Human beings look after each other. Some Christians occasionally do this. We can therefore claim it was invented by Jesus. That is, if I hadn’t started with a 15,000 year old skeleton with a broken femur that had healed.
So it turns out that people of all hairstyles and none look after each other, and Christianity’s got absolutely nothing to do with it.
And that is today’s Big News from a Faith Perspective,
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vDINJTFxJkcQMX3lKVSF4yWjQBGU5Q2V/view?usp=sharing
Platitude of the Day 
Just so you all know: I’ve responded to Beattie directly on Twitter. And she’s replied…
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Is there a link?
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Hope this works!
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Nice one! I note that she didn’t reply to your reply. No surprises there.
I didn’t know she lived in Camber. I didn’t know that anyone lived there: it’s pretty solid caravan parks and day-trippers. Hell of a commute to Roehampton, as well.
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@Rev Peter – Haha! Thanks for highlighting that spectacular own goal from Beattie. It would be pointless to comment further had she not also progressed to ‘collective responsibility’ and made the bold claim that ‘at their best, religions, like civilisations [a reference to her opening anecdote] start with care for the vulnerable; that’s their enduring strength….’ That she could say such a thing in the light of the IICSA report, and the distressing statistics not only of levels of child sexual abuse in religious groups, but of the lengths those groups go to in order to cover up these crimes, shows a breathtaking ability for self-deception; her own church being perhaps the worst offender.
She added – in reference to that ‘enduring strength’ – that their [the organised faiths] survival depends upon it.’ Well, she has effectively signed her religion’s own death warrant there, though sadly it will be a long time before the RCC or any other faith collapses, even over the matter of child sexual abuse, since their primary instinct, it seems, is not the protection of the vulnerable at all, but for their own survival at any cost.
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The RCC’s reflexive, self-interested self-protection is uncivilised particularly when compared to the laudable instinct (which comes from our evolutionary development as social animals – no IMF required) to help the injured, protect children, etc.
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Oh, I expect she would try to make out that Jesus was bringing his compassionate influence to bear on 15,000-year-old carers without them even realising it.
Which raises an interesting theological question. At what point did hominids become human enough to benefit from Jesus’s intervention? Did Neanderthals qualify? Denisovans? Homo habilis? Australopithecus? I think we should be told.
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Which is why the Creationists hang on to their delusion of a human species created, with its genetic code as it is now, 6000 years ago.
For other believers who realise that position is ludicrous given the overwhelming scientific consensus, like Beattie’s version of Christianity, they have to make something up to cover the evolutionary truth that our ancestors, so many thousand generations back, were not human. As StephenJP asks, at which generation did god intervene and provide us with a soul and the chance of everlasting life in heaven (or, as I always say, in hell for me).
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From Richard Dawkins, ‘A Devil’s Chaplain’:
“You stand on the shore of the Indian Ocean in southern Somalia, facing north, and in your left hand you hold the right hand of your mother. In turn she holds the hand of her mother, your grandmother. Your grandmother holds her mother’s hand, and so on. The chain wends its way up the beach, into the arid scrubland and westwards on towards the Kenya border.
How far do we have to go until we reach our common ancestor with the chimpanzees? It’s a surprisingly short way. Allowing one yard per person, we arrive at the ancestor we share with chimpanzees in under 300 miles. We’ve hardly started to cross the continent; we’re still not half way to the great Rift Valley. The ancestor is standing well to the east of Mount Kenya, and holding in her hand an entire chain of her lineal descendents, culminating in you standing on the Somali beach”.
So, Tina, at which point did the IMF inject the little bit of soul-substance into that unbroken chain?
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