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2B Five reasons not to believe in God

6A

What is the Bible?

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My first book: Where the Wild Things Are. I wanted to be little Max, racing through the forest, and sailing across the magical sea. My first trip to the cinema: Disney’s Fantasia when I was four. I was terrified by the Sorcerer’s Apprentice scene, when the enchanted broomsticks pick up their buckets and flood the castle. My first concert: Queen, 1982, the Hot Space Tour at the Milton Keynes Bowl. That’s a good one to have ticked off the bucket list… Books, films, music. These are some of the things that form you over the years. It’s more than just entertainment. It’s the culture in which you live. You learn a whole way of seeing the world. It shapes your heart and mind. The book that has probably had the biggest influence on the history of the world is almost certainly the Christian Bible. It has touched individuals and societies in so many different ways. It has been a source of fascination even for those without faith. But what exactly is the Bible? Well, it looks like a book. You can pick it up, you can hold it in your hands. It’s got a title page and a table of contents, a big section at the front, usually called the Old Testament; and a shorter section at the back, usually called the New Testament.

CHAPTER 8

PRAYER

8A

What is prayer?

Whenever someone does a survey about faith and religion, they very often discover an unusual fact. The number of people who say they pray is nearly always higher than the number of people who say they believe in God. In other words, there are lots of people who have no faith but still feel drawn to pray. It sounds odd. But maybe it’s not. I think that prayer is like a human instinct. We have an instinct that we are not alone; an intuition that there is something greater behind the universe. It’s natural that we want to reach out to God, even if we are not one hundred per cent sure that he’s there. A traditional definition of prayer goes like this: Prayer is “raising up the mind and the heart to God.” We need to reach out to God, to look up and to look beyond. This is part of prayer. But you could also say that prayer is “opening the mind and the heart to God”, because he is not just “up there”, he is present with us here, whether we are praying or not. There are so many different ways of praying. Prayer can be informal and spontaneous: I often pray while sitting on the bus or walking to the shops. Prayer can be formal and solemn: if you go, for example, to a beautiful Choral Evensong in an Anglican cathedral.

CHAPTER 9

FINDING TRUE FREEDOM

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