Excellence at Easter

There is no need to bother blogging about Easter when others do it so well!

If you have little to do today except read, and have not already come across these articles and posts, then I commend:

Cranmer on Sunday 12 April 2009 posting on Quem quaeritis?

E.J. Dionne on 'A Resilient Christianity' from Real Clear Politics, making the point that the true strength of Christianity does not lie in 'numbers' but in costly discipleship.

Then, who else these days, N. T. Wright-and-Tom Wright (i.e. scholar-and-bishop in one) on "The Church must stop trivialising Easter
Christians must keep their nerve: the Resurrection isn’t a metaphor, it’s a physical fact". Superb.

Finally, read this brilliant review of (an anti-religion film by American comedian Bill Maher) Religulous, by Brendan O'Neill. Here is a taster:

"Having disabused viewers of the idea that mankind is anything more than a bundle of genes (presumably Maher was born with the Unfunny Gene), he then argues that the central problem with religion is that it is distracting us from the real threat facing the planet: no, not Satan coming to destroy it with hellfire, but, er, manmade global warming coming to destroy it with hellfire. Without even a whiff of irony – and I am not making this up – Maher concludes the film by giving a sermon on a mount in Jerusalem in which he talks about climate change and war and terrorism and religious craziness, and says that as a result of these things ‘the world could actually come to an end’. Humankind must ‘grow up or die’."

The whole is devastating in its critique of the New Atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens and co. O'Neill opines: "Maher shows how depressingly biological, even bovine, the New Atheism is, and how stultifyingly soul-destroying The Science can become in the hands of political activism." Former altar boy O' Neill remains an atheist but longs for some recognition of the distinction of humanity from animals to grace atheism in its latest phase!