Tag Archives: Atheism

The Desperation of Atheist Trolls

21 Thursday Nov 2019

Posted by in Faith

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PUBLISHED ON by Charlie

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
CHARLES DARWIN

When I was an atheist, the thing that distinguished me from my peers was that I wasted no time trolling believers on their blogs or their websites or drawing them into debate in the offline world. The first and most basic reason for this distinction of mine was that atheism is a fundamentally boring topic. You are not arguing for a something but for a nothing. It is easy to be passionate for a positive but not so much for a negative.

The second reason is that it struck me as a waste of time. When you consider the existential dimension of atheism, what do you gain from disabusing people of their fairy tales? If life is nothing more than a blip in a sea of infinite nothing, why should I care if you find some comfort in a lie? Atheists humor people in more damaging fictions like those of the transgendered who mutilate themselves in some vain effort to resolve the conflict between their biology and their delusions. In fact, I know from personal experience that atheists will tolerate virtually anything you care to believe so long as it is not the Christian religion. This is how my club of fellow atheists turned from people devoted to science and reason into a society tolerant of polyamory and Wicca.

Despite having a short life with the expectation of eternal nothingness awaiting at the end of it all, many atheists prefer to spend their precious time in this finite existence arguing endlessly in Christian forums and comboxes against the thing they do not believe in. Bishop Robert Barron noticed this same phenomenon of atheists trolling the CNN Belief Blog and being passionately interested in the thing they claim to be a delusion and a waste of time. I can honestly say that I spend no similar amount of time in flat earth forums attempting to disabuse those people of their nuttiness. I have a friend who is a flat earther, and I can say that the flat earth delusion does no practical harm to him whatsoever. This might be different if he was a travel agent.

The atheist troll will make the claim that debunking religion is a good cause done out of charity and goodwill in order to make the world a better place. Look at how great Chinese society is as a consequence of their efforts to stamp out all things religious. It is an awesome thing to be able to think anything the government allows you to think. Yet, this charitable desire of atheists to stamp out ignorance does not seem to extend to the Musloid fanatics with a penchant for beheading their critics and flying passenger airliners into tall buildings. The Freedom From Religion Foundation focuses on the truly harmful religious practices of coaches praying with their teams before football games or swearing on Bibles before taking office. The world would be a truly better place without those superstitious practices. Plus, those Christians don’t tend to swing scimitars, chop off the heads of your menfolk, and force your women and children into bondage and sexual servitude.

The ire, vitriol, and combox hijinks of atheist trolls comes down to the desperate desire to convince people like me that my belief in God is incorrect. They have it right, and I have it wrong. For some reason, convincing me of my wrongness is worth the third of their meaningless lives they waste trying to badger me into unbelief. Then, they discover that I was already an atheist and for a very long time. Now, I am not an atheist. That troubling fact causes even more desperation and distress for the atheist troll. One of their own defected from the ranks of unbelief to embrace the myths again.

The reality is that atheist trolls waste their time because they do not need to convince others of the truth of atheism. They need to convince themselves. Despite having an arsenal of scientific facts and logical arguments at their disposal, they are not convincing to the atheist trolls because people like me still stubbornly believe in God. Somehow, the assurance of God’s non-existence does not reach 100% until some believer becomes an unbeliever. I find this bizarre because my flat earth friend causes no similar distress in my round earth worldview.

The fact is that forever is a long time, and it is certainly made longer when it is eternal damnation. That potentiality would certainly make wasting a large portion of your meaningless life a worthwhile endeavor. I can afford to be wrong as a Christian because I have nothing to lose from believing except the love and adoration of atheist trolls. If God does not exist, I will never even know that I was wrong. And the atheist will never know that he was right. Knowledge requires consciousness which atheists claim is extinguished at death. But if God does exist, the atheist will have to contemplate his error forever. That possibility is a great motivator to make sure you got it right.

I will now render some charity to those atheist trolls and help them a bit in their desperation. If I became an unbeliever again, would it make you feel more confident in your unbelief and assurance of annihilation at death? Would it end all of your doubts in doubt? Would it make one damn bit of difference? Of course, it wouldn’t. Countless Christians apostasize and lose their faith in God. In fact, the entire world could become atheist, and this still would do nothing to alleviate the desperation of these atheists. The suspicion that God exists and the desire to know Him are itches that remain even after the scratching has stopped. If you doubt this, contemplate the phenomenon of the atheist church or the semi-religious practices of the atheist Sam Harris who attempts to gain the benefits of religion through meditation practice while retaining a prophylactic of unbelief.

