Church of Rummy

is Donald Rumsfeld’s famous Iraq gobbledygook in fact eternal wisdom?.. or just a load of old guff?

There are known knowns,

There are known unknowns

and there are unknown unknowns

Let’s save the world… prove Jesus

I’ve been given a vision, it’s been sanctified and verified by god himself, I claimed his gift of faith, and i have faith that it is so.

If the New Testament of the bible is ‘on the money’ then people really need to know about it, and quickly. You might say that there are plenty of people out there trying but the fact is that they aren’t very good at it. They’ve had 2000 years to do it, and there are still a large majority not realising what happened in Judea. If it’s true that there actually is an afterlife… and unless we tell Jesus we accept his sacrifice we’re doomed to hell… then, well the race to save peoples souls should be on the news on a daily basis - we need a daily updated on the souls saved - maybe involved some sort of tracking technology. So why isn’t it?

I think, in my not so humble opinion that it’s the way  go about telling others… it’s almost like we want to keep it to themselves. We’re happy to leave it to the shouty street preachers… who just come across as deranged and deluded. Or to manipulative and cheesy Alpha Course types.

So how do we do it? We need to find a Unique Selling Point, we need to focus on the things that are common to all of the other non-true religions and leave them to one side. There are millions of decent moral, right thinking, loving people who conscientiously adhere to their factually inaccurate faith. Everyone who has a faith is really convinced that they commune with their respective god, and that he answers them and guides them and has a plan for them (to some degree). Amount and depth of faith isn’t impressive at all… lest we’d all be turning to militant Islam. But they are all of course being deluded by Satan, except for Christians. Simply using manipulative phrases like ‘Jesus loves you, why don’t you accept the free gift’ gets seen for what it is…the religious equivalent of ‘when did you stop beating your wife’.

We must remember that if the NT is a reliable message from god then we know that he loves and wants us all to know about the Jesus salvation narrative. The most wonderful gift he gave us, something no other faith has, is the historical events that happened in Israel 2000 years ago. Let’s not get caught up in the mumbo jumbo and benign brain washing of the worlds churches - lets stop all this obsession with ‘faith’ - we don’t need to rely on faith, we have facts, that’s what Jesus gave us. He didn’t need to, the resurrection could have been a meta-physical spiritual battle or could all have happened in the middle of the desert so we’d never know.

We need to be confident in that, we need to put it all on the table. We need to accept that a loving god wouldn’t make it difficult for us, if we approach the evidence with an open mind and with our logical and rational heads fully screwed on then he will bless that. Logic and rationality are gifts which he gave us, and he insists we use it lest we fall for the devils seductions. In order to prove the truth to the world we have to be open to the idea that the Jesus stories aren’t in fact real, and that the Jewish messiah could still return and ask why we fell for the devils trickery re: the Jesus church.

Let’s not peddle this self-defeating nonsense that Jesus doesn’t want to make it too obvious too us so we can have free will. This belittles our lord, and threatens to be a barrier to salvation as it makes people rightly suspicious. Jesus could have been a lot more subtle if he’d wanted to - maybe appearing for a moment in each of our dreams and giving us the salvation choice. Instead, if we’re to believe the NT he appeared to lots of people doing magical signs to convince them - sometimes 5000 in one go. Are we saying he respected these peoples free will less than ours?

God won’t punish you for applying your reason and rationality and assuming Jesus wasn’t who it’s reported he was… until you’ve assessed the evidence and decided he was (or wasn’t).

It’s like when you were a kid and your dad said… don’t get into a car with any strangers even if they say they that I sent them to pick you up… make sure you are 100% convinced they are who they say they are. I’d rather you rejected someone I might genuinely have sent for you, than get into the car with the wrong person, that’s the actions of a loving parent.

I’m not talking about getting a bishop with a doctorate in theology and an obvious agenda to write a book packed full of ultimately true, but logically very dodgy assumptions. This is the definition of preaching to the choir - this will be accepted with the same open minds that we read Dawkins! Maybe we should sponsor a panel of the worlds smartest and most qualified people, a cross section of the intelligentsia (perhaps those who are currently non-aligned to any religion but who have proven themselves open minded) and get them to carry out a thorough investigation and publish the results at the UN for all to see, where they can be challenged and assessed.

