How is it, asks Richard Dawkins, that despite science having exposed old religious myths, militant faith is back on the march? The mechanism for perpetuating beliefs that Dawkins describes as leading to murderous intolerance, is by imposing religion on children who are too inexperienced to judge it for themselves.
I agree. Religion should not be imposed, good behaviour and morals should be taught. However most parents and schools would seek an authority to back them up. They are likely to turn to inspirational texts from the generations that built the society that has brought their family into existence. What is needed is to have texts that are consistent with current knowledge. There are plenty available and as I have shown already, the Bible and Book of Commion Prayer are full of them if properly understood. No doubt the Koran is also. What has gone wrong is these sources are being imposed by mentally deficient, or deluded, or ignorant people.

We wouldn't categorise children according to their parents' political stance, says Dawkins, since they are too young to make up their minds about such matters. But we segregate them in sectarian religious schools, where they are taught superstitions drawn from ancient scriptures of dubious origin, which promote a 'contradictory and poisonous system of morals'.
I agree. The religious texts that are used need to be explained by people who understand them. This is not happening.

From generation to generation

Dawkins compares this to a virus, which infects the young and is passed down the generations. Visiting an ultra-orthodox Jewish school, he describes the British-born headteacher Rabbi Gluck's Yiddish accent as testament to the isolation of his community. Gluck says that it's important for members of minorities to have the space to express their own beliefs and traditions. He describes science as one tradition, and Judaism as another. His students are taught about evolution and if only a minority end up believing in it, he says, this is not out of ignorance.
Gluck's position is ridiculous, of course. The understanding and perspective of previous generations can be respected and admired without pretending that it does not have to be expanded and interpreted in the light of later evidence. If half his students believe one thing and half another, with no possible rational co-existence, we have basic societal incoherence, not healthy variety in studies.

The number of faith schools is increasing. More than half the Government's proposed City Academies will be run by religious organisations and there's a growing number of private evangelical Christian schools. ACE – Accelerated Christian Education – has developed a curriculum which includes a mention of God or Jesus on every page of its science text book. The head of a school which uses this material argues that if there were no lawgiver, there would be no reason to see rape and murder as wrong.
I went to boarding schools where we went to a Christian service frequently. We sang great hymns, intoned great prayers, and never for a moment doubted that the way our religion was understood by each individual was a personal affair. As a born scientist who studied evolution and physics as soon as I could read and assumed the 'Big Bang' theory was a correct visualisation of the devlopment of space-time, I never had the slightest problem with respecting the Biblical texts and understanding how they related to current cosmological and biological perceptions. I never imagined anyone else did either. It is only now that I find myself having to live in a world where morons are taken seriously and allowed access to powerful means of public expression that I realise that unless we straighten this mess out immediately we could be in for some painful times.

Hellfire and damnation

Transmitting such a 'warped reality' to young people, says Dawkins, amounts to indoctrination. Children are uniquely vulnerable and if they fail to question and shake off such superstition, they remain in a state of perpetual infancy. He talks to a woman brought up in a strict Christian sect who describes the terror of eternal damnation, which dominated her childhood, as a form of abuse.
Here I have to agree 100% with Dawkins. But hell-fire and damnation arrives regularly on this planet when we muck up. People of limited education need to ascribe this to an authority greater than their local or national government so 'God' gets lumbered with it. Insurance companies use the same tactic so don't be too dismissive of this cop-out.

Hellhouse movies are a new growth industry in the USA today. Graphically filmed, they demonise abortion and homosexuality with the explicit aim of scaring the viewers. Pastor Keenan Roberts explains that the aim is 'to leave an indelible impression on their lives that sin destroys … and Jesus saves'. The result, says Dawkins, is a mindset which can justify the murder of a doctor who carries out abortions on the grounds that he is destroying a being created in God's image!
Again I am 100% with Dawkins. Abortion is something to be avoided, but carried out if pregnancy is unwanted and for some reason not avoided. Hellhouse movies are rubbish. Homosexuality has been a natural development, it appears, maybe a form of population control. What offends some people is not its existence but crass public sexual behaviour which homosexuals, for some reason, seem to enjoy.

Innate morality

Physicist and Nobel prizewinner Stephen Weinberg describes religion as an insult to human dignity. 'Without it,' he says, 'you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.' Dawkins agrees. It is more moral, he says, to do good for its own sake than out of fear. Morality, he says, is older than religion, and kindness and generosity are innate in human beings, as they are in other social animals. The irony is that science recognises the majesty and complexity of the universe while religions lead to easy, closed answers.

Is there no more than just this life? asks Richard Dawkins. How much more do you want? We are lucky to be here, he says, and we should make the most of our time on this world.

First of all, let us get rid of the.major problem with Weinberg's statement. Religion has inspired a great number of people to do very good things, which atheist or agnostics would not have bothered with. Being decent to your friends or neutrals is easy for any well adjusted atheist. For significant or advanced altruism, it takes religion. It has been the very source of civilisation of that there is no doubt. It was once the science of its time, evidence based. Well paid middle class academics have little idea of the innate savagery that is to be found in humans whose environment is dangerous and competitive. Morality is NOT older than religion. Morality beyond that shown by animals is almost the definition of religion, as it is based on the concept of a natural law that is above the individual. Of course there have been religious wars, the appalling Spanish Inquisition, the wars to defend historical sites, the invokation of religion by leaders of sectarian movements to gain dominance over land or positions of power. But what is at issue now is not history but the future. There is nothing but verity in the realisation that science is knowledge based on evidence, and that science has revealed the majesty and complexity of the universe. Any religion that denies the evidence is a religion that has got into the wrong hands. It is also in the case of Christianity a religion that has been totally misunderstood. Here is a religion that was founded to clear away superstition. So if what Weinberg wants to dump is the muddle in the heads of those who have a religion that is based on superstition and denies science, then he is to be supported.

Second let me deal with Dawkins final sentence. "Is there no more than just this life?" he asks. This is a strange question. It is rather as if a single brain cell group, if it could speak (and a single brain cell group is complex) said to itself - "is there no more than just this life?" To which the answer is yes, there certainly is. There is more in every way. Yet Dawkins is also right when he says "How much more do you want?".Life for a human is as much as he or she can cope with. However, there is life after death. Every life is one after death. There is no need to get into complex theories of reincarnation to work out that nature achieves consciousness in living beings. We bring with us the innate experince gained over all of time. There is only one universal question which God or Nature had to answer, Shakespeare put it in the mouth of Hamlet, but it is the question to which the asnwer to Life, the Universe and Everything applies. It is this: To Be, or Not To Be. It has been answered in the affirmative, and therefore the truth which Dawkins is trying to express is also the answer that many, particularly when they find themselves in extremis, come up with: "We're here because we're here because we're here, because we're here". This is a much more profound statement that you may realise. And the plea by Weinberg to do good for its own sake is entirely correct. What neither he, nor Dawkins seem to understand is that their ideas of Heaven and Hell are as hopelessly inadequate as the very religionists they are trying to banish. If they were not, they would understand the New Testament.

Saudi officials said the pilgrims were crushed at the eastern entrance of Mena's disaster-prone Jamarat Bridge as they jostled to perform the stoning between noon and sunset in Mena, a narrow valley near the holy city of Mecca.

"So far, the number of confirmed deaths is 345 and the number of injured in hospital is 289," Health Minister Hamad al-Manei told Saudi state television, adding that many had been discharged.

Some 2.5 million Muslims are performing the haj this year, and the death toll was the worst since 1,426 people were killed in a stampede in a tunnel in Mecca in 1990.

"It was like the road of death there," one pilgrim said, describing women fainting and people elbowing and pushing to get closer to the wall where pilgrims direct their stones.

Thursday's crush, which occurred after noon prayers, intensified after many pilgrims scrambled to pick up belongings lost in the heavy crowds, the Interior Ministry said. "Pilgrims fell over and crushed each other at the eastern entrance to the Jamarat," it said in a statement.

Many pilgrims insist on following Prophet Mohammad's example of stoning after noon prayers instead of staggering the ritual throughout the day as some clerics recommend.

Bodies covered in white shrouds littered the Jamarat area, as medics tended to the injured on stretchers. The bodies were driven away in ambulances and refrigerated trucks.

"The people who died were trying to get onto the bridge to do their stoning. But a wave of people came from the (other) direction trying to get off the bridge. That's when people died," said Egyptian Amr Gad.

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Sultan blamed the crush on pilgrims who insisted on carrying bulky baggage during the stoning ritual despite officials' warnings.

But he defended the kingdom's organisation of the haj, saying: "The state can't stop God's will, its impossible to think that any human can stop God's will."

The crush was the second disaster to hit this year's pilgrimage. Last week, 76 people were killed when a hostel in Mecca collapsed in a narrow street.

Saudi security forces set up a tight cordon around the Jamarat Bridge to control the crowds, as many pilgrims thronged to carry on stoning three walls in a symbolic casting out of the devil and rejection of temptation.

The haj is a duty for every able-bodied Muslim at least once in a lifetime. Many pilgrims transport their belongings from site to site, hampering the flow of pilgrims.

"There was crowding and pushing, of course. It's so sad to hear about the people who died," said Fawaz Zahrani, a Saudi.

The pilgrimage has been marred by stampedes in the past, and some of the worst have occurred in Mena. In 2004, some 250 pilgrims were crushed to death at Jamarat Bridge. A decade earlier, 270 were killed in a similar stampede.

Saudi Arabia has revamped the Jamarat area by expanding the stoning targets and provided unprecedented security including 60,000 security men to control the huge crowd and avert possible attacks by Islamist militants.

After this year's haj, the Jamarat Bridge will be replaced with a more elaborate bridge involving a four-level system of entrances and exits to the three walls, including a subway, and costing 4.2 billion riyals (645 million pounds).

Pilgrims, in white robes meant to eradicate differences in race and class between Muslims, perform a third day of stoning on Thursday and make a final visit to the Grand Mosque in Mecca, according to rules laid out by Prophet Mohammad 1,400 years ago.

Mohamed: the messenger of Allah

By Paul Vallely

Published: 03 February 2006

Images of the Prophet Mohamed have long been discouraged in Islam. The West has little understanding of why this should be so - nor of the intensity of the feelings aroused by non-believers' attitudes to the founder of Islam.

To historians, Mohamed was a prophet and religious reformer who united the scattered Arabian tribes in the 7th century, founding what went on to become one of the world's five great religions. To Muslims, he was the last in a line of figures which included Abraham, Moses and Jesus, but which found its supreme fulfilment in Mohamed.

They believe that he was visited by the Angel Gabriel who commanded him to memorise and recite the verses sent by God which became the Koran - and that he completed and perfected the teaching of God throughout history.

Because Muslims believe that Mohamed was the messenger of Allah, they extrapolate that all his actions were willed by God. A singular love and veneration thus attaches to the person of Mohamed himself. When speaking or writing, his name is always preceded by the title "Prophet" and followed by the phrase: "Peace be upon him", often abbreviated in English as PBUH.

Attempts to depict him in illustration were therefore an attempt to depict the sublime - and so forbidden.

More than that, to reject and criticise Mohamed is to reject and criticise Allah himself. Criticism of the Prophet is therefore equated with blasphemy, which is punishable by death in some Muslim states. When Salman Rushdie, in his novel The Satanic Verses, depicted Mohamed as a cynical schemer and his wives as prostitutes, the outcome was - to those with any understanding of Islam - predictable.

But understanding of Islam is sorely lacking in the West. The culture gap has its roots in the fact that Christianity - like Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism - is essentially an iconographic religion. In its early years, the Christian world took the statues of the old gods and goddesses of Greece and morphed them into images of the Virgin Mary and the saints, which were venerated in all the churches. Muslims, like Jews, take a polar opposite view. Islam and Judaism are religions of the word, not the image.

Islam has traditionally prohibited images of humans and animals altogether - which is why much Islamic art is made up of decorative calligraphy or abstract arabesque patterns.Throughout history Muslims have cast out, destroyed or denounced all images, whether carved or painted, as idolatry. Despite that prohibition, hundreds of images of Mohamed have been created over the centuries. Medieval Christian artists created paintings and illuminated manuscripts depicting Mohamed, usually with his face in full view. Muslim artists from the same era depicted Mohamed too, but usually left his face blank or veiled.

Sixteenth-century Persian and Ottoman art frequently represented the Prophet, albeit with his face either veiled, or emanating radiance. One 16th-century Turkish painting, in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, shows Mohamed in very long sleeves so as to avoid showing even his hands.

The ban is not absolute. Today, iconic pictures of Mohamed are sold openly on the street in Iran. The creation, sale or owning of such images is illegal, but the regime turns a blind eye (Muslims in Iran are Shia not Sunni).

Two things are different today. The cartoons published first in Denmark and now more widely across Europe set out not to depict but to ridicule the Prophet. And they do so in a climate in which Muslims across the globe feel alienated, threatened and routinely despised by the world's great powers.

The combination of this with Islam's traditional unhappiness at depictions of any human form, let alone of their most venerated one, was bound to be explosive. The affair is an example of Western ignorance and arrogance combined. We have lit a fire and the wind could take it a long way.

END OF ARTICLE.

