'Old-time religion' is not good enough for us all in this day and age

The planet Earth is flat. The sun orbits that planet. So it once was said and so most people believed. But some - faithful to an inner voice that lured them to seek for the truth - doubted and asked questions and sought to answer them.

Jesus himself was a magnificent doubter. Wild ideas of a war-making Messiah who would overthrow the Roman occupiers of Israel were rampant in his day. He doubted them. He saw religious leaders trusting in long prayers, dietary laws and rigid Sabbath rules. He doubted the lot. Samaritans were an inferior race, according to many of Jesus' contemporaries. He doubted it, and went on to affirm that a good Samaritan was miles ahead of a bad priest.

To teach a child to accept as true what are but fantasies and to further teach that child that questioning any one of those fantasies is a sin, is to perpetrate an evil.

Let me lay my cards on the table. I am, unapologetically, a "religious person". For me, the stories and symbols that best point me to, and enable me to stutter about, the sacred, about the holy, about "God" are the stories and symbols and images defining the Christian faith. I am a bloodied but unbowed liberal Christian.

I regard the "old-time religion" as, in the final analysis, irreligious, as utterly lacking in a sense of awe and wonder and reverence and thankfulness and humility.

Engage in a thought experiment with me. Trace your genealogy. You - the unique person you are - are here. You did nothing to exist. One of millions of spermatozoa from your father - the sperm that had you in its back pocket - succeeded in making its way to one particular egg released by your mother. That egg became one of the few embryos that survived their initial development, became a foetus and was born.

The odds against that are considerable. But think further back. The same odds-defying improbability applies to your grandparents. It likewise applied to the 400 to 500 generations giving birth to your grandparents.

At each point, one sperm of countless spermatozoa made its way to and fertilised one particular egg. The resulting embryo survived, in spite of the odds, and a fully developed child was born. In each case, that child survived, defying a staggering infant mortality rate, plague, famine and myriad other hardships simply to reach puberty, make love, and give birth to a child.

And that is only your human ancestry. Factor in the millions of years of evolutionary development that preceded the emergence of humanity.

And keep going back, back to the so-called "Big Bang". Or merely go back to the appearance of stars within which such elements as iron - part of your make-up - came into being. You are a child of stardust. Surely cause for awe and wonder and thankfulness. Of that mind-blowing, staggering, wonderful awe and thankfulness and humility, religion is born.