Don’t forget we’re here forever – Part memoir, part reportage, wholly uncritical

It is perhaps because Lamorna Ash wrote this book after she started showing up regularly at church that its pages are coloured with the bias of someone who is convinced that following a religion is the right thing to do. I would not have had a problem with this had the blurb not made it sound like this would be a critical exploration undertaken by someone curious about the younger generation’s explorations of religions. Really, it should have just said Christianity, but let us overlook that misdirection because there are more meaningful things in this book to criticise. Lamorna says Richard Dawkins ‘and his ilk’ attack a ‘straw-man version of religion’, the ‘most pallid and simplistic form of religion they could devise’. I am no fan of Dawkins’s warlike approach to atheism; my own thought is that people should be allowed to follow religions they find interesting or find meaning in and, even as we continue to debate on the futility of religions and the idea of a ‘God’, nobody should be…