2014: Not Our Best Work.....

The purpose of this blog and the accompanying website, book and ‘God Enquiry’ Course is to try to pursue the truth honestly and openly, regardless of where it might lead. Viewed in that spirit, I have to say that 2014 has had its fair share of truth-avoiding, truth-denying and truth-twisting moments.

The horrors perpetrated by the ‘Islamic State’ speak for themselves – except they have not been allowed to do so. Instead their ghastly actions and equally ghastly philosophy have been used by many to justify various degrees of anti-Islamic sentiment.  Mexican drug cartels have killed more people this year than have the Islamic State, they have tortured, raped and beheaded more victims and they pose a further and immediate threat to the lives, health and welfare of thousands of Americans through illicit drugs, prostitution and ‘organised crime’ They rarely hit any of the pages of our newspapers, never mind the front pages. As far as I am aware there is no public outcry against Mexicans, Roman Catholics or Spanish speaking people, and yet the actions of the Islamic State are,  in many quarters, deemed to be symptomatic of ‘the real face’ of Islam. I wonder why.

‘Christian bakers’ and ‘gay cakes’ in Northern Ireland provided the catalyst for Christian moral outrage and cries of victimisation in Northern Ireland, masked in apparently reasonable appeals to human rights provisions.  I am uncomfortable with a society that cannot find a way of embracing a pluralism that is generous and that does not require recourse to the courts in order to settle such disputes, but I am even more uncomfortable with the sight of churches that have failed to be at all generous in their treatment of LGBT individuals now calling ‘foul’ when they think that the tables might have turned. Nice way of sharing God’s love.

Ebola has come and gone – except it hasn’t. We were whipped into a frenzy of concern a few short months ago as images of dying Africans hit our TV screens. The concern, however, was much less for them than it was for ourselves, in case the virus hitched a ride on an airplane and landed in our airspace.  A communal sigh of relief was permitted just in time for Christmas shopping to begin; there is unlikely to be an ongoing crisis after all….except in West Africa, of course.

Oh yes….there was Gaza; so distant in the media memory that it might as well have happened around the same time that Herod was doing his bit of innocents-slaughtering. The shelling seems to have stopped, water and electricity have been turned on again and across in the West Bank the Christmas nativity celebrations were not disrupted.  Well, that’s all right then…..

Anyone holding their breath for 2015?