In the last post I discussed the problems that might arise due to the world’s ever growing population and looked at some of the discussion about what might be done about it. In this post I am going to explore the growth in population of different religious groups.

In recent times, there has been some heated discussion about Muslims having large families and taking over western countries through sheer numbers. But do the figures bear this out? A little exploration of the Australian Bureau of Statistics website shows some interesting facts. Below are a few trends projected for the growth of religious groups, firstly in the Australian population, and then in the world population. Please keep in mind that while statistics are fun, they can also lie quite easily, so one should take the predictions for the future below with some caution.

If there are any statisticians out there who have a better way of analysing the figures and making more sound predictions, I would love to hear from you! If you email me (“Contact Me” at the top of the page) I would be happy to share my spreadsheets with all the Bureau statistics and you can play around with them to your heart’s content. But please, do share your results.

My Results:

For 1996-2006, Hinduism (120%) and Buddhism (110%) have grown faster than Islam (69%) or Christianity (0.8%).

The percentage of children in Australia who are 0-14 years old has changed from 1996 to 2006 as follows:

Buddhist: 1% to 1.8%

Hindu: 0.4% to 0.7%

Islam: 1.7% to 2.6%

Christian: 65.3% to 58.2%

Growth is very hard to predict, and I am not a professional statistician. First I tried multiplying each population by the same growth factor that occurred from 1996-2006, but this produced some obviously ridiculous results by the year 2016. So I then tried just assuming that each population grows or declines by the same number of people every ten years. Obviously, this method too has its limitations, but using it, the big winners are going to be “No religion” and “Religious Affiliation not Stated” which together will grow by 2106 to be 49.5%of the population, compared to only 29.9% in 2006. In the same period, others will change thus:

Buddhist: 2.1% to 6.4%

Hindu: 0.7% to 2.3%

Islam: 1.7% to 4.2%

Christian: 63.9% to 33.6%

At current rates of decline, Churches of Christ would disappear by 2036; Uniting Church by 2066, Presbyterians by 2086 and sadly, the Salvation Army by2076. Of course, this is all unlikely as other factors will certainly come into play.

So the biggest trends on these assumptions are the shrinkage of the Anglican Church and the growth of non-religion. In 2066, the non-religious will outnumber Christians for the first time in Australian history.

Non-Christian religions, while experiencing significant growth, are so small in number that they do not really make any big impact on the country’s profile. By 2106, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam combined would make up only 12.9% of the population compared to 4.5% in 2006.

Of course, this calculation does not take into account what the immigration trends will do, or fertility rates. I could not find fertility rates by religion at the ABS and I suspect they may not want to publish them too easily. The bureau responded to my email enquiry by telling me that such comparisons are not produced as standard, but one can have them generated at a cost of about $500.

It is interesting to compare these figures with worldwide population trends predicted by the United Nations. They note the falling growth rate of the population and predict, by some models, that the population of the world will stabilise at around 10 billion just after the year 2200. What is more interesting is their predictions about the change in the distribution of the population. Here, it is Africa that seems to be the big winner, growing from 12% of the world in 1995 to 24% in 2150. By contrast, China declines from 22% in 1995 to just 14% in 2150, and Europe from 13% to just 5%.

“By 2150 in the medium scenario about a third of the world population lives in China and India; about a quarter in the rest of Asia; another quarter in Africa; fewer than one in ten persons lives in Europe and Northern America; and about the same proportion lives in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

One of the lessons from the UN study is that population growth is exquisitely sensitive to fertility rates. The Executive Summary explains that varying the worldwide fertility rate by small amounts can lead to wildly different outcomes:

“By 2150, the population of the world will be 24.8 billion according to the high scenario, 9.7 billion according to the medium scenario and 3.2 billion according to the low scenario. The low and high scenarios illustrate how deviations of about half a child from replacement level, if sustained over the long run, can produce large deviations from the path of the medium scenario which leads to an unchanging population size. Owing to the nature of exponential growth, the deviations expand over time (see table 1 and figure 1). Thus, the differences between the high and low scenarios with respect to the medium scenario are moderate in 2050 (at less than 2 billion each), but in 2150 they amount to 15 billion and 6 billion respectively.”

So it seems that the average number of children that a community has will seriously affect the proportion of that community among the worldwide population. If the community is very small, then the effect will not be great – doubling a population is not a big deal if that population starts with only 12 million people, say, as is one estimate for the Coptic community worldwide. Amidst the billions, there is little difference between 12 million and 24 million.

But what about a much larger population, like the Hindu or Islamic communities? The UN report cleverly avoids mentioning religion, and looks at trends only in relation to geographical areas. As we saw above, the starting points in Australia (1.7% Muslim) are relatively small, so the effect will not be so pronounced, even with high fertility rates. A country like France (8-9.6% Muslim) will begin changing its face long before Australia does. But the worldwide picture is quite different. It doesn’t take much to see that if one starts out with a large proportion of the world’s population in 2011 and adds to that a high fertility rate in comparison to other groups, over the centuries the world will certainly look very different.

