Giles Fraser speaks the truth

I've said some things about Giles Fraser on this blog in the past, but recently — since his resignation from St Paul's — he's been pleasingly unpredictable, and my previous minimal respect for him has grown. He still says stuff I disagree with, but his performance on this morning's Thought for the Day makes me want to put previous disagreements aside. As I soaked in the bath I could hardly believe what was coming out of the radio: no-nonsense speaking of truth to power — and on Thought for the Day!

Well done Giles.

Downloadable mp3 from here, for 30 days:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/thought/thought_20130304-1117a.mp3

Streaming audio here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p015vmw9

Text transcript from BBC website:

This morning the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland is waking up to one of the biggest crises in its modern history. A few weeks ago, Cardinal Keith O’Brien was expecting to be in Rome electing the next Pope. Now he’s in disgrace, vowing that he’ll never again take part in public life.

We still don’t know the details of what he did, simply that he’s admitted to sexual misconduct amongst his fellow priests. Charges of hypocrisy have been swift to follow. This month last year, the Cardinal was on this very programme attacking gay marriage as evidence for the “degeneration of society into immorality”. Indeed, he insisted: “if the UK does go in for same sex marriage it is indeed shaming our country.”

So why is it that all the churches - and not just the Roman Catholic church - seem to attract so many gay men who are themselves so virulently hostile to homosexuality? Perhaps it has to do with a misplaced sense of shame about being gay, a sense of shame that they go on to reinforce by being vocal supporters of the very theology that they themselves have been the victims of. As the novelist Roz Kaveney tweeted yesterday: “I feel sorry for O'Brien. I hope one day he realises that the sense of sexual sinfulness the Church forced on him was an abuse.” And that “O'Brien needs to distinguish between his sexual desires and his bad behaviour and not see all of it as sin.” I totally agree.

The election of a new Pope provides an opportunity for real change. The culture of secrecy that fearfully hides this bad behaviour – and not least the clerical abuse of children – needs dismantling from its very foundations. Inappropriate sexual relationships, relationships that trade on unequal power and enforced silence, are the product of an unwillingness to speak honestly, openly and compassionately about sex in general and homosexuality in particular. The importance of marriage as being available to both gay and straight people – and indeed to priests – is that it allows sexual desire to be rightly located in loving and stable relationships. I know there are people who see things differently, but I’m sorry: the churches’ condemnation of homosexuality has forced gay sex into the shadows, thus again reinforcing a sense of shame that, for me, is the real source of abuse.

Things may now be changing. It is encouraging that four priests have had the courage to speak out against a Cardinal – though one of them has expressed the fear that the Catholic church would “crush him” if they could. This is precisely the climate of fear that does so much to create the conditions of clerical abuse.

“It seems to me that there is nowhere to hide now,” said Diarmaid MacCulloch, the professor of the history of the church at Oxford University in a recent interview. He goes on: “We have had two Popes in succession that have denied that the church needed to change at all. The Roman church has to face realities that it has steadily avoided facing for the last thirty years.” And I might add, not just the Roman church, but my own church too.

---

Clearly I'm not alone in my assessment of this particular TftD:
http://www.platitudes.org.uk/platblog/index.php?entry=entry130304-081648

No more NOMA, no, no, no.

This evening I watched something my faithful telly-watching machine recorded for me last week — Rosh Hashanah: Science vs Religion, a half-hour programme presented by the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks.

Lord Sacks is often on Thought for the Day, speaking with his characteristic measured pace, endowing each word with great meaning and authority. His precise enunciation, however, fails to conceal an embarrassing fact: that the meaning and authority are wholly spurious. It's almost as if he strings words together solely based on their euphony, without consideration of what the words might actually mean.

 

"For me, science is one of the greatest achievements of humankind — a gift given to us by God."

Well, which is it, Lord Sacks? An achievement of humankind? Or a gift from God? (Is it any wonder he thinks science and religion are compatible when he obviously can't see the blatant incompatibility of what he's saying right at the start of his own TV programme?)

