A recent opinion poll suggests that just 49% of people in the UK believe in God ( bit of a biased question for those who believe in two or more Gods) and 55% believe in the super natural.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2590349/God-Were-likely-believe-supernatural-Number-people-think-sixth-sense-higher-regularly-attend-church.html

actually both figures are slightly down from a similar poll in 2008
http://www.livescience.com/7608-people-aliens-ghosts-god.html  - 58 percent believe in the supernatural, including paranormal encounters, while 54 percent believe God exists.

Predictably, certain commenters - like Melanie Phillips http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanie_Phillips
trot out the usual line from G.K. Chesterton "when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything." The implication is that people abandon religion and take up belief in anything from psychic healing, telepathy, astrology, ghosts and demons etc

My experience is that actually, the self declared atheist is actually far more sceptical of super natural claims - its inherent in rejecting a super natural God.

Plenty of religious believers I have met have had no problem reconciling their religious belief with astrology, crystal healing, and all sorts of super natural phenomena.

So it would be interesting to see the polling data broken down to see whether my anecdotal evidence is backed by the polling figures. Mostly, I just find the assumption by people like Melanie Philips rather odd.

With just 6% of the population claiming to be regular church goers, I suspect even believers in God have but a vague comforting idea about karma, things we don't understand, everything being OK when you die etc  just in the same way someone guessing the person calling them on the phone - might find it comforting to think it was a sixth sense that made them 'know' who it was.

God Knows

What a muddle the Church of England and the Catholic Church are getting into over the issue of homosexuality.   Quite honestly I struggle to understand why anyone Gay would wish to have anything to do with either Church.   It seems to me undeniable that both Churches have had a long history of being anti-Gay and it seems equally absurd to me that a Church can claim to follow the unchanging teachings of God and yet revise those teaching.

Time was God used to appear as a burning bush and tell people what he thought, these days his mobile number or email might be better, rather than leaving people to pray to him and receive very different answers.

Brian Cox, light speed, amazing.

There was a very funny parody of Professor Brian Cox on Radio 4's the Now Show on 24th June. It was "amazing". (it seems the popular scientist Brian might over use that word)

Still,it got me thinking that the Universe really is amazing.

Light travels at about 300,000 kilometre a second.

It would take a human a long time to walk that distance!

In a minute, light travels around 18 million km, that more travel than a human is likely to do in a lifetime.

It takes approximately 8.31 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth Don't you like the approximately?

In a year light will travel 9,460,730,472,580km, a light year.

Current interpretations of astronomical observations indicate that the universe is around 13.75 billion years old and that the diameter of the observable universe is at least 93 billion light years.

All of which make an omnipresent God a startling concept.

 Here is a being that is not only present ever where and at all times but also instantaneously and simultaneously aware of all the thought and deeds of billions of other creatures. I mean, I thought my broadband was fast.

And following the logic of creationists who argue for "intelligent design"
the creator who designed God, must be, as Brian Cox might say, amazing.

Gay Bishops

The Church of England seems to be going through one of it's agonising debates about whether to appoint homosexual Bishops.  Well, they think that is the debate, but in reality there have been plenty of gay bishops, just  few of them have been openly gay.   So what does God think ? Lets ring him up and ask. Can't be done ? So lets turn to scripture and see if that can help us.  Quite clearly the answer is yes, no and maybe.
So whatever your view- you can reinforce that. But that leaves a more interesting question - why would God be bothered ? 

The Skeptic's Bible

The Skeptic's Bible is an excellent project to show how silly the Bible, Koran and Book of Mormon are if you take them literally.

Of course too many people, the Bible, Koran and other books are not to be taken literally, or only selectively literally. A bit like political manifestos?

The trouble with this view is that it is there is no guidance as to which bits should be taken literally and which bits shouldn't.

Personally, I always find the more literal approach to be the more sensible.

Just one more God to go

When someone comes up to you in the street and asks if you believe in God, what do you say ?

Which God are you asking about ?

I think about the Gods of Ancient Roman and just find them all a bit implausible.

The Greek Gods are similar, but do they live on Mount Olympus still ?

I used to love tales of the Norse Gods in my younger days, Loki, Thor, Odin - they still have a small neo-pagan following.

There have been so many Gods over the years people have written encyclopedias about Gods, that have only scratched the surface.

The two most popular religions - Christianity and Islam insist that there is only one God. They dismiss all the others. Hundreds and thousands of Gods. Which leads to one of my favourite saying - most people are just one God short of being an Atheist.