As a spin-off from talking about The Root of All Evil, Richard Dawkins' new television documentary, the Julian Pistorius blog has called me out on my views on religion.

My respect for religion is like my admiration for a well-made steam engine. It's great what it can do, we're more powerful with it than with nothing in its place BUT it has been supplanted and the new way is better. But Julian comes back with...

"That amounts to saying that...the ball and chain you've shackled yourself to makes nice sounds as they drag along the ground."

Well he's right! Just as the limitation of steam-powered industry was a shackle upon further progress it too was a pleasent, even romantic, way of life- from which many "nice sounds" and stories are still with us. But like a ball and chain, the age of steam had to be cast off in order to be supplanted. Could we possibly have had Henry Ford's transport revolution and be getting by these days in steam automobiles? Could we have today's aircraft without the petroleum revolution? Could we send space craft to the moon with massive water-boilers as the prerequisite?

Steam, like religion, was a fine thing. Where would the Industrial Revolution have been without it? But, like religion, its time in domination has come and passed (all due respect to people who live in Huntly and Rotorua). Only someone who cannot admire something in a steam engine cannot either admire something in religion.

Julian says,-
"In my mind, religion is the careful avoidance of thinking about certain things...To believe in something with no ground in reality, to rely on faith, is just playing pretend."

Religion is not so one-dimentional as this. Epistemology asside, you've got to give religion credit for lifting us out of the muck. In the beginning humans were few in number, existing in small tribes that competed with the other animals to survive. Standard of living? What standard of living!? Life expectancy? What a joke! But this is the benchmark, it was as primitive cavemen that we lived and can live again. It's not our genetics that separates modern man from primitive man but the institutions that have been slowly put in place since those times and it started with religion.

For example, how long would the 1.2 billion Muslims survive without their religion? If you could strip it away and leave them with the primitive cave-man mindset they would all die. Cave-man sense is insufficient apparatus to support 1.2 billion people. Maori stone-age culture, in 700 years, didn't do much better for their prospects. Australian Aborigionals have been in action even longer than that and achieved far less progress for themselves and many continue to be "shackled" by it. Mere humans, however, with the addition of Islam have a social system that gets the food, shelter and clothing to many millions within many nation states. Islam is the firmament for an international airline and for the world's top oil producers. How much of the economic wealth in the world is traded into the hands of Muslims? Lots. What faith preserved and advanced the Western heritage when the West was in the Dark Ages? This one. Which conception of life can make primitive cave-men the major security threat to the superpower of the twentyfirst centurary? This religion, this culture.

Antiquated and inferior though it is, religion deserves our admiration for what it has done for us in the past and for what it still does for others today.