In short the policy allows liberal kirks to opt out of the policy rather than change the policy. It’s a compromise. I’m not sure how many presbyteries have to vote in favour for it to pass in 2015 but there are still a minority who will vote no and it may still scupper it. Liberal presbyteries are unsiprisingly more tolerant and open to compromise and as with the CofE often end up with nothing.

Ironically those who will vote no are the same sort of presbyteries that usually petition the Assembly for the same sort of compromise on other matters. They don't usually like centralised decisions. They threaten to leave but really don’t have the money or the clout to do so. The most vocal kirk St George’s Tron in Glasgow, which in the end became nothing more than a personal vehicle for it’s own minister, left last year. They tried to take the multi million pound recently refurbished (with public money) Georgian church with them but the Church of Scotland said it was their property. A new minister was placed in the kirk and it continues. The attendance at the breakaway church has subsequently dwindled. The Church of Scotland had only 25 applications to minister in 2012. Only 16 were accepted which is below the replacement rate for those minsters who are close to retirement.

To those who object: When is the last time you saw an animal drive a car or watch TV?

When did you last communicate by sonar.

I'd live on a boat.

Get yourself a stew going, have some hot ham water, grab a Burger King (It's a wonderful restaurant)as Season 4 is on Netflix this weekend. It's as Anne as the nose on plains face that this is probably one of the best comedies of the last ten years.

I cannot wait

For the Anglicans, identification has fallen from 40% in 1983 to 20% in 2010. For Catholics, it has been a little more stable from 10% to 9%. For 'Other Christian' they have fallen from 17% to 15%, Non-Christian belief has risen from 2% to 6% and those with say they have no religion is up from 30% to 50%. So for the past 30 years the number of people who say they have no religion has generally been high and climbing. ‘Irreligiousity’ has always been a fairly strong part of British life in recent generations. While 56% never attend religious services now, even in 1983 the figure was 49%. Even amongst those who claim to be religious, only 14% of them attend services weekly. That’s 1 in 14 of the total population.

It's been noted in the USA that church attendance is over reported, much like visiting the symphony, art galleries etc, because it is viewed in the culture as a "good thing". Is this same phenomenon present in the UK or does it not exist as the culture is much less Christian?

It can be over reported, but less so by respondents. Motherwell Diocese got rapped a few years ago for doing their annual church attendance headcount on Easter Sunday

Well that's a great disappointment. I'm worried now.

I've had belief in a God for as long as I can remember, and I've managed to go eighteen years so far without having once doubted it.  That is far from saying, however, that my faith has not evolved over the years.  I used to have such a simple perception of God.  I used to imagine God as a humanoid figure, just like you or me, who wants us to behave, answers prayers, and does a lot of neat stuff.  But I never really got in touch with my faith until I began to experience life.

God's nature has not yet been embraced by people who claim to know Him.  I think that for centuries, God has been reduced to a mere symbol whose very being exists within the circle of human understanding.  Few God believers are willing to acknowledge that this God, should He indeed exist, goes beyond human conception, which has since the beginning of mankind consisted of people's thoughts and writings.  But this acknowledgment of an unknowable God doesn't discourage me.  In fact, it entices me into thinking of this God as something greater and beyond human perception of its foundation.  Isn't that, in the long run, what makes this God so good?

And this is where Christianity comes in.  As a Christian, I believe that God manifested Himself as a being that's human as God could get while still being wholesome in uniqueness and power.  This, I believe, was to create a relationship between God and creation that could be appreciated and understood.  The great irony of this is that we, if anything, have gone further away from understanding God through the infinite number of questions that have stemmed from the life of this one man.

And this is why I don't believe any side has a monopoly on truth, and I don't believe that anything should be approached with absolute certainty.  I am willing to accept that I may very well be wrong, and if I am, I will take full responsibility for it no matter who's right in the end. 

