he must break one of his own scientific rules : 'don't ignore and twist the data to fit your theory'. If I worship God and follow Christ, and there's behavioural evidence to prove it, don't describe this as a form of atheism! I recognise that I impute religious behaviour to atheists - but that is quite acceptable, as the Cowley Carnival example above demonstrates.

In many senses, the most anti-religious figure in history was Jesus. In Mark 11 he describes how if you have enough 'faith' the entire Temple Mount has no more meaning for you, then goes on to say, effectively, that the Temple is replaced in his new community by the simple (but incredibly challenging) call to 'forgive one another'.