This isn’t in the best taste really. It appeared in a UK paper and is based around the perceived hyper-paranoia of armed UK police in London who wrongly shot dead a Brazilian on the London Underground earlier in the year.

At the time there was outrage at the fact that the wrongly suspected terrorist who was held down by two plain clothed police officers while another plain clothed police officer emptied his gun into the head on the 27 year old man at point blank range.

Only a tiny proportion of UK police officers carry firearms in reflection of the fact that firearm incidents are few and far between in Great Britain.

After the shooting people were said to be very nervous about carrying backpacks on the London Underground as Police had initially given this as one of the reason they shot Jean Charles de Menezes a total of eight times with hollow point or dum-dum bullets (seven times in the head at point blank range and once in the shoulder).

Police eventually blamed ‘bad intelligence’ for the killing and apologized to the mans family.

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UK Police shoot man ‘execution style’

As someone who lives in the Liverpool area I wanted to mark today, the anniversary of the death this cities most famous son, John Lennon, who was shot dead on this day 25 years ago.

I was just a kid at the time and I can’t say his death really shook my world. I remember the weeks after his death and how the charts were overtaken by John Lennon and Beatles songs. I was never a fan of the Beatles, and to this day I’m still fairly unmoved by their music, but having said that nobody can deny their place as the most iconic band in the history of music. Lennon himself is widely attributed as being the ‘voice of a generation’.

Hailing from the city I live by, four Liverpool ‘lads’ took the world by storm and changed the music industry forever. Lennon’s assassination at the hands of Mark Chapman shocked the world and ensured that the former Beatle would forever be locked in time, never to get older than 40 and often frozen in the image of his younger self as a Beatle.

Today Liverpool remembered Lennon. As darkness fell on the city a vast image of him was projected onto a building on the cities waterfront. Although history of course remembers the date of Lennon’s death as the 8th of December, most people in the UK would have learned of his death on the morning of the 9th as Lennon was shot dead at around 11PM New York time which would have been 4 o’clock in the morning in the UK.

For many people in the UK they first learned news of John Lennon’s death on the morning of the 9th of December as Lennon was shot dead shortly before 11pm New York time, 4am UK time.

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BBC : John Lennon remembered
BBC : On this day in history
BBC : John Lennon in pictures
Emotions run high in New York City
Tapes of Lennon’s killer to air
Remembering the night Lennon died

I went to watch the sunset this afternoon (3:30pm!). I wrapped up nice and warm and walked a little further out onto the sand than I usually would. I was the only lunatic out there in the freezing cold but I felt like I was in a movie. My iPod played a track that just made the scene feel really quite sad really. (If you have your speaker on you may well be listening to it now too.)

I stood there for ages, just me, the music on my iPod, and the slow motion action of those distant windmills. The picture isn’t very good, I took it on my phone and it was having a terrible time trying to focus as I was pointing the thing right into the sun as it took up its hiding place below the horizon.

As I strolled slowly back to the parking lot the sky quickly darkened and I watched planes flicker there way across the sky, hurrying home, or some place far from here. I’ll be joining them myself in just over a week.

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Sunset (a little movie I made a while back)

Years ago I was effectively chased out of a Church congregation, ‘disfellowshipped’ from the pulpit by the Pastor for sins he said I showed “no remorse for”, despite the fact that he and none of the church leadership had ever approached me to discuss the ‘sins’ in question. It was an unceremonious, humiliating and deeply painful experience to go through, and one that effectively separated me from the church, as in all churches, from that day forward.

The pastor didn’t choose to disclose the details of my ‘sin’ to the assembled church of nearly 400 local people. Instead, he simply labeled it as “sexual immorality” and let the congregation gossip and guess what I could have done that was so bad as to be thrown out in this way.

The truth, had anyone actually bothered to find it, would have been far less salacious. I had a girlfriend and we had been doing what boyfriends and girlfriends do. Except ironically enough I had broken off the relationship a few weeks previous because I was finding it so difficult to live a ‘Christian life’. At that point, the pastor’s daughter began to show an interest in me and, I suppose, in an effort to avoid having her sully his ‘good name’ he chose to simply sever me from his Church.

