Good day! Here's some interesting words concerning truth from Jason Clark's (or "jase" as ben might say?!) Emergent blog. Interesting

Some Corinne Bailey Rae Fans

Corinne Bailey Rae

Slightly out of leftfield....

Right then,

I know that this is a little off the topic, but how do you put those clever hot link type things in one's posts? Where you click on a blue word and go to an article.....

Please fix it for me to be able to do them

love from jim

(age 27 and a quarter)

'It may be Holy Week, but I still can't forgive...'

Hi i was reading this in the independent today. was wondering what people thought about it?

'It may be Holy Week, but I still can't forgive...'
The priest who lost her daughter in the July bombings speaks about her shaken faith

By Robin Stummer
Published: 09 April 2006

The woman priest whose daughter was killed in the London suicide bombings last July has revealed that the week leading up to Easter - the time for reconciliation and forgiveness in the Christian calendar - will leave her struggling harder than ever to maintain her faith.

"It's beyond my human capacity to deal with," says Julie Nicholson. "What is there in Scripture that says a mother should forgive?"

Mrs Nicholson stood down as priest of St Aidan with St George in Bristol last month. The murder of her daughter Jenny, a talented 24-year-old musician, had left her unable to preach forgiveness.

Yesterday she revealed for the first time the full extent of the doubt at the heart of her belief in God, and the near impossible demand of her faith that she should forgive Jenny's killers.

Speaking to the Roman Catholic weeklyThe Tablet, Mrs Nicholson, 52, says that the approach of Easter has only highlighted her personal crisis of faith.

"Easter," she says, "is supposed to be the final proof that love is stronger than death. But how much comfort is that for parents who have to stand, like me, at the foot of the Cross?"

Since stepping down as a priest, Mrs Nicholson - who, despite her misgivings over forgiveness, remains a committed Christian - has been working with children in Bristol, directing a community youth group performance of C S Lewis's The Magician's Nephew.

"I don't backtrack on what I said, because I don't forgive and I don't feel that's wrong. It's not for me to forgive," she explains. "If Jenny were here she could, but as her mother I don't think it's my privilege.

"I could give forgiveness for the pain caused to me, but for that pain alone. But that's all. I'm not at that point and don't know if I ever will be. I have laid forgiveness to one side and it's for God at the moment. It's beyond my human capacity to deal with. And I don't feel that's outrageous, unbelievable or even un-Christian."

Speaking about her feelings immediately after the Circle Line suicide attack by Mohammed Sidique Khan that killed Jenny, Mrs Nicholson - who has two other children, Tom, 16, and Lizzie, 22 - is frank about her instincts as a mother. During the identification of Jenny's body, she says she "wanted to hold my child to me. And it was absolutely vital that I should, at the earliest opportunity, go and anoint her body. The symbol of the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit reflected the intimacy of mother and child, of a loving human touch."

Soon after this, she says, "I stopped responding to the priestly side of my nature and became pure mother. At times I didn't want to be a priest, I wanted to grieve as a mother without any of the baggage of a priest. What is there in Scripture that says a mother should forgive?"

There are signs that Mrs Nicholson's faith, though resolute, has undergone a subtle but profound change since the events of last July, with a closer focus on the significance of Mary - as a mother. "If the image of Mary through the Passion is pure mother," she says, "the letting go, the waiting, the caring [for] the body when restored, the anointing... There is no huge expectation to do more. I find comfort in that."

Mrs Nicholson believes that Jenny's murder should provoke reflection on what forgiveness is. "We need to go public on this, to consider the weight of the language... what do we really mean by faith and forgiveness? I think the world should be challenged to consider this, as I have been."

Asked if she could imagine a time when - in common with other parents she had met recently whose children who had died in traumatic circumstances - she could speak with true conviction about forgiveness, Mrs Nicholson remained extremely sceptical.

"If Archbishop Rowan Williams and the head of the Muslim Council of Britain came to me and said: 'Stand up and say, "I forgive Mohammed Sidique Khan for taking my daughter's life", then all terrorist activity in the world will stop,' I would do it. But in my heart I know I wouldn't have forgiven."

'Every Parent's Nightmare', a documentary in which Julie Nicholson meets other parents who have lost children, is broadcast tomorrow on BBC 1, 11.15pm

nature of faith and belief type gubbins.....

Good day fellow travellers,

Whilst flicking through the pages of G2 today i found this rather excellent little ditty. I am a bit pants at all this so i have cut and pasted it Hope that's ok. It's an article about belief and how pre enlightenment it didn't necessarily entail attempts at proof. tres bien. here it is:

Divine inspiration on ice
Peter Stanford
Friday April 7, 2006
Guardian

A few years back, a BBC producer approached me with his idea of a Jesus-lookalike reporter (being about 33 and having long hair seemed to be the main qualifications) retracing the divine footsteps around the holy land. He wanted said reporter to try out the various miracles for authenticity. Walking on water, he reassured me, would be no problem. There was a hydraulic platform that had been installed for visitors in the middle of the Sea of Galilee so they could be photographed amid the waves playing at being the son of God.
The project never came to anything and, if I'm honest, my worries were less about drowning than having to appear in my trunks on camera. But that fascination with finding a logical explanation for the apparently miraculous events recounted in the gospels remains. A team of US and Israeli scientists has just reported in the Journal of Paleolimnology - the study of prehistoric lakes - that in biblical times the Sea of Galilee, thanks to its salty springs and an unusually severe cold snap, could have frozen over. So when Jesus appeared to be walking on water, he was actually floating on a thin layer of ice.

It is a conclusion that makes him sound more con-man than Christ figure, but it is just the latest in a long line of efforts by scientists to bring 21st-century wisdom to bear on the Authorised Version. There was, for instance, the team that put forward the theory that Jesus had an epileptic fit on the cross, fainted and only woke up three days later by which stage his apostles refused to be convinced that he hadn't in fact risen from the dead. Another group of experts suggested that he went into a shock-induced coma on Calvary when the first nail was driven in.

Then there was the wonderful one from some fertility experts suggesting that a rare genetic condition in his mother might have made for a self-fertilising egg and therefore validated the virgin birth. And do you remember the scholars who floated the notion that when Jesus fed the 5,000 with two loaves and fishes, it was really a case of everyone having brought their own picnic but being too polite to mention it once he'd started serving up?

If you've enough imagination, you can always find a rational reason for anything. And with Jesus's story there is the added frisson of debunking in the process what has been a central belief of western civilisation for 2,000 years.

This game, however, is a relatively recent invention. Until the enlightenment, the distinction between faith and belief was rather better understood. So medieval Christians had faith but it never crossed their mind to expect documentary proof. They had, I suppose, what we would now dismiss as blind faith. So all the narratives told in the gospels, the stories of saints whose heads were chopped off and then miraculously reattached, even the notions of heaven and hell, were understood not in the literal sense but as pathways to approach a truth that was in itself ineffable - beyond our imagination.

With the advent of the age of science, however, faith is now utterly conflated with belief - the idea that unless you can put something under a microscope and show that it exists, it has no legitimacy at all. And so every single detail of the religious canon has been poked, prodded and found wanting. This, the scientists proclaim, shows that it is all a lot of nonsense. But, leaving aside the claims of Mel Gibson and a relatively small number of nutty Bible belt fundamentalists, this is to judge and damn mainstream Christianity on trumped up charges, for it never claimed it was all literally true.