The atheist must contend with the fact that if man is an animal then he is a religious animal. The material universe produced material beings with desires for non-material things. This makes no sense. Yet, religious belief and superstition is ubiquitous, and human beings have expended great amounts of material, manpower, and resources over the centuries to serve these needs and desires for the non-material. Humanity desires the divine. The desperation of atheist trolls is merely a symptom of religious frustration stemming from a denial of this desire for the divine.

Rocks and Hard Places (2)

24 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by in Faith, Islam

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The forms in which Islam makes its challenges to our society in the West are variations on an old theme. The old ways of tackling them are not likely to work – if Afghanistan and Iraq show anything at all, it is that violence is welcomed by radical Islamists; they truly see that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of growth. However strange many of us find the various Youtube clips (to which I have no intention of linking) of young men in Syria rallying others to their ranks, if we are wise, we will recognise they have an appeal to others whose mindset we fail to grasp, and we will wonder how that might be met; we might, if we are very wise, wonder why it exists. The other challenge to Christianity comes from the aggressive secularism which tends to dominate our media and political class. That is not to say that they will not, from time to time, pay lip service to the ‘importance’ of ‘faith’ to individuals; but it is to say they will insist it is kept out of public discourse. They fail to see that this, itself, is an ideological position. When people say, as some do, that this means we are back to a position analogous to that in which Christianity grew, they have a minor point, but miss a major difference. The minor point is the similarities in terms of promiscuity and spiritual relativism; the major difference is that this is a society which sees Christianity as having been tried, weighed in the balance and found wanting. One reason why secular polemicists major on the misdeeds of Christians in the past is to ‘prove’ that Christianity is, in Lord Ridley’s words, a ‘virus’ which needs to be ‘exterminated’. As our own Geoffrey Sales rather predicted someone would, Ridley (whom I have met) wants religion to be taken out of schools altogether; as a Tory peer he is presumably not of the opinion that the State should provide the money which would be needed to fill the holes in funding if all churches withdrew financial support for education in this country. The sort of lack of self-reflexivity mixed with arrogance which is typical of this type can be seen in his comment: “rationalists no longer expect to get rid of religion altogether by explaining life and matter: they aim only to tame it instead, and to protect children from it”.

It is reflective of some of the lesser minds who concentrate on science, that Ridley thinks in terms of religion as ‘explaining matter’; there’s little to be done with one who starts from there and claims a monopoly on being rational. But he reflects, with devastating accuracy, the mindset of which I have been writing here. Unencumbered by much in the way of actual knowledge of religion, emboldened to speak with ignorance by the fact that the people to whom he is speaking share it, Ridley peddles the old, broken, solutions for how to deal with Islam; he assumes that Western rationalism will win out. One has to have some level of admiration for someone who can so defy the experience of the last century. He sees Islam and Christianity as both need extirpation. He is a Cameron created ‘Tory Peer’. He says openly what many of his fellows say in private. Perhaps, like so many Cameron Conservatives, he desperately wishes to atone for his sins on that front – after all to be an ‘out’ Conservative is much more likely to see one criticised than to be openly gay – by aligning himself with liberal pieties elsewhere. If you want to know why the British Government has done (and said) nothing of significance about what is happening in Mosul, there is a short answer; it doesn’t really care.

To those of you who have followed me thus far, I apologise if you were expecting some answer to the dilemma in which Christianity finds itself; but I hope some attempt to outline the problem coherently might be a place to begin such an exercise.

Putting Paul in context

17 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by in Bible, Early Church, Faith

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el_greco_st_paulIt may be because so many modern aggressive atheists are from a science background that they fail to understand the way in which historians proceed; but quite what excuses their ignorance when this is pointed out is a matter for their care workers and not for me.

The notion that people who had seen their beloved leader die on the Cross would, in some ay not explained, all collude in a delusion that He had risen from the dead is simply a form of atheist madness. No one has delineated such a mass delusion across even a decade, let alone centuries; yet atheists who pride themselves of their devotion to reason can trot out the idea of mass delusion without blushing. Paul knew that eye-witness testimony mattered, and as he told the Corinthians, more than five hundred people has witnessed the Risen Lord; he offered important names among them. Paul was more than happy for contemporaries to check his story out. The same was true of Luke, who puts at the very start of his Gospel the declaration that it is based on eye-witness testimony; St. John’s first Epistle does the same.  These men had seen what they preached and happy to call in aid eye-witness testimony.  If modern atheists wish to behave like the bad part of doubting Thomas, that’s their look-out, but to say there is no eye-witness testimony is simply incorrect. There’s more and better corroborated testimony for Christ’s resurrection than there is for Caesar landing in Britain.

