Incredolous

Twitter atheists

2012-02-03T20:21:00.001Z

I got unfollowed on Twitter the other day. I bet I get unfollowed quite regularly but this guy decided to tell me why. "Too often. Too inchoate. Though sympathetic".

Don't worry, I had to look inchoate up, too. It means half-formed, normally applied to thoughts. My first thought was, you're saying my tweets are inchoate? What does your tweet even refer to? And my second thought was, way to go with the social skills.

My third thought, though, was this. I assumed he was talking about my thoughts on religion. I had been tweeting and retweeting a lot about it at the time so I thought maybe he'd had atheist overload. And I sympathised.

Yeah, I know! Who'd 'ave thunk it? Me, having enough of atheists. But it's true! I have unfollowed many an atheist for their broken record tweets and vituperous exchanges with creationists.

So I'm calming down on the religion thing. On twitter anyway! There's still lots to worry and write about here!

By the way, I still follow the atheist's atheist, @RosaRubicondior and I recommend you do too.

The truth is out there, sometimes

2011-12-09T17:22:00.001Z

I'm going to say something that's a bit old-fashioned in this day and age. It's not very PC, I'm afraid. It may shock you.

Truth exists.

There, it's out in the open now. O hope it's not taken out of context.

Post-modernism would have us believe that everyone's view is valid and reliable and that objective truth does not exist. This has done us great service. It has halted judgement of cultures where things are done differently. It has opened up organisations to considering the opinions of patients, passengers, pupils and others whose views were generally ignored or not sought in the past. It has fostered a degree of dialogue between religions.

But how can that work? Surely in religion, much more than in other walks of life, adherents mist believe there is one truth? I'm with those guys, though I suspect I differ from them on the conclusions I draw.

I see that, in religious terms, the truth is that there is no god or gods and all that implies. Some would accuse me of being arrogant for asserting this, using the morally relativist argument that no-one can know the truth. That is erroneous. But standing up for what you aliens in gets you grief nowadays.

And you can see the dangers of espousing moral relativism. When genital mutilation (note, both male and female) can be excused on the grounds of cultural or religious difference, it is time to speak out.

Can we be relativist about when relativism applies? We could have some universal truths or morals to cover the most important stuff and be tolerant about the less important stuff. The question is, what's the Most important stuff to be firm about? I very much like lists so here's my attempt at a list of things we shouldn't excuse on the grounds of moral relativism:

• oppression
• abuse
• attacks on freedom of speech
• discrimination
• promotion of an ideology and/or misinformation that keeps people in poverty and/or endangers lives

These are broad issues but I'm sure you can think about specific cases to link to each item on the list. And I'm sure you can add to it too. Please do!

The saga of St Paul's and the protesters

2011-11-16T09:26:00.001Z

This rumbles on and on, doesn't it? St paul's losing £22k a day in revenue and the nation increasingly turning against the dirty, unwashed protesters. Many believe the protesters situation outside the cathedral to be missing the point, just an accident because the stock exchange would have dealt with them more severely had they dared to protest outside their buildings.

Maybe that was the motivation but I can see how protesting about the economy outside the most visible monument of the established church would make sense.

I've seen a couple of Question Time's where the matter has been discussed. I saw Peter Hitchens, though, call the protesters silly, self-appointed and boring. Does that bring pot and kettle to mind for anyone else? I missed the one with Julian Fellowes. The twitterati were aghast at his suggestion that the CofE was somehow linked to big business and City shenanigans. Giles Fraser, the first resignee from St Paul's, was ethical advisor to the City. He didn't do very well, did he?

But it doesn't stop there. Watch out for the Church's annual reports to examine what assets and investments it holds. For an organisation often pleading poverty and having local collections to raise money for roof repairs or new bells, it's a surprise to see they have £5bn in the bank. Here's the report in PDF format: http://www.churchofengland.org/media/1244828/final%20annual%20report%20at%2019%20april%202011.pdf.

It's good to see the Church recovering strongly from the financial meltdown in 2008. But wealth in itself is not an evil thing. Hypocrisy kinda is, though.

Given their propensity for bewailing the commercialisation of modern life, it's interesting to see they have a large stake in several shopping centres, such as the Metro in Gateshead. The Guardian reports it thus: http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/apr/28/religion.anglicanism?cat=world&type=article.

So, where to in the commercial world that is high church? Big Society contracts, of course! Will we have to go to church to access welfare services? Let's hope not, it seems like a backward step to me.

But despite how bad a picture this paints of the Church of England, it is as nothing compared to the murky and often illegal financial dealings of the Catholic Church. Don't get me started on that one, just read David Ranan's, Double Cross: The Code of the Catholic Church.

Faith schools

2011-09-06T13:09:00.002+01:00

This is a pet subject of mine. Recent news has revealed that of the 24 free schools being opened this week, about a third have a religious ethos. That's about the same as the number of faith schools nationally. Is it a problem for a school to have a religious ethos? Where I work in Camden many Muslim families send their children to the local Catholic or CofE schools as the religious ethos is assumed to instil the right kind of attitude.

In my village I have the choice of two first schools when my daughter is old enough. One is a CofE school and one is a community school. Luckily they are both rated outstanding by Ofsted so I don't have a difficult decision to make.

It would be nice to have a statistic as to how many faith schools are rated outstanding and, if it's high, why? I can't see how teaching kids something untrue and making them by turns guilty, frightened, confused, and well-practised in double-think provides an outstanding education. The National Secular Society points out that the selection processes faith schools employ means they can exclude pupils who might bring the school's rating down (see link above).

One of the most specious arguments for faith schools is that they promote community cohesion. What? Surely they do the exact opposite? Hasn't anybody learned from the example in Northern Ireland?

Am I going to comment on the riots as well? Oh, alright then.

2011-08-15T12:56:00.002+01:00

Only to say that the predictability of the religious set is exposed again. One MP said that the riots started because of low church attendance. A friend of mine pointed out on Twitter that riots were common in the medieval period and later when religion was a lot more widespread. Here's another blogger saying the same thing better than I could.

Then, there were the militias. That's what they were. Groups of men along mainly religious lines protecting businesses and places of worship against rioters. They put themselves in danger and made life more difficult for the police by providing more people they had to protect from violence. Unfortunately some of the men in these militias died. This is not specifically a religious thing, but is part of a secular state where we have a police force to protect our lives and our property. The Met, however, issued this statement to businesses in affected areas that includes advice on how much force you can use to protect yourself and your property against looters. Pretty encouraging tone, huh? And Archbishop Sentamu agrees with me, so I must be right!

Scientology got in on the act, trying to convert some of the disaffected, as they did with the vulnerable after 9/11 and 7/7. There's nothing much to say to this apart from: parasites.

Waiting for Credo

2011-07-25T13:25:00.003+01:00

I know I said I would be transferring my so-called 'searing commentary' to religion in the media on a wider scale, but I can't resist just commenting on Saturday's Credo. It was by my favourite dippy theist, the Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks. Helpfully, his lordship publishes his Credos on his own website, which doesn't have a firewall, so you can read it here.

He goes on a lot about Bounce, a book by Matthew Syed, and one my husband tells me is a great read. He's a bit of a table tennis player himself, my husband. Syed basically says that becoming a professional at anything just takes practice - 10,000 hours of it to be precise.

So, the Rabbi applies this to religion. 'How could this fit in to my faith?', he thinks to himself. And he came up with ritual. He likens ritual to practicing a skill. The headline is "Ritual develops habits that can lift us to greatness". Frankly, it could have just been, "Ritual develops habits".

What the Rabbi has unwittingly done is to say that it takes 10,000 hours of 'practice' to train one's brain into believing this bullshit. He exposes another consequence of ritual - that of cognitive dissonance. If you have spent 10,000 hours of your life doing this, you're not going to be able to stomach the idea that it's all been for nothing and that none of it's true.

Hence the reason why religion even has ritual - because it's a competitive trait that keeps the whole memeplex alive. If your religion doesn't have rules that impact on your everyday existence, it ends up being irrelevant. That's where the CofE is at, no big deal.

Too much science on the BBC?

2011-07-22T20:09:00.002+01:00

In a report this week, the BBC has been slammed for providing too much science programming. "It's a fringe interest enjoyed by only a tiny minority of the population and shouldn't be paid for out of the licence fee," said one angry bishop.

Only joking! No, this is the report by Prof Steve Jones of UCL and of Imperial College London of an analysis of BBC science programming that was largely very positive. The main criticism was giving too much time to fringe opinions on well-established scientific facts, like climate change. I think that's true, but only for some topics. Why climate change deniers should be allowed to express themselves freely on air and HIV/Aids deniers not is beyond me, though I'm very glad the latter aren't!

The accuracy and breadth of programming was particularly praised, especially in the Today programme. That's quite funny because slap bang in the middle of all that praiseworthy science journalism is Thought for the Day, the spot that falsifies this next statement from Connie St Louis, Director of City University's Science Journalism MA, made on the Today programme at 8.52am, Thurs 21st July when commenting on the report:

"On no other subject would we have scientists getting away with making the statements that they make without... being scrutinised and investigated and challenged..."

Err, what about religion?

Lords reform

2011-07-04T13:04:00.002+01:00

How does this trespass in the religious domain, I hear you ask. Or maybe I don't because you know very well what the problem is. Clegg's proposal to reduce the number of Lords Spiritual (i.e. Church of England bishops) from 26 to 12 does not go far enough. What right do these very rich men have to have a say in our government? Only 2% of the population goes to Anglican church regularly. To say these men have some kind of moral authority is false. As I have argued before, society makes morals, not religions. We are one of the very few countries worldwide who still have clerics in our legislature, another being Iran. Great role model, there.

So, what would we do instead? Nick Clegg suggests 80% of the Lords being elected by proportional representation, with an option for a full 100% election. Many people are against election on the basis that it would just be a second House of Commons. So what! Many other systems do the same, but just have slightly different terms therefore minimising the party political influence.

This guy suggests choosing people to serve in the second house like being chosen for jury service, which I think is a great idea!

The main thing, though, is to get those bishops out. They are not more qualified to speak on moral matters than anyone else and they represent only a tiny minority of the country. They are there, as are the peers, because of tradition. And that's not a good enough reason to keep them.

Another apology and not Credo ever again

2011-06-22T13:01:00.002+01:00

Sorry - late again. This time Incredolous was delayed by fleas. You may be thinking, "Aha, God/ Vishnu/Thor has punished her by sending fleas to plague her house!" but if so, I say bring it on. We have exterminators now, various gods, and can deal with any household pests you care to rain down on us. I will let readers know if any god takes up the challenge.

Also, my old friend "the Chief", as he's apparently known, had a large article devoted to him in the last Saturday Times as he has a new book out, The Great Partnership. Not that I'm suggesting you buy it, but if you do, rest assured some money will go to me bringing up thoroughly open-minded children.

It's about how religion and science compliment each other, need each other and generally work together really well. It's that old chestnut, "science tells us how, religion tells us why". Well, as my husband has been remarking for decades, religion hasn't actually got us very far into the why of it all, now, has it?

Anyhoo, it didn't make any sense but I can't link to it and show you because The Times has changed its subscription plans so that I have to pay twice as much per week just to find the offending article and link to their website and I have decided I just won't pay it anymore.

This blog will take in a little of Credo and other religious stories and articles in the media but will evolve into the musings of a militant, new atheist mum, one of those people with a disappointing intellect, according to Lord Sacks. I guess if my intellect won't allow me to perform amazing feats of double-think and hypocrisy, then I guess I am a little disappointing.

Not Credo

2011-06-13T14:04:00.003+01:00

There was no Credo this weekend due to the announcement of the Queen's birthday honours list, which doesn't get me quite so agitated so I guess I'm free to talk about whatever I want. And in my own voice!

I've just been thinking about the nature of credulity and how it seems to be quite prized in our culture. It is lauded as 'keeping an open mind'. It leads people to go for acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropracty, and believe in ghosts and that mediums can talk to the dead as well as whatever various religions pedal.

It also stems a little from moral relativism, which the religious often use as a stick to beat the secular with, saying that only religion can give you a moral structure. Bollocks. It's the other way round: every society creates its own morality and religion is continuously reworked to conform to the new moral landscape. That's what's happening in the Anglican church at the moment. And if it doesn't respond to changes in society's morals, it becomes less and less relevant, like the Catholic Church.

But moral relativism, though somewhat true, can be taken to extremes. There are some universal taboos that we should not tolerate anywhere in the world, never mind what cultural apologists say. Genital mutilation, of girls or boys, should not be practised. Defend circumcision if you want, but I don't think cutting off a baby boy's foreskin for no practical reason is defensible.

By saying that one person's world view is as valid as another's, you must allow, for example, that creationism is as valid a viewpoint as the scientific one, i.e. that evolution is true. But that can't be. Either one or the other is true, and one can't maintain this duality just to desperately try to avoid offending one side or the other.

