HAVING an unelected House of Lords in Britain is ludicrous – but even more objectionable is the presence in the Lords of 24 bishops and two archbishops The House of Lords, widely seen as an elitist and out-dated institution that doesn’t represent the diversity of the UK population, needs to be reformed, and its unelected, [...]
Continue reading about Vote for an elected House of Lords – and help boot out its 26 bishops
THE Church of England is facing a fresh schism this week over its long running and frequently fraught attempts to consecrate women bishops. An influential coalition of evangelicals said they would order newly trained priests to leave the Church if it pressed ahead with the ordination of female bishops without any caveats for conservatives who [...]
Continue reading about Evangelicals threaten to withhold cash if the C of E ordinates women bishops
FIRST, the “bad” news: the dear old Church of England has been hit by a new slump in its congregations, with the latest figures showing its fifth year-on-year decline. Also, the Church’s first analysis of its worshippers showed that nearly half are pensioners. The established Church has lost more than 40,000 worshippers since 2003, shortly [...]
REMEMBER the Reverend Archie Coates? He made it onto this blog last October when he arrived in Brighton to reclaim this, Britain’s “most godless city”, for Jesus. Coates came to atheist Brighton – home of the Freethinker -Â to establish a franchise of London’s evangelical Holy Trinity Brompton church at the failed Anglican St Peter’s [...]
IT’S 2010 – yet there’s still place for primitive mumbo-jumbo in the financial heart of the capital. In London’s 17th-century St. Lawrence Jewry Church yesterday, parishioners took out the tools of their trade – mobile phones and laptop computers – to have them blessed by The Rev Canon David Parrott. A “symbolic” pile of the [...]
Continue reading about ‘Dear God, please bless my BlackBerry (and my iPhone and my Nokia …)
TODDLERS as young as TWO are to be targeted by an increasingly desperate and irrelevant Church of England in a bid to save the church from almost certain extinction. The C of E, according to this report, is planning its first concerted drive to engage under-18s after admitting that it is comprehensively failing to connect [...]
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
