THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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Religion is a poor guide to life’s mysteries

Religion is a poor guide to life’s mysteries

Re: “Let’s hear it for comparative religion”, Have Your Say, April 19.

As a student of religion, Ye Olde Theologian advocates teaching comparative religion in schools when adolescents’ “brains should be mature enough to grapple with philosophical concepts”. Alas, the fact is that most children are indoctrinated (usually) into the religion of their parents as infants. It is also a fact that, as many adolescents mature and begin to “grapple with” these concepts, they soon work out that religion is childish, superstitious nonsense. 
Man has created many cultures, many religions and many gods but, interestingly, A Bangkok Theist believes in just one, “as no other gods exist”. Religions are not “under attack”, as he/she claims, but are simply being exposed by steady advances in science and education, which in turn displace ignorance. 
It’s not my place to proselytise, preach or diminish sincerely held beliefs. As an atheist I, too, am unsure of what lies beyond life or how life began, but what I am sure of is that religion doesn’t provide answers. The “text” of religion is not the word “of god” but man-made superstitious mumbo jumbo. Anyone who believes that one can rise from the dead, and much else of the “literal word” of the god, may need to consider where truth and reality ends and faith must take over. This is not naturalism or atheism. It’s called reality. 
Christian Knottone

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