Operation Quicksilver  was a key part of the 1944 D Day deception plan designed to induce the Germans to hold troops away from Normandy in belief that the Normandy landing was only a feint and that the major invasion would come in the Pas-de-Calais.  (If you’re interested in WW2 trivia, the Quicksilver plan was devised by a Colonel David Strangeways, who after the war completed a theology degree and ended up as a Canon in the Church of England, retiring to serve in the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich!) 

It’s not surprising that military generals love deception plans. Quicksilver only required a few dummy tanks to be scattered across the countryside, banks of radio equipment to spew out entirely fictitious signals, and about fifty double agents to let slip some choice morsels of misinformation.  And yet because of it the Germans kept 15 reserve divisions near Calais even after the invasion had begun at Normandy. Just think about that – 15 fearsome Panzer divisions sitting with their engines idling miles away from the battle, because they had been fooled into thinking that their real battle was somewhere else. 

The Christian’s Adversary has his own Quicksilver plans. Deception is what he does best. Yes, he loves to discourage and defeat Christians who are fighting the good fight. But the Enemy chuckles loudest when he deceives us into fighting the wrong fight altogether!  

I guess it is time I started to put this elaborate analogy to some practical use. So consider this question: if you asked most Western Christians aged 18-30 to describe their spiritual warfare, what answers would emerge? We live in a postmodern society, one that has given up on Christian concepts like truth and justice. (Now I have to be very careful here, because the idea of Divine justice has been horribly distorted by harsh, sick religions that portray God as a vindictive monster. If you watched Louis Theroux's documentary  "America's Most hated Family in Crisis" on BBC2, you'll have seen a view of God that is perfectly monstrous. So the concept of God's justice needs to be resued from vile distortions that portray a god who turns out to be a devil. But the answer here is not to forget the idea of God's justice. We must rescue the concept, not ignore it).

Anyway, back to my main point: I think it fair to say that modern society rejects outright the idea of an afterlife or any sense of accountability to God. So we might reasonably expect young Christians to describe their spiritual warfare in those terms – standing up for God’s truth, upholding the Biblical idea of justice, living in anticipation of Christ's return. 

The problem is this: I often hear Christians aged 18-30 talk about the love of God (and what a delightful truth that is to proclaim). However I rarely hear them talk about the battle for truth. Far too many young Christians are ashamed of the Christian doctrines of absolute truth, or God’s justice.There’s no point  training Christians in apologetics if they are ashamed of the very thing we’re trying to train them to defend. (People like me have undoubtedly done a very poor job in helping young Christians to articulate a reasoned defence of God's justice. But there is a deeper issue at stake here).

I used the dreaded word ‘doctrine’ just now. This is the elephant in the room. If you are a Christian, and that word makes you uneasy, then (how do I put this graciously?) you are an idiot. DOCTRINE IS GOOD. The angular contours of the Christian church have withstood centuries of persecution and intellectual attacks because coherent doctrines like propitiation, and the sufficiency of Scripture, gave us structural strength. Today it feels like we’re living in a giant blancmange – a sort of postmodern love smog that smothers all rational belief with its incoherent sentimentality. 

If I hear that Francis of Assisi quote (“Preach the gospel always, if necessary use words”) one more time I will be tempted to douse myself with petrol. The theology of that quotation, in technical terms, is what we call A Load Of Old Tosh. Contrast it with the crystal clear logic of the Apostle Paul in Romans 10: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?”. The shocking conclusion from this passage is that PREACHING THE GOSPEL IS GOOD. You might be a lovely person. But you are not the Gospel. Christ is the Gospel. A cup of hot tea is a wonderful thing. But handing out cups of hot tea is not the Gospel. Christ is the Gospel. So you need to open your mouth and use actual words - words that articulate the Gospel to people who are lost without it. The most compassionate thing you can do for anyone is to preach Christ crucified, because therein lies the power of God to transform and rescue broken lives. 

So the question arises: why are so many young Christians not fighting in these key battles over absolute truth, justice and the reality of Heaven? Well, because of Operation Quicksilver. We have been deceived by our Adversary into fighting the wrong battle altogether.  

