by KEVIN O’ CONNOR
A prime reason for religion’s existence is to allow human beings to cope with the prospect of death and of seeing parents, children etc again. But as I say to my 87-year-old mother: “Mum, if you want to say anything to me, say it to me now, for we won’t be meeting again in heaven or hell as there are no such places. When we die, we die. It will all go black, and that’s it.”
I have confidence in these statements because I was brought up as a Christian and attended church until I was 18. So I knew of something else before “converting” to atheism, whereas most people of “faith” know of nothing else, having been indoctrinated from the earliest age into a particular religion by their parents and schools.
I do have a slight preference for Christianity over Islam. The Sunday Monitor’s cartoonist could draw a cartoon of Jesus with this article. But if he did one of Prophet Mohammed, both he and I would fear for our lives. Hitchens’ chapter 9 (The Quran is borrowed from both Jewish and Christian myths) should be compulsory reading for all Muslims.
And on the subject of reading, the “Faith” pages in this Sunday Life magazine should include (if not every week, then at least every month) an article by an atheist to provide intellectual contrast to the traditional, rather boring, religious articles. As Facebook’s Atheist Society of Kampala (ASK) shows, there is no shortage of atheists in Uganda who would gladly write these articles.
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