Tim Worstall

Over at Liberal Conspiracy we have a Catholic trying to make a religious argument in favour of gay marriage. I think there are excellent arguments in favour of gay marriage (not least they should be allowed to be as miserable as all us heteros). I think there are even better arguments in favour of a [...]

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Yet it is time that foreign churches, as well as sending money and priests to the Middle East, used their influence to reform family law in the region. Who will bring pressure to bear to modernise the dense muddle of Christian personal status laws in the Middle East? The majority of the 14 million Arab [...]

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No. Use this page as a handy check as to whether the Rapture, the giant earthquake which will sweep believers into heaven, has happened as yet on 21 May 2011. If the page is still here, no it hasn’t.

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No, not the europhilia (although that grates) but the Heresiarch has something about his religious faith: It makes people think I’m peculiar and lack intellectual fibres because I don’t have any doubts about my faith, but I’d be terrified to have doubts. Which is really a rather odd statement actually. For his faith is Catholic, [...]

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Not a great surprise in the Church of England of course: Dr Williams said the Bible made clear it was the duty of the powerful to ensure ordinary people were “treasured and looked after”, particularly those without the resources to look after themselves. “What about having a new law that made all Cabinet members and [...]

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Emdadur Choudhury, 26, a member of Muslims Against Crusades (MAC), was convicted of public disorder after burning two poppies during the two-minute silence on November 11 last year. He added: “I get more when I get a parking ticket.” Judge Howard Riddle imposed the low fine despite saying Choudhury was guilty of a “calculated and [...]

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This is actually a very good piece indeed. You’ll know that I’m not religious myself and there’s certainly lots of the Mormon world view that’s easy enough to mock. But an intelligent piece in The Guardian about one of the symbols of fatih: who would have thought it?

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Normally the non-Catholic partner agrees, at the request of the priest, to let the Catholic partner bring up the children in the faith if they are being married in a Catholic church. Umm, no. The non-Catholic partner has to agree to let the Catholic partner bring the children up in the faith if they are [...]

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And agnostics and atheists seem to get better results. And on the short version you can take yourself, this agnostic/atheist got 100%, aided by two things. One, a lucky guess on the last question and two, well, try this: When does the Jewish Sabbath begin? Possible answers are Friday, Saturday or Sunday. The correct answer [...]

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Cute. I hadn’t realised that the Jedi census thing was more than just the UK.

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No, really: The Blues Brothers have received an endorsement from the unlikeliest of quarters – the Vatican. When you think about it they’re right too. Despite the faults of the Church on Earth, the Brothers, Jake and Elwood, act as if that Church is indeed their family. And they ignore the secular authorities, indeed strive [...]

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Umm, no. For that is not the preserve of Archbishops, however mighty they may be. It’s only the Big Boy himself who gets to make that decision. There was an intake of breath among the congregation, yet I wondered if I’d misheard the Archbishop. I hadn’t, for the text is on Rowan Williams’s website: “If [...]

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If I might put it in anachronistic terms, Jesus lived practically his entire life in the ‘private sector’: so far as we are aware, his only significant ‘public sector’ involvement was in the day or so before his execution.

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At Takimag. On the advantages of temple prostitution, the use of sex as a form of worship. Agape, that good natured Christian love of all is all very well in its place but there’s no reason to posit a Sky Fairy as a reason to practice it. Nor to purchase Cadillacs, fine houses, and private [...]

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Various lefties were all over the Pope when he said that capitalism needed taming, that ruthless self-interest just weren’t right. Appeals to authority even: look, distinguished churchman telling the neo-liberals the truth! Benedict XVI claimed that legislation introduced by Labour to end discrimination “actually violates natural law” because it stopped worshippers remaining true to their [...]

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The astonishing efforts to lure away Anglican priests show that Pope Benedict is set on restoring the Roman imperium. That’s Hans Kung that is. And he seems just a tad dim here. For the Pope and the Catholic Church rather claim to be the one true apostolic church. It is therefore, by their own lights, [...]

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This’ll be fun. As many as 1,000 priests could quit the Church of England and thousands more may leave churches in America and Australia under bold proposals to welcome Anglicans to Rome. Entire parishes and even dioceses could be tempted to defect after Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to offer a legal structure to Anglicans joining [...]

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So, a question. The widow of Ferdinand Marcos disclosed last week that she is pushing her son Ferdinand Jr, 51, known as “Bongbong”, to stand for president next year. … He was educated at Worth, a Benedictine boarding school in West Sussex. I remember, when I was at the prep school there, seeing the limo [...]

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Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has urged non-Muslims to fast for a day during Ramadan and then to break their fast at a mosque to improve their understanding of Islam. Why not? And we can then go on to where everyone has only one meal and no meat on Good Friday as with old [...]

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