How could anyone object to that? Let’s make sure they report back before the rapture.

The randomness of guilt

An estemend blogger wrote about the ‘drama of forgiveness’… he injected lots of god mumbo, and yes, some jumbo but the sentiment was an interesting one.

Guilt is a funny thing and from my experience, quite random. I’m sure (know) I’ve done lots of bad things and hurt people along the way but for most of these incidents I feel only passing guilt and in the most cases I would imagine I don’t remember. But there are somethings I’ve done which stick with me and fill me with genuine guilt.

I’m gonna lay them out before you here not as a confessional, but to show you how random and quite puny these things are.

Both are things which I did or was involved in when I was in primary school, at the age of about 7-8. I wonder if there are any psychologists out there who can make some assessment of me based on this. It’s gonna come across that I was a goody-two-shoes as a boy, which I suppose I was… but I did ‘bad’ things like lighting fires, chucking crab apples at peoples windows (windys), once pulled a pen knife on someone during a fight (seriously)… zero guilt attached.

These are the things which I find myself thinking about occasionally on the bus to work

The first is the most puny I’d say… simple as this… stole a fiver from my mum’s purse and spent it on loads of sweets then scoffed them all. Back in them days a fiver was ‘something’ probably equivelent to a £20 today… I was able to buy a carrier bag full of sweets and treats. I think the guilt is made worse because my mum asked me directly if I had taken it, and I lied through my teeth. SERIOUSLY I’ve felt guilt about it since then, so much so that on my mother’s death bed when I was 25, I had to tell her, she laughed and couldn’t even remember.

The other thing is a wee bit worse, all the females reading this are gonna think I was a orrible little boy. It all involved a girl whose name I remember well but will call her Kate… she was my ‘best friend’ when I was a 5 yr old. Crucially she was the first girl in the class to get boobs - not her fault, and some would also jump to my defence and say it’s not my fault. All of a sudden the boys in the class decided that they were supposed to ‘love’ her. No one was quite sure why and what exactly we were supposed to do. About 5 or 6 of us started to hang around outside her house to see her (I think her dad actually did come out with a big stick one time). Kate didn’t really know what to do with all this attention, she remained friendly and one fated afternoon she agreed to kiss us all. Very nice of her, but ill advised. There was an actual queue, I think I was toward the end of the line so I could make sure everyone else was actually gonna do it.

This is when it all changed. I’m not sure who it was, I don’t think it was me but it might have been, that decided to call her blubber lips. We were suddenly all very ‘aware’ and embarrassed - like Adam and Eve in the garden of eden, if you will. We all ran for the cover of mockery and made her life hell. We all decided we hated her… that she was fat, ugly and had blubber lips (which she hadn’t… she was just a normal little girl, who’d been early to develop). For a few months it was our sport… mocking her, laughing at her, refusing to stand beside her in line-ups. She moved school. I was 8 years old, and still I feel bad.

There you go.

The Ethical Bomb

Diplomats from around the world are gathering in Dublin for a conference that aims to secure a treaty banning the use of cluster bombs.

But some of the world’s main producers and stockpilers - including the US, the UK, Russia and China - oppose the move.

There is some controversy at the moment in UK military circles (at least as reported in the media) with some high ranking personnel campaigning for the ban and some against.

It strikes me though, what is it about a cluster bomb that is so unethical? It does its job quite well - kills people. I grant you that some of the bomblets hang around after the fact to affect unsuspecting passers by, but by and large a cluster bomb doesn’t kill as many people as an a-bomb or even the massive bombs dropped on buildings during the gulf war… not even as deadly, I propose than an AK-47 in the wrong hands for 25 years of its life.

Since when did bombs become subject to ethics? I doubt the receivers of any bomb payload ever think of the hardware as suitably moral in its construction.

is it not closer to the truth that most people find most weapons pretty unethical until the time comes when they need to use them. Cluster bombs might seem nasty until their use stops the proverbial hun from killing you and yours. In 1945 japan found out that the USA was planning to drop devastating A-bombs on their cities, they decided that it was ethical to use ‘waterboarding’ to extract information from POWs… the people who carried this out were eventually executed by the Americans for unethical war crimes… skip forward 50 years when the USA has similar fears about ‘them and theirs’ and the ethics of such a thing are is lot more grey. Such is life.