You have a couple of days to catch the whole thing on iPlayer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01mqvmv/Rosh_Hashanah_Science_vs_Religion/

Some clips:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mqvmv

The blurb from the BBC website:

Religion and science are frequently set up as polar opposites; incompatible ways of thinking. The Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks begs to differ. For him, science and religion can, and should, work together. To mark Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, he puts his position to the test. He meets three non-believing scientists, each at the top of their field: neurologist Baroness Susan Greenfield, theoretical physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili, and the person best known for leading the scientific attack on religion, Professor Richard Dawkins. Will the Chief Rabbi succeed in convincing the militant defender of atheism that science and religion need not be at war?

It's clear that all three of the atheist scientists to whom Lord Sacks puts his plea are willing to concede that there are limits to science — and that's where the Chief Rabbi jumps in to claim the ground for himself, while simultaneously decrying "God of the gaps". But he doesn't seem to realise that just because science doesn't have answers to certain questions, he cannot claim that religion does. Because it doesn't. All that religion can do is interpret scripture — which more often than not means making stuff up.

Thought for the Day will not be opened to atheists

"Thought for the Day will not be opened to atheists, says BBC religion chief" — says the Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9530350/Thought-for-the-Day-will-not-be-opened-to-atheists-says-BBC-religion-chief.html

Not a surprise, but some of us will keep plugging away. I object to the implication that theists are the only commentators qualified to think. The BBC should include non-religious viewpoints on Thought for the Day, or else rename it Religious Thought for the Day or something similar — something clearly indicating that these are thoughts from a religious perspective.

I was alerted to this latest non-development — and latest demonstration of BBC obstinacy — by Justin Brierley's post on the Unbelievable? Facebook page, to which I added a comment (whole thread to date follows):

Unbelievable? · 1,641 like this.

Thursday at 23:32 via Twitter ·

The BBC won't be letting atheists on Thought For The Day - but you can still come on my radio show instead http://t.co/7RudXHoA

Thought for the Day will not be opened to atheists, says BBC religion chief - Telegraph

telegraph.co.uk

The BBC will resist calls to include atheists on Thought for the Day, the corporation’s head of religion has said.

Like · · Share · @UnbelievableJB on Twitte

• 7 people like this.
• 

  Alan Vaughan Good for them! Those with no religion have no place on a religious programme. If it were a stamp collecting programme I would expect only those who collect stamps to participate. Listeners would have no desire to listen to someone with no interest in stamps. Kudos

  Thursday at 23:48 · Edited · Like
• 

  Justin Schieber We appreciate it Justin.

  Thursday at 23:50 · Like
• 

  Addison Hodges Hart Good.

  Friday at 00:06 · Like
• 

  Paul Jenkins “People have complained, as they have the right to, and I have taken a view that at this moment in time as far as I’m concerned we stay as we do.
  
  “It is a specific slot within the Today programme which is a reflection from a religious perspective on stories of importance in the news.”
  
  Well, the slot *is* called "Religious Thought for the Day", so therefore no-one but the religious is qualified to be on it. If, however, the slot was called merely "Thought for the Day" then one could naturally expect non-religious viewpoints to be given a proportionate hearing.
  
  Or have I got that wrong?

  Friday at 00:15 · Like
• 

  Paul Jenkins Frankly I can't decide whether I'm disgusted or simply resigned.
  
  (In protest, I'm resolved to look elsewhere for my platitudes.)

  Friday at 00:17 · Like
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  Andrew McBrearty Booooo! for the BBC... Yay! for Justin. :)

  Friday at 00:19 · Like
• 

  Ian-Luke Penwald Where is the share link????

  Friday at 01:32 via mobile · Like
• 

  Peter Byrom We've been given plenty of rhetoric recently about how atheism is not a religion or even a worldview (e.g. "if atheism is a religion, then off is a TV channel, and abstinence is a sex position" etc) so if this really is an officially religious slot then, frankly, the atheists can't have it both ways.
  
