From TMD's 2010 Carol Service for the First Sunday of Advent
... on the last verse of Angels we have heard from heaven, the angel ascends platform, singing.
Angelis
Do not be afraid.
Look!
I bring you news of tremendous joy
which every person will hear.
For a Saviour,
who is Christ the Lord
Is born this day
for you
in the City of David.
You will find a baby
wrapped in swathing bands
and lying in a manger.
And this will be a sign for you.
The three atheists come briskly onto the sanctuary. They wear dark glasses and university scarves Their banners say:
There’s probably no God.
Now, stop worrying and enjoy yourself.
(Atheist Bus Campaigns and the BHA)
Why believe in God?
Just be good for goodness sake.
(American Humanist Association).
The bad news is that
God does exist.
The good news is that
you don’t need him.
(Italian Union of Rational Atheists
and Agnostics)
Angelis
Can I help you?
The City of David is the first turn on your right.
Ovis
I don’t think you can help me, Sir or Madam. What are you?
Angelis
I’m an angel. That is, perfect will and pure intelligence.
Ovis
So far as I can remember there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. (Bertrand Russell)
Angelis
Whose intelligence?
Ovis
Human intelligence.
Angelis
(Peering into his face) Umm.
As it happens, the Lord does praise intelligence: he says the children of this world are wiser than the children of light. Though it’s not exactly a compliment, and he suggests his followers should be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves though there’s not much sign of them doing it.
Ovis
(Points to the banner) One can just be good for goodness sake.
Angelis
I haven’t seen much of that either.
Ovis
Come, come. Man would be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. (Albert Einstein)
Angelis
(Looking around) Man does seem to be in a poor way.
Ovis
The National Secular Society affirms that this life is the only one of which we have any knowledge, and human effort should be directed wholly towards its improvement, and that supernaturalism is based upon ignorance, and assails it as the historic enemy of progress.
(NSS Charter)
Angelis
How does you brain work?
Ovis
Very well thank you.
Angelis
Your thanks are not misplaced. But how does it work?
Ovis
I don’t know. Brains are not my subject.
Angelis
Yes I can see that. If you cannot explain your own intelligence how will you explain the intelligence of him who made you? (St Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses)
Ovis
A believer states everything must have a creator but fails to say how he was created. (The Atheist Blogger, 101 Atheist Quotes No. 60 source: Anon)
Angelis
By your own assertion you claim nothing has a creator; yet you do not seem able to explain how you yourself work.
Ovis
Are you talking about faith?
Angelis
Well, if you have no answer, let us by all means change the subject.
Ovis
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. (Richard Dawkins)
Angelis
Naturally stupid are all men who have not known God, who from the good things they can see, have failed to identify their creator.( Wisdom.13:1)
Ovis
There is no creator.
Angelis
Prove it.
Ovis
Can’t. I believe in evolution.
Angelis
Out of what did everything evolve?
Ovis
Matter
Angelis
Ah. Can you find any piece of matter anywhere in the universe whose precise appearance cannot be dated?
Ovis
Well, no. But knowledge is also evolving.
Angelis
It is increasing, we sincerely hope. But it will not change the date of carbon. There was a time when carbon was not. There was, provably by your own scientific accounting, a time of nothing. How could anything evolve out of nothing?
Ovis
But I believe all these things will - as science progresses - be explained. (Matthew Arnold)
Angelis
You are using a very awkward word, my friend. You believe; that is, you have faith. Now, good Mr Dawkins has said that faith is belief, in spite of, even because of the lack of evidence.
Ovis
Yes, yes! But he was talking about religious faith.
Angelis
Was he? But you just told me that faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence (another of Mr Dawkins’ one liners, by the way). Well, think! And evaluate the evidence.
Ovis
For creation, there is no evidence. (Sarcastically) The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars .... is a myth of childhood, not anything that a sane, undeluded adult could believe in. (Daniel Dennett)
Angelis
Is he? Where’s your evidence? I’m sorry, my friend. If I may be permitted to quote good Mr Hitchins: What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. May I dismiss your argument?
Ovis
No! Perhaps we could agree to differ.
Angelis
Yes? Perhaps you were right to put God may not exist, on your poster.
Ovis
Prove God!
Angelis
Certainly. Perhaps we could break for a carol first.
Ovis
(Enthusiastically) I actually love most of the genuine Christmas carols. I was once invited to King’s College Cambridge for their carols and I loved it. (Richard Dawkins quoted in the Mail, 23 December 2008)
Angelis
(Scepticaly) We might not quite equal Kings....
Angel ushers them off as we sing While Shepherds watch their flocks by night....
The Angel and 1st Atheist, without placard, return on last verse. They sit on platform.
Ovis
Okay. Prove God.
Angelis
Certainly. The Lord said to those who followed him, his apostles, at the last supper, “Believe in me, either because I speak with the Fathers authority or because of the evidence of the miracles I have done.’ (John 5:37-40)
Ovis
Possibly, but I don’t believe in the Bible.
Angelis
But you don’t have to believe in the Bible. It exists. It is a physical object.
Ovis
I don’t believe in its content. What about the cheating and the trickery, the violence and the massacres and the rest of the dark deeds of the Old Testament (Verbum Domini 42). And what about the Law...