The population of Muslims in 2009 was estimated to be around 1.57 billion, around 23% of the world’s population. The world’s Hindu population, mostly in India, is estimated at around one billion, or about 14% of the world’s population.  But while the populations in Western countries are stable or even declining slightly, both these cultures currently have relatively high fertility rates. It would be interesting to find some modelling that projects how they will fare as percentages of the world’s population in the years to come.

One study suggests that Muslims will grow significantly as a proportion of the world’s population over the next 20 years. The trend is worth looking at from 1990 to 2030. The percentages below are percent of world population.

1990 – 19.9%

2000 – 21.6% increase by 1.7%

2010 – 23.4% increase by 1.8%

2020 – 24.9% increase by 1.5%

2030 – 26.4% increase by 1.6%

But the study also suggest that the vast majority of this increase will be in countries that are already majority Muslim, and that the Muslim populations of Western countries will not grow drastically as proportions of their national population.

“If current trends continue, however, 79 countries will have a million or more Muslim inhabitants in 2030, up from 72 countries today. A majority of the world’s Muslims (about 60%) will continue to live in the Asia-Pacific region, while about 20% will live in the Middle East and North Africa, as is the case today. But Pakistan is expected to surpass Indonesia as the country with the single largest Muslim population. The portion of the world’s Muslims living in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to rise; in 20 years, for example, more Muslims are likely to live in Nigeria than in Egypt. Muslims will remain relatively small minorities in Europe and the Americas, but they are expected to constitute a growing share of the total population in these regions.”

Another study compared the growth rates of the major religions in the world:

Islam  - 1.84%

Bahá’í Faith  - 1.7%

Sikhism  - 1.62%

Jainism  - 1.57%

Hinduism  – 1.52%

Christianity  - 1.32%.

If these rates continue into the future, there is little doubt that the face of the world will change. The question is whether the current fertility rates will drop as the Muslim and Hindu worlds continue to grow more prosperous, and inevitably more secular, as has happened in the largely Christian world in the west. Then again, Africa with its large Christian population may be the balancing factor.

Apologies for the lack of posting recently – I was locked out by some technical glitch which now appears to have resolved itself!

Radio National’s Encounter program (30 October 2011) recently covered a very interesting yet little discussed topic. In the Bible, God commands Adam and Eve, and later Noah and his family, to go forth and multiply and to fill the earth. With our planet’s population having ticked over seven billion this year, and expected to reach nine billion by 2050, is it time to stop multiplying? Haven’t we now filled the earth?

Interestingly, there are arguments on both sides. On the one side is the fear that the earth cannot sustain too many more people. Its resources are limited after all. We have already experienced water shortages that were undreamed of when I was a child, and it is no longer unusual to hear that there is a famine somewhere in the world on any given day. Surely it is a straightforward matter of mathematics: limited resources cannot sustain an unlimited population. If we want to preserve our quality of life, we must take steps to limit the quantity of people alive.

Some have advocated a solution to overpopulation that sees wealthy countries helping developing countries to speed up their economic development. The poor, it is argued, have many children because they know some of them will die in childhood, and they want enough children to survive into adulthood to help on the farm and to look after them in their old age. But if they become financially secure and enjoy a raised standard of living, then they will have fewer children.

But does this solve the problem of the effects of overpopulation? A peasant family in India with 10 children may actually consume fewer resources than a high tech urban family in the USA with only two children! The amount of food the American family throws away each year might well feed the whole Indian family for a year! Perhaps sheer numbers are not the only problem: lifestyle may be an equally important factor.

A capitalistic society relies on growth for its prosperity. Today, a country’s success is unquestioningly measured by the annual growth of its GDP – Gross Domestic Product (although some have challenged this and produced measures of “national happiness” as alternatives). GDP growth means that you need a growing population to provide more consumers to buy more goods to create more jobs to put more money into people’s pockets. But I have often wondered, isn’t this something very like what a cancer does? Healthy body cells and organs grow to a certain limit and then just replace damaged or dead cells, maintaining a healthy, sustainable equilibrium of cell numbers. The whole problem with cancer cells is that they just don’t know when to stop multiplying. Eventually, they consume so much of the body’s resources that the rest of the body starves, and inevitably, dies. Our economic system is built upon exactly this unlimited growth principle!

Here it is important to point out something that the Christian living in the West needs to think about. As a member of Western society, the Christian is committed to upholding and participating in its various systems, including the capitalist economic model. But capitalism is most certainly not a Christian model. To be sure, it draws on some Christian ideals, such as free will in the marketplace and the liberty of the individual. But it also relies heavily on some other ideals that are most emphatically not Christian: personal profit; selfishness; materialism and greed, to name a few. Remember that Christ commanded anyone who wishes to follow Him that they must sell all they have, and the first Christians came and laid their possessions at the feet of the Apostles who distributed them according to need among the whole community.

