10 thoughts on “Chine McDonald, professional Christian

  1. This was just lazy, banal, and dull. Without diminishing the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is hardly news. We’ve already heard many other contributors bashing on about community spirit, good neighbourliness etc etc since last March – with the inevitable inference that the speaker’s religion invented these things. Sad to say, Chine’s BBOMS is full of accounts telling how her IMF encouraged its favoured people to do quite other than show communal spirit or be good neighbours – probably far more than instances of the benign kind she likes to highlight.

    The Beeb (or at least its religious affairs dept) should widen the pool of TFTD contributors – there are names that pop up all too frequently, and today Chine had put nil effort into her perfunctory piece. Three mins of prime Radio4 air time is an opportunity to inject ‘thoughts’ that would really make listeners sit up; one that most people would leap at. Offerings like today’s make the slot sound like a chore.

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      1. I saw that. I nearly posted the wrong link. The name was derived directly from the philosophy, by the look of it.

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      2. Linux nerds know that “Ubuntu” translates as “I don’t know how to install Debian”…

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  2. Chine, for a serious Christian, is “the perfect antidote to loneliness” really the general concept of neighbourliness which emerges in all cultures?
    Whatever happened to publicly praising your never-leave-you-alone Invisible Magic Friend and/including Mr Jesus? If you’re scared that most of your captive audience will either laugh at or feel uncomfortable about such a proclamation, that’s of no importance because you’re told it’s “foolishness” to the unsaved.
    You appeal to common values but at that point your IMF is removed from the conversation. Tell me again why this qualifies at all for TFTD.

    It’s all the more shameful that such banalities take precedence over an honest admission & discussion of child sexual abuse following the IICSA report.

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  3. Like others, I found this one deeply dull and uninspiring. Chine McDonald tells us she didn’t bother that much about her neighbours until Covid struck, so why does she think bringing Ubuntu and Desmond Tutu into the discussion is likely to convince the rest of us? ‘The IMF made man in its own image, therefore the IMF can be seen in other people’, indeed. At least she didn’t lecture us about our own lack of neighbourliness.

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  4. As this was so dull the one thing that caught my ear was the assertion that her IMF made all of us in its own image. This seems to be a recurring Christian response which I find ridiculous. So what colour eyes has the IMF, ear lobes or no ear lobes, an extra digit on each hand, introvert or extrovert, genius or village idiot, thoughtful or thoughtless? It is such a vague saying that I think Christians forget to think about what it means.
    If instead they said that the IMF set out a plan billions of years ago using DNA whose combinations over time would lead to the evolution of a species now known as homosapiens and that all of those homosapiens would look and act sort of similar and have the attributes that you would expect a creating god to have, well that might be a version of the truth if you think that there is a creator.
    My argument against that sort of nonsense is that if the IMF was there at (or before) the Big Bang and that humans are it’s greatest creation, then why did it wait 13 billion years for those tiny scraps of life on one tiny planet to start believing in it and praying to it. As another constantly repeated Christian phrase goes, it passeth all understanding.

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    1. Paul, I guess that your bit about the IMF’s plan is not a million miles away from the RCC’s position, that evolution has indeed occurred, but that the IMF has had its thumb on the scales to ensure that human beings were the end product; and that it interfered further in order to insert magic soul-material into the lineage at the appropriate time.

      Real scientists think that, on the whole, we have probably not stopped evolving. I don’t know the view of the Magisterium on this issue. I bet they’re not too keen on the idea.

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