Overly-long musings on day-to-day religion

I don't tend to think much about religion; it generally has no effect on me personally, except when I'm at someone's wedding or christening or funeral in church and I wonder about the absurdities of it all, and whether or not I'm being a hypocrite by attending said weddings and funerals in the first place.  To which I have concluded that I'm not really; even when I went to my niece's christening and the vicar, who seemed a really lovely and kind man, took my arm and said he hoped I would be visiting the church more often and I replied, spluttering awkwardly, that I would try to make it.

No - religion can be harmless, and it can also help people.  Bizarrely, my first realisation of this came when I was about thirteen years old and watching an episode of 'Brookside' in which Tony Dixon got killed by a car.  His Mum, paralysed by grief, could only get through her days by going to church.  I spent quite a lot of time as a teenager wishing that I could be religious, so I could feel a sense of belonging to something like that; something that might get me through life's occasional awfulness.  But I'm afraid it just never "took"; my mind has always been one of those that questions everything in a supremely annoying manner, and religion doesn't really stand up to annoying questions.  So I stumbled, and continue to stumble, through life as an atheist.

Anyway, this week I went to a Zumba class.  Zumba definitely has no religious connotations, unless you're doing it in a church hall, which this week I was (religious or not, you have to admit that church halls, even in this day and age, are wonderful for bringing communities together in all kinds of activities!) The instructor was late for class, so while we waited for him I went around the room reading all the posters on the walls.  One in particular struck me; it was a collage made by a Sunday school group of children, each of whom had written a little note of something they particularly wanted "to thank God for".  Some of these expressions of gratitude were endearingly small, like "my Mum's dinners that she works hard to make for me" and "my favourite chocolate" and others were impressively grand, like "the beautiful blue sea". 

Cute as these little notes were, they also made my heart feel a bit heavy in that kids are being trained from such an early age into believing that a) there is a God, no question, and b) that they should have to thank an unknown deity, rather than Mum herself, for the dinners she "works hard to make".  Same goes for the "favourite" chocolate manufacturers, I suppose.  They've got me on the "beautiful blue sea" thing - I suppose God can have that one if thanks are really necessary for things like that.

Another slightly religious thing I noticed this week was on 'Masterchef', which doesn't normally relate much to religion - you certainly couldn't re-enact the feeding of the five thousand with a minuscule plate of seared duck beak on a bed of wilted spinach - but one of the contestants, on being told he'd made it into the next round, kept on crossing himself, as though he were thanking a higher power for his good fortune.  Which is nice, I suppose, except I felt there was something arrogant about it as well; thinking that if there in fact is a God, then he is using all his power and influence...to ensure you make the final four on a TV cookery programme.  Surely he'd have more important things to do than listen to Gregg Wallace shouting his way through a bowl of mango sorbet?  You'd certainly hope so; but then again...

So is there an actual point to these observations?  You'd think so, but unfortunately there isn't.  You can thank God for that, if you so wish.