FEBRUARY 5th 2006
Lets have a look at Taoism. To most people there seems to be little conflict between the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament and Lao - Tzu, the supposed author of Taoism, as far as the consequent instructions for how to behave during life are concerned. There are also parallels with Buddhism which equally obvious. If one takes a look at the cosmogeny of Taoism, according to Yin Hsi (a famous Taoist) "It is a kind of cosmogony which contains all the fundamental tenets of Esoteric Cosmogenesis. Thus he says that in the beginning there was naught but limitless and boundless Space. All that lives and is, was born in it, from the 'Principle which exists by Itself, developing Itself from Itself'". Scientifically this is not quite as good as St John, who does not assume that space-time existed beforehand but emerged from a singularity. But let us not quibble, there is absolutely no case for Taoists and Christians and Bhuddists to disagree about how to behave, providing we don't get bogged down in cultural minutiae developed by fundamentalists and the various sects and denominations that developed during the 2 millennia since Jesus lived. Here are some links for Taoism.

http://mb-soft.com/believe/txo/taoism.htm
http://www.thetao.info/tao/tao.htm
http://morrisinstitute.com/os/mihv_pc_morris_14.html
http://www.experiencefestival.com/tao_te_ching
http://www.dynamicbalancingtaichi.co.uk/Lao%20Tzu.htm

FEBRUARY 7th 2006
Today we have Prof David Starkey's last programme in his "Who Killed Christianity" series. He targets Karl Woytila (spelling to be corrected when I find out what it is) Pope John Paul. He gives JP his due as a key player in the winding up of the Cold War but rightly takes him to task for turning the clock back to a sex-obsessed period and an Aristotelian rather than a Christian interpretation of sexual morality. John Paul was right to extol behavioural change as the key to improvements in e.g. Africa. There is no doubt that the abuse of women and the male dominance of the cultures has to be tackled if there is to be control of AIDs. There is everything to be said for 'old fashioned' values in marriage. But to get this confused with fundamental opinions on the use of condoms in absurd.

Starkey comes to the defence of the first page with which I opened this GOD STORY, prompted as I was, not primarily by the madness of Muslim fundamentalist fanaticism, or the emptiness of unimaginative atheism based on shallow and partial science, but by the truly appalling failure of the fount of Christianity to have the courage to show that its real roots, the life and teaching of Jesus, is compatible in every way with the most modern scientific knowledge. Jesus fulfilled the role of Jewish Messiah because that was what was needed. But he was also the first Humanist.The Virgin Birth was part of the legend - we do not need it now. He did not heal the sick - he showed them how to heal themselves through faith. We tend to forget that Christian Science was born in the same time as bacteriology, and tests in the last 25 years of the 'placebo effect' have proved the mind can control not only the experience of pain but the immune and other bodily systems. Jesus taught the Kingdom of God is within us. That feeding 5,000 or 5 Billion is possible if we share. That death is not the end because the spirit of life lives on and "We", "I", "You" will always be here as the eyes, the hands of God. In the beginning was The Word, and The Word Became Flesh, is the story of evolution. The parable of The Sower is the teaching of Natural Selection. Seek and Ye Shall Find is a key instruction. Love thy neighbour is another, and thy neighbour is not defined by race, colour, or even creed. He also prepared us for some very tough times ahead.

FEBRUARY 8th
This morning I have to listen to John Mortimer talking to Dominic Lawson saying "How can you believe in God when you have The Holocaust". Sometimes one wonders how someone with an intellect as inadequate as that can make a living as a lawyer. Mind you, it could not have helped when Cardinal Hume, in answer to his question, told him "God is the Shakespeare of the universe - he has to have his villains..." No wonder we are in a mess when the head of the Catholic Church in the UK did not understand the meaning of the crucifixion or of the humanity of Christ.

MARCH 21
Well done Archbishop of Canterbury! We could be on the road to recovery. Dr Williams has clarified the Intelligent Design muddle and, even though the coverage of his media interview in the Guardian almost confused it again (headline writers are the bane of information dispensers and editors next on the list), it looks like the C of E will get it straight. Five separate links here to the Guardian. As I am sure you will guess, at no time did he say "I am comic vicar to the nation."
(Archbishop: stop teaching creationism, March 21)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,1736264,00.html
21.03.2006: 'I am comic vicar to the nation'
21.03.2006: Transcript: Rowan Williams interview
21.03.2006: Audio extracts: Archbishop of Canterbury's interview

MARCH 24 2006
Now we have Richard Dawkins addressing an audience at the Oxford festival on the Selfish Gene 30th anniversary and his new book. A summary of his position on the BBC 6pm evening news: "Richard Dawkins does not believe in life after death". There are different conceptions of 'life after death'. One is that we, as individuals, wake up as ourselves in another place. I am not sure at what stage of our lives we are supposed wake up, at the age of our choice? And then what? Would we start at that state and it would alter with experience again, or not? Would we meet people we knew in their previous life? What if those people did not wish to meet us? I do not think any intelligent person, certainly not St Paul for example, has really thought that this sort of life after death was likely. But if anyone is happy with that as their idea of what happens when they die, what's the harm in it? The second conception is that they are reborn as someone or something else. OK, in that case they are something or someone else. In many ways this is true. The physical body is transformed in different ways depending on cremation or burial or any number of other possibilities that may occur by choice or by accident. That is not an individual experience of life after death. A third conception is that of reincarnation as a human here on earth. I have yet hear of anyone who brings with them a memory of their previous life. There are those who under hypnosis etc relate details of a previous life, but there is absolutely no proof it was they who lived it as the person they now are. It is evident that their subconscious has the details in it, but no evidence that the data has been acquired by them personally. There are various ways it can be explained by very advanced theories of physics and biology which have not yet established themselves as an orthodox science.

A fourth conception is that our experience and personality as formed over a lifetime rejoins a sort of central source of energy, life and creation in which we share. Of this we cannot say much, but we can speculate this: that the nature of the universe as we have revealed it so far through investigation and science, leaves scope for existence other than that we experience. The universe is multidimensional, our human experience of time is applicable to our lives, which as indivduals have a start and an end, but there can be more types of existence of which we are a part. In a very important way we know there is life after death. All life is life after death and has only occurred as the result of death. All Richard Dawkins will do, in my view, is upset some simple souls who do not need to be troubled, in order to push his own ideas which are usually very obvious and been thought through already. It is quite probable that the universe is capable of satisfying both Dawkins and those he thinks are up the creek, including all the religions of the world. To quote an old phrase: "This thing is bigger than both of us"..

APRIL 08 2006

According to the Independent

Yesterday, a 62-page codex, written from the point of view of the man who betrayed Christ and said to date from the 3rd or 4th century, was unveiled in Washington. A seismic moment for the Christian church? Paul Vallely and Andrew Buncombe report

Published: 07 April 2006

It will "shake Christianity to its foundations". Or so the pre-publicity suggested. A 3rd or 4th-century document called "The Gospel of Judas" was launched upon an unsuspecting world yesterday by no less a biblical authority than the National Geographic magazine in Washington. Its contents were "explosive", according to Mario Roberty, president of the Swiss foundation which now owns the ancient papyrus manuscript.

So as the heat faded from the television lights at the press conference, has 2000 years of orthodox Christianity been overturned? Well, not quite. But it was all jolly interesting, for those who love that sort of thing.

Half of the 62-page codex, written in Coptic script, is devoted to an account of the final days of Jesus Christ written from the viewpoint of the man who has for two millennia been excoriated as Christ's deadly betrayer. The text begins: "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot three days before he celebrated Passover..."

Secret, hang on to that. That's the important bit.

And though the manuscript has been carbon-dated to around 300AD, it is likely to be a copy of an earlier Greek manuscript written around the year 150AD, in the same period when the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were also written down. So, the new discovery is serious competition, the National Geographic people implied, for the official version.

What The Gospel of Judas says is that, far from being Jesus's enemy, Judas was his chief apostle - who "betrayed" him to the authorities at the actual request of his master in order to fulfil a divine ordinance for the salvation of the world. Judas, alone of the disciples, understood the true significance of Jesus' teachings - because Jesus told him. "You will exceed all of them," Jesus tells the main man in the key passage in the text, "for you will sacrifice the man that clothed me".

Thus the individual whose name has entered the language as a synonym for traitor - selling his master for 30 pieces of silver, the amount for which the law of Moses specified an Israelite could buy or sell a slave - was, instead of being the big villain, the secret hero.

"The Pharisees ... went to Judas and told him ... although you are evil in this place, you are Jesus' true disciple. And he answered them as they wanted him to. And Judas received the money. And he surrendered him. This is the end of the Gospel of Judas." Without Judas's help, Jesus would not have been crucified and God's plan to redeem mankind, the Gospel suggests, would not have been fulfilled.

What makes all this rather dubious is not just the provenance of the new document, though as a dossier it is dodgy enough. The National Geographic yesterday said the manuscript had been found in Egypt in El Minya on the Nile in 1978 - though when it was offered to potential buyers previously it was variously said to have been found elsewhere in Egypt in 1947, during the 1960s, in the mid-70s, and in 1980.

It was first shown to academics in a seedy hotel room in Geneva in 1983. They turned down the $3m asking price for the smuggled book. There was at least one other known attempt to sell it in the 1990s after which it languished in a safe deposit box in New York where the condition of the papyrus deteriorated.

But then in 2004 Professor Rudolf Kasser caused a stir at a conference of Coptic specialists in Paris by announcing that he was working on translating the text from the same Sahidic dialect of Coptic used in the 46 different apocryphal texts discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi in Egypt - books such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth which had prompted a major re-evaluation of early Christian history. The rumour was that the National Geographic had bought the Gospel of Judas manuscript, which also contained several other works.

There was no doubt that a Gospel of Judas had once existed. That much was clear from the writings of a second-century bishop, St Irenaeus of Lyons, who condemned it in his work Adversus Haereses (Against the Heresies) written around 180AD. He even set out what it said. Its authors "believe that Judas the Betrayer was fully informed of these things and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, fulfilled the secret of betrayal that confused all things, both in heaven and on earth". The text was the work of a sect called the Cainites who were so determined to accentuate the positive that they saw Cain (the Old Testament's first murderer) as a hero too. Some academics suggest that Irenaeus took as his source Justin Martyr which would date the Gospel of Judas 120AD.

The Cainites were part of a movement known as the Gnostics, a sect often described as Christian heresy but which was a syncretistic tendency that picked-and-mixed elements from many different religions. What was common to their magpie pickings was the notion that salvation was to be achieved by the acquisition of secret or arcane knowledge (gnosis in Greek). The Gospel of Judas suits their purposes admirably. It contains a radically different creation story, with the world created by angels, and in several places in the text Judas is singled out for special treatment by Jesus:

"Step away from the others and I shall tell you the secret of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it but you will grieve a great deal.

"Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way is your star."

If only these Gnostics could acquire the same secret knowledge given by Jesus to his inner circle, they would be saved too.

The modern world is not big on salvation - though our obsession with "personal fulfilment" is an attenuated version of the notion - but we are still terribly keen on secrets. The persistence of Gnosticism through the centuries is testimony to that, surfacing in everything from medieval heresies to modern romanticism - it is there in William Blake, in theosophy, Aleister Crowley, Jung and most recently in the work of Philip Pullman.

And it plays into the contemporary proclivity for conspiracy. Mario Roberty, the Judas manuscript's owner, is wont to drop dark hints about there being another copy of the unauthorised gospel - in the Vatican Library which the Church of Rome has for centuries refused to publish.

"It is highly logical that the Catholic Church would have kept a copy of the forbidden gospels," he has said. The Vatican only makes life easier for such searchers after the arcane by refusing to deny such claims, though to be fair, as the plethora of books like The Da Vinci Code and Holy Blood, Holy Grail show, Rome could spend all its time denying all manner of hair-brained claims that secularists find more plausible than the central Christian notion that God became man in Jesus Christ.

All that, and the post-Freudian urge to uncover psychological motivation, explains the attraction of Judas to our time. For the past 100 years the figure who has for two millennia been the archetype of treachery has been far more likely to be accorded sympathetic treatment than in the days when he was seen as the personification of betrayal.

Edward Elgar in his oratorio, The Apostles, depicted Judas's betrayal as an attempt to force Jesus to declare his divinity and establish the kingdom on earth. One of Jorge Luis Borges' short stories in Three Versions of Judas concluded that Judas is the true saviour of humanity.

The film The Last Temptation Of Christ drew on the notion that the crucifixion of Christ was a conscious re-enactment of biblical prophecy in which Judas acted with Jesus's full knowledge. The musical Jesus Christ Superstar shows Judas as a man who believes in and loves Jesus, but wants a lasting charity organisation rather than a new religion.

Judas is even to get an empathetic portrayal in next week's BBC extravaganza, The Manchester Passion, which dramatises the final hours of the life of Christ with songs from local rock groups, including Oasis, Joy Division, New Order and M People - Judas will sing The Smiths' "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now". And after that one of the Holy Blood, Holy Grail authors is to produce a new book alleging that it was Judas rather than Jesus who died on the Cross. (Not that there is anything new in that either, by the way; a similar claim is to be found in the medieval Gospel of Barnabas whose author won't at least sue in the High Court for plagiarism).

All of which seems to have left the foundations of Christianity - currently with 1.6 billion believers worldwide, and growing - looking decidedly unshaken. One of the scholars wheeled out for yesterday's launch Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, the author of The Gnostic Gospels, was enthusiastic about the addition of the Gospel of Judas to the Gnostic canon. "[This] is transforming our understanding of early Christianity," she said. "These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion."

But most experts remain underwhelmed. "In a way we have been through these things before, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library," said Father Donald Senior, president of the American Catholic Theological Union, another of the prominent theologians at the launch.

"I think the most important thing will be to highlight the diversity of the early Christian community. But will it be a source of inspiration and teaching today? I doubt it."

It will "shake Christianity to its foundations". Or so the pre-publicity suggested.

Of course the authors quite correctly explain that it does no such thing. All it will shake in my view is those who did not realise that without Judas there would have been no crucifixion and no cathartic fulfilment of the task Jesus had set himself - to move the religious perception of the time on to a better understanding of the way forward for humanity. He expected Judas to do the job and had clearly spoken to him about it. A reading of the New Testament we already know, with a level head, makes that clear. Jesus knew what he had to do, Judas knew what he had to do, and they got it right. Every year of the 2 millennia that followed proves them right, When this is properly understood in the coming decade they will be shown to have been even righter.