I suspect that the real battle going on in the heads of many young Christians is with other Christians. In particular, this generation of Christians is pointing its guns at previous generations of Christians. They are reacting against the sort of evangelical colonialism that dominated Northern Irish culture for decades. So the battle is perceived to be about cultural sensitivity, and showing Christian love through social action. Well, that might all be psychologically valid. Maybe we’re all having a big argument in our heads with our Dads. But it is of course entirely the wrong battle to fight. If we don't turn up to fight the war over truth then - however worthy our efforts - we're engaged in a splendid waste of everyone’s time. We’re like those 15 Panzer divisions sitting with idling engines. We’re nowhere near the real battle. 

We need a young generation to fight itself out of the love blancmange, take a quick shower, and start contending for the faith. Stand up for God’s truth and His justice as well as his love. Start kicking lumps out of materialism. Of course we must show the love of Christ to everyone we meet. But what people really need is truth. They need to be told the story of how God's love and his justice were reconciled on the Cross of Calvary, and that the Risen Christ offers them forgiveness and acceptance, peace with God and a hope that transcends all our fears.  

So I give you the New Radicalism, the Beyond Emergent Alternative…… 

DOCTRINE IS GOOD.

PREACHING THE GOSPEL IS GOOD. 

because truth matters. 

As Paul puts it in Ephesians, we should "speak the truth in love".

Who knows. Maybe God will use you to lead your generation towards the real battle. And maybe before long, the Enemy will be radioing for help, because the Panzers have arrived.

The first thing to say is that I am not too sure how I would vote on this resolution. Dividing humanity into two camps (atheists and everyone else) makes very little sense to me. (Atheists who push for this division should be careful. It is more than a cheap shot to point out that atheistic ideologies have led to far more violence and death than all so-called religious wars put together). But that sort of general argument isn’t worth having anyway. The term “religion” is so wide-ranging that it serves no useful analytical purpose. As a Christian I am under no obligation to defend the actions of every man since the dawn of time who happened not to be an atheist. The gulf between Christianity and (say) Hinduism is as wide as the gulf between Christianity and atheism.

Secondly, my job is to defend real Christianity: the authentic faith taught by Jesus and his Apostles, not the wildly corrupt institutions that have sprung up within Christendom over the centuries. I feel anger, but not embarrassment, when I consider the Spanish Inquisition, for example. (No one expected that....) The corrupt politicians of that time were playing the oldest trick in the book - using the power of false religious ideas to control people. So the only question I’m left with is “is authentic Christianity a force for good in the world”?

And here we encounter the Great Lie spun by New Atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens. (how many capital letters can I get into one sentence?) They preach a revisionist version of history that no serious historian has ever endorsed. They argue on ostensibly historical grounds that Christianity has brought untold misery on humanity, degraded women, celebrated slavery, and held back education and science. Then (fanfare of trumpets, please) there came The Enlightenment. In the days before men started wearing White Lab Coats (BWLC), human beings were all immeasurably stupid. But in the rapturous dawn of AWLC, everyone became incredibly clever, apart from a few old religious diehards. Hitchens views all of history through this distorted lens: at one point in the debate he laid all the problems of the Middle East at the door of religion, where “people will kill each others' children for ancient books, caves and relics”. This is risible. Do we seriously think that the two gulf wars and the nuclear armament of Iran are explained by religious relics or maps from the Bronze Age? That sort of simplistic analysis is unworthy of a fine journalist who knows his geopolitics as well as anyone.

Blair was so busy talking about Muslims and Christians working together in Sierra Leone that he never tackled Hitchens about the astonishingly positive influence of Christianity over the centuries. Let me cite just a few examples:

Christianity established the sanctity of human life. Take the problem of infanticide in the ancient world. Even enlightened Romans like Cicero and Seneca advocated the killing of disabled infants (female babies were especially vulnerable). We know from early Christian writings (e.g. Didache) that infanticide was explicitly condemned by Christians as murder.  This stand took courage: the early Christians were even persecuted because they stood up against the gladiatorial games – a form of entertainment that any sane human today must repudiate. Looking across wider history, from Irish to Aztec cultures, it was Christianity which stopped the unspeakable horror of human sacrifice.  