Paul called on that testimony because of who he was. An avowed enemy and persecutor of the Christians, he was received by them with some suspicion, and the notion that such a man could simply come in with his fancy ways and rewrite what others had seen and what he had not is, again, one which carried weight only in atheism 101, that fact-free zone where atheists cheer each other up by repeating improbable stories and then attributing them to Christians.  Paul came as a penitent to the Church, one with an important vision, but there was nothing in that vision which was not already known to those to whom he talked. The fact was that Paul needed to be vetted and checked out, and he was. His vision matched what the early Christians already knew – that was why they accepted Paul.

But Paul never occupied any leadership position in the Church in Jerusalem – indeed he paid an enormous personal price for his conversion. His old allies, the Pharisees, pursued him with hatred to his death, and it is clear that James the Just and the official leadership regarded Paul and some of his ideas with lasting suspicion. If we stand back a moment we will see that Paul spent his life as an itinerant missionary, suffering many hardships, including shipwreck and persecution, and indeed, ended by receiving martyrdom in Rome under Nero.

If we place Paul into his context, we see, even before we examine any detailed evidence, how improbable it is that he would have been able to come in with a very different version of what Christ taught and who He was – let alone have been able to convert to such a view those who had seen the Lord in the flesh.

Ichabod

11 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by in Church/State, Faith

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5969997250_2ac68c7bab_zMy generation has the dubious honour of having seen, in its lifetime, a passage from a Christian to a post-Christian society. When I was a lad the local clergyman was a respected figure (even if you weren’t one of his flock), people expected to go to church or chapel on Sunday (even if they didn’t get there as often as they should), which was a day of rest when most of the shops were closed. Our legal system was soundly based on a framework of Christian ethics. Divorce was infrequent, abortion something which if it happened, did so in the dark corners of society.

What happened in these last cases illustrates a wider problem. There were couples who lived lives of real misery because of the difficulty of divorcing; there were lasses who died because of back street abortionists. In an effort, they said, to solve these problems, liberal-minded men like David Steel and Roy Jenkins pioneered changes in these things. We were told, on the abortion issue, for example, that there would be many safeguards; there were, and are, but everyone knows we effectively have abortion on demand in this country.  In place of the problem of some couples living lives of misery, we now have many more, and their children, being damaged by the divorce rate. Could it really be said that our last state is better than our first? or have we (literally) thrown out the baby with the bath water?

These changes were put forward with good motives, and incrementally. But their effect has been to create a society very different from one anyone said they wished to create.

The reasons for the de-Christianisation of our society in the UK are complex, but it would be very hard not to ask the churches and chapels what they’ve been doing all this while? Part of the answer seems to have been ‘going along with it so as to seem relevant’. That is a trahaison des clercs.

The role of the churches is to proclaim the Gospel. Proclaim it in action by all means – what point is our faith if it produces nothing but sermons and books on theology? But we are also here to witness to society in another way – that is to declare there is a radically different way of being in this world. That involves talking about sin – which of course modern clerics seem (with some notable exceptions) to dislike.

The results of this failure are plain. Look at any urban landscape and you will see it littered with abandoned chapels and failed churches which are derelict and decaying.  If you want to see the failure of our churches, look at their physical embodiments.

Yet could it really be said that this society needs the churches less than it did. I am involved, as I know Jessica is, in my local foodbank. Here my chapel, like other churches, plays a crucial role in a place where the State has failed. There are other such places – let us as Christians seize the opportunities. Despair is for sissies – not disciples of Christ.

Witnessing

07 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Faith

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how-to-be-a-christian-at-workOver coffee with a colleague the other day the subject of the Government’s Same Sex marriage bill came up. At work I try to avoid controversy. I don’t expect people to agree with me, and everyone is entitled to their view, and the work place is not, for me, somewhere for argument over things unconnected to my job. My colleagues, to a woman, agreed with the Government, and while I tend to keep my views to myself, it was noticed that I had said nothing. So my view was sought, and I gave it. It went better than I had thought, but as we walked back to the office, one colleague said to me: ‘I didn’t know you were a Christian, you seem so normal!’ It took me aback, and it was only talking to Chalcedon on the way home that I began to wonder about it.

