Religion

The gravity of Stephen Hawking’s non-god

September 2, 2010

I thought the silly season for news stories ended when term started. But apparently not. On the other hand I may be unusual in thinking this is a complete non-story: Stephen Hawking apparently thinks scientific theory renders God redundant. The journalist reporting this seems to take Hawking’s earlier reference to “the mind of God” – [...]

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Getting my head around Jewish identity

August 29, 2010

I’ve been trying to clarify some ideas for a sabbatical proposal in my own head. I’m all too aware that what I’m proposing deals with some controversial areas, and that by concentrating on one particular perspective I run the risk of being accused of bias. A sabbatical, however, is relatively short, and I think it [...]

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Fresh Expressions of Funeral

August 12, 2010

I have begun raising this with various people, but it seems to me that the current mainstream funeral provision in the UK is misconceived. There are, I think, a significant number of people who have some fairly inchoate beliefs, and a larger number who are well aware that within their family grouping there are religious [...]

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This image of heaven must go

August 10, 2010

Despite Rob Kashow’s comment, it’s not so much that I find addressing the question of pets in heaven to be a “waste of time” as that a) I find it difficult to deal with the level of evangelical seriousness with which the original poster dealt with it and b) I am increasingly impatient with the [...]

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Clayboy’s sceptical maxim

July 7, 2010

I was reading this post of James McGrath’s when it struck me: the more “sceptical” (I rather doubt the universal applicability of the adjective in the case of much atheist posting on religion) a person’s view is, the less they feel the need to offer a reasoned evidence-based case for it. For rather too many [...]

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This is the only true church (and you’re going to hell)

July 4, 2010

There’s a lot of “only true church”-ism about, and here in Droitwich we’ve just gained another example. A new “independent fundamental Baptist Church” (which seems to consist of a pastor from some 60 miles away advertising services) has set up shop in a hall two doors away from the long standing Baptist Church. This is [...]

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What does Oxbridge have to do with Rome, Canterbury and Geneva?

June 18, 2010

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles) It feels good to be getting along to the end of this series on the articles, now that I arrive at the thirty-fifth. Again, this article demonstrates something of the huge change in culture between the Church of the Reformation [...]

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Preaching to pigs and other articles of faith.

April 20, 2010

The proliferation of “statements of faith”, together with their content, never fails to amaze me. Today I came across two more with their own idiosyncratic take on things. I was following a commenter on this post to find out who this defender of bad street preaching was. In this post I only note her statement [...]

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Competitive street “evangelism”

April 19, 2010

This morning I passed a group of street preachers in Birmingham. The snatch of message I heard as I hastened by was along these lines. “You know as well as us that there is life after death because the Bible says God has put eternity into man’s heart. How will you spend that eternity?” Round [...]

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Carey’s Sharia: how to lose the battle before you start?

April 12, 2010

Oh dear. Last week I was critical of Lord Carey’s defence of Shirley Chaplin. This week, however, the former archbishop has decided that any court which doesn’t rule as he wants must be biased. His quite bizarre answer, however, is not simply to call the court biased (an attitude with an honourable and just occasionally [...]

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