"So-called primitive religions were never about faith, they have much more in common with science, being concerned with sheer cause and effect i.e., if we thrash a frog the water god will weep rain. If the rain doesn't come, it isn't because we didn't have enough faith, it must be because we thrashed the wrong frog, or not enough frogs. The idea of common sense is always very present. Primitive religions are closer to us and our doubts. They make everything seem clear, simple and logical."

"Ironically," he adds, "Modern Science although apparently created by reason, is often treated as a kind of religion. We tend to place the irrational faith in science. This tendency to treat science as a religion was never more pronounced than in America in the early fifties, in those first bomb drunk years of the Atomic Age when there was a tremendous drive, at least in the popular sense, to believe in the unlimited and untainted power, not only of the Atom, but of the nation which possessed its secrets. Atoms were in those days about optimism. Atoms were going to subdue not only the filthy communists but vast Nature Herself."

Bill Brookfield originally trained as a lawyer at Duke University, but after a peripatetic few years in Italy, where he lived for seven years, and in Paris, he decided to become a writer. he presently lives in London.