Northern Flights

Scotland was wonderful, even though Edinburgh was cloudy and cold despite the rest of the country sweltering with temperatures in the mid 20s. It was also the first time I've ever been on a diverted flight - Edinburgh was fog-bound so the plane couldn't land. But in the evenings I was able to get out and drive around - very ecologically unsound! You don't get many days when the sun shines brightly in the Highlands.

The sense of space and freedom was great - but I must admit that I do prefer the West Highlands. OK, Perthshire does have real mountains and lochs, but you just get the sense that civilisation is only ever 20 minutes away.

It was also good to see Keith and Becky. Keith was the leader of the church we went to in Glasgow, and we got to know them and their family quite well when we lived up there. Eventually the story of the loss of faith came out, together with all the responses I've come to expect - "don't confuse the church with God" and so on. The interesting thing was that they have obviously been so conditioned to not give up on church that they continue to do things for it despite Becky having a collapse of faith herself a few years ago. Also they want to re-define (or, probably, more accurately, un-define) God. The clearest definition I could get was that "God is love", and that the picture the church has painted for hundreds of years leads you to no other option that God is a monster - well, in their view, God is obviously not a monster so the church must be wrong.

Anyhow, when the time came to fly out from Edinburgh on Wednesday evening, I was actually quite sad. The implementation had gone well and wasn't very taxing - finishing in the mid-afternoon every day. The weather outside of Edinburgh was warm and sunny, and I had a car and the freedom to just ramble around.

J and I had an interesting discussion last night fed from my discussions with Keith and Becky. Again, it centered around what God was, if anything. I asked two simple questions. The first was "doesn't the existence of hell invalidate the concept of an all-loving God?" (within the framework that God does exist) - either God is all-loving in which case hell cannot exist, or God is not all-loving. The second is "what is sin?" - based on the Christian notion that death is the punishment for sin, yet creatures were dying millions of years before mankind ever existed - so did God know that mankind would sin? J was trying to work out her position on heaven. Fundamentally her view now is that people would go there based on how good they were - but then, I asked, didn't that mean that someone or something had to make the decision. After all, you can argue that Mugabe did good for the people of Zimbabwe twenty or more years ago, and you can argue that Hitler did good for the German people in the mid-1930s. So what decides whether the bad you have done outweighs the good - and therefore doesn't that mean that God is all-powerful? Ah, came the reply, the Bible doesn't teach that. Yes it does!!!