What would happen if we changed our system? Would we be willing to accept a freezing of our standard of living in exchange for a more sustainable future? Could our economic system survive, or would we see massive unemployment and inflation result? Or perhaps we need to rethink economics from the ground up, and come up with a completely new system that is not based on individual profit, but rather on cooperation and sharing – something much closer to the model of the ancient Christian community? Could such a system ever be made to work, in view of the disastrous experiments with communism of the twentieth century? After all, human selfishness and greed are not so easily snuffed out.

And there are other aspects to this religious dimension of this debate. The Roman Catholic Church has always opposed contraception of any kind (other than natural methods) and encouraged Catholics to have large families. The Coptic Church, being located in overpopulated Egypt, has had a much more sensible approach to the question, banning only those forms of contraception that result in the death of a fertilised zygote (e.g. IUD’s and the morning after pill) but encouraging population control with forms of contraception that prevent fertilisation of the egg in the first place (e.g. oral contraceptive pill and barrier methods). It will be interesting to see whether the Roman Catholic Church will review its position over the coming decades as the population pressures build.

In the next post I will explore some statistics about the growth of religious communities in Australia and across the world. There are some trends that might surprise you…

Moallem Jirgis Al Jawhary

A 32 year old Protestant Iranian pastor with a young family is on trial in Iran for apostasy from the Muslim faith. He stands at grave risk of being executed, although he has been told that he would be a free man if only he would ‘repent’, renounce his Christian faith and return to Islam. Interestingly, a Muslim blogger, Hesham Hassaballa, has responded in the most powerful way possible: by proving from the very words of the Quran that such treatment is against the teachings of Islam. A sample: 

The evidence is overwhelming: Islam firmly upholds freedom of choice in matters of faith. Indeed, some Muslims do not, but their sins do not speak for the entire faith. Rather, their sins are an affront to the principles of Islam.

 The Iranian authorities must let Pastor Nadarkhani free. The choice of faith that he makes is his alone, and he will face the Lord in the end for his choice.

 Even if the head Shaikh of Al Azhar University converted to Catholicism, it would not diminish the truth of Islam’s message one iota. The Qur’an is quite confident in the truth it speaks, and so should it be with its adherents.

 When will Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt and all over the world understand that if they want to be true to their own religion, they need to accept freedom of religion?

 I think we will be waiting for a long time. This kind of fanaticism is nothing new for the Copt. An interesting historical article about important Coptic historical figure, Girgis El Gohary by Dioscorus Boles highlights some of the horrible circumstances Copts endured as recently as the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Surely we, as a human race, have moved on from such barbarism?

Over the past nine months fanatic elements within the Egyptian Muslim community have stirred up civil unrest all over Egypt. Copts have been attacked, houses and shops looted, and churches burnt down. While it is true that a general degree of anarchy has prevailed in the country since the revolution, one expects that as the new order comes to fruition, such anarchy will quickly be brought under control. THis is to be expected when so drastic a revolution happens in any nation. But acts of violence along religious lines will divide the country and turn it into another Lebanon. As thousands of Egyptian Copts protested the lack of protection from the ruling Army since the revolution, the army opened fire killing dozens of civilians and injuring hundreds. The Army has blamed “unknown culprits” for the violence. Yet surely, there is no doubt as to who did the killing?

If Egypt is ever to become a modern country it has to embrace modern standards of integrity and accountability. Provocateurs are being blamed for inciting the violence, yet we have often seen armies in other countries counter such violence without killing anyone. Why can’t the Egyptian army do the same? Are they not well enough trained? It is simply not good enough to say “they started it”. You are the ones with the training and the weapons!

After this terrible incident any decent army command would very quickly find out who gave the orders to fire on civilians and make a public example of them so that the rest of the soldiers understand that this absolutely unacceptable. The Army showed admirable constraint and what seemed to be great wisdom in refusing to use violence against protesters during the January revolution. Why has that restraint disappeared now? Why does it disappear only against Christians?

If the army does not want to be seen as being selective in who it protects, it MUST take immediate, decisive action against those in its own ranks who have shown this lack of discipline and were responsible for this atrocity. Only in this way can it prevent this tragedy from being repeated. Covering up and blaming others is a green light for atrocities like this to recur in the future. There is an old adage that says, “What you allow, you teach”. If I were a Muslim army officer, with the slightest tendency towards sectarianism, and I saw the perpetrators of this violence getting off scott-free, what message does that give me? If on the other hand, i saw them being severely punished: tried, courtmarshalled, perhaps imprisoned; then I would certainly think twice before repeating their mistake.

Egypt is not at war. Soldiers killing civilians is simply not acceptable! Those responsible have committed murder. When will it be recognised for what it is?

Persecution is nothing new for the Copts. We have survived nearly two thousand years in an environment that has been hostile for the vast majority of that period. But the events unfolding in Cairo are the fork in the road for the Egyptian nation. The Army can use this crisis to point the way for a better, brighter future for all Egyptians by exercising transparency, integrity and responsibility. Or it can just fall back on old ways of the old regime and plunge an Egypt that has tasted true freedom back into the dark ages.

His Holiness Pope Shenouda has called for three days of fasting and prayer starting today on behalf of the peace and security of Egypt. This is indeed a watershed moment.

