Although not always evident in my general outlook, my failure to find solace in my parent’s Roman Catholic religious culture is an issue always at the back of my mind, and has prompted much of my reading since adolescence. 

My adolescent confusion, dis-ease, and disaffection with organised religion lie behind many of the good and not-so-good things I have done in my life. Eventually, when I matured emotionally and intellectually, I came to see that the issues were not just about the nature of organised religion, but also involved the impact of the permissive liberal social culture that has dominated British life for the past half-century. 

This is not to say I am obsessed with religion – I have long accepted that I have no religious faith, and I am not aware of any unmet desire to develop one. What does fascinate me is the apparent need to believe – in anything – manifested by the vast majority of people. If we are condemned by the fact of having such an active brain to desire or need to believe in something, then the issue is not only what we believe but also the nature of belief itself and our capacity for managing our tendency to believe, especially when that belief is orchestrated by an organised religion. 

I do not approach this issue from a psychological perspective, however – the latter I view as being informative but not definitive of the impulse to believe. Instead I see the impulse to believe as the cultural expression of inherent human propensities to feel a sense of identity, meaning and purpose – in other words, the desire for a sense of cultural security. It is the cultural issues – those aspects of values, attitudes, belief, conduct, and so on, that are transmitted to each new generation through learning – and what these features reveal about ourselves, collectively and individually, that interests me the most.