I believe in ...

Finally got round to watching one of my Christmas presents last night: 'Stripped', the latest live show released on DVD by Eddie Izzard. I appreciate that Izzard is an acquired taste - but in my book, he's a genius. His ability to improvise and to follow wild tangents means you have to be prepared for things to get a little surreal - as it does when he notes that giraffes have no warning cry to communicate danger. But they can cough. Izzard imagines this to be a discreet, 'British' kind of cough, before the whole thing morphs into two giraffes playing charades in order to communicate the fact that they are about to be attacked. As I say, the man's a genius.

The man's also an atheist - he was keen to tell us that, having been for many years an agnostic. This change may have been a recent thing, because he did have something of the zeal of a new convert about him, keen to share his new-found insights into why there is no God. Some of this hit home, as the reflections of an intelligent person saying 'hang on a minute'.

But some of it was a bit ill-conceived and clunky, even allowing for the fact that he was exploiting the comedic aspects of faith, rather than engaging in philosophical debate. It did seem as if he had a point to prove.

One striking example was in a section on Hitler (and by extension, the problem of evil). A familiar and very natural question became (in Izzard's world) 'why didn't God just flick Hilter's head off?' (with all the attendant possibilities for surreal humour). Why didn't God intervene? If there is a God, surely he would have done?

It is a very good question - but it raises a number of others. If we assume that God (if he exists) should have stopped Hitler, at what point should he have done so? When he ordered the building of the death camps? When he rose to power? When he wrote Mein Kampf? When he was conceived?

As far as we know, Hitler himself never executed anyone. The final solution was dependent on the active compliance of millions of soldiers and bureacrats, as well as the failure of millions of others to intervene. Hitler has become the focal point for what was a whole movement. To suggest (as Izzard does) that if you take Hitler out of the picture everyone else would just walk away is pretty naive.

And of course, what is true of Hitler and Nazi Germany would be true of many other contexts throughout history, and in our present era. Then we might add in the issue of global poverty, and the culpability of all of us, to some extent. I'm not suggesting that 'we're all as bad as Hitler' - but the question 'where would you draw the line?' is a very real one. To suggest that all that's required is a divine hit squad to pick off the really bad guys is hopelessly simplistic.

At one point in the show, Izzard says 'I don't believe in God, I believe in us'. Which gained a bit of a cheer from the audience, but is actually pretty depressing. Because if you can't blame God for Hitler (or Stalin or Mugabe or ...), then who can you blame? Us. And if it is all down to us, the signs don't look good.

It seems to me that the Christian story helps us to make sense of who we are, in all our ambiguity. And it gives us hope that we can be different. And part of being different means that we take seriously our responsibilities to change the world, in whatever ways we can.