  However, I must say I'm disappointed that the BBC doesn't have a programme like Justin's! Indeed there's plenty of anti-religion and pro-secularism bias in the BBC already so, again frankly, I hardly think the NSS have much to complain about and it looks much more like they're trying to encroach upon one of the few religious slots left.

  Friday at 10:04 · Edited · Like
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  Fergus Gallagher Atheism is not a religion, but it is a position with respect to religion.

  Friday at 13:59 · Like
• 

  Paul Jenkins If TftD is an officially religious slot, that ought to be clear from its name.

  Friday at 14:13 via mobile · Like
• 

  John Humberstone "We've been given plenty of rhetoric recently about how atheism is not a religion or even a worldview (e.g. "if atheism is a religion, then off is a TV channel, and abstinence is a sex position" etc) so if this really is an officially religious slot then, frankly, the atheists can't have it both ways."
  
  All that needs to happen is that they stick to the title of the slot - Thought for the Day. Couldn't be simpler really.

  Yesterday at 12:11 · Like

Cartesian dualism assumed; proximate metaphor discouraged

In his Thought for the Day this morning Akhandadhi Das commits the linguistic infelicity I've noticed far too often recently (noticed presumably because we're getting so much Olympic coverage at the moment), that of using a metaphor from sport to describe something in ... sport. The "level playing-field" is its most prevalent form, and to me it shows laziness. It's inappropriate because it's confusing. If you use a metaphor from sport (such as "a level playing-field") to describe something else in sport (such as methods of ensuring sporting contests are fair), how are we to know that it's a metaphor, and that you're not talking about the actual — rather than metaphorical — thing?

If you refer to a "level playing-field" when talking about ensuring fairness in sporting contests, the fairness aspect of a level playing-field is likely to get lost in concerns about whether the sport in question actually takes place on a playing-field. If it does, and the slope of the field isn't what you're talking about, your meaning will diffuse into uncertainty. If the sport doesn't take place on a playing-field, people will — for at least a moment or two — wonder what on earth you're talking about.

In summary, if you want to be understood clearly and quickly, don't use metaphors that are too close to the actual subject you're explicating. But that's not why I'm writing about Thought for the Day (again).

Akhandadhi Das refers to research done at Bristol University on "innate fairness" in young children. This is fine — I'm all for looking at the science when considering such questions — but Das immediately takes an unjustified leap to talk about "psychological traits which arise from the physical embodiment of the soul." He bases this on nothing more than religious dogma, going on to make more bald assertions about how the soul is affected by which particular body it's embodied in. Somehow he connects this to scientific explanations of thoughts and motivations, but claims that science cannot explain altruism, sacrifice, love or fairness. If he did a bit more research he'd find that science has quite a lot to say about all four. (Indeed he's already mentioned a scientific study of fairness.)

Das refers to the Hindu belief that "ultimate fairness" is a "spiritual insight", and then goes off into uncharted woo-woo land, talking about "the soul's remembrance of its own spiritual origin", and "the dual nature of our existence".

Never mind the level playing-field — Akhandadhi Das isn't even in the same ball-park.

Podcast of Thought for the Day available here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/thought

Direct link to mp3 audio available here:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/thought/thought_20120905-1038a.mp3
(available for 30 days)

A Thought for the Day — any day soon, please?

Evan Davis, one of the hosts of Radio 4's morning news radio show, The Today Programme, shared his views about Thought for the Day in a brief profile article in the Independent recently, subsequently picked up by the British Humanist Association, which has long been campaigning for the daily four-minute slot to be opened up to non-religious speakers:

Today programme host: ‘Thought for the Day’ should have secular voices

This is so obvious it should have been done years ago, but the BBC have a blind spot about their religious programming. They even claim that the "faith" content of TftD is balanced by the "non-faith" of the rest of the Today Programme. It's just part of an insidious insistence that morality is the exclusive preserve of religion, which is not only false but profoundly so. An excellent case can be made that religious considerations of moral questions are inherently lacking in morality, and that the only truly "moral" approach to such questions is a secular humanist one.