But does anyone do this? I used to. I clearly didn't say creationism was true, but I was seduced into that whole reinterpreting the Bible to see how it could fit the truth. It can't. And why should it? It wasn't written by a divine, omnipotent, omniscient being. It was written by people in the context of their own society with their own morals and limits of knowledge and experience. It's an interesting historical source (if you allow for all the bias and unreliability) but nothing more.

Sorry, I presume I'm preaching to the converted. And reworking long discussed ground, I expect. I'll just end by saying that scepticism is a much healthier world outlook than credulity. It might save you time, money and even your health. We all have these amazing brains, and we should all try to use them. Rather than keeping an 'open mind' perhaps we should be keeping an 'active mind'.

Very Reverend Doctor John Shepherd, Dean of Perth, Western Australia

2011-06-07T13:04:00.003+01:00

On how the church has many reasons to laugh, often at itself or how Christianity is all a bit laughable really, isn't it?

From time immemorial, the church has been evil and corrupt, and members of the church have been the first to see it and enjoy it. The propensity we have to get ourselves in a mess and then blame others for it, is quite incredible. Right from the start, when God made Adam and Eve, tempted them with the tree of knowledge and then blamed Eve for succumbing to that temptation, it just makes you want to laugh in disbelief, doesn't it? Or cry. One or the other.

When God told Abraham he would give him a son, Abraham just giggled. He was 100 at the time! His wife Sarah, who was 90, also laughed, as you would. God was a little put out by this, so he made Abraham promise to sacrifice this son and only stopped him at the last minute, saying "I can't believe you were going to go through with it! That is sick, man!" (Genesis 22:12).

Some of the Gospel stories are also a little comical. When Jesus heals the Roman centurion's slave just by saying a few words to show how blind faith is definitely the best way to go, he didn't even point out that having slaves was bad! (Matthew 8:5) What a faux pas on Jesus' part, d'oh!

And the bit in Mark when Jesus casts out devils into 2000 pigs, who then jump off a cliff. Priceless! Pythonesque in scale! And all those people who lost livestock were jut rolling about the floor in fits of giggles. Even animal rights protesters would find that funny. (Mark 5:12)

In fact, in Mark in particular the disciples are generally figures of fun. They don't get it, they fight over who is the most important, they betray Jesus, they run away, they deny they ever knew him. Fun times, fun times.

The modern day church is also a source of fun. All this hoo-hah over women and gay clergy. It's hilarious! All these clerics joining the Ordinariate of the other church. The incredible propensity of people to keep on believing this clap-trap! Stop, it's making my sides hurt!

So, is there anything that makes the Christian church holy? In a word, no.

Read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

Jon Ashworth, former business writer for the Times and founder of Yala Fund

2011-06-01T12:42:00.003+01:00

On how serving others is a useful way of life, whatever your creed or I'm thinking about converting to Buddhism.

I was wondering how to start this article and decided I would start with horrific death. Something to jolt you smug middle class Times readers out of the post-breakfast reverie into which you sink every Saturday morning, heedless of how privileged you are to live in a country where horrific death never happens, not like where I live helping people in Sri Lanka.

I saw a mother, father and child dead on the road. They had been riding their motorbike to English class, so they were committed to learning and bettering themselves, which makes this even more awful. Then they had collided with a lorry.

If you didn't know, Sri Lanka is mainly Buddhist, and yet I, as a Christian, still help them despite their mistaken, but beautiful, beliefs. The tradition when someone dies in a horrific crash with a lorry is to lay them in caskets under elephant tusks for people to see and pay their last respects. Their house and street were garlanded with white flags to show people where to pay their last repects. I even went.

The mourners said the family would have a better life next time around, and I had to try hard not to snicker. I mean, isn't one life long enough without having to be reborn again and again, maybe millions of times, before eventually attaining heaven?!

And yet, here in Sri Lanka, with their colourful quaint little rituals (e.g. freshly washed flower petals or bowls of fruit placed at Buddha's or a Hindu deity's statue), Buddhism seems more alive than Christianity. And if you open your mind (a state not comfortable for religious, I know) you can see much common ground between the two religions.

Buddhism and Christianity both have their meditation/prayer moments, which relieve stress and make us calm, supposedly. If you're lucky enough to reach that enlightened state in Buddhist thought, you're more infallible than the pope! Be selfless, trust your natural state and you can't go wrong! Hmm, sounds really interesting. Not sure I want to reject my family though, sounds a bit culty.

Hang on a minute, what would God say if he knew I was contemplating switching sides? Better not. Buddha would be much more forgiving than Yahweh, so I'll stick to my Church. But can I incorporate parts of Buddhism into my life? Can people create their own religion out of bits and pieces of other religions? [Yes, and they frequently do. Ed.]

I am here in Sri Lanka to help people after the tsunami. I've got the best of both worlds, 'cos Buddhists think I'm doing good to improve my karmic bank balance, and Christians see doing good as an end in itself. It's not a way to ensure I get to heaven. No, not at all.

To me, it shows some kind of universal truth underpinning all religions. Being bribed into being good.

Whether you're Christian or Buddhist, or any other religion a life helping people is the best way to achieve heaven. But not if you're an atheist - no amount of charity work is going to save you, my friend.

Read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk)

Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. For now.

2011-05-23T12:57:00.003+01:00

On how China is reversing the decline and fall of Christianity or what have I been reading this week?

I'll tell you what I've been reading, Niall Ferguson's Civilization. What a smashing book. He quotes the Chinese Academy of Social Science, who as you know are infallible, who were trying to work out why Europe had surged ahead of China from the 17th century. At first, apparently, they thought it was our guns, then our political system, then our economic system. But for the past twenty years they have thought it was our religious system which made it all possible.

Someone should tell them that Europe was Christian for about 15 centuries before they overtook China and the 17th century coincides with great advances in science. Never mind, let's go with the Chinese scenario just for the sake of this column, shall we?

Christianity is declining everywhere but China. More people go to church there than are members of the Communist party, apparently. Christianity, and the rampant greed and capitalism it obviously engendered in the West, is clearly more preferable to an oppressive, outdated ideology. Oh, wait, sorry, it's exactly the same. But it isn't the poor and oppressed that are turning to Christianity, it's the rich and oppressed who are going to church and I'm sure the clergy are more than happy with that arrangement.

It's fascinating for me, as a non-Christian (I thought I'd point that out just in case you didn't realise I was Jewish), to see Christianity growing in the east and declining in the west, which begins to resemble a failing civilization, what with the kids nowadays being so selfish and individualistic and amoral. It's just like the end of the Roman empire all over again. Edward Gibbon said it was the rise of Christianity that caused it, and now the fall of Christianity will cause the fall of the West. Just you wait. I predict it'll all end on 21st May 2011. Or not.

Niall Ferguson says that civilization falls when celebrities are vaunted. Coincidentally, our society vaunts celebrities quite a lot. Or makes fun of them. Either way, it's a sign of impending doom.

And, as Niall forgot to point out but I'm sure he really thinks this, societies grow old when they stop believing in fairy stories. They grow up and get all boring and tired and too busy to play. But it's not too late! It's never too late to start believing in fairy stories again and be all fun and silly and please play with me, pretty please!

Judaism and Christianity are very similar, you know. They can reinvent themselves for every generation. In fact, like every religion, they have to because every generation has a new moral code and the religion must fit in or risk dying on its arse. That's the stage we're at now. No big deal.

And now I'd like to end with a joke. Christianity may now come with a label saying "Made in China", but all you snobby Times readers had better still buy it, because even the wrong religion is better than no religion at all [I don't get it. Ed].

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read it on timesonline.co.uk).
Helpfully, the Chief Rabbi publishes his unedited Credos free on his website.

Monsignor Roderick Strange, Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome

2011-05-16T13:05:00.004+01:00

On the echo of Easter that can lift us from despair to beauty or on how some people get more religious as they get older

Farewell, Elizabeth Taylor. Or, indeed, au revoir. So, Liz Taylor died recently. Wasn't she some kind of woman? She had more husbands than you could shake a stick at! But let's not judge her for that. Someone else will be doing that.

At her funeral, to which I was not invited, someone read a poem by a Jesuit priest. How many Jesuit priest/poets do you know? Well, it was Gerard Manley Hopkins, of course, not the other one. Let me now spend the next five chapters going through this poem for you. What's that? You're not that bothered to hear what Liz Taylor requested be read at her funeral? What kind of person are you?

Oh, alright, then. Suffice to say, the poem talks about how beauty can't last forever but when you die, as God's been taking care of every single eyelash and hair that you've shed throughout your lifetime, you'll be really hairy. It's not the easiest poem, but I think I've got the gist of it there for you. So, basically, Lizzie was looking forward to a hirsute afterlife. Or maybe she just liked the poem? Who knows the answers to such questions? Well, her loved ones, probably, but as I said, I haven't been invited to meet them.

And so to Easter, which happened a few weeks ago now, but I haven't got anything else to tie the above ramblings into. Easter's about transformation and this poem by Hopkins may alert believers and non-believers alike to the shaggy transformation that awaits you on death.

Read the original article (warning you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

Michael Freedland, author, journalist and erstwhile friend to the stars

2011-05-07T13:22:00.004+01:00

On how two boys glimpse the world beyond Spurs, or how a bar-mitzvah isn't the same as confirmation or how I love to listen to the Archers.

I was listening to the Archers the other day when somebody said something like, "And we'll be catering for weddings and bar mitzvahs." Bar mitzvahs? Do they even know what they are? And how many will they have in Ambridge, the last bastion of Englishness (forget your Midsomers).

So, just for the people of Ambridge, I'm going to tell you all about bar mitzvahs and what they are. Up until recently I bet none of you Gentiles had even heard of them and if you had you thought they were just some weird party. Well, you'd be kind of right. It is a party for a young man who gets lots of presents, mainly pens. The old joke is, you stand up and say in thanks, "Today, I am a fountain pen." Cracks me up every time! Nowadays, kids would stand up and say "I am an iPad" which is not funny.

My twin 13-year old grandsons recently were accorded the title Bar mitzvah (son of the commandment). I had helped them through the process and had taken them to the synagogue while they studied for a year. Then on their special day they read from the Torah in front of the congregation. The bar mitzvah is a rite of passage, then, not like the confirmation in the Christian church. The confirmation is just studying, and attending church and then getting a special day in church often followed by a party. Bar Mitzvah is so much more than that.

I was so proud, as were the boys other grandparents, and their parents, and the rabbi. The rabbi talked about the boys' roles in the community. Their cousin donated half her presents from her bat mitzvah (which means daughter of the commandment, unsurprisingly) so it makes you a better person, too.

The boys are not yet men but they count towards the quota you need to be able to worship and their parents are no longer accountable for their sins. You hear that, Ben and Jamie? You better stop that, right now! They're still only boys, but they are on their way to becoming men. And that gives us all something to think about.

Read the original article (you will have to pay to read it on timesonline.co.uk).

The Very Reverend Dr Jane Shaw, Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

2011-05-07T12:52:00.002+01:00

On how after all the excitement, it takes times for reality to sink in or how can I make a comparison between the death and resurrection of my god and a topical event?

Easter can be overwhelming. All that chocolate! You know, I still have Easter chocolate in the fridge? As a Very Reverend Dr I get an awful lot of Easter eggs from very generous parishioners and I see it as a particular duty to eat every last bit myself in gratitude. And, of course, all those bonnets! They are so overhwhelming.

So, although my god was resurrected on the third day after his apparent death, we don't celebrate it until the Sunday after cos by then we're not so overwhelmed by chocolate and bonnets and can properly concentrate on this improbable event. This Sunday is known as Low or Bright Sunday. Many say the Low comes from low attendances cos all the part-time Christians don't bother turning up, having done their time in church the week before. Actually, it's only because it's a rather normal Sunday after the big fuss we make at Easter.

Bright Sunday comes from a quip made by St John Chrysostom (yes, even the Church Fathers could have a bit of fun!) that the resurrection was a joke played by his god on Satan. Nowadays this saintly quip is memorialised by clergy wearing crazy hats.

On Bright Sunday we talk about how difficult it is to believe that Jesus was resurrected and we praise Thomas for doubting and just having to see it with his own eyes. It's a perfectly normal reaction when told someone you had buried is actually walking around like nothing happened. I hear about it all the time. Thomas had to poke Jesus in the ribs before he say, "OMG, it is you!".

And, of course, Bright Sunday is on the third day after the Royal Wedding (see what I did there?!). Marriage is a lot like Easter. Too much chocolate and bonnets. And with the Royal Wedding there'll only be more chocolate and bonnets than any other wedding.

"Traditional" marriage is a modern invention. Apart from the fact that roughly monogamous pairings seem to have been the norm in our early ancestors. But the Church's interference in marriage - now that's modern. And modern marriage can seem doomed to failure, not that I'm suggesting anything about Kate and Wills' marriage, of course.

To extend the analogy between Easter and marriage, the reality of marriage can take a while to sink in. It takes a lifetime to convince yourself that Jesus really was resurrected and it takes a lifetime to work on a marriage. So this Bright Sunday, as we lick the chocolate off the bodies of our loved ones, say "I do" like Kate and Wills, just as we Christians say when we do the same on our idols of Jesus and say "He is risen, risen indeed!".

