Bit of a fun blog today, stretching my mind around two of the many human activities I find quite baffling.

Here are my Top Ten Reasons why smoking is like following a religion:

1 – If they didn’t exist, no-one would invent them. Watch Bob Newhart’s legendary Raleigh sketch here, and you’ll get the idea. Then imagine him calling home to try and explain religion to a nation evolved purely on science and reason.

2 – If our kids didn’t learn about them from us, they wouldn’t discover them later. This is a great argument both for religious education and smoking in homes or close to children to be banned.

3 – Both are harmful to health. Smoking inarguably so; religion stifling to open enquiry and rational thought. The late great Christopher Hitchens referred to religion as a mental illness, and who am I to argue?

4 – There would be fewer premature deaths without either. Sure, we’ve all got to die sometime, but that’s no reason to wantonly leave the party early. Whether you choose to literally expire through self-inflicted respiratory destruction, or get caught up in an act of slaughter in the name-of-all-that’s-holy, either is a tragic waste of precious life.

5 – Both originated from our ignorance. Religions were invented to provide explanations where current knowledge failed. The sun rose – must be a big man upstairs. Washed away in a flood – that’s him again, punishing us for being bad. Smoking was promoted long before medicine caught on to its perils. Hell, we even thought it was good for us!

6 – Now we know better. The corollary to number 5. 21^st Century Medics unanimously agree that smoking is among the easiest and surest of slow suicides yet discovered. Scientists are equally aligned that most things previously given a mystical status are now fully explained by science.

7 – Both are financially ruinous. I know people who spend more on fags than they do on a mortgage payment, for God’s sake. And no-one could make an argument of fiscal responsibility for the Vatican, hoarding looted treasures worth enough in cash terms to rid the world of all known diseases. Probably. If all the churches in the UK were converted into social housing, we’d solve the new homes shortage at a stroke. Maybe.

8 – They waste good people. Smoking, as we’ve agreed, truncates lives and thereby loses any future intellectual and social benefits those people may have yet had to bring. Organised religion is a huge sap of talent. I know several intelligent, intellectual and compassionate priests who could have contributed positively to our society in many other more useful ways.

9 – Both are widely practised, yet wrong. The argument that if enough people say or do something, it must be right, has never been disproved more effectively than through smoking and following religion. No-one needs to re-read the list of tobacco-related diseases to know that for sure, and here is a great rationale of why the same applies to religion.

10 – We’d be better off without them. You won’t find many people outside of the tobacco industry and HMRC arguing any positives for smoking. Even the smokers I know agree it’s plain silly. As for religion, John Lennon summed it up as perfectly as a man ever has.

So there you have it. Now you all know that I’m anti-smoking, and an unrelenting apologist for scientific reason!