The prospect of an Archbishop of Canterbury who is not economically illiterate must be accounted a blessing.
Less of the prolonged woolly stuff from Lambeth Palace and less evasion of real public issues (like the importance of spending cuts) will be nice.
By chance — or, as believers would say, by the mysterious workings of the Holy Spirit — as the news of Justin Welby’s promotion was announced I was tuned in to the proceedings of the Parliamentary Commission on banking standards and hearing the man himself asking questions of the Bank of England director Andy Haldane.
And very good questions they were.
I will not weary you with the key issue of the valuation of bank balance sheets that provided the chance for this interesting duet.
But that is about as far as a welcome for the new Archbishop can go. The conflict between God and Mammon remains unchanged and irreconcilable.
Banking issues are tangible. Yet religions, all of them, remain as delusional as ever and dangerous, too. It has been permissible and even fashionable for the past century or so for us to look back on the wars of religion and declare that, thank goodness, we are not as previous generations were with their taste for burning heretics or slaughtering them en masse or paying tribute to the papacy despite its wickedness.
But are we so sure about our enlightened age? The world of Islam has become increasingly convinced that it is under threat from the West. It resorts to counter-attacks which we convince ourselves are supported only by a small minority of fanatics.
The arrival on the scene of the suicide bomber is certainly a product of religion with its promise of paradise for martyrs. The battles between Shia and Sunni Muslims speak for their own absurdity.
Belief: A mere 10 per cent of Britons go to church on a regular basis, compared to 45 per cent of AmericansWe in Britain take religion less and less seriously, but in the U.S. it is very different. Some 45 per cent of Americans claim regular church attendance compared with France’s 15 per cent and our 10 per cent.
Religion also made a significant contribution to the Cold War, where President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles brought us close to nuclear Armageddon with his fanatical hostility to ‘atheistic Communism’.
And we have only just missed having as the next U.S. President an adherent to that most implausible of religions, Mormonism.
The fact is that religions only offer differing degrees of silliness and are not a solution to anything.
More... Hats off to you! New Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby is already a hit as he swaps headgear with a policeman Revealed: Archbishop blindfolded by rebels with Kalashnikovs on jungle mercy mission Not your average Archbish! Not only does he actually believe in God, but the new Archbishop of Canterbury is the son of a bootlegger who was Vanessa Redgrave's loverIn the Christian case we have the Old Testament full of battle, murder and sudden death with much of it approved by God. In the New Testament we have a mass of contradictions.
Since it was put together some 300 years after the Crucifixion, the Church authorities had to vote on what to include out of the varying gospels and scraps of stories then in circulation — coming up with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, none of whom, it is acknowledged, were the actual authors.
Besides, anyone familiar with urban myths knows how wildly inaccurate stories can gain great circulation — without even the assistance of Twitter.
Newspapers spend a lot of time fending off improbable stories.
You can imagine an investigative journalist trying to make sense of the votes in the assembled New Testament. How do you know x is reliable, but not y? Where did this or that ‘gospel’ come from?
Sorry to sound cynical, but that’s the real world.
The end of another scare storyPity the gloomsters who, when they are not preaching about global warming, have long been claiming the world is running out of natural resources.
Their beliefs amount to a sort of substitute religion — a chance to beat their breast and sound pious. Lib Dems are much given to this sort of thing.
Hot on the heels of evidence that wind turbines are an uneconomic as well as an aesthetic nightmare comes news that the U.S. will overtake Saudi Arabia in oil production by 2020.
Condemned: Wind turbines have been described as uneconomic as well as an aesthetic nightmareThe improved ‘fracking’ process for extracting oil from rock and shale has proved revolutionary.
But this was never supposed to happen. Mankind was supposed to have run desperately short of oil by now, according to the Club of Rome and fellow catastrophists.
Why won’t they read the small print? Forecasts for the future known supply of oil have been between 25 to 30 years for many decades — at that year’s price, at that year’s level of consumption and at existing levels of technology. If the price goes up, it makes sense to go out and look for more and/or improve the technology to drain existing wells better.
It is not a complicated proposition. It is known as the law of supply and demand. When there is a shortage of any commodity or service, human ingenuity will always come up with a solution — if you let it.
That, of course, means allowing the free market to operate. Politicians in varying degrees dislike that — Socialists a lot and Tories considerably less. The Lib Dems are in the first group. Watch them while they still exist.
