- If Jesus did not mention a subject, it cannot be essential to his teachings.
- You are not being persecuted when prevented from persecuting others.
- Truth isn’t like wine that gets better with age. It’s more like manna you must recognise wherever you are and whoever you are with.
- You cannot call it “special rights” when someone asks for the same rights you have.
- It is no longer your personal religious view if you’re bothering someone else. If you want to pray for someone, you don’t need to do it anywhere near them.
- Marriage is a civil ceremony, which means it is a civil right.
- If how someone stimulates the pubic nerve has become a needle to your moral compass, you are the one who is lost.
- To condemn homosexuality, you must use parts of the Bible you don’t yourself obey. Anyone who obeyed every part of Leviticus would rightly be put in prison.
- If we do not do the right thing in our day, our grandchildren will look at us with the same embarassment that we look at racist grandparents.
- When Jesus forbade judging, that included you.
I’m very grateful to James Butler for posting this list on his twitter feed, which I found when it was retweeted. It looked like it originally came from someone else but let’s face it, there’s nothing on this list which those of us who want to bless the good life didn’t already know.
Reading through some of the comments which have recently been posted on my blog, some of the nonsensical blog posts that have been written about me elsewhere when I was camping out in St Paul’s Churchyard & criticising the Cathedral authorities and some of the email correspondence I get, it becomes clear that there are plenty people who call themselves ‘Christian’ but in fact haven’t got the slightest grasp of the basic tenets of that creed, let alone reality. If the people they call fascists and totalitarianians behaved towards their churches in the way they try to control us, we’d be regulating what they can call their services, what sort of schools they could send their kids to and accusing them of perverting the morality of society at large by insisting that good things can only be learnt from an imaginary friend.
Recent revelations have made it clear that the Catholic Church has been, for a very long time, little more than a great big ring of organised paedophiles, at least in the West. Show me a Catholic and I’ll show you someone who has been emotionally abused. Not that any other religious groups are much better. The Protestant hierarchy in this country queued up to bless the illegal Iraq war. Often we hear Christians protesting that these wrong things are done by other Christians, who have followed a mistaken view of the Saviour. The plain fact is that, as with all other types of sectarianism, many Christians hate other types of Christians more than followers of other religions. In the US the churches appear to adopt a colour bar. These days we love to think of the Quakers as being morally good but the fact is, back in the day, plenty of them got rich on the back of the labours of large numbers of slaves.
Scientists pursue the truth through experimentation. Bible bashers pursue you for not agreeing with their chosen truth.
There are plenty of beautiful people who devote their lives to good work having been motivated by their Christianity. I got to know some of these people when I was involved in Occupy London. I’m thinking of people like Roger Chisnall, who set up the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which successfully campaigned to cancel the debts of some of the world’s poorest countries. You won’t hear him banging on about how his religious faith is under attack. In fact, after he first asked to help me with Occupy London’s legal team’s work, I checked him out and later mentioned, in passing, that I realised that he was a Christian. His response? “I didn’t tell you that!”
There are plenty others I could name, who have inspired me. These people appear to have learnt a lesson from the Italian Marxist Gramsci, who ‘preached’ that revolutionaries should concentrate on good works first and talking about their ideology second. It’s a strategy that works. Ramming your views down other people’s throats first and foremost is about as counterproductive as possible.