Surely not at Easter.

I’m afraid so.


That blacksmiths traditionally never worked on the Thursday before Good Friday has always resonated with me, to feel the shame of your predecessors for supposedly making three long nails centuries earlier seems so appropriate to the Christian ethos of mankind‘s everlasting sin. Carpenters may have felt that their professional affinity let them off any such misguided, but nonetheless deeply felt, opprobrium for knocking together a couple of large pieces of Cedar. It being Easter has also made me wonder, if Christianity is so full of forgiveness, why then is Judas’s marzipan representation still banned from the top of a simnal cake. For no particular reason, other than maybe symmetry, I’d like to see it back with the rest of the apostolic balls.

Recently the General Synod chose again to ignore the marzipan issue completely and instead decided, with only two dissenting voices, that science and the Biblical tenet were compatible. Another milestone in Church of England capitulation to be acceptably open-minded, which can’t further confidence in the completely confused perception of the church, and in what it currently believes.

The bishop of Southwark, commenting on a leading physicist’s view that the universe was filled with unseen matter driven by an as yet unknown force, said: “If believing that isn't faith, I don't know what is. I don't think we need be defensive about ours.“ Within perhaps even the next twenty years, far more will be known about the universe, but religions, by their nature have to basically remain defensively static at their core; how many more pages of their book can they just simply disregard on the grounds of new-think, I think they may be facing quite a lot of defending actually. On a brighter and far more relevant note, next year marks the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible.

There are always new ways to be astounded by the Christian perspective, one of blinkered optimism, and devious selectivity following hard on the dictatorial heels of a historically pernicious and shaming past. Which is sidelined as old-fashioned muddled thinking, because now we know better, and we should faithfully peer further back still to a story that can’t be verified in any way to really see the roots of what we are faced with today. Man invented gods for explaining the inexplicable and control, lots of control, and there are deities with some serious domination problems stemming from the insecurity of being one over many, and there are always so many. Mau, Stalin, Pot, Amin, Minh, Doc and Tito all knew the sweaty fear of the sweaty masses, (not the dwarfs from hell just the bullies with short names, there were and are plenty of others). None of them had any need for repressive guilt-saturated religion; they had more down to earth and in your face methods of conversion.

A well-meaning and reasonable chap, in say 150 BC, without the overbearing religious rule-book, could have enjoyed a peaceful and harmonious lifestyle, not fornicating outside of his rude hovel, not nicking stuff, nor killing, or even coveting. Would the later prescriptive edicts really stop someone who was seriously considering doing any of these, it never did and doesn’t still, it can’t be true that because of this bossiness there has been less killing, adultery, thievery and coveting in the last two thousand years. I expect the Christian response might be that the reason there is still a great deal of most of the above is because people have turned their backs on religion. And now, coveting is out of control, as it was when 150 BC man, chewing thoughtfully on a turnip, looked at Mrs Jones from the next hovel and thought, ’she’s well fit, if I rub out Jones I could pillage her and his ox. Plus, I’d get the big self-esteem bonus of not having to keep up with them anymore, it’s a no-brainer let’s do it’.

However he probably didn’t, if he had, as an average sort of man then so would they all and the human race would have been run. There is no evolutionary advantage in killing Jones and reducing the gene pool in a predominantly monogamous society, and really, yes the ox was a nice set of legs, but Blodwyn Jones? I mean, well seriously, you just wouldn’t would you.

The rest of the advisory notes chiselled into stone are a little less concerned with nuisance neighbours and more centred on the actual don’t make graven images, don’t look at another god, and don’t take my name in vain. There are people who have discovered, after presumably some research of some sort, that God was a woman. Why not, it shouldn’t make much difference, and in a way it sort of makes sense. If we now translate graven images as the photo taken by you from behind her, when the one to worship was bending to pick up her print of Michelangelo‘s God creating Adam from where it had fallen, and then being forced to delete it at the point of a steel nail-file, then yes, I can see how they might think that.

Don’t even think about looking at another, “keep your gaze right on me then you can be sure you won’t get into any trouble, and when you’re driving, just the road, always the road, keep thinking of the road. As a passenger, I am not only watching the road, as I must, but also you. Don’t take my name and twist it to something you think is cute to get round me, I saw you looking at her, just checking for hazards were you? Oh I see, were you worried that her enormous boobs were going to crash into us from the pavement?”

The rest were fillers, don’t go to Tesco on a Sunday, that is quite a good one actually, I find the Sabbath shopper a bit more smug than the Saturday one, as in, "this is the only time I have to spare in a week filled with important big stuff, and I’m going to treat it as a casual recreational jaunt, not proper shopping. So yes, I am going to be slow, real slow and in your way as much as I can be. Look, I’m wearing canvas beach shoes and light blue shorts, that‘s how seriously I‘m taking it, okay?"

Finally, be nice to your parents and don’t bear false witness, you can try as hard as you like, as I once did, but to have your mother and father deported as illegal Albanians is a big ask. Even when you’re prepared to swear on a bible in court that they’ve stolen your real parent’s identity with a low-fat sex-butter email-scam, and that you’ve never seen them before in your life. We’re all okay about it now, we just hardly ever talk about what is looked back on now as a watershed moment in our parent/off-white sheep relationship.

The predominant colour where we live is green, out of every window it’s all a hundred shades of green and rural tranquillity, occasionally interrupted by the Jehovah’s Witness named John and his nameless taciturn friend of the moment. With a grandiose sweep of his neatly charcoal-grey suited arm, John proclaims all the greenness is solely the work of God; I know if we could have the same conversation in a piss-soaked needle-strewn alleyway he would rightly tell me it was all man’s doing. Perhaps then, God should have recalled Adam for a few modifications before he let it go so far.

When John first called, we used to mildly argue, in a light-hearted and smiling way, about all the standard things that every atheist spouts off about to a fundamentalist, Peppered moths, Eohippus, and not forgetting the dubious memory and manipulative nature of Paul of Tarsus.

So now, after two years of occasional visits, we are at an amicable impasse. We never seem to get much beyond the basics, Jung’s demotion of Christianity to a level of other belief-crutches would be a step too far, as would Nietzsche’s ‘the one immortal blemish of mankind’; and so we continue for the sake of politeness, forever slowly turning on the jammed-on-go carousel of flippers that changed into feet and the manifestation of the haloed-one in every leaf, blade of grass and insect.

I really don’t know who would get the credit from John if we could look at the 15,000 small African corpses from the last seven days, courtesy of God’s sleight of hand called malaria.

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