I was just 23 years old and insanely angry at the injustice of what had happened, so I began to try and resolve the issue. It was then when I unearthed the ugly side of organized religion. The Pastor refused all requests for a meeting, the elders too. I approached the main denominational body (Elim) and asked them to intervene, but was again given a frosty response. So with no way of resolving the matter, I penned a response to the Pastor’s accusations and mailed it to the entire Church membership.

That unleashed the full and unrestrained anger of the Pastor who took to the pulpit the following Sunday and launched into an angry sermon that amounted to little more than an hour or slander against me. We continued to battle in one form or another for almost three years. The Pastor contacted all churches I tried to attend and would ‘warn them’ that I was a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and a “deeply evil individual.” But not one Pastor contacted would ever agree to go on record for legal proceedings I wanted to bring.

In the end, having watched the whole affair tear a deep divide in his church the angry and bitter feud faded. He continued to run his church and, as I said, I never returned to another congregation anywhere.

Despite this, my faith in God has not changed. I’ve been through some hard experiences in life, and feel that God has pulled me through them. Had it not been for the kind and selfless acts of many Christians I know (and some whom I didn’t know at all) I would most certainly have ‘lost my faith’ in God.

I can’t believe that God isn’t real when I look at a leaf or the stars above me in a cloudless sky. When I see a sea horse or an anemone, when I watch the sunset or fly through a mid-Atlantic night spellbound by the shimmering emerald green waves of the mysterious northern lights. For me this is evidence of God, his pure creation, unadulterated by the ego and agenda of men. If such creation is perhaps a faintest glimpse of heaven, then maybe religion without God is a preview of hell?

I suppose I have ‘lost my faith’ in Church. That is to say that I cannot seem to bring myself to trust or remain uncynical of organized religion. Because I have many Christian friends (especially in the United States) I have on a number of occasions attended church services. But the moment the preacher begins to start his sermon I find myself ‘closing down’ and dismissing the speaker as just another suit-wearing smiling fake.

In a typical church, I feel utterly penned in. I find them just about the most uncomfortable places in the world. They feel impersonal and dangerous to me. Everyone smiles and everyone is your ‘brother’ or ‘sister’, but it’s easy to be friendly to someone in a club where contact is limited to a handshake on Sunday and the occasional encounter out ‘in the world’ (as if the church isn’t somehow in the world?).

From my perspective, and surely the perspective of many, it seems so hard to tune into God these days. He’s being shouted down by people with way bigger budgets and whiter teeth than him. From the feel-good preachers like Houston’s Joel Osteen, to the hellfire and damnation pulpit shouters of the Pentecostals. Some of these preachers may be right on the nail, but how is anyone supposed to know?

I recently read an article in an old copy of Texas Monthly entitled ‘Prime Minister’ about Joel Osteen’s vast ’empire of faith’. His non-denominational privately run Lakewood church has seen the congregation swell (and continue to swell) to over 30,000 people, all wowed by motivational sermons where Satan has been re-branded as “the enemy” presumably because Satan is far too negative a word to use in such an upbeat church.

Indeed, William Martin, the author of the article, writes “Joel illustrated his points with stories of people he had known or read about, and occasionally he cited scripture whose words seemed to fit, whether or not the author had that application in mind.”

Then you have outspoken idiots like Rev. Jerry Falwell who often says things like “Homosexuals are brute beasts…part of a vile and satanic system that will be utterly annihilated, and there will be a celebration in heaven.” As ever, the warped representations of Christianity seem to forever be the most outspoken and most visible.

It seems to me that Christianity’s greatest enemy is the Church itself. Divided and split so many times that the message has become fragmented, twisted, reshaped and re-branded to suit whatever lifestyle or political leanings the faithful might have.

To those who enjoy church, this might seem strange but I simply don’t feel that I fit in a standard everyday church. Sitting in a chair listening to some microphone wielding preacher isn’t something I can do anymore. I feel disconnected from that tradition. Singing hymns or praise songs makes me feel like a fraud just reciting words written by someone else that don’t necessarily reflect my thoughts, motives, or emotions. I am, in effect, totally alienated by the entire church experience now. I often wonder if God himself even goes to church.