Related Posts:

http://www.frantonios.org.au/2010/10/25/292/

http://www.frantonios.org.au/2010/11/03/fanatical-drive-against-copts/

Warning: This entry is not for the traditionalist or the ascetic. If you belong to one of those categories, better to stop reading now.

It is for the sincere Christian striving to reconcile their life in the world with their faith in Christ. 

There are certain similarities between formal prayer to God and listening to a song you like. By formal prayer I mean a prayer that is written down somewhere, such as Agbia prayers, the liturgy and so on. By song I mean a song you listen to on the radio, or more likely nowadays, on your portable electronic thingummy. 

In both cases you are paying attention to someone else’s words. Ideas, thoughts, experiences and feelings that someone else has had are embodied in language an melody and thus communicated far beyond the immediate proximity of the author. Across the oceans or across the ages, in both song and formal prayers, we share something with someone we have never met and often know very little about. 

In both cases the words and melody are not the whole story. They are not like a mathematical equation that can only be interpreted in one way. The value of art is not in what it is, but in what it can inspire. You may have noticed that the lyrics of many popular songs are fairly vague, and listeners spend many hours trying to interpret them. When asked, the composer will often evade the question, because a song doesn’t have to mean just what the author intended – it can mean different things to different people. In the same way, the words and melodies of set prayers can mean different things to different people. They can even mean different things to the same person at different times in their life. The value of a prayer is not in the words or melody itself but in what they can inspire in us. They are merely tools we use to help us achieve the real goal: connection with God. 

A good pop song will make you think and feel things you might not have experienced without it. In the same way, an effective prayer opens your mind and heart to new experiences with God, revealing new insights, changing attitudes, softening hard hearts and inspiring repentance. 

There is a certain enjoyment in a well crafted song. Our brains were created to be pleased with harmonic melodies, clever rhymes or plays on words. We are also wired to derive satisfaction from seeing things in a novel way (’Oh, I never thought of that!) All these things can also apply in a formal prayer, particularly when words are synchronised with tune. Which is why virtually all the formal prayers of the Coptic Church are sung or chanted rather than just read out blandly. It takes longer, but it adds another dimension to enrich the experience. 

A truly great song inspires action, perhaps even helps to change the world. Just think of anthems like ‘We Are the World’ that moved millions to donate to help the starving masses dying in Ethiopia in the late eighties. Folk singers like Bob Dylan used their music to influence the thinking of a whole generation. Prayer too can change the world, only in this case it can act not only through the person who hears or prays it, but additionally through the work of the Holy Spirit who hears and answers prayer. 

In modern times, our Coptic community has considered listening to popular music to be a waste of time at best, downright harmful and spiritually dangerous at worst. It is considered worldly and likely to entice the listener away from God. But I wonder if we could not view it in a more positive light? Perhaps those very skills one needs to enjoy pop music are the self same skills one needs to enjoy prayer? Given the right guidance and encouragement, I wonder if the avid music listener is not the best candidate for becoming an effective exponent of prayer? It’s just a matter of taking those skills of focus, interpretation, application and feeling someone else’s words deeply and applying them to prayer. 

Kind of lends new meaning to the old phrase, ‘On a song and a prayer’.

 Fr Ant

 IMPORTANT - CHANGE OF VENUE:
“Why Christianity?” will not be held at St Joseph’s
Instead it will be held at
St Abanoub Youth Centre
49 Fourth Ave, Blacktown
All other details remain the same.

You’re only a Christian because you were born a Christian. If you were born a Muslim, you’d be a Muslim today. So why should you think your faith is the right one? It’s purely a matter of chance.

I have discussed that challenge with many people over the years. On the face of it, it sounds pretty convincing. But that’s only on the face of it. When we dig a little deeper, you might be surprised at just how strong the case for Christianity against that of all other religions.

Now there are some who will say that we shouldn’t even be considering a question like this, that it is dangerous and might weaken the faith of some, or that it is disrespectful or blasphemous to even think about such things. But I follow the principle that if Christianity is true, then you should be able to throw anything at it, absolutely anything at all, and it should be able to stand up to it. If it can’t, then I want to know, by gum! That is, if I really care about Truth; and Truth is the very thing that Jesus not only promised would set us free, but even used as His own title (“I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”).

But it turns out that those who worry need not do so. Christianity is unique in so many ways that it really does stand alone among all the religions of the world. I know that’s a politically incorrect thing to say nowadays, but I believe it is true.

Next Saturday, we hope to explore this topic in some depth. St Abanoub’s Church, Archangel Michael Church and the Coptic Apologetics Group are organising a day where we will examine the question: “Given that God exists, why should we believe that Christianity is the right faith in contrast with all the other faiths in the world?” Last year we had an Atheism Day where we looked at the arguments for and against the existence of God. The ‘Why Christianity’ Day is the logical follow up to that.

