Religion in the Dock.

I was reading about a woman in Sudan who has been sentenced to hang because she married a Christian man and converted to his religion. It seems that in Sudan you’re not allowed to believe something different from what the state tells you to believe. (Religion is just a belief system, right?)

The woman is pregnant, and it’s said that she won’t be executed until the child is two years old. So now she has to start counting down the days until the final one when a bunch of hired thugs will come and take her away to meet a violent death and an innocent two-year-old child will be deprived of his or her mother.

That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, back in this relatively safe and blessedly secular state of ours (and one in which the majority religion is Christianity) a man can lose his job for criticising Islam. That’s because it’s being disrespectful to somebody else’s belief system.

What is one to make of this strange juxtaposition of opposites? The whole thing is utterly absurd.

I’m inclined to suggest that the world is full of mad people, but if I did I would probably attract the attention of some arrogant religionist monkey who would jump up and down, frothing at the mouth and railing at me that it’s all because we’ve ‘moved away from God.’

The religionists (at least the Judaic variety) tell us that man is made in God’s image. So what on earth does that say about God? And is it any wonder that I walk mostly alone, trying to maintain high ethical and humanitarian values whilst harbouring the deepest suspicion of humankind and refusing to have anything whatsoever to do with religion? I don’t think so.