When attempting to discredit natural selection the standard argument put forward by the religious zealot is "creature x is so amazing and perfectly developed for purpose that it must have been designed, it can not possibly have happened by chance". This argument obviously sees 'chance' as some arbitrary gamble at the horse track or coming up trumps at the national lottery etc – this is clearly not the case. Natural selection is billions upon billions of subtle iterations that has taken place over a timescale the religious person is not even allowed to comprehend. As Dawkins says in his book Intelligent Design is merely creationism wearing a cheap tuxedo.

This brings us neatly to another aspect of religious belief – lets call it 'selective religion' for the time being. Anyone with an IQ over about 70 will agree the biblical timeframe of 6000 years or so from creation to now is utter bollocks. It has been conclusively proven by scientific means and no amount of nut-job financed creationist "museums" will be met with anything other than derision by anyone who has even the slightest grasp of reality. So given that any intelligent religious person has to reject this timeline and also tends to have rejected absurdities such as the old testament passages relating to stoning people to death for blasphemy etc we seem to have reached a point where it is considered acceptable for people to pick and choose the bits of their religion they want to believe, i.e. they can make it up as they go along.

This was one of the many things I struggled with when I played with religion back in the 70s. I always got the impression the C of E churchgoers would happily hoof a tramp out of the church porch and then sit and listen to the sanitised sermon convinced they had done nothing wrong. The last thing any of them would do was to give up any of their wealth to help others beyond making a token gesture of sticking 50p or so in some charity box. They had IMO selectively ignored the vast majority of documented teachings from their Christ and were clearly hypocritical. Likewise the US bible belt nutters use carefully selected biblical passages to bolster their aggressive and hateful right-wing politics whilst completely ignoring the key new testament teachings on tolerance, wealth distribution and pacifism. The problem with books such as the bible is that they are so incoherently and poorly written that it is impossible to interpret them without such levels of ambiguity. There is a stage where it all becomes completely and utterly worthless – if the instruction manual is bollocks what does that say about the product?

Tony.