One common thread running through the history of the world is the mistreatment of women. Under Christianity, women received back their freedom and dignity. Men like Hitchens idolise the golden days of the Greeks. But Greek culture despised women. The Romans weren’t much better. The so-called Twelve Tables of Roman law gave a man supreme, absolute power over his wife. He was allowed by law to chastise and, sometimes, to kill her. So the Apostle Paul’s words in Galatians are revolutionary: “In Christ there is neither male nor female”. In more recent times, think of Christianity’s influence over the Hindu practice of widow-burning, and of foot-binding in China. Or think of the literacy brought to women by Bible reading - this was the first rung in the empowerment of women, not birth control. From the very first chapter of the Bible, the equality and dignity of women is established. Jesus himself went out of His way to reinforce the respect God has for women. Just read through John’s Gospel if you don’t believe me.

What about Christian charity and compassion? It was Christians who pioneered orphanages, hospitals, and care for the elderly. From the 1^st century Christians established common treasuries for the needy. By the 4^th Century they had developed Poor Houses and mental asylums. Let’s come forward to modern history: think of Lord Shaftesbury’s astonishing work to create the Factory Act of 1833 – the first of a series of giant steps taken by Christians to protect children from exploitation. The abolition of slavery in Britain was largely due to the courage of Christian abolitionists like William Wilberforce. To put this question of charity and compassion in crude terms, consider financial giving in our own society. A 1987 survey in the US shows that Church-going people give more money away than those who don’t attend Church – I’m talking about giving to non-Church organisations here. Blair made this point repeatedly in the debate. In his opening speech, he gave the astonishing statistic that 50% of healthcare in Africa is provided by religious (overwhelmingly Christian) organisations.

It was Christians who built Universities and libraries, even through the Dark Ages. This year we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. Anyone who understands the history of literature will acknowledge the seminal importance of the English Bible on literature. European art, music, and architecture owe a great deal to their Christian heritage. The same assertion could be made of science: a large number of the world’s greatest scientists were Christians (Galilieo, Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Kelvin, Leibniz, Pascal, Faraday, to name just a handful). Our entire legal system is built on the foundation of Judeo-Christian values.

My point is this: a view of history which says that Christianity’s influence on the world has been negative is simply untrue. Now of course even what I call “authentic Christianity” has a history littered with dreadful hypocrisy and wickedness. I don’t dispute that for a moment. But at the macro level it is historically accurate to ascribe a positive role to Christianity in world affairs. Britain, the US, and Germany are not products of the Enlightenment. They are products of the Reformation.

Anyway, enough about history. Hitchens based his speech on a quotation from Cardinal Newman – I won’t quote it here, because you can Google it for yourself. (Incidentally, I disagree profoundly with Newman’s statement. But I do so without embarrassment because it’s a non-Biblical statement. What’s Hitchens’ point in throwing rocks at non-Biblical statements? It’s another example of the New Atheists’ trick of setting up strawmen just so that they can tear them down to general acclaim). Having quoted Newman, Hitchens then says: "Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well”.

It seems to me that this criticism undermines his own position more than mine. Remember that the speaker is a man who regards human beings as material objects. Human beings are just bits of stuff. Love and joy and sorrow are just chemicals moving across our synapses. Death is just a rearrangement of molecules. Now read his statement again: he accuses the “faith mentality” of turning men into objects. The pot is calling the kettle black. More importantly, it misses the point that God's plan turns slaves into sons and daughters; it takes damaged and fragile lives and transforms them into something of exquisite value.

Hitchens closes by saying that religion is "a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and ordered to be well". Well, it is true to say that the Bible regards us as spiritually sick. The law of God was given, primarily, to prove to us that we are in fact sick. But in Jesus Christ God gives us the cure. The Bible does not order us to be well. It presents us with the cure for our spiritual sickness. So Hitchens’ statement is untrue.

Hitchens later acknowledged the existence of a cure. He said: “redemption, indeed, is promised, at the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties”. Well that’s a good way to get a cheap laugh but it is based on a misunderstanding of faith. Faith is a reasonable act. It isn’t a form of intellectual suicide. It is making an evidenced-based judgement that Christ’s claims about himself are in fact true. I’m a Christian because I used my critical faculties to follow the evidence.