But I find myself infuriated with those who abuse God for the advancement of their selfish and destructive social agendas.  We now have this notion that you can buy your way into Heaven and use fear tactics to get people to accepting a moral code, which, 99% of the time, doesn't come close to the moral code established by Jesus Christ.  We now have this notion that God only works for man in this universe and nowhere else, and this is a God that I just can't accept.  I think that until we worry more about the people destroying our world than the one Who created it, we as a human race will never advance the way each and every one of us needs it to.

There are contradictions in your post, which are okay, I just feel the need to perhaps touch upon them out of curiosity. Please don’t think me rude

I find it curious that you are happy to embrace the idea of an ‘unknowable god’ which is not an inconceivable concept. Yet you claim that you believe god manifested himself as a human in the Christian tradition. That is a theistic approach; a claim of knowing god in both form (the body) and intent (his message). Now an unknowable god, if it does not have ‘human traits’ means that whatever you do or do not do, whether you worship it, or another created god or none at all has no impact on you. Something that is unknowable cannot demand that you know of it, if it seeks worship or acknowledgement. The same is true of an unknowable god who does embrace human traits and is fair (no rational human would get annoyed at someone not knowing who you are if they had never been told about you or you had never made yourself known to them, of course the unknowable god may in fact be unreasonable.) That approach doesn’t concern me as because it quite literally doesn’t concern me; nothing I do or say or think matters. I just live then I die without it knowing I was alive or knowing I was dead. I’m just intrigued as to why you believe in an unknowable god, nor believe that any side, including your own presumably, has a ‘monopoly on truth’; yet you follow a religion that makes very specific claims about the nature of god that other faiths and spiritualities do not.

I digress a little. You also say that ‘We now have this notion that God only works for man in this universe and nowhere else, and this is a God that I just can't accept.’ Do you mean this in terms of the spiritual domain? Or do you mean something more material. This is a god that we are told in the Christian tradition revealed himself to us on this planet, in this galaxy, in this universe. This was at a time when man thought himself the centre of everything. Now we know we are at the centre of nothing. We are discovering that stars with planets and moons are the norm rather than the exception in our part of the galaxy. The potential for intelligent life elsewhere, even just one more race is more likely than us just being by ourselves with all the countless rocky planets and moons containing either nothing or basic life. If that is the case, and let us for a moment assume that it is, is it just us who get the message? If not, then why are we to assume that human concepts of love, justice etc preached by god apply to other beings? Would this god send someone to talk about ‘love’ if love was not a tangible concept in their world? If it wasn’t, what would he talk about? What if for their existence, as some evolutionary function for example; hate was a better thing to embrace than love. Would he preach hate because it benefits them more than love? What actions and morals are therefore ‘right’ in the universe as a whole? Surely there can be no universal moral code.

If that is the case and universal morality is relative, jumping back to earth, you talk of the ‘moral code established by Jesus Christ’. What code was established? There isn’t anything that he said of material moral value (I’m excluding supernatural claims as it is reasonable to do so when making a comparison) that was new, unique or was ‘established’ at the time he was alive. Nor did he lack the ability to say or do things that relatively speaking (like asking his followers to steal transport for him) that would be considered to be immoral. Are we therefore not the arbiters of our moral code and is our moral code not in fact an imprint of our evolutionary purpose; to live and let others live? What creator god can hand down a moral code of what is right and wrong if morality on this planet is relative never mind any other place where life may exist?

Interesting how low 'affair' scores in acceptability yet is curiously fairly common. Surveys have it at about 13-20% (ie the % of those who admit to having an affair) at a conservative estimate.

Is my 'Player 2 Select' on the Religion and Philosophy Board. Neither of us like details unless pressed so it makes sense not to elaborate

Not amused...

Marriage is more likely to disappear as a social and civil concept before then.

