Christian politics

I have just heard Melanie's sermon for last Sunday which I gather caused some discussion about whether it was too political.  For myself I thought it was a splendid sermon and highlighted the conflict between Jesus teaching and practical politics.  Of course, one must have the rule of law and and this must be enforced with punishments.  But, as Melanie says, we must distinguish between justice and revenge.  Justice requires an investigation of the causes of the riots, rather than an instant reaction following our own prejudices.  And then we must try and ensure that they do not happen again.  The society we want to see is the kingdom of God and to bring that about we must behave as God's subjects and that includes doing politics from a Christian point of view.

Assisted suicide

Did any of you see Terry Pratchett's programme on assisted suicide  the other week?  It actually showed a man committing suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.  I found it quite traumatic and I think Terry Pratchett did too.  At the end of the programme I thought that I would certainly not want to put my wife through the process of seeing me die, but then later on, I thought would I want  t to put my wife through the pain of watching me die of motor neurone disease like those who had attended the clinic in the programme?  So I'm afraid I started watching the programme being undecided about assisted suicide and ended also undecided.

The Anglican Covenant

The Anglican covenant is a document which is intended to codify what it means to be Anglican, given the diversity which currently exists in the communion.  To my mind this is one of those things which are best left unspecified, but many of the churches within the communion are pushing to make things more precise.  The result is a document which I have to say is difficult to read, difficult to understand and tends to induce a feeling of losing the will to live.  I cannot think that any good will come of it.  It is currently before the diocesan synods, before being debated in general synod.  I hope it fails and could go on at greater length about it but my voice recognition software is having a bit of trouble with recognising the word synod!

The Bible and archaeology

I watched this program on television last night (half way through  the series) which was trying to show that most of the Israelites' monotheistic religion was invented during the Babylonian captivity and that the story of the exodus and basically the early books of the Old Testament were mythological..  I don't really have a problem with this, although I think the archaeological evidence is pretty slim and raises as many questions as it answers.  But I would certainly go along with her assertion that this resulted in our ideas of God as being exclusively male oriented, a point that people kept on trying to make throughout the program.  In fact our ideas of God will always be imperfect and will need to change

What's happening to the web site?

Well, I'm in the middle of changing the navigation buttons, as well as doing some updating and the weekly and monthly updates.  I am doing it bit by bit, so as you go about the web site the navigation list may change, but I hope it will always work.