The Anglican garden was not of course perfect, nasty poisonous fungi in the corners, infection in the soil, but crude ugly men came with chainsaws and bulldozers, cultivated, the fungi, spread the infections, strung banners along the fence reading “War is Peace.  Freedom is Slavery.  Ignorance is Strength.’  Crude, ugly people, who cultivated the fungi, the infection, tried to spread it.  And what did the Anglican Church say but yes, this is better, what silly billies we are not to understand this is true faith.  It is hardly surprising civilized life has taken them at their word.  Indeed all religion is homogenous, homogenously vile, dirty and ugly, for peasants and savages and those with severe psychological problems, particularly concerning sex.  Religions have given the world things of beauty, whether selfless acts saving others,  great art or just routine goodness towards those who fall by the wayside.  Since on this religious leaders are utterly silent it might be assumed by those who know of them that the religious leaders are dismissive of anything beautiful – and by those who don’t that there is nothing beautiful to be dismissive of. 
 
For the first time in many years in England there was just the faintest whiff of the bonfire,  you accept, you obey, you submit, men insolently spouting complete drivel to the public and assuming it would be swallowed whole, because, just because, because it is the utterance of a religious person.
 
People do not need God to be whole.  People do need love, being as it happens without love sounding brasses and tinkling cymbals.  The Bible states categorically God is love.  At which point the whole thing collapses as if nuked.  You could at a pinch say churches are the house of love, if you were feeling poetic, but the idea of love demanding of you elaborate rituals and invocations is absurd.  You could at a pinch say saying sorry to love is what people do when they realize they’ve done something wrong, but it’s rather than love is causing them to have that realization. 
 
If you have love and the universe, you do not need God.  You may have God anyway.  It is not the concept of God that is a problem, but a fantasy universe populated with fantasy clones and the fascists who attempt to impose on others. Why should God be anything remotely imaginable
 
There is one perfectly good sense in which humans are puny and insignificant, and that is as a part of the universe, which as we know is like big. We are not required to find a hill-top to stand on to daily tell the universe how small and meaningless we are, what crap we are or others are, how we hope the universe will forgive us for existing, how much we beg it to let us do its will.

There is and has been for as long as humans started to think about these things, an area of human thought in which belief and unbelief meet. The orthodox of course both know about it and strive with all their might to enforce division. That is pantheism, the proposition everything is in essence god, you, me, the fly buzzing against the window, the lilies of the field. 'Are ye not better than they?' Different: ye have the capacity called consciousness to know what ye are.
 
Possibly in fact the main horror of religion today is that having started in societies of ignorant, illiterate peasants and savages and panoplied itself in the trappings of those societies, it then insists those trappings are the core, that the chalice is the wine.
 
The Church says we are nothing without God, the ultimate reductionism, and indeed many of the faithful are reduced, devoid of love and mind no matter how devout  Millions of atheists indicate that we are love and mind without God – I suppose if you wanted you could say that God is there in you whether you believe in him or not, but that is certainly not what the Church says.  Once you start talking about God within you are merely talking the language of mystics throughout the world but God is supposed to be out there somewhere, utterly separate.  Where exactly?  On the far side of a black hole?  Why not? 
 
Why worry?
 
20And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: 21Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17)

As ever intellectual frauds babbling about literal interpretation ignore the bits they don't want you to take the slightest bit literally.
 
Cf Omar Khayyam:
 
“I sent my Soul through the Invisible, 
Some letter of that After-life to spell: 
And by and by my Soul return'd to me, 
And answer'd: 'I Myself am Heav'n and Hell”  

Richard Dawkins thinks someone as intelligent as Jesus would be an atheist today and has written for Atheists for Jesus.  The Catholic Herald of course has a field-day with it, since they ‘know’ Jesus was God.  Others have other views: Jesus as Sufi, Jesus as Brahma, Jesus realizing his Buddha nature.  I have recalled the story of the Sufi Al-Hallaj crucified for proclaiming ‘I am God’.  Or Brahma. That Jesus in some sense was God, should God exist, by no means proves him the only-begotten Son of the Father but only indicates that state known throughout the world in mysticism of being nothing, dissolved in the Whole.  I don’t think he would have been an atheist, but readily identifiable as a mystic.  The Church hates the modern world quite as much as Islam hates it, of course, hates being one of many, hates people in the West deciding that Lao-Tze or Buddha got it right, or at any rate more right than the Vatican.
 
Because of course they have for most of 2000 years survived and thrived on mass ignorance of anything other than their teachings, ignorance of other ways of looking at the world, ignorance of physics, of biology.
 
As late as 1951, 5 million Italians were illiterate (out of a population of 47 million)
 
With of course no television as an alternate source of information.
 
Not a lot of feeding of the sheep going on there, Holy Father.  Other of course than with a very select diet.
 
I don’t think Jesus would have been so arrantly stupid as to call Dawkins evil – him and 40-50% of the nation. Thought-crimes as ever appear to matter more than real ones.  Yup, we’re all so evil, just spend all our time raping and murdering children. 
 
From the inauguration of Cardinal Nichols:
At the installation of the Most Rev Vincent Nichols at Westminster Cathedral, his predecessor, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, described a lack of faith as “the greatest of evils” and blamed atheism for war and destruction, implying that it was a greater evil even than sin itself.....
 
