Skip to Content

religion

Halo Halo!

Hello Hallo

Look out. He’s behind you!

RIGHT! THAT’S Christmas over and done with. We’ve had enough mince pies, mistletoe and baby Jesus to keep us going till next December when the whole bloody farce kicks off again. It’s pantomime season now, so let’s take a look at one of religion’s other comic characters.

Every good pantomime has its villain, and the Catholic Church is no exception. This baddie doesn’t usually get a look in over Christmas, but recently he’s been back in the news. It’s our old friend Satan.

If you’ve been possessed by the devil recently, Father Gabriele Amorth is the man you need. He’s been the Vatican’s chief exorcist for 25 years and claims to have carried out 70,000 exorcisms. (And in case you haven’t got a calculator handy, that’s 2,800 a year or 7.67 exorcisms per day, seven days a week). And some people say the clergy don’t earn their money.

Halo Halo! - Rowan Williams v New (and old) Atheism

Hello Hallo

You almost have to feel sorry for the Archbishop of Cant. It seems that the Church of England is on its knees. With declining attendance, internal disagreement about God’s wishes regarding women and gays becoming bishops, and clergy defecting to the Catholics he has the job of holding the whole circus together and trying to present it as a credible organisation with something useful to say.

Back in February, in response to a report highlighting the problems the Church faces in trying to convince us to take it seriously, he put much of the blame on what he calls ‘new atheism’.
How this differs from old atheism he didn’t say but presumably he was referring to the numerous books published recently attacking the antiquated beliefs that he and his cronies expect us to accept. What was needed, he said, was for the clergy to be more vocal in countering the arguments put by such writers as Dawkins and Hitchens.

Halo Halo!

Hello Hallo

Politics, Poverty and Gods

To keep the world ticking over, it seems, God occasionally needs a little help from believers with political clout.

Although, as we are told, God is all-powerful and all-knowing and should therefore be quite capable of identifying problems and sorting them out by himself, the US Presidential hopeful Rick Perry decided recently that a couple of things needed to be brought urgently to God’s attention, namely the state of the economy, and America’s declining moral standards.

Halo Halo!

Hello Hallo

Holy Smoke

In 1933 the Nazis attempted to obliterate what they saw as anti-German thinking with a book burning campaign. Fortunately ideas are not so easily killed off and book burning as a form of censorship was abandoned. Or so we thought. Then earlier this year along came the wacky Florida pastor, Terry Jones, who decided that the thoughts of a non-existent god in the Koran were a threat to the thoughts of his own non-existent god - and rectified the situation by burning the Koran.

Now another Christian preacher in Wales, the Rev Geraint ap Iorwerth, has been at it too. In a novel twist though he’s not been burning the Koran, or even the works of Marx and Engels. He’s been cutting out and burning the bits of the bible that he doesn’t like.

Syndicate content


Theme by Dr. Radut.