Hi I'm Superham and rain is my kryptonite...

That pretty much sums up my intended Wednesday run, although I got 5 miles in 37:37 today.

The rest of this post was prompted by the man who rang my doorbell yesterday.

"Hello, good morning, is it possible for me to speak with you for a few minutes?"

I knew what would have come up next. You see, many years ago, it was me in his position; and while I didn't go around ringing doorbells, I would have been accosting other students in school (at least, it must have seemed that way to them) and handing out free literature.

We get our fair share of people distributing religious literature around here. At tube stations, at your door - you name it, you'll get it. The skeptical part of me wonders whether it is mainly self-motivated. Whether it is more of a case of the "witnessing" person wanting to feel they've fulfilled their duty to spread their Word, to tick it off the "to-do" list on their PDA, rather than a deeply-rooted urge to share their faith.

Religion is a tricky issue - it seems that way to me. People are drawn to religion for various reasons. Call me the cynic, but in my opinion some people ascribe to a faith because they feel having one means you belong in a higher social class than an athiest. After all, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs ranks self-actualization as the last of needs to be fulfilled, after physiological, safety, love and status needs (in that order). Declaring a want for spiritual needs implies you've achieved the needs at the bottom of the pyramid already, and you're better off in all these ways than others. You're of a higher status; a higher class. Better.

In Britain 70% of people declare themselves as "Christian", but church attendance among believers in 2005 was 6.3%. That's right, 6.3% - no typo error with the decimal point there. There's something quite disconcerting to me about those figures. Personally, I see religious attendance (at a church, mosque, temple etc) as an extension of one's faith. While I know it is also important that one lives a life on the other 6 days of the week according to religious beliefs, the disparity in those figures suggest to me that, in this particular case, people in Britain call themselves "Christians" not so much because they believe in the core values, but merely because it is the thing one does if you belong to a certain ethnicity (in this case "White British"). It is almost as if religion is a secondary by-product of your race.

The issue of Muslim women and veils has lingered continually in the background of British society and surfaces from time to time. There have been some readers' opinions in newspapers about how Britain "is a Christian country" and "if Muslims want to live here, they must embrace our rules". Just as Caucasian women don headscarves and veils when they visit Arab countries, it has been suggested that Muslim women do the same if they want to live in "Christian" Britain. But can a society be said to be truly "Christian" when church figures suggest otherwise, and in these days of secularization, religion is used as a stepping stone to give the impression of class?

Religion is also underpinned by other forces such as politics. As the general election in Britain looms, columnists have suggested that the reason why the issue of veils has surfaced at this time, is because Muslim-bashing is popular with certain elements of the predominantly-white society, and gains votes, and the Labour party, which initiated the whole debate, is not afraid to Muslim-bash and lose Muslim votes because they already lost them over Iraq. It sounds terribly awful and seems blasphemous to use religion as a political tool. "I want to hold on to my power in office, and hold on to my big fat salary, so let's bash the Muslims and get a few thousand votes to ensure I stay in power." Great.


"No, thank you," I told the guy.

I don't mean to offend those with religious beliefs, but has religion lost its pure essence, and become too intertwined with other aspects of life to become, among other things, a convenient status symbol and vote-getter?

It'd be interesting to hear your views.