As the supernatural cosmology of Christianity loses its authority, its moral questions remain. This article proposes “moral economics” as a practical framework based on responsibility, reciprocity, stewardship, cost, benefit and consequence.
A reflection on why many spiritually curious people avoid the Bible, not because they have read it closely, but because Christianity itself has made it appear dead, authoritarian, or morally compromised. The piece argues that the Bible, especially the Gospels, remains a work of great psychological, poetic, and spiritual depth.
Jordan Peterson’s struggle with Christianity raises a wider question: do human beings live by truth, by happiness, or by the narratives that give life meaning? This reflection argues that stories can guide or mislead us, and that the deepest relief lies in finding the source of goodness within ourselves and following it.
Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am” opens onto a deeper human problem: we know that we are alive, and therefore we know that we shall die. Religion, resurrection, reincarnation, and judgement are all attempts to answer the wound of self-conscious mortality. But perhaps the most honest conclusion is that the self is unfinished — and that we may only come this way once.
There are certain words in religious speech which are used so often that their meaning is easily assumed rather than examined: God, Spirit, light, grace, glory, kingdom, eternal life. They carry great emotional weight, but they are not always used with precision.
An argument that God is not best understood as an external commander, but as the inward source of moral recognition: the strength by which we see the good, stand by it, and give it outward form in law, art, worship, and responsible action. Drawing on Jesus, Paul, Shakespeare, Wilfred Owen, and the failure of external religion, the article reflects on truth, conscience, self-command, and the need to recover the spiritual key to Western moral life.
Some truths cannot be taught as information. They can only be pointed to, lived, and inwardly recognised. Drawing on Ecclesiastes, Paul, Eckhart, Tolstoy, and the teaching of Jesus, this reflection explores the possibility that the divine is encountered not as doctrine but as experience: a depth within consciousness that upholds, illumines, and transforms. Whether that experience comes from beyond us, from within the brain, or from some mystery joining the two, the practical question remains the same: whether we live in contact with that depth or merely skim the surface of life.
From Augustine to Eckhart, from Teresa to Tolstoy and beyond, the same lesson returns: the deepest truth cannot simply be taught from outside but must be realised inwardly. This essay follows that long mystical trajectory through childhood faith, doubt, animism, Jesus’ inward law of love, and the betrayal of his message by empire and institution.
Christianity, as history has handed it down, is not identical with its original impulse. What may once have been a small Jewish movement, centred on inner change and moral re-alignment, was gradually overlaid by cosmic theology, mythological symbolism, sacramental structure, and institutional dogma. Paul universalized the movement; later centuries elaborated it; orthodoxy organized and defended it. Yet the stripping away of those later accretions need not end in mere negation. Beneath them, the original summons may still be heard: a call to metanoia, to a reawakening of the moral centre, to the recovery of that inbuilt orientation towards the good which the world so easily obscures. If so, the real significance of Christianity lies less in dogma than in the possibility that, beneath all its historical layers, it still preserves a call to become inwardly true.
Prayer is often understood as asking for things, but in the Gospels it appears as something quite different. It is not a means of control, but a moment of release — a stepping back from the self and a return to what is real. In prayer, one lets go, sees more clearly, and, however briefly, is set in the right direction.