News and Opinion

On Thursday 20th we had a Vicar come to Secular Hall to speak on Faith, Fear and Fundamentalism . Tony Windross, Vicar of St Peter's Sheringham and author of The Thoughtful Guide to Faith . The following is a summary of some responses by people present at the meeting. George Jelliss (editor of this blog) tried to make a few notes, but found it increasingly frustrating to understand anything the speaker was saying! Mr Windross suggested that our LSS should stand for "Lifelong Seeking Significance". He spoke much about "religion" without defining what this meant, although it was in some way like art and literature and music and dealt with the most profound questions, though he didn't say what those were. According to him "truth" is the slippiest of all philosophical concepts. He seemed to distinguish between scientific and religious truth. He seemed to think that religious truth was to be found in "christian stories", though when I asked h

While the sun beams down benevolently on my very small, rather neglected and overgrown, garden I've been spending an idyllic time watching the Bees and the Butterflies on the Buddleia. So far I've observed five different varieties of butterfly: small white, small tortoiseshell, red admiral, peacock and comma. I don't think I'd seen a comma before, though apparently they are common in the midlands. When closed up it looks just like a dead leaf. All things are bright and beautiful in Darwin's domain. Meanwhile in the civised world of men of faith we find nature red in tooth and claw. The centre of God's world, according to the Mappa Mundi , has erupted in its worst exchanges of violence for some time. Massimo Pigliucci offers a trite solution: the US should threaten to withdraw its financial support from Israel. But didn't this little spat of trouble all begin just when the US (and Europe) withdrew their financial support from the newly democratically electe

More pointless bombings killing ordinary people going about their everyday business. This time in Mumbai. How do the people who do this think their actions are going to promote their cause, whatever it is? Can it just be mindless nihilism? Certainly there can be no justification of such acts in moral terms. Nor in any sensible religious terms. Nor even in purely pragmatic terms. A report in Progressive.Org magazine leads: Mumbai bomb blasts sickening. A basic rule for any insurgent movement worth its name: Do not kill civilians by the dozen with bombs set to maximize pain and destruction. ... Not only does this violate every norm of human decency, it also takes you much further away from your political goals. ... What do the perpetrators hope to achieve by this? (Here, one has to assume that the bomb manufacturers had goals other than a nihilistic orgy of violence or to set off religious rioting.) The same article suggests that there is "alienation" of the Muslims in Kashmni