I quite liked Christopher Hitchens. As a man he has displayed considerable nobility in his battle with cancer. I wish him well. But his arguments are error-laden and his conclusions false. Authentic Christianity is a force for good in the world. He concluded the debate by describing religion as “superstition…which [is] designed to make us fearful and afraid and servile”. Most of it is. But faith in Christ brings freedom from fear, and a noble dignity. That's why many Christians don't even like describing their faith as a religion. At the heart of true Christianity is a relationship. We find the very opposite of Hitchen's "fearful, afraid, and servile" attitude. We encounter a God who loves us, a God we can trust with our lives, one who stands ready to forgive and cleanse us.

I dislike Hitchen's god as much as he does. I share his distaste for all religious systems. Like him, I despise men who use religious ideas to frighten or control other people. I just wish he would turn away from religion and turn to faith in Christ.

When I worked in business, my office in London was situated in Newgate Street, overlooking St. Paul’s Cathedral. I used to walk up Cheapside, past the Bank of England and the Royal Mint, before cutting through Paternoster Square, beside the neat gardens which border the west side of the great Cathedral.  My walk was a pleasant stroll along clean, well-ordered streets, one that would have been unrecognisable to the fire fighters who stumbled through the chaos of that terrible firestorm.

I have often wondered how the people of London felt when they emerged out of their Anderson shelters and the Tube stations, and stared in stupefied horror at the alien landscape around them. Nothing looked the same. Their world had been literally blown apart.

Well, miraculously, one building remained standing.  One familiar landmark stood firm. Although most of the City of London was reduced to charred ruins, St. Paul’s Cathedral survived. A black and white photo of St. Paul’s, taken on this terrible night, hangs in my hallway at home. The photo shows the iconic dome lit up by the sea of fire that encircled it. (In fact at one point the building was nearly lost. At about nine O’clock, an incendiary device lodged on the roof, and the burning mercury inside began to melt the lead of the dome. But the bomb dislodged, fell to the floor of the stone gallery, and was smothered with a sandbag).

When this world was created, it was like a well-ordered garden. But today the world is far from Eden.  Mankind’s rebellion against God has created the maelstrom of chaos and distress which we call the human condition. The world is so messed up that there is a danger that we lose our bearings, and forget what life should be like. But there is one great Landmark that remains firm and unchanged, one that helps us recover our bearings. The author of the book of Hebrews asks us to turn our eyes away from the chaotic mess of sin, and consider Christ. He says: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith”.

I actually have two black and white photos of St. Paul’s hanging in my hallway. Both are taken at night, and in both photos the dome is illuminated. But in the second photo the dome is not lit by the fires fuelled by German bombs. Because the second photo was taken on the 8th May 1945, which we call VE Day. In this photo the great landmark is set ablaze by bright searchlights. The illumination was a symbol of the triumph of good over evil, and victory over a regime that seemed so invincible.   

When we consider Christ, we see both pictures. We see the One who passed through the horrors of Gethsemane and Calvary. But we also see Him as the exalted, Risen Christ. So I should have quoted Hebrews more fully: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart”.

A friend of mine bought me a toy Eeyore for Christmas, as a gentle reminder not to be quite so pessimistic about life. Well, I hope that you and your loved ones have a happy and peaceful 2011. If I was a Tigger I would leave it at that. But it is possible that a few bombs will fall into our lives sometime in the future. So it is good to know that there is One who will remain standing the same, yesterday, today, and forever.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.  

Many fantastic interpretations have been foisted upon these few lines: some commentators say the poem is about death. Others say it is about poetic form itself. However most sensible people seem to agree that the poem is about a man who is in two worlds. There is the world of social obligation and communal life. In that world he has promises to keep, and miles to travel. His little horse is used to the routines of that world, and is confused by the interruption in its journey. The animal’s instincts tug the traveller back into the familiar world of daily living.

But the traveller stops to contemplate another world. The snow has outlined the contours of the woods, revealing them to be lovely, dark and deep. Here, perhaps just for a moment, the man pauses to reflect on the nature of reality itself. This isn’t a moment of introspection, more a silent encounter with what we might call the Numinous. Apart from the noise of the horse’s impatience, the only sound is “the sweep of easy wind and downy flake”.

Perhaps the poem speaks to us because we all live in two worlds. There is first of all the world of social obligation. It is not unusual for people in their thirties and forties to ask themselves: “how did my life end up like this?” You have promises to keep and miles to travel before you sleep. Life is about fulfilling your obligations as a spouse and parent, as an employee and a citizen. We rarely get a moment to ourselves, the pressures of life are just so demanding. I was talking to a young Mum last week. She told me that her thought life is spent calculating when she might next get some sleep. People in business rarely get a moment to pause in life. Their existence is consumed by talk of deadlines, stock prices, and competition.  