Click here to read the original (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk)

An apology

2011-05-06T19:49:00.003+01:00

Another blip in Incredolous! When I finally got round to doing it I couldn't find last week's article on timesonline.co.uk. Tomorrow's has already been posted!

If anyone finds it, point me in the right direction and I'll Incredolous it. It was by that nice lady vicar from somewhere in London on the royal wedding.

Steve Clifford, General Director of the Evangelical Alliance

2011-04-25T10:15:00.002+01:00

On the great disappointment who rose as the Saviour, or how the apostles came up with a really kick-ass plan on Easter Saturday

Happy Easter everybody! Here's my very own tragic Easter story. I lost my Daddy, who was a vicar, when I was only five. I then later went on to become religious. Who would've thunk it?! But when I was a teenager I wasn't particularly religious. In the late 1960s I had more interest in sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. But I took a job on a farm commected to a Christian conference centre and heard them preach about the Easter story - and I was hooked! Yes, I know, tragic, isn't it? Another impressionable teenager sucked in to a freaky cult - Christianity!

As I listened to that story about how Jesus was arrested, his trial, crucifixion, death and, three days later, his resurrection, I knew deep down it was true. I couldn't prove it, not can I now after being a Chrisian for a very long time, but I still feel it in my gut. It makes me sick just thinking about it. Jesus rose from the dead, eeeurgh!

This weekend 13% of the population will attend an Easter service. I don't know where I got that statistic and I wont try to justify it in any way [I will. Ed.]. Jesus, who was the central character, just in case you didn't know, was a terrible disappointment to everyone, especially his mother, who thought he was a very naughty boy. His Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem convinced many people that he wasn't the one who would defeat the Romans and establish a God-given rule on the throne of Jerusalem. And they were right.

The betrayal, humiliation and death had not been in the script. Or, to put it another way, they had. Here was a story rewritten by spin doctors. Jesus prophesied his own death and resurrection, except according to John. Judas was supposed to betray Jesus. Jesus was supposed to die. Jesus was supposed to come back to life. St Paul said, "If Christ has not been raised, we are wasting our goddamn time." And, clearly, the Apostles thought that, too.

Far from being "too improbable not to be true... not what you would make up if you were starting a new world religion", the resurrection story is a very natural story for the Apostles to have made up. Loads of people came back to life before Jesus. Absolutely loads. And it was a good way to start up a new cult. That, a bit of luck and a lot of violence turned Christianity into a world religion.

Read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk.)
Luckily, Steve Clifford has shared a similar article on his Evangelical Alliance website for free.

Lord Jonathan Sacks, soon-to-be ex-Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

2011-04-19T09:57:00.003+01:00

On how passover has lessons for those fighting for freedom or a verbatim copy of my Thought for the Day from last Thursday because I'm retiring soon and I have so checked out already.

Happy Passover everybody! Isn't it a coincidence that when people in Africa and the Middle East are fighting for freedom, it's Passover time! You may not know, unless you heard me on Thought for the Day the other day, or read what I wrote about Passover last year and the year before that, that Passover is about the fight for freedom.

This Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world, and has been performed even when Jews have been far from free - when Romans ruled Judea, when Jews were kicked out of Judea, when Jews were massacred or exiled by Christians and during the Holocaust, we celebrated Passover because we are free.

Free in the sense of out of the clutches of the Pharaoh. Which is a myth and never happened anyway. But this myth comes from the Bible, so we honour it. Chapters 12 and 13 in Exodus are a bit counterintuitive - not like the rest of the Bible, then. The mythical Moses assembled the Jews who, mythically, were slaves to the Pharaoh. Moses tells them that the mythical God is about to set them free.

What would you say if you were the mythical Moses? Tell the Jews about the destination they're heading for to rally them - the 'land of milk and honey'? Tell them how difficult the journey is and how many of them will be slaughtered by the mythical God along the way? Well done you for thinking of saying these things, but the mythical Moses came up with something better than real, solid you.

He mythically said "In days to come, when your son asks you, What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?" you can say you did your bit. Or all about how you escaped from Pharaoh. Moses didn't speak about freedom - he spoke about the indoctrination of the next generation. He focused on the future and particularly on children. In doing this he was making a fundamental point. It may be hard to escape from tyranny but it's even harder to escape from indoctrination as a child.

To defend a country, you need an army. To defend religion, you need indoctrination at a young age when children will believe anything an adult tells them because that is generally a useful evolutionary trait. To show how well-read I am, I can tell you that even Rousseau admired Moses for putting together such a ridiculous set of rituals and customs that set Jews apart from others and made them forever strangers in whatever land they were in. And parents had to pass the customs down to their children because otherwise noone would believe them.

Religion begins with what we teach our children. That is why all religions love to get a piece of the education pie, and thank you so much Michael Gove for making that even more likely in the UK from now on.

For everyone else, teach your children the history of religion if you want them to not believe in any of it.

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read it on timesonline.co.uk).
Helpfully, the Chief Rabbi publishes his unedited Credos on his own website free.
Also, Platitude of the Day does a much better parody of the Chief Rabbi than this.

Jeremy Henzell-Thomas, Visiting Fellow at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge

2011-04-11T13:05:00.005+01:00

On being in search of true harmony amid a babble of voices or how I believe one stupid myth above another Those who are not familiar with the biblical story of the Tower of Babel will therefore not really be familiar with the metaphorical application of the word 'Babel' to mean a clamour of mutually incomprehensible language, so we're off to a bad start. In that case, I'd better tell you all about it. The descendents of Noah built a massive tower (of Babel) to try to reach to the heavens and for such presumption they were punished by God by being made to speak different languages and not being able to understand each other. It's basically a myth to explain why different peoples speak different languages. But I don't believe that myth. I believe this one. The Koran tells us that God made diversity so we could learn to cope with difference. Here's a quote, "Unto every one of you We appointed a different law and way of life. And if God had so willed, He could surely have made you all one single community: but He willed it otherwise. So play nice." This is a call to engage with one another in a nice, fluffy and understanding way. But only with other Muslims, as the Prophet Muhammad said, "The diversity of my people is a blessing." It's also in the Koran, quite clearly, "And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter... Such is the reward of disbelievers." But there is another myth, found in another cult book, "'The Babel fish' said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, 'is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything in any form of language." This, I think you'll agree, is utter nonsense and totally undesirable. If we could actually understand each other, then we'd have no need for people like me. What we need is to learn to love each other despite our differences, as long as you're Muslim, of course, and then everything'll be just fine. Read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

Monsignor Roderick Strange, Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome

2011-04-04T14:39:00.004+01:00

On how dawn comes after the dark night of the soul or don't worry if you're in despair over the loss of your faith - it's only temporary!

Crises of faith are unpredictable. You can't order one off the internet to come when you're prepared for it and want to show off how totally religious you are. But at Lent, they may come because of your chronic chocolate cravings or because you're thinking a bit more about the whole religion thing at this time of year and it suddenly dawns on you it's a crock of shit.

What happens? A person who up until now has serenely and blithely led a life of ignorance and religiousness suddenly steps into the bright light of thinking for themselves. This is scary and disorientating. You wonder whether religion, or as we like to call it now, faith, is just an illusion. Or are you being tested? (That's a good meme started back in Old Tasty-mint times, meant to reel the doubters back in and laud them for their ordeal. Everyone's a winner! Apart from rationality and reason, of course.)

Mother Teresa famously lost her faith, er, sorry, spent time in the 'darkness'. It wasn't a long time. Just fifty years. So we don't call that loss of faith. What does this 'darkness' mean? "Isn't it the same as loss of faith?", I hear you ask. Well, no, and I'll tell you why.

When you first gained faith, unless you're the kind of religious person who's always been religious and just does it out of habit, you were like someone in love and the feeling was euphoric. But soon, like romantic love, that euphoria fades and you're left with a more quiet feeling and you may be disappointed and give up on religion. Don't! Just like a good relationship, staying religious just means having to work at it and make compromises e.g. keeping on telling yourself God exists and ignoring the lack of evidence for this conviction.

Then there's a kind of darkness when you feel that Christianity is a fairytale, that you've deluded yourself into having religious experiences. And you'd be right! But don't worry, if you start believing against all that reason again, it'll be like falling in love all over again. It's so great having a crisis of faith 'cos you can then rescue yourself and feel really good.

And then there's simple loss of faith when you feel happy that you have finally realised the truth, that there is no God and you're responsible for your own actions and can think for yourself. If you feel happy that there is no God, then you're done with religion and won't come back. But if you feel even the slightest of twinges of loss, worry or anxiety, then come back to the church, quickly, you need a fix of God to make you feel better. Those twinges of anxiety are nothing to do with losing a network of friends, feeling like you'll upset your parents, or that you feel a little worried about making all your own decisions, which some say are quite natural on losing faith.

So plod on, go to church, go through the motions, profess your faith to all and sundry, like Mother Teresa did, and in the end you'll believe again. And if you don't, you've only wasted your life, so nothing too important.

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk.)

Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell, Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe, for now...

2011-03-29T10:47:00.007+01:00

On how the power of our tears should not be underestimated, or, go on, let it all out, there, there The shortest verse in the Holey Bible consists of two words - "Jesus wept". It is in the Gospel according to St John as part of John's story that Jesus cried when he saw his friends Mary and Martha crying over losing their brother Lazarus. Jesus then goes on to bring Lazarus back to life, but even then some of the Jews didn't believe Jesus was the son of God. To this Jesus said, "What does a Messiah have to do to get your attention, guys?" Anyhoo, the whole story shows that Jesus was a man as well as a god because he could cry. Or maybe he was just a man? Whatever, he was a nice bloke, that's for sure. Except he condoned slavery. Hmmm. I'll work on that one. Anyway, you know that carol, Away in a Manger? Well, the writer was, like, so wrong because St John clearly said Jesus was capable of crying so I bet he cried as a baby. Wouldn't you think a newborn baby who'd be awakened from sleep by cattle lowing would cry? Exactly. We all cry as babies, to attract attention and express our needs when we have no other language to do so. It makes us human. Other animals don't cry emotional tears. But then we learn not to cry as we get older, except in exceptional circumstances. If you can't cry, you're not human. You're worse than an animal, do you hear me? Cry goddammit! No need for your stiff upper lip here! Here I will write more about tears through the ages. I will mention lots of historical people to show how learned I am. This will basically make my point that tears are about penitence, forgiveness, thankfulness, joy, taking communion and the transforming grace of God. Cry when you pray, and then God will know you're not faking. You can even cry for the poor reptiles who get to live a terrible life being designed by god to be reptiles. Oh yeah, and tears are about compassion, too. Those were Jesus' tears. And tears, because they're water, right, can also be linked to the water of baptism. So, all in all, a very well developed argument for tears being good and holy. Such an important topic to cover in this time when so many people are crying for so may reasons. Enough to bring tears to your eyes, eh, readers? Read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

Soon to be retiring Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi etc...

2011-03-21T14:43:00.004Z

On how in the struggle for democracy, the wolrd should not forget the voice of the prophets or how the Jews, like, really invented human rights and shit.

Has anyone mentioned Libya, yet? No? Good. As people struggle for democracy in Libya, let's not forget human rights, for the two do not necessarily go hand-in-hand.

The West was shaped by two profoundly different civilisations, brought together in Christianity: Ancient Greece and Ancient Israel. Ancient Greece obviously gave the West democracy, but it was the Hebrew Bible that gave us human rights. Don't laugh!

Let me tell you a story. Nadab and Abihu, two sons of Aaron, offered strange fire to God as a form of worship. He told them to stop it, he didn't like this fire, it made his eyes itch. But they continued so he burned them to death. And God told Aaron and his brothers not to mourn for Nadab and Abihu because if they did they'd be killed, too.

Note what is happening here, politically rather than morally. God is demonstrating that he has complete power over men's lives and they must obey him utterly, even in the smallest, most insignificant thing as the type of fire used to worship him. Otherwise they will die. Wrong animal sacrifice? Death. Eating old meat? Death. Drinking at the tabernacle? Death. Being a Canaanite? Death. And they call Gaddafi mad!

Sorry, that story doesn't really demonstrate what I wanted to say, which is that even minorities have rights. I should have used that story about David and Uriah. In short, David shagged Bathsheba and sent her husband Uriah to die and then was brought to book by Nathan for it. Uriah was a Hittite and even Hittites had feelings, apparently.

Anyhoo, Greeks brought democracy. And it's a good thing. Except when it's not, and that's when a majority oppress a minority. Which could never happen in a despotic state. So, Libyans and Egyptians with your new found democractic values - please don't go round persecuting minorities in your countries!

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read it on timesonline.co.uk).
Helpfully, the Chief Rabbi publishes his own unedited Credos on his website free.

David F. Ford, Regius Professor of Divinity and Director of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme at the University of Cambridge

2011-03-16T10:23:00.006Z

On Lent, a time of liberation to dream dreams and take risks or to sit around and talk to yourself

In an excruciating love poem to his wife, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester wrote:
"Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.
With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace,
She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face."

