Currently listening to: Mahler's Eighth. Just for a change. Still not got that sound card fixed, though, so it's on another player.

I'm becoming increasingly brassed off with the New Statesman, the left-leaning weekly news-and-culture magazine to which I subscribe. Rather than do something sensible like write to them, though, I am, of course, venting my spleen here.

In each of the last three weeks, NS writers have got on my wick with their comments on - quelle surprise - faith and religion. The religious believers who write for the magazine haven't seen fit to respond, so maybe I'm just being hot-headed and over-touchy. Perhaps I do have a youthful streak of misplaced exuberance after all.

Chronologically, the first of these swipes was tucked away in a review of a book on the Enlightenment. Specifically, a comparison was made between religious believers and flat earthers.

While I can't be bothered to work out which branch of science it belongs to, 'the earth is flat' is a scientific statement. The earth is an observable phenomenon and one of its observable features is that it's not flat. This can be observed through photos from space and through round-the-world sea and air travel.

Whether or not 'I believe in God' is a scientific statement, the existence or otherwise of a deity cannot be observed in the same way as the flatness or otherwise of the earth. Indeed, it's long been my opinion that the existence or otherwise of a deity quite simply can't be proven or disproven in the way the verbs 'to prove' and 'to disprove' are conventionally understood. This particular book reviewer would seem to disagree with me, but I would disagree with his presentation of a subjective opinion as objective fact.

Not only are religious believers and flat earthers basically the same, denominational schools are, according to this same reviewer, apparently centres for religious indoctrination which certainly have no place in the State sector. Quite how denominational schools get away with this when they are subject to the same inspection regimes as other schools wasn't made clear. Having worked myself in a number of denominational schools myself and having these past twelve months in particular been able to observe their running and their teaching of religious education especially closely, it's also a bit a of a puzzle for me how I've managed not to notice the routine large-scale brainwashing with goes on in these schools.

My hackles were raised last week in the opinion pages, on that occasion from the angle of 'abortion is a fundamental human right (with appropriate feminist overtones)' category. I acknowledge that abortion is only tangentially a religious matter at best, but the original column made a specific link, so it's not just in my imagination.

Before continuing, I should point out that what's always got to me about the abortion debate is the way both sides use extreme cases to illustrate their points. I suspect that this is partly because there's a chronic shortage of statistics regarded by all as reliable. Discussion of this sort of matter shouldn't hinge on which side has the better made-up figures.

To illustrate this point, the columnist in question said that 'for every woman who regrets the decision to have an abortion, there are millions who feel nothing but relief'. Really? If there are 180 000 legal abortions in the UK each year (about the only figure most people agree on), then a woman regrets it once every six years. As abortion has been legal in the UK since 1968, that means, statistically speaking, there are only six such regretful women in the country. Either the stories which appear fairly regularly in conservative Sunday tabloids are all complete fabrications, or the 'millions to one' ratio is widely exaggerated.

Rather than face up to the possibility that the foetus/unborn child may have rights, the columnist put inverted commas around the words 'unborn child' on the one occasion she used it in a way which clearly didn't indicate quotation. I'm not qualified to comment on the biological debate concerning when exactly life starts, but I have observed that eminent biologists espouse a variety of views, including abortion-is-murder-and-I-agree-with-it. To dismiss this aspect of the debate through derogatory punctuation struck me as weak argumentation.

It was back to the book reviews for this week's dose, specifically a piece about Richard Dawkins's 'The God Delusion'. Everyone knows where they stand with Professor Dawkins and the reviewer didn't praise the book unreservedly. Despite giving a distinct impression that she was favourable to its stance and that criticism was more of content choice and presentation.

The first sentence which jarred with me was that 'educated people aplenty cling to faith'. I can only speak from experience, but my experience is that an adult's faith, regardless of their level of education, is seldom, if ever, 'clingy'. I've been privileged to know some extraordinarily intelligent and learned people who positively embrace religious belief in full knowledge of what they're doing. These people include artists and scientists, those brought up religious and those not. To deny the presence of thinking, well-adjusted religious believers in today's Britain, as some seem to do, is just lazy.

The second jarring bit was a reference to a 'false but sanguine belief in eternal life'. On reflection, I'm not sure how different this is from the improvable nature of belief in God, so I'll not repeat myself.

While this has indeed been the third occasion in three weeks that I've been annoyed by something in the NS, I'm not, despite the title of this post, going to cancel my subscription. By and large, it's an excellent publication and while it's clear in its political stance, it makes no claims to be radically counter-cultural. It is not, therefore, likely to challenge the consensus that religious proselytising is to be abhorred but secularist propaganda actively encouraged. Moreover, it was a columnist in the NS who put into words my long-held belief that phenomena can be 'true' and/or 'real' without being clearly observable as such by the senses. To give just two examples, do justice and love 'exist'? This belief seems to underlie many of my ramblings above and it is a matter of no small regret to me that contemporary Western culture, unlike other cultures, doesn't seem particularly able to cope with multiple ways of knowing.