Martin Rowson is an illustrator, political cartoonist and comic artist. He created the ambitious 'The Wasteland' and 'The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'. His political cartoons appear in the Guardian.

Who's Who lists his interests as "cooking, drinking, ranting, atheism, zoos and collecting taxidermy.

As a hard-line atheist I have severe problems with the notion of Christian morality. Indeed, morality in general often strikes me as one of the more dangerous human attributes, empowering the self-proclaimed moralist to descend into levels of almost bestial immorality. As far as I'm concerned, religion is the proper subject not for theologians but for anthropologists, sociologists and even biologists. Quite apart from the obvious shortcomings of religion - its misleading simplicity, exclusivity, intolerance, inadaptability, obscurantism and so much else - it's also clearly and demonstrably wrong. The fact that this is almost a matter of faith with me is, I know, rather ironic, but it also means that I simply cannot understand why billions of my follow human beings persist in choosing to be deluded into continuing to believe in their own chosen deity when it plainly doesn't exist as anything more than a comforting extension of themselves.