Happy Lent everybody! Lent is a time for reflection. Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness, fasting, praying nd hallucinating. He saw all kinds of pyschedelic stuff - and he didn't even need LSD! These mirages formed the basis of his Kingdom of God that he preached. This Kingdom of God was, funnily enough, also based very closely on Jewish scripture. Anyhoo, Jesus demonstrated what the Kingdom of God would look like by being nice to people, performing miracles and gathering a group of young male friends around him. Yes, the Kingdom of God is gay - no women allowed in. Not surprisingly, there was some opposition about this vision in the Middle Eastern Iron Age, society not being as progressive there as it is now [Er, hang on?... Ed.]. So at the end of Lent we remember Jesus died.

So what do we do in Lent nowadays. We can't very well spend 40 days in the desert. So we fast (i.e. give up chocolate - don't worry, not real fasting!), study (but only the Bible so no real rigour is involved), give (Easter eggs!) and pray (sitting on your behind thinking). It's just like Jesus' sacrifice!

So, from that description it's clear that's not enough. Lent is a time for making overblown gestures and huge personla sacrifices to show you're holier than your neighbour, who you also love. What could this look like? Perhaps praying 'for as long as it takes'. Yeah, whoa - praying for a really long time. That's definitely hardcore Lenten sacrifice.

You could fast not just from chocolate but also from media - so stop reading this right now! Or you could study something that really stretches you - how about evolutionary biology?

Remember the Kingdom of God is for everyone. I have some dear, dear friends in Libya who have been asking me for help during the brutal reprisals by Colonel Gaddafi. And I truly feel for them so have been offering prayers as the most effectual way of helping them. As well as being friends with Muslims, I am also friends with Jews, one of whom blogged that he stood in solidarity with the Muslims in Libya who wanted a free country. I guess the Muslims will have to change their minds about Israel now, after this show of friendship.

So let's all sit on our behinds and pray for the Kingdom of God to deliver us from all this evil that's about rather than doing anything about it.

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read it on timesonline.co.uk.)

The Very Reverend Dr John Shepherd, Dean of Perth, Western Australia

2011-03-05T22:10:00.003Z

On the paradox of God who can do anything but does nothing or please still keep your faith even if people you know have died in recent antipodean natural disasters

Is Christianity doomed to believe in a God who doesn't exist? Are we kidding ourselves that there's someone who's up in the sky looking out for us? In a word, yes.

In Australia and New Zealand we have recently suffered a number of devastating natural disasters. What kind of God would not intervene to save the people he professes to love?

Religious researchers have pored over the scriptures and historical documents from every age and they can only find evidence that God may have intervened at three crucial moments - creation, impregnating Mary and creating an invisible 'Holy Spirit' to inspire people. And even that evidence is pretty shaky.

So is God really real? And if he is, why doesn't he get off his arse and do something?!

He does, of course, through us. He has made us able to demonstrate acceptance, forgiveness and compassion (see how I'm scrupulously avoiding mentioning the soul) and we can choose whether or not to exercise them. We have to have this choice (again note how I'm avoiding using the term free will) otherwise it would be no fun for God.

So God can't do anything independently of us, 'cos if he did then he would be a tyrant and not worth worshipping. If something bad happened we would then assume it was God's work and we might start to hate him. And if he could intervene independently then he would have to be choosy and capricious, save some and not others, and again not be worth worshipping. He wouldn't be God. So those people (note how I avoid saying new atheists) who attack this idea of God are wasting their time, 'cos that God doesn't exist.

But if you think of God as someone who experiences our suffering when we suffer and acts through us to do good, but leaving it up to human choice, then you'd be close to thinking that human compassion and charity were God and revere them instead (Isn't that humanism? Ed.).

God will not intervene directly, but if you're lucky, some nice human beings might.

Read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk.)

Monsignor Roderick Strange, Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome

2011-02-20T19:55:00.005Z

On why we must still strive to match the Bible's high ideals or why we must still strive to expose the Bible's low ideals

There are statements in the Bible that are so startling they can utterly disconcert us. We are commanded to make slaves "of the heathen that are around you" (Leviticus xxv, 44). How can we be expected to obey such a command? It is morally bankrupt. But if slavery is approved of by God, who are we to say it's wrong? And just in case you're thinking, well that's just the Old Testament, how about this, "that servant [slave], which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself... shall be beaten with many stripes." That's Jesus telling a parable accepting the institution of slavery according to Luke (xii, 47). If Jesus thought slavery was OK, why don't we? It's not like morals are relative or anything.

Sorry, I started out on the wrong tack. I meant to choose two completely different bits of Leviticus and the New Testament (Mark v.48 actually) that tell us to be perfect and holy because God is perfect and holy and then give us a load of instructions about how to be holy. In the second draft I'll start with that.

So, what kind of instructions do we get? Vineyards are not to be stripped or fallen grapes gathered so that poor people and outcasts can eat the rotting fruit. Isn't that charity at its finest! Of course, it's a metaphor, as so many of these things are, and means you shouldn't hoard everything to yourself but leave some scraps for others.

Deaf and blind people should be respected, not mocked. Isn't it great that there's a text out there that tells us these things. I tell you, before I became a Catholic I mocked many a deaf and blind person. I even put stumbling blocks in front of blind people, which the Bible specifically bans. How I prayed for forgiveness after reading those lines!

Don't steal, be fair, don't lie, play nice. Those are all injunctions from the Bible. Amazing ideas that I bet you've never come across before! At the heart of this inspiring teaching is the commandment not to wear a jumper made of a mixture of wool and linen. It makes God's teeth grate! Just don't do it!

Matthew echoes the teaching of the Old Testament but takes a different line. Instead, it includes a whole range of teaching and in particular the command to love God more than you love your own family. Anyone can hate Johnny Foreigner, what is special about that? Jesus predicted that it would take Christianity [or indeed any religion, Ed.] for brothers to deliver brothers up to death and children to rise up against their parents. How right he was. He came not to send peace, but a sword.

These biblical commands may need to be adapted in society today, as each society makes its own morals, but they have not been rendered nugatory by an improvement in the moral fibre of the country. Violence and hatred may not come instinctively to many people, but as we struggle against the new militant atheists and secularists, we could do worse than to school our hearts in the violent words of the Bible whose source is divine.

Read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk.)

Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth (for now)

2011-02-13T21:05:00.004Z

On how the Sabbath is a quiet antidote to web chatter or how we all need a bit of time out every now and again

Is the internet making you stupid? Are social networking sites detroying your relationships? Then join us in the Jewish faith where we can make sure you take time off from your digital lives and regenerate your batteries, if you'll pardon the pun.

Several people have written books recently about how social media is destroying us as individuals and destroying our society. I agree, but I also disagree. I don't like those petty bloggers, as Andrew Marr said, "A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. " They pick holes in the most carefully contructed argument, damn them.

But, the internet is also a very good thing. It spreads information better than any other medium and allows democratisation of knowledge. Social networking is being used as a new way of supporting each other and energising social movements.

New information technology has always revolutionised the world, like the invention of writing and then the printing press, which led to the growth of science and secularism and mass literacy so people could see the holes in the religions they were pedalled.

So, in order to keep people in the fold, several religions have sabbaths or days set aside for contemplation away from the distractions of the internet. Maybe you should do the same. Right now. Turn off your computer because what you're doing is hardly important. It's not worth reading at all, in my view. Especially if today is your sabbath.

Read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk)
Luckily, the Chief Rabbi published unedited versions of his Credos on his own website.

Not Credo

2011-02-07T18:42:00.004Z

The article below Credo caught my eye on Saturday. Lord Jonathan Sacks is retiring as Chief Rabbi. I will be sad to see him go, as his Credos are usually the most fun to paraphrase in my own (I was going to say inimitable and then realised that I'm actually imitating another) special way.

But then I read that he's still around for two more years, so I'm sure I'll get plenty of chances to have some fun with his writing. And I do hope whichever of the rabbis who are hotly tipped to take Jonny's job succeeds to the role is as good as him for contradictions, retractions and misrepresenting scientific principles and theories. Otherwise, my job would be much duller.

Good luck in all your future ventures, Lord Sacks.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell, Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe, whatever that means

2011-02-07T15:05:00.006Z

On why I shall stand firm in the Anglican (C)atholic tradition, or why I shall soon be joining the Ordinariate (but sssh - don't tell anyone!)

Anglicans who don't want women priests or homosexuals anywhere near the church have recently had a bad press, for some reason. It's almost as if we're, I mean, they're not on the same wavelength as the rest of society. Well, we, I mean they, are - just not this one. Maybe society a hundred years ago. And they have the nerve to call us, I mean, them 'traditionalists' - such an insulting and degrading word!

The very sensible departure of five bishops to the Ordinariate set up specially by Benny to tempt backwards looking Anglicans (like me!) has been seen as a betrayal when it rightly should be seen as enabling dialogue between the two denominations. Maybe because of our, I mean, their, actions the two will become one again after 500 years of long and lonely existence.

Someone I admire very much, Ronald Knox, who also converted to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism, said that the Church of England was an 'ecclesiastical Noah's Ark', by which he didn't mean it was full of shit, but that it welcomed a diversity of opinion. Trouble is, the lion doesn't lie with the lamb all that happily.

The Anglican Covenant is the last ditch attempt by the Church of England to hold things together before the ship falls apart at the seams. The Declaration of Assent is unequivocal, saying the church is one creed worshipping 'the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit' [Sorry, I count four there. shome mishtake shurely, Ed.]

What the liberal wing of the church should remember is set out in the Covenant, that we should be following scriptures and the apostolic faith of the early centuries of Christianity. If that's not traditionalist - what is? St Paul even used the Greek word tradition to talk about handing on the Eucharist to the Corinthians. So tradition must be OK.

If things change in the church, it shouldn't just be because society has changed. When the church was formed in the sixteenth century, there was a deliberate choice to keep bishops, priests and deacons, unlike the Protestant Reformation on the continent. This was in order to keep the traditions of the early church (and nothing to do with the fact that Elizabeth I wanted to bring an end to the reformation/counter-reformation of her siblings and protect herself from Catholic assassination attempts and just plain liked the old church smells and bells). So change in the ordering of bishops, priests and deacons to bishopesses, priestesses and deaconesses is a major departure from the early teaching and we should consult all Christians in this before doing it. And have I been consulted? I have not!

So, I went to see Benny last year. And I told him that, as an Anglican bishop, I wanted to be a (C)atholic Anglican bishop and he said, 'Of course, come and join us. The more the merrier!' We're all cut from the same cloth, aren't we?

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

Alexandra Wright, Senior Rabbi of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue

2011-01-30T21:47:00.004Z

On how a synagogue born in upheaval celebrates its centenary or how you've got to adapt to survive

How do religions survive with their outmoded and, frankly, barbaric customs in the modern world? How do they bridge the gap between the incredible beliefs of the past and the values of rational thought and scientific evidence of the modern world?

Well, the founders of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue (where I'm the Senior Rabbi, you know) decided that they would make up their own version of Judaism, cherry-pick the best bits of the old faith and add in all the good bits of the modern world, like being able to drive on a Saturday. This happened a hundred years ago so is now very well established.

I was a child in the congregation and am now its Senior Rabbi (did I already say that?) and so this version of Judaism is embedded in me and others and will continue to make its own traditions in the face of the changing society and new scientific evidence. Double-think is a great transferable skill so when the congregation implodes on itself I could go into politics or advertising or something like that.

The founding members were motivated by only good intentions to follow the nice bits of Judaism and forget all the horrible bits from the scriptures, but this didn't leave very much so they had to make some things up. They decided that being nice to other people was one of the things to take from the scriptures because that wasn't something that they could learn from the modern world.

So, members of the congregation have always been doing nice things, like talk to homeless people, the unemployed and give toys and food to poor families. Doesn't that prove that our religion is true? Holocaust survivors talk to people about how bad it was, because they wouldn't realise it was a bad thing without someone religious telling them.

Many people say how can we praise God when every day some 20 children die of starvation. I will ignore this point and only say that, when religion can change with society it can make itself seem relevant even though it abandons all the traditions of the original religion and it can inspire people who would otherwise be selfish to do nice things for others. Unless they find some other inspiration.

I would like to end by thanking the Times for giving me this chance to advertise the centenary of the synagogue where I am Senior Rabbi and paying me for it!

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk.)

Apologies

2011-01-30T21:06:00.004Z

I would like to apologise for the brief pause in posting. I have not found god or been shut down by the Times. I have had a sick baby, been ill myself, gone back to work and been in pantomime in the last couple of weeks. We will draw a line under the whole sorry business, including not going back to the two Credos I missed. I'm sorry I missed a chance to lampoon Roderick Strange's ramblings on silence or to explore the rampant contradictions in Jeremy Henzell-Thomas' piece on reason, but I think I'll let them pass. I know it's a bit unfair to then have a go at a nice, liberal Jewish rabbi, but everyone get's the same treatment here. That's true equality.

Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Congregations of the Commonwealth

2011-01-09T21:44:00.005Z

On how my new year prediction is that tomorrow never knows or how I can prove free will exists - really very simply

Has anyone talked about the new year, yet? No, I didn't think so.

What does the future hold? That's what everyone wants to know at this time of year. Some of you pagans have probably peered into your crystal balls, read runes, consulted an astrologer or listened to a soothsayer. I would never do anything so superstitious and unscientific.

Some people might think they can predict the future, like the weathermen saying spring will come eventually, or the physicist saying the sun will rise in the morning, but I can assure you they won't unless you pray really hard for them.

Darwin said in the foreword to On the Origin of Species that he didn't think his book contained anything to offend any religious sensibilities, but he was wrong about that wasn't he?! Even though he dealt with all the objections that religious people bring up and didn't even touch on the origin of life, he didn't count on the fact that religious people would make a judgement on his theory without even reading his book or looking at the evidence. What a surprise!

Nobody thought England would retain the Ashes, or that Nick Clegg was a Jack Daniels drinker, but you can't predict everything! People often surprise us. They're unpredictable. Why is that? Because God is free and we're made in his image. Don't understand that explanation? That's the point!

Let me make a prediction. Scientists will never explain free will. Oh wait, they already have. It's a constant feedback mechanism that reacts with your genetic makeup, all your relevant past experiences stored in your brain and the immediate environment. Does that make us all automatons? Do we not have minds, because the mind is all in the brain? That's what my explanation would lead you to believe. It's much better to think that there's more than this material world and make the word material sound really, really bad. It keeps me in a job, anyway.

I personally believe that the way our ancestors talked about things is true, but that's just me. God said to Moses, "I am what I am, and what I am needs no excuses". Yes, God came out to Moses. He loves musical comedy. So I urge you to go to see a West End show so you can be just like God.

Read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk.)
Helpfully, Lord Sacks makes his Credos available free on his website.

The Very Reverend Dr Jane Shaw, Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco

2011-01-05T22:35:00.005Z

On how to start the new year by committing to see the world anew or new year, new you!

Have you made your New Year's resolutions, yet? I bet you don't keep to them, because you're not religious enough. You have no willpower.

But New Year's resolutions aren't a Christian thing. They go back all the way to the Romans. Julius Caesar changed the calendar to start on January 1st rather than March 1st and so the new year became associated with Janus who looks backwards and forwards. This neatly leads me into talking about Advent - no-one's done that recently, right?

St John the Baptist is talked about during Advent, although his nativity is celebrated in June. Wasn't that John such a hippy? Jumping around in the water with a great big lousy beard and tattered clothes! He baptised people, which is why he's called St John the Baptist. This religion thing is really very simple, huh? Think you could do my job? Think again!

When you're baptised you have to repent (here comes my next segue). Repentance has been said to be about feeling contrite and doing penance, but actually, in my very learned opinion, it's about change. It comes from the Greek word 'metanoia' (can't you see the resemblance?) which means 'get stones out of your mind, man' - in other words, enter into a new way of seeing things, and change. Maybe this religion's thing isn't so simple, after all, eh?

To change and move forward we have to look back, and don't forget to look sideways at what everyone else is doing too so you don't look like a complete fool spouting nonsense. And we have to be honest with ourselves and admit when we're wrong. That's it, renounce your faith, everyone! Only joking!

To get back to New Year's resolutions (did you forget that's what we were talking about?) - as well as being able to look backwards and forwards, and sideways of course, and being honest with ourselves, we also need to have imagination to conceive of a better future. Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky.

Get out of your minds, man, and conceive of a future where you live for today, it isn't hard to do, nothing to live or die for, and no religions too. Imagine all the people, living life in peace. It's music and art and literature that gives us empathy for others and a rich and happy life. And the willpower to make changes.

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk.)

Archbishop Bernadito Auza, papal nuncio to Haiti

2010-12-19T16:59:00.004Z

On rejoicing in God's presence even in the chaos of Haiti or I don't live in an ivory tower, honest

I have this daily ritual of standing at my office window which is not in anything that even looks like a tower and is in no way made of ivory, looking out at the grinding poverty, the shanty towns and the sick of Port-au-Prince.

One American TV evangelist said that the Haitians had brought the earthquake on themselves by making a pact with the devil. I wish he hadn't said that as it proves Christopher Hitchens' claim that religion makes good people do bad things and intelligent people say stupid things. We must prove the Hitch wrong before it's too late. Here goes.

Despite all my prayers to God and the sterling work of the Roman Catholic Church, the shanty towns have grown and the people still live in poverty and with the threat of fatal disease. Where are you, God? Have you taken a sabbatical this year?

Many people of profound faith experience this doubt, though I'm not saying I have experienced it, of course. Some people have. But not me. But what might comfort some people is to ignore their worries and believe that God has a plan that we can't pretend to know anything about. Maybe suffering, disease and hideous death are good things according to God's morality. And if that makes you think, 'well - if that's his morality I don't want to worship him', then you haven't really grasped the point I'm trying to make.

If we look at the Bible, we'll see a lot of evidence of how horrible and vindictive God has been to people in the past who kept worshipping him. Abraham nearly sacrificed his only son, for Christ's sake! Job suffered hugely just over a bet God had with the devil. Do you want to worship a gambler? A gambler of human lives? Why not?

This way lies despair. As C.S.Lewis said, the existence of suffering is the atheist's argument for God's non-existence. Or, at least, one of them.

But, you're forgetting. God has experienced great pain. He was flogged, he was nailed on a cross and he died (but didn't die). One Haitian woman told a British journalist that God was suffering with them. There is but one answer - God is a sado-masochist.

And that's what Christmas is all about. God exposes himself to us, wants us to hurt him, and then he will give us release. He emptied himself by becoming like us and getting nailed on a cross. My God does not hide himself from suffering or shun pain - he positively revels in it.

While you revel in your own way this Christmas, remember us Christians who will revel in the way God intended us to - in our own suffering and the suffering of others.

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

The Right Reverend Geoffrey Rowell, Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe

2010-12-13T23:07:00.003Z

On the lasting relevance of St Paul's great discovery in Athens or how you've got to trick people into believing in God.

I'm a very important man, you know. I'm very good friends with Rowan, or the Archbishop of Canterbury to you. We went to Greece together the other week. Separate rooms, you understand. We went on business. The business of talking with other people who believe in the same fictional God that we do, but believe He wants us to do slightly different things. Then we went sight-seeing. St Paul went to Athens, too. It was a bit different in his day - he just couldn't get through to those really clever, sophisticated, sceptical philosophers. I wonder why?

So he made something up (old trick in religious circles). He had seen an altar to 'an unknown god' and said that was his God and his God had made the world and all the people in it. And he asked the Greeks whether they ever felt a longing for something more. That was his God. At this the Greeks laughed for their longings were not godly.

Another trick you can use to try to convert people is to say you had a dream about God. Jacob tried this one, but it's not recorded how many people he convinced that he saw god climbing a ladder. What would Freud say about such a dream, eh?

Now, these two examples are a bit distant from your experience so I'll come up with my own trick. I'll take something you don't like, like a hoody-wearing grafitti artist, and tell you that all he wants is world peace and a world without war. I told him that the place he sought was heaven. Just before scurrying off the train to get away!

So, we all want a place where there's no war, only love, justice and peace. Only if you believe in God will you get it! The catch is, you only get it after you die. Which is annoying as enjoying it gets a bit hard when you're slowly decomposing. But, at Advent you should be thinking about Christ's birth and death. And forgetting that both stories were nicked from pagan deities anyway.

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read it on timesonline.co.uk)

Apologies for the lateness of this post. Baby kept me busy.

Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

2010-12-05T16:41:00.007Z

On an identity rooted not in confrontation, but education, or give us more faith schools, please!

First of all, Happy Hannukah, everybody!

Second of all, it's so good to be able to reuse my platitudes from Thought for The Day.

Jews are celebrating Hannukah, so let me tell you what it's all about. It is inspired by the films I♥Maccabees 1 and 2. In these stories, the janitors sat around in an existential angst wondering what life is all about until the Temple in Jerusalem fell down around their ears and the Maccabees rose in revolt to rebuild and rededicate it and relight its menorah, the most visible symbol of the festival today (and called candlebridges in your local garden centre.)

But this story didn't make it into the Jewish Bible because the Jews didn't want to be remembered for liking a weird David O. Russell film. They knew about memes long before Dawkins, you see, and used this knowledge to their advantage to promote the memes they wanted to be associated with and stop the memes they didn't.

One story that was allowed in the Jewish Bible was how the Jews were the first ever people to have universal free education for children. Mainly for teaching them the Jewish faith, of course. It's what I was saying about knowing how to keep certain memes going - transmit them to the young and they'll believe them for the rest of their life and transmit them to their children ad infinitum. So these schools taught that being Jewish was not about fighting, but about culture and spirituality, and so it still is today.

So faith schools are a great thing, because otherwise how do we brainwash our children into believing the things we want them to believe?

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).
Helpfully, the Chief Rabbi publishes his unedited Credos free on his own website.

Monsignor Roderick Strange, Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome

2010-11-28T13:50:00.007Z

On how we are called not once but many times or being a doubter proves you're a good Christian.

Happy Advent everybody! Advent starts for real on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, not the 1st December as your chocolate advent calendar tells you. So it starts on 28th November this year. We Christians get to put our decorations up early, you know.

But Advent is not about chocolate or calendars or decorations. Oh no, it's about the past, the future and the present. It's about waiting. It can be about anything you want it to be. Today I want it to be about renewing your faith. I know that some of you Times readers may not be as faithful as you should be. Take a minute now to renew that faith. There, don't you feel better? It's not as good as the first time, is it? But it can still be satisfying as you reach middle age and people are still doing it into their seventies and eighties, don't you know?

One of my friends has recently died and I would like to speak about his several calls to faith, but not give too much away for I would be invading the privacy of his grieving family. Suffice to say that he was born and baptised a Catholic and became a very successful businessman. One of his children did something that I'm not going to tell you about but I will tell you it wasn't awful. You'll just have to guess what it was. Anyway, that made my friend much more religious (so it must have been something to do with religion, just keeping you guessing!). He helped other people a lot more, because being religious makes you a better person, obviously. But he was a businessman so some people didn't like his manner. So being religious doesn't make you a better liked person. Obviously.

My friend experienced another renewal of faith as he was dying. His daughter found a quote from the recently beatified Paul Newman which was helpful in this time of great sadness, "Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it." No, that's not right...

And you never know, maybe this year Christ will come again and take over his throne on earth. And not before time.

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk.)

Not Credo

2010-11-21T20:28:00.004Z

Evidence that morals are not absolute. One pope decides that condoms are evil when they are the newfangled contraceptive and another decides nearly 50 years and millions of deaths from Aids later that actually, they're alright - for limited use. How long before it's alright to use them whoever you are?

Plus, apparently popes aren't infallible. So does that mean he's wrong about condoms? I'm confused.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, minister of Maidenhead Synagogue

2010-11-21T19:35:00.004Z

On how women rabbis point the way in the Anglican debate or how we're more progressive than you, ner-ner!

The Church of England are close to breaking point over women clergy. What a shame. We've dealt with the issue in Judaism and I'm going to tell you how progressive and amazing we are.

Female rabbis were very hard to accept by many of us, including me. Male domination was just a way of life. Women were treated with civility but were not seen to be as able to believe ridiculous things and tell others to believe them too, so were not allowed to be religious leaders.

But, you see, Jewish women had the Bible as evidence for women in leadership roles. Women such as Miriam and Deborah. Maybe you progressive gentiles should take a look at what you call the Old Testament for evidence about how highly women were valued. That's the problem with using scripture, of course: it can be used to defend any attitude and is open to wildly different interpretations. And yet we still manage to believe in a loving father figure that we largely create in our own minds.

In the end it was only tradition that had stopped women from becoming rabbis and when society's morals changed, they imposed different morals on Judaism. Or at least, part of Judaism. Orthodox communities have stuck to their guns and only allow people with penises to spout rubbish. Reform or Progressive Jews take the best thing about modernity, i.e. freedom, and transform their religion into something unrecognisable.

The 1970s saw the first ordination of female rabbis and now about 40% of all British Progressive rabbis are women. Once they started working in congregations people suddenly realised that women are equal with men, they are quite capable of believing and telling others to believe ridiculous things.

But women are different to men and I shall now wheel out some tired stereotypes about women bringing a more caring, sharing, listening and less competitive ethos into the rabbinate. The yearly Rabbi X-factor was scrapped very soon after women joined the ranks.

Amazingly, the congregation is able to see past the breasts and lack of penis and see that these women rabbis are people too. I was surprised to be able to do this, having been opposed to women rabbis because I thought all women thought about was shoes and handbags. But once I stopped ogling the tits of the first woman rabbi I heard speak and actually listened to her, I realised she was spouting first class tosh just as well as many male rabbis I had known.

