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

Illogical Logical Trilemmas

A regularly peddled evangelistic tool, other than the simple ‘repent or burn in hell’ approach, is CS Lewis’s so called Trilemma. It goes something like this… It’s not enough to say that Jesus was a great teacher or a prophet, he doesn’t allow you that… he says he’s god. So either he was the son of god or he was crazy or he was the devil.

It gets some traction because it’s cleverness is this… Christianity is very much ingrained in our culture, we’re a Christian country, a Christian hemisphere. No mater what rebel rousers like Hitchens say we see Christianity in general as a force for moral good. There can’t be many in the UK who don’t know about the Jesus stories and no one would honestly say they thought he was a ‘bad’ person based on what they’ve read. Similarly the bible is considered to contain some wisdom, and wise sayings are attributed to Jesus - he’s not regarded as ‘mad’.

So he’s God, right?

The logic of course is horribly flawed because it assumes the complete reliability of the New Testament. In the last few months I’ve had this one wheeled out to me by a couple of friends - one who’s a church minister and the other who’s lets say, a very progressive Christian. In both cases I was taken aback that they still used it. I’d already answered it before and they must have forgotten. I’ve no conceit that id managed to change their minds re: god but i was disappointed i hadn’t convinced them that it was an invalid logical trick.  It’s the tactics of brainwashing - however benignly they may see it.

The answer to the question is, ‘what the heck do I know?… obviously I assume people aren’t god until really really convinced otherwise but i’m not going to condemn someone ive never met of being mad or bad based on ancient compromised writings’.  The only way it works if you assume that Jesus is god before you start (circular logic) - and maybe that’s why Christians think it makes so much sense.

If you believe that Jesus is god then you believe that god would have made sure the New Testament was reliable and complete, so it’s more than enough data to make our judgments.

Therein lays the problem… if we make the assumption that a man called Jesus lived and died in Jerusalem around that time, we’ve no idea exactly what he said. We have the reports and quotes written decades later, no one would say that we know EVERY WORD he said. Even if we stretch credibility and say that the words reported are largely in line (truly a miracle of factual short-hand journalism)… then how do we know that he didn’t take Peter a side one day and say… ‘hey, you do know that I’m talking metaphorically here about the whole messiah stuff?’ (Peter’s gospel of course didn’t make the cannon!) Or over breakfast one Tuesday before the Last Supper turn to Mary and say ‘…I think I should stop all this teaching, people are starting to get the wrong idea about me…’.

THAT’S the problem with the Trilemma, it only works on those who accept that the bible is a completely reliable account of what happened to Jesus. And if you believe that the bible is a reliable account of what happened to Jesus - then frankly you’re a Christian already.. or you’re mad… or bad.

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.

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.

Paisley, the pope and me

[greatest ‘hits’ redux]   

 

School was boring, most of the time I wanted to be doing something else and the worst time was always from after lunch to home time. I used to sit beside a guy called Mark, whose dad was the assistant Minster at Ian Paisleys Martyrs Memorial church. He was good craic and we usually spent the time chatting and drawing silly cartoons to while away the hours until the bus came to take us back to the Gilnahirk ‘hood.

Occasionally he’d tell me that Big Ian was round at the house/manse for dinner the previous evening or that he was joining Paisley and his dad protesting outside some den of iniquity (or something or other). He even roped me in one time to going door to door with DUP European election leaflets - im embarrassed at the thought.

One Monday afternoon, after a double PE he told me that his dad was off to Brussels today to kick the pope (exact words). I enquired further and discovered that his holiness John Paul II was addressing the European parliament, so his dad and Paisley where heading over to voice their disagreement with some of JP’s theological musings.

I turned on the six of clock news that night to see Big Ian being dragged out of the chamber by his ankles, shouting. I RENOUNCE THEE THE ANTI-CHRIST… I RENOUNCCCCCE THEE THE ANTI-CHRIST!! There standing beside him was Mark’s dad, holding his papers - he was dead proud in school the next day.

Storm in a ocean sized tea cup

Well, the time has come. The lead story on the news at ten tonight will no doubt be “BONG:Question Monkey breaks his silence on the Archbishop Sharia row”. Doubtless some of the lesser informed hacks won’t even realised that I WAS keeping a silence.