Jebus: Martyr or Murderer?

‘Murderer’ is over egging an already well egged pudding - but it has a nice controversial rhythm to it. Anyway, let me tell you a story passed down to me for generations (say).

They say Jebus was born miraculously in a small town just north of Cardiff, a thousand years ago during the English occupation. He was a bit of a thinker and philosopher and when he came of age some people started to say he was ‘the one’, god’s messiah.

As he travelled into Cardiff one spring morning crowds gathered to greet him as their saviour, he didn’t do anything to correct their assertions so the rumours grew - as they did quite often in those times. He did a bit of a speaking tour talking about god and hinting that he was their long-awaited messiah, but then things started to go a bit sour.

There had been rumours of wondrous miraculous happenings, so a caravan of the sick and the needy started to follow him around. One day he was on the way to a wedding when some people stopped him and said… about 10 percent of our children die before they reach the age of 2… what can we do about it? But instead of telling them about water purification, antibiotics and general child heath care (which if he was god, he would have of course known) he said… sorry, I’m on the way to a wedding… but you’ll like this… while I’m there I’m gonna take some of that pure water which you need, and then I’m going to turn it in to wine, yazam! We is going to par-tay. The villagers used their god-given rationale and knew that this couldn’t be the actions of a loving god so they continued their messiah search.

It kept happening… one day on the way to a friend’s funeral… a group mothers came to him and said, our children have all died in the last month of an infection, dozens more are sick, they were innocent kids who we loved, if you are god can you be merciful and raise them from the dead? He said… hmmm , nah sorry… but tell you what how’s about I resurrect my mate Lazarus instead. The mothers where less than impressed, especially when he refused to give them any hints as to why infections spread in the first place (which he of course would have known).

The mothers decided that if someone had this kind of power, yet chose not to use it (apart from the odd party trick), and chose to let these innocent children die that it was tantamount to murder, or at least man slaughter, certainly not the actions of a loving god - so they continued their search for a messiah. Jebus wasn’t the one. There were later rumours of a personal resurrection, but he’s conveniently lifted himself up into the clouds to heaven… the mothers rolled their eyes with a chuckle and continued to worship Yahweh like they always had.

But maybe the problem was that their minds where too small to comprehend the wonder of why Jebus was actually god’s son, and if only they had opened their hearts a little more to Jebus they would have believed… as opposed to following the non-related Jesus of Nazareth who WAS of course, the one, as his actions and the evidence is a lot more compelling.
Happy Easter

The Algebraic god

To early man, the sun rises from its hollow in the ground, processes over his head before submerging into the earth in the other direction. The wind randomly gathers and calms to power his fishing boat to feed his children. Flowers and vegetables emerge magically from the soil every spring bringing with it nurturing life and sustenance. All tempered by the random terror of earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes.

Not only where there unknown unknowns like nuclear physics, but there were lots of known unknowns such as basic anatomy, circulation and respiratory as well as the ins and outs of animal and human reproduction - the miracle of life itself.

How did we as a species, summon the courage to even leave the cave never mind to survive and thrive? I read a book some years ago now, by the anthropologist Pascal Boyer - I don’t think it would be too much hyperbole to say that it was a turning point. It is called ‘Religion Explained’ and I read it to learn more about how ‘other’ religions emerged. The can of worms was probably open before I read it, but this book spilled them out all over the floor.

He riffs on the idea that ‘Blind Faith’ is a healthy and natural human phenomenon. It’s perfectly acceptable and desirable that before Galileo worked out how earth isn’t the centre of things, and in fact the earth rotates around the sun… that people had to just have faith that the sun would rise every day (some still did a morning dance just in case). They had no tools or knowledge to rationally determine how or why it would. They had to make some assumptions just to get on with the business of living. It’s completely helpful and normal to see it as a mystically defined ‘black box’ or even personify it as a deity.

The point is I suppose that this is blind faith, and it’s ok, and in fact helpful. The Greeks gave names to the black boxes (Aphrodite, Apollo, Thor, and Zeus). The problem surely comes when after a few generations people start to take these gods too literally, develop dogmas and then when a bright mind inquires how the stars fit in the sky - people call him a heretic for daring to deny the authority of Apollo.