Twelve years after being set adrift by the church I am still listening for God and I’ll continue to listen. I think he knows that too.

How then are we to know where the truth lies, where God is, and indeed who God is! Listening for God is hard work when his name is used by so many. President Bush claims that in his wars on the other side of the world, God is on his side, but so then do the President’s enemies. Many terrible things are done in the name of God. The Bible is the inspired word of God, but then surely so is the Koran, and so to is the book of Mormon, and the Apocrypha, the Gita, etc.

Maybe I need to cast off my cynical nature of organized religion. But how on earth am I to do that? Where on earth do I begin? I feel like all those years ago I was set adrift and today I am, in some ways, still lost at sea. Despite everything, I still have faith that God is listening, that God can hear me when I talk to him. So I guess I’ll just keep talking to him, and maybe one day, through all the interference and white noise, I’ll hear him talking back. I hope so.

In my post below about my forthcoming dental surgery Beloved_wretch wishes me “Godspeed.”

Now I appreciate her good wishes, but it got me to wondering… Exactly how fast is God speed? Does anyone know?

At just before 6am today in Singapore a young Vietnamese man raised in Australia makes his final short journey from his Changhi prison cell to the gallows where he is about to be hung for drug smuggling.

The story of Nguyen Tuong Van, 25, is tragic but not unusual. He was arrested in December 2002 for smuggling 396.2 grams of heroin. A task he had undertaken in a misjudged attempt to pay off debts run up by his twin brother who was at the time gripped by heroin addiction.

As his face is splashed across the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald with the headline ‘HANGED!’ I cannot help but ponder for a moment the questions that such a killing always raise. Is execution right? Does it actually serve as a deterrent?

The sixth commandment of the Bible says “thou shall not kill”, and while some Christians might hold this commandment up as reason to not execute it would seem that in the context of the time the commandment was actually referring to murder, an unlawful killing. Execution by the State, such as in this case, would surely then not be considered unlawful, and therefore would fall outside of this commandment?

Clearly the possibility of the death penalty didn’t deter Nguyen Tuong Van from attempting to smuggle drugs through Singapore airport. Three men were already in prison awaiting trial and almost certain execution when he was arrested, and in the time between his arrest and his trial another three were arrested, and again they too will almost certainly be put to death.

Australian news coverage has focused on Nguyen Tuong Van’s family, friends and supporters back in Australia. some of his letters have been read out on TV and his clearly distraught mother has been interviewed on camera on a number of occasions. But regardless of this polls suggest that the country is split in it’s opinion regarding the fete of the drug smuggler.

One call-in radio show found that for every 50 people who called deploring the execution as barbaric, there were 60 commending Nguyen’s death. Many said Nguyen “deserved” to die, saying his attempt to smuggle heroin into Australia amounted to a crime against Australian people. Some callers even spoke of their admiration at Singapore’s tough stance on the crime of drug smuggling, regardless of the fact that in this case the accused had previous criminal convictions.

According to Amnesty International, about 420 people have been hanged in Singapore since 1991, mostly for drugs offences. Under Singapore’s stringent drug laws anyone caught with more than 15 grams of heroin must be executed.

At 9am (Australian time) this morning prison chaplain, Father Gregoire Van Giang, performed the last rites before Nguyen, hooded and handcuffed, was positioned on the trapdoor of the gallows. His death was witnessed by a doctor and a select group of prison officials. His body is to be flown back to Australia for a private burial next week.

So tonight while Australians discuss the first hanging of an Australian citizen in 12 years, a chilling execution milestone is coincidentally reached on the other side of the world as the United States carried out its 1,000th execution since capital punishment was reintroduced in 1976. Death by lethal injection might seem a little less gruesome than covering a mans head then hanging him, but no matter how clinical the killing, the questions still remain. Is execution a just punishment or a moral crime in of itself?

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Australian executed in Singapore
Death of compassion
Anger over Singapore hanging
Why Nguyen must die
US carries out 1,000th execution
Explanation of “Thou shalt not kill”