This is a long post, but I hope you'll stay with me. It's an important subject. Let me tell you about something sad I once saw. When I was twelve I went to the local baths for a swim – it might have been with school, I don’t remember – and as I arrived I encountered a group of young children...

Some time around the publication of Richard Dawkin’s bestselling The God Delusion, it became impossible to go to the pub without a heathen friend launching into an argument about how demonstrably wicked religion is. I used to argue back, but now I don’t. I’ve come to the conclusion that those...

Pure Land Buddhism is an interesting religion. Its legendary founder, if founder is the right term, was a primordial being called Amida who, after millennia of austerity and meditation, achieved Buddhahood and forced the cosmos to grant him two wishes. His first wish was to be granted his own...