We in Progressive Judaism have been able to cope with women rabbis. If you can't in the Church of England then you're obviously prejudiced and need to keep up with modern life. Or break your church apart. Your choice.

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

John Wilkins, former editor of The Tablet

2010-11-14T20:47:00.006Z

On the lasting legacy of Pope Benedict's visit or, why did it take you so long to get round to publishing my article? I wrote it months ago!

Just in case you'd forgotten, the Pope visited the UK a couple of months ago. It was a really, really important thing, you know, that this head of an ancient and discredited cult deigned to visit our humble little country.

For some reason, he was greeted with hostility. Oh yeah, that's 'cos the teachings of his church are responsible for the deaths of millions of Aids because of their systematic and pseudo-scientific lies about the efficacy of condoms. And 'cos of being the head of the biggest peadophile ring in the world. And lets not forget the effect of the church's teaching on contraceptives and abortion has on women in theocratic countries. Oops, I did.

But at least the media did their job and fawned all over him. As did the Queen and the whole government. Not like those awful people in Spain who have objected to the Holy Creepy Father attacking their secular state. I guess it's down to the legendary British tolerance. Tolerance of his wacky views on atheists and Nazism!

Because the Holy See is considered a state by some, although the people it purports to represent are already represented by their country of residence, the lovely little gentle gracious shy man got to have a go at politicians in the place where St Thomas More was convicted for putting the pope at the time before the king.

So the Bishop of Rome had a go at the descendants of the politicians who had helped their monarch break from his church for breaking from his church. He attacked the aggressive secularists who want church to be separate from state and religion to be a private matter. You see, his holiness wants religion to be shoved in everyone's faces and given special privileges so that it can be as discriminatory and offensive as it likes without fear of people criticising it. A reasonable request, don't you think?

As he acknowledged, the UK is a rainbow nation and he said the best way to help everyone get along is to force them to become Catholic. It would be particularly good as attendance at Mass has dropped considerably over the last few decades and we need more money from the collection plates to pay off all the child abuse victims.

His Popiness also got along spendidly with the Archbishop of Canterbury, despite all their religious differences and the fact that many Anglican bishops had recently defected to the Catholics because they object to anyone with a vagina being able to serve people wine. But they're very alike, il papi and the Archbish, pseudo-intellectuals who haven't really thought things through.

Loads of Catholics, like millions and millions, turned up to see him, despite him not really apologising or making changes after the child abuse scandals. But it is amazing to see how many people can keep their faith when the men entrusted with spreading God's word of love beat and sexually abuse children in their care. Quite extraordinary.

And then Paul Newman was beatified. The CofE doesn't care for Paul Newman, being more Robert Redford fans, and the Pope skirted all the minefields, such as his support for homosexual rights, and just talked about his charity work.

After showing himself to be so tolerant, clever and likeable, will atheists now stop being so horrible to poor Ratty? Pretty please? It hurts his feelings ever such a lot.

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

Commenting

2010-11-07T20:04:00.001Z

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Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

2010-11-07T14:58:00.006Z

On how regular worship is the mortar of the Big Society or religious people are better than non-religious people. Only they're not.

Who is going to do best out of this Big Society lark? Religious institutions, that's who! Though maybe not my own particular brand. Still, we may be able to get a bit of money from the ConDem government.

An academic from Harvard, don't you know, has published a book that says that religious Americans are nicer people than non-religious Americans. His survey found that religious Americans are more likely to give to charity, do voluntary work, donate blood, be honest, be kind, smile and have fewer diseases (I may have made a few of those up).

It's a good thing, this survey, as the same guy suggested ten years ago that people were becoming too individualistic and going bowling alone, which is no good when you want to get a drink but don't want someone to steal your lane while you're at the bar.

With some good deeds, like watering someone else's plants while they're away, not throwing slugs into a neighbours garden, and not urinating through your neighbour's letterbox, there was no difference between religious and secular. But no good deed was performed more by the non-religious than by the religious.

Another survey found that religious people across the world are more likely to kill someone for a religious cause and more likely to believe ridiculous things than non-religious people.

Back to this Harvard guy, though, and he also says in his book that religious people get more involved in community organisations and lead them more often. He also says that even fervently religious Americans believe people from other faiths could get to heaven. Haven't they read their religious texts properly?

Now, here's the catch. By religious people, read regular church or synagogue (or whatever other place of worship you have) goers. I have to admit, grudgingly, that it's the social engagement that makes people more altruistic, not the belief in a supernatural being. So it's not all good news for us god-botherers. All you have to do is join a club and you'll be a better person! Take up table tennis, bridge, amateur dramatics - or go to a church or synagogue (or other place of worship).

When I visit the synagogues of Britain I see this strong network of people doing good things for other people. They have to, 'cos there ain't no deity gonna do it for 'em! And, soon, there won't be a welfare state to do it for them, either. But I'm not suggesting that everybody is going to have to join one of us religious organisations if they want childcare or someone to look after their elderly relative, but it may help you to the front of the queue!

Read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).
Luckily, the Chief Rabbi freely publishes his (unedited) Credos on his own website.

Monsignor Roderick Strange, Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome

2010-10-31T09:22:00.006Z

On giving thanks for the unacknowledged saints in our midst or Is your grandma a potential saint? - write to the Catholic Church at...

Nobody's talked about All Saints Day recently, have they?

You horrible secular people in the UK may not celebrate All Saint's Day on 1st Nov, but we do in the very religious country of Italy, where a government minister can freely express a desire to wipe out atheists by joining up with the other monotheistic religions in some kind of super faith-army.

Of course, the UK is not a secular as some of my colleagues have been saying, with at least 41 million Christians and ten percent of those being Catholics according to our books, though only a quarter of those attend mass regularly.

Anyway, getting back to my topic, what is a saint anyway? Some people think saints have to be completely holy and never do anything bad, but that would be impossible! They just have to be as good a person as they can be. Hmm, I guess some atheists might actually be allowed to be saints on that criterion so let's give another. They have to believe in God. And that's it!

We'll ignore the fact that saints are technically people who are in heaven, and that there's a convoluted and bureaucratic process for beatifying and canonising people. At first saints were martyrs who had died for their faith, then, when persecution of Christians became rarer, saints were people who had lived for their faith. Now, saints are people who are nice to other people. Your grandma might be a saint, though she will never be recognised as such by the Catholic church.

Just to make this clearer for you, I will pick on the one class of people who I know all you nasty secularists in the UK venerate and worship daily - celebrities. By celebrities I don't mean those with real talent, like Susan Boyle and Michelle McManus who were found on those programmes of pious search for talent, Pop Idol and Britain's Got Talent and sang for the Pope on his recent visit to the UK. I mean talentless, one trick pony celebrities like Stephen Fry and Ricky Gervais who will, no doubt, be forgotten in a matter of months.

Stephen Fry has such an inflated sense of himself that he is bound to fall victim to schadenfreude (and, I have to confess, I will be laughing my head off when that happens!) and that is what makes him a bad candidate for a saint. Saints don't think of themselves that way at all but just do what they do as well as they can do it.

And those are the people we venerate on All Saints Day. Not the enormous number of people actually venerated as saints by the Catholic church.

Read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

Right Reverand Geoffrey Rowell, Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe

2010-10-24T19:34:00.006+01:00

On grace - we cannot earn it, count it or share it, or what does that even mean?

No man in this world has loved too much but many have loved in the wrong way. So said Pope Benedict XVI on his recent trip to the UK, referring to what they're euphemistically calling the clerical abuse scandal, which makes it sound like it's the poor clerics who are being abused, and not children.

No, the real quote is from a 17th century guy called Thomas Traherne. His work was lost until the 20th century but now we have his meditations on God to sustain us. He went to Oxford University but found the teachers all taught their subjects separately. So to bring them all together he started believing in God. That meant he could stop learning things because he found that God loved him and that was all that mattered.

You see, he came up with a great idea. The idea that God is love. Yes, the very same God who is jealous and smote the Israelites for the slightest transgression and turned a woman into salt for looking behind her. Yeah, he loves you baby.

God is love. Love is God. God loves you. You should love God. God. Love. God. Love. God. Love. Same thing. Love is of God. He who is born and loves knows God. He who does not love does not know God. A bit of Traherne again. Good stuff, huh? He also said, we only love because God loved us. God created the world in love. He made us in the image of his love. Have I said that God is love, yet?

St Paul, who basically created Christianity out of a Jewish rebel's deeds and sayings reported second-hand to him, said that when God created the world he 'emptied himself' into it, which isn't the same thing as saying God is love at all but I'm going to pretend it is. If you go by St Paul, God could just be all matter - or maybe dark matter. God knows the absence of God and the nothingness of death - cos there ain't no afterlife! It's all just a big con!

When Jesus died on the cross, they specifically nailed his arms outstretched as if he was hugging the world. The Romans didn't do that to anyone else who was crucified. No, they were all just nailed to an upright piece of wood and had their hands by their sides. Trust me, I'm a theologian.

Who else can I quote who said something about God and love? Oh, yeah. Gerard Manley Hopkins. He loved God. Mainly Jesus who was 'lovely in eyes and limbs'. Get a room! Oh, and Austin Farrer said "Jesus invisibly feeds your invisible soul and no science will ever be able to see or measure that last statement. So there."

And, by the way, Happy All Saints Day! Yes, it's that very important day that everyone knows about just after a very little observed festival called Hallowe'en. The fact that there's so many saints, or heroes of the Anglican Church as they're known, and they're all so unique shows there is a God (forget that there are a couple of hundred St Johns and quite a few St Mary's - and also that recognition as a saint is a formal, bureaucratic process).

As the anonymous psalmist said, "If you go down in the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise. If you go down in the woods today, you'd better go in disguise. For every saint that ever there was is gathered there together because today's the day after Hallowe'en."

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk.)

Nick Jowett, Vicar and Minister of St Andrew's Psalter Lane Anglican-Methodist Church, Sheffield

2010-10-16T19:35:00.006+01:00

On how diaries and journals give us the raw material of faith or I wish there was more evidence that my religion is true.

Isn't a shame that Jesus didn't write his memoirs for us to read so we wouldn't have to rely on the frankly dodgy writings otherwise known as the gospels. Ironic, huh? That the gospel aren't gospel. If only someone would find some writings in Jerusalem and be able to prove beyond doubt that they were written by Jesus, we would find out that he was just a Jewish rebel and not the son of God. Then we'd be able to give up this ridiculous religion once and for all.

In the absence of that, let's look at the writing of Christians through the ages for the evidence that Christianity isn't true. St Augustine's version of Christianity certainly wasn't true and he said stuff like, "Faith is believing in the unbelievable". And, he wrote his Confessions when he was old and religious so he would have interpreted his past in a distorted way.

What about Peter Abelard, who seduced his pupil Heloise, secretly married her against his vows and was then castrated by her uncle, who also forced her to become a nun? He was a very religious man but he can also give us an idea that religion isn't true. He said, "Doubt leads to investigation and investigation leads to the truth - there is no God."

But, to come to my personal favourite, John Wesley ('cos I'm partly a Methodist, you see). He wrote some stuff about his life to prove how godly he was. But even he said something that proves God doesn't exist: "When I was young I was sure of everything, as I grew older I grew less sure and now I am not sure of anything at all". Granted, he went on to say "except what God has revealed to me" but you know how good us religious people are at selecting bits of texts that agree with what we want to say.

Now, someone from a completely different faith but still very religious - the Dutch Jew Etty Hillesum. She died at Auschwitz but her diaries up to her transportation show how religious she was. Even she showed a bit of a humanist leaning, though, saying "Be peaceful in yourself and reflect peace to others. The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in the world." So true. If only there was less religion in the world, there would be less conflict.

And, finally, Thomas Merton, an American monk. He wrote diaries about how he wrestled with the life and God. In his own words, "Just listening and being attentive of God takes a lot of imagination."

These diaries, though written by people who believe slightly different things to me, should be more useful to people of faith than the bible, 'cos they should be able to work out that God doesn't exist more quickly. I prefer the gospel of Mark for that, though, as it leaves a lot open to interpretation and doesn't pretend that Jesus was resurrected like the others do and shows he was just a man.

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read it on timesonline.co.uk).

Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

2010-10-10T13:32:00.007+01:00

On the labour of love which was the apple of King James' eye or how the bible used to sound much better

In the absence of a suitable Jewish festival, I would like to say an early Happy 400th Birthday to the King James' Bible. I'm going to tell you all about this edition of the bible in an effort to show exactly how inter-faithy I am.

My story starts in the medieval period when the horrible Catholic church forbade anyone to read their sacred book in a language they could understand. They kept knowledge of what was actually in the bible to the priests 'cos they knew as soon as anyone actually read what was in it, they would see it for the pile of crap it was. Plus, it meant the priests could make up anything they wanted and justify it by saying it was in the bible.

Some people had tried to translate the bible, for instance Wycliffe in the 14th century. He criticised the pope for interfering with secular power, not at all relevant to today's situation so forget I mentioned it. For his sins his body was exhumed after he died and his remains burnt and thrown in a river. The Catholic church showing mercy and charity at all times.