He laughed, as he tends to, being entirely pragmatic about what you can expect, especially if you work at a University. He has a crucifix up in his office, and he has an icon on his wall, along with a prayer card with the image of the Virgin Mary on it. He often comments that the day is surely coming when someone will complain. When they do, he intends to point out that other colleagues have secular posters up in their offices, as well as pictures of their wives and children, which might well make the childless feel ‘uncomfortable’; he will fight fire with ridicule and fire. Thus far it has not happened. But, as he said, when he began working, homosexual people kept their preferences secret – now Christians do.

I have heard people say that we should lose no opportunity to evangelise, but I would not think my work place an appropriate place to do that. I wear a crucifix which is visible, but not obtrusive; other women wear necklaces, and I suspect my colleagues simply regarded my crucifix as decorative. Is it, I found myself wondering, cowardly of me in some way not to go on about my faith? I don’t think so – but then I clearly have, so far, managed to pass for ‘normal’.

I asked the colleague, a day or so later, what it was she expected a Christian to be like? She said she thought we well all ‘Bible bashing fundamentalists’. I asked whether she’d ever been in a church, and she said that except when friends got married, she hadn’t been, ‘but everyone know what Christians are like’, was her answer. She confessed to being puzzled about how to reconcile that view with my ‘normality’. Inspiration struck, and I asked whether she thought that all Muslims were fanatics who wanted to fly aeroplanes into buildings. She said that of course she didn’t. I pointed out that some people did, and that I agreed with her that that was to demonise a majority for the misdeeds of a minority, and asked if she didn’t think that was what she’d done with Christians?

To my amazement, she agreed that she had done that, adding, ‘you’ve made me think about that – thank you.’ So, there I was, witnessing despite myself.

Lessons from history

26 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by in Church of the East, Faith

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christians-in-muslim-countries-face-persecution-ranging-from-low-level-discrimination-and-harassment-to-utright-genicodeWe have a narrative of Christian history, and it is on the whole an optimistic one. It began in the Middle East and spread westwards and northwards. There were set backs, but the progress is clear. Our Faith conquered Europe and Russia, it crossed the Atlantic where it triumphed there, and during the nineteenth century it followed European Imperialism to the ends of the earth. For all the splits, for all the setbacks, it is a story of success. That may be one of the reasons so many Christians are baffled by what’s going on around us.

In Europe our Faith is undeniably in retreat, and even in the USA, the threats seem greater than they have ever been. It is not just (though it is that too) that our beliefs are no longer treated with respect and are mocked, it is that the very ethos of secular society seems antagonistic to our beliefs. I heard on the radio this morning that one of the effects of the new legislation here on same sex marriage will be that adultery will not longer be a ground for divorce in heterosexual marriages – because lawyers can’t agree what a definition of adultery for homosexuals would look like. Really, and there we were being told this would have no effect on the rest of us!

Atheists attach their own narrative to this process. They see it as the triumph of reason over religion. There are some very weak-minded Christians who think the same way and see the only hope for Christians as being to appease this mood. But this narrative is as wrong as our Western one. There is no necessary connection between religious belief and intellect either way, and the atheist jibe that Christians are not very bright is advanced only by atheists who fit that description. My co-author, Chalcedon has a doctorate, as does Geoffrey Sales, and both have occupied senior positions in education.  The idea that somehow it is the advance of education which will eliminate Christianity is not true.

But if, as I did a week ago, you look outside of that Western narrative, you get a different story and one which we should heed. It is a story not unfamiliar to us now. Across whole swathes of territory where Christianity was once widespread, and even (as in Egypt, Syria and Turkey) dominant, it has either vanished or is under threat as the religion of a persecuted minority. If we look at the global history of our faith, what is happening here now has happened before in many places. We have failed the winnowing process; we have failed to consolidate our position; we have been driven to the margins; we have hung on, but only just.

One of the reasons for this is the one we least often face up to – it is ourselves. Our tendency to division, our habit of persecuting each other, and our love of our opinions are, none of them, new. Long before persecution hits us, we have hollowed ourselves out. That is why we should be worried. Are we ready for what is to come?

I believe

25 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by in Blogging, Faith

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john-bunyan-2I should like to thank Jessica for her invitation, which I’ll not abuse by writing too often. She’s explained the background, and I have nowt to add, save that if you live by the sword, you’d be best advised not to whine when you die by the same.

