Letter Of The Week: Dear God

Eight-year-old Grace asked an intelligent and penetrating question (Ask a grown-up: If God created everything, who created God?, Weekend, 22 December), to which she received a trite and one-sided reply. There was no attempt to explain why, if the universe was created by a loving God, he felt the need to create the Ebola virus, or polio, or intestinal parasites. And is Dr Fraser unaware of what is going on in Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine and parts of Africa, or does he choose to simply ignore them? And what are the leaders of his religion doing while all these atrocities continue? Debating how many gay, female bishops can dance on the head of a pin. The kindest thing you can say about God is that he doesn't exist; if he did he would almost certainly be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

Dick Hadfield
Ludlow, Shropshire.

The Guardian.

Being a wild and crazy guy, I spent yesterday evening reading Bertrand Russell's essay, An Outline Of Intellectual Rubbish - a hilarious demolition job of Christian lunacy and dogma.

Man is a rational animal - so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked Man diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging continually further into madness. I have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense. I have seen cruelty, persecution, and superstition increasing by leaps and bounds, until we have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age. All this is depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion. In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived. The follies of our own times are easier to bear when they are seen against the background of past follies. In what follows I shall mix the sillinesses of our day with those of former centuries. Perhaps the result may help in seeing our own times in perspective, and as not much worse than other ages that our ancestors lived through without ultimate disaster...