Nelson Jones (aka "The Heresiarch") took up the matter in New Statesman:
New Statesman - God's Morning Monopoly
...giving a comprehensive overview and a reasoned argument that, today, thoughts don't have to be religious.

New Humanist chimed in with the following:
New Humanist Blog: Time for atheists on Thought for the Day?
Not just time. It's long overdue.

Guy Stagg

So far, so unanimous. But then Guy Stagg penned this staggering drivel in the Telegraph:
Secularists on Thought for the Day will expose the loneliness of atheism – Telegraph Blogs
(Via HumanistLife.) 

There’s so much wrong with Guy Stagg’s article one hardly knows where to start. We'll try the beginning:

Evan Davis has called for Thought for the Day to be opened up to secular contributions. The Today programme presenter thinks that the show is discriminating against the non-religious. Davis probably thinks this would strengthen the role of secularism in society, but in fact the opposite is true.

Naked assertions do not an argument make.

Thought for the Day is one of the better things about the Today programme. In comparison with some of the indulgent and irrelevant slots that fill up the three hours, Thought for the Day is consistently focused and intelligent.

Stagg obviously misses the ones I hear, which are mostly woolly and platitudinous.

What is more, as most atheists recognise, faith has plenty of lessons for religious and non-religious alike.

Secularism has plenty of lessons for people of faith (and no faith), so let's hear some of those too.

Finally, Radio 4 gives lots of space to secular contributions – a few minutes of God in the middle of the morning is hardly a victory against the Enlightenment.

But this is exactly the point — where else in the Today Programme's three hours can we hear secular views on ethics and how-we-should-live? Restricting TftD to only God-based views is clearly discrimination.

There are also practical problems with Evan Davis’s idea. Who would be invited onto the new Thought for the Day? Davis suggests “spiritually minded secularists”. I guess that would include philosophers and academics, but presumably poets and lifestyle coaches as well. The question is: who does it exclude?

Why should it exclude anyone?

There is something a bit immature about the idea, like a schoolboy trying to get off chapel. It belongs to the same category of silly proposal as Alain de Botton’s secular temples, or Dawkins's rebranding of atheists as “brights”. It shows that, although secularists have realised that they cannot simply be defined by opposition to religion, nevertheless they have little to offer in its place. Crucially the secular tradition has no successful institutions to preserve and spread its principles.

Stagg hasn't done his homework. "Brights" did not come from Richard Dawkins, though he and Dan Dennett have promoted the soubriquet, which hasn't found much favour among secularists. Secularists, however, have plenty to offer the Today Programme's listeners, if given the chance. As for replacing religion, if one has a cancerous tumour surgically removed, one does not seek to insert something in the body to replace it. And what does Stagg mean by "the secular tradition", if he's claiming secularists have no successful institutions? Is he not aware of the well-established British Humanist Association? The National Secular Society?

This is something that few secularists admit: atheism is quite lonely. Not just existentially, but socially as well. Secularism does not offer the sense of fellowship you find in religion. Watching old Christopher Hitchens debates on YouTube with a like-minded sceptic is entertaining, but I doubt it's as nourishing as Sunday Mass.

There's a reason secularists don't admit that atheism is lonely, at least not in Britain today. Because it isn't, neither existentially or socially. (On the global scale, is Stagg unaware of the Reason Rally? If so, he seems quite unqualified to write this article.) And I've no idea why Stagg thinks a secularist would find Sunday Mass in any sense "nourishing".

This doesn't make the claims of religion true.

He gets that bit right, at least.

For what it’s worth, I doubt them as much as Evan Davis. But I recognise that atheism has a long way to go to provide a complete and compelling alternative to religion. And it will take a lot more than inviting some yoga teachers onto the Today programme.

