God is clearly female. So claims theological revolutionary and duck liberator young master Lindow. I beg to differ, for the simple reason that I don’t believe in God. Nor do I not believe in God. Like everybody else in the world (only a fraction of whom choose to acknowledge as much) I don’t actually know.
Religious debate rears its head infrequently in this house, and I’m certainly not going to start any here. This is because my wife is a believer and wishes our children to be so as well. Occasionally people express surprise at my willingness to have them raised this way, but it seems to me that the right sort of Christian teachings - ethics, morality, social responsibility – are not dissimilar from those I am trying to impart to the children myself. I just do it from a humanist perspective rather than a spiritual one. For her part, my wife accepts that the children should be aware that I do not share her faith, so that that option will be open to them as they get older and perhaps start to question what they’ve been told. It’s a delicate balancing act but it seems to be working, more or less. All it needs is tolerance of someone else’s belief system. Maybe we should be running the Middle East.
