Let athiests poke fun at religion, but don’t deny us belief in an afterlife

SIR, I agree that blasphemy should not be a criminal offence and that we should have the freedom to poke fun at religions if we so desire. However, I also believe that it is better, having secured this freedom of expression, to show respect to the religious beliefs of others than to subject them to ridicule and contempt.

Atheists and materialists make much of the fact that one cannot prove the existence of God. They tend to get quite carried away with this fact, forgetting all too often that neither can one disprove the existence of a creator or ultimate originator of the universe.

Sure we all know that it started with the Big Bang they insist. Scientists theorize that about 13.7 billion years ago, before the theoretical Big Bang, all the matter in the Universe was compressed into a single tiny point.

Fine, it’s an interesting theory. But who or what brought that single tiny point into existence?

I remember during the 1970s hearing news reports almost every day of explosions in the north and each of these was attributed to either Republican or Loyalist paramilitaries. But one never heard a newsreader say: “there was an explosion today that was NOT caused by anything or anybody. It just happened.”

Of course that would have been absurd. Yet the materialists and atheists ignore the necessity of the allegedly biggest bang of all having been caused by some force or agency and the need for the “single tiny point” containing all matter prior to the explosion, if there was such a thing, to have come from somewhere.

If there’s a God, he must be a sadist or a tyrant, we hear from cynics like Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins.

I don’t know if there is a God who is either cruel, kind or otherwise disposed towards us humans and other species. I keep an open mind on the question.

But I DO know there are humans who, in the absence of any evidence for non-existence after death, continue to deny even the possibility of an afterlife to the millions of suffering grieving ethical beings on our planet who live in hope of a world beyond this one... of seeing their loved ones again. Now that’s cruel... even sadistic. If there is an afterlife (and I’m inclined to believe there is on the basis of evidence from mediums, near death experiences, and death bed visions) then the atheists and materialists will have a lot of apologising to do. Sincerely, John Fitzgerald, Lower Coyne Street, Callan, Co. Kilkenny.