Whether the contents of the codex are true is, however, quite another thing.

article356265.ece

APRIL 24th 2006
It is 8 months since I pointed out that the contraceptive and protective roles of condoms, being different, it is illogical to condemn their use in one role because of their function in another, and when the world is not short of children and certainly does not need them to be born infected in an environment that is neither supportive nor supportable, it is doubly illogical to condemn their use. It now seems that wisdom is prevailing in the Roman Catholic Church guided by its new Pontiff. By admitting that the protective role might not be a crime against nature, the contraceptive argument is bypassed to a considerable extent.

MAY 7th
There will now be a pause, I imagine, on pronouncements on condoms by eminent Vatican spokespersons until it has been decided how to declassify the use of condoms in a protective role as a sin without appearing to recommend their use as a protection when it is known that their performance is not 100% reliable. We have here a classic example of how the obsession of many human religions with abstract theories related to imaginings of supernatural phenomena for which there is not the slightest evidence beyond the over-exercised human imagination, impinge upon rational judgment of moral behaviour. Jesus recommended, of all teachers and theories: "by their fruits ye shall know them." Why not take his advice and stop mixing religion with medical advice. There is no doubt that intelligent behaviour is the best route to good health, pills and prophylactics are for emergencies and corrective treatment.

On the religious side there remains then the proposition: "Family planning is a logical human duty." That is the question. Most educated people have decided that it is. There is a certain logic to it.

NOVEMBER 17th 2006 John Humphrys interviews God's ambassadors and stumps them

I started off in despair at the thought of Humphrys and what I saw as his trivial questions about 'God'. But at the end I took my hat off to him.

His interviewees were on the other hand incapable of imparting anything but the conviction of their own faith. It is quite obvious that none of them got close to fully explaining even their own religion.

I sympathise totally with Humphrys view on 'religious experience'. Who needs it! Well, it seems some do, as a sort of cathartic correction to a lopsided view of life.

To take just ONE example, the problem some (including Humphrys) have with God and a world with pain and suffering. You need to work this out when young, or you may (it seems) get stuck later.

No scientist can envisage or imagine a world where pain and suffering are impossible. The moral problem for Humphrys and others is to reconcile this world with God because they cannot imagine God other than in terms of an external, paternal wizard. The whole message of Christianity (which for some reason the Archbishop has never twigged) is that God is immanent. The third person of the Trinity is Humanity, emergent and imperfect. JC showed The Way, and was thus correctly, rationally, spiritually and symbolically and mystically, viewed as the Son of God. Evolution is part of what we call God in the process of regeneration. It can be painful! And there can be what we call local dysfunction, just as there is local dysfunction in the human body. Existence, Creation, Recreation is the ultimate. Our world is a tiny part of it. But size or the lack of it is not related to importance. What Christians refer to as The Second Coming is simply the time when humanity understands all or most of this. At the present rate of striking it does not look imminent, when neither a reputed rationalist or three top preachers seem to have the foggiest clue - but we might have our minds concentrated in the coming century!

The Rabbi's remark about Judaism being better than Christianity through 'cutting out the middle-man' must be the worst Jewish joke of all time. God is also the Middle Man. Humphrys handed the Rabbi a gift with his question "Where was God at Auschwitz?" Sachs was pleased with his reply, but failed to deliver the punch line "in there being stripped naked and gassed". He backed off, as it would have led to a proper understanding and acceptance of Christianity. The Hebrew development of religion was magnificent and it is sad that we now end up with this denial by a Rabbi and a total failure by the Archbishop, though both are totally sincere, nice guys.

Humphrys was quite right to be unmoved. They were incapable of rational explanation of their own convictions. But that is fine for them, they don't need to understand, they have faith. If Humphrys learned science, he could understand AND have faith that was not a suspension of science. If he wanted a rational explanation then he should have done the work. But he certainly showed up the preacher-men.

NOVEMBER 26th 2006
Well, here's some good news from India, anyway. I am relieved. There is no religion I know of that defines God in any different way. However the Christian religion defines God not only as observer but participant. 80 percent of Indians thought God had a human form. Obviously not when creating the world, so that leads then straight into the same positions as Christians and toward a theory of Trinity.

India sees God as creator, not controller - report

Sunday November 26, 06:52 AM

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Most Indians perceive God as a macro-manager responsible for controlling things like the earth's rotation, rather than being in charge of the actions of humans on a day-to-day basis, a survey said on Saturday.

According to a poll conducted for the Times of India newspaper across 10 cities with 1,007 respondents -- which included people of Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikh faiths -- Indians were not convinced that God controlled our daily lives.

"(God) is seen as the Creator -- 91 percent feel God controls macro-affairs like the rotation of the earth or the cycle of life and death," the newspaper reported.

"A significant 46 percent said (God) was an observer, not a controller."

Predominately Hindu India is seen as being a deeply religious country where idol worship and superstitious beliefs are widely adhered to, but the poll found that only one third of Indians sensed the presence of God in idols.

While 80 percent of Indians questioned thought God had a human form, 23 percent felt God was male and 11 percent believed God was female. Forty-nine percent thought God took both a female and male form.

The poll, conducted by market research firm TNS for the daily newspaper, also found 54 percent of Indians believed God answered their prayers and 56 percent thought God was never unjust.

The newspaper said that while India is often perceived as a land of God-fearing people, God is seen by many as more a source of energy than someone to be feared.

DECEMBER 4th 2006
The article below looked encouraging at first glance, but the comments by BBC readers are, with a few exceptions, not showing much insight.

Science, the Hebrew religion of the Old Testament, many priciples of Islam and the teaching of Jesus Christ are all perfectly compatible if properly read and understood. What has gone wrong is due to the unfortunate perceived necessity to have religious establishments run by authorities who lay down the interpretations of the Bible and the Koran and are unable to update them in the light of new knowledge.

These historical documents contain a great deal of wisdom gathered over the years and distilled at the moment they were collected and archived. They must be understood in that context.

The New Testament is quite obviously the testament of the followers and subsequent advocates of the first man to fully realise that God is Nature, that humanity is the 'child' of Nature, that the human mind has a growing ability to relate to Nature and take part in the guiding of its evolution. He realised that he expected Messaiah was not a Warrior King but a new revelation of the relationship of humanity to Creation. His teaching makes it clear that our covenant with Nature is not confined to any given race; that we do not need and should not expect miracles, as Nature is already miraculous; that we must do away with superstition; that evolution proceeds through natural selection (parable of the sower); that mismanagement in one generation can cause problems that will be inherited by later generations; that the power of the mind can affect the workings of the body; that an excess of affluence can render it difficult* to appreciate the wonders of Nature; that pain and suffering cannot be eliminated in the material, temporal, evolving world, even for one who understands and teaches all this; even for Him.

The Lord's Prayer needs no revision, and the revisions made from the authorised version are misleading. However there are some mistranslations in the Gospels - *it was a not a camel that it was difficult to thread through the eye of a needle but a mooring rope.
The doctrine of the Virgin Birth was a formula that had to be adopted at the time if Christianity was to flourish and draw on the strengths of the Old Testament. Now that it has survived, all that is needed is for the modern world to understand it, starting with the Pope, Cardinals and Bishops of the Anglican Church.

God. Who knows?

With religion increasingly polarised, is there any benefit in not knowing if there is a higher power? Mark Vernon - an ex-vicar - explains why agnosticism is his creed.

We are in a period of intense debate about religion. It seems there are believers, secularists and atheists - in their manifold varieties - arguing over their various concerns. Veils. Intelligent design v evolution. Ordaining gays and women. Contraception and Aids.

But there is one voice that is squeezed out, partly because it can equivocate, partly because it tires of the tit-for-tat that the debate is so often reduced to. That is the agnostic.

AGNOSTICISM

Philosophical view that truth of claims like the existence of gods is unknown or unknowable

Word from Greek a , meaning without, and gnosis , meaning knowledge

Noted agnostics include Francis Crick, Sir David Attenborough, Carl Sagan and Warren Buffet

It is a position that interests me because I used to be a priest in the Church of England. Then, to cut a long story short, I left - and I left a confirmed atheist. After a while, I found unbelief as dissatisfying as full-blown Christianity. It seems to entail a kind of puritanism, as if certain areas of human experience must be put off-limits, for fear that they smack of religion. So I became an agnostic.

Now, many atheists and believers alike think agnosticism weak. Atheists would bundle us in with them; liberal believers likewise. But this does us a disservice. In fact, I have become really quite evangelical about the need for a passionate, committed agnosticism.

Why? How else to deal with something that lies at the heart of the human condition: uncertainty. Thus, a corresponding "lust for certainty" characterises many of the debates currently doing the rounds. In religion, fundamentalism is the obvious case in point.

A similar lust for certainty also increasingly characterises mainstream religion, such as the crisis about homosexuality in the Church of England. For conservative evangelicals, what you think about gay love-making is a test of what you think about the truth of the Bible. To be for one is to be against the other.

When it comes to the scientific worldview, a lust for certainty is manifest in different ways. Think of the way that some atheists go on at great length about the need to throw off superstitious belief and don the freedom and reason of the Enlightenment.

What they will not accept is what the inventor of the word "agnostic" sought to highlight. TH Huxley meant his neologism as a rebuke to all who peddle their opinions as facts - notably their opinion, scientific or religious, about God. For whether or not God exists is neither proven nor, he thought, provable. God just isn't that kind of concept.

Einstein, another agnostic, looked at the universe and saw the workings of a "spirit" beyond our understanding, an intuition the atheist would stumble over.

Fear of unknown

The lust for certainty spills over into other walks of modern life too. Take the so-called politics of fear - the constant reference to risks, from hoodies on the street corner to international terrorism.

Whatever the truth of these risks and the best ways of dealing with them, the politics of fear plays on an assumption that people cannot bear the uncertainties associated with them. Politics then becomes a question of who can better deliver an illusion of control.

Being agnostic can amount to little more than a shrug of the shoulders. But can it be a weighty way of life? It can, because it has great traditions to draw on - no lesser traditions than those of philosophy, religion and science. At their richest, all three are riven through and through with an agnostic spirit.

Take philosophy. Socrates was a genius because he realised that the key to wisdom is not how much you know, but how well you understand how little you know. That is why he irritated so many powerful people in ancient Athens; his philosophy burst the bubble of their misplaced confidence.

Similarly, Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) said that to be human is to be "between beasts and angels". He meant that we are not ignorant like the animals. But we are also far from wise. Faith for Augustine was about deepening the capacity to enter this cloud of unknowing, rather than opting for the shallow certainties that religion can deliver.

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe - a spirit vastly superior to that of man
Albert Einstein

Finally, in science, the best sort - in the sense of the most humanly enriching - is that which answers questions by opening up more questions, and in particular links to questions that are beyond science alone answer.

This is the spirit that you see in cosmology. On one level, cosmologists understand an extraordinary amount about the universe. But simultaneously, this only deepens the sense of the universe's tremendousness. The science keeps pointing to the big question of why we here at all.

The revival of a committed, passionate agnosticism in philosophy, religion and science is vital for our age. Without it religion will become more extreme; science will become more triumphalist; and our politics increasingly based on fear.

Mark Vernon is the author of Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life, published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Add your comments on this story, using the form below.

Agnostic, atheist, Hindu, vegan, Man Utd supporter... seems mankind is genetically pre-disposed to want to be categorised as one thing or another. Pigeon-holed into rigid belief systems when, in reality, our views are probably more inconsistent and contradictory. From an atheist with Sheikh leanings that enjoys the Morning Service on Radio 4.
LH Kirby, London, UK

As an atheist turned Christian, I'm convinced that we can't have certainty about God or anything connected with him. What we may have is faith - a very different matter. I believe in God because I've had spiritual experiences that I interpret as being in touch with God; I believe in the Christian Gospel because it helps to make sense of humanity. I'll pray for Mark.
Robert, Reading, England

In my opinion we atheists are passionate and vocal about our (lack of) belief because we see the harm which centuries of allowing religion to overrule thought has done. Religion would be a fine thing if we could let each man or woman decide his or her own belief; however that would mean no family pressure, no Sunday school, no faith schools, no baptism and no teaching of any religion until of an age to understand.
Geoff Winkless, Leicestershire, UK

I empathise with the frustration over being considered a fence-sitter. At one point I started using the term "epistemological nihilist" (as I have an inkling that humans are incapable of knowing everything), but that term just sounds pompous to the people I'm likely to be debating with. As for agnosticism in general, I find it bemusing that it's not the preferred way of thinking. Data gets filtered through the senses into the brain and then filtered out via human language - how can we be sure we are ever on the same page enough to consider our ideas true knowledge? Surely that realization should instil enough humility to temper the extremes of fundamentalism, atheism, nihilism, etc. Ah well, humans must need the strife on some level.
Lanna, Kirkcaldy

How about other religions? If Christianity hasn't provided you with the answer, then how about Islam. As a Muslim, I found my religion to honestly provide answers to the multitude and creator behind existence.
Yemeth Nabel, Dudley, West Midlands

Not knowing and admitting it takes courage, but it is a healthy attitude in times of fanatic struggles around religion. Michel de Monteigne did so when French Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in order to prove that one or another variety of Christianity was the true one. He answered the question "which is the true religion?" by saying "que sais-je ?" I think this took about as much courage as any of the other options. I think we have the right to wonder, to ask questions, to talk about our doubts. Even if I am religious (I am a Jew).
Eva Bucur, Arad, Romania

What is God? It seems to mean different things to different people. I think a lot of the debate is semantics. I don't believe in an omnipresent being micromanaging our lives. So I'm atheist. But what caused the universe to come into existence? What determined the rules (of nature/physics etc) that took the universe on from the big bang to what we now know and love? In order for something to have the powers to do that, it must be so alien to our way of thinking that we probably could never understand it; does this view make me an agnostic? Personally I think what is relevant is whether we believe in a heaven and hell, an afterlife, spirit, etc.
Joe Grey, Folkestone, Kent

