Chuck should team up with Sholto Byrnes. Together they could make Britain a more spiritual and caring place. Chuck has told the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies that environmental problems are on account of not believing in “the soul” and that it’s Galileo’s fault and that scientists are baffling because they don’t see things his way.

“As a result, Nature has been completely objectified — ‘She’ has become an ‘it’ — and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.” The Prince said that he believed “green technology” alone could not resolve the world’s environmental problems. Instead, the West must do something about its “deep, inner crisis of the soul”.

That … Read the rest

Of course – a reasonable sensible even-toned review of Stephen Prothero’s God is Not One which stops the reasonable sensible even-toned bit for the final paragraph in order to say the obligatory:

Prothero debunks not only the fallacy of religious sameness, but also the “New Atheists” who have, lately, become so pervasive and culturally relevant. Atheism can take on its own religion, one dedicated entirely to disparaging the god-fearing, and, in doing so, become as nasty, hostile and ill-informed as the religious fanatics they so thoroughly condemn.

Keep it up. The steady relentless malicious othering is just the way to bounce more and more and more people into the “New Atheist” camp.… Read the rest

Imagine being a writer, or a reader, in Egypt.

More recently, the literary magazine Ibdaa (“Creativity”) had its license revoked over the publication, in 2007, of a poem by the renowned poet Helmy Salem, deemed blasphemous because it personified God with lines such as: “The Lord isn’t a policeman/who catches criminals by the scruff of their necks”…Before Ibdaa was shut down, Salem had already been forced to return a State Award for Achievement in the Arts, honoring his entire body of work. The court that rescinded the award found that “The sin that he committed … against God and against society, challenging its traditions and religious beliefs should fail the sum total of his work, rendering him ineligible for