I am living in Indonesia where I teach English at a primary school - to both teachers and pupils. When Churchill re-joined the Conservative party in 1925 he said, \"Anyone can rat but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat.\" I too am a re-ratter, but I don\'t claim any ingenuity - just the very slow drip feed of doubt and contradiction over forty years. As a teenager my physics teacher used to say that although the word \"science\" is derived from the Latin word, scio - I know, a scientist is someone who doesn\'t know. I loved science and decided that to be a true scientist I had to be an agnostic. The 1944 Education Act meant that it was compulsory for British schools to have religious education and a religious assembly. I didn\'t want to be a hypocrite and asked my mother to write to the school and ask for me to be excused from religious assembly on the grounds of my agnosticism, which she did, despite her own strongly held religious belief. A few years later, while still at school. I was drawn to a moderate branch of Islam, mainly, I now realise, because of the sense of community and acceptance I found within it. My father, who had seen religious conflict in India and was against organised religion, was deeply shocked by my \"conversion\". It took a long time for me to finally come to realise that all religions are human artifice, in an over-night epiphany on a trip to Kuala Lumpur as it happens. Despite the passivity and intellectualism of the group to which I belonged, I realised that Islam in all its forms was the most dangerous and virulent of the current world religions. Living in the UK it was easy to compartmentalise religion and not feel threatened by it. Working in a Muslim majority country, even a relatively open society like Indonesia, it became more obvious how pervasive and powerful the influence of Islam is and how numbing its effects are on human thought. My fifteen-year-old self had been far wiser than I had been in my adulthood and I returned to his agnosticism. The chronic pain of guilt I had been feeling all those years over my doubts and deviations was gone and I was freer and happier than I could ever remember. I do not describe myself as an atheist since arguments or positions over the existence or otherwise of God, or what God might be are pointless. The most important thing to fight against is religion of which Islam is the most dangerous. It is the HIV of viral memes. As a very dear friend and scholar of Iranian society told me: ...to some extent I\'ve seen Islam from the inside and I can see how it has a special way of worming its way into people\'s brains in a barbed way which makes removal very difficult. I\'ve tried to explain this to people but they don\'t get it. And yes, an Islamic reformation would be against core tenets of Islam. It would be bid\'a, for one thing.