Being at peace with God is not an intellectual argument as to how best summarise the perceived benefits, both to man and to God, of salvation in a general statement on the atoning work of Christ, achieved through His death, arrived at by the studious scanning of scriptures, making sure along the way to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, to present an entire man, grounded in the best of modern Biblical scholarship, holy and just and blameless before God.

What began as an extraordinary, shattering life-changing experience for a group of men who beheld and grew to desperately love the most remarkable man to ever walk the planet has denigrated into a belief system.

What began with a group of fishermen leaving behind their livelihoods in a sense of wonderment and urgency to follow a powerfully disturbing enigmatic stranger has become a ritualistic utterance of formulaic doctrine to gain entrance into a privileged club.

What began with the birth of a morality so pure that people feared the power emanating from the transformed first apostles has become a refuge for every scoundrel and confidence trickster who has ever mockingly held their hands together in prayer.

There has recently been renewed interest in religious matters particularly so with the rise of the religious right in the United States. This has fuelled much comment in numerous newspapers and periodicals, justifiably so, but one thing that I cannot help noticing is the obvious confusion in the minds of many commentators who wrongly assume that faith and reason are two separate and conflicting ways of viewing life. That there are conflicting ways of viewing life is undeniable but to claim that to have faith is beyond reason and conversely to live by reason is to live without faith is an untenable position to take. What is often meant by reason is a belief that there is nothing that exists outside of the material universe or that to have a belief in something that cannot be apprehended by the five senses lies beyond the domain of human experience and hence is an unreasoned response. Both of these contentions are unprovable axioms and hence can only themselves be labelled as belonging to 'belief systems'. The truth is reason cannot exist independently of faith. What we put our faith in determines how we reason. Those who claim to live by reason rather than faith are really putting their faith in their own ability to reason. But what they fail to grasp is that it is the reasoning faculty in man that has produced the superstitions and dogmas they find objectionable.