Einstein was not referring to the Gods of the 3 main religions when he referred to a spirit beyond our understanding. He was referring to "mother nature", a set of forces we may never completely understand, but that need not be attributed to some higher conscious godlike power just in the same way we would not attribute the mysteries of the universe to a giant teapot orbiting in the sky.
Joel, London

If a Church of England vicar becomes an atheist before becoming an agnostic hasn't he really ended up where he started?
Greg, Glasgow

I think the way he writes suggests he is using a scientific mindset to judge faith, which is like using the rules of cricket to run a football match. Nevertheless he is right to say that the search for certainty is unlikely to be successful. Faith is by definition something that must include doubt. This is where Dawkins is more fundamentalist than his religious opponents in that he seems to be certain that God does not exist. Keep searching, Mark - you may find your way home soon.
Derek, Keighley, West Yorkshire

I believe if any English word can be used to describe the powers that be, it's "nature".
Scott Tyrrell, Grimsby, UK

perhaps this individual should be looking into God's word the Bible rather than the human traditions of the church
Gillian Laurie, Warrington, Cheshire

With regard to Gillian Laurie's statement regarding "God's word - the Bible", there is no proof that the Bible is actually the Word of God. It was written by uncounted different people over the space of 1,000 years; it is based on peoples' opinions and views of many centuries ago, and isn't really current to base one's life and beliefs on in this day and age.
Peter, Birmingham

Francis Crick, Sir David Attenborough and Carl Sagan were/are not agnostic. They were unsure of the origins of the universe itself, and could not truly rule out the existence of some higher power. However (and this is very, very important), when it comes to the nature of this higher power they were certain it was not the Abrahamic God of the major world religions. They were no more agnostic regarding this God than they were agnostic that a flying spaghetti monster created the world. Regarding Christianity, Judaism and Islam these men were/are atheists. And you can add Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson and Douglas Adams to the list.
Andrew, Belfast

I agree strongly on the merits of agnosticism, and am endlessly frustrated by the flawed, sniping attempts to "prove" or "disprove" the existence of God. I consider myself a monotheist agnostic; I think this is a consistent position, and it reconciles my attitudes to science and religion.
Chris, London, UK

You don't have to be agnostic to question some of the core assumptions of religion, or to question some of the biases of anti-religious scientism. It seems he is trying to make a belief-system out of something which, by definition, cannot be systemised in such a way.
SC, Deal, Kent

About damned time that someone wrote a clear and meaningful article on agnosticism. Those of us who identify as such have been consistently written off as being fence-sitters. Glad to see there still exists some common sense (and greater sense) in this "modern" world. It's been terrifying to see the fear-mongers stirring everyone into greater depths of hatred. Perhaps there is hope.
Shadow Morton, San Francisco

Published: 2006/12/04 11:21:19 GMT

© BBC MMVI

JANUARY 21 2007

Today I looked forward to watching 'The Meaning of Life', a short BBC Programme described as:

Documentary series which offers some entertaining, original and thought-provoking theories as to how we got here, why and what happens when it's all over.

Contributors including John Lydon, Fern Britton, John Humphrys, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, Bill Oddie, Dame Kelly Holmes and Alan Titchmarsh give their thoughts on their own childhood beliefs such as Santa and the tooth fairy, and how hard it was to sort out the meaning from the mumbo jumbo

:It was introduced by Dawn French (Vicar of Dibly is my favourite sitcom - in fact the only one I watch - and I though we would be amused and also have some insight. But it was disappointing. There was no insight at all, some weak jokes and the only laughter possible was at the absolutely incredible naivity of the participants. Amongst these the comedians ran true to form, showing that their knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology and cosmology throughout their formative years (and in Bill Oddie's case his whole life to date) was ZERO. I have long come to the conclusion it is their terror of reality, which they find utterly incomprehensible, that creates professional comedians. The only way they can rationalise existence is by accepting it as absurd.

Kelly Holmes was charming, Humphries was pathetic - unable to comprehend the metphorical or the factual or the relationship between the two, As he gets older he becomes evidently exasperated and even bored, as no philosophy that he can get his head round fits a world with the slightest meaning or hope.

All in all, though when I started this file "The God Story", and referred to delusions, I was referring to misunderstandings slightly more sophisticated than those we witnessed here. We really do have a problem on our hands. I commented on 'Planet Earth' last week, in the context of Global Warming, that we needed to 'update our religion without throwing the baby out with the bathwater', I did not realise the extent to which these people, if they are representative of any section of society, have not even got to first base from which to update. Humphries read the entire Bible as a young man without understanding the meaning of any of it, either to those who wrote it, to those who quote it often wirth little understanding, to those who lived in different eras, and to what it can add to our understanding of humanity today. Humphrys thinks the writer of Genesis thought the world was actually created in 6 earth days. No doubt he thinks Rudyard Kipling thinks that Rhinoceroi have loose hides because a Parsee rubbed cake crumbs in it when the animal took it off to go for a swim. The book of Job must have been a real mystery for the Humph.

MARCH 14th 2007
I should note at this date that the Archbishop of Canterbury spoke out clearly on BBC radio to the effect that mankind is part of Nature yet also responsible for natural outcomes. He made this statement in the context of the debate on Global Warming. I take great heart from this, having myself called for an update in our religious thinking so as to actively engage Christianity in taking responsibility for control in the future climate of the planet. The climate changes of past eras have been the drivers of evolution. The natural changes will again play this role, but in an extraordinarily different way. This time it will bring about an evolution in human thinking. We shall control the environment just as we did on a smaller scale when we developed farming and housing, but this time it will also force global political cooperation in the cause of survival. Or, alternatively, failure, but that is not an option for positive thinkers.

APRIL 8th 2007 EASTER DAY

The following Lent Talk makes some good points, but is still not quite there

Jeffery John says he had a great uncle 'who died a happy man, as you might imagine'. Considering his great uncle's life as described, it is quite obvious he did not even live a happy man and he died a miserable long-drawn out painful death. I have know people who have had fulfilled lives and very happy if at times painful deaths and they were not in the mould of this great uncle. Nature does punish bad behaviour.
The minister who preached the sermon at his funeral was spot on.

But where I go along with Jeffery John is on his opinion that Nature's rules are not cruel. They lead to the the growth of intelligence. The world has much suffering and cruelty in it these days but only because there are millions of people being born in inappropriate places to parents who are not exactly up to speed on the global or local human condition.

Of course there is no 'vengeful God' punishing 'sin'. For people to sin, they have to know what they are doing, should be doing and are not doing. If they haven't a clue, it's not sin. If they try but fail, its not a sin. Sin has to be deliberate. And Jeffrey John is right on the button when he gets to the end, where he discusses the true meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus. I m glad he understands it just a little, though there is a lot more too it than that, and one just has to wonder at the obstinacy or blindness of Ellie Wiesel of not understanding some of what Jesus was showing us, if that is still indeed the case.

Jeffrey John also features on a web site called THINKING ANGLICANS. He seems to indeed have made some progress, but it doesn't say too much for the others if this is as far as he has got and he's with the leaders. Have a read. It gets better as it goes on.

Lent Talks: Jeffrey John

BBC Radio 4

Wednesday 4th April 2007

The instinctive feeling that suffering must be a punishment sent from God seems to lie deep in the human soul - or it does in mine anyway. In my case it may have something to do with the fact that I was brought up in a tradition of Welsh Calvinism which took a pretty firm line on sin and retribution.

In my childhood I also had a naughty great uncle, a man who very uncalvinistically drank and smoked and swore and womanized. He died a happy man, as you might imagine, but at a rather early age, of cirrhosis of the liver. His funeral was the first time he'd been in Chapel since his wedding. But the really memorable thing was the sermon, and the gasp of disbelief as the minister took a text of appalling relevance: Psalm 55, verse 23, "Y pechadur ni chaiff fyw hanner ei ddyddiau"…; "The sinner shall not live out half his days, for thou Lord shalt bring him down to the pit of destruction".

Well, you know where you are with religion like that; but belief in divine retribution isn't confined to Welsh Calvinism. Some years ago there was a small earthquake on the island of Crete, which the local bishop promptly declared was God's punishment on the Cretans for practising contraception. And it's not so many years ago that some people in the Church of England were seriously wondering whether God had personally hurled a thunderbolt at York Minster in a fit of pique at Bishop David Jenkins' consecration. It is a pleasing thought in some ways, I admit, but it does leave you with an alarming picture of God if you carry it through.

Even on a personal level we seem to have this instinct that good fortune or bad must somehow depend on how good or bad we have been. Something awful happens and what we do? We look up to heaven and say "What have I done to deserve this? - as though divine rewards and retributions really were immediate and automatic.

Now, as it happens, there is some biblical backing for this instinct. In most of the earlier parts of the Old Testament, the bits that date before the Babylonian exile, this is precisely the way God's justice works. Sinners are struck down on the spot; Sodom is razed to the ground; whole clans are wiped out for the transgression of a single member, and the people of Israel suffer or prosper in direct proportion with their obedience or disobedience to God. At the personal level, if a man is healthy and happy it means God approves of him, he must have been behaving himself. Bu if he's poor, ill, luckless, childless, and subject to cirrhosis or earthquakes, then he must be a bad man, God is obviously punishing him.

"The Lord preserves the way of the righteous" says the Psalmist, "But the way of the ungodly shall perish".... "Once I was young and now I am old" he says, "Yet I never saw the righteous man begging his bread". I must say I've always felt, reading that, that the Psalmist really needed to get out more. Because of course it's nonsense. The theory doesn't work, and after the experience of the Exile most of the later Old Testament writers saw very plainly that it doesn't work; but it remained a persistent theory. And of course a very convenient one, if you happen to be rich, successful and healthy, because it gives you the added bonus of knowing you're in with God as well. But if you are none of those things, then not only do you have to suffer your misfortunes, you have the added burden of knowing God doesn't like you either.

There's a much-ignored passage in Luke's Gospel that tells us very clearly what Jesus thought about this theory of retribution. The disciples come up to Jesus one day and tell him about two recent events in the Palestinian news. In Galilee Pilate had just staged a massacre of some sectarian Jews who had been holding an illegal sacrifice; he had actually had them burned along with their offerings. And then in Siloam, a suburb of Jerusalem, a tower block had collapsed and killed l8 people. The disciples were very excited about all this and distinctly inclined to gloat. These people had got it in the neck, so they must have deserved it; besides, they had just been to Jerusalem and Galilee with Jesus, and those people had refused to listen. So plainly they had it coming to them. But when Jesus replies, what the disciples get is a wonderful smack in the mouth. "Do you really think the Galileans were worse than anyone else because they suffered? Or do you suppose the people in Siloam were greater sinners than anybody else?

The fact is that throughout the New Testament the primitive theory about the relationship between justice and suffering is turned upside-down. Jesus couldn't have been clearer. Blessed are the hungry, he said, not the well-fed. Blessed are the poor, not the rich. Blessed are the sick, the miserable, the disreputable, the outcast, the down and out. They are the ones who will get their reward. If anything, a man's suffering and failure in this life are the sign of God's special blessing and care for him, not the opposite.

Come to that, how would Jesus himself have fared by the standards of worldly success? He who was the best and most holy of men, who should have been the happiest man alive if the old theory had been correct, turned out to be a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

And then finally, at the end of it all, he got himself crucified. Crucifixion may or may not be the worst form of torture in the world, but it had a particular theological significance we mustn't miss. As St Paul explains, crucifixion was the method of execution which, according to the Law, was the special sign of God's ultimate punishment, his absolute curse: "Cursed be he that hangs upon a tree". On the cross, says Paul, Jesus took the place of all those who were supposed to be punished according to the Law. "God made him into sin who knew no sin". "He became a curse for us".

But hang on - you may well say - what exactly does that mean - 'Jesus took our place' ? Does it mean, then, that we are back with a punishing God after all, and that the Cross is somehow to be understood as God's ultimate punishment for sin?

That's certainly what I was told in my Calvinistic childhood. The explanation I was given went something like this. God was very angry with us for our sins, and because he is a just God, our sin had to be punished. But instead of punishing us he sent his Son, Jesus, as a substitute to suffer and die in our place. The blood of Jesus paid the price of our sins, and because of him God stopped being angry with us. In other words, Jesus took the rap, and we got forgiven, provided we said we believed in him.

Well, I don't know about you, but even at the age of ten I thought this explanation was pretty repulsive as well as nonsensical. What sort of God was this, getting so angry with the world and the people he created, and then, to calm himself down, demanding the blood of his own Son? And anyway, why should God forgive us through punishing somebody else? It was worse than illogical, it was insane. It made God sound like a psychopath. If any human being behaved like this we'd say they were a monster.

Well, I haven't changed my mind since. That explanation of the cross just doesn't work, though sadly it's one that's still all too often preached. It just doesn't make sense to talk about a nice Jesus down here, placating the wrath of a nasty, angry Father God in heaven. Christians believe Jesus is God incarnate. As he said, 'Whoever sees me has seen the Father'. Jesus is what God is: he is the one who shows us God's nature. And the most basic truth about God's nature is that He is Love, not wrath and punishment.

Some Christians go through their lives without grasping this. I recently came across an interview given by an elderly priest who said it wasn't till he was nearly seventy that he was finally set free from his picture of an angry God.

Fr Robert Llewellyn was nearing retirement when he was appointed as custodian to the shrine of the 14th century mystic, Julian of Norwich. Until then he'd regularly recited the confession in the prayer book which speaks of God's "wrath and indignation against us" without a second thought. But Julian's teachings changed his life, because through her he met a God who didn't need placating. Instead he says he became "drenched in the love of God". He realised, as Julian did, that the wrath of God is no more than a human projection, and that for God to be God, he can't be less merciful and loving than the best of human beings. As Julian wrote,

wrath and friendship are two contraries… For I saw that there is no manner of wrath in God, neither for short time nor for long;-for in sooth, if God be wroth for an instant, we should never have life nor place nor being.

