Just got the current NewScientist in my letterbox and it's called
The God Issue. I'll have a read and see if there's anything interesting.
For starters here is a quote from Alain de Botton's
Religion for Atheists;
Quote:
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It is when we stop believing that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely daft that matters become more interesting. We can then recognise that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: firstly, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply-rooted selfish and violent impulses. And secondly, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise. God may be dead, but the urgent issues which impelled us to make him up still stir and demand resolutions which do not go away when we have been nudged to perceive some scientific inacurracies in the tale of the seven loaves and fishes.
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As an atheist raised Catholic and a parent of young children I can certainly understand the attraction of the notion that you will be reunited with loved ones in the afterlife. The bond between parent and child is such that any mental gymnastics required to at least imagine that we can maintain that bond beyond death is entirely understandable.