Religion, UK Politics and Teddy Bears

Now, this may be a bit contentious, but frankly I don’t care. I am an atheist and a proud subscriber to the excellent websites “The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science”, “The Official Richard Dawkins Web Site” and “The Out Campaign”.

My wife, on the other hand, is a Christian. We don’t discuss religion much, at least, not matters of her beliefs and mine. She has certainly never attempted to convince me of her faith, though I occasionally rant about the reasoning of science.

Nevertheless, I support the rights of her and our children to follow whatever path they choose… and both my elder children have taken part in the “life of the Church of England”, as it relates to the rural, village community within which they have grown up.

I have supported them by attending the occasional service where they have both acted as “servers” (though I am told that my snoring occasionally disturbed the congregation), and I enjoyed the service which was both an aesthetically beautiful part of our wedding day and of great importance to my wife.
 
The point – and I will get to it eventually, is this… I am both tolerant of, and respectful toward, the beliefs of those that I love and respect.

However, I really cannot understand why, given the patent failure, and frequent vicious cruelty, of systems of faith such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam, we as (mostly) rational human beings, continue to allow religious leaders and followers of such religions (for example, UK backbench MP’s voting on important matters such as an embryology bill), to be influenced in their voting by anything other than reasoned, objective argument.

Why do we allow a faith-based, failure to reason, to have any influence in the government of our country?

By definition, the term “reasoned, objective argument” has nothing whatsoever to do with any faith-based, system of religion… and it should have nothing whatsoever to do with governing a country.

Why also do we respect, or even tolerate, the foul obscenity of criminal (possibly capital) punishment, based on crimes against faith-based systems of belief?

We might as well hand the asylum over to the inmates.
 
My teddy-bear is called Muhammad Jesus Allah Christ-on-a-Bicycle Milligan… and he’s an atheist too!!