CHALLENGE THEOLOGY

“We're all supposed to stroke our chins and think, this is an insight into humanity and human warfare and tribalism. And well, the sort of thing that interests us, we'll get on to this in a second, the question you want to do on nationalism and devolution. But traditionally, we've always imagined that civil wars are often the products of human culture. And by human culture, we mean human imaginations and ideas, you know, the idea of a nation, the idea of a flag, the idea of us and them, these quite sort of strange arbitrary mental structures that we create.”

“Number eight, religion and government are intertwined. Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions. And maybe that's where you can pick up on the just war, because that's what has taken this to the next stage of this row.”

“The reality is that Vance and the administration are wrong. I mean, they're theologically illiterate. They are consistently portraying a worldview, which is, well, in a lot of their actions, almost seems to be completely unbound by any kind of ethical principles. There's no sense of empathy. There's no sense of caring for the vulnerable. I mean, if Christ's message is about anything, I mean, I guess the repeated theme of the Gospels again and again, is that this is someone who is perpetually reaching out to the most marginalized people in society.”

“One of the reasons that Victor Orban, who we talked about a lot last week, he's such a big global figure, is because he was the first, I think, fully to understand that if you were going to change minds on big cultural issues, then you had to internationalize campaigns. He understood the importance of propaganda. He understood the need for networks. He understood the need for money to fund it all. He was the key to Steve Bannon's operation in the States and around the world.”

“One of the things that's so slippery about this, and one of the reasons why it's so disturbing is that the very same members of the Christian right, and then we're seeing this with the far right across Europe, who are creating these Judeo-Christian coalitions against Islam. Their technique is basically to claim that every Muslim in the world, of whom there are two billion people, fifth of the world's population, quarter of the world's population almost, somehow are supposed to believe all the most extreme versus the Quran.”

“Where I sat then, for sure, I was very much in that camp that believed that the status quo, as was, was completely untenable, that there was a real democratic illegitimacy point about a big part of the United Kingdom that kept essentially saying, we do not want conservative government here at all, and wasn't electing conservatives. And yeah, it was constantly felt like it was just being governed by a distant remote government based in Westminster. And I felt that the Scottish Parliament after, you know, a very, very long gap that is re-establishment would settle that debate.”