Pagans were fond of predicting the apocalypse and so are we -- despite the fact that we were warned not to: "But of that day and that hour knoweth no man" (Mark 13:32). Oh but that's what you think! The Church's hierarchy is in thrall to Climate Change. All the bishops and the Synod preach the new pagan apocalypse of global warming. As befits pagans, ancient or modern, there is a new god. Only in this case a new goddess in the form of the child-savant Greta Thunberg. False gods tell lies. That's what being false means. The principal lie is that there is a consensus that knows the truth about Climate Change. But there isn't. There is a very large chorus of informed dissent from eminent scientists throughout the world who are not persuaded by the lies and bribes of a massively self-interested -- and richly subsidized -- industry whose mission is to terrify us into accepting their agenda. And paying for it instead of spending our money on things that matter.

Then of course pagans always had their own morality. And so do the pagans of today. Their morality is not that of biblical teaching and the traditions of the Church over the whole 2,000 years of its history: that is one man with one woman in marriage. Instead their morality is the complete LGBT+ syllabus. Of course, the Church, armed with the true Gospel, rejects this heresy? No it doesn't. It preaches it. Both Archbishop Rowan Williams and Archbishop Justin Welby declared, "The Church has a lot of catching up to do with secular mores." Never mind St Paul's "Be ye not conformed to this world" (Romans 12:2).

What did St Paul know compared with the brave new wisdom of our current leaders? They are busily getting on with this catching up. Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop designate of York, is already doing his level best to speed up the process. Here is what he said recently: "It is wrong to ignore the damage being done by western society's current view of human sexuality. I am not sure that the church has ever before had to face the challenge of being seen as immoral by the culture in which it is set. And taking a biblical view on same-sex relationships can legitimise homophobia in others." Wrong Sir! It has always been the Church's duty and vocation to oppose secular morality when that morality deviates from revealed Christian truth in the clear teaching of both the Old and the New Testament.

But if you think that Stephen Cottrell's words about the danger of "legitimising homophobia" are a pretty severe criticism of the morality prescribed in the Bible, Cottrell went on to make his secular allegiances absolutely clear: "The biblical passages which so describe these things are part of our story and our inheritance. What we can do is recognise what we know now about human development and human sexuality. This requires us to look again at those texts to see what they are actually saying to our situation. For what we know now is not what was known then."

Cottrell says that biblical teaching is "part of our story and our inheritance." Does he admonish us then to treasure this inheritance and cling to our story for dear life as the most precious gift we possess? No -- we are urged instead to abandon it. Because the Church hierarchy explicitly and without ambiguity preaches and teaches that we now know better than the Old Testament prophets, St Paul and Christian orthodoxy over the whole period of the Church's existence.

Naturally. The new pagan ethics will not be formalised all in one go. It will follow the pattern of the gradual, piecemeal ecclesiastical vandalism by which the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer were abandoned and replaced by the new Babel that now besets us. Only the repudiation of the Church's sexual ethics will be completed in less than half the time. Within ten years the Church's policy on sexual relationships will be indistinguishable from that of the LGBT+ secular immorality. So yes, it's Lent, when more than a little self examination is called for.

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