There's no reason why atheism ("lack of belief in a god or gods") should be an alternative to anything other than god-belief. Secular humanism, however, holds that it is possible to lead an ethical, fulfilling and meaningful life (the only life we have) without religion. I am without religion, and I see no need for anything in its place. And it may well take more than yoga teachers on TftD to convince people of that fact. So let's do it.

---

As mentioned above, the BHA has an ongoing campaign about Thought for the Day, and they are once again urging secularists, humanists and others to write to the BBC trustees. Here's my effort, sent on 2 April:

BBC Trust Unit
180 Great Portland Street
London
W1W 5QZ

Dear Sirs,

In today's Independent, Evan Davies, one of the presenters of Radio 4's Today Programme, is quoted thus:

===
Davis, an atheist, feels strongly about Today's "Thought for the Day" slot. A decade ago he complained that it was "discriminating against the non-religious". Now he says: "I think there's a very serious debate about whether the spot – which I would keep – might give space to what one might call 'serious and spiritually minded secularists'. I don't think "Thought for the Day" has to only be people of the cloth."
===

The BBC has over the years received many calls to restore balance to this slot but has not done so. The calls keep coming.

As a listener to the Today Programme for several decades I would like to add my own strong feelings that "Thought for the Day" should include secular views. The consideration of ethical questions is not the sole purview of the religious, and given that the slot is not called "Religious Thought for the Day" its content remains unbalanced. I urge the trustees to rectify this as soon as possible, in line with what is likely to be the majority view of the programme's audience.

Yours faithfully,

Paul S. Jenkins

---

I sent this via email, to trust.enquiries@bbc.co.uk
(...and only now, on pasting this in, do I realise I spelled Evan Davis' name incorrectly.)

Giles for the Day

The Rev Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral has come up with some weird suggestions for appropriate responses to crises in the past, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at his advice for dealing with the outbreak of rioting and looting throughout the country last week.

While the media and the Government pondered the correct action to take to stem the lawlessness, Giles Fraser had an altogether "alternative" solution:

Do nothing.

I'm surprised he didn't suggest lighting a candle, as he has before. Presumably this crisis was so serious it required the full force of moral action to nip it in the bud. You might think it was a bit late for that, but when the action suggested is in fact inaction, it doesn't really matter precisely when you don't do it.

Glory in the the advice of the Giles here, for a limited time:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00jq9jw

Or read the transcript:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00jq9jw
(Yes, it's the same link — streaming audio and text on the same page.)

Or if you're a glutton for punishment, get the podcast:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/thought

(It's been suggested to me that I'd be a lot happier if I avoided Thought for the Day in general, and Giles Fraser in particular. But I listen to the BBC's premier morning radio news programme — Today — and sometimes I just can't avoid the Godspot. Fortunately my blood pressure is commendably normal, so a bit of witless pomposity does no more than limber up the critical faculties at the start of the day.)

Theology for the masses

It's less than a week since The Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser, Canon Chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral, informed us on BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day that America's financial problems were foreshadowed in the Garden of Eden. Now he's berating politicians for using fancy phrases that don't mean anything.

Not that theologians would do anything like that, of course — though Giles does acknowledge dismissals of theology as "unrealistic stargazing" and "the musings of unworldly philosophers with their heads in the clouds". However, says Giles, "...theology, like blue-sky thinking, is the attempt to see things in the widest possible context." Or to put it in a way comprehensible to the ordinary bloke and blokesse (that is, those who are so lacking in the finer subtleties of academe they can't tell exegesis from hermeneutics), theology is like a zoom lens pulling back to its widest setting. That's right, theology lets us see everything. But just in case said bloke and blokesse get a bit cocky by being shown how easy theology really is, Giles tosses in a snippet of Latin to keep them in their place.

Lest we think he's off on a flight of fancy, he warns us, "Of course the practical minded are not wrong to worry that all this abstract reflection can easily slip its anchor with reality." Next, to reinforce his cultural credibility he quotes a verse of poetry. By this time we're approaching the end of his allotted three-and-a-half minutes, and though Giles has dutifully included something theological (remembering to dumb it down for the hoi poloi), thrown in some Latin and even some poetry — he's so far not mentioned God.