Just to whet your appetite, here are some of the reasons why I find Christianity to be quite worthy of the title, “The True Faith”. Each one is strongly supported by powerful evidence. Sure, some of the other religions may have one or two of the characteristics below, but none of them come even close to having the complete set – except Christianity …

• The founder of Christianity is universally respected for His wisdom and compassion, and lived a genuinely blameless life.
• The historical, textual and archaeological evidence for the reality of Christ as a Man who walked the earth and rose from the dead is unparalleled for the founder of any other religion.
• Christianity is the only religion that genuinely makes Love its central and essential theme. Sure you can twist other religions to try and somehow highlight love within their framework, but in Christianity, love is the cornerstone and foundation.
• None of the other great religions teach that all humans are equal. Christianity does. It may be single handedly responsible for changing human society in this way.
• Christianity offers the best explanations for the deep philosophical questions of life, and offers the best fit with the scientific knowledge of today.

If you will be in Sydney next Saturday and would like to flesh out these and many other ideas and engage in stimulating and completely open discussion about them, please come along next Saturday. No question is off limits (so long as you’re polite). You can find details on facebook.

Sitting at home in bed with a nasty respiratory infection is not my ideal way of spending a Sunday morning. My groggy head makes it hard to focus, and I find my thoughts turning to the heavens above…

 A milestone was recently passed: the 555^th extrasolar planet was confirmed. An extra solar planet is a planet orbiting a star other than our own sun. When I was growing up, there was a debate going on as to whether such planets even existed. Then in 1992 a few thousand years of wondering came to an end when the first extrasolar planet was discovered, whizzing around a pulsar. Since then, the discoveries have come thick and fast, with new methods for detecting the slippery little creatures being developed all the time. A few of the planets have even posed for a photo, like this one orbiting Fomalhaut (see picture), a star just 25 light years away in the constellation of the Southern Fish (Fomalhaut is Arabic for ‘mouth of the whale’). The Kepler space observatory is expected to take the figure into the thousands.

 How exciting! Imagine what it might be like to travel to one of these planets orbiting around an alien sun. What exotic landscapes would we see? What new science might we learn there? For all human existence, we have been limited to one little, tiny corner of the universe. Until a few decades ago, we had no direct physical access to anything except what we could find here on earth. And then, as we began to send robots to the moon, the planets, the asteroids and comets of our own solar system, we were constantly surprised by what we discovered. Our furthest explorers, the Viking probes launched in the 1980s, are only now approaching the edge of our solar system, and again, making unexpected discoveries. What might we discover in an alien solar system? 

Could there be life?

 The scientific answer to that question is an interesting one. Most scientists who think about it believe the chances are pretty good that life exists somewhere else in the universe, but that our chances of ever coming across it are pretty dismal. Much of this thinking can be traced back to the famous Drake equation that calculates the probability of life and compares it to the number of planets that might be capable of harbouring life. There is ample speculation out there on the scientific and social questions that are raised by the possibility of alien life, so I won’t go into them here. But there is another set of questions that is a little harder to find being discussed.

 The theological questions are no less interesting. I recall hearing HG Bishop Moussa commenting on this topic at a conference once: “If we find life on other planets, we’ll just tuck our Bibles under our arms and go and preach to the aliens” he said. A nice repost for an impromptu response, but perhaps there is more to the matter?

 I see no problem in God creating life on other planets in the universe: it is abundantly clear that He has created a wildly huge universe, most of which is completely inaccessible to us anyway, so whether some of it has life or not hardly makes any difference. But what about intelligent life? Would such life be conscious in the same way we are? Might there be creatures who are like us but have no eternal spirit? Or if there are creatures with eternal spirits, would we meet them in Heaven? Perhaps that joyful meeting will not only be with angels and saints, but also with Alpha Centaurans! And would the aliens also be created in the image of God? Perhaps there are aliens throughout the universe, each of which is some variation on the image of God, much like a painter who paints the same scene in a number of different styles?

 Would conscious aliens also have free will? If they fell from grace, would God need to incarnate in their form to save them? Or was that a one off solution for the particular problem of humans, and there are other solutions He might use for the particular problems of alien races? Would their sins be the same as our sins, and their virtues the same as ours? If “God is love”, surely Love would have to be a universal virtue, whatever you or your alien society looked like? Perhaps by making contact with the aliens, and studying their morality and beliefs, we could better work out which truths are universal truths, truths that hold everywhere and at all times, and which ones are just local rules suitable for earth alone.

 Might some aliens be more in tune with the world of the spirit than we are? Are there worlds where the very question of the existence of God is not even raised because given their senses and brains, the answer is as blindingly obvious as a sunrise? Would they laugh at our debates over this topic (if they had laughing organs, that is)? Could they teach us new ways of experiencing God? Could they tell us new things about Him? What effect would this have on our relationship with Him? Could this kind of knowledge actually be harmful to us – something more than we can cope with?

Could there already be aliens out there on one of those very planets our telescopes are now imaging, peering back at us, watching and waiting for us to reach a level of maturity where we can sensibly communicate with them? If we found a planet ruled by cockroaches, we wouldn’t bother communicating with them, after all. Perhaps there aliens who think the same of us? What would such a discovery mean for how we see ourselves? Medieval theology considered humans to be God’s greatest creation ever (although I don’t think the Bible ever actually says that). What if we weren’t? What if we’re just one of many different creatures created by God in this wide universe, some greater, some lesser than we?

