The most essential thing to write here, above all others, is:
 
Check Your Facts

And so He dies to be replaced by another.

I hope its David Tennant. Bill Nighy and Richard E Grant are a bit too posh. We've had posh Doctors already. Alan Davies has been in too many other things to be believable as The Doctor. Sure, David Tennant has been in some high profile stuff already but he's got just the right amount of newness. And who the heck is David Thewlis?

Check out the candidates here

Sorry, here

Doh! here

He was a good man, some would say infallible. He was a bad man. Perhaps he was a bit of both. The best article on the Pope, his life and dying, and the public response to him was by Malachi O' Doherty in The Observer in which he observes:

"The entire Catholic world is emotionally involved in the passing of that enthralling man, John Paul II. But in a perhaps ironic reflection of the old injunction to love the sinner and hate the sin, Catholics, in their millions, loved that man and disregarded his teaching.

What many of them will be looking for in the next Pope is that same charm and energy; they will hardly get that. They will not be looking forward to a Pope who nurtures the same doctrinal fundamentalism as John Paul did. They did not love him for his teaching. They forgave him his teachings because they loved him as a man."

Therein lies the problem. Often faith or belief is extolled as a Good Thing in and of itself, as in 'let's have more faith schools'. Of course it depends on what one has belief or faith in. A commenter over at Johann Hari's site writes:

"Interesting quote from Steven Weinberg 'With or without religion good people can behave well and bad people can do evil, but for good people to do evil - that takes religion'. This may seem harsh to the good people with an emotional investment in religion but there seems to be overwhelming evidence that the required loyalty to narrow tenets of particular belief systems can blind people to a broader ethical view of the negative consequences of such tenets."

Another commenter agrees but correctly qualifies the quote:

"I would say that the above Weinberg quote is correct so long as we assume religion to mean any ideological system, not merely a God-based one, yes?"

Quite. History has shown that goodness or evil are not the preserve of any particular group of people. Goodness or otherwise (sometimes even both at once!) resides in the person and that person may or may not join a group such as a political party, a religion or even just other humans through which they express themselves.

Canon Raven (whoever he was?) paid tribute to George Garrett (whose writings greatly impressed George Orwell):

"Few men of my acquaintance are so Christ-like, so marked by suffering, so patient, so free from bitterness, so generous to those who for years have persecuted him. Blacklisted and deprived of any possible employment, imprisoned, driven from the country, forced to leave wife and children, never secure, almost starved, miserably clad, he yet speaks and acts like a Christian gentleman. And his only crime is that he cannot endure in silence the oppression and the wastage, the demoralising insecurity and the soul-destroying squalor, in which his fellows have to live. For me to preach to such a man would be an impertinence...it is a pity his views are so unsuited to his character; a bad creed, even if it has no influence, is an obstacle...but I have a feeling that Jesus is much more manifestly incarnate in this man and his kind than He is in me."

Garrett was a labour activist, for a time a member of the (godless) Communist Party and also involved with the Industrial Workers of the World (The Wobblies) when in America.

And yet he was a good person!

There you see.

Some also suggested that the Pope's suffering was 'instructive' for the rest of us. I don't see how. He had the best of care and lived in great comfort. As a letter writer to The Independent contrasted the lot of the Pope:

"He had the best medical care that money can buy, the satisfaction of having led a full and fruitful life..."

..with the millions of..

"children dying premature deaths, from starvation or from easily curable diseases, without any medical care, in poverty, in squalor, in loneliness and abject terror"

Also among the reporting on the pontiff's death over recent days mention was made of declining church attendance. This shouldn't be a cause for concern. We should rejoice that people can go out into the world and behave in a humane and civilised way toward their fellow humans without having to be told to. Simple human empathy works. Remember at christmas the spending spree required by a capitalist economy failed to happen and then the spontaneous giving which occurred when the tsunami hit by a nation supposedly corrupted by materialism and bereft of spiritual values.

What was it Tom Paine said: "My country is the world, and my religion is to do good"

I think we're doing ok.

March