Then there was Tyndale, who translated the New-fangled Testament from 1525. The Catholic church again displayed its Christian love for their fellow man by torturing him and burning him at the stake. There was a blip in the Reformation in England when Bloody Mary was queen and Tyndale's supporters fled to Geneva and published a new bible from there.

When James I came to the throne he decided to publish an official bible to rival the Geneva edition. But there were things in the bible he didn't like (understandably given the events of November 5th 1605), like calls to subjects to rebel against their kings, so his edition left out the marginal notes the Geneva bible had that encouraged this.

Other than that, it was a really good edition. English literature was having a heyday with some fellas called Johnson, Marlowe, Donne and some little known guy called Shakespeare writing some good stuff, so I'm told. But it didn't measure up to the King James Bible. Many of our everyday phrases come from that bible. Here are some examples:

"Neither a borrower or a lender be", "milk of human kindness", "give the devil his due", "more sinned against than sinning". Oh - no - wait. They're from Shakespeare.

How about "hell hath no limits", "there is no sin but ignorance", "money can't buy love". Just a minute. No, they're Christopher Marlowe.

What about these? "give peace a chance", "all you need is love", "imagine there's no heaven". Hang on, that's John Lennon! What's going on? It seems as though if you quote anyone at all you can get some nice sounding morals to guide you're life, and you don't need no stinking bible!

But that's clearly wrong. The King James Bible really does have these phrases "and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death", "if it be a son, then ye shall kill him", "for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God", "Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you". That's more like it. And it sounds even better in the original Hebrew.

Martin Luther King was a Christian and quoted the bible, so it must be good.

The texts a culture teaches its children shape their landscape of literacy, their horizon of aspiration. People who can quote the bible walk tall because they know what a load of bullshit it is and how they don't have to believe anything in it and can live life without worrying about some all-powerful god judging them because he was made up. You bloggers don't write like people did in the 17th century [No shit, Sherlock. Ed].

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).
Helpfully, the Chief Rabbi publishes freely available (if unedited) versions of his Credo on his own website.

Monsignor Roderick Stranger than fiction, Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome

2010-10-03T20:29:00.003+01:00

On how guardian angels (yes, really) alert us to greater depths or how all bad things can be blamed on fallen angels and all good things on good angels (yes, really)

I can't really believe I'm writing this and so I'll fill half of this article by talking about something else to distract you from the utter ridiculousness of the final conclusion.

Muriel Spark was a novelist. She started with a title and then built a story around it. She made up a lot of stuff. She thought that this made her spiritual and she felt an affinity with the man of the moment, Paul Leonard Newman, who once said "You only grow when you're alone" so she left her husband and son to set up a life in a different country. Very spiritual of her.

The title of today in my Catholic calendar is the feast of the Guardian Angels. Now, look, I know you don't believe in angels, but just hear me out. You Times' readers still do superstitious things like throw salt over your shoulder, don't you? You don't? Oh, well, let's pretend you do. Angels are just on the other end of the superstition spectrum.

What are we to make of these made-up spiritual beings? Well, forget everything you ever thought you knew about angels. They're not small fat babies with wings. Ignore that image. It's a distraction. Don't think about flying cherubs. Whatever you do, don't equate angels with those cute putti you see in Renaissance paintings. Those Renaissance painters didn't know a thing about angels. But I do.

First, let's think about the made-up bad types of angels. We call them devils because they are diabolical. Or is it the other way round? Either way, it's a circular argument, which are the best and most watertight kind. If I consult my dictionary I can see that diabolical means very, very bad, so these fallen angels are therefore very, very bad.

Sometimes very, very bad things happen in the world, like genocide, terrorism or horrific child abuse being covered up by an institution that is supposedly guarding the morals of society. Because these things are very, very bad, perhaps it's the fallen angels who are causing them. (Semantic arguments are the very next best thing after circular arguments. Neither can possibly be refuted by critics.) It's not actual people just behaving badly like sometimes people do. No, it's the devils at work. No human being is to blame.

If devils are diabolical then non-fallen angels are angelic. In my dictionary angelic means very, very good. So conversely, when anything really nice happens, like someone gives you a free chocolate in a supermarket, or decides not to splash you by driving their car through a puddle in the road when you're walking on the pavement in the rain, then you should thank your guardian angel.

So devils are responsible for everything bad and angels are responsible for everything good. Firstly, what's the point of humans and secondly, doesn't God have any power? And thirdly, Christ is the centre of the angelic world. (This is just an assumption and not an argument so is a bit shaky.) Anyway, up the Catholics!

Click here to read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

The Very Reverend Dr John Shepherd, Dean of Perth, Western Australia

2010-09-25T18:55:00.005+01:00

On how God's unconditional love gives all our lives a purpose or how I have reinterpreted the Abrahamic God to be more palatable to all you 21st century wusses

Life, what's it all about? Some people say the meaning of life is 42 whereas others say it's to be a better person than you started out. Not that you started out bad, of course, that's what the other side believes.

And the best way to be a better person is to believe that there is an all-powerful being in the sky who is very, very good and very, very loving and will never, ever desert you no matter what you do. That way you can feel secure enough to do the right thing. Whereas if you believe what the other side tells you about going to hell if you do bad things, that's going to make you more likely to do bad things. Reverse psychology, mate.

So, God loves you, baby. Every one of you. Even those who don't believe in him. You see, I'm going to pick bits out of the Bad Book to show you this is true and leave out the specific bits that mention going to hell and this God being judgmental in any way. You see, when Bejeesus came to the world he took over from his father (who is, of course, actually the same person) he was a bit nicer. Not so much of a ball-buster.

Even though it says it quite clearly in the Bad Book, the idea that we are all judged at the end of the world is against the spirit of the book. Honestly, I've read it all and the general gist, despite the actual words, is that God could never be that nasty.

So, God's not going to judge you. All you need to do is judge yourself and if you think you're an OK kinda guy, you're in! And if you don't, you're still in! Everyone's a winner!

But don't judge others. They may not be doing something you agree with, but it's probably just God working in mysterious ways. Then again, even if you judge others you'll still be in. So don't worry about it.

In an ultimately flawed attempt to use logic in this area, if God made us, he couldn't not love what he has made and couldn't send anyone to hell. If God really is the creator of everything, would he even care if we believed in him or not? Would he care if we tried to make other people believe in him? Probably not. So I'll stop.

Click here to read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell, Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe

2010-09-20T19:46:00.004+01:00

On how the power of Newman's words resonates down the years or, I know a lot about the films of Paul Leonard Newman so I'm going to tell you all about them

Some other fella dared to talk about the wisdom of Paul Newman a few weeks ago in this column, so I thought I should really let him know that I am the leading authority on this towering intellect. Me, do you hear?!

Ah, he was so great. He said so many memorable things. For instance, "Newman's second law: Just when things look darkest, they go black." This understanding of the essential darkness of life resonated with moviegoers.

The Pope will be beatifying Paul Newman for his services to charity (all post-tax profits and royalties of his food line were donated to charity). He gave $250,000 to the Catholic Relief Services to aid refugees in Kosovo in 1999. By 2007, however, his allegiance had changed, and he donated $10m to the Anglican Kenyon College in Ohio.

Despite this, L'Osservatore Romano (the newspaper of the Holy See in Rome) lauded Newman's philanthropy and generosity. This was the first sign that, in time, he would become a saint.

He was such a forward thinking mind that he campaigned for gay rights and same-sex marriage, something the Vatican is deigning to overlook.

For Newman as an actor, entrepreneur, philanthropist and auto-car enthusiast, life was for living and if you happened to do well for yourself it was your duty to help others.

But, in his own humble words, "I don't think there's anything exceptional or noble in being philanthropic. It's the other attitude that confuses me."

The original article (actually about John Henry Newman, of course) can be read here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

Apologies for the lateness of this post. I was away. And ill.

Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

2010-09-12T15:38:00.005+01:00

On how conscience stands between us and the void of unbelief or how there's no way I'm going to think I'm just another animal, I'm special, me!

Scientists make me feel inadequate. They tell me that I'm not the be all and end all of all creation and I don't like that. First it was Copernicus and Galileo who said the earth wasn't the centre of the universe, then some other less famous scientists decided that our solar system and galaxy are basically backwaters.

Then Spinoza said free will was an illusion and that we're purely physical. He shattered my dream that there is some invisible being inside me telling me what to do. Then Marx was so rude as to say that religion was the opium of the masses.

Darwin said we are related to animals and Freud said something nonsensical. Now there are neo-Darwinians who I won't name who say that we are just selfish genes vying to get into the next generation but if I had actually read the book I would know that the same neo-Darwinian also said that because we are conscious we don't have to follow the selfish path. But, of course, because I am religious (if you hadn't guessed) I just read the book from the title.

And because I am religious I wilfully misunderstand the process of evolution and represent it as completely random rather than natural selection acting as a directing force on random mutation.

It's not fair. Through science we have understood what no other species has about the universe and the natural world so you would think we would be special in some way. But no, we're no better than worms. Of course, there's nothing wrong with being a worm, it's just that I'm not one. And they do very valuable things, like eat vegetable matter and transform it into rich compost.

Like worms, we have a special adaptation as well. It's called culture and it's what makes humans special. We can make stuff up. And the biggest made up stuff of all is religion, which makes us feel better about ourselves and helps us make up other stuff, like how Christians and Jews abolished slavery.

Besides, science can't teach us anything that wasn't written down a few thousand years ago by people in the desert. Here's a quote from one book: "Bow to me, for you are merely worms before Zod."

No animal smeared faeces on their bed and called it art; no animal said "For I'm your lady, and you are my ma-a-a-a-an"; no animal ever thought they were no different to a human being (although I'm not sure with the dolphins). We may share 98% of our genes with chimps but I can't see the resemblance. I mean, they may have social groupings and use tools and the rudiments of language, but they're nothing like us! They fight and kill each other and they're sexually promiscuous, so nothing like humans.

So, believing in a patriarchal superbeing who demands my complete subservience and controls what I wear, eat and do with my life is obviously the alternative to admitting that we are nothing but an animal with a special adaptation. And it makes me feel good about myself.

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk.)
Helpfully, the Chief Rabbi makes his writings freely available online here.

Chief Rabbit spouting again (not Credo)

2010-09-08T20:13:00.002+01:00

Here's a link to Platitude of the Day for a summing up of the risible reply to Stephen Hawking on Thought for the Day by our old friend Johnny Sacks.

Monsignor Roderick Stranger than fiction, Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome

2010-09-04T18:55:00.004+01:00

On how we should remember that failure is not an obstacle to virtue or, yes, this is a rare Catholic admission that the Pope has failed

The Pope's coming to get you, all you gays and women and atheists in the UK! A previous pope from a very long time ago once said your English were angels, but many things have changed since then. That was before you started criticising Ratfink the great.

This pope from ages ago who doesn't even matter now was called Gregory. He saw some Angle slaves in a market and made this very clever play on words. History does not record whether or not he had them freed, but God approved of slavery back then. Anyhoo, Gregory sent Augustine to England to convert the Angles and Saxons and Jutes to christianity as they were nasty pagans and Gregory would not rest until they were properly brought under control.

He wrote a lot about personal issues that shows how honest and forthright he was. One of his homilies includes this passage: "If I said what I really think in front of people I want to convert, they wouldn't, so I play with the truth and trick them into it." Great stuff. That has been the basis of the Catholic church's mission ever since.

So, Gregory was at least honest about his intentions, which leads me into a neat segue to the current successor of Peter, who has been far from honest. But, then, he is a bit old and a bit tired and doesn't like to be in the public eye, so he makes little slips now and then.

Pope Benny will start the process of making a new demi-god when he arrives in the UK, and in Catholicism that's not against the first couple of commandments at all, you're reading them wrong. All Paul Newman needs to do from beyond the grave is a couple of miracles, maybe his salad dressing will cure someone's cancer or something, and he'll be there. He used to be an Anglican, by the way, but converted. One-nil to us!

Newman said some interesting stuff, too, like "Newman's first law: it is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down." This is an axiom that the Pope should definitely take to heart.

Stop being nasty to the Pope, Times' readers!

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

Stephen Hawking vs. God (not Credo)

2010-09-03T19:20:00.003+01:00

On how physics shows that God does not need to exist

The media furore over Stephen Hawking's comments are amazing. Every religious nutter and his (or her) dog who has a soapbox from which to peddle their nonsense has something to say about it. One of our favourites here at InCredolous is Chief Rabbit Lord Sacks. He said:

"There is a difference between science and religion [how I hate that Stephen J Gould gave the theists their own scientist approved unassailable magisterium]. Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation [too right - interpret anything any way you want as long as it proves god exists]. Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean [should read: religion puts unrelated things together to make false meanings]. They are different intellectual enterprises."

Before that he had said that Stephen Hawking was not the first to discover God did not create the universe. As if he knows God didn't create the universe. So if you know that, Lord Sacks, why do you worship a god that said he created the universe when you know he was lying because of all the lovely science that's happening now.

