Garth George: Ten simple steps that lead to good living for mankind

I don't know whether the silly season has come early this year, but there seems to have been a lot more than usual claptrap floating around the news in the past week or so.

It started with all the kerfuffle over the death sentence on the young Australian for trying to smuggle drugs through Singapore.

It seemed an open and shut case to me. Singapore law provides for a mandatory death sentence on anyone caught with sufficient drugs on their person to indicate trading therein.

Anybody who has kept even cursorily abreast of current affairs in recent years would be aware of that, for this case is only the latest of several which have seen foreigners executed in Singapore for carrying drugs.

I can understand that there are many people who disagree sincerely and passionately with capital punishment (I am not one of them, incidentally) but why they would try to interfere with the sovereign law of another country is beyond me.

Even more claptrap has been generated over the kidnapping in Iraq of Harmeet Singh Sooden, who has been described ad nauseam as a "peace-loving man". I don't see him that way; I see him as a side-taking man.

Those who genuinely seek peace, the blessed peacemakers whom the Bible says "shall be called the sons of God", never take sides. And certainly never protest.

Sooden does both, as evidenced in a front-page picture of him in this newspaper carrying a banner reading: "Israel apartheid is wrong".

But that aside, anyone who sets himself up as a self-styled peacemaker and sets out to negotiate in a war zone cannot be a bit surprised if it all turns to custard, particularly when he might find himself dealing not with rational human beings but with religious fanatics whose minds are firmly locked in the 12th century.

I just pray that Sooden, and his equally misguided colleagues, don't pay for their naivety with their lives.

Now for the ultimate claptrap to appear in this newspaper of late. Under the heading "Lessons in being a soul survivor" it appeared on this page on Tuesday from the pen of the Rev Glynn Cardy.

Cardy is the latest of a series of pretentiously unconventional, even oddball, parsons to inhabit the pulpit of St Matthew-in-the-City, that elegant pile of Anglican stone which gives Auckland's inner-city Hobson St a modicum of character.

I take issue with Mr Cardy on two counts: (1) that the word "sin" should be deleted from our lexicon as historical spam; and (2) that Jesus Christ came to Earth to be a politician.

Much else that Mr Cardy wrote is beyond my comprehension, which is how I generally find the dissertations of religionists who have evolved their own personal theology.

So impenetrable was some of it that an old friend of mine, once a big gun in the Anglican priesthood, was moved, most uncharacteristically, to describe it as "bullshit".

It beats me why some people - and churchmen in particular - go to such great lengths to complicate what is such a simple concept.

Sin is nothing more than rebellion against God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, who made us in his own image and likeness.

Since God wants only the best for his people - be they in church or out - he laid down a set of principles which he knew would lead to good living for all. Simple they are, too - there are only 10 of them.

But as the millenniums rolled by he came to the conclusion that mankind was incapable of obeying even 10 simple principles, and in the meantime his beloved humanity was losing touch with him and had come to see him as a strict disciplinarian rather than a loving father.

So he sent his son, Jesus Christ, whose birth we are again about to celebrate, to show us how much God loved us as our heavenly daddy and to make himself a sacrifice for the sins of us all.

There is, of course, great mystery here, but the simplicity of it is that God told us that if sin was getting us down, then all we had to do was ask him through Jesus and he would forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Some of us recognise ourselves as sinners, many don't. Some of us try, often without too much success, not to be sinners; many don't. It's strictly a matter between an individual and God.

But if we're going to delete "sin" from our lexicon, then we will have to delete such words as "religion", "Christianity", "Judaism", even "church", for there will be no need for any of those - and Mr Cardy will be out of a job.

As for that statement that "the arrival of Jesus was a political act" and that to the Roman Empire "Jesus was a political threat", I must admit that I was gobsmacked.

Jesus showed no interest whatsoever in the Roman Empire, neither was he a threat to it, although some insecure lackeys of Caesar's might have seen him so. Had he been, then he must be seen as an abject failure, for the Roman Empire lasted for centuries after he had gone.

He was a threat only to the religious leaders of the day, King Herod among them, who had a huge vested interest in keeping God at a distance from the people.

So they killed him - and by doing so lost the spiritual battle (Jesus was involved in no other) for the souls of men. I praise him and thank him that as a result, 2000-odd years down the track, I am a soul survivor.