The following is an excerpt from the chapter:

It’s not in how much you pray or to whom, but if it helps to get you through the bad times then you should do it. The journey’s not such hard work if you have someone to help carry the load. The same is true of your troubling thoughts and who better to share them with than a person who only ever listens. It doesn’t matter if you’re standing, kneeling, prostrate, all three in succession, facing East, West, to the Sun or the Moon, eyes closed, chanting, head bowed or covered because if it did there would be a lot more people excluded from doing it through no fault of their own.

It’s not in what you wear or your diet. If actions speak louder than words, what you wear literally yells, and though you may have a desire to advertise your beliefs in public, others will find what it says offensive. Uniforms distinguish between parties – police and public, nurses and patients, friend and foe. Do you consider yourself at war? And you shouldn’t expect your friends to make allowances at the dinner table unless you’re going to reciprocate. There’s not much room for popular ethics if you live in a really cold climate where meat and animal skin is essential to survival.

It’s not what you read or how much you’ve read. What arrogance from people who feel the need to dismiss another’s beliefs as nonsense by quoting from the scriptures. Worst still are the people who write their own scriptures in the first place. Scientists, clerics, philosophers and actors have as much right to an opinion as anyone else, but not more. The quality of belief does not increase with qualifications and certainly not charisma or popularity - history stinks of the rotting corpses of those who have died protecting someone else’s equally rotting ideals.