Mr Stephen is much exercised - one might say obsessed - with Sin. Sin is all over the place - 'all of us are sinners; none is righteous'. This deplorable state of things applies to people not so much for what they do but rather for what they are. Mother nature has caught it too; 'because of man's sin, the earth is cursed'. Now, of course, Mr Stephen is entitled to see us all as blighted by Sin, in General, and he is entitled logically to develop a view of life from that premise. He does it very capably and he must be respected for that.

It occurs to me however that if all-pervading 'Sin in General' is real, rather than merely a much loved theory of Mr Stephen's, the practical consequence would be a world overflowing with wickedness, a world full of wicked people. However, I assert that the world is not like that at all. I assert that wickedness and folly, while horribly real and dangerous, are a relatively small part of the human scene. I assert this on two grounds:

1) I and the many hundreds of people of many sorts with whom I have been associated these sixty-odd years cannot in all conscience be said to be horribly wicked or sinful (with a tiny number of arguable exceptions) on any practical commonsense definiton of those words. My main impression of my fellows is that they are kind, honest, loyal and diligent in the conduct of their lives and that human worth, rather than human lapse, is the big fact of life. And moreover, I see no reason to suppose that the hundreds of people I have known are untypical of the millions I, inevitably, cannot know.

My reason 2) is that we humans are essentially social beings and human society, in all its various forms, has survived and grown more numerous over the millenia. This is a success story according both to biological and scriptural criteria (we have indeed 'peopled the earth'). Human society is fragile; it can withstand only so much folly and wickedness - that is why people have always tried, according to their lights, to identify wisdom and virtue. The fact that our species is still here, and multiplying, therefore suggests that we humans are not that daft and not that bad.

I reject the view that sins (the natural products of Sin) are the big fact of life. Human worth is the big fact and, armed with that rational faith in our kind, we can hope rationally to rise above our difficulties by our unaided co-operative efforts. Mr Stephen's religion sees no hope realisable in this life - because of Sin. Humanism sees reason for hope in this, the only life we actually know about, because of demonstrable human worth. Without this faith in the efficacy of human striving, numerous good people (including many liberal Believers) would have no basis for their work for human rights, the environment, justice, care for the vulnerable and all the other things that the cruelly despised 'do-gooders' try to do. This humanist faith - explicit or implicit - would be quite void if we were as Mr Stephen says we are.

I submit that the problem Christianity claims to identify is mostly in the grim imaginations of its adherents. Wall-to-wall Sin is their fantasy - as many people suspect. The churches might begin to fill up again if Christians can finally shake themselves free from grim piety about salvation and instead rejoice in human wisdom and virtue and our capacity to act on these attributes. If remaining Believers like, meanwhile, to think of human wisdom and virtue as 'God-given' - let them think so. The main thing is to stop bellyaching about Sin and get on with the quite possible job of promoting justice and human dignity here and now.

The next instalment might be to suggest that even if the Christians' perceived problem (Wall-to-wall Sin) is real, their suggested solution is fallacious - that Christianity is part of the problem rather than the whole of the solution.