So they came back Saturday and Sunday and Monday the street pastors were there again. On Saturday I was pulled into a conversation yet again by one of them who recognised me. He called me wicked said that I had 'rejected god' and could not by any standards consider myself a good person. I walked. On Monday however, me and Michael had the day off and it was very warm. Once again we walked through the city and the American pastors were there again. Again they pulled me in to a discussion and this time with a group of four or five and Michael we had a discussion. They asked me if I could be wrong about everything. I said yes of course but so could they and they said 'No.' I don't understand this stubbornness.

Anyway Michael got into a non religious discussion with his fellow Americans which ended the very moment he said he was my husband. They were abusive and probably more aggressive than they had been before they knew. I got defensive of course but I was very calm and quietly explained that they had little notion of what love was if they couldn't see the love that we had and couldn't acknowledge the hatred within them. One of them did later apologise, not for what he said but how he said it which was a start. I did however say that a negative message delivered with a smile was still negative.

As for the others let's say that Glasgow fought back

I have no faith. I lost it and I feel that I am 'spiritually' better off as an individual as a result of that. I don't believe in a god or a need for a god or the need for a being that adheres to our standards of what a god is or a need for that being to reveal it's presence to us in select and pre-determined ways.

All our notions of god, faith, religion and spirituality are androcentric. I feel that we are one planet of 7 billion people that have only been 'people' for a few hundred thousand years and the planet itself is part of a solar system that is 5 billion years old and may not have been the first or the last to have life. And this solar system is one of billions to exist that rotate around trillions of stars that spiral around millions of galaxies that may be part of an infinate number of universes. There could be endless lives out there.

If I was a deist, then I could never accept that all this is just for us and specifically for one tribe who had one god that was no different from all the other gods that headed or protected tribes. Nor can I accept that this god cared about tribal conflicts, what people said, what they ate, what they cursed and whom they f-cked to such an extent it was all written down in a book.

If there is anything divine or spiritual, when it starts to get condensed down into rules and right and wrongs and politics then you know that what is left is as far removed from the intent as you can conceivably get. You know that what is left is so muddied with human fingerprints that it has to be human and not divine or spiritual.

I have often declared (and my signature is a slight play on that) that if I worship anything it would be the sun. It's the one thing that materially impacts upon every thing on this earth and I am made from the same basic materials that it is made of. I'm an atheist but it doesn't mean that I'm not 'spiritual' or don't take a great inhale of excitement and awe from what is simply there in front of me. I find religion in general to be stale. It's stale in part because it's human and because it can never be external or divorced from our own thoughts and desires. All the human gods have human emotions and human concerns. The idea that this standard transcends the universe and all non human things within it just isn't good enough.

An elderly anti-gay activist appears to have shot himself in the head at Notre Dame. His last blog entry seemed to hold out hope that the 'Islamists' would repeal the law when they were 'in power.'

It's worth noting that the Indian Parliament which represents the world's largest democracy with some 710 million registered voters has 790 MP's. Either the cuberoot rule or padfoots suggestions makes sense. As of 2010 that's Wyoming with 563,626. You then use the harmonic mean to calculate entitlement for each state (like in England and Wales) You could use registered voters, but that in the USA is far more fluctuating due to the system of voter registration.

Nixon. I'd rate Nixon over a whole swathe of politicians actually.

What the hell was going on?

Considering that it hasn't been broadcast in the UK yet, how would you know?

Ways and means Besides, it’s okay..right…if you have an American husband?...

I did grasp the episode though which was pretty much summed up in the last minute along the lines of ‘Every time we get a car, this place turns into a whore house.’ Coupled with the large buttock dose of 'happy' the whole episode was feverish yes but actually fairly slow; just a few plot points and characters. We usually get something like this now and then, like Roger’s acid trip, and the writers make it work well.

[Being a 70-year-old bachelor really qualifies you as an expert on these matters apparently.]

Labour MPs who voted for the Loughton amendment were apparently:

Joe Benton (Bootle), Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire), David Crausby (Bolton North East), Jim Dobbin (Heywood & Middleton), Frank Field (Birkenhead), Mary Glindon (Tyneside North), Paul Murphy (Torfaen), Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East).

