When a mentally sick person shot children in Scotland we did something about guns. Soon the gun lobby over in the 'States will be screaming to arm six-year-olds so that they can 'defend themselves'. These horrors have causes. Why do they happen? Jesus said it was so that the will of God...
I liked the man - people of principle are (now) very rare in politics. His original views were way below undergraduate, but he at least sticks to some sort of sense. I think the difficulty is that most conservatives are simply used as cannon-fodder by the extremely rich, who regard them, really...
All right for you, not me - there's a very deep difference in national cultures. Back in the old days here it was okay for ordinary people to go poaching, because that was against the bosses' law, and children were hungry. Nowadays we understand that animals feel pain, and there's nothing funny...
Tell me about it. Two nights ago I was out helping stop a local council bid to build on a badger sett: we stopped 'em.
I am not a believer in gestures, except where personally involved, as with the chickens, where the whole business makes it impossible for me to get that meat down. All I...
What point are you making? Do you suppose me to be a Hindu? How exactly would the poverty-stricken child get to eat the dumb stinking cow, please? The rich will see to it that s/he does not, as well you know, because there is no profit in it.
I'm caught all the time between a liking and respect for Anglicanism, in our Country the most civilized of churches, and the near-impossibility (shared by all but the happy-clappy, I think) of believing what it is supposed to believe. I got to where I am by way of a slow, grudging retreat.
It does depend on how you define religion, and I'd define it as a doomed attempt to appease a pretty nutty non-OK Fifth-Century-BC tyrant, a transfer to the realms above of a type all to common in the world of that time. I think it was Jesus' mission to get rid of that sad, sick old stuff...
You could say that the Church made a huge mistake when it incorporated all that stuff just to get the prophecies in. The New Testament is hugely more coherent.
The local bigwig used to send us such lead-full corpses once a year. I can still feel the ache in my teeth!
Train the kids up to be learnéd and better burglars then! About the same difference! :)
No, but you do have to believe in the forgiver, which implies a person in personal contact, difficult to reconcile with the sort of vast computer required even to know about such a vast creation?
'S'mae' means 'Howdy' in our language, more or less.
I'm the eldest son of a very left-wing parson, a Christian Socialist and a serious one quite unlike the Bliar-supporters of today - I remember Harry Pollitt, Chairman (I think - or was it Secretary?) of the CPGB coming to call - and my...
I mean that in the time of Jesus a successful politician like Julius Caesar could be elected a 'god' by the Roman Senate, and the 'gods' of the earlier peoples were ludicrous sex-mad absurdities. As we know more and more of the universe(s) the concept of even a transcendental God in control of...
I use what's available, but have never killed anything by choice since I gave an old and wholly inadequate shotgun back to the farmer who lent it me. I never eat chicken because I have worked in the concentration-camps in which they are forced to drag out their lives, but tend to suppose that...
Like so very many positions people feel they are somehow required to hold, it is a metaphor expressing the way people felt a long time ago, and it has become a shibboleth, a way of identifying 'our side'. We need to get into these metaphors, symbols and whatever and ask ourselves what they...