Doug tagged me with this; I’m supposed to “Post a collection of 10 things you believe, ethical, philosophical or theological.”
1. I believe that God is a very great deal less concerned about sexual preference (and even behaviour) than we are.
2. I believe that God is a very great deal less concerned about styles of worship than we are.
3. I believe that there are services of “Christian worship” which qualify under neither heading.
4. I believe that love makes the world go round in a very literal (ie law of physics) sense.
5. I believe that governments consistently cause more problems than they solve, and I especially appreciate the prayer in the BCP that we might be ‘godly and quietly governed’.
6. I believe that the seriousness of climate change is significantly overstated.
7. I believe that all abortions are in every case sinful, but I also believe that on some rare occasions it can be a lesser sin than the alternative.
8. I believe that the church has lost something essential with a shift away from “supernatural” understandings of the faith (eg angels and demons); I also believe that there are problems with such traditional language of the “supernatural”. Should I ever get a chance to scratch the academic itch then I will research the nature of these forms of theological language and try to answer the question ‘what is actually going on during an exorcism?’ I believe that something very real and important takes place, but neither the supernatural nor the secular approaches capture it.
9. I believe that Wittgenstein is not well understood by many (most?) mainstream philosophers, most especially with regard to his understanding of religious language. (He’ll be my principal converation partner if I end up doing that PhD – but I doubt it will be in a Philosophy faculty.)
10. I believe that atheism in the humourless sense is a passing fad and that within perhaps as little as twenty years the likes of Richard Dawkins will be viewed in the same way as, eg, Ron Atkinson was for his language. That does not mean that all atheists will become believers (to think that is to persist in missing the point) – it is to say that at the philosophical level positivism has been comprehensively debunked, and all that’s left are the cultural echoes amongst the half-educated, which will slowly die out.
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