Rating 3 out of 5 (Fairly platitudinous)

I was invited here to point out that Judaism has absolutely no problem at all with the theory of evolution. Like Christians and Muslims, I was going to tell you how rational Jews have reinterpreted the wrong bits of their scripture to make them symbolic. Unfortunately there's all this trouble in Gaza at the moment. That's when I realised that Darwin tells us something about Judaism. You see we Jews debate everything: whether the Invisible Magic Friend exists, whether he spoke to Abraham, Moses and the prophets, whether he led us out of Egypt and gave us the land of milk and honey, whether, despite being all knowing and unchanging, he responds to our prayers when we tell him things often enough. In a process of ruthless Darwinian dialectic, these ideas have been critically examined over thousands of years. They've been empirically tested against observation. The fact that we still believe them means they must be true and that's what we pass on on to our descendants.

Tonight we will pray for peace, just as we have for the past 3,000 years.

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Rating 2 out of 5 (A little platitudinous)

When we hear the word 'Gaza', we all immediately think of Milton's
poem about Samson. Samson was the kind of muscular, sexy, intellectually- challenged hunk that we vicars tend to fall for. When the Philistines captured Samson, they mocked him. It's exactly the same today: Israelis and Palestinians mocking one another across the Gaza border. Irony, sarcasm, litotes - there is no end do the depth of their mockery for one another. They know each other so well that they know exactly how to hurt the other's feelings.

Is there any hope that they will pull back from this madness of mockery? Before someone gets really upset? The bible gives great room for hope here. You see Palestinians and Jews are both descended from Abraham. So they're really the same family. They've only been mocking each other for a few thousand years. I think we can expect peace and understanding to break out any millennium now. There'll be no need to bring the house down like Samson did, making him the first Israeli suicide bomber.

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Rating 4 out of 5 (Highly platitudinous)

The question of "Thought For The Day" is a difficult one. There may be a case for widening the pool of contributors on Thought for The Day to make it more reflective of modern British demographics and opinion. While on balance we prefer to ignore this argument, nevertheless never let it be said that the BBC doesn't listen to its licence payers. Your word is our every command. With this in mind, we have indeed decided to greatly expand the number of TFTD presenters. Representatives of Astrology, The Raelians, Scientology, Wiccans and Satanism will all be invited to provide a unique perspective on current affairs as part of TFTD, thus making it a more balanced, inclusive slot.

The remaining 2 hours 57 minutes of the Today programme are completely dominated by atheists, it seems churlish to deny a mere 3 minutes to those with a faith perspective. In fact this argument is so good that I have decided to apply it across all Radio 4 factual output. Prayer For The Day will be rescheduled to the middle of Farming Today, thus bringing greater balance to a programme that is otherwise completely dominated by secular farming issues. Money Box, a veritable den of heathen personal financial advice, will be balanced with a reminder of how Christ suffered to save our investments. The Shipping Forecast, a profane and totally biased piece of meteorological dogma, will by balanced by a druid examining a sheep's entrails.

A rather loud mouthed, and unrepresentative bunch of Radio 4 listeners have complained about these exclusive religious slots in programmes that have nothing whatever to do with religion, but I think we can dismiss these as yet more evidence of the growing intolerance of militant atheists.

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Rating 3 out of 5 (Fairly platitudinous)

Many muslims struggle with evolution. Yet evolution was hypothesised and taught in Islamic centres of learning over a thousand years ago. Even Islamic poets said it was true. One wit remarked "I am the Invisible Magic Friend. Darwin said, I was an ape. Each according to their aspiration." Oh, how we all laughed! But the important thing here is not to claim that evolution was invented by muslims. The important thing is how to reconcile Darwin's theory with the Koran. The clue here can be found in the story of Jesus' evolution into a prophet. As a scientist and an Imam, let me just assure you that, when the Koran says Jesus was born to a virgin, it actually means that he wasn't. We can learn something about Adam using this. It turns out that both Jesus and Adam were human beings. So when it says Adam was created from dust, it also means that he wasn't. There we are - evolution and the Koran perfectly reconciled, just as you would expect. For my next trick I will prove that up is down, black is white, and that David Hasselhoff was the greatest recording artist of all time.

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Rating 3 out of 5 (Fairly platitudinous)

Happy 2009 everyone! Isn't it terrible! Shops closing, everyone unemployed, Israelis and Palestinians bombing each other. And then there's Africa.

Can you guess what my solution to all this is? That's right, I'm going to tell you about a Sikh guru. I bet that comes as a surprise. The tenth guru was a real cheeky chappy. Even when he battled against religious intolerance and caste prejudice, even when his sons were killed in battle, he always had a joke to tell and a smile on his face. "Always look on the bright side of life," he said.

While I'm here, let's have a quick rant about materialism. That's terrible too.

The tenth guru said you have to be true to your principles and values. It's a good job I'm here to tell you that the 10th guru said that, otherwise you wouldn't have realised that you have to be true to your principles and values.