But never fear — the flight of fancy may be postponed but it's not forgotten: God is everywhere! And God is in the details!

"One might even say," Giles continues, "that this incarnation of theology of God-become-human is the original localism." One might, but what would it mean if one did?

Whatever the "original localism" might be, Giles won't let those stick-in-the-muds obsessed with practical reality blunt our wild speculations. "Indeed, too often, talk of 'being realistic' is just code for a failure of the imagination."

Wild speculation, apparently, is essential to politics, just as it is to theology. I think the "practical minded" may be right. Giles Fraser slipped his anchor long ago.

Theology isn't all hermeneutics and exegesis

Theology is such a useful subject. You can apply it to anything and nobody can contradict you. It uses strange words like "hermeneutics" and "exegesis", which allow you — if you're so inclined — to bamboozle the uninitiated. But the greatest thing about theology is that with it you can sound superficially intellectual even without the big words. All you need to do is link what you're saying back to scripture, and you will imbue your mundane rhetoric with the authority of holy writ.

But be careful not to overdo it, otherwise your fatuous ramblings could be seen for what they are, and you'll be in danger of exposure as an intellectual fraud.

Giles Fraser, Canon Chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral, doesn't use the big words when he's on Radio Four's Thought for the Day. Three minutes isn't really enough to get down and dirty with the exegetical ramifications of a Bible verse, especially not at breakfast time. As for hermeneutics, unless they can be eaten with milk, sugar and added bran his audience probably isn't interested.

On Tuesday morning Giles took his cue from Rowan Williams and talked about debt. He laid out his relevant qualifications, just so we can be in no doubt of his authority on the subject. "I'm not an economist," he said. Nevertheless he went on to explain that America's current problems are the the same as those of Adam and Eve, and the reason Greece needs to be bailed out by the Eurozone is because of "the fall of man".

I'm not a theologian, but it seems to me that the Rev. Canon Dr. Giles Fraser has once again amply demonstrated theology's utility¹ and its relevance to the modern world.

Behold — for thirty days and thirty nights — the Fraser thought here (mp3):
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/thought/thought_20110727-1110a.mp3

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1. I think there should be an "f" in that word somewhere.

A Moral Maze — of science and morality (BBC Radio 4)

On Wednesday BBC Radio 4 concluded the present series of the Moral Maze, its weekly live panel discussion on topical issues of morality. Unlike most other radio discussion panels, the Moral Maze adopts a cross-examination format, calling witnesses one by one to be quizzed by the regulars. As it's a live show, things can sometimes get a bit heated. (This also depends on which of the regulars are on the show in any given week, and who is chairing the panel — David Aaronovitch has temporarily replaced Michael Buerk for the latter part of this series. Melanie Phillips' more incendiary views often spark fireworks, though she wasn't on this week.)

The topic on Wednesday was science and morality, and two of the witnesses were Giles Fraser and Jerry Coyne. Fraser doesn't seem to have learned from his encounter with Sam Harris (but Fraser's views appear remarkably ill-defined at the best of times, especially on Thought for the Day). He impaled himself categorically on one horn of the Euthyphro dilemma by stating that God's morality is not intrinsic to God but external to him (which surely makes him less of a god). But theology has never been Fraser's strong point.

Jerry Coyne dealt patiently with his interrogators' questions, but clearly could have used more time to develop his responses. In some ways he was an untypical choice for this topic (maybe they couldn't get Sam Harris), but nevertheless he did well.

