Beyond Belief

Of all the career choices open to young people, entering a religious community must come fairly near the bottom of the list. Yet the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has set up a new community based at Lambeth Palace for young Christian people from all over the world. About 500 started the application and 16 have been chosen. They will have the opportunity to live in the Palace for a year,...

A hundred years ago the trenches had been dug and British and German soldiers were engaged in bloody combat in Flanders and Gallipoli. Faced by the scale of the slaughter, many people turned to pacifism, the idea that all resistance to evil should be non-violent. It was not a new idea; some Eastern religions adopt it as their default position. But the deadly potency of weapons of mass destruction...

What do Muhammad Ali, Helen Shapiro and John Travolta have in common? They all changed their religion. They abandoned the traditions in which they had been brought up in favour of something different. In some cases, it produced a great sense of betrayal. Some religious groups will cut off friends and family who renounce their religion. Life for the so-called betrayer can be very difficult indeed....

You may be surprised to learn that one of the best-selling poets in America today is a man who lived and died 800 years ago. The Persian-born Rumi, Jalal ad-Din Muhammed Rumi, to give him his full name, was a Sufi master who wrote ecstatic poems about joy and love and separation and pain. One respected scholar compares Rumi's work to Shakespeare's for "its resonance and beauty." Contemporary artis...

Discussion programme in which guests from different faith and non-faith perspectives debate the challenges of today's world.

The luxury hotels in the beach resorts of Tunisia which were once packed with tourists now lie nearly empty. The slaughter on the beach at Sousse on June 26th has added Tunisia to a growing list of no-go areas for Western tourists. Tunisia is 99% Muslim but was considered an oasis of secularism in the Arab World. Its revolution in 2011 marked the beginning of The Arab Spring, bringing democratic g...

The Greek Debt Crisis has highlighted in the most dramatic way just how much our economic systems depend on borrowed money. The figures of international debt are mind boggling. In the economies of wealthy countries like the United States and the UK, around 97-98% of the money is debt. It is money whose value rests not on something that exists in the present but on something that might exist in the...

To Muslims, Muhammed is the most important person who ever lived. He is the Seal or the last of all the prophets, the one chosen by God to receive his final revelation. To insult the memory of the Prophet is a blasphemy and a body blow to the Muslim believer. It can carry terrible consequences as the staff of Charlie Hebdo discovered when they published cartoons which were thought by Muslims to be...

The very public failures of the Mid Staffordshire National Health Service Foundation Trust raised serious questions about the standard of care in some hospitals. Two Enquiries agreed that there had been "appalling" emergency care with deficiencies at "virtually every stage." What would have prevented such a humanitarian failure? Some said that an obsession with targets and bureaucracy had been all...

In January Alexis Tsipras became Prime Minister of Greece and formed a coalition government with the nationalist Independent Greek Party. Tsipras is a radical, committed to ending austerity. He is also an atheist who publicly declared that he wants to move Greece in a secular direction. That would be a radical move, for Greek Orthodoxy is the only legally recognised religion and may command the lo...

Kathmandu was a city of temples. Now it is a city of tents." That was the comment of one observer after the two recent earthquakes which struck Nepal. Thousands have died; many more made homeless in one of the world's poorest countries. Nepal is overwhelmingly Hindu; central to the Hindu belief is karma, the conviction that every action produces an equal reaction; that suffering in this life is a...

Ernie Rea and guests discuss the promise and threats of developing artificial intelligence with Anders Sandberg, a philosopher from the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, Elaine Graham, Grosvenor Professor of practical Theology at Chester University, and Professor Lionel Tarassenko, Chair of electrical engineering at Oxford University. Producer: Rosie Dawson.

This is the Holy Week; the time when Christians remember the events leading up to the trial and execution of Jesus of Nazareth. It came to a climax on a Cross on a hillside outside Jerusalem, when Jesus laid down his life, according to Christian belief, as an atonement for the sins of the world. He was a scapegoat, an innocent man who suffered the punishment which by rights should have been ours....