Our predicament is worsened by the constant brainwashing which demands that we accept the idea that this world is the only world there is. Our society hurries past any sign of another world. The idea of Otherness is regarded as dangerous and irrational, so our social instincts tug at us to move away from reflection. But what if reality does include Another World?

At Christmas we rightly celebrate family life and goodwill to our neighbours. But perhaps there is a deeper reality to encounter. Over these next few days, traveller, why don’t you simply stop for a moment? What objection could there be to considering the idea that there is more to life than one’s social obligations? Just consider the alternative: the last line of Frost’s poem reads: “miles to go before I sleep”. Is that your motto for life? A private journey that ends in the sleep of death? A journey where every evidence of your passing is obliterated by relentless time?

Maybe Frost's horseman did the right thing by stopping. We would be delighted if you stopped by at our Christmas Eve Carol Service at 7.30pm here in Crescent. I hope it'll give all of us the opportunity to pause; to contemplate; to consider the Person who said he came from Another World. Snow permitting, of course!

In 1999, the new Belfast development centre was the jewel in the crown of Nortel’s European empire.  Sweeping open-plan spaces stretched out in all directions, full of sleek office furniture. Hundreds of talented software engineers - some of them friends of mine - worked on the fibre optic technologies that formed the foundation on which the new e-business economy would be built.  But then the bubble burst. Dot Com suddenly became Dot Bomb. In March 2000 the NASDAQ was over the 5,000 mark. 18 months later it sat at 1,387. Nearly 75% of the market value wiped away in a year and a half.

Behind those figures lies a real human cost. Today most of the Nortel buildings are empty. The neat lines of cubicles are in disarray, as the furniture is disassembled for resale. Half a desk sits forlornly in the middle of the lobby. The network testbeds, once full of state-of-the-art multiplexors, are now just rows of skeletal metal racks. At one point I nearly fell over a jumble of broken chairs. On one of them, someone had used Tipex to write the initials “JUB”. Perhaps some long-suffering engineer had tired of colleagues who borrowed his chair without permission.

JUB no longer sits in his chair. Just another casualty caught up in the bloodbath that engulfed the telecoms industry in early 2002. Sorry if this all sounds a bit maudlin, but the moment got to me. A stained Microsoft Project plan on the floor, an empty carton of herbal tea on a dusty desk: these are the only relics left of the dot com dream. The Masters of the New Economy – from Jim Cramer to Bernie Ebbers (that well-known Sunday School teacher) – have left the stage. When I think of those fools and knaves, the words of Coldplay’s Viva la Vida come to mind: “I used to rule the world, seas would rise when I gave the word. Now in the morning I sleep alone, sweep the streets I used to own”.

History always repeats itself. Empires rise and fall. Exciting dreams turn to ashes. I remember once waiting for a bus in a little town about 30 miles from Budapest. A whole collection of Soviet-era statues had been dumped around the bus stop: scowling busts of Stalin and Lenin, bronze casts of the noble workers - the usual communist kitsch. I sat on Lenin’s head for a while and thought about the almost unbelievable speed with which the Soviet empire had collapsed.  Why do we keep building our castles upon pillars of salt, and pillars of sand?

The Bible records an incident which captures the same mood. It occurred just after Jesus was crucified. Two depressed people walked along the road from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus. A Stranger came alongside and joined in their discussion. The downcast couple were talking about the death of Jesus. “The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel”.  There’s a little phrase in that sentence which haunts me: “we had hoped”.

It’s a sad thing to hear someone talk about hope in the past tense. I sometimes listen to people talk about their struggle with childlessness, or singleness, or another of life’s disappointments. “We had hoped…” they often say. At some point we all come to know that life doesn’t go the way we plan. The optimism and ambition of youth becomes transmuted into an unspoken yearning for what might have been.

