I am "fortunate" to receive every month a copy of my local diocesan newsletter which, of course, I read avidly from cover to cover.

This month (June 2002) an odd little article caught my attention. It was announcing a play written by two students from Wycliffe Hall, the theological college of Oxford University, about the burning at the stake in Oxford in 1555 of the Archbishops Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer for being Protestants.

Leaving aside completely the rather un-Christian way in which the Catholic Church used to deal with anyone who didn't agree with it, there was this quote from the authors of the play:

"The martyrs paid for their beliefs with their lives. Their story doesn't make sense if there is no life after death"

Well, quite. Of course it doesn't make any sense. The logic that we are being asked to accept here, if you think it through, is that because three bishops were convinced enough in their beliefs to allow themselves to be killed for them, then those beliefs must be true. How ridiculous. This must also mean that there really is a comet up there somewhere populated by benevolent extraterrestrials ready to take us off to a better life, otherwise the Heaven's Gate-ers would not have died for those beliefs.

"All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wise and wonderful
The Lord God made them all"
- Popular hymn

Recently I happened to see a wildlife documentary on TV. At one point, it showed a group of egrets foraging about on the bank of a small river in South America. One of the egrets put a foot into the water. The foot was immediately seized by a piranha fish waiting there in the shallows. Within seconds, the single piranha was joined by dozens of others, and together they dragged the terrified bird into the water fighting for its life and literally ate it alive.

Like me, I'm sure you have all seen from time to time wildlife programmes where a lion or some other big cat stalks and then pounces on an antelope or gazelle. Can you imagine the fear and terror which must be going through the mind of the antelope in those final moments as the lion leaps on its back and sinks its teeth into its neck? Once I saw a scene where a gazelle was dragged down by a pack of ravenous hyenas that started tearing lumps out of its belly as soon as it was on the ground and still alive.

Charles Darwin commented on how he could not reconcile the existence of the ichneumon fly with the idea of a benevolent creator. The ichneumon fly is a parasite that lays its eggs inside a caterpillar. The eggs hatch and proceed to eat the caterpillar alive from the inside, keeping it alive until the larvae emerge.

The harsh reality of life is that most wild creatures end their days either starving to death, when they are too old or frail to feed themselves, or by being killed and eaten by predators. Why would a benevolent creator arrange things like this? Even allowing that it is reasonable that he should create creatures which need to eat other creatures to stay alive (why couldn't he make every creature vegetarian?), then why make the process so cruel and painful for the victim? Why could there not be an inbuilt biological mechanism whereby the antelope, when cornered by the lion, simply drops dead before being eaten? Why do so many animals in the world deserve to spend their lives in fear and die by the teeth and claws of predators?

Let's forget all the silly imagery of Jesus stroking young lambs and recognise that the Creator is (a) cruel and thoughtless; (b) limited in His powers; or (c) both of the previous.

Most likely of all, the Creator simply doesn't exist. Prey, predators and parasites are there because that's the way natural selection works, and it's how the world is, simple as that.

I recently read an article in The Times online about the last of the unidentified victims of Hurricane Katrina being buried in New Orleans. It turns out the these last victims were in fact babies, who probably drowned in their mothers’ arms, when the mothers were in the attics of their houses trying to break through the roofs to escape the floodwaters, and couldn’t.

Dr Frank Maynard, the New Orleans coroner, made this comment:

“I’m sure there were a lot of mothers holding babies, trying to climb up in the attic, couldn’t get out, couldn’t break a hole in the roof. We found a lot of people like that, people that died in the attics. That’s the hard reality of what happened to us here”

Imagine the sheer horror of that, and the terror and desperation that must have been going through the minds of those mothers.

What really struck me in this article was the next part. As the last crypts were sealed, “Dr Maynard, who led the effort to try to identify all of Katrina’s victims, played a jazz version of What a Friend We Have in Jesus on his trumpet.”

What a friend, indeed. I wonder if he realised the irony?