George, you know what happens to people when they mention the name of that Scottish play...

>>It somehow reminds me of “(Life) is a tale told by an idiot, … signifying nothing." (Mackbeth)<<

Thank goodness you spelt the name of the play incorrectly, and failed to credit the author - I think you might have got away with it this time.

But it is indeed interesting that Shakespeare, who was very much aware of the power of the State when crafting his plays, was brave enough to give his main character such an extremely non-religious thought-pattern. Did he perhaps figure that, since he had committed the supreme sacrilege of regicide, "Mackbeth" had license to articulate such a nihilistic view?

Shakespeare lived in Elizabethan England, where openly-practising Catholics were guilty of treason, and were accordingly hung, drawn and quartered. At the same time, everyone - lords and peasants - were required to attend church on Sunday, or be fined a shilling for each non-attendance. With workman's wages at fourpence a day - excluding food - this was a substantial incentive to piety. It lends the entire scene a most powerful aspect, and would have given audiences a particular frisson to hear these words spoken aloud, and in public too.

Now, you know what you have to do...

"you must utter the words 'Angels and ministers of grace defend us!' Then the offender must leave the house, turn around widdershins (counterclockwise) three times, swear and knock to be readmitted."

>>George, you know what happens to people when they mention the name of that Scottish play...<<

Yes, they get a silly response irrelevant to the topic in the context of which the name of the play was misspelled.

Dear Jon,

You wrote to Peter:

<<Never mind that it's revealing new and exciting ways to achieve goals that we could never have dreamed of.>>

So you admit that modernity brought new goals into people's minds - now they have to work double-hard to achieve them. Happiness is achieved by eliminating goals not by multiplying them.

<<Never mind that it's spared an increasing number of us the need to earn our bread through hard physical labour.>>

So instead, most of us do meaningless sedentary jobs, unrelated to bread, in order to achieve the above new goals. The amount of rest, free and family time we get has actually decreased by modernity.

<<No, it's all about 'nihilism', and denying God, and everything else is immaterial.>>

Rather, everything else is material. The problem with material things is that they are all temporary.

<<Why don't you grow up and stop trying to make out the details of the world through your God-coloured glasses?>>

But that's exactly what Peter is already doing - this and all his other articles are addressing Christians (and only Christians: he won't even reply to me because I'm not a Christian), telling them to STOP trying to make out the details the world through God-coloured glasses, as the church has wrongly done for centuries.

If you want to make out the details of the world - use science, but better still why even bother about the details of this fleeting world?

@Yuyutsu -- I certainly don't work as hard as my father did at my age -- or indeed any other. Do you? And at 55 I've already outlived two of my grandparents and my mother. Are you seriously claiming that modern life ISN'T better than it was in, say, 1960?

There's nothing 'meaningless' about my sedentary job. I work as a freelancer from home, taking on jobs I enjoy and rejecting those that I don't, in far more comfort than any factory labourer churning out five hundred widgets a day. Let the robots do that -- they're welcome to it.

If material things are temporary, that's OK -- so am I. As long as my material possessions last me until I'm ready to kick off, then they can fall apart immediately afterwards -- so what? And I 'bother about the details of the fleeting world' because they give me pleasure -- what better reason could there possibly be?

Making up imaginary verities simply for the sake of my self-esteem never appealed to me, but if that's what turns you on, fine. Just don't pretend they give you exclusive access to the moral high ground.

Peter Sellick is either ignorant of history and religion or distorts what we know of the past.:

Peter Sellick wrote: "It also means that we can no longer talk about nature as the good creation of a benign God; talk about God's plan in this respect is now no longer possible."

Benign God? Peter’s god near as I can see is the God of the Bible. He is a vindictive, arbitrary, vengeful and sadistic entity. He destroys most of the life of the world in the Flood. He commands a man to show devotion by murdering his son. He incited the armies of Joshua to to commit genocide on the Canaanites. In the New Testament he condemns his own son to torture and death. Perhaps Peter is confusing the myth of deity with the myth of Santa Claus.

He also wrote: "These assumptions about God are based on the view from nature and as such are foreign to the original Hebrew and Christian traditions that existed before "nature" became a description of the world."

Peter, you have turned history on its head. To the best of our knowledge the early gods invented by humans were all connected with nature. There were spirits in both animate and inanimate objects. Later the Greek and Roman gods embodied aspects of nature. As examples Poseidon was god of the sea, and Boreas was god of the winds.

He also wrote: When Christianity spread across the ancient world the old idols and gods were easily toppled because they were exposed as projections of human fear and desire.

The pagan gods were not easily toppled. They were eliminated by Christian persecution of their adherents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_I

The Christian persecution of Roman religion under Theodosius I began in 381, after the first couple of years of his reign in the Eastern Empire. In the 380s, Theodosius I reiterated Constantine's ban on former customs of Roman religion, prohibited haruspicy on pain of death, pioneered the criminalization of Magistrates who did not enforce laws against polytheism, broke up some pagan associations and tolerated attacks on Roman temples.

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Between 389–392 he promulgated the "Theodosian decrees" (instituting a major change in his religious policies), which removed non-Nicene Christians from church office and abolished the last remaining expressions of Roman religion by making its holidays into workdays, banned blood sacrifices, closed Roman temples, and disbanded the Vestal Virgins. The practices of taking auspices and witchcraft were punished. Theodosius refused to restore the Altar of Victory in the Senate House, as asked by non-Christian senators.

In 392 he became sole Emperor (the last one to claim sole and effective rule over an Empire including the Western provinces). From this moment till the end of his reign in 395, while non-Christians continued to request toleration, he ordered, authorized, or at least failed to punish, the closure or destruction of many temples, holy sites, images and objects of piety throughout the Empire.”

After Theodosius Christian rulers continued to impose Christianity on the pagan world by persecution and violence. Charlemagne gave the pagan Gauls the choice of Christianity or beheading. Olaf, patron saint of Norway gave the pagan Norse more options: Christianity, exile or the blood eagle. The blood eagle involved staking the subject spreading his or her lungs on each side of the body.

For the history of the violence by which Christianity has been imposed on non-Christian peoples in Europe read Richard Fletcher’s “The Conversion of Europe from Paganism to Christianity: 371-1386, London: Fontana (HarperCollins), 1998”.

THE PAGAN GODS WERE NOT EASILY TOPPLED. THEY WERE TOPPLED BY CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE.