I had a conversation with a work colleague yesterday. It went something like this.
“Are you a Muslim?” they asked.
“No. Why?”
“Well it’s a Muslim name…”

Gosh. I never thought of that. I asked my friend Luke if he was a Christian.
“No.” he replied.
Mathew, Mark and John were all at the same table, eating their dinner. None of them are Christians either.
When Adam, Isaac and Nebuchadnezzar come in later, I’ll ask them too.

I do seem to get asked it more than my colleagues or friends though. I have not researched this at all and it may well be that the percentage of Asians with ‘Muslim’ names who are practising their religion is much greater than those with ‘Christian’ names who are practising Christians. I can understand if the question was asked, for instance, to a white male or female with an obviously Asian name. You would then be justified in thinking it had been adopted by them on conversion to a particular religion (amongst other reasons of course, not least of which is the fact they got fed up with being called 'Ernest Heppelthwaite The Third' and just fancied a change...)

Hang on. Adam’s turned up and… nope. He’s not a Christian either but tells me to wait a moment as he pulls out his mobile and dials his girlfriend’s number.
“Eve?” he begins…

For what it’s worth, I am proud to call myself an atheist. Why ‘proud’? Well, it’s because it takes more effort to read, study and think about the full consequences and effect of evolution by cumulative natural selection than it is to look up into the sky and say ‘I believe’. The book that did it for me was ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ by Richard Dawkins. The chapter in that book that explains echolocation in bats is the second most amazing, lucid and awe-inspiring pieces of writing I have ever read in my life.
(The first was the ending of ‘War And Peace’ when it turns out that it was the butler that poisoned Mrs Peacock all along. Plus the fact that my second-hand copy had a faded cover and all along I thought I was reading ‘War...d Peas’, which was a study of the therepeutic effects of having a small garden pea allotment in the grounds of an acute psychiatric hospital. It wasn't until I got to the end of Book Two when Prince Andrei leaves for his military engagements and Elena and her brother Anatole conspire for Anatole to seduce and dishonor the young Natasha Rostova, that I realised that peas had nothing to do with the story at all.)

It will be interesting to see if there is any response to this. We can talk about politics, the financial ineptitude of our peers, mass murderers, local councillors doing ‘favours’ for immigrants and why we may choose not to recycle.

But talk about religion and…