The cross, then, is not about Jesus reconciling an angry God to us; it's almost the opposite. It's about a totally loving God, incarnate in Christ, reconciling us to him. On the cross Jesus dies for our sins; the price of our sin is paid; but it is not paid to God but by God. As St paul says, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Because he is Love, God does what Love does: He unites himself with the beloved. He enters his own creation and goes to the bottom line for us. Not sending a substitute to vent his punishment on, but going himself to the bitter end, sharing in the worst of suffering and grief that life can throw at us, and finally sharing our death, so that he can bring us through death to life in him.

There's a song by Sidney Carter which ironically sums up our misunderstanding of the cross, in the words of the impenitent thief:

It was on a Friday morning when they took me from the cell,
And I saw they had a carpenter to crucify as well
Well: you can blame it on Pilate, you can blame it on the Jews
You can blame it on the Devil - but it's God that I accuse;
It's God they ought to crucify instead of you and me -
I said to the Carpenter a-hanging on the tree.

Like the impenitent thief, we too can be so fixated on our picture of the punishing God of power we imagine up in heaven, we can't grasp he's really down here, bleeding and dying at our side.

The most powerful illustration of this I know comes not from a Christian writer but a Jew, Elie Wiesel, the holocaust survivor and Nobel prize winner, who described his experience of Auschwitz in a famous book called Night. In the face of so much horror and evil many lost their faith; yet for a few it became, paradoxically, a new realisation of God's closeness to them. In one harrowing passage Wiesel tells how a young boy was punished by the guards for stealing food. He was hanged on piano wire, while all the other prisoners were forced to watch:

For more than half an hour the boy stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony before our eyes. We were all forced to pass in front of him, but not allowed to look down or avert our eyes, on pain of being hanged ourselves. When I passed in front of him, the child's tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed. Behind me a man muttered, 'Where is your God now'? And I heard a voice within me answer him, 'Where is he? Here He is. He is hanging here on this gallows'.

For me - if not for Ellie Wiesel - this above all is the meaning of the Cross: that God is one with us in our sufferings, and not just 2000 years ago but through all time.

On the cross God absorbs into himself our falleness and its consequences and offers us a new relationship. God shows he knows what it's like to be the loser; God hurts and weeps and bleeds and dies. It's a mystery we can hardly glimpse, let alone grasp; and if there is an answer to the problem of suffering, perhaps it's one for the heart, not the reason. Because the answer God's given is simply himself; to show that, so far from inflicting suffering as a punishment, he bears our griefs and shares our sorrow. From Good Friday on, God is no longer "God up there", inscrutably allotting rewards and retributions. On the Cross, even more than in the crib, he is Immanuel, God down here, God with us.

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APRIL 24th 2007

Here is yet another example of a typical modern British arts graduate rejecting the confused thoughts of others on Christianity. It all seems, as he implies in the first paragrapg, from his naive literal acceptance of what he was taught as an infant and in his formative years. Those of us who were luck enough to have learned science, history and religion all together were spared all this. Any fule kno that miracles, beyond those performed or performable by nature, are not required in the contemporary modern context by those who can live with our role as the responsible agent.

"I am sure religion is wrong" writes Parris. I am sure that, as understood by Parris, it sure was. He no doubt undertood it as incompatible with theories of evolution and the laws of physics and chemistry. That would indeed be an approach to madness. I suggests he reads the Bible again and tries to see how it was written , when it was written and what it all means.

But here for your edification is the Judgment of Parris. It seems to be concerned mainly with the Roman Catholic Church. Rather like criticising science on the grounds that The Philosophers' Stone is a myth invented by humans seeking a solution to their eeconomic and technical problems.

From The Times

April 21, 2007

Shout your doubt out loud, my fellow unbelievers

Matthew Parris

Christianity was part of my upbringing and education. Because I am fascinated by moral philosophy, enjoy reading the Bible and, as Private Parris in the Boys’ Brigade, detested military drill, nautical knots, whiting-up my sash and polishing my brass belt-buckle, I have acquired a reasonable grounding in the other skill you could shine at in the BB: religious knowledge. I think religion, like politics, is tremendously important.

The trouble is, I’m sure religion is wrong. This drives me as a columnist into a curious dilemma. My subject is of interest mostly to those of my readers who are liable to be offended by me. One is left writing for a minority audience predisposed to take umbrage at what one says. Those who don’t care for religion don’t care to read about it.

The dilemma was brought home by readers’ responses to a column I wrote on Maundy Thursday, inveighing against claims that a French nun has recently been cured of Parkinson’s disease through invoking the name of the late John Paul II, and that this alleged miracle could lead to the possible canonisation of the late Pope. I have been deluged with letters, almost all from Christians, and overwhelmingly critical of the column.

Three strands of opinion in particular emerge from this fascinating pile of letters. The first insists that miracles do occur, that saints may be invoked and that the successful invocation of putative saints may be grounds for canonisation. Such assertions have been made by a number of Anglican correspondents. I should remind them that their own Church had something to say on this more than 400 years ago. Article 22 of the Thirty-Nine Articles states: “The Romish doctrine concerning . . . invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded on no warranty of Scripture.” I rest my case.

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The second strand is more tentative. “Why rule out the possibility?” sums up the thought, variously expressed to me. Things do occur for which there is no available explanation in Nature; in such cases is it not perfectly rational to accept that the divine explanation is at least a contender for the truth?

For the answer to this, I need only go back two-and-a-half centuries, to the greatest philosopher our islands ever produced: the Scot David Hume. Hume took a cool view of “the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous”.

A miracle, began Hume (On Miracles, pt I), “may be accurately defined, [as] a transgression of a law of Nature by a particular volition of the Deity”.

But “there is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves.” Forced to choose between doubting the evidence, and believing in a divine suspension of the laws of Nature, only someone already convinced that divine intervention occurs could opt for the miraculous as an explanation. Miracles cannot therefore be evidence of a divinity: belief in a divinity must be the evidence for miracles.

In consequence, Hume concludes (hinting at atheism with such sly elegance that no Edinburgh pharisee could pin it on him): “The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.”

But stop. Why should Hume, or Richard Dawkins, or lesser polemicists such as me, bang on about this? For heaven’s sake, wail many of my correspondents (and this is the third strand in my pile of letters), what are you getting so het up about? You don’t believe. Fine. Well why not shut up, then? Tell us about things you do believe in. Surely it is those who believe who should be proclaiming. How can one be a passionate non-believer, they ask, hinting that, like Saul, I may be battling against my own inner faith.

Proselytisers for atheism such as Richard Dawkins will be as familiar as am I with the lament. I heard it most memorably from a Conservative Chief Whip (urging me to pipe down about homosexuality) who remarked to me that he had never believed in God, but felt absolutely no imperative to jump to his feet in church and broadcast this fact to his astonished constituents.

How do we reply? An ad hominem response would be to remark that when the Church had the upper hand it was happy to persecute, imprison or behead non-believers and fight crusades against other religions. Now it has lost its boss status it simply asks us to keep our opinions to ourselves (but still wants laws to criminalise us for mocking its pretensions).

On the back foot at last, it discovers (first) a brotherhood between all its sects. Then as the situation deteriorates Christianity discovers within itself a respect first for Judaism (suddenly we are all “Judaeo-Christians”), then women with a Christian vocation, then for divorcees, and finally finds a common purpose with religions such as Islam, too (the “faith” community). Needs must.

And as the Devil (or falling church attendance) drives, these “members of the faith community” cease enforcing their moral imperatives upon a secular world and retreat into whimpering about their “freedom of conscience” to carry on persecuting the minority groups upon whose sinfulness they can still find a consensus. Freedom of conscience, my eye! If only there were an afterlife: Martin Luther would have loved Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor’s protests. They don’t like it up ’em.

As mainstream Christian church attendances fall farther still I predict that the Church of England, and finally the Roman Catholics, will be driven to conclude that they cannot even afford to make enemies of homosexuals, unmarried couples and family planners, and start welcoming them in too. I expect they’ll call it the “love community”. In truth it’s the “can’t afford to be choosy” community.

But there I go again. Getting passionate, fighting dirty. But we have a better argument than “you’d do the same to us if you could” — though they would, and until about half a century ago they did.

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It is that they will again, unless we non-believers are watchful, and energetic and — yes — passionate. I hate ending up in scraps with nice Anglicans and thoughtful Catholics because the Church of England and intelligent Catholicism are not the problem. They are the best kind of Christians, but the best lack all conviction. It is the worst who are full of passionate intensity. Look at the evangelical movement in America, and to some extent, now, here. Look at the Religious Right in Israel. Look at fundamentalist Islam. What they share, what drives them, the tiger in their tanks, is an absolute, unshakeable belief in an ever-present divinity, with plans for nations that He communicates to the leaders, or would-be leaders, of nations. They are the very devil, these people, they could wreck our world, and their central belief in God’s plan has to be confronted. Confronted with passion. Confronted because, and on the ground that, it is not true.

Disbelief can be passionate. Sometimes it should be. Agnosticism can be passionate. A sense that we lack certitude, lack evidence, lack the external command of any luminous guiding truth, may not always lead to lassitude, complaisance or a modest silence. Sometimes it should provoke a great shout: “Stop. You don’t know that. You have no right.”

I hit you, earlier on, with a burst of the admirable David Hume. But he was not always right. “Opposing one species of superstition to another,” he wrote, “set them a-quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.” No, David. Listen instead to Nietzsche. “This eternal indictment of Christianity,” he said, “I will write on walls, wherever there are walls.”

We who do not believe must be ready with our paintbrushes, our chisels and our cans of aerosol spray. Disbelief can be more than an absence of belief. It can be a redeeming, saving force.

APRIL 29th 2007
Today I discovered this article by Tim Lott. In it he approaches a matter which I hope will be resolved in the coming decade - that of the nature of Christian belief. There are those who hold that the basis of Christianity is the supernatural, and hold that those who deny this are without substance in their faith. I disagree entirely. Those who search for the supernatural in our times miss the point. I do not think Tim Lott has anything new to say here, and he has a way to go yet, but he is on the right track. The proper understanding of the New Testament is, however, of far more use than studying Taoism or Buddhism, valuable though that is.

Tim Lott: What do we really believe?

Motive & Meaning

Published: 17 July 2005

What were the suicide bombs made of? Acetone peroxide, say the police. Hate and evil, add the rest of us, and outrage at something or other (no one is sure what). But at a more fundamental level yet, the bombs were made of an elemental ancient substance, a substance as crucial to human life as oxygen or food. The bombs were made of meaning.

I suspect that in destroying themselves and the innocents around them, each of the young men were not driven by any crazed bloodlust or need for revenge for transgressions in Iraq. They were driven by what in their terms would be a need for virtue, a need to send a fireball of meaning into the uncomprehending world. The meaning said this: my life is not futile and my death is not final. This carnage has a higher purpose than anything the barren ceremonies of the West can offer me with its expensive gewgaws, watered-down religions, trips to the leisure centre and celebrities.

This is a terrifying reality, that these bombers want nothing in return for their lives other than what they perceive to be the virtue of martyrdom. But as usual in incidents where it is suspected that al-Qa'ida is involved, no demands were made. The point was to kill non-believers and thus gain not only a place in heaven, but also a paradoxical assertion at the exact point of detonation of the absolute reality and significance of their own lives.

This is not specifically a criticism of Islam or even fundamentalist Islam. In fact there is something weirdly admirable in the fundamentalist Islamist, however maniacal, compared, say, with his wishy-washy, half-baked Anglican counterpart. Because the real difference between a fundamentalist Muslim and a moderate Christian (or a moderate Muslim for that matter) is surely that they really, really do believe. They don't use their religious custom as social glue, or conventional ritual, or a way of fitting in. They talk the deadly talk and they walk the deadly walk.

The difference between a fundamentalist and a moderate is that the fundamentalist is not playing games, at least not games that he is conscious of. In fact, "I'm not playing games" is one of the meanings that the bombings expressed. This is another way of saying, "I am the hero of my own life. I have the courage of my terrible convictions. I will not flinch in fulfilling my bloody destiny."

Again, this is not suggesting that Islam is "mad". It is no more mad than Christianity, where we have a whole raft of leaders and politicians who seem quite happy to believe that 2,000 years ago a man performed miracles and then died to rise again. The only difference being that, I suspect, most Christians in the UK do not really, really believe it. They just say they do, even to themselves, whistling in what they secretly recognise to be the dark. Christian faith is dying in the West, and in Britain it is nearly dead (deduct all the people who are trying to get their kids into the local school and it looks even more moribund).

In the meantime, man's desperate thirst for meaning and heroism continues. What can we offer? A few drinks down the pub, some nice glittering objects, sex, a bit of entertainment, a safe refuge for family and friends, a reasonably rich and stable society. Surely that is enough?

Sometimes, but not for anyone with a spiritual imagination (and that may be most of us). Many of us get by, happy enough to await our eventual extinction through old age or disease, distracting ourselves with toys and work, bringing up our kids till they push us aside and into the grave. Others find a gigantic and growing void in the place where meaning should be, a place they fill with endless millions of prescriptions of Prozac, binge-drinking, self-harm, crack cocaine and reality TV.

The bombers are lying to themselves, just as we are, but they are doing it in a more committed, one might even say, more honest way. This is their way of saying life is not a joke and death is not a rumour. This, the life we are living, is real, and deadly, beautiful and terrifying. We must burn away the illusion, they say. In their case, it is simply, tragically, to reveal another illusion.

But is there anything but illusion, any truth about the world that could give the atomised, lost century a meaning powerful enough to act as a buffer and a prophylactic against suicide bombers? Are there truths worth living for beyond family, finance and fun? Because if there aren't, make no mistake, more bombers will come, and will succeed.

I believe that meaning is there - in the sacredness of life itself, in the deep mysteries of science, in the magic of collective storytelling, in the cage of time and space we all have to share. But we lack the language to express it, at least collectively. We need to find one, and we will find one, but it will take not years, but generations.

