The Gospel according to...

OK. It's Sunday morning, so here's the Gospel according to Parson Thru.

The world's major religions all appear to form a part of one masculine power elite or another.

They all seem to harbour a fear of women's sexuality to a greater or lesser extent. To varying levels of abhorrence, they employ inhuman means to protect the soft underbelly of masculine strength from the threat of that sexuality. Religion is crafted to provide a simplified understanding and means of controlling human sexuality for the ignorant and insecure.

Religion is very good at protecting cabals and tyrannies. That, after all, is what it was invented for. Books can be written and held aloft as evidence, threat and justification. God wrote it, you see. Persecution, slaughter and bestial behaviour in the home must be God's way. Trouble is that each book has its own God. Each adherent has his own God, when it suits him. How can I believe in that?

In places of worship, people look skywards to find the spirit that they sense is present. Actually, they ought to look around them to learn from where the spirit is emanating. Shame that the veneration of this great and mysterious thing ends the moment they walk out of the door.

When you look into the eyes of another human being and see suffering that you are inficting; when you assert that you are doing this in the furtherance of God's work; ask yourself whose God that really is.

When you claim to bring God's peace, but are filled with jealousy, hatred or anger, ask yourself what peace might look like to somebody else.

Love the spirit wherever you find it.

Remember that hypocrisy is the death-watch beetle of all religion.