Angelis
(Amazed) You object to the ten commandments? Come, come, you are not that bad. The first three may pass you by, but you don’t like theft, murder, adultery and envy and you are willing to do as you would be done by.
Ovis
What about an eye for an eye, and stoning people, and burnt offerings and not eating prawns and pigs, and all the unclean stuff.
Angelis
Scripture is the Word of God in the words of men (Dei verbum III), not a dictation test from on high. The Old Testament is governed by the New; that is, those commands which are explicitly endorsed by Christ, are valid for all. And those which are not, are not.
For example, Jesus remarked: “You have heard it said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’, but I say, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’”
Ovis
I don’t notice any Christians doing it.
Angelis
I don’t notice many Christians doing it. But, personally, I only accept responsibility for Roman Catholic Christians.
Ovis
They’re the worst.
Angelis
That’s right. There is more of them than the rest, and Christ insisted on coming to save not the righteous but sinners (Matthew 9:13). As a devout Catholic, Hilaire Belloc said: “No merely human institution that conducted its affairs with such knavish imbecility would last a fortnight.” The Roman Catholic church is not a club for the nice and virtuous, but a hospital for the sick and disorderly.
Ovis
You take the words right out of my mouth.
Angelis
But no one can claim that the Gospels command war, murder, abuse, adultery or lies. If Christians do these things it is for their sins, not their principles.
Ovis
(Cautiously) I might, just, be prepared to concede that Christ was a good man.
Angelis
Don’t. He wasn’t. Read the Gospels. Try your teeth on: I am the way, the truth and the life; I an the resurrection; before Abraham was, I am. (John 14:6, 11:25 & 8:58) You have two choices: either he’s a nutter or he is .... God.
Ovis
You’re dodging. That’s faith. I don’t do faith.
Angelis
No. It’s a rational estimate. If the Lord was a mere human nutter even you would be able tell. Mental disturbance is fairly transparent.
Ovis
Has it occurred to you that the Gospels might lie.
Angelis
Why should they? Almost everyone who wrote them died a violent death which they could have avoided by renouncing their message. Do you really want proof?
Ovis
Yes.
Angelis
Hundreds of thousands of people have died because they would not deny that Christ is God; more of them in the last century than in the nineteen before. We are the witness to the truth that sets you free. To die for someone else proves that you love someone else more than yourself - that’s true life - and holiness.
As I started to say earlier, Christ said, “Either believe in me because I speak with the Father’s authority or because of the evidence of the miracles I have done”. And he added, “I tell you the truth. He who believes in me will also do the miracles that I do - and greater miracles than these, he will do!”
Ovis
Oh, miracles! (politely sneering). Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. That’s why the seventy four thousands dollars reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a miracle under proper scientific controls, is safe. (Richard Dawkins)
Angelis
In the last 30 years the Catholic Church beatified 1340 people and canonized 176 (give or take a saint). Unless they were martyred, there has to be a miracle each time. Look up some of them; a lot are in living memory.
Ovis
(Scoffing) For example?
Angelis
At the age of 22 Sr Catherine Capitani had varicose veins of the oesophagus, her stomach was an open mess and she was dying. Through the intercession of John XXIII she was completely cured. The doctors declared that there was no possible scientific explanation for the cure. Sr Catherine is alive and now in her fifties.
Gianna Mola was a doctor married to another doctor when they were told she would not survive the birth of their fourth child. She refused to have a termination. Their child was born and Gianna died of sceptic peritonitis a week later. The child, Gianna Emmanuela is still alive; she is also a doctor. However, Gianna Bereta Mola, is not merely a saint because she laid down her life for her child, but because God heard her prayer for Elizabeth Camparini who had a torn placenta and lost the amniotic fluid surrounding the child in her womb. The doctors said that the child could not live, but she carried it to birth. Mrs Camparini and her child are still very much alive.
The Australian nun Mary Mckillop was canonised a few weeks ago. Her prayer to God healed Veronica Hopson, then aged twenty three, of myeloblastic leukaemia. A mother of six, Veronica attended the canonization with Kathleen Evans, who was healed of inoperable lung and brain cancer. These are still alive. They were all in Rome last month
Juan José Barragan, a Mexican drug addict, after stabbing himself, leapt off the balcony of his mother’s flat and hit the ground thirty feet below, on his head. His mother, Esperanza, implored the help of Blessed Juan Diego. They took Juan José to Durango hospital where they still have the X-rays and medical reports. Three days later he rose from his bed, completely healed in body and mind. The doctors said it was unheard of, amazing and inconceivable. Mrs Barragan and Juan José are still alive.
And many of us watched the beatification of John Henry Newman and saw an elderly deacon who was so excited he nearly forgot to take the book of the Gospels with him up to the lectern. That was Jack Sullivan whom John Henry healed of spinal stenosis ... Are you going somewhere?
Ovis
(Over shoulder, exiting) The National Secular Society asserts that supernaturalism is based on ignorance and assails it as the historic enemy of progress....
Angelis
What’s progress? (They turn to him and face him) What do you want to be when you are grown up, mm?
Ovis
Alive! (hastens off)
Angelis
(As they hasten off) You’re so right! And that brings us to the real theme of tonight’s celebration: Life.
(Exits)
The service continues with On Christmas night all Christians sing and ends, ultimately, with God rest ye merry gentlemen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
TEXT: barring attributions, TMD 2010