And what of the tantalising possibility that God only created one conscious species in each galaxy? If interplanetary travel is impossible for us in the near future, intergalactic travel is impossible for as far as we can imagine into the future! The distances are just mindboggling, even to the nearest galaxies. Even messages travelling at the speed of light would need to travel for millions of years before they got to us. By the time we messaged back, the whole alien civilisation would more than likely be long gone! What if the quota is exactly one conscious species per galaxy? That would mean that there are something of the order of 200,000,000,000 other conscious species living their lives, seeking their destinies, and we would never, ever know. Neither would they know about us.

Wow. If God’s intention in making this big universe was to help us realise how utterly small and insignificant we are, He did a really good job.

 The questions seem as endless as the rain that gently, irresistably falls on the lawn. Like the raindrops, they seem to disappear unsatisfyingly without a trace as soon as they land. Shall we ever find answers? Regrettably, I can’t see interplanetary travel happening in my lifetime, nor even in my grandchildren’s. If it were, I think I would work really hard to be the first Coptic priest in space. But sometimes, on a cold, wet Sunday morning, with no one but God and few noisy birds outside my window for company, it is interesting to ponder….

 Fr Ant

As a student at university in the 80s I had a traumatic experience. One day, as I was walking out of the library, I noticed a female student, a complete stranger, walking out right behind me. So I did the courteous thing and held the door open for her to go out first. What followed still haunts my nightmares! How dare I do such a thing! She launched into an aggressive tirade about how patronising I was being; did I think that she was incapable of opening a door for herself? Who did I think I was? Welcome to the world of late twentieth century feminism! I did the only the only thing I could: I apologised for my thoughtlessness and walked out the door. 

In a world where relationships have changed in so many ways, I find it sad that good old fashioned courtesy has been one of the casualties. It hasn’t been totally eradicated of course, but it has certainly decreased greatly in importance. There are some who argue that this is not such a bad thing. Courtesy can certainly be used a cloak for anger, insults or sarcasm. But that is misuse – it is not the courtesy’s fault, but the user’s. 

Others complain that courtesy encourages insincerity. Isn’t it better to just be honest about our feelings rather than hide them under a formal disguise of good manners? Again, one must distinguish between use and misuse. There is nothing inherent in courtesy to make us act insincerely. It should always be practiced from the heart, with feelings of love towards others. And that same love dictates that we must be honest with each other. All courtesy does is ensure that when we are honest, we do so with respect, kindness and consideration. 

For me, one of the images that epitomises the sublime nobility of courtesy is the famous 1500m race in 1956 where John Landy went back to help fellow runner Ron Clarke who had tripped over. Incredibly, Landy went on to catch up to the rest of the field and win the race! I wonder how many people today would do what he did? And what does that tell us about how we deal with each other?

Courtesy is Biblical. To love one another is the core command that Christ gave us, and again and again in the Bible we find that agape love expressed through courtesy. In that most famous of passages about love, we learn that among other things, “Love … is kind …  does not behave rudely, does not seek its own …” 1 Corinthians 13:4,5.

God is courteous towards even those who evil:

But love your enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For He is kind to the unthankful and evil. Luke 6:35 

 Had Rehoboam been a little more considerate of others, he might not have lost most of his kingdom:

And they spoke to him, saying, “If you are kind to these people, and please them, and speak good words to them, they will be your servants forever.” 2Chronicles 10:7 

 St Paul included courtesy often in his advice on good living:

Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honour giving preference to one another. Romans 12:10 

And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you. Ephesians 4:32 

 And St Paul himself practiced what he preached:

Nevertheless, not to be tedious to you any further, I beg you to hear, by your courtesy, a few words from us. Acts 24:4 

 Old fashioned courtesy is not only Biblical, it helps create and sustain healthy relationships. It is our nature to respond in kind. When someone treats us with contempt we want to get them back, and when someone is kind towards us we are moved to return that kindness. Thus do our actions and attitudes spread to others.

 A family where insults and selfish behaviour are the norm ought not be surprised when the children grow up to be self-centred and arrogant towards their parents and others. On the other hand, a family where courtesy is considered essential raises children who are considerate of others and kind towards their parents in their old age.

 It may sound trite and out of date, but insisting on common courtesies at home such as saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’; or greeting one another in the morning and bidding each other good night at the end of the day; or sharing the household chores and helping one another; or deferring to one another when a choice must be made as to which television program to watch – small things like this create an atmosphere of courtesy that is unselfish and other-centred. If one can behave this way at home, where all one’s defences are down and the true self is apparent, then one shall surely find it easier to practice sincere and genuine love of others outside the home.

