HELLO, READERS. Badger begins this week by acknowledging a grave error In last week’s column. In that article. Badger described the IPPG Cabinet as “a gang of time-serving nincompoops.” He apologises: Shelley wrote Ozymandias, not Keats. You know how it is. readers: distracted by the sheer commonplace idiocy of Jamie Adams saying that -change is never popular- (think winning the lottery. bucko!) Badger got his nineteenth century poets confused. Readers of Badger’s past columns will recall that he has. occasionally, expressed views which might lead his readers to suggest that while he appreciates and understands that others are possessed of religious faith. Badger is rather more sceptical. Badger is sceptical about many things: UFO’s. ghosts, the Loch Ness Monster, and conspiracy theories of any stripe.

Simply because some things are on the periphery of understanding does not mean that they cannot or could not be explained. With the caveat that Ken Rowlands clearly defies explanation. Every year. in December. national newspapers of a certain type produce acres of newsprint bewailing the loss of the spirit of Christmas. At some point in such an article painted wooden soldiers. nutcrackers. tangerines and the words “traditional Christmas fayre” appear with startling regularity. Along with an exhortation to say “Hurrah for the Black Shirts!” Easter is different. For an event that should be a celebration. there’s an awful lot of moping around and glumness. One expects on or around religious festivals a given number of (necessarily) pious pronouncements by Church leaders. a reaching for meaning and relevance.

But readers , are you ready for the zillionth showing of The Robe. Quo Vadis. The Greatest Story Ever Told, or Ben Hur as TV networks try to strike the right note of constipated cinemascope solemnity/ When he attended secondary school. Badger remembers one fervently devout teacher espousing the opinion that the television series Jesus of Nazareth, starring Robert Powell. was a blasphemous trivialisation of the message of the Gospels. Even then, Badger remembers thinking that this was a pretty rum position: now. Badger thinks it ignores – providing one believes in an all-knowing and all-powerful God – the likelihood that such a deity would be as much behind the making of television programmes and popular entertainments as he would be behind the oscillations of the stars in the heavens and the existence of the beasts of the field.

And that. for Badger, sitting in his sett and occasionally scratching his head, is at the heart of Badger’s Easter message. If you are inclined to believe in a deity. your faith does not exist in a vacuum. The world changes: faith – does not necessarily change but the context in which one exercises it does. A god – or gods. whatever one believes – did not create an unchanging world. The world might be “without end” but it is not pickled. Change, if one is inclined to believe Jamie Adams (please see above. then take two of the 80mg tablets and go for a lie down), is never popular. Badger could not agree less. Change for the better, whether personal or collective is always popular. It isonly with some people that some change is unpopular. For example the National Health Service is a jewel in the crown of public welfare provision. When it was first proposed it was as unpopular with the BMA as free thought is the County Council’s Cabinet.

The medical profession attended the NilS’s inception in the same way as – according to the Christian bible – Pharisees and Sadducees regarded the person of Jesus. Or as the !PPG greets scrutiny. Badger believes that change is the motor that drives us all forward: a necessary part of living; an essential pan of our growth as human beings. Badger notes that if you are a Christian. your faith is rooted in a radical change in Judaism that your belief tells you took place two millennia ago. While religious faith might he “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”, scripture is itself endlessly changeable. Politics – both worldly and ecclesiastical – as much as faith were behind the collation of the New Testament in the third and fourth centuries and the finalization of the Old Testament around the same time.

The same considerations underpinned the creed at the heart of the Christian faith. As Badger has noted before: words, even ones supposedly divinely inspired. are slippery and elusive. In such a way, doctrine and dogma change while faith can remain constant. Direction of travel remains the same. even when the highway code changes. And so it is with marriage. There’s been an awful lot of hullabaloo about same sex marriage in the sort of papers that buy into Christianity periodically and selectively. At the same time there has been an outpouring of outrage by those who regard the idea of changing the institution of marriage as a sign of the approaching end of times. Badger’s readers might know that before 1753 there was no statutory law underpinning marriage. The absence of banns or a licence – or even the fact that the marriage was not celebrated in a church – did not render the marriage void.

Then Parliament regularised and regulated marriage by statute. Statutes are drawn up and passed – however one regards George Osborne – by humans. And it is by humans they are changed. Human-made law governs the worldly actions of all of us. We render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Badger remembers reading that somewhere. Since 1753. it is the law of the land that has governed marriage. And now the law has changed. It has
changed because the: ad has changed and so has society. Put it this way, if the English language had not mutated and evolved we would have no way of describing how we live. We would be like the French: fighting a losing battle against the modern world of le weekend, e-mail. le parking and le budget. And readers, nobody – surely, nobody! – wants to be like the French.