In his homily he said: “Faith in God is not, as some would portray it today, a narrowing of the human mind or spirit. It is precisely the opposite. “Faith in God is the gift that takes us beyond our limited self, with all its incessant demands . . . Some today propose that faith and reason are crudely opposed, with the fervour of faith replacing good reason. This reduction of both faith and reason inhibits not only our search for truth but also the possibility of real dialogue.”
Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor went farther. Referring to the battles that will be won and lost in the effort to sustain the Christian presence in secular society, he said: “What is most crucial is the prayer that we express every day in the Our Father, when we say ‘deliver us from evil’. The evil we ask to be delivered from is not essentially the evil of sin, though that is clear, but in the mind of Jesus it is more importantly a loss of faith. For Jesus, the inability to believe in God and to live by faith is the greatest of evils.
“You see the things that result from this are an affront to human dignity, destruction of trust between peoples, the rule of egoism and the loss of peace. One can never have true justice, true peace, if God becomes meaningless to people.”
From The Times, 22nd May 2009, now behind a paywall
 
To the harmless civilized atheist of course belief in God may seem the principle and explanation of all moral deviations; to many, whether Christian or not, it would seem that on the contrary faith may underpin the clamourings of the limited self, claiming the forcing of its incontinent urges on others has divine sanction; it is love that takes us beyond them. 
 
A modest Christian education recalls 1 Corinthians:
 
1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. 3And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
 
13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
 
Is this Murphy-O’Connor creature evil or merely stupid, as indeed the author of Corinthians was not, as Jesus was not, for he understood that loving God was not enough, that unless people also loved other people they could claim to love God all they liked and still treat other people like shit.  As to what faith inspires – murdering children at a pop-concert springs to mind.  It’s just such obvious drivel.
 
Doesn’t he know the only unforgivable sin is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit
 
Matthew 12:31, “Therefore I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men.” 
 
Which seems to mean basically that any sin is forgivable by God if you are sorry but if you reject the voice of conscience aka the Holy Spirit and convince yourself that you have not done anything wrong and go on committing the sin that is not forgiven.  Go on repeating the same tired and tiresome lies, for instance. 
 
The Virgin Birth is a very clever story, clearly written by a very bright guy, finding a way of communicating that Jesus was, what shall we say, of mixed parentage, fully human and fully God.  But if you have decided to believe that one, how are the details of any great significance?  Of interest, certainly.  God has moved in his mysterious ways his wonders to perform, but about significant as what wood the crib was made out of.
 
The annual hysteria rite is not Christmas shopping, it’s what happens when anyone so much as suggests the Nativity is not literally true.  Christendom is shaken to its foundations.  Not.  Small-minded morons are shaken to their foundations.  Having defined itself as yet another sect of literalist morons, the CofE should not be exactly surprised that in the age of quantum theory no-one much wants to know.  And what garbage do the traditionalists come up with, anything other than literal belief is ‘watering-down’, pandering to modernity.  It’s hard to believe they’ve actually read the NT, which is one of the great metaphysical texts of the world.
 
John of course does not bother with shepherds and angels but launches his story as below.  Quite what the man in the Jerusalem donkey-cart made of this we can never know (between the lines, the man in the Jerusalem donkey-cart was probably illiterate and a certain intellectual sophistication may have been expected of those who could read) but the man on the Clapham omnibus remains ludicrously adamant that to view the thing in terms of abstractions is somehow pandering to modernism
 
 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
7 The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.
8 He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.
9 That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
11 He came unto his own, and his own received him not.
12 But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:
13 Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
15 John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me.
16 And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.
17 For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.
18 No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.
19 And this is the record of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou?
20 And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ.
21 And they asked him, What then? Art thou Elias? And he saith, I am not. Art thou that prophet? And he answered, No.
22 Then said they unto him, Who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself?
23 He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias.
24 And they which were sent were of the Pharisees.
25 And they asked him, and said unto him, Why baptizest thou then, if thou be not that Christ, nor Elias, neither that prophet?
26 John answered them, saying, I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not;
27 He it is, who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to unloose.
28 These things were done in Bethabara beyond Jordan, where John was baptizing.
29 The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.
30 This is he of whom I said, After me cometh a man which is preferred before me: for he was before me.
31 And I knew him not: but that he should be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water.
32 And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him.
33 And I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost.
34 And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God.
35 Again the next day after John stood, and two of his disciples;
36 And looking upon Jesus as he walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of God!
37 And the two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus.
38 Then Jesus turned, and saw them following, and saith unto them, What seek ye? They said unto him, Rabbi, (which is to say, being interpreted, Master,) where dwellest thou?
39 He saith unto them, Come and see. They came and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him that day: for it was about the tenth hour.

Well, I mean, it’s not literally a light, is it, not a table-lamp such as you might buy in Argos.  It is remarkably unclear to me that Jesus would think it necessary to believe in the Biblical accounts of either his birth or his Resurrection in order to follow his teachings, that you have to prove you can surrender your mind; your heart, yes, your mind, no.  I can only think that, were they living in the C21st Jesus and John would be incredibly enthusiastic about quantum physics and where it fits with their perceptions.