{"id":1594,"date":"2009-10-04T08:54:38","date_gmt":"2009-10-04T07:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1594"},"modified":"2009-10-04T08:54:38","modified_gmt":"2009-10-04T07:54:38","slug":"do-you-believe-in-angels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=1594","title":{"rendered":"Do you believe in angels?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t &#8211; but I have good friends who believe in them very much. So I&#8217;ve watched all 10 episodes of the Sky TV series called simply <a href=\"http:\/\/reallives.sky.com\/angels\">&#8220;Angels&#8221;<\/a> which I believe is the first series on British television to address this subject.<br \/>\nWatching the series inspired me to devote one of my series of short stories to an &#8216;angelic&#8217; appearance. It&#8217;s called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/Story10.html\">&#8220;The Face At The Window&#8221;<\/a>.<br \/>\nSo often, in the television series, some conjunction of events which were described as angelic would be dismissed by the resident sceptic Professor Chris French as coincidence &#8211; a position I support. But the believers will insist that there is no such thing as coincidence and that instead everything happens for a reason.<br \/>\nThere are two major problems with the school of thought that insists that everything has a reason. First, it seems to suggest that everything is intended or purposeful and therefore planned which appears to contradict free will. Second, if everything is for a reason, this means that all the evils in the world &#8211; including disease, destruction and death itself, even such horrors as the Holocaust &#8211; are for a reason which appears to defy comprehension.<br \/>\nOf course, people of faith argue that everything is planned by a God whose mind we cannot understand and all evil has a purpose but we are not capable of appreciating it. This seems to me to be an utterly circular and self-serving argument that is just too convenient.<br \/>\nAlso, if believers truly believe that all evil and all sorrow have a divine purpose, then why do we seek to oppose evil and avoid sorrow and why do we condemn evil and feel sorrow?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t &#8211; but I have good friends who believe in them very much. So I&#8217;ve watched all 10 episodes of the Sky TV series called simply &#8220;Angels&#8221; which I believe is the first series on British television to address this subject. Watching the series inspired me to devote one of my series of short [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}