Church attendance my be declining, but real individual religion has undergone a huge revival in the past 30 years

Look for the religion section of almost any bookshop in Britain, and you'll find it's been subsumed under "Mind, body and spirit". The reason is simple: what we call religion has changed – dramatically – in just the past 30 years.

I think the change is so significant we can call it a "de-reformation" of religion. In other words, the main features that have characterised religion in Britain since the Reformation of the 16th century have given way. For most people, religion has ceased to be a matter of belonging to a clerically led community, affirming unchanging dogma, participating in prescribed rituals, and holding conservative social attitudes. It's transformed into something else.

Let's start with rituals, both national and personal. From the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 onwards, the church has gradually ceded control. It still has a role to play, but by the time of Diana's death in 1997, that role had become secondary to popular practices and innovations. Similarly, the churches' hold over birth, marriage, and death has weakened dramatically.

Religious belonging has transformed as well. It used to be about local and national belonging. Now it's a matter of association with like-minded people by way of real and virtual networks that transcend local and national boundaries. A British Muslim, for example, may associate face-to-face with a few like-minded friends, spend a lot of time reading and chatting on the web, feel part of a global ummah, and long to go on hajj. And you can say something similar for young Catholics, evangelicals, neo-pagans and others.

The statistics on church attendance confirm it. Between 1950 and 1980 attendance halved, and between 1980 and 2005 halved again – down to 6.3% of the population, according to Christian Research.

What we believe in has changed at the same time. According to British Religion in Numbers, belief in "a personal God" roughly halved between 1961 and 2000 – from 57% of the population to 26%. But over the same period belief in a "spirit or life force" doubled – from 22% to 44%. And 41% of us now believe in angels, 53% in an afterlife and 70% in a soul – that's much higher, often double, than when the records began. And you can't just say this is a growth in superstition – because belief in fortune-telling and astrology has not risen.

Turning finally to religious identity, 72% declared themselves Christian in the 2001 Census, yet fewer and fewer claim to belong to a religion, and the number declaring "no religion" has grown from 31% in 1983 to 51% in 2009 , according to British Social Attitudes. There's also a lot more "mash-up" religion around – plenty of Christian Buddhists, Muslim reiki practitioners, even Christian atheists. Religious identity has now become an essentially contested achievement, forged in an exploding market of offers.

So what's going on? Those who have even noticed the shifts have tended to dismiss them by saying that real dogmatic religion has been declining, leaving people with a muddled and fuzzy residue. I think the exact opposite is true. Turn it on its head and you see it the right way round: real religion – which is to say everyday, lived religion – is thriving and evolving, while hierarchical, institutionalised, dogmatic forms of religion are marginalised. Religion has returned to the core business of sustaining everyday life, supporting relations with the living and the dead, and managing misfortune. That's why angels, cathedrals, pilgrimages and retreats are all doing well. And why mind, body, spirit has taken over from theology in the bookshops.

Why be surprised or dismissive? In democratic, consumerist societies we believe that we are responsible for own choices, and that our participation counts. We don't want to be preached at any more, we want to participate and test things out for ourselves. It doesn't mean we are anti-tradition, that Christians cease to tick "Christian" on the census, that young Muslims stop reading the Qur'an, or that young Catholics don't turn out for the Pope. We appreciate tradition, but want to discover and sift it for ourselves, with people we trust.

It's misleading now to think of six or nine world religions, of pre-packaged traditions into which individuals can be subsumed without remainder. The monopolies have broken down. Religious leaders don't have the same authority. Religious identity is more individual, more idiosyncratic, more interesting.

The tragedy is that we continue to asphalt over all this change and variety with simplistic understandings of religion rooted in the past, and all too often projecting some sort of fundamentalist understanding. The effect is to let religious and secular extremes get away with it – get away with telling us that only dogmatic, conservative, totalising religion is real religion. It isn't, and it's time to stop dwelling on minority extremes at the expense of the middle ground majority – which is to say, most of us.

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Source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/commentisfree/rss/~3/GvaxhhaDqmI/mind-body-spirit-dereformation-religion

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Our desire for life to be dramatic can lead us to merge real-life stories such as the death of Gareth Williams into fiction

The obvious, though almost entirely forgotten, truth about the deaths of the SIS cryptanalyst Gareth Williams and the British businessman Neil Heywood is that they were loved by their families and friends and this grief is no less than any of us would suffer.

But this barely registers when the public scents a real-life thriller – the appetite for intrigue and mystery quickly trumps any respect for the bereaved as we marvel at the artfulness of fate. Either the news is becoming more like thrillers or thriller writers are people of exceptional prescience who have somehow fracked the drama out of modern times with new precision.

In the Williams and Heywood deaths, it's really striking how they comply with the laws of mystery writing and, without changing a single detail, these exact circumstances could easily have been written into serviceable fiction.

In the Heywood murder, we have a police chief who takes refuge in the American consulate after alleging the murder; Heywood's main patron, an ambitious Maoist governor, destined for the top; and his wife, who is alleged to have had an affair with Heywood and who is also known to have imported hot air balloons from Somerset, as a means to conceal the illegal transfer of cash from China.

Like the Williams case, where the brilliant young victim was found locked into a red holdall, it is all too bizarre, much richer and more extravagant than most mystery writers have the capacity to imagine. Yet conventions are respected. In both stories, there is an unexplained death of a man who is engaged on secret, or at least highly secretive, work and who expires out of context – the old Harrovian Heywood was in China and Williams was killed in an anonymous flat in London, away from his home patch of Cheltenham. We are struck by their isolation and the lonely terror of their final moments, though to dwell on this is far from entertaining.