Likewise Adam and Eve is a perfectly helpful algebraic black box until it causes people to
limit their investigations into the origins of man. The ‘universe instigator’ god is helpfully algebraic until it colours our investigations into universal origins.

Perhaps the unhelpful kind of faith is that which allows for acceptance of supernatural claims based on less than convincing evidence rather than the kind that helped Newton explain the natural world. It’s the kind of faith which a makes a suicide bomber believe that he communicates intimately with a loving Allah or for a Christian who lives his life in the light the resurrection and virgin birth of Jesus, not because he is necessarily convinced by the evidence but because he has faith in the dogma.

I don’t see this kind of faith as a virtue; it’s not blind faith, its blinding faith.

The Story of Stuff

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

a bit preachy and bleeding heart… but really well presented.

Pro Human Life

Not that I’m chasing hits and controversy!!… 

Some people hold all life as sacred, I however do not.  I hold that human life is sacred (unsurprisingly given that I am one), but by proxy I kill and eat animal and plant life for food.

So what then IS human life, what make us human? Is there a difference between an acorn and oak tree? Grape juice and wine? A maggot and a fly? is a tadpole a frog? Is an egg a chicken? More importantly do I consider an non-viable foetus to be a human, with equal rights as any other human?

Well, I actually don’t know. Sometimes I think yes, sometimes I think no.  All I’ve managed to do is distil my ethic from life=good/death=bad to ‘at what point do a consider the item inside a pregnancy to be human’. Stem Cell? Embryo? Foetus? moment of birth?

At whatever point that is then it must have the same rights as me, before that it’s just part of the carrier’s body which if left unharmed by medical intervention or indeed natural miscarriage, has the potential to be human.

I really don’t consider the ‘morning after pill’ to be the killing of a human, and when someone miss carries in the first few months i’m not sure of the need to mourn…hmmm…easy to say i guess

I’m what the American press call a flip-flopper, if my list of quotes on this topic were put together over the last 5-10 years … well let’s just say no one could every accuse of me of being intransigent.

Who do you think you are?

This is one of those posts were I have no idea where it’s going, one of many. It’s such an obvious idea, but I find it really interesting. It’s the idea of family, heritage, race, ancestors and national culture.

I was watching a program a while ago called “Who do you think you are?” When celebs track their family tree - it’s a surprisingly interesting program. This week it was Barbra Windsor, the arcatypical East Londoner. Sure enough her parents and grandparents had been born and bred within the sound of the bow bells, but what struck me was when she went back a generation more and found that they have come from County Cork and Scandinavia.

I don’t know much about my family tree, but I can go back to my great grandparents on one side as County Longford shop keepers, and on the other side as county Down farmers. The interesting thing is, anything further back than that, I have no idea - for all I know they could all be Russian, Italian, Polish.

With that thought in my mind it strikes me as strange for anyone to have a over inflated sense of nationalism. Seeing themselves as ‘true’ English or ‘true’ Irish or whatever - even Babs Windsor is quarter Irish/Scandinavian. After a generation or two an immigrants family can be truly integrated to the point where they can even find themselves being jingoistic about their ‘adopted’ country.

I have a Czech friend who lives near me and it strikes me that in 100+ years our respective great great grand kids will probably just see themselves as English and maybe not even know our original nationality - and maybe complain about the Paddys and Poles coming in and taking all the jobs etc.

Were it is different I suppose is with skin colour. If I was literally green, with green skin then my great great grand kids would know that they weren’t originally anglo-saxons, and more importantly others would see them as ‘different’. If Obama’s parents came from Albania rather than Africa he might just assume that he could trace his linage back to the Mayflower - and it wouldn’t mater either way.

There is a nugget of something worth saying here.

The morality of meat

There is quite a push at the moment, on TV at least to encourage us to be more ethical in our consumption of meat and eggs. The latest sermon was given by Jamie Oliver last week in a live audience presentation and debate about battery chicken farming. It’s unfair to call it a ‘sermon’, I like Jamie Oliver and think its great when a star like him is willing to trade in a bit of his credibility to draw attention to causes he believes in, even if it does mean that arm chair sitters like me get to call him preachy.