 Young couples today often seem to ignore courtesy in their relationship. Like the young lady at the library, young Coptic women may feel that to have a car door opened for them or a chair at the table pulled out for them is insulting or demeaning. To them I say, please rethink! A partner who is willing to do those small things for you is far more likely to treat you with the same kindness in the big things. It is not a guarantee, of course, but it is helpful. Think of it as training for your partner, and let them do it. Accept it as a sign of their love and devotion for you rather than an insult to your independence.

Gentlemen, please be gentlemen. And ladies, please let them!

Life today in a western society is very different to the life our parents and grandparents knew. As a result, our whole world view is quite different, and as such, I propose, our faith needs to also adapt to the new and ever changing circumstances.

 One important area where this applies is the relationship between faith and knowledge. Extremes often help to illustrate a point more conveniently: think of your ancestors of centuries ago, most likely living in rural village somewhere along the majestic Nile. Let us imagine Folla, your great, great, great grandmother. She has grown to be a young woman without the benefit of formal education, for very few Egyptians can afford a formal education, and the vast majority would not want it even if they could afford it. It would be a waste of time and would not in any way help in running the family farm. Thus she is blissfully unaware of any formal laws of nature, of anything but the most basic mathematics, she cannot read or write, so she has no access to books or newspapers, and the only history she knows is the local legends of her village and the stories she hears read out in Church from the Bible and the Synaxarion every Sunday. She does not understand what the priest prays in Church every Sunday, for he prays in Coptic while she only knows Arabic. Sunday School has not yet been introduced to Egypt and the priest has only slightly more education than her, so he does not give sermons or conduct Bible studies; in fact her chief source of religious knowledge is her mother, the kindly woman who would sit her on her lap when she was a young girl and tell her stories that she had heard from her mother before her.

 Folla’s faith is a very simple one. It is not based on outright reason so much as on trust. The people she loves and trusts in her life, her parents, her relatives, her priest, all agree about the faith they hold, so she holds it too, without questioning anything it. Not only is it backed by this authority (and no one in this society would ever dream of questioning authority), it makes sense of her world.

 Because this is the nature of Folla’s faith, she is blissfully unaware that the core of ancient Christian faith at its heart has been mingled with centuries of accretions and additions. For her, it is all one body of beliefs, all of equal importance. For her, it is equally important not to drag your feet inside the house (for that would bring bad luck) as to proclaim that Christ is risen at Easter time. So far as she knows, not dragging your feet was part of Christ’s teachings.

 Simple faith is a beautiful thing. In some ways, I wish I could have been Folla. Of course, the modern person would object that some of Folla’s faith is based on false premises, but this objection does not seem to me to be such a terrible thing. Even our most elaborate theology, our most impressive science, can never be more than our fuzzy guess at a reality that is far, far beyond our comprehension. There is absolutely no reason to think that we can ever gain a true and complete understanding of the nature of our reality in this life. As St Paul famously said, “For now, we see as in a mirror dimly, but then, face to face” (1 Corinthians 13). Isaiah gives this sobering evaluation, from the mouth of God Himself:  “ ‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,’ says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts’ ” (Isaiah 55:9). So in a sense, our best efforts are going to fall a long way short of the truth anyway, and the difference between the size of an ant and the size of a horse pales to insignificance when you compare both to the size of the planet upon which both live.

 However, I am certainly not advocating a return to ignorance! Today, we have been given the gift of knowledge, a gift that once received can never be returned. We cannot go back to being an ant, and the ways of an ant will no longer work for us – we must live as horses, like it or not.

 What does that mean? For one thing, it means that our faith can no longer be based solely on the authority of others. Today’s Folla, let’s call her Felicity to avoid confusion, is bombarded with conflicting viewpoints from many different authorities. She still has the Church telling her one thing, she probably has her parents who largely agree with Church but may differ on a few small points, then there are her school teachers and university lecturers who may not be Christian at all, and all those voices of authority in the media, experts and politicians and community leaders, many of whom are almost certainly not Christian.

 Felicity does not have the luxury of a being surrounded by a single unitary world view as Folla had. How is she to navigate this confusing maelstrom of ideas and beliefs? How is she to decide on her own world view?

 To expect her to simply accept what her family and priest say purely on faith is unrealistic. For one, she has been trained by the western education system to question everything and to think for herself. Even her parents were probably educated in a system where you mostly had to learn facts by rote to get through and creative thinking was squeezed out of them in the highly competitive race to succeed. But today’s young person in the west is trained to think and encouraged to think for themselves. If we come to Felicity now and ask her to suspend thinking for herself and just accept our authority, it will seem like a major step backwards, a step into ignorance and darkness.

 This is not the path to faith in the twenty first century. Reason is not the enemy of faith, but its helper. Our precious Coptic tradition teaches us that. We glory in the lofty achievements of the ancient Christian School of Alexandria, the centre of Christian learning and knowledge in the early centuries of Christianity. The most intelligent people in the world flocked to study at this school, where no discipline was off limits and natural science, astronomy and philosophy were firmly on the curriculum. Many of the ancient Fathers from this school display a remarkable mastery of the secular knowledge of the day, and use it to construct their arguments for their faith, arguments that were raised against the pagan philosophers who rejected the Christian faith. They took them on at their own game and won, in the process proving that reason too, is a gift from God, and completely compatible with faith.

