Category Archives: Religion

The definition of marriage

I was caught out. On Thursday I was giving a talk on homosexuality to a church deanery readers’ group. I expected differences of opinion, but the big sticking-point was not what I expected. Nobody argued that intimate same-sex partnerships were … Continue reading

Posted in Churches, Ethics, Religion, Sexuality | 1 Comment

Does the Church still need parishes?

For churchgoers, yet another fascinating YouGov survey by Linda Woodhead for the Westminster Faith Debates. This one is about the views of Anglican clergy. Anthony Woollard comments here. In this post I focus on the finding that 83% want to … Continue reading

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Assisted dying and the sanctity of life

This is another attempt to address the issue of the sanctity of life in the context of proposed changes to the law on assisted dying. An earlier post is here. The trouble with assisted dying is that the arguments on … Continue reading

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Old age: what next?

My wife Marguerite retired a few weeks ago. She was looking forward to it, but just as it happened we had a succession of funerals to attend. It was as though we were given a reminder: with retirement, death approaches. … Continue reading

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Humanity and nature: who is in control?

In a recent post I mentioned the fact that the study of anthropology began with nineteenth century atheists who struggled to understand why our hunter-gatherer ancestors all over the world made the same crazy mistake of imagining the existence of … Continue reading

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Smug Christians and Jewish sacrifices

There is a version of Christianity, still sadly all too common, that claims to accept everything in the Bible literally as divine revelation and is not interested in information from any other source. Quite often such Christians positively disapprove of … Continue reading

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Ivan Karamazov and God’s goodness

This is part argument, part request for information. I’m researching theodicy. Why does a good God allow suffering? One of the classic texts is Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan describes a five-year-old girl being deliberately tortured by her parents. It … Continue reading

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Which is the true religion?

This is the last of three posts on ‘religion’. Why are there different religions? Christianity is one, Hinduism is another, all the religions are different from each other, only one of them at most can be true, so you can’t … Continue reading

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What does religion tell us?

This is the second of three posts on ‘religion’. The first describes how seventeenth century thinkers developed ‘religion’ as a new concept: a self-contained feature of society, a private matter to do with beliefs about God and life after death … Continue reading

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Is religion irrelevant?

This is the first of three posts on ‘religion’. What is it, who invented it and what is it for? These days when its social role is changing it is worth asking what we are talking about. According to the … Continue reading

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