So today I sat in that spookily empty Nortel office, and asked myself the hard question: is hope only for the young? Well, I suppose the obvious answer is that it depends on what we hope for. If hope just means  wishing for the things that we really want, then disappointment will drown hope. History doesn’t lie: we can’t control our lives and we can’t cheat Death. But the Stranger on that road to Emmaus offers us a different kind of hope. The story reveals the Stranger to be the Risen Christ. The resurrection is the bulwark for the Christian's soul. It is this great Fact which halts our slide into despair. The man Chris Martin calls “St. Peter” put it best: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!” he says in his first letter, “In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead”.

As you may have gathered, this blog is about hope. How can we transcend the tragedies, fears and disappointments that make up the human condition? By trusting the Risen Christ to complete His mission. Remember this: you are part of a kingdom that will never end. God has promised to take your fragile and damaged little life and make it into something of exquisite and eternal value. So even if you must walk these days in  quiet shade, rather than in the sunshine of youthful dreams, remember that one day you’ll hear the bells in the New Jerusalem ring. “St. Peter will call your name”. Your life will never be reduced to a set of initials written in Tipex on the back of a broken chair. Your name won’t be forgotten like a faded dream. There is hope. And here’s why:

Before the throne of God above
I have a strong and perfect plea.
A great high Priest whose Name is Love
Who ever lives and pleads for me.
My name is graven on His hands,
My name is written on His heart.
I know that while in Heaven He stands
No tongue can bid me thence depart.
No tongue can bid me thence depart.

OK, I promise that normal service will resume in my next entry.

I had a hilarious evening down in Dublin on Saturday evening with my friends Monty and Gwen. I was trying to persuade Monty to co-author a book with me, entitled “Grumpy Old Christians”. (I’m sure you’ve seen the BBC Programme called Grumpy Old Men. I used to think Will Self, Gerry Robinson, Des Lynam and the rest were being funny. Now I just think that they talk complete sense).

The contemporary Christian scene provides a rich seam of material for any self-respecting Grump. In my salad days, a Church service was a straightforward affair: someone turned up at 6.45pm, unlocked the front door and turned on the lights; an elderly organist limped in at 6.55pm; and the speaker got up after the announcements and talked for 40 minutes. After a final hymn, everyone left, the lights were turned off and the front door was locked. Simple, really.  

Nowadays the organisation of a Church service requires a postgraduate qualification in Advanced Logistics. The whole exercise is equivalent to the military planning that precedes an invasion of a small country. The activities of the Welcome team, sound and video technicians, lights guys, singers, praise band, and chairman are managed using a colour-coded Master Rota spreadsheet that can only be printed off on A3 paper. Some earnest youth wearing a Bluetooth headset whispers that the service will start in “T minus 3”. I was at a Church in Los Angeles some years ago. The announcement about car parking (I’m not joking… car parking!) took the form of a brilliantly scripted, professionally filmed 3 minute video. But at least I understood that video. The two other videos shown during the service were similar to the Christian Dramas I have endured over the years – surreal, incomprehensible affairs involving black tea shirts, amateur ballet and random flags. Nobody over the age of 25 ever understands them.

I sometimes wonder if this techno-gubbins has improved the quality of praise in our churches. It certainly hasn’t done anything to improve the singing. In fact the volume of singing is usually in inverse proportion to the amount of technology. Sometimes all you can hear above the sound of the band is a vague mooing noise.

I blame EasyWorship myself. It is simply impossible to follow the thoughtflow of a hymn when you only read three lines at a time. So we all live in the Powerpoint Moment and give up on thinking about the logic of the words. It's not as if we can even enjoy the serenity of The Now, because the lackadaisical youth on the computer keeps us all in a perpetual state of angst by being 0.5 seconds late on every page change. It’s a Union thing, apparently.

And then there’s the archetypal Prez leader. What’s the boy up to, whimpering into the microphone? Is he praying? Should we shut our eyes? O wait.. I’m pretty sure he’s singing. Well, at least we usually know the tune. How many times should we repeat a modern Christian song? Up to seven times? No, I tell you, not seven times but seventy-seven times…..

For the professional Grump, while all this is going on, a metaphorical woodpecker is drilling into his head with an insistent, repetitive refrain: can we PLEASE sit down now? It’s no good saying “sit down if you want to” because if I do then (a) I can’t see the screen and (b) I am admitting that I'm an old warhorse who can't stick the pace.

