Good Friday...

Beyond the gospels - which offer widely varying accounts of his last hours - there is no evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus. Historicity aside, the ‘events’ of Good Friday are incoherent even as a metaphor for vicarious atonement: forgiving the sins of humankind through self-sacrifice. For example, if I do you a grievous wrong, I cannot claim to have been forgiven already by the self-sacrifice of a third party; the only person who can truly forgive me is you.

The Christian God, understood by believers to be both omniscient and omnipotent, allows evil to proliferate in the world. This conundrum, the knottiest of theological problems, was authored by believers, not atheists. It is such a huge obstacle to belief that it has a name: theodicy. No matter how hard the rightous try to explain away this problem, it simply can’t be done. It’s like trying to prove that 2+2=5.

Objections to the blithe assertion that God loves us are so massive that they block out the sun. The global pandemic, killing thousands of people every day, should be a devastating riposte to this kind of wishful thinking.

Licensed today: a walker on the Pennine Way in Derbyshire...