When people are right and not right with God - John Newton

"When people are right with God, they are apt to be hard on themselves and easy on other people. But when they are not right with God, they are easy on themselves and hard on others."

- John Newton

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The Irony of Richard Dawkins? - Stephen Pollard

"Last week’s court decision to ban prayers at the start of council meetings is all of a piece. The judge may or may not have got the law right – there will almost certainly be an appeal. But it is the National Secular Society which, in taking its case to court to have its views imposed on the rest of us, is responsible for the ban on Christians praying

As a Jewish schoolboy, I had to sit through Christian prayers at the end of every assembly. It would not have occurred to me or any other Jew I knew that we should try to stop them praying in front of us. We were a small minority at a school with a large majority of Christians. I simply sat silently, my mind wandering off to other things. 

The militant secularists, however, have only one modus operandi – attack. Respect for others’ views seems to be entirely missing from their moral calculus. 

They entirely miss the irony of their position. Religious leaders who focus solely on a sectarian appeal to their own followers, and who seek to raise their own standing by diminishing the views of others, end up on the margins of serious debate. And as their noise drowns out the quieter, less confrontational majority, they act against their own religion’s interest."...

- Stephen Pollard, an editor from "The Jewish Chronicles", quoted from The Telegraph Article, For once, Richard Dawkins is lost for words.

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To Dawkins' Worst Fans, I Say ... (from Cracked.com)

Personally, I don't care whether you believe in God or not. I change my mind on the subject daily. I don't care if you can quote The God Delusion cover to cover as if it were some holy book (although odds are that if you like name-dropping Dawkins every two seconds, you probably haven't even read it). Just do me one favor. If you do quote Dawkins, don't drop the mic and leave the stage like nothing more needs to be said, as if the possibility of the divine -- of some form of something beyond our limited conception -- has been obliterated because a highly educated Englishman has constructed something eloquent, reducing all faith to ignorance and fear. Bertrand Russell did that quite well a century before Dawkins, and millions of believers remain. Some of them have actually read Russell and Dawkins and still think there is much to consider and debate because, after all, we're only talking about a simple thing like the meaning of creation and existence.

From the often hilarious website, Cracked.com and article

Plus another interesting, edifying and amusing article from the same author "4 Things Both Atheists and Believers Need To Stop Saying". An excerpt below commenting on Christopher Hitchen's book "God is not Great":

And given how much we suck, why shut the door completely on the possibility of something in this universe being better, stronger and wiser? Something we could strive to be more like? It's always seemed to me that the most virulent atheists -- not mere nonbelievers, but those who claim to be positive about God's nonexistence and openly hostile to anyone who could think otherwise -- are incapable of believing there could ever be something greater than they. Not a lack of faith so much as humility. Certainly, that's not true for all atheists, but it doesn't help the atheist cause that the three most hostile atheists I can think of are also on the short-list for most overbearingly arrogant.

Dealing with Margaret Thatcher's death and funeral

From the Guardian

"...Today is the one day that I will not be demonstrating or turning my back. For Thatcher and I share that final description: both of us failed, both in need of forgiveness. Its the ultimate human solidarity. And while I recognise that many find the language of sin and judgment increasingly uncongenial, it is nonetheless for precisely this reason that it is such a theological mistake to use her funeral as an occasion for grand political theatre, inviting comparisons with Winston Churchill. As the Habsburg funerals recognised, none of that makes any difference in the ultimate scheme of things.

Without God, final judgment becomes the domain of the crowd and the newspapers. I once asked the former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, what he really wanted to say to Robert Mugabe before his trip to Zimbabwe, back in 2010. The archbishop looked up from his drink, and dropped his voice: "There is no immunity from prosecution when you are dead," he said. And no, this column is not deliberately putting Margaret Thatcher in the company of thieves and dictators to make a political point. I'm putting us all in that company to make a theological one."

- From Giles Fraser, "How to bury Margaret Thatcher"

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