Elohim yivarech otcha

I don’t know what you think it means in general, but your description of it as “hilarious” that the children pictured have Christian parents suggests that you may have thought it meant something like: “children will be much happier if you bring them up as atheists – like these smiling atheist children here”. But that is only a conjecture and I would be interested to hear what you do think it means and what you think of what it proposes.

But that instead they should be left to grow up and label themselves for themselves.

Please explain exactly what you think it means for me.

PS I haven’t asked you to prove anything you are living proof that someone who has spent a long time in church situations has the power and intelligence to think whatever they want and not be restricted by what others have tried to tell them.

But to try to avoid any additional misunderstanding on your part, I will answer your questions anyway.

Of course people should have the alternatives explained to them so they can make an informed choice. I have never said otherwise and the poster doesn’t say otherwise, so I have no idea why you ask the question.

Explaining a world view to someone is quite clearly not labelling them. I have never said otherwise and the poster says nothing of the kind so, again, I have no idea where your question comes from.

Why should I give you proof of something I have never claimed and don’t believe? The poster doesn’t claim that either. I painstakingly went through what the poster actually says in my first comment; I thought that if you read it through you might understand that it’s not about any particular belief system or ideology.

Let’s be clear: I haven’t said that I agree or disagree with the poster. All I’m asking is that you report fairly on what it says. If you want to criticize what it actually says, or what I actually say, I encourage you to do so.

I suspect rather that Come Alive is about the birth of a child, Let It Die was about divorce, and Learn To Fly is as much directed to Jesus as Audioslave’s Like A Stone and Show Me How To Live (which is to say, not really). It’s probably more Deist than anything.

BUT… how can you get to Jesus without believing that a transcendent Father God exists.

The recent poster says, “Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself.” Behind the main text are various labels that might be applied to children, such as “Buddhist child”, “Agnostic child”, “Protestant child”, “Atheist child”, “Muslim child”, “Catholic child”, and so on.

Now you can disagree with the poster’s argument that we shouldn’t label children. What you should not do is claim that it is ironic that a poster making this argument contains pictures of children who have been so labelled. It is ironic only if you accept the premise of the poster, and you have made it clear elsewhere that you don’t.

I’m genuinely shocked that people like you and Ruth Gledhill could have so utterly failed to understand the poster. All you had to do was read 12 words.

For me the heart of ecumenism rests in the second three points you make about our about fundamental common ground as Christians – God’s intent towards us, the Bible and Jesus’s death and resurrection – and from there to respect each other’s differences. Which as you point out does not mean we will agree with each other. I am sure that some of my liberal views on abortion and homosexuality for instance do not chime with others who are Christians,(mainly because on occasion they have told me so!!)

But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t able to worship together or learn from each other.