Several things....

So I am making progress with my list of 50 Things to Do (see a previous blog entry). I have spent time gardening (this was always going to be the easiest one to complete, since I spend a lot of time gardening, but I thought it best to have a few 'quick win' tasks, so I would feel better about myself). I have also made some additions to my Enid Blyton collection (courtesy of charity shops) and have added a few Booker winners to my bookshelves as well (charity shops again).

I have also spent some time on the Richard Dawkins website (this paragraph is not connected with the one above, by the way. I have now Changed The Subject). Apart from being appallingly slow, this is an amusing site. I have given up on trying to have profound thoughts about Richard Dawkins' writings (well, The God Delusion anyway) and decided it's just a pile of pants. This is an easier route, clearly, than considering it carefully and making philosophical and intellectual comments about it, but for that I make no apology. Life is hard enough without tying myself in knots over a pile of pants.

The difficulty with a lot of the posters (i.e. People Who Post) on Dawkins' site is that they seem to be defined almost exclusively by what they don't believe in. The site's header is 'a free-thinking oasis', but other than that, it's just one big rant against religion. And a lot of them have no sense of humour.

In Other News, I think I have discovered which of the latest 'Christian boxes' I fit into. I am a Post Evangelical. That means, I have Evangelical beliefs, but have reservations about some of the practices and 'dogmas' of traditional evangelicalism. I discovered this unexpectedly... I went to the library to get a book on how to make soft toys (for my church craft fair) and I saw Dave Tomlinson's book 'The Post-Evangelical'. It's really interesting.... written about 10 years ago, it talks about the struggles that a lot of evangelicals have with the evangelical church - the apparent shallowness of some of the worship, the dogmas of 'quiet time' and so on, and the tendency to focus on 'heaven when you die' rather than 'life here and now'. So it had me all a-pondering about the direction the church needs to take in the future. I may get round to turning these into coherent thoughts, I may not. If I do, I'll let you know.

Anyway, I had never yet found a box I fitted into and now I have. So I have climbed in and shut the lid so no one else can get in. If you'd like to join me, do our secret knock and I'll let you in.