To be serious for a moment, maybe we should unplug the amps and reflect on why we do what we do. Once you've seen the Praise Band descend on wires through smoke, you know that a reaction to this sort of thing is well overdue. In this brief paragraph of sanity, I suggest three questions: (1) are we trying to compete with other churches? (2) are we trying to pretend that we're still young? and (3) are we united in thoughtful, unselfconscious, worship? It seems to me that the distinction between small, old-fashioned churches and trendy big churches is a false one. The only true distinction is between those churches which worship God and those which go through the motions. If worship isnt heartfelt and genuine then the level of amplification is irrelevant. 

But those aren't the sorts of thoughts Grumpy Old Christians have. It’s great to be a Grump, you know. I can sit in the comfort of my own smugness, in a "church" that I've designed for myself, far away from the annoying noise of an upcoming generation of Christians who are trying to work out how best to worship and serve God. It’s quiet in this secluded spot. Restful. Because there’s no one else here. No one - maybe not even God.

Normally, crowd sound plays an important part in stadium experience: human voices amplify the drama being enacted on the pitch. But not this time. The Vuvuzelas played B flat for ninety mindless minutes. There was no correlation between the ebb and flow of the game and the human reaction to it. Instead of the sound of humanity appreciating the passion and skill of the game, we listened to the white noise of talentless people caught up in their own self-importance.

Political correctness allowed no criticism of the Vuvuzela. We were told that the trumpets were part of Africa’s rich cultural heritage. This turned out to be an urban myth. There is no link between the Vuvuzela and the traditional kudu horn (which is remarkably similar to the shofar used in Jewish ceremonies). The first Vuvuzela was apparently made a few decades ago from a bicycle horn. These brash, annoying devices were an imposition on an ancient musical culture. They served only to drown out the sophisticated rhythm and harmonies that we rightly associate with African culture.

Today Pope Benedict XVI caused controversy by criticising the aggressive secularism which dominates British culture today. I think his intervention was timely and important.  The sound of Richard Dawkins is the sound of a cultural Vuvuzela.  The New Atheist message is negative in tone; it drones on with no sensitivity towards the pulsating human drama of our lives; and it has cheapened the ancient and noble culture on which it feeds. 

I for one am tired of the relentless monotone played by the media, that tacky instrument of postmodernity. I am wearied by this tuneless noise which drowns all thoughtful discourse in its smug certainties.  Britain used to pause and listen to the beauty of evensong flowing through an open Church door. No longer. The cheap red plastic sold by the New Atheists can only project the annoying buzz of sceptism. It's loud, but it doesn't thrill the soul. 

For a few moments today, when we stood alongside the countless thousands of Celtic men and women who for centuries have sung the ancient Christian hymn “Be Thou My Vision, O Lord of my Heart”, we encountered a reality which makes the modern voice seem shrill and small.

One day, it will all go quiet over there, Richard.

In the days when we lived in an agricultural economy, Farmer Jones’ wife would lift a few eggs from the chicken coop, grind some flour in a hand mill, and then bake a Birthday cake.  After a few centuries, society moved to what we call a ‘goods economy’. So now Mrs. Jones would walk to the village shop, buy some eggs and self-raising flour, and use these goods to bake her Birthday cake.  Later, society evolved into what we call a ‘service economy’: Mrs. Jones could now drive her Range Rover down to Marks & Spencer, where she could buy a pre-packaged Birthday cake straight off the shelf. But the 1990s saw another profound shift in society. In the new so-called ‘experience economy’, Mrs. Jones phones up a company like choc-o-bloc or McDonalds. She books an entire Birthday party experience for 30 screaming kids, and the company throws the Birthday cake in for free. Mrs. Jones has no longer any idea how a Birthday cake is made, or how much it costs.

In today’s world, people don’t pay for goods or services; they buy experiences. When we buy a coffee in Starbucks, we aren’t really paying for a cup of hot milky liquid. Our money is exchanged for the experience of café culture. Look at the marketing literature for Disneyworld, the latest gaming platform, or a BMW car. The promises being made to consumers all focus on the concept of an experience. We live in an “experience economy”.

This way of thinking has infected how many Christians think about a local church.  There is an expectation that settled, well-run churches can exist in pre-packaged form (built by people who do that sort of thing), allowing the rest of us to sample the experience they offer.  Many young Christians sit loose to their current church and avoid any attempt to get tied down by concepts like membership. Elders who talk about membership are treated like timeshare salesmen, trying to trap the unwary into a deal that will limit a young Christian’s freedom for decades.

But freedom turns out to be just another word for loneliness. Northern Ireland is notorious for the swarms of disillusioned Christians who move from church to church, searching for a better experience.  And in fifty years time, I believe that the problem of Christian consumerism could lead to the demise of Christian witness in Ireland.

Why do I make such an extravagant claim?  Well, building a local church is a bit like baking a cake.  It takes hard work, skill, and years of learning. The art has to be passed on from one generation to the next.  If everyone acts like consumers, then in a generation there will be no one left who knows how to bake the cake. Churches, like ships and computers and everything else, will be made in China. But unlike material goods, churches cannot be imported. Unless they are built locally, they wont celebrate many more birthdays.

First of all, Hawking claims that the universe creates itself “out of nothing”. But nothing is not really nothing in the world of Hawking.  The Hartle-Hawking model of “nothing” is sometimes described as zero volume with 3D geometry and sufficiently subject to the laws of quantum physics to allow for talk of ‘tunnelling’. Well, even if you aren't sure what any of that stuff means, it sure ain’t the same thing as nothing. (In actual fact, the quantum vacuum is a seething, infinite sea of fields and virtual particles: its fluctuations and phase changes are governed by the beautiful symmetries and finely tuned laws which make life possible). As Rodney Holder pointed out on Channel 4, the statement “because there is a law such as gravity, the universe will create itself out of nothing” is a paradox. Read the statement again. It refutes itself. Creatio ex nihilo is creatio ex materia after all. Everything comes from Nothing because there is Something. This audacious piece of logic only works if we re-define Nothing to mean Not Quite Nothing. (“When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean”). Nothing in fact turns out to be Something. And we don't understand how the Something came to be. For instance, I don’t think it unreasonable to ask that someone explain to us what gravity is, and how it came into existence, before announcing that the Creator has been made redundant. Hawking says that God isn't needed to "light the blue touch paper" that leads to Everything coming into existence. Well it's one thing to believe that a piece of blue touch paper underwent spontaneous combustion. It is quite another thing to argue that a piece of blue touch paper is nothing at all. It turns out that Hawking believes in creatio ex materia. Which doesn't really count as breaking news: the first person to make the headlines with that idea was Thales of Miletus, in 550BC.

Second, Hawking pulls empirical science into categories where it doesn't belong. For instance, we shouldn't assume that mathematical models of the world are real things. Some (like Newton's laws) seem intuitively to depict reality. But others must be viewed as anti-realist instruments, which can make no ontological claims. Take Hawking's (speculative) concept of “imaginary time”. What category of thing are we talking about here? Something like imaginary time can only be a calculating device. Like an actual infinity, imaginary time could never be actualized in the real world. We exist in real, moment-by-moment time, not imaginary time. (Hawking simply declines to convert his imaginary time model back into real time, because if you do, you're back with a singularity). So, if you decide to accept the headlines about Hawking's theory, remember that you aren’t trusting the math. You’re trusting in a dodgy, populist realisation of the math.

While I’m on the subject of over-extending maths and physics, we should talk briefly about Hawking's commitment to “multiverses”: the idea that our universe is just one of a (potentially infinite) set of parallel universes. John Polkinghorne makes a devastating point about all the various Many Worlds theories: “Let us recognize these speculations for what they are. They are not physics, but in the strictest sense, metaphysics. There is no purely scientific reason to believe in an ensemble of universes”. By the theory’s own definition, it will never be possible to signal or contact any other universe.  So you’re going to struggle to find observational data to test your theory. You’re choosing to believe that reality is construed as an inflated bubble emerging from spacetime foam. And you accept this (somewhat curious) belief knowing in advance that there will never be any empirical proof to support it. But at least you're not an unscientific theist.

Hawking wants to use physics to make statements about God. But his attempt to jump from maths to ontology, from physics to metaphysics, is an unhappy one. Asking gravity to displace God is like asking Macbeth to kill Shakespeare.  Hawking thinks that physical laws actually produce stuff. Which is a confusion of category: laws might explain stuff, if they are any good they will predict stuff, but they never produce stuff.