My one regret is simple enough. The one sensible atheist there had been willing to enter into a discussion about God, and why the use of derogatory terms such as ‘sky fairy’ were neither clever nor helpful.  One of the regulars there, ‘Lanfranc’, had posted a linked to Father Longenecker’s site here where he has a good account of what Christians mean. Lanfranc also gave a good account which supported that one.

The response was that while this was very interesting, it was way beyond what most Christians understood by God. I’m not inclined to dissent, but am to wonder why that should be. All answers to this are complex: part of it is poor communication; another is our desire to know what God knows. It did for Adam and Eve and it’ll do for us.

God is Infinite; we aren’t. Jessica and I have had this one out in a number of emails, and we agree – we can’t know Infinity; stands to reason. But we can know what God has revealed. That is why a good knowledge of Scripture matters; in there the Living God, the Triune God, has revealed what we need to know for salvation.

When all’s said and done, no Book has been subject to more criticism and study than our Bible. For me, as for many, the New Testament stands up to critical examination. That’s not why I believe in God, but it is why it reasonable of me to do so.

I am not going to disfigure Jessica’s blog or abuse her kindness by getting into polemic about churches. When I were younger I was a red-hot anti-Catholic – that was the way I was raised; and more’s the shame of it. Well, through a long life and knowing some good Christians from everywhere, I’ve long ago given up that game. It does no good to anyone, and I’d advise anyone still playing it to chuck it.

I was born into English nonconformity and shall die in it. It’s my tradition, and at my time of life, I’m not going elsewhere. I believe in the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed and that tradition is a rich source of help when it comes to understanding God’s revelation to us. I’ve little time for Bishops and the like, met a few who seemed men of God, met more who seemed middle managers working for the Corporation, so to say. But I’ve met many priests in all churches who more than made up for them.

‘Credo’ is ‘I believe’. I believe because God has come in the flesh to redeem my flesh. He has loved me, sinner as I am; I can do no less back.

GRSS

Persecutions?

22 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Anglicanism, Church/State, Faith

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391673_488227474550756_905700956_nIn the light of what we have seen of the fate of so many Christians in the Church of the East and in the Coptic and other churches, we in the West, should be very careful before daring to use the word ‘persecution’. The fact that some secularists bring cases against Churches or individual Christians, and the fact that some courts rule against us in ways we don’t approve of, and even the legislation in the UK for gay marriage, should not lead us to cry ‘wolf’ too loudly.  Indeed, as with the boy who did just that, our word might not be currency when it becomes really true.

One feature of the British cases, picked up by The Daily Telegraph, is, however, worrying, and it is the intolerance with which local councils and employers seem to have pursued these cases. Now I am not a lawyer and can’t comment on the legality – but the Telegraph is right to focus on the loss of the old British pragmatism and tolerance. There was a time, not too long ago, when cases like these would have been sorted out without resort to the law – but not any more. But does that not cut both ways? To what extent were the Christians here willing to compromise? Even a quick reading of the cases shows that intransigence was not all on one side. If we go on about ‘persecution’ and seem to be bringing it on ourselves, then that is not, even in the short, run, going to be good for anyone.

None of that is to deny that there is a sneering and nasty atheism in our society which takes a delight in rubbishing all we hold dear – but what do we want – to be exempt from criticism? To have the right to decided what we think is fair criticism? Just because we have inherited a society which used to treat us with more respect than it does now, we don’t have the right to claim to be exempt from criticism or even ridicule.

Whether we like it or not, we live in a society in the West where defence has all but vanished. Celebrity has replaced it, but as ‘celebrities’ know, they can be torn down as quickly as they were raised up by the media. Some point out that the media does not ridicule Islam, but we know why that is, and would we really want people to lay off us because we were the sort of people who’d cut their throats?

If, as in the on-going debate in the UK over gay marriage, we Christians give the impression that we are motivated by dislike for homosexuals, then we fail to witness effectively to our Faith and to Christ.  As an orthodox Christian I am convinced by the teaching of our Faith and by its tradition, and so cannot agree with those who regard active homosexuality as not being sinful. But then I take the same view on sex outside of marriage and adultery – and I don’t see my Church making much of a fuss about those two sexual sins.

So, if we are not careful, we can look both hypocritical and paranoid. Of course, some out there are out to persecute us, but let us not mistake their intentions for the actions of our society as a whole.