Ernie Rea and guests discuss the revival of Confucianism in China. In 1966 the Red Guard in China sent a telegram to Mao tse Tung. "Dearest Chairman Mao," it read. "We have rebelled. We have torn down the plaque extolling "The teacher of ten thousand generations;" we have levelled Confucius' grave; and we have obliterated the statues in the Confucius Temple." By the time the Cultural Revolution ha...

In Britain we're sometimes nervous about talking about religion, lacking the tools to talk about it in a society of many faiths and none. But how can we begin to understand one another if we cannot talk about those things which form the bedrock of so many peoples' lives. Joining Ernie to discuss Religious Literacy are Dr James Conroy, Vice Principal of the University of Glasgow and lead author of...

According to Islamic teaching, there will a be a Day of Judgement when all of humanity will be judged by Allah. It will be preceded by divisions within the body of Islam and battles throughout the Middle East, particularly in Syria. Little wonder that some Muslims are speculating that the End Times are upon them. The leader of Islamic State, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, uses the language of End Times to...

Is Purgatory a religious place or a psychological concept? Even in this so-called secular age, people with little or no religious belief often revert to religious terminology to describe their experience. After a difficult time, someone will say, "I've been to Hell and back." And after a time of testing or of waiting, they might say they've been through Purgatory. The word Purgatory comes from the...

Is it correct to describe the killers of Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris as fundamentalists? When this programme was recorded, the operation to detain the suspects is continuing. The initial murders were carried out in the name of Allah in retaliation for the publication of cartoons deemed to be lampooning the prophet Mohammed. How do you describe people who carry out such atrocities? A quick glance...

Moses has always been good box office even before Ridley Scott's blockbuster movie hit the cinema screens on Boxing Day. There was Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments; the cartoon Prince of Egypt. It's a great story - Ancient Egyptian pharaohs and pyramids, babies in baskets, plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, and a great chase. The story of Moses is the seminal one for Jews; without him the...

In Beyond Belief, Ernie Rea and his guests explore the place of faith in our complex world. Ernie is joined by three guests who discuss how their own religious tradition affects their values and outlook on the world, often revealing hidden and contradictory truths. In this programme, ahead of Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to England and Scotland, Ernie and his guests ask what is distinctive abou...

What was the Church's role in the creation of Magna Carta? We all know about "Bad King John" and his barons, but this was a religiously charged document. The very first and the very last clause declare that "The Church must be free," and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, almost certainly drafted it. Ernie Rea is joined by the Very Rev June Osborne, Dean of Salisbury , whose Cathedral...

Ernie Rea and guests discuss the enduring appeal of TS Eliot's religious poetry. It's 50 years since TS Eliot died. His later work, most notably the Four Quartets, is informed by a Christian Faith which became one of the pillars which sustained his life. How religious is his poetry? And what does it have to say to a society which many feel has lost its Christian moorings? Ernie is joined by Lyndal...

In recent months some major American cities have experienced racial tension which has erupted into violence. In August Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Sections of the community reacted with violence, looting and protest and when, at the end of November, a Grand Jury decided not to indict the policeman there was further v...

The sale of Ouija Boards has soared recently due to a new horror film Ouija. The desire to make or maintain contact with the dead has been a feature of societies down the ages, but for one modern religion, Spiritualism, it continues to play a central role. Spiritualism is on the rise in Britain, increasing by 17 per cent between the 2001 and 2011 censuses. Ernie Rea discusses the appeal of Spiritu...

How are religious plague narratives affecting the responses to the Ebola outbreak? Throughout history, people have sought explanations for such deadly epidemics. Pre scientific societies thought that plagues were a punishment from the gods who were displeased with human behaviour. We have a better understanding of the causes and effects of disease today, but such ideas persist in many quarters and...