Some of the Protestant traditions find the idea of invoking literal saints disturbing, but there is of course one famous dead person who Christians of all beliefs *are* comfortable in psychically communicating with.

Does Jesus communicate with us through the Holy Spirit, or through some other means?

That’s a very forceful and rather startling statement to make. Are you sure you’ve entirely thought through what it means, and are you prepared to stand behind it?

Certainly *talking about* love and forgiveness is not quite the same thing as *practicing* them. But neither love nor forgiveness are empty concepts. There are plenty of modern philosophers, and some New Age spiritual advisors, who don’t talk about these ideas at all, or actively consider them to be bad.

Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, for example, both considered altruism to be literally evil, and the individual and the individual’s search for physical advancement the only true thing. Margaret Thatcher, advocating the similar ideas of neoliberal economics, famously said ‘there is no such thing as society’.

Some recent New Age publications (for example, The Secret) give the impression that spiritual advancement is all about forming desires for one’s self (mostly about money) and achieving them. ‘Love’ in the Christian sense of compassion for others doesn’t really come into this mindset at all.

As for forgiveness, that’s really controversial today – if you don’t realise just how controversial, have you actually thought about its implications? Restorative justice programs, which try to apply Christian concepts of forgiveness in the very real world of the law courts, constantly come under attack from loud advocates of ‘decent citizens’, ’sensible sentencing’ and ‘victims rights’ who claim that it is literally immoral to do anything less than punish lawbreakers to the fullest extent. Preemptive war and preemptive ‘anti-terrorism’ arrests stand directly against not only the idea of forgiveness, but of any kind of shared humanity between us and our ‘enemies’.

A recent popular book arguing for muscular foreign policy was titled ‘Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos’, and argued precisely that Christian ideas of forgiveness are out of place in the ‘real world’.

So taking a principled stand for love and forgiveness is a huge philosophical break with many of the deepest ideas on which our current world is based. And it’s exactly the same thing that Jesus commands us to do. Why then would you consider people who take this stand to be doing a meaningless or unimportant thing – regardless of where they got the idea from?

Do you think it’s more important to *say* we are Christians, or to *do* the things that Jesus told us to do? How do you think Jesus would suggest that we deal with people who *don’t* say they are Christians – perhaps who even angrily shout that they aren’t – but nevertheless *do* do what he says we should?

I seem to recall a couple of parables along those lines, and to me it’s not an empty question. I know several people who are self-confessed atheists and pagans who nevertheless have a spiritual intuition that leads them toward doing practical things to change their community in ways that promote love and forgiveness.