Skip to main content

Parable

Quakers believe that something of God may be found in every human being.  That thought prompted me to dream up this modern reworking of a very old joke.

After a long, good, moral, and kind life, an atheist finally dies at a ripe old age.  Much to his surprise he discovers that there really is such a thing as God, and life after death, despite never having entertained such notions during his life.  Moreover, he discovers that God, whom he had previously been warned was a jealous and judgmental character, was in fact the source of the good that was in his life - and indeed he had lived a very good and noble life.

So, as a result, completely unexpectedly, he finds himself admitted to Heaven.  It is a wonderful place: a massive party with tables laid out with delicious food that never seems to run out,  and plenty of drink which you can drink without ever getting too drunk.  Laughter and dancing abound all over the place.

He takes a stroll around and comes across an immensely long wall.  Looking into the distance, he sees that the wall eventually disappears, like the horizon, and he realises it encloses a gigantic circular region.  Out of curiosity he puts his ear to the wall, and hears similar sounds of merriment coming from the other side.  Wondering what the purpose of the wall is, he calls over one of the angels who is serving the drinks, and asks "What's with the wall?  Who is it on the other side?"

The angel replies:  "That'll be the Christians.  They think they are the only ones here."

PS in the original version of the joke, it was the Catholics who thought they were the only ones there.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Large Hadron Collider Rap

Just LOVED this, physics geek that I am. "Alpinekat" (Kate McAlpine) is a science writer at the CERN experiment in Europe, which will turn on the largest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider, on Sept 10th. There are some who say it will cause the end of the world, because of the potential to create "mini-black holes". Black holes are normally formed by the gravitational collapse of a massive star, but it is possible that the conditions at the time of the Big Bang could have created extremely small black holes. Steven Hawking postulated that such holes would evaporate by the emission of radiation, called "Hawking Radiation", a result of a virtual particle-anti particle pair being produced at the black hole's event horizon. Some physicists now believe that Hawking radiation may be a flawed concept and that a mini black hole created by the LHC would not evaporate, but could cause a cataclysmic disaster and swallow up the earth....
8 comments
Read more

Outing myself as a straight gay sympathizer

OK. Having thought about it and wrestled with it for a long time, the time has come to make a stand. Guess it's pretty cowardly to put it on a blog that practically no people read, but one has to make a start somewhere. Let's get "straight" to the point. I think it's time evangelical Christians took a long hard think about their attitude towards gays. There are a range of attitudes prevalent, and while I think there is some evidence of evangelicals acting in a compassionate manner, I think few people take it far enough. There is the out-and-out homophobia element. The kind of person that says homosexuality is "disgusting". Yes, in some ways this is understandable - there is a natural revulsion that people feel for certain physical acts, sure. But people who think that way should really try to remember what they felt when they first found out about sex. When you're very young and you first find out about what your parents did to make you, your...
7 comments
Read more

Simulation games, miracles, and why Dawkins is wrong

I recently listened to a debate between the foremost "New atheist" spokesman Richard Dawkins, and Oxford Mathematics professor John Lennox, who is an evangelical Christian. Dawkins led off in his typical manner, attempting at the outset to ridicule Lennox for believing in miracles. Doubtless this will give Dawkins acolytes much to cheer about; though it is difficult to see how it is constructive dialog offered by a human being interested in rational discussion. He started by saying that he was accustomed to debating with "sophisticated theologians", (presumably ones who don't believe in miracles) but in Lennox, he had found a scientist who believed that Jesus turned water into wine. He outlined what this entailed - that somehow Jesus had interacted with the water molecules and added proteins, carbohydrates, tannin and alcohol to it. This, and other beliefs (such as walking on water, dying for our sins etc), he stated were "profoundly unscientific"....
5 comments
Read more