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Rating 2 out of 5 (A little platitudinous)

I've just been to the Darwin Exhibition at the Natural History Museum. It's jolly good, with a model of his boat, and all sorts of fossils, finches and notebooks. The really important thing here is how to reconcile Darwin's theory with the Book of Genesis. By observing variations between birds on the Galapagos Islands and the mainland, Darwin realised that species were not fixed, as the book of Genesis says they are, but can in fact mutate and change. Clearly Genesis has got it wrong. Anyone who believes in the literal story of Genesis must be an ignorant, irrational, unscientific nitwit. Pope John Paul II said so, so it must be true. What then for we rational, logical, scientific believers in the Invisible Magic Friend? Don't worry - it turns out that Genesis is a symbol, as indeed are all the wrong bits of the bible. In fact, it gets even better. Now that we can see how the Invisible Magic Friend creates species, it makes it even easier to believe in Him. Isn't that nice!

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Rating 3 out of 5 (Fairly platitudinous)

I want to talk to you today about souls. Unfortunately, if I start talking explicitly about the invisible magic bit of you that flies away after you die, most people will think I'm a loony. So instead, I'll restrict myself to a purely descriptive talk about souls, contrasting their poetic and spiritual references, and only leaning one way or the other in a purely nudge-nudge, wink-wink, sort of way.

Ken McDonald, the former director of public prosecutions, doesn't think the government's shiny new database of every digital thought that ever happens is a good thing. "No government of any colour is to be trusted with such a roadmap to our souls,” says Ken. He is not talking about your invisible magic bit here, but is instead using "soul" poetically to describe the core of what makes you you.

Anglican vicars on the other hand, who are not the same thing at all as Baptist Ministers and whose views I can therefore reference objectively without prejudice aforethought, are talking about invisible magic bits when they talk about souls. They think Jesus, the visible third of the Invisible Magic Friend, was talking about invisible magic bits when he talked about eternal life.

I make no comment at all on either use of the word. As Jesus said, "What does it profit a man if he should gain the whole world, but suffer the loss of his invisible magic bit?"

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Rating 4 out of 5 (Highly platitudinous)

Barack Obama will soon be the President of the United States. This poor man was brought up by a ramshackle bunch of Methodists, Muslims and atheists. He was given no coherent set of beliefs to guide him, to give him a sense of tradition and provide him with a community to belong to. He was informed by all sorts of points of view and exposed to a wide variety of ideas and opinions. It was nearly as bad as a European upbringing. Fortunately, Obama himself recognised this flaw in his background and found himself a nice black, Christian church. Not only that, but he even managed to find a church that didn't demonise scholarship. He probably hasn't got out of his bad habits of listening to people who don't share his faith, but at least he now has a single coherent world-view to guide him. People who don't have a faith can't have a coherent world-view, making them confused and unreliable. Thanks to Obama choosing the Christian faith, he has the potential to become a great president, just like the current one.

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Rating 4 out of 5 (Highly platitudinous)

Happy New Year sinners! Because that's what you all are. Every last one of you has been maxing out on your credit cards, borrowing money against your ever depreciating homes. Not one of you has been saving and spending prudently. You've all been driving fancy cars, going on flash holidays and buying 50" plasmas TVs like me. Well now you're all going to lose you jobs and have your house repossessed. What do you make of that sinners! There's going to be loads and loads and loads of lovely misery. Get yourself jobs as priests because misery's about to become a growth industry.

Some will tell you that the explosion in debt was down to easy credit, poor banking supervision and nobody really understanding the risk profiles of complex derivatives, but I'm going to use a very old fashioned word: morality. I know it isn't very fashionable, but that's the kind of down to earth, no nonsense sort of chap I am, and you're all a bunch of immoral sinners. We're going to get back to some decent puritanical values very soon, let me tell you.

So good luck in 2009 everyone, you're going to need it. And don't forget, I'll be there after every single financial disaster to tell you afterwards how you should've avoided it. Repent sinners! Repent I say!

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Rating 3 out of 5 (Fairly platitudinous)

I bet you didn't know there were two versions of Hallelujah at the top of the charts and another version somewhere else. Hallelujah is a song about King David and his love, and how she tied him to a kitchen chair. It is a deep, profound, reflective work of ART, with words so mysterious and intellectual, so cerebral and sincere, so confused and utterly meaningless that you can sing it any way you want and it still comes out good. The fantastic thing about this amazing work of ART, is that you can be happy or sad, triumphant or downcast, emotional or whatever the opposite of emotional is. Here at the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity where we work to equip Christians to engage biblically and relevantly with the issues they face, including Work, Capitalism, Youth Culture, Media and Communication, we recognise that this song has everything. It's the psalms, John Lennon, Bob Dillon, Stevie Wonder, Handel's Messiah and Beethoven's 9th all rolled into one. I'd just like to pause here to confuse Soul, a balladic musical style, with the soul, the invisible magic bit of you that is spelt the same. Seen in the light of such insights we see Jesus, broken on the cross, as the ultimate work of ART. The great thing about this sensational, breathtaking, remarkable work of ART, is that you can over-analyse it and talk bollocks to your heart's content. No one would dare say that it's just a good tune with bizarre lyrics that don't make any sense.

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