This is the fourth of my pieces on religion.

I write these words as the sun sets over the Solway Firth. From the window before me I can see across to Scotland, where Criffel rises gently to hide its peak among the flat bottomed clouds which shield it from an otherwise blue sky. It is Saturday 1 January, 1994, and it has been a crisp and clear day. Earlier I walked out to Grune Point where the cormorants' nest may be seen, out in the middle of Moricambe Bay. The air was still, and there were few other walkers abroad. On days such as this, in such a splendid location, one cannot fail to appreciate the sheer joy of being alive and being here.

But is there a hidden danger in such an idyllic setting? Can the overwhelmingly large inputs which bombard the senses in this area of outstanding beauty somehow distort one's sense of reality? I believe that we can fall victim easily to shifts of perspective readily arranged by our ever-active and imaginative brains, when we are at our most vulnerable at times like this.

As I look down over the surface of the water, a seagull skims the waveless millpond, its reflection warning it to maintain its distance. Oyster catchers follow the falling tide, and far away a small boat hugs the Caledonian coast. The pebbles upon the beach are arranged neatly in order of size, and near the water's edge the sand is flat and golden.

The spectacle is perfectly proportioned, and has the appearance of a masterpiece of organisation. The boatman is several miles away, steering his craft between the sand banks, and the seagull is much nearer. The boatman surely cannot see the seagull from such a distance, but I can see them both, following their every movement. I can see much more besides - houses and buildings are as dots on the shore opposite, and behind them the hills form a softly undulating backdrop.

It is easy to imagine that the entire scene has been designed for my benefit, and that of others like me. I agree that it requires a high degree of egocentricity to suppose that I am somehow better able to see than is my seafaring friend near the opposite shore (he can probably see dozens of seagulls which are too far away for me) but the temptation is strong. Such thoughts, however, did not push their way into my conscious mind until I saw something else.

High in the almost cloudless blue, just a few minutes ago, I caught sight of a shape which really had no business to be there. It was a near vertical cylinder of perfect white cloud, a spectral drainpipe illuminated in the westering sun, hanging without any apparent means of support. As I watched, I fancied I could make out the features of a wraith-like face within the cloud. It was positioned in the exact centre of my field of vision, and I imagine it would have been directly above the boatman. It was more or less at that moment that the central heating boiler, hung on the wall in the kitchen behind me, chose to emit a sudden and disturbingly loud clanking and clattering, lasting only for a few seconds.

It would require very little persuasion to believe that the whole thing was more than coincidence; that just as the immensity and beauty of nature was busily impressing itself upon my consciousness, someone somewhere decided to underline the point with a little display of divine intervention. Indeed, a supposedly intelligent colleague told me once that she had been riding on the back of her husband's motorcycle, through some of Scotland's most beautiful scenery, and had looked up to see a cloud resembling the face of an old man. When she blinked and looked again, the face was gone. She told me that she believed she had seen God. The woman is no crank; nor was she converted instantly to Christianity. She believed that she had seen God, for she is, and was, already a Christian.

Lacking the post-natal conditioning which this lady had enjoyed (resulting, of course, in her proclaimed Christian status) I failed to draw a similar conclusion from my "vision". I appreciate it for what it was: an unusual cloud formation, activating my brain's store of recorded face-shapes (we all have them - stare at a patterned cushion or roughly folded curtain for a few moments, and you will see faces too). The boiler has a habit of clanking from time to time; the coincidence with the appearance of the cloud was perhaps sufficiently unlikely not to happen again this year, but nevertheless it happened. We really cannot expect to live for seventy years or more, and be totally free from coincidences! One or two truly amazing things are bound to happen during our lives, and very occasionally something really staggering occurs (a tumour goes into natural regression; somebody wins a fortune on the pools). We all get to hear about such occurrences because of the instant global communication available to the news media. Therefore we can sometimes feel that we have all shared in the wonderful experience, and risk reaching completely the wrong conclusions.

The point which I seek to make is this. Every one of us has had, or will have, some kind of unusual experience which certain people would define as religious or supernatural. What we make of such experiences depends almost exclusively upon our existing beliefs. Those who were trained early in life to believe in God will see their experience as religious in nature. An atheist will see his experience as a rare coincidence brought about by pure chance. The person favouring the religious interpretation will invariably, however, use an account of their experience as a means to persuade others to their way of thinking. But we have, I hope, seen that their way of thinking is based not upon seeing queer shaped clouds or hearing of miraculous cures, but on what they were told when they were children. So now, deluding themselves that their beliefs are de novo and supported by observable evidence, they will proceed to abuse the absolute trust placed in them by children, and fill their receptive minds with the same indelible garbage that was programmed into them years ago. And their nonsensical explanations of things which they have seen will appear to strengthen their arguments in the eyes of their charges.

If you are a Christian, you may well now be saying, "You accuse Christians of using accounts of chance experiences to persuade others to their way of thinking. Is that not precisely what you are doing?" Well yes, I am. But the important difference between what the Christian is doing and what I am doing is this. The Christian is starting from a set of beliefs acquired as a young child, and seeking to strengthen actively those beliefs in preparation for the indoctrination of others. He already knows all the answers, and is using his account of a religious experience purely for illustration, disturbingly effective though that illustration may prove. I am doing no such thing. As a child I received no religious conditioning, and nor did I receive any instruction in atheism. I do not favour a Christian explanation of the world and everything in it, because having examined such an explanation I find that there are other, vastly preferable explanations supported by overwhelming evidence. I am encouraging everyone to examine available evidence for themselves, and to permit others (especially children) to do the same. If a child sees a strangely shaped cloud, and asks about its significance, then it should be given a sensible explanation. It does not need some know-all to use the question as an opportunity to instil religious belief. If the child is going to favour a religious explanation of observable phenomena, than it will be able to do so for itself upon reaching a suitable developmental stage.

I think that, if all religious text and persuasive propaganda were to carry an 18 certificate rather than the present PG, the number of those seeking to promulgate falsehoods would drop markedly within a couple of generations.