The world knew Him not

17 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by in Bible, Early Church, Faith

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Blood-spattered-mural-of-Jesus-in-EgyptNon-believers often ask for ‘proof’ that God exists. Well, when He walked this earth and performed miracles, there were plenty who, even then, did not believe in Him, so what is it that is being asked here? Do these people really want to see Him come again in glory? Will they then swiftly declare their belief? If it is too late, will they snivel that it wasn’t their fault, if only He had given them ‘a sign’?

All three Synoptic Gospels record the frustration of Jesus with the ‘faithless generation’ which witnessed Him walking this earth. To the Scribes and Pharisees who demanded a sign He said:

But He answered and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.

As Mark records it: He sighed deeply in His spirit, and said, “Why does this generation seek a sign? Assuredly, I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation.”

Not even the Resurrection, witnessed by so many, persuaded that faithless and perverse generation. Even those brought to the faith by St. Paul himself managed a bit of backsliding – as he chided the Galatians: ‘I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel.’ As St. Peter wrote:

For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty.

St. John emphasised the personal nature of the message he delivered:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life

The British scholar, Robert Bauckham, has done a brilliant job in his Jesus and the Eyewitnesses of examining all the evidence, and as one of the many reviews of this books puts it:

While it is true that some of his conclusions may be labelled as conjecture (i.e. the reason Cleopas was named), even his harshest critics must agree that his arguments for them are logical, persuasive and, above all, perfectly possible if not entirely provable. For anyone interested in historical apologetics, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses is a must-read.

I have never yet come across an atheist who has read the book, let alone engaged with its complex arguments. They do not wish to believe, they wish to reiterate a mantra which is a sort of crutch to them – namely that Christians are unintelligent and need religion as a crutch. I’ve never seen either allegation justified, and suspect it simply does duty as an excuse for not bothering to find out what it is Christians believe and why we believe it.

We should not, therefore, get too downhearted with this perverse generation, for it is in direct line with those who scoffed at Our Lord Himself. When we are mocked in His name, it is a badge of honour.

Aliens and God

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

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My friend Keri Williams (whose excellent blog I recommend highly) pointed me to a link which made the prefect even of holiday topic. According to a recent survey, more people in the UK believe in aliens than believe in God. My immediate reaction was rather similar to that of my co-author Chalecdon when the hymn ‘Shine Jesus Shine’ is played in his church.

The I looked at it, and the ‘research’ was commissioned by a video-game company, and it was only of 1300 or so Britons, but it is, we are assured, representative of British opinion:

Nick Pope, formerly of the British Government’s Ministry of Defense UFO Project, said he believes the survey results. “Just 20 years ago, religion was a huge part of life in the U.K., and this shows just how much attitudes have changed,”

Well, that last part is certainly right, alas. Quite how accurate it is to say that more believe in aliens than in God might be a moot point, but that belief in God has declined, is declining, and is set to go on declining seems absolutely plain. Yet, in the most recent national census, more than 37 million people in England and Wales identified themselves as Christian, and there are more than 184 ‘religious affiliations’ listed. So there is some disjunction somewhere, as that is about two thirds of the people in the country.

Some of the discrepancy comes from the fact that census forms ask you to put your religion, and many seem to write in ‘Christian’ without ever darkening the doors of a church. But to me, in an optimistic frame of mind, that suggests that there is no great opposition to the Faith, simply an ignorance of it. It suggests that however many people believe in aliens, there are more with a residual belief in God, even if they do not know much about Him or what He does and is.

Having committed myself to some work in evangelisation, that is an encouragement. But it does raise a question to which I have no answer. Why have our churches let it reach this state? What have they been doing – or rather, what have they not been doing – and why?

When I read of the work of the great John Wesley, and of other preachers of the past, I wonder where they are today, and where their latter-day successors have vanished to? Is it simply that our modern churches feel too unconfident in their own beliefs that they do not try to evangelise for Christ?  If they remain on the backfoot, hoping for some hole and corner existence where they are allowed to eke out their lives in peace, that is what they will get – if they are lucky. But how unlike the Apostles is that?

Andrew and John did not know what baptism they would have to undergo in Christ, but they followed Him and drank of that cup. St. Paul endured all for His Lord. We endure so little in the West, and think, sometimes, we are persecuted. We aren’t, not really, because no one takes us seriously enough to do that to us.

There is a great mission field out there in the UK – and all those people who believe in aliens are part of it.