 Felicity needs us, the Church, to return to that ancient tradition. If she is to sincerely believe, it will be a faith fortified with a hefty dose of reason. The alternative today is not a faith based only on trust, but no religious faith at all.

 How does the state of teaching in the Coptic Church measure up to this challenge at the moment? Well, there a lot of progress has happened over the past century, and especially in the last few decades. The re-establishment of the Theological College by Pope Cyril V around the turn of the twentieth century revolutionised the education of the priesthood and has led to today’s crop of highly educated, highly literate clergy. Figures such as the late Bishop Gregorius put knowledge and reason back on the agenda, even if they were not appreciated by everyone. The advent of books in English translated from the Arabic, especially by authors who are well in tune with the need for a reasonable basis for modern faith such as HH Pope Shenouda and HG Bishop Moussa have been of incalculable benefit to many young people growing up in the west. And most recently, vibrant discussions on the internet, such as those that run on www.tasbeha.org regularly, provide a forum for questions to be discussed and resolved.

 But there are still some areas that lag dangerously behind. Many Sunday Schools still follow curricula that do not address the real concerns of young Copts today. If you have ‘graduated’ from Sunday School, ask yourself this simple question: in thirteen years of teaching, how many times did you actually address the question of why we believe in God, why we believe in Christ as God incarnate, and in His resurrection? How well were we taught the arguments people have raised against these beliefs, and the reasons we reject them? When did you learn of the evidence for the accuracy of the Bible, of its agreement with other historical documents and archaeological discoveries, and of the evidence for the faithful transmission of its text down through the centuries? And how satisfying was the treatment of modern scientific issues such as evolution or the Big Bang Theory and how they relate to our Christian faith?

 It is wonderful to know the stories of the saints, the traditional staple of Sunday School lessons, but today, Felicity needs much more than that.  She needs to find satisfying answers to the many questions that will inevitably arise in her mind, and she needs a Church that provides a free environment for raising those questions without guilt or stigmatisation. She needs to be guided in how to harmonise her secular knowledge with her religious faith and use her mind as well as her heart to mould an all-encompassing faith for the Coptic Christian of the twenty first century. Can our Church provide that? I believe that nothing less than the future viability of the Coptic Church (and all Christian Churches) depends on the answer to that question.

 We have a lot of hard work ahead of us…

 Fr Ant

This is an historic moment. A few hours ago, President Hosni Mubarak resigned after thirtyyears of apparently untouchable rule. He took what was perhaps his last opportunity to depart with dignity. No one can deny that he has done much that is good for his people over the decades, regardless of the damage that he also presided over. Our Lord, who is the true judge of hearts, will no doubt deal with him with justice and mercy.

The great thing about this change in Egypt is that it took place largely peacefully and it was not engineered by foreigners, the army, Islamic radicals or any other narrow interest. It came about because the people of Egypt finally found their voice.

The 1952 Egyptian Revolution that ousted the monarchy began with great idealism. Opinion is divided as to how closely its leaders adhered to that idealism, although most would agree that Egypt has degenerated rather than improved over the past sixty years. This time, there are no obvious leaders like Gamal Abd El Nasser to garner the love and trust of the people and turn it into dictatorship. Perhaps this time Egypt will give birth to a system rather than a leader, a far more stable and beneficial state of affairs!

I cannot help feeling a deep thrill of joy today. Justice has triumphed over injustice. Freedom has triumphed over the police state. The common man has triumphed over the despot. The youth of Egypt feel they have a future again, and the enthusiasm of youth is a powerful force.

Though so many rejoice today, tomorrow the real task begins. This momentous change must not be allowed to be hijacked by narrow interests for their own benefit – the people of Egypt have suffered far too long from the rule of the selfish. All those public spirited people who have come out of the wood work need to organise themselves and find from their number men and women who are both capable and willing to serve their land with faithfulness and integrity.

‘Freedom!’ is the call of all the protesters. I dare to hope that as the Egyptian people begin to explore and construct their freedom over the coming years, they will move towards making Egypt a genuinely free land. That includes the freedom to practice one’s religion without discrimination or persecution. Perhaps even the freedom to change one’s religion without coercion. The older generation of Muslims is mired in the mindset of the supremacy of Islam and the shameful horror of apostasy. Is it a fantasy to hope that the younger generation of Muslims, imbued with more liberal principles absorbed from their exposure to other cultures via technology, might be more willing to grant true freedom to their Christian co-citizens?

If this historic achievement of the people of Egypt is any indication, Egypt is capable of developing into one of the leading nations in the international community. If the Egyptian people are set free to attain their true potential, who knows what they might not be able to do?

Egypt stands at the beginning of a dangerous tightrope walk. The possibility of toppling off lies on both sides. No doubt many winds will buffet her as she takes her cautious small steps forward, and there will be voices jeering as well as cheering. Let us pray that the marvellous sense of balance she has shown this past eighteen days will carry her through to the other end…

Fr Ant