My better half is a veggie, which you’d think would make for much debate in the house, but it doesn’t really. QMonkey isn’t as narky and argument-baiting in real life (I hope), if it’s not too cheesy to say - we respectfully disagree. The only thing she insists on is that I buy ‘quality’ meat, preferably organic and certainly free range. I’m happy to do this as I do subscribe to the moral of treating animals with respect. At least I think/thought… you sense the unsurity don’t you?

The problem with the TV show is that I was troubled by something, not by the images of the battery hens (although that was shocking in some cases), but I was more troubled by the audience reaction. People were hiding their eyes and shrieking at the scenes of substandard farm conditions, wincing and ugghging at the sight of processed meat. Then came the real revelation for me anyway. Jamie had with him an organically farmed chicken, the kind he is promoting, he had been recently trained and qualified as a slaugherman and was kitted out with state of the art equipment. He showed the humane method of killing the chicken with an electric shock to the neck, then cutting its mouth to let it bleed before butchering.

Here’s the reveal… THIS was the event the audience were most shocked by, they turned away, and some yelped and shouted. I was honestly taken aback by this. The audience were all meat eaters who I presume have no problem dicing a nice chicken breast for their stir fry or tucking in to a tikka masala. They seemed almost surprised that an animal needs to be killed in order to make this happen.

This completely undermined the rest of the program for me, or at least turned the message on its head. In my view if you eat meat then you should be willing if necessary to do the killing yourself, and certainly should be able to watch without feeling any sorrow or guilt or squeamishness. If you don’t like killing animals for meat then become a vegetarian. I have to admit to having never killed a chicken but I have killed fish and eaten them and although I don’t want to, as it’s a bit gruesome and messy, I would have no moral twinges about killing an animal for food.

So having come to the conclusion that these audience members needed to either become vegetarian (for which I think there is a decent moral argument) or harden-the-f***-up, then what is the moral with regards to the treatment of animals before we kill them?

Jeepers, ‘her indoors’ isn’t gonna be happy … but I think I might actually be moving in the opposite direction to Mr Oliver. I think there’s a reasonable case that if these animals are bread for food, the life experience we give them is the life they know, are they really distressed/disappointed to find out that they aren’t wild birds (where a fox will mercilessly tear it apart anyway)? Isn’t the moral question - to farm and eat animals or not to?

Is it right to spend say £1 extra on your chicken fillets to give them a slightly more sanitized 54 days before we slit its throat… as opposed to using that £1 to keep an African child alive for a day longer? I don’t know the answer to that, I’m the question monkey, but if it’s a choice between keeping my child alive for a day or giving a battery chicken a foot more space in his cage, then it’s less of a difficult moral to wrestle with.

Daddys can’t be trusted

A moving tale was regaled to me around the table at a wedding over the Christmas period. You know how it goes, no one at the table knows each other but there’s the one guy who’s willing to be the chatty one - everyone else lets him fulfill that role because it’s easier than trying to think of our own conversation. He did though weigh in with a story about his niece which left us all close to tears.

His brother was very worried about his eight year old daughter’s performance in school, she was good at English and reading but was continually failing maths. He struck upon an idea to inspire her, she loved Harry Potter above anything else so he wrote out a fake letter from Dumbledore to his daughter saying that she had been chosen to attend Hogwarts next term, all she had to do was to get a C in maths. He rubbed some butter on the letter and put it under the grill for a minute or two, then ruffled it up, put it in a fancy calligraphy envelope and sealed it with some wax.

When his daughter got the letter she was overwhelmed with excitement, running around the house ‘daddy daddy, guess what!? Guess what!?’ he advised her not to tell her friends in school because they would be jealous, but to just try her best to do better at maths, this of course, she did, studying every night to get better grades. Her dad kept the letters coming, from Dumbledore telling her that she was doing well and to keep it up, the problem was that she was improving so well that the implications started to register with daddy.

He’d no idea what to do, he knew his daughter would be gutted when she found out that she wasn’t going to Hogwarts. He decided to stop sending the letters in the hope that she would just forget about it, a forlorn hope as it was all she ever talked about. He started to subtly cast doubt on the validity of the letters saying that she should get her hopes up too much, and that it might actually be better if she didn’t go to Hogwarts. One evening she came out with it… ‘Daddy, did you write the letters from Dumbledore?’ so there he was faced with lying to his daughter, right to her face, the alternative was terrible too but he had no choice… he said ‘yes, but only….’ . It was no use, she ran up to her room in floods of tears.

