4 Quotes by Andrew Rilstone

Books—all books—are complicated things, muttering at us in different contradictory voices, refusing to stay the same when we go back to them. Tying them down too much robs of them of the magic.

unity. Evangelicals, by definition, don't care about "unity" nearly as much as they care about truth. When you say "We may differ on some issues of morality and theology, but the important thing is that we stay together in one united Church" you pre-suppose that the liberals are right and the evangelicals are wrong. Which, when you think about it, isn't very liberal at all.

I was sent a copy of Richard Dawkins' amusing book, The God Delusion, by an anonymous donor, so I feel I should at least try to review it. This isn't easy. I got as far as page 36 before chucking it across the room in disgust. I was in the Boston Tea Party on Park Street in Bristol. I warned the other customers to get out of my line of fire first.

(Everyone, I guess, sees their position as the neutral one and everyone else's position as biassed. I wonder why 177 minutes of the Today programme is completely secular; you feel horribly excluded by 3 minutes of Thought for Today. I see a sinister anti-religious bias when David Attenborough goes through a whole series without ever once aying "On the other hand maybe God made it all"; you feel that 30 minutes of hymn singing on Sunday evening amounts to theocratic oppression.)