The American academic Sam Harris concludes his brilliant book The End of Faith by saying that the way forward for the West lies in "religions of non-religion", world humanist philosophies such as Buddhism and Taoism. These schemes of thought have also been hijacked by the religious, but at their root they do not talk about God, but man. They are rational, have no dogmas, are beautiful and if not "true" then at least not demonstrably absurd to the modern, sceptical mind. Mysticism, Harris adds, is a rational enterprise. Religion is not.

He's right, and fundamentally, vitally, globally right. We need mysticism. We need "faith" (I could spend another article defining what I mean by that). But we have to outgrow the infantilism of our religions, both traditional (primarily Judaeo-Christian and Islamist) and modern (consumerism, individualism, desiccated rationalism).

There is a life of the mind. There is a scientific basis that combats, even destroys, the deadening modern myth of materialism. Quantum physics reveals us to be ghosts flicking in and out of existence, each locked in a private box of relative time and space. There is no "material", no stuff. We are patterns of energy, in a timeless now, forged in the stars, our ancestors fish and sea and gas and space, the void itself.

Our lives do have meaning. Our deaths do not negate it, but affirm it. Existence is mysterious, even magical. And you do not have to be religious to believe it. Only intelligent. Only imaginative. Only human.

But until the religion virus disappears for ever, we will never, never apprehend what the truth is about the illusion that the bombers were pursuing - so lost are we in our own myths, lies and evasions, in our pointless flight from and our relentless denial of the terrors and beauties of both life and death and existence itself.

Tim Lott's latest novel is 'The Seymour Tapes', published by Penguin

MAY 31st 2007

I have always thought the Catholic Church was on the whole more beneficial than harmful in much of today's world, though not in its ideas on contraception. Now I think it really is time to wind it up if it is incapable of reform. We really cannot have this barmy, incoherent cardinal interfering in politics. Children should be born into this world by parents who want them in environment that can support them. That means birth control and when birth control fails, and the mother does not want the child, abortion. If some daft, brainwashed old bugger thinks he speaks for God there is nothing we can do to stop him but to dignify his statements by conceding he has either scientific or religious authority for his ramblings is quite unnecessary. As a Christian by birth, baptism, confirmaton and conviction, I strongly object .

Cardinal O'Brien says that "the equivalent of a classroom of children every day are being aborted in their mothers' womb". His assumption that they, or anyone else, would be better off if this was not the case has no basis in philosophy, religion or science. If it were not necessary, that would indeed be an improvement. The UK has 10.78 births per 1000 persons per year. That is 1800 per day for the nation. Given the inadequate and inappropriate circumstances than many children are born into and are reared in, that only 30 a day or less (1.66 %) are aborted is pretty good going. If the cardinal's advice is taken the number of children born into inadequate and inappropriate circumstances will increase. That's a fact, proven by valid statistics. His advice is therefore very bad. The man's a fool and his supposed authority nothing but conceit.

Cardinal sounds abortion warning

Catholic politicians who defend abortion should not expect to remain full church members, Scotland's most senior Roman Catholic has warned.

In a sermon marking 40 years since the Abortion Act, Cardinal Keith O'Brien said pro-abortion MPs should consider their stance on receiving Communion.

At Edinburgh's St Mary's Cathedral, he has urged voters to reject candidates who defend a "social evil".

The cardinal's opponents have accused him of using inflammatory language.

We're told by statisticians that the equivalent of a classroom of children every day are being aborted in their mothers' womb
Cardinal Keith O'Brien

They said it was up to elected officials to decide such ethical issues without facing threats from church leaders.

Abortion remains a reserved issue, legislated over by politicians at Westminster.

BBC religious affairs correspondent, Robert Pigott, said Cardinal O'Brien has been frustrated by what he sees as the marginalisation of Christian values in public affairs.

He has embarked on his boldest intervention yet in political life, our correspondent said.

His sermon attacked the 1967 act, describing the roughly seven million abortions in Britain since then as an "unspeakable crime" and the "wanton killing of innocents".

What Cardinal O'Brien has done is bring it up in a manner that makes people stop and listen
Harry Conroy
Editor, Scottish Catholic Observer
Interview in full

The cardinal told the BBC: "We're told by statisticians that the equivalent of a classroom of children every day are being aborted in their mothers' womb - basically murdered in their mothers' womb."

However, his intervention has angered some politicians. Jeremy Purvis, a Liberal Democrat member of the Scottish Parliament, said the cardinal was using "inflammatory" language.

He said: "It is not right that we would be seen to be put under pressure, or indeed some members threatened, by a religious leader on what is a very sensitive issue."

Harry Conroy, editor of the Scottish Catholic Observer, said the paper fully supported Cardinal O'Brien's stance on abortion.

Mr Conroy denied that the cardinal had used extreme language.

"What Cardinal O'Brien has done is bring it up in a manner that makes people stop and listen," he said.

Health strategy

A Liberal Democrat spokesman in Westminster said abortion was a matter for the individual conscience and that Mr Purvis was giving his own personal view as a liberal politician.

That view was echoed by the main parties in Scotland.

Minister for public health, Shona Robison, said that the Scottish government was committed to improving Scotland's sexual health and reducing the number of unintended pregnancies through Respect and Responsibility, the national sexual health strategy.

Ann Furedi, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said: "Abortion is a safe, legal and medically legitimate procedure, essential in safeguarding women's reproductive health.

"Women should be able to make their own choices about their bodies and their future. The cardinal has every right to hold his views. He obviously doesn't have to have an abortion, or provide one."

JULY 18th 2007
The Pope is arguing the toss with all the non-Roman Catholic Christian church again. At this rate, Dawkins will win the argument. I thought we might at last have a sane Pope, but if we have I suppose that, just like a political leader, it's his followers that are his problem.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ni/2007/07/dominus_iesus_redux.html

AUGUST 24th 2007
I am encouraged by the revelation that Mother Teresa, an obviously practical person, was forced to come to the conclusion that her conventional understanding (or as I hold, misunderstanding), of the New Testament was not quite right as she came to the end of a life of full-blooded experience of life on Earth. "If there be no God -- there can be no soul -- if there is no Soul then Jesus -- You also are not true." she is reported as writing in 1959. The journalist below finds that this doubt destroys the vision of her as one who was driven by faith. I beg to differ. It was simple faith tht inspired her, and then kept her going, but she realised with time that her simple faith had not provided her with understanding that reconciles the way of the world with her idea of God. That left her with no support, empty, believed in by others and therefore not daring to reveal her doubts to them. She was in effect, disillusioned. Excellent. Illusions are OK when the truth cannot be grasped but sooner or later the real business has to be faced. Only then can the understanding come and the reconciliation of science and religion, along with the revelation of what the Gospels and the teaching of Jesus really mean, be achieved.

Letters reveal Mother Teresa's doubt about faith

By Daniel Trotta Fri Aug 24, 3:37 PM ET

A book of letters written by Mother Teresa of Calcutta reveals for the first time that she was deeply tormented about her faith and suffered periods of doubt about God.

"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear," she wrote the Rev. Michael van der Peet in September 1979.

Due out on September 4, "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light" is a collection of letters written to colleagues and superiors over 66 years. In the United States it will be published by Doubleday, an imprint of Random House, which is owned by German media group Bertelsmann.

The ethnic Albanian Roman Catholic nun, who dedicated her life to poor, sick and dying in India, died in 1997 aged 87.

Mother Teresa had wanted all her letters destroyed, but the Vatican ordered they be preserved as potential relics of a saint, a spokeswoman for Doubleday said.

Mother Teresa has been beatified but not yet canonized.

Time magazine, which has first serial rights, published excerpts on its Web site.

"I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God -- tender, personal love," she wrote to one adviser. "If you were (there), you would have said, 'What hypocrisy."'

The book was compiled and edited by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, a proponent of her sainthood and senior member of the Missionaries of Charity order that she founded.

The letters likely would do little to affect her cause for sainthood as church history is dotted with saints who have been tormented about their faith.

Saint Thomas the Apostle -- the "Doubting Thomas" -- doubted that Jesus had risen from the dead until, according to scripture, he touches the wound of a resurrected Jesus. Christ himself wondered "God, why have you forsaken me" while on the cross, the Bible says.

But the Mother Teresa letters nonetheless stand in marked contrast to her public image as a selfless and tireless minister for the poor who was driven by faith.

"I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented," the Rev. James Martin, an editor at Jesuit magazine America and the author of "My Life with the Saints," told Time.

THE DARK LETTERS

The writings address numerous topics, but the ones most likely to create a stir are what Doubleday called the "dark letters."

"Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself -- for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead," she wrote in 1953. "It has been like this more or less from the time I started 'the work."'

Then in 1956: "Such deep longing for God -- and ... repulsed -- empty -- no faith -- no love -- no zeal. (Saving) souls holds no attraction -- Heaven means nothing -- pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything."

And then in 1959: "If there be no God -- there can be no soul -- if there is no Soul then Jesus -- You also are not true."

At times she also found it hard to pray.

"I utter words of community prayers -- and try my utmost to get out of every word the sweetness it has to give -- but my prayer of union is not there any longer -- I no longer pray."

DECEMBER 1st 2007
I am watching Matthew Collings "THIS IS CIVILISATION". Intelligent stuff, but why does he contrast mediaeval religion, with all its sadism, fatalism and mysticism, with the Renaissance and humanism he so admires. It as he, like Richard Dawkins, has never got off the launch pad in understanding the life of Jesus. "God has no feelings" intones Collings. "Only humanity has feelings and emotions". It it amazing that such an intelligent man has failed to see that the interpretation of the life of Christ which he is apparently still stuck with was abandoned long ago in the Enlightement. The view of 'God' that Collings is stuck with was overthrown by Christ himself 2,000 years ago. I refer the reader to St John's view of how God feels at the very opening of this file, and Christ's actual words as reported by St Luke a little lower down. It is as if Collings had never read any of this. Seek and you will find, dear boy, and please do that before lecturing the rest of us.

It is if one was to criticise modern chemistry by citing the beliefs of ancient alchemists, or modern science by holding up the science of the Middle Ages as what we hold as the state of the art today. Collings is worth listening to on Goya and Davide and the feeling they bring to their art. The photography is well lit. But why does he have to rubbish the history of our religious understanding when he could so easily raise the baby from the murky bathwater and champion the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the amazing insights of Jesus at the same time? Is it that all those who were indoctrinated in their religion when young, rather than being taught it as a subject, the history of our religious development, were so disturbed at being disallowed their own interpretation that they become atheists rather than Spinozan Christians?

Towards the end of the this episode, Collings almost seems to move towards the view I am advocating, but he never gets near to attributing it to what is written in the New Testament. The Catholic and even the Protestant church must surely carry the blame for so failing to follow the guidelines given 2,000 years ago. "We hurl ourselves into hell, God does not do it" says Collings triumphantly, as if it was a revolutionary idea. DOH! If he had been paying attention at any of my schools, or bothered to read the Bible with the thousands of years of hindsight that we all have the privilege of, he would have know by the age of 10 that this was the very first lesson.

DECEMBER 6th 2007
Just when you thought insanity had reached its global limits:

Pope approves Lourdes indulgences

Pope Benedict XVI has authorised special indulgences to mark the 150th anniversary of the Virgin Mary's reputed appearance at Lourdes.

Catholics visiting the site within a year of 8 December will be able to receive an indulgence, which the Church teaches can reduce time in purgatory.

Lourdes has drawn pilgrims since Mary was said to have appeared in 1858 to shepherdess Bernadette Soubirous.

The waters of the French shrine are said to have miraculous healing powers.

INDULGENCES AND PURGATORY

A plenary indulgence offers full pardon of the temporal punishment (suffering in this life or the next) due to sins already forgiven in confession

Purgatory is a kind of spiritual waiting room - for people who do not go directly to paradise or hell after death - to purify souls of residual sin before they enter heaven

The Pope is expected to visit the shrine next year.

The pontiff also said believers who prayed at places of worship dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes from 2-11 February next year - or who were unable to make the journey - would also be able to receive indulgences.

The decree was signed by US Cardinal J Francis Stafford, who is head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, a Vatican court dealing with indulgences and matters of conscience.

Indulgences became infamous in the 16th century for being sold rather than earned, helping, historians say, trigger the Protestant reformation.

While some might consider indulgences an outdated concept, great spiritual importance have been assigned to them by Benedict XVI and his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.

* * * *

It seems the current Pope is as crazy as his predecessor. Madder still, some cleric justifying this lunacy on TV quoted one of the most profound passages from the New Testament. I covered this in August 2005. Clearly it is not yet understood. I repeat:

Matt 18:18, "Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

The text from St Matthew is a statement to humanity, not an exclusive license to St Peter and his successors, or any collection of theologists who are still trying to understand reality without studying the facts, nor a remote adjustment kit that affects dead people's hypothetical afterlives in Anne Widdecombe's overstressed imagination. It is a statement that we now need to understand clearly, as on this understanding rests our participation in the universal enterprise. The future of the universal enterprise depends on the decisions and behaviour of humans and their descendants, on this world and on others. We are already making quite a pig's ear of it, and our failure to understand the wisdom of our antecedents, of the meaning of the New Testament and the words of Christ as handed down, are the principal reasons for our failure.

The stupidest thing Ratzinger could possibly do is encourage Catholics all over the word to travel to Lourdes, and the worst thing he could do for his church is pretend his indulgences have any reality or any connection with the teaching of Christ. This really is the bitter end. It is time to wrap up the Catholic Church once and for all. Dawkins, I hate to admit it, they are worse than you.