Some bright spark at the Catholic Herald suggests that Hawking can not explain how something came out of nothing. Do you read your own stuff, Quentin de la Bedoyere? How do you explain how something i.e. god, came out of nothing?

Some mathematician at a two-bit university called Oxford says science flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries as a way of exploring the perfection of god's creation. Well, yes, but it soon showed how unperfect the world is and led to the break down of belief in the divine, so what's your point exactly?

The one truly insightful comment came from Graham Farmello of the Telegraph saying that Hawking basically did this as a publicity stunt to generate sales of his new book, just like putting god in the back of his Brief History of Time. This may well be true, and well done to Prof Hawking as it seems to have worked.

Jeremy Henzell-Thomas, former director of The Book Foundation promoting the universal message of Islam as revealed in the Holy Qur'an

2010-08-28T16:36:00.006+01:00

On how Ramadan is not just about fasting and abstinence but a way to divine revelation or Ramadan, Ramadan, ooh rama rama rama, Ramadan.

Happy Ramadan everybody! My mum's not a Muslim but I am. My mum had a dream which she misinterpreted, thinking the dove in the cave was something to do with the Christian version of a supernatural being but it was actually the Muslim one. If only she'd known before wasting her life on the wrong religion. Sorry, mum.

Ramadan is not just about fasting, but about being good and nice and kind, which are things the rest of society can never be as long as they eat and drink during the time a gaseous fireball shines its light on their part of a watery rock an arbitrary number of times.

Ramadan is just the tonic everyone needs for being so materialistic as to eat food and drink liquid to sustain their physical bodies. You must deny the fact that you're an animal to be a good and nice person. Feed that invisible, intangible, unknowable, unbelievable you inside, instead.

Ramadan is the time to make yourself feel good through self-sacrifice so you can be self-righteous during the rest of the year, not like you non-Muslim Times readers who never deny yourselves anything and are totally evil for doing yoga just for the stretching, even though everyone knows it's supposed to be for meditation to attain spiritual peace. Although it clearly doesn't do that as only Ramadan is the way to do that, as Islam is right and Hinduism isn't, obviously.

Ramadan, according to wikipedia, comes from the Arabic word for intense heat, scorched ground and lack of rations, but that's not why Ramadan came about. No, it was always spiritual and never pragmatic.

In a neat segue, how about I talk about the origin of the word Credo - the title of this column. I am a comparative linguist, you see, so I know about these things. In a non-existent language called Indo-European that we linguists have made up by comparing lots of modern languages, credo doesn't mean 'I believe' as all you Times' journalists and readers were taught. It actually means, 'I make jam' from the root 'curd'. Related words like cur and curse clearly show how this was a negative word that referred to making jam out of other people's beliefs.

Back to my mum, she and everyone else 'Celtic' (clearly related to the word clitoris, referring to the sexy nature of Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish people) are all Muslim deep down, they just don't know it. Some of the 'Celtic' temperament overlaps with Islamic principles, so it must be true.

I could do another history of a word for you. It's my party trick. Go on, give me a word, any word. Belief, nice one. This is clearly related to the words belly and belfry, bringing us neatly back to the feeling you get in your stomach when having to read this drivel and what I must have bats in to write it.

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this at timesonline.co.uk).

Dr Ian Bradley, Reader in Church History and Practical Theology, University of St Andrews

2010-08-21T15:28:00.006+01:00

On how we must wipe out the long shadow of fundamentalism, or how holy texts don't need to be taken literally.

Fundamentalism was born in 1910 - launched by some evangelical Christians in the US. Who'd've thunk it? They distributed pamphlets that told everybody to take the Christian book of made up stuff literally. That's right, they suggested people really believe things like a supernatural being made a man out of clay, that a first century Jewish rebel rose from the dead after three days in a tomb, and that 'God' is both three and one at the same time. Unbelievable, huh?

It is exactly a hundred years since then, and look what fundamentalism has done to our society. Those evangelical Christians have got even more fundamental, and fundamentalism has spread to the Catholics, the Muslims and even the Jews, but not really the Anglicans. We're really forward thinking and liberal with our clear non-discrimination against homosexuals and women.

Liberalism in religion could be described by four words picked randomly by me: grace, order, openness and diversity. Actually, at the heart of all the big religions are these four characteristics of 'God'. And you will notice, those of you Times readers who are almost as clever as me (almost, because it was me that came up with the words, after all), that these four words' initial letters spell good.

Our 'good' 'God' is not jealous in any way, or vicious, or vengeful, like it says in the religious texts. Let's get away from those texts and make up our own, 'good' version of 'God'. More modern interpretations of the big religions use these ideas as their understanding of 'God' anyway, and don't really use the religious texts to work out what he's like, otherwise good would not be the word. You'd have to choose four other adjectives to describe the scriptural god, like cruel, underhand, nasty and terrible, for instance.

As the Saints Agnetha, Benny, Björn and Anna-Fride say, "That kind of man is hard to find, but I can't get him off my mind/ Ain't it sad?/ And if he happened to be free, I bet he wouldn't fancy me/ That's too bad!"

So, let's not actually look at the religious texts, let's go with my grace, order, openness and diversity, because those spell 'good'. Because 'God' is 'good', humans are 'good' and the world is 'good'. Sure, shit happens, but essentially it's all 'good'.

My book, Grace, Order, Openness and Diversity is available in all good books shops, by the way.
Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

2010-08-14T18:22:00.009+01:00

On how doing guilt obliges us to accept responsibility for our sins, or how you should feel really bad about yourselves.

Happy Yom Kippur, everybody! Yom Kippur is a time for Jews to repent and confess their sins to an imaginary being in the sky. If you see me on the street talking to myself, don't worry, I'm not mad, I'm just apologising for my behaviour to a non-existent supernatural being. That's not mad at all. In fact, more of you should be doing it.

You Times readers never take responsibility for the bad things you do. You blame everybody apart from yourselves. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Then you'll feel better.

I think Judaism gets it right. Yes, I know, it's surprising that I, as the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, am actually a practising Jew, but it's true! Anyway, we Jews feel guilty at this time of year so we can get it all out of the way and get forgiven by an imaginary person and get on with sinning for the next year before we have to feel guilty again.

Feeling guilty means we're better people than the rest of you. Feeling guilty means that when things go wrong we don't blame other people. When we're persecuted we don't blame other people, we blame ourselves. And it makes us feel like better people. It gives us power, it makes us free. Without this feeling of guilt, society will be destroyed. It is dangerous and addictive to not feel guilty about things - don't do it!

You'll be the happiest you've ever been if you just feel decently guilty of every bad thing you've ever done for a few days, believe you've been forgiven by some non-existent deity and then get on with your life for another year. Honest!

Read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).
Helpfully, Lord Sacks publishes his Credos on his website.

Monsignor Roderick Strange, Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome

2010-08-07T14:51:00.005+01:00

On how good fortune comes from God, not from our own efforts or don't blame God when things go wrong

If you'll allow me to paraphrase the 'good book' out of context for a moment, Isaiah 10.15 says that you are naughty for taking all the credit when you do something good because you only do it because 'God' is controlling you.

But 'God' gets annoyed if you then blame him when something bad happens, because he doesn't control everything, you know. Keep up! This is how double-think works! 'God' both is and isn't all powerful, so there. And if you don't believe it, then maybe 'God' will do what he says in the rest of Isaiah chapter 10 - send a wasting disease on you, or consume you with fire. Your choice.

Let me tell you a story of a man because a life story is so much more convincing than talking about my religion. This man dealt very stoically with the death of his wife after 24 years of marriage. He didn't question his faith and, instead, in this time of grief, decided to become a priest. The church is always there to help when people are vulnerable.

To reinterpret the burning bit, if you do keep your faith when bad things happen to you, the fire won't be a bad one, it'll be a good one. That's the great thing about the 'good book', it can be interpreted in so many ways!

Read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this article on timesonline.co.uk).

The Right Reverend Geoffrey Howell, Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe

2010-07-31T20:21:00.004+01:00

On how faithfulness should overcome conflict in the Church, or between churches (or religions as they were once known).

Aren't the media awful? They are always wheeling out non-stories about conflicts in churches (or religions as they were once known) in a sensationalist way. But they don't know what they're talking about, these media folk, as understanding churches (or religions as they were once known) takes an awful lot of classical education and incredible ability to double-think. They're jolly complicated, you know.

There are lots of people studying churches (or religions as they were once known). In the 19th century people actually studied churches, would you believe? The actual buildings with pews and altars and lecterns and pulpits in and everything! Nowadays people study churches (or religions as they were once known). But by looking at the actual buildings, you can see that even in one church(or Christianity as it was once known) there are a huge number of different beliefs.

The Quakers do it their way, the Catholics do it their way, the Orthodox churches do it their way (and, I don't mind telling you, I quite like the Orthodox way) but the Church of England does it the right way, of course.

But I digress. I wanted to show off my learning about the history of the church (or, well, you know the drill). What I can show you is that the church (...) has changed for every era and culture and become what it needed to be for those people at that time. But it has stayed the same.

If you're approaching my level of classical education, you may have attempted to read some Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose - the other ones are too diffcult even for me!). In that book of made up stuff, separate to the real book of made up stuff, of course, there is some real history. A monk called Joachim had a thought. Hitler thought it sounded good and wanted to usher in the age of the Spirit. And people say he was an atheist. Pah!

But of course, Joachim was wrong. Every age is the age of the Son (well, in the Roman period he was confused with the Sun, but that's another matter). Even though the church (one more time, all together now...) has changed utterly since its beginnings, a man in a big hat and purple shoes has said that it hasn't. And I believe him.

You can read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read it on timesonline.co.uk).

Sheik Ali Gomaa, Grand Mufti of Egypt

2010-07-25T19:52:00.006+01:00

On how a joint approach is the only way to avoid catastrophe or, why can't we all just get along?

The great Islamic cleric, His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, has spoken. And what he said blew my mind, dude! It's like, to save the world, man, everyone has to be more like us Muslims. Awesome!

Us Muslims are really leading the way, man. We've selflessly given up drilling for oil, building huge skyscrapers and artificial islands. That's over, brah! And, like, half the population are banned from driving cars. And unnatural things that are against nature like the internet or watching football on TV are, like, so not cool.

Hey, you can't judge Islam by Muslims, dude, judge us by our teachings which are, like, so utterly spiritual and are about nature and people and love and whatnot. It's bitchin', brah. And if you break the code, you will get aggro. It's far too deep to go into any detail about it, but take my word for it, brah, it's da bomb.

The Prince! That man is bogus. Not! He's always been on our side, promoting understanding between us and other dudes from other beaches. And he promotes the spiritual, too, man. You can't save the world unless you got some spiritual sense, some feeling of wonder and mystery and deepness. Whoa. That was deep.

You can read the original article here (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk).

Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

2010-07-17T18:13:00.010+01:00

On how the good that we do continues long after our death

A good friend of mine died recently. Death makes people think of God. My friend was very religious and his death at a young age may have made some people question their faith, but not me. The number of people who had gathered at my friend's funeral is testament to how many lives he touched.

The best way to illustrate this is to use a work of fiction. No, not one of the books of made up stuff (I couldn't find anything in there about altruism), but a film. A film in which a boy decides to do good things for people and they, in turn, do good things for other people. Can't virtue be contagious? Isn't there a word for that? A contagious idea? A virus of the mind?

God is bound by the laws of nature and so can't change anything in this world. Well, he can - but only very few people at a time as his power is quite limited.

Immortality is gained by doing good things here on earth, 'cos you sure aren't going to get immortality anywhere else!

Read the original article (warning - you will have to pay to read this on timesonline.co.uk but, helpfully, Lord Sacks also posts his Credos on his website that you can read free).

Monsignor Roderick Strange, Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome

2010-07-11T13:01:00.000+01:00

On how biblical texts have the power to dispel all the shadows of doubt if you pick the right ones and think about how they do hard enough and stop yourself thinking about how they don't like John Humphreys does.

I live in Italy, don't you know, so I can visit friends in Umbria with ease. One of these friends had a copy of John Humphrey's misguided In God we Doubt, which I had meant to read, so I did. John doesn't really get it, does he?

He suggests not many people have been converted by reading the one of the books of made up stuff. Well, let me tell you, I find a lot in it to help me, as long as I pick the right bits.

For instance, the Good Samaritan story is great, isn't it? If Jesus hadn't told us that being prejudiced is wrong, we wouldn't have known, would we?

I could pick out all sorts of bits from one of the books of made up stuff that sound good. Some bits you have to think about for a long time before they mean something. For instance, a sentence from Jeremiah has been occupying my time for quite a while. If I think really hard, I can get it to mean anything I want. And if you think about it, you can make it mean anything you want, too.

By the way, my friend in Umbria is now becoming a Catholic! It wasn't after reading the book of made up stuff I've been talking about. It was after reading a book by someone else about the book of made up stuff. It's so much better to have the important bits pointed out to you than wading through the rubbish yourself.

Read the original (warning - you will have to pay to read the original on timesonline.co.uk).