"Imagine there's no heaven, and no religions, too..." John was an excellent songwriter and a poor sociologist. Remove the spiritual underpinnings of a society and you do not remove the need for spirituality. Crap and Islamofascism will fill the void.

Kentun8 - I have also heard the bishop speaking, & am extremely impressed by his grasp of what is happening in this country. As for the Anglican church's "constant adjustment to secular values" - that is its nemesis: it is becoming secularised & will eventually have no purpose for existing.

hola I can't agree with what you said really.... please ellaberate a bit more for me ;D thank you

To go back to the article... does anyone really know what the bishop was saying? He proposed "a rigorous investigation into the origins of nationhood", to show, I think, that Christian values moulded those that are essentially British. But his grasp of historical development is not just fuzzy but absent altogether. To cite one secular example, there was no consensus between Evangelicalism and the Enlightenment, the former arose in protest against the latter's diminishment of faith and Biblical belief. In his own backyard of church governance, the founding documents of Anglicanism, - the preface to the 1662 Prayer Book and the Thirty-Nine Articles - reflect the pervasive influence of secular values such as political tolerance, individual rights (mostly founded on property), and respect for personal conscience on the life of the church, rather than the other way round. And a phrase "The Westphalian consensus is dead" suggests that he does not even know what the Treaties of Westphalia were concerned with - the right of an outside force to interfere across national frontiers to right what it perceives as a moral wrong; if the concept of nationhood that grew ut of those treaties is really dead, why are we tying ourselves in knots about conditions inside Zimbabwe's borders, as we did over Bosnia, Kosovo, etc? I know the bishop is the media's conservative darling, but he is not the real article. He has no sense of the abiding values of the Anglican church, its tolerance, its constant adjustment to secular values, and its continuous self-criticism. As one of the bishop's flock, I have listened intently and repeatedly to his sermons, and I know him personally to be a kind and charming man, but I have never known him present an intelligent, clearly argued statement of what he actually believes.Or more alarmingly still, what he actually knows.

When I was young I attended Church every Sunday with my family and was ridiculed for doing so by the neighbourhood children. As I grew up and learnt more about religion and the world in general: new discoveries, technologies and ideologies I too turned away from God. How in an age of reason could a person believe in and worship children's stories and fairy tales? And then I continued to grow up and discovered that although one didn't necessarily have to believe in the supernatural aspects of God one could believe in his teachings. Being a good and moral person how could one scorn the teachings of the bible? I was happy to discover that a man born some two hundred years ago thought along the same lines that I was thinking, I am of course referring to Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd President of America, who took a pair of scissors to the Bible and cut out the supernatural aspects and repackaged it as "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth". However after looking at the long-term impacts that removing the Church and God from studies, as he perpetrated, and day to day life I realised that you can't have one without the other. Some think that I am quite childlike in my belief that man can and will be better. At one time politicians were of quite good moral stock, yes you could always find a bad apple in the barrel but generally speaking recent history has shown that those who democratically governed us did so with truth and honesty. I do not believe that it is childish or naive to think that that time will come again, and is, in fact, closer than we realise. Politicians today have a bad rap and in most cases quite deservedly, but the new generation of politicians will learn from their predecessors they will see that they cannot base their careers and campaigns on lies and deceit because it is getting harder and harder to fool the public, and so the new stock of politicians wont be the same mealy mouthed rats that we have grown so accustomed too. They will be of the most impeccable scruples, morals and decentness. To believe in God is not to believe in "sky Gods" to believe in the teachings of God is not to believe in "nonsense" it is to believe in the better nature of man and to believe that man can and will be better. God doesn't insist that you genuflect to him, or that you partake in costly rituals. He only asks that you love him and that you love your neighbour. God will forgive even the most destitute sinner if that sinner truly repents. God is merciful but only if the mercy is deserved, many people have the mistaken belief that if you say sorry for your sins that it gives you leave to sin again: because you can always say sorry again and God loves you and will forgive you. God does love you and he will always forgive you, but remember whatever God does to you he does because he loves you. If you are of the stock that sins, makes a false apology and then sins again, he will find a way of making you truly repent before opening the doors of Heaven to you.

Miles, The bad news is that because of man's increasingly deceitful and proud state of mind, we are willfully killing ourselves at an increasingly alarming rate: The knowledge and power to completely destroy deluded mankind becomes increasingly more available to an increasing number of people who are growing increasingly more evil. The good news however, is that God has made known to us how to overcome this death culture and to look forward to His promised paradise where the infinite imagination of the Spirit of truth is the infinite realm of everything, where pure love's endless glory is perfect love's free and endless creation. Freedom is the freedom to choose.

This should not be about whose religion is "right" or "wrong". This should be about the ability of out nation's religions - and athiests - to co-exist without conflict or without the need to overshadow one-another. I am only 19 and yet I am greatly saddened by what I see has become of this once great country. Britain is weak and lacking in identity. This is nothing to do with how many Muslims we have, how many Christians we have or how many Hindus we have. It is to do with how many horrible, nasty excuses for human beings we have roaming our streets and running our country, and the rifts that they driving open between our many wonderful communities. The religious and non-religous alike should be uniting against these hatemongers, not each other.

If christians want to believe in their god, then go ahead. BUT - if you are planning on "sharing" the good news that we all deserve death and eternal punishment - and that is what we will get if we don't believe what you believe, then expect a challenge. And it will be loud, and reasoned and equally passionate.

The Churches only have themselves to blame, they have conspired with socialism since 1945 and abdicated their responsibility to the people to the 'Welfare State'

The intellectual history outlined here is, frankly, so oversimplified as to be incredibly misleading (an obvious example, one cannot simply lead from the neo-Scholastics concerned with the Americas to John Locke: a hundred years and Northern European permutations are something of a gaping chasm). We are fortunate indeed that the current Archbishop of Canterbury is not given to making such intellectually dubious pronouncements.