Religion: Personal, Political or Problematical.

Is religion the cause of the morass we are in? Or has it been tainted by our own mess?
Is religion itself inherently bad or is it those that practise it?
Should religion be confined to the home or should it be something that defines a section of society and their laws?
Or should religion itself be made redundant in a brave new world of technological advancement-advancement which brongs us uncomfortably close to rebuilding the Tower of Babel-i.e being unto like God?

As ever there are no definitive answers. As Morpheus in the matrix said you can believe what you want to believe. I think religion and globalisation have come together and ultimately will reinvigorate each other but on the fringes the extremes have also frayed and crossed over-religion is neither cause and effect which leads on to inherence.

No religion is inherently bad. It all comes down to interpretation. I'm sure somebody could reinterpret Buddhism in a fundamentalist way and decide for example that the destruction of the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan calls for a worldwide defence of Buddhism against Islamic fundamentalists (Buddhists are allowed to defend themselves just not be the aggressors). Christian history is littered with acts of cruelty that are today considered deplorable. Islam has done much for culture around the world.

However I think we are at risk of losing a happy medium we had since the enlightenment. We perhaps need to return to the early liberals such as John Stuart Mill and his idea that can be synthesised thus-my right to throw my fist ends at your face-. In other words, religion should be freely expressed in public be it wearing a cross or a hijab maybe even the veil if freely chosen, but a theocracy which forces people to follow a set of religious rites is wrong.

Religion also is needed more than ever to help reinforce a rigorous moral and ethical examination of our potential advances because while we have unlocked many mysteries of the body there is as of yet and probably will never be a gene for the soul.