DECEMBER 23rd 2007
As we come up to Christmas we are faced with this tale of mindboggling inconsequence. Nick Clegg's thoughts on God. What this has to do with any sort of reality is not revealed, but it seems he does not think he 'believes' in 'God'. Since his family are Catholics and he is bringing his children up to believe in God as presented by the Catholic Church as opposed to Anglican Christianity it would appear that Clegg is either completely round the twist or any thoughts on this matter are simply beyond his capability. He should in my view teach his Children about the Christian religion and let them understand it in their own way - certainly not insist that they believe in the doctrine and dogma taught by Catholics which is unsubstatiated hogwash. Today we are also informed that Tony Blair is converting to Catholicism. The supernatural is the last refuge of those who fail to understand Nature. Why don't these confused people read the New Testament again (and the Old, for that matter) and in the light of all the understanding added by 2000 years make a stab at understanding both. They do indeed contain the history of religious thinking of an important part of our human heritage and clear clues as to how we can understand 'life, the universe and everything'. But first of all they need to dump the baggage of the past and distinguish between interpretations appropriate to certain eras and the real insights that transcend these and are timeless. Clegg can be praised for being 'honest'I suppose in saying he 'does not believe in God' but it reveals not just honesty but the fact that a man seeking to be a national leader has not reached the state of maturity one would expect or demand. If he had said he was not an 'active church-goer' that would have made some sense.

Steel defends non-believer Clegg

Former Liberal leader Lord Steel has praised new Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg for his honesty in revealing that he does not believe in God.

But Lord Steel - a practising Christian himself - said personal religious beliefs should be kept out of politics.

Mr Clegg, who was elected Lib Dem leader on Tuesday, was asked if he believed in God on BBC Radio 5 Live.

He replied 'no' but added later that he did not have a "closed mind" on the subject of faith.

He told the BBC News website: "I have enormous respect for people who have religious faith, I'm married to a Catholic and am committed to bringing my children up as Catholics.

"However, I myself am not an active believer, but the last thing I would do when talking or thinking about religion is approach it with a closed heart or a closed mind."

He did not elaborate further on his own beliefs, although school friends have recalled he was interested in transcendental meditation.

'Straight answer'

Mr Clegg's stance was praised by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who said: "It matters less to me than to know they are honest and reliable and that what beliefs they have they hold sincerely."

People who purport to be God's messenger on earth are a danger to politics
Lord Steel

Lord Steel, who led the Liberal Party, as it was then known, from 1976 until its merger with the Social Democratic Party in 1988, said Mr Clegg had given a "straight answer to a straight question".

"I don't know Nick Clegg very well, but he is an engaging personality, highly motivated and dedicated, and you get what you see," the Lib Dem peer told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"He is very straight-talking. I think that is quite typical of him."

Fundamentalism

Lord Steel went on to say it was "not necessarily a good thing" that questions of personal religious belief had become a part of public life, particularly in the US.

"People who purport to be God's messenger on earth are a danger to politics.

"The problem in the world today is not Islamic fundamentalism, it's fundamentalism of every kind, Islamic, Christian or Zionist.

"I think it's best to keep religion as a private matter, not a public thing."

'Nutter' fear

Lord Steel, whose father was the moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, said his own Christian faith had been the "inspiration" for his political career "but that's not true of everybody".

Last month, former prime minister Tony Blair said he had not talked much about his faith for fear of being labelled a "nutter".

His ex-spokesman Alastair Campbell once told reporters: "We don't do God."

Current Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the son of a church minister, is also a Christian who has spoken of his father's advice acting as his "moral compass".

AUGUST 11th 2008
Good grief Charlie Brown, Now we have Richard Dawkins explaining [Channel 4- THE GENIUS OF CHARLES DARWIN] how human cooperation and effective altruism as a product of evolution. Next he will be telling us water is wet, grass green and the sky blue. This extraordinarily childish man has taken most of his life to discover what those of us who were taught science and religion at the same time took as probable when young and discovered to be fact fairly quicky in adulthood. It looks like a fair bet that before he dies this confused man will see what was in the mind of Jesus and those who twigged what he was talking about 2,000 years ago. Why does this fool spend his time confusing religious fundamentalists with rational Christians? Why does he think the little science he does understand make the slightest difference to a proper reading of the New Testament or, for that matter, the Old. Hour after hour of obvious platitudes issue from the mouth of this guy, yet I have sit through it all just in case there is some tiny morsel of interest or anyting I didn't cover in THE STATE OF THE ART (1984). He is still saying 'altruism is a survival theory for selfish genes' but now he is nervously trying say there is more to be said. Oh yes, little man, there is indeed, but it has all been said. We don't need you but you seem to need a public to explain yourself to. Well, perhaps some good will come of it after all. That remains to be seen when I have sat through all this boring series. It seems, you are now admitting, that you didn't understand things properly before and it is only now you are getting to grips with the subject.

An example of Dawkinism:
Dawkins says Nature is ruthless
But Ruth (pity) is a human concept. And Ruthlessness can only be the absence of a concept that has developed.
In Nature where pity had not developed, ruthlessness is impossible.
Dawkins then says Nature is 'where we evolved'.
No, Nature (in that sense) is what we have arisen from and can surpass, though some are easily recidivist.
Dawkins goes on to show how ruthlessness in human affairs does not work. Bravo. It has taken him a lifetime to discover what intelligent people understand before puberty. He then says we can escape Natural Selection - without realising that the very physics and geometry of Nature make this a conditional possibility. A theologian would say: God's love is unconditional but human fulfilment is conditional.
Dawkins insists there is no forward planning in Nature. He overlooks there is something far greater than a deterministic plan.

I think in a really roundabout way Dawkins is going to justify his road to religion on rational grounds, proving that atheism and Chrisitanity are the same. In a way that is true. My complaint is he made such a mess on the way. If he had done the work he could have done a lot to bring some sanity to the established Churches.

SEPTEMBER 07 2009
Everything Lord May of Oxford says in the article below is true, provided we take the conventional and fundamentalist view of human language and imagery. I love this guy, I heard him struggling on the radio this morning to get his point across, his point being that fundamentalism based on the literal interpretation of metaphorical imagery which was never intended as anything else even at the time it was written, is indeed a serious problem right now. There is no need for religious people with an enquiring mind to be in any way upset by what Lord May is saying, and Lord May himself is a victim of his own simplistic use of language here. There are always those who think that the Spinozan universe (updated of course) is incompatible with any personal access to wisdom beyond what we can learn by study of nature, trial and error on the physical/material level. Others can span the range, jump the gap and see the reality in more dimensions. It may not have occurred to Lord May that the 'afterlife' is another time, rather than another place as he and many 'religious' people imagine, or that in space-time of more dimensions one can be the other.

The metaphorical god who can dish out punishment is no different from the Nature that May believes in unless he, May, limits Nature in ways he has no qualifications or trainng or right to claim authority. By telling us that humans have built since many thousands of years ago a graphical user interface in our minds that is now out of date, May is hardly saying anything beyond the obvious, but it seems it needed saying and I congratulate him on so doing. Where he has possibly tripped up is in not realising this interface which was suitable as he says for past ages, and not (as he points out) for today, does not need to be replaced by an upgrade that gives individuals no personal, spiritual access to resources that are Super-Natural in a way that before was seen through a glass darkly.

T S Eliot wrote "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time".

Fundamentalists will discover the writers of the text they hold as literal never meant them to be such when these apply to descriptions of the human condition, creation of the universe etc. They, having explored religion in their own way, will find the truth and real meaning in the efforts of their ancestors to establish moral guidance and respect for the environment and their fellow men and women.

Bob May will find as scientific observation continues and human life proceeds, that the simplistic mental graphic user interface he believes we can dispense with on a personal level turns out to be, if properly used, perfectly appropriate for those who wish to saty with the operating system they know. A dose of humility is in order. I am not saying Bob May is at fault in that department, I am talking in generalities here.

Both fundamentalist and Scientists will be surprised. Existence is much more than science yet got to grips with, and the world religions which are completely incompatible with each other and science as understood by their fundamantalist proponents do in fact hold between them the insights scientists will one day appreciate. Kureishi and Sharma will both be able to say 'I told you so' and both will be right but both very surprised. As for an 'Interventionist God', the difference between dialectical materialism and God intervening is not necessarily what people who have not studied either suppose.

Here is the report of Bob May's complaint. It is important it is recognised and the energy and faith that is being wasted in conflict such as that exhibited in the suicide videos of the airline bomb-plotters is turned to positive, not destructive ends.

September 7, 2009

Fundamentalism will damage society, says top scientist

By Steve Connor, Science Editor, The Indpendent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fundamentalism-will-damage-society-says-top-scientist-1782930.html

The existence of a supernatural being in the form of a god who can dish out punishment in the afterlife may have been an important force in the past that helped to keep societies together as co-operative entities - but not so in the future.

Lord May of Oxford, the president of the British Science Festival, said that although religion may have once helped to stabilise human societies, the rise in fundamentalism could make it more difficult to bring about the sort of high-level co-operation needed to tackle the global problems of climate change and a growing human population.

The former chief scientific adviser to the government warned that the rise of fundamentalist religions in both the east and west will have a detrimental impact on the ability of the world to cope with the problems of the 21st Century.

Lord May, a mathematical biologist, said in his presidential address to the conference, that co-operation between people globally will be needed more than ever in the coming decades but added he feared that to make sure it worked there had to be some kind of mechanism that punished those who cheated others. In the past, the ultimate punisher was God.

He said that punishment was much more effective if it came from "some all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful deity that controls the world", rather than from an individual person.

"In such systems, there is unquestioning respect for authority. Faith trumps evidence. But if indeed this is broadly the explanation for how co-operative behaviour has evolved and been maintained in human societies, it could be very bad news. Because although such authoritarian systems seem to be good at preserving social coherence and an orderly society, they are, by the same token, not good at adapting to change."

The rise of fundamentalism, not just in the Muslim world but in the United States, and within the Catholic church, could actually make global co-operation more difficult at a time when an unprecedented level of teamwork was needed, Lord May said. "If you take the view that in times of stress, authoritarian hierarchies tend to resist change, what the history of religion has been has been towards a softening, less dogmatic values, but under stress you simplify complex problems to simple mantras," he said.

DECEMBER 28th 2009
As we come to the end of another year, let me have one more go at showing how religion and science, properly understood, are truly compatible.

I will take an extreme case: The Doctrine of Transubstantiation.
First, have a quick read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation
or if you don't have time, my quick summary is: Transubstantiation is the changing of bread and wine when blessed at the Communion Sacrament into the effective body and blood of Christ, even if there is no change to the taste or appearance.

The first thing to understand is the word 'substance' in the time the concept was first introduced days (1,000 years ago) meant essence, meaning, not chemical constitution. By 1500 AD it is not clear that in the various languages in which things were dicussed, not always Latin or Greek, that this word 'substance' meant the same thing to all educated people in their native languages. By the time Luther gets cracking there is already confusion in the minds of many, particularly those with rudimentary ideas of chemistry.

Next:
Why should the idea of an actual change to the bread and wine, rather than a symbolic one, have ever been introduced?

Here are some answers:
1. To set aside bread and wine allocated for use in the sacrament from other resources of bread and wine. In other words to prevent abuse of inventory. Blessed bread and wine was not always used on the spot but could be taken to the sick unable to attend mass, kept for later use or to signify the presence of Christ at the church and not to be knocked back on the quiet or in public later by unauthorised persons.
2. Because it was found from experience that those who believed that it really was, when blessed in this way, the blood and body of Christ, derived otherwise inexplicable support, or relief, or inspiration from the mass.

Next:
Enter the age of early chemistry and physics.
Chemists say: "This Hocus Pocus is indeed what in future we shall call hocus-pocus. The bread and wine remain the same, there is no physical or chemical change". The protestant reformists, already confused by the meaning of the word 'substance' in different languages and contexts, decided to make this a reform issue. Dawkins would approve I am sure.

But hang on just a minute. The chemistry argument can be turned round to invalidate the objections. There is no chemical change in the bread or wine but there is in the head of a true believer. If the purpose of consuming the actual essence of Christ was to bring about a change in the recipient of the sacrament, modern science knows, indeed insists, that that change can only be a change in the chemistry of the brain, however it is brought about, whether through behavioural therapy or cathartic experience or a session with a shrink!

The true believer who has been given and received, however well or poorly, the message of the Gospel, and who then takes the sacrament in analloyed faith, will indeed receive what was promised in some degree and that evidence will be noticed in some cases. Those who turn to unblessed wine in greater quantities will get a chemcal change in their heads as well, leading if they are not careful to alcohol dependency and not in any way assisting to improve their social behaviour. The worth of the sacrament to true believers is evidence based science.

So, Mr Dawkins, you want no dependency at all, eh? No opium of the masses (religion). You want to educate everyone or failing that give them money instead - though the science you worship is in the hands of those to whom productivity with minimum labour is the goal, and the money gets spent on alcohol and drugs, leading to dependency till some escape by 'getting religion'? You are right that we should be less dependent but would you mind not trying to destroy a flawed and confused fellowship that can be rescued and brought to fruition, by insulting the intelligence of all its supporters.

No doubt, Mr Dawkins you want Homeopathy banned as Hocus Pocus, even though it is the best way to avoid dependence on dubious allopathic remedies and inappropriate boosters.

Here endeth the lesson for today.

PS Personally I am C of E all the way, but whatever works for you, works, and whatever satisfies your own logic, keep it and only move when your foot is securely on the next step - up, down or sideways

NOVEMBER 20th 2010
NOW HE TELLS THEM....(see para 3 of the first entry here, August 21 2005)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11804398

NOVEMBER 23rd 2010
Far from only approving condoms in exceptional circumstances, Benedict (Ratzinger) has made it clear that where is is a life-saving medical responsibility, he approves it as a matter of policy.

Pope's condom views clarified by Vatican

The comments are published in a book based on a series of interviews with a journalist

The Vatican has clarified Pope Benedict XVI's comments on condoms, saying their use by men and women to prevent HIV could be an act of "responsibility".

The clarification follows comments suggesting Pope accepted their use only in exceptional circumstances.