The audio can be streamed from the Moral Maze website or direct from iPlayer:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b011jv8m
Check out Jerry Coyne's two posts on his blog Why Evolution is True:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/i-iz-on-moral-maze-today/
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/moral-maze-podcast/

"Grill a bishop" and you'll get undercooked answers

A revealing segment on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme yesterday seemed to confirm (anecdotally at least) that young people are by no means apathetic about the god question. Bishop Graham Kings has taken it upon himself to answer secondary school pupils' questions about God. From the BBC website:

A Church of England bishop has called on Anglican clergy to take the Church's message to young people by trying to address the fundamental questions of life and death

Dr Graham Kings, the Bishop of Sherborne, in Dorset, says a lack of religious knowledge is one of the causes of religious doubt. Robert Pigott reports

The four-minute audio stream is here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9367000/9367602.stm

The questions and answers that the Today editors included in the segment are transcribed below:

Q: "Do you think God planned the creation of nuclear weapons? Because seeing as he's supposed to be loving, that doesn't seem like a very loving thing to do."

A: "Not everything that happens in the world is God's design, so I don't think rape and racism and apartheid and smashing people up is God's design. But he has given us free will, either to respond to him and to other people lovingly, or not."

Q: "You say that God doesn't command everything, yet in the Bible it does, so surely somehow he did command that person to create nuclear weapons. Because in the Bible it says that God commands everything."

A: "It doesn't say that in the Bible."

Bishop Kings apparently blames young people's estrangement from the church partly on declining knowledge of the Bible. You may detect a recurring theme here. When asked how he knows there's life after death, the bishop replies, "I give the illustration of someone who's come back from the dead. Someone's come back and said, yes there is life after death, and that's Jesus of Nazareth himself. So I just have to be honest and say, well I believe in the afterlife because someone's come back and reported back."

Q: "You said a moment ago that homosexual relationships fall short of the glory of God." 

A: "I think we are designed for the glory of God. Paul says that in Romans 3, but he also says that just everybody falls short of the glory of God." 

Q: "If people are accepted exactly how they are, then surely God will accept them if they are homosexual. Why is it wrong, in that respect?" 

A: "God accepts them exactly as they are. What sometimes happens, and it doesn't always happen, is that sometimes they think, is this right, do I continue in a sexual relationship, or do I become celibate?"

Bishop Kings clearly bases everything on the Bible, but we didn't hear his answer to the obvious question, "How do you know the Bible is true?" (The answer is likely to have involved some circularity.) Note that Bishop Kings' answer to the question about homosexuality did not reference the Bible's unequivocal condemnation. This is probably because such a response would expose the Bible as a repository of repugnant immorality.

As if to emphasize the desperate disconnectedness of religion, Robert Pigott's report was immediately followed by Thought for the Day, in which Rhidian Brook gave us his take on Blue Monday (also available as a transcript). I would hope Mr Brook knows that Blue Monday is entirely made up by a PR company to sell holiday bookings, but I suppose if you subscribe to a belief for which the only "evidence" is fictitious scripture, it's difficult to tell these things apart.

Knowledge and faith are not remotely the same thing

On this morning's Thought for the Day the Rev Tom Butler, who claims to be trained in both science and theology, said this:

One physicist has written: "Our measurements point to a universe filled with a kind of matter which we've never seen, propelled by a force which we don't understand." If believing that isn't faith, I don't know what is.

It might help if Tom Butler had been trained in logical thinking as well. The unnamed physicist is clearly making a statement about a lack of knowledge, and it is revealing that the cleric interprets this as faith. Cosmologists speculate about about the nature of the universe, and see that their knowledge about it is far from complete. Clerics may speculate about the nature of God, and with even less knowledge go on to claim that they know in detail what this deity wants you to do with your genitalia.

Sorry to labour the point, but I find it frustrating that this has to be pointed out yet again. Cosmologists may indeed suggest that the universe is largely composed of quantities of matter and energy that they know next to nothing about. But they then go on to suggest how this stuff might be accounted for. They hypothesise. They speculate. They calculate. They test.

Theologians, on the other hand, faced with something about which they have a comparable lack of knowledge, do not do this. They just make stuff up.

Thought for the Day is available as a podcast feed here:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/thought/rss.xml

or from iTunes here:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=261779755

(BBC podcasts, like the iPlayer streams, usually expire after seven days, but all the Thoughts are available for audio download as mp3s on the TftD archive website.)