My take on it is this, it very much depends on what he meant (duh), either it was a completely run of the mill comment which actually didn’t need to be said and it’s just an obvious truism, or it was a shocking affront to democracy and the rights of man.

I have a private members club, let’s call it Fight Club (patent pending), in this club all the members consent to occasionally having seven bells knocked out of them. According to the law of the land GBH is illegal, but the way we enforce law in these matters is very much down to consent - if you consensually choose to have someone staple your privates to the floor, then the law isn’t involved, if you don’t consent then it very much is.

I would though expect the police to keep a close eye on it to make sure every one really is consenting - and there should be no question of what the over arching law is.

So is this what the Archbishop meant, that we should respect and recognise marriages, annulments and arbitrations? If so, then I’ve no problem with it - and I really don’t know why it’s been such a big deal. I fear though that he meant more than this, that he’s suggesting that the law should in some way take into account peoples ‘faith’ and beliefs. The words ‘Thin edge’ and ‘wedge’ come to mind… I do respect people who stand up for what they believe in, like for instance when Quakers refuse to fight in WW2, but its entirely right that they should go to prison for a while… the law has to apply fairly to all no matter what hocus pocus you say you believe.

A better way for the Archbishop to make Muslims feel more respected and equal would be to disestablish the Church of England! It’s an anathema that a Muslim MP has to swear allegiance to the Queen when he or she enters parliament - as opposed to just swearing to fairly and honestly represent his or her constituents. I await the Archbishop’s response to my challenge

Osama Jones

Its poor blogging to chat about stuff you saw on TV, it says something about a life wasted. But i am what i am.

There were two nice happy happy documentaries on last night, both set in the late seventies. The first was a Storyville special about the Jonesville Suicide death cult and the other was a historical look at America’s involvement in Afghanistan - which is topical I suppose with the release of the movie ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’.

First to Jonesville - this was one of the most depressing things I’ve seen. To give some background, Jim Jones was a cult leader/preacher in America in the late 70s who led a church called the People’s Temple. It was thousands strong, multi racial and counter cultural. A lot of the services were filmed, giving us lots of material of ‘healings’ and conversions and euphoric people selling their homes to give money to the church. Jim Jones then had a great idea to set up a new town in the South American rain forest and bring all his followers there. To cut a long story sort it all went sour when a congressman flew out there to investigate them (with some reporters)… all seemed idyllic until a couple of the members started passing notes to the reporters asking to be rescued… when they tried to leave Jones’ men shot and killed them along with the congressmen. This was all caught on film as one of the cameramen who died left his camera running.

It was gruelling to watch, especially then Jones then gathered up the 1000 people and told them that they would all have to die, and supplied the cyanide. There were no pictures of this but everything was taped through the PA system, letting us hear babies being wrestled from their mothers and poisoned, people pleading for their lives and ultimately the silence when everyone was dead. Three people survived by running into the jungle, and they told the story as we listened to the soundtrack. Gruelling. I’m not all that emotional or sentimental but I had to go and wake my baby son up to give him a hug after watching it - of course making him cry for the next half hour, doh!

Next was the retrospective from Afghanistan. This got my gander up a bit (always helpful when it comes to blogging). Some people have such a selective remembering of history, and are so accusing and self-righteous when using their 20/20 hind sight. In the late 70s when the world teetered on the brink of a nuclear holocaust which would have rendered the entirety of human progress and charity meaningless, the USSR invaded Afghanistan to set up a puppet communist regime. America decided to fund and assist the Afghan freedom fighters, a no-brainer really. But the narrative of this program seemed to be that American was stupid and immoral for backing the likes of Bin Laden and are now reaping a deserved whirlwind. Most of the interviewees were from countries who decided to spend their money on nicer hospitals and social welfare, and let bad old America step up to the plate of saving the world (hyperbole a go-go).

Anyway… this is too long a rant. All I’ll say is… if you travelled back in time to 1980 and told people that the Afghans they funded in the war against the USSR will turn on you after the year 2000, and you’ll get some problems with terror attacks, and a few thousand will be killed in New York. They would have run around the pentagon high-fiving saying… you mean we averted nuclear war!!?

