The central theme of Sea of Faith (a non-realist theist tendency associated with Don Cupitt - whose principle is that "religion as a human creation" - is not a million miles from the classic atheist dictum that Man creates God in his (Man's) own image. A slight change of tense - "has created" instead of "creates" - is sufficient to reconcile atheism with the existence of God. This super-Cupittian endeavour can be pursued by supposing that the God of traditional, and indeed of contemporary, belief is a false creation of Man and that, all this time we (you) have been in breach of the First Commandment, all that while the true God has been there, unidentified, unregarded and unloved. He must be fed up; that would explain a lot.

It is now some thirteen hundred years since god was dreamily re-invented for the umpteenth time; it is time for a rethink, time we created a God who is like the only true God that our information can allow, that our reason can sanction. When we examine the classical arguments for the existence of God we find that they are mostly contrived word-spinning with two important exceptions - the Design argument and the First Cause argument.

When we examine the Design argument we have to conclude that, unless we are prepared to carry rationalisation to the point of cringing absurdity, we have to infer that the Designer must have been careless or perverse as well as manifestly talented. Had He, for example, wished to make rape endemic in human society He would have made men, on average, bigger and stronger than women and also endowed men with far stronger proactive sexuality than is needed to arouse and practise affection and to promote reproduction. The Design Theory predicates a Designer whom people, especially the often raped fraction of total humanity, cannot worship with integrity and under whose sovereignty there would be no place to hide. You can't fill the pews with that, can you? You don't, do you?

The First Cause idea, although open to radical doubt, does at least effect a certain metaphysical tidiness - for those who like that sort of thing. To have all those, technically, contingent entities milling around in the cosmos without a necessary entity to corral them all is a wee bit disturbing to many. It is a pity that there is such a rush to anthropomorphism when theologising about that necessary entity, that First Cause.

But business is business; no anthropomorphism means no mass appeal in this democratic age.

My new religion is called Creatheism and the essentials of Creatheology are:

1) All things, barring only Himself, were created by Him as a sort of cosmic doodle in which He is no longer interested; He has not even put it in the shredder. He 'lit the blue paper and retired immediately'.

2) There are significant elements of order, of pattern, in this doodle. They are sufficient in extent and quality to enable useful 'knowhow' to be feasible on the part of some of the creatures that have evolved since He doodled.

3) We are the most accomplished of those creatures with the ability to observe the various bits of order that are extant and to infer knowhow from what we observe. We have, whether by chance or by design is of no matter, the ability to identify and deal with the challenges of our shared life - at least to a sustainable degree.

4) It follows that His will, so far as a doodler can be said to have such a thing, is that we leave Him alone and 'get on with it'. It is his will that we be Humanists, that we be, operationally, atheists.

That's it - the Creatheist Creed.