But the Vatican's senior spokesman said the key point was taking the life of the other person into consideration

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11821422

I have to say the most important effect will not be on individuals deciding whether or not to use condoms, but on NGOs and Governments who had a policy they had restricted previously by what they took to be a Vatican policy which was the reverse to what has now been 'clarified'.

NOVEMBER 24th 2010
Days after the release of Pope Benedict XVI's comments that condoms can be justified to prevent the spread of HIV, there is widespread confusion about exactly what he was trying to say. The remarks have put some of the strictest defenders of church teachings in the awkward position of potentially disagreeing with the pontiff.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101125/ap_on_re/us_rel_pope_condoms

I can't say I am surprised. Our ecclesiastical authorities are prisoners of the simple, honest minds of their own followers. The same is true of political leaders, economists and some scientists. We should not crow but understand why a previous Pope asked Gallileo to just cool it. Those who submit to a social or religious contract or perception don't take kindly to change of terms half way through their term.

MARCH 7th 2011
In the previous paragraph you will see that when a Pope overturns some doctrine, the 'strictest defenders' find themselves 'in the awkward position of potentially disagreeing". How very different from the behaviour of some muslims. When a modest Imam expresses the opinion that the Darwinian theory of evolution was not incompatible with the teaching of Islam, the death threats are so credible he has to suspend his role in leading prayers at Leyton Mosque in East London. Perhaps we should abolish the law courts and justice system as its reliance on evidence offends homicidal maniacs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12661477

My own view? The person(s) who made the death threats should be identified, tried and dealt with according to the law.

APRIL 18th 2011
A delightful mix this morning on Andrew Marr's "Start the Week", beautifully chaired as always.

Andrew Marr's guests include the neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris, who argues that science ought to influence human morality rather than religion; the writer Masha Gessen who describes the extraordinary story of the Russian maths genius Grigori Perelman who solved a mathematical problem that had remained inscrutable for a century but refused to take the credit - or the million dollar prize; Adam Rutherford, geneticist and journalist on decoding the genome and being human and the Revd Lucy Winkett of St James's Piccadilly, London on how the religious sensibility can contribute to the 'good society'.

JUNE 2nd 2011 ASCENSION DAY
An open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. I have only sent the very first sentence, to cheer him up when he reads the mail today or tomorrow. The full version will be sent later. I did not enjoy writing it.

Dear Archbishop

More perfect words for the sermon today would be impossible to find. The rest of the proceedings were very dubious.

All the outpourings of the celebrant were theatre, from a man who believed every word of what he was saying and understood NONE of it. In the sense he understood it, it is not true; while in it's vital meaning, it is deeply an timelessly true.

Jesus was/is indeed God in human form, but hammering on the fact that he was there at the beginning before all worlds is to miss the whole essence of the Trinity (a sound concept as it turns out, even if it was invented by a committee). What was 'With God' in 'The Beginning' was the Nature that contained within itself all the power, and all the need as well. The need that answered the question To Be, or Not to Be, more than a singularity, in the affirmative. To confuse people into thinking that God in human form existed before the creation of the world is, in this millennium, not only perverse but the very stumbling block that prevents Christian theologians from explaining why there is suffering in the world.

That they fail to explain was proved in spades by the present Pope's failure to answer in public a child's question; "Why did the tragedy of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, with all its suffering, happen?" Benedict's reply was "Remember, Jesus suffered". He stopped there before she could ask some more 'why' stuff. He could have welcomed it, but he would have been stuck with 'for our sins' and all that, so near and yet so far from the truth this child was entitled to know.

The moment anyone changes the words of the Lords Prayer from 'who art' to 'which art', because the latter bothers them as being inconsistent with the proposition that God is Love, they have lost the plot. I am not saying we cannot have a personal relationship with God/Nature, or draw on powers beyond the human here-and-now, but getting chatty with Jesus is fine as long as you understand it. For many it turns them later into atheists when Jesus goes quiet just when they think they need him, or their limited understanding of science undermines their naive faith.

There is no harm in any individual imagining God in the way they choose, that fits their needs - indeed it is vital that they should. but ramming theological claptrap down the nation's throat with the authority of the St Martin-in-the-Fields Ascension Day Service will not gain the Church of England followers. It will lose them.

Jesus was the first Humanist. Humanists don't understand that, neither did your Christian celebrant today. I am afraid it is going to come as quite a big surprise that Jesus will return in glory, in the minds of humanity, when it becomes clearer to them all what he was saying. Heaven and Hell are here on Earth, and any other appropriate place in space and time. The Lord's Prayer, as unspoiled in the Cranmer Payer Book, is perfect. All that is needed is to understand it.

Christianity is still the hope of the world, but if it survives only in the form of fundamentalism or a collective self hypnosis with the chanting of mantra to whip congregations into an emotional homogeneous mass, it is no better than the rallies at Nuremberg or a religious cult.

For these reasons, the Ascension Day Service represented both the best and the worst the Church of England has to offer.

Yours sincerely

James

JUNE 9th 2011 (entry delayed till 11th due other work)
Well, blow me down, the next thing that happens is our esteemed Archbishop launches into politics! As a member of the House of Lords he is absolutely entitled to, and I approve - but having just praised him unconditionally for his choice of words in the pulpit I am not at all sure he is up to speed in the political forum.

He criticised the government's welfare reforms, complaining of a "quiet resurgence of the seductive language of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor" and the steady pressure to increase "what look like punitive responses to alleged abuses of the system".

As head of the Established Church of England, the Archbishop's job is care for and counsel the poor whether or not they are deserving. That is the big message of his church, and if the poor he seeks to help are not helping themselves as they could and therefore should, his is the mandate to raise their game in the face of all the problems they face, by inspiring them with faith. The first faith he must inspire them with is faith in humanity, which many may have lost, rather than faith in dogma or doctrines that divide even Christians amongst themselves.

His criticism of the current government casts doubt on their humanity and casts it, in my view carelessly in its choice of words. He accused the coalition of rushing through radical policies 'for which no one voted'. In an overtly political attack he dismissed Mr Cameron's vision of a 'big society' as 'painfully stale' and said ministers needed to understand how much 'plain fear' their plans had aroused.

There is indeed a fair amount of fear being felt - but had Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling been running the show the policies would have been very much the same because there are big changes that have to be put through. It is also true that 'The Big Society' is nothing new, or ought not to be, but society has in effect been rendered 'government dependent' over recent decades and government, at certain critical levels, is not able to cope.

But the big mistake is in the talk of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor. As distinct from the mission of the Church, the government's job is above all to decide in many instances, on behalf of the nation, between the deserving and the undeserving, both rich and poor. That is what governments do in every adjustment of the financial and monetary rules and taxes that are decided on at budget time and in between budgets. It is also a recipe confusion to use such phrases as undeserving poor when some will use it to describe those who do not deserve to be poor, and others to describe those who do not deserve help.

The House of Lords, not the New Statesman, was the right place for Dr Runcie to raise his voice if he has better ideas than the government and its civil service advisers. If his experience and knowledge that comes to him through his Church, which is itself an example of The Big Society and an example of its (temporary?) decline, gives him insight, it can be valuable.

JULY 24th 2011
I am entering the Norweigian massacre and car-bombings here in the God Story file because it is an example of idiosyncratic religious behaviour, the personal destiny syndrome where the individual pits him/herself knowingly against the whole of society. The individual in this case supposes himself to be a Christian with a duty to refuse toleration of Islam, or at least to Islam as pushed by the fanatics for whom he then appears as the mirror image.

He seems to have overlooked a keystone of Christianity. Jesus himself did indeed take on an idiosyncratic stance but pitted himself against not society but the established church of the time. He was not against the state or the government, nor against those who respected the religious history, which he wished to explain and fulfil so society could move on. He was however against violence. When he pushed the bankers out of the temple it was clearly with the approval of most of those present, apparently by a verbal assault which succeeded. The one thing Jesus was utterly against was taking the law into ones own hands.

Anders Behring Breivik, 32, admitted to carrying out both attacks, which he described as "gruesome but necessary".

At least 92 people were killed in the attacks - 97 have been injured and some are still missing

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14266815

JULY 25th 2011
There will of course be debate as to whether this man should have a public trial at which he can deliver his philosophy but in my view he should not, because he would then have achieved his ends. He cared nothing for the deaths or for his arrest, and he would care nothing for his own death should it occur after a trial at which he had the freedom to speak. If there are any laws which stipulate an individual deliberately manipulating the law in this way cannot be stopped, these should be changed with immediate and retrospective effect, in Norway and elsewhere.

That the current hearing is behind closed doors is quite acceptable in a well-run democracy with no history of the abuse of human rights and freedom of speech. As I have frequently explained elsewhere, the 'law' is based on precedent and cannot deal with unprecedented situations that develop in domestic and international communities and societies. Glasnost is vital, and Perestroika may be needed in any country, east, west, north or south, however ancient the traditions.

There should be no need at all for Norway to change, or to cut down on any freedoms that affect citizens or visitors. All that is necessary is to ensure that the law is such that nobody can get free time to address the public, either in court or on the Web or radio/TV, by killing people. This will not stop other attacks by terrorists who do not wish to use words, argument or political pursuasion, these have to be dealt with by the best means we have. But it would certainly have stopped this man who believed he had something to say and went about it the wrong way.

OCTOBER 17th 2011
On and on we go repeating the same old arguments, while some 'scientist' proclaims a new discovery completely changes 'our view' of life the universe and everything.
Andrew Marr discusses the wonders of the universe with Lisa Randall, Richard Dawkins and the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. The cosmologist Professor Randall looks at the how the latest developments in physics have the potential to alter radically our view of the world around us, and our place within it. Richard Dawkins explores the beauty and magic of scientific reality, from rainbows and shooting starts, to our genetic ancestors, and believes the facts far exceed the stories of ancient myth. Jonathan Sacks rejects the false dichotomy of science and religion, and argues that faith has a complementary role to play in the understanding of the human condition.
Hmmm.... Not a single new idea was voiced for anyone who understood a space-time continuum a century ago (OK, I agree Einstein didn't fully but later on we have had enough time to get it). As for the word FAITH, all it means in this context is a belief that the religious speculation and subjective experiences (as opposed to peer-reviewed objective science) that has been developed by a great many people over the centuries has, in its finest examples, value, merit and metaphysical truth - which indeed it clearly has even though it is subject to abuse and misunderstanding - as are the material sciences. Lisa Randall tried to explain to them their argument was unnecessary but since Dawkins' science and Sacks' religion are both circumscribed by idiosyncratic mental positions formed in their youth or prior to that, she wasted her breath. We can only hope that although the dialogue of the deaf between the talkers continues there is a growing, silent majority that is abandon the primitive interpretations of both science and religion without throwing out the essentials of both.

NOVEMBER 10th 2011
Yet another Horizon programme on Science and Religion proving that poor scientists and badly enducated religious fanatics have a problem, and that for most people science and religion are the same thing, though they both have a history.
The programme today was called "The end of God?" and, though it took the roundabout route, it came to conclusion that science (the Greek for knowledge) could enhance our understanding of all aspects of existence, and the answer to the question was NO,
Nevertheless, the presenter did not seem to fully appreciate what the programme revealed, and we had once again listen to that twat Brian Cox telling us that the Higgs Boson particle made space-time like treacle, which is exactly what it does not.
The day any physicist understands space-time is the day a smile spreads across his or her brain, and all this stuff becomes laughable, and they wonder why it wasn't obvious all the time. It is also the day they realise that they cannot make a TV programme to explain it. You have, so to speak, to get your head around it.
The presenter suggested that perhaps God was just the God of the 'big picture' who left the small stuff to work itself out. Close. Very close. Very, very close. But no cigar. He then showed us a physicist who said the 'multiverse' theory was the best bet to explain WHY things are as they are. Again, very close; true in a way too, except it is also wrong because there is no difference between the multiverse and the single universe theory, if you understand either. As I said, you have to understand space-time and, dear reader, you can.

nnnn

The Root of All Evil?| Episode 2: The Virus of Faith [my comments in text like this]

From generation to generation

Hellfire and damnation

Innate morality

At least 345 pilgrims killed in Saudi haj crush

Mohamed: the messenger of Allah

By Paul Vallely

Published: 03 February 2006

Yesterday, a 62-page codex, written from the point of view of the man who betrayed Christ and said to date from the 3rd or 4th century, was unveiled in Washington. A seismic moment for the Christian church? Paul Vallely and Andrew Buncombe report

Published: 07 April 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article356265.ece

India sees God as creator, not controller - report

Lent Talks: Jeffrey John

BBC Radio 4

Wednesday 4th April 2007

Shout your doubt out loud, my fellow unbelievers

Tim Lott: What do we really believe?

Motive & Meaning

Published: 17 July 2005

Letters reveal Mother Teresa's doubt about faith

Fundamentalism will damage society, says top scientist

Pope's condom views clarified by Vatican

The Root of All Evil?| Episode 2: The Virus of Faith [my comments in text like this]

From generation to generation

Hellfire and damnation

Innate morality

At least 345 pilgrims killed in Saudi haj crush

Mohamed: the messenger of Allah

By Paul Vallely

Published: 03 February 2006

Yesterday, a 62-page codex, written from the point of view of the man who betrayed Christ and said to date from the 3rd or 4th century, was unveiled in Washington. A seismic moment for the Christian church? Paul Vallely and Andrew Buncombe report

Published: 07 April 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article356265.ece

India sees God as creator, not controller - report

Lent Talks: Jeffrey John

BBC Radio 4

Wednesday 4th April 2007

Shout your doubt out loud, my fellow unbelievers

Background

Background

Tim Lott: What do we really believe?

Motive & Meaning

Published: 17 July 2005

Letters reveal Mother Teresa's doubt about faith

Fundamentalism will damage society, says top scientist

Pope's condom views clarified by Vatican

SAM HARRIS

LUCY WINKETT