Days went by and she had stopped crying but she refused to even look her daddy in the eye. She had told her closest friends about the letters who hadn’t really believed her and now she had to tell them that they were right. There was nothing daddy could do or say, she wouldn’t engage with him. After a week or so as they were having breakfast her mum asked… ‘Darling, are you alright? Daddy is really sorry, I think you should be friends again’.

She replied in a very adult voice… ‘Mummy, I think we have learned something… daddys can’t always be trusted’.

Barely a dry eye around the wedding table.

No words needed

Some nice pod casts

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/podcast.xml

Paste that into your iTunes postcast bit… the best one, i think, if the Stephen Fry/Hitchens one on blasphemy - interesting as always. The theos among you will like his references to CS Lewis. If only that tw*t Hitchens would shut up a bit, which he does, after someone in the crowd shouts at him .

I think Stephen Fry is great but i think, as i say, Hitchens is on of the most annoying arrogant people on earth. Even though i agree with the large part of what he says - which just shows that sometimes it about ‘how you say it’.

You can listen to the MP3 here.  The first ten mins and the last ten mins are the best.

It’s not exactly a ‘debate’ as both are in more or less in agreement. It reminds me somewhat of those Greenbelt ‘debates’ i used occasionaly attend (but in the other direction).

Blessed with faith

Last week I was walking down High Street minding my own business, when I was stopped by David Blaine and his ‘Street Magician’ camera crew (not really). He did his trick, the one he does on his TV show, he levitated before my very eyes. Like everyone I had the ‘whoa, that’s amazing’ reaction. Blaine walked on down the road, leaving in his wake his mesmerised audience.

I thought about it later in the day and for a moment thought - did he actually do that? Is he actually magic? Only for a moment though, because I know it’s impossible, and even though I’d seen it with my own eyes, I knew it was more than likely a trick, not a phenomenon. Not to say that impossible things don’t become possible, but Joe Normal tends to need a lot more evidence than one performance, under the circumstances of the performers choosing.

So, I don’t believe, or have faith that he really levitated, because it’s impossible according to the laws of physics. Yet I have friends and family who believe that a guy known as Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin, walked on water, raised people from the dead including himself. Why do they believe this? Because its written in an the Bible. In Gospels written decades after the reported events by guys who were trying, lets say for altruistic reasons, to get their religion up and running.

I recently met a lady on a couple of occasions, a friend of my wife’s, who literally believes EVERYTHING. You name it, she’s into it. Acupuncture, Reiki, homeopathy, astrology, cupping, Feng Shuiand that’s only the ones she mentioned in the 2-3 hours approximately I’ve been in her company. I’ve no doubt that she’d have no problem accepting the Jesus miracles as a positive probability. However, most people I think are open minded but heavily sceptical about miracles and physics defying events unless they are proven beyond reasonable doubt. For me, it’s really the only way to get on with your life - we can’t assume every claim of magic to be probably correct - the world would completely unpredictable - I wouldn’t want to get out of bed never mind get on a plane, in case aerodynamics suddenly changed its nature.

So why do intelligent people believe the Jesus stories? Let’s make no bones about it, smarter and more thought intensive people than me have decided in their heads that Jesus walked on water, turned water to wine and in some cases they believe that he guides them in their day to day life! (though obviously Gabriel only appeared to Mary, not Mohammad - THAT would be ridiculous). The answer is faith. I think it’s the same with most religions, but in my culture, Christianity is the major force, and a lot of my family and friends would describe themselves as having a faith in the god of the bible. I have recently had some interesting debates with them, and when it comes down to it, they don’t usually focus their argument on trying to convince me that the bible is reliable when it talks of physics-defying events, they say its at this point in your journey you need faith, and faith is the key.  An intellectual discussion usually turns into a theological discussion, and sometimes I get the feeling they are dancing and gloating in the space between that which we know and that which we don’t yet know. It goes… we don’t know everything, therefore anything is possible, therefore my position is intellectually sound - all i need is to declare my faith!! As soon as they proclaim that it comes down to faith, they admit that they can’t convince me that its true with evidence based enquiry alone - I need faith. In fact if it could be shown to me in an convincing manor, then it would no longer BE a faith.