Derren Brown - slain in the spirit

hmmm…. rings some bells for me

 

Voodoo 

Talked out Talked in

“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into” Jonathan Swift (Irish writer and satirist)

“Belief cannot argue with unbelief, it can only preach to it” Karl Barth (influential Christian thinker)

After my last ‘faith‘ post many moons ago, i got cold feet and moved all such musing to a new nom de plume… lest the monkey loose track of his mission to bring nonsense to a sensible world. Wounds licked, ive decided to get back on the horse.

Above are two quotes, both of which i tend to accept as sensible. So im trying to work out the implications of it for those who live inside a world of faith and those who live outside.

Following the logic in both these statements… well… ok … i am of course saying that ‘im correct’ that as i noted in my last post, faith is something which, if god/jesus requires it, must be something you are blessed with, not something you atain or decide. If someone cannot be reasoned into believing and cannot be reasoned out, then well… thats were my thinking is.

I do know (am related to) one person who was (i think) reasoned into faith. As in, had no interest whatsoever, wasnt brought up in the church, but now says he has a faith - truth be told its not proving easy to reason him out of it… but Swift and Barth give me hope. As for the others who were brought up beliving - Swift’s logic applies. My first question should probably always now be, what made you first believe/not-believe - and if the answer involves the phrases ‘well i was brought up in a christian home…’ or ‘at the age of 13 i went to a camp…’ it doesn’t mean their faith is any less real or valid, but as far as discussion goes,  again i must refer to Swift and Barth.

I might have found myself an Existential Dilemma

I’ve been dying to get one of these for ages… and I’ve eventually found myself one - not offa eBay or anything, just lying in bed thinking - flip, this whole existence stuff is a bit weird.

I must admit this may be fueled by the fact that my learn-ed brother in law lent me a book of esseys by John-Paul Sartre, which I’m loving. 

In modern civilisation, lets say from the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, people have been born, lived for an average of lets say 50 adult years then died.

So I am born, try my best to learn the history of all those 200 or so generations that have gone before me, do my little bit to be involved in the process of moving humanity on a little further, get together with another person to create another generation of people who grow up and learn the history of human kind (including the addition made (and being made) by my generation), I then shuffle off the mortal coil, having done my little bit.

I suppose this is Nietzschean ‘death of god’ thing… the thought that there is no overarching ‘watcher’ of the whole of history happening, the players just nip in for a while, do their bit, then pass the baton to someone else. A very few make a mark which reverberates through history, I wonder if will, probably not, oh dear that’s a bit depressing

A prize for anyone who guesses the amount of commas

No words needed

The Summit of the Tor

I know this isn’t meant to be diaretical (that’s not a word is it? At least not a word that means diary-like, in fact it might be something to do with bowels), anyway, it’s not a diary, but it’s all I have to write about this morning. Yesterday I reached the summit of Glastonbury Tor. I know it’s not Everest, but its deceptively steep and a hit of oxygen wouldn’t have gone a miss.

My mate Eamon (a Fermanagh country boy, refugeed in the city of London, making his fortune) travelled down on the train early in the morning, through the mist and fog which we thought might ruin the trip a little. But as we drove through the winding Somerset roads the mist cleared and in the distance we glimpsed the mystical Tor, calling us from the centre of ancient Avalon.

First up we got ourselves a bacon sandwich (as is our want) from a café in Glastonbury itself, seated beside a heavily bearded man in a long white robe (no joke) who grunted something at us, which sounded like ‘beware’ (seriously). After an hour of so walking round the assorted ‘nut job’ mystical and magical stalls and shops ( for a moment Eamon seriously considered buying a cane) we made our way to the base of the Tor.

It’s a deceptively steep climb which takes about 30 minutes to circumnavigate the base before you made the final assent. When we reached the top, the view was stunning - Bristol in the far distance, looking like the emerald city, the rolling Somerset hills to the west and the English channel to the far south.

The Tor is an ancient abbey were St Patrick is thought to have come and brought Christianity to the early Saxons, its also where a lot of the Arthurian myths are set. It was last inhabited in the 15th century, the last abbot being hanged from the Tor… some say late at night he can still be heard chanting his final ode.

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.