At least one name on that list is... amusing. Anyways, I think all but Field (a very conservative Anglican) and Qureshi are Catholics. Murphy is actually a Papal Knight. Notable geographical concentration in the North West, but I repeat myself.

And Frank doesn't half love getting on his high horse about broken families.

Being a 70-year-old bachelor really qualifies you as an expert on these matters apparently.

It works for the Catholic Church; we have 70 year old bachelors declaring themselves sex, marriage and family experts.

It’s probably worth noting that given that census questions on religion are often answered in a cultural context, actual levels of association and affiliation with religion are generally lower. The ongoing British Social Attitudes Survey in 2010 suggested that 50% of Britons have no religion, 20% are Anglican/CofE, 15% are 'Other Christian, 9% are Catholic and 6% hold a non Christian religious belief.

For the Anglicans, identification has fallen from 40% in 1983 to 20% in 2010. For Catholics, it has been a little more stable from 10% to 9%. For 'Other Christian' they have fallen from 17% to 15%, Non-Christian belief has risen from 2% to 6% and those with say they have no religion is up from 30% to 50%. So for the past 30 years the number of people who say they have no religion has generally been high and climbing. ‘Irreligiousity’ has always been a fairly strong part of British life in recent generations. While 56% never attend religious services now, even in 1983 the figure was 49%. Even amongst those who claim to be religious, only 14% of them attend services weekly. That’s 1 in 14 of the total population.

Those who do hold a religion are usually older. 64% of 18-24 year olds do not hold religious beliefs. Amongst 55-64% the figure is 47% however amongst 65+ it's only 28%. The survey concludes that; "There is little evidence that substantial numbers find religion as they get older." Figures for those brought up in a household with no religion indicate that only 5% of them find religion later in life.

Tim Loughton's wrecking amendment was defeated by a majority of 305.

What the hell was going on?

Snowy is and remains my good forum friend.

P.S Loving the hypnotic hattifateners.

It's certainly interesting to think about. If there are other universes out there, they could feature entirely different rules of physics that we, in this universe, couldn't even begin to comprehend. To be honest, this theory pretty much represents my only small hope for an afterlife.

I think the probability of other universes is so high that it makes the millions of galaxies in this universe and the trillions upon trillions of stars, planets and moons seem trivial. And given that makes our little planet even more trivial, I feel I'm on the same level of importance as a proton.

If you want to see something sad:

http://i.imgur.com/b6kkCYI.png

Ugh. It's John Hurt. I always wanted a man of that stature to play the Doctor and it's finally happening even just as a one off. Stupid Mary Sue's can't see the bigger picture because 'OMFG DOCTOR NOT HAWT!!!'

It was a great story. Only thing to be disappointed about was that a certain someone didn't sound menacing enough at the end.

He's not supposed to be menacing or bloodthirsty or anything like that, just look at this lines. "What I did, I did without choice. In the name of peace, and sanity".

What's curious of course is where he fits in. It's been suggested he is wearing 9's coat for example. He could be a regeneration after 8 during the Time War and then for whatever reason regenerates into 9 as the 'Doctor' again. I agree he's not supposed to be menacing but a little corrupted, tired and jaded. Why 10 and 11 end up teaming up with each other in the 50th given that this other 'x' doctor is also there is curious.

From what we know so far I'm thinking he's the 9th incarnation (between McGann and Eccleston) but he did something (I'm thinking ending the time war and basically committing genocide on the Daleks and Time Lords). It had to be done but it's not in the The Doctor's nature so basically the other Doctors shun him. So for now basically Smith is the 11th Doctor but the 12th incarnation of the man. I do have a feeling he'll be a true doctor at the end of the 50th but it'll be a fun ride either way.

I have that feeling too. What's interesting is that as of the end of the episode the Doctor and Clara are still in the Doctors time stream. It's entirely possible they remain there for whatever reason and that allows the 10th Doctor to make a plausible appearance. Either way the interview snippet suggests the two doctors get on well.