The problem is I don’t have faith. I could pretend that I do, I could try to talk myself into it, but deep down I don’t have faith and I can’t help it. You can’t make a decision to have faith, I can’t decide in my head that I believe that David Blaine levitated in front of me - even though THAT happened before my eyes! So how can I believe the heavily processed story of a man 2000 years ago who apparently did some physics defying stuff. You can talk someone into believing facts through evidence based inquiry but whether I’m Joe Bloggs or Pope Benedict, faith is something you have or you don’t.

Debating the probabilities and possibilities of various iconic events and the evidence thereof, is destined to lead nowhere. Because depending on what religion you’re talking to, your faith has to be different. It’s not ok when talking to a Christian to say you have faith that you will be re-incarnated when you die, or to a Muslim that you have faith that Jesus was the son of god. To be a Christian you have to have been blessed with the ‘Christian’ faith - I wonder how many little children in Surrey wake up one morning and say mummy, I’ve just been given the faith to believe that Mohammad was a prophet of god.

So either you’re A) lucky and were brought up as a Christian and pretty much taught the bible as fact, so the need for faith is minimal, or you are B) someone who believes absolutely every extra-physical hoodoo, without extended inquiry, or C) god decides to bless you with faith in later life.

This is a dilemma, because it’s not my fault that I don’t have faith. If you believe in the god of the bible then the only outworking of this is that some are blessed with faith, faith is god given. If it is something that some are given and some aren’t then why do Christians try to convert people and tell them the ‘good news’, they might have some success with the lady I know who believes everything from astrology to Reiki, and obviously a child will believe pretty much everything a trusted adult tells them, but as for the likes of me, according to John 3:16 I’m doomed to a fiery eternity because I don’t have faith, which is a smidge unfair I think.

There are of course valid attempts to explain the quandry, but the logic seems quite circular - usualy about ‘letting god do the work’… but there’s a big assumption which has been breezed past - which is of course his/it’s ultimate existance and involvement. Most times when i hear people stuggling with these questions - i fear they have missed the elephant in the room, that it might just all be in their heads.

The gumpy miser in me

Monday lunchtime I decided that Kentucky Fried Chicken would be the best option when deciding how to make myself fatter. So I headed up the hill at Broadmead, past the Odeon to my fast food purveyor of choice. All I wanted was a Zinger Meal with Coke, the last thing I expected was a moral dilemma.

The young girl behind the till took my order in double quick time, almost before I had said it, then she inquired, in the space usually reserved for ‘is that all sir?’,… ‘would you like to donate 5p extra for the World Health Organisation?’. Without skipping a beat I said ‘no’.

She looked at me with a confused grin and an almost disbelieving gaze, as if had just stolen a bottle of Lucozade from a thirsty African child. When the Zinger Meal arrived she mumbled ‘enjoy your meal’ with undertones of ‘unlike the poor children’.

As I tucked into my, admittedly still very tasty chicken burger, I tried to determine where my sense of charity had gone and why I was suddenly a grumpy miser. It was only 5p for goodness sake. I like to think I’m a caring person, with a generous world view, who does ever such a lot for charity… but doesn’t like to talk about it much. So where did this ‘no’ come from?

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the same ‘no’ I give in response to questions like ‘would you like to save 50% on your electricity bill?’ or ‘can you spare some change’ or ‘do you have two minutes spare to stop and talk about Help The Aged?’ Compassion fatigue I think they call it and it looks like I’m well and truly infected.

My immediate reaction to any question I’m asked by a stranger is to end the conversation as soon as possible. Whether it’s a charity plugger in the street, or a phone call from a someone who miraculously knows that my contract is almost up - no matter how to-good-to-be-true the deal sounds my only feeling is to say as little as possible and end the conversation. This can’t be a good thing.

If I had the moment again I would say ‘… only if Colonel Sanders agrees to give 5% of his profits to a charity of my choice’ (but quick thinking like that only happens to people on clever American dramas). I think that’s the core of it, it’s the thought that a multimillion pound company ‘giving’ its customers the opportunity to donate money to a charity of KFC’s choice, while they charge us £1.99 for a Coke that cost them 10p to produce! But that won’t stop the nice young KFC girl telling all her mates that I’m a grumpy miser.