I had intended to rmake a comprehensive reply to your response to my comments. Indeed, I actually completed the majority of a draft before losing it.

I apologise for not doing so but I think it would be relatively pointless for, as Jonathan Swift said, around 300 years ago:

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."

As nothing in your reply actually refutes anything I wrote and as all is based on superstition, myth or, if you like, 'blind faith', it is clearly not based on reason.

Sadly, you are not alone in your conviction that there is a 'God' and that a man known as 'Jesus Christ' was the son of that god or is his incarnation or one of his incarnations or whatever. Christians never seem to have come to any agreement regarding the 'Trinity' question.

You also are somewhat presumptuous in assuming that I have not read the New Testament as you imply when you suggest I should read it.

I have read both Old & New Testaments and delved into them on many occasions for I have been fascinated by the manner in which human beings have been conditioned and controlled by religion.

It is a tragedy that such a device as religion, the product of false prophets, preachers, church founders and fraudsters should attract so many followers as it has done and continues to do such enormous harm.

Studying religions, in an informal way, i.e. predominantly through observation, reading, discussion & reference to history, as opposed to via an academic or theological institution, has been a life-long pursuit of mine. It began with my efforts to learn to read from a family King James version of the Bible but continued with excursions into many 'holy' or 'sacred' texts, codes of conduct and prescriptive ways of life to which people have been conditioned throughout history.

Unfortunately, human beings are easily conditioned, easily led, easily fooled, easily controlled. Sadly, too, there are always those who will use that fact to control others. When combined with physical might and/or the State apparatus, such conditioning facilitaates ready control of the many by the few.

So, if you wish to sacrifice your intellect to the banal notion that some man from the past will suddenly reappear and 'save' - not everyone of course, only the chosen ones - then that is your choice.

However, it is not mine for I don't believe in privilege or in privileged access. Nor do I believe in wasting what intellect I have in an irrational belief for which not one shred of evidence provides any support.

So please don't waste your time proselytising to me, even though I don't doubt that you may mean well.

Gambling offends me with the harm it does to individuals and those around them so although I'm now well past my thee score and ten, I'm not going to place even an each way bet.

My body is donated to medical research and my brain would be too if it weren't for the inane and obtuse laws emanating from 'blind faith' that either disallow it or make it almost impossible to achieve.

Paradoxically, I do believe in eternal life for I know that when I die that of which I'm composed at that time will eventually return to the tiniest of particles from which it came. They will then, in turn, be a part of something else. So, in that manner, I will continue to be. However, the 'I' that is considered to be 'me' will no longer exist, indeed it is questionable as to whether it exists now.

The irony of this type of discussion is that neither of us will be able to feel the satisfaction of having been proved right for there will be neither a you nor a me anymore that could do so.