In both cases, families, colleagues and the authorities were slow to realise what had happened and it took time to establish that Williams and Heywood had in fact been killed. There were different degrees of cover-up in both stories and these suggest hinterlands of corruption and intrigue in Chinese and British authorities. We have no idea why these two apparently blameless individuals were murdered, exactly how they met their deaths or what was – or still is – at stake. In fiction, the whole thing would be wrapped up in under 500 pages by a heroically flawed, and therefore lovable, protagonist, who solves the murder and, by the by, exposes the conspiracy.

Here, the real world and fiction part company, because in neither case is there likely to be a completely satisfactory solution. Gareth Williams and Neil Heywood will be memorialised in headlines about the manner of their deaths (Spy in the Bag, Death in a Hotel Room), not by loving epitaphs. Life is rarely as neat or as just as fiction.

Yet there's good evidence that we desire a merger, or overlap, of reality and the fictive world – a demand for narrative in the news and a requirement that the works of the imagination should be based, as the movies say, on actual events. We want life to be melodramatic, because, despite impressions to the contrary and the hysteria of the war on terror, most human existence in the west today is peaceful and humdrum and bears out the theory in Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, that violence in history is in steady decline.

However, modern societies are beautifully set up to meet the plot demands of a thriller. We communicate with each other incessantly; we are at all times watched and photographed and traceable; and we move around a lot and are often far from home. (Incidentally, when I hear the words "a British businessman", my Pavlovian response is to expect trouble, as in any of the following verbs – murdered, jailed, extradited or disappeared.)

Reality has obliged us with high-concept melodrama, inconveniencing many a writer of hard-boiled dialogue and diabolic scenarios. "You couldn't make it up" is the phrase that springs to our lips as we contemplate jetliners piling into skyscrapers, US Navy Seals snuffing out Osama bin Laden – with the president and secretary of state on the other end of the live feed from Seal head cams – and the chief of the IMF ruling himself out of today's French presidential election by molesting a maid in a New York hotel that was miraculously wired for compromise.

You couldn't make it up, nor would you. As a writer of espionage fiction, I am not sure I would have dared to imagine Anna Chapman and the herds of Russian spies, grazing in America's suburbs and communicating with each other's laptops by coded wireless transmissions, while – and here is the bizarre and unimaginable part – conveying very little useful information to their spymasters in Moscow Centre. I would not have made up MI6's phony rock with its secret compartment, lying in a Moscow park, because it seems exactly like something a thriller writer would make up.

That story may provide a hint of what is going on. Not long after 9/11, I was on a book tour in Canada with a female novelist, who made a persuasive case that thriller writers had corrupted the imagination of mankind by enabling evil men such as Bin Laden to act out their extravagant fantasies. The constant drip of conspiracy and demonic plotting had changed us for the worse, she argued, rather like porn distorts sexual behaviour.

The first proper thriller writer was Erskine Childers, who in 1903 published Riddle of the Sands, a novel slightly less thrilling than Childers's own life, which was ended by a firing squad in 1922. But not before he shook hands with its members and told them: "Take a step or two forward, lads – it'll be easier that way." It was as though Childers had jumped out of one of his own novels. There was a confusion of author and character; his fiction was somehow decreeing how his life should end.

Ever since then, writers of intrigue have also been participants in the great game (Maugham, Buchan, Fleming, Greene, le Carré) and have benefited hugely from their experience.

Those who do not have that time in the trenches take care to stand close to power and politics and it would be odd if, over the course of a century of this relationship, some kind of exchange did not occur.

Source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/commentisfree/rss/~3/gv1eOspCDC4/henry-porter-fact-stranger-than-fiction

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Source: http://www.thisissomerset.co.uk/Lorry-drivers-ignore-A361-flood-diversion-putting/story-15992269-detail/story.html

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It's the biggest solar farm in the world, covering 2,000 ha of northern Gujarat, India, and it has the capacity to generate 600MW of power

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/picture/2012/may/02/gujarat-solar-power-park-india

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Armando Iannucci says feature-length movie about Norfolk's favourite son will begin filming later this year

It's hardly experienced the development hell of "Monkey Tennis", but after seven years of waiting the Alan Partridge movie seems finally to be making its way to the big screen.

Partridge co-writer Armando Iannucci has told Empire magazine that filming on the feature-length adventure will start this year, with Steve Coogan returning as Norfolk's favourite son. "It's just about all come together now," Iannucci said. "[The script] is written [but] we're always rewriting, rewriting and rewriting." Iannucci followed up the interview by tweeting: "Mr Alan P is going cinemasurroundsound".

Declan Lowney, the Irish director of sitcom Father Ted, will film a script that has been worked on by Iannucci, Coogan, Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons (writers on the Fosters funny series Mid-Morning Matters and the fictional biography I, Partridge). Peter Baynham, co-writer of Sacha Baron Cohen's Brüno movie, worked on an earlier draft.

Unlike Baron Cohen's creation it's unlikely that Alan will make the trip to the big ol' US of A, opting instead to stick to the convenient service stations and competitively-priced hotel chains of Norwich. "We don't see Alan, for example getting Simon Cowell's spot on American Idol and going over there," Coogan told the Playlist last year. "That's too good for Alan. [His] future is always brighter in his head than it is in the real world."

And on that bombshell … we await The Alan Partridge movie, which should be hitting cinemas in 2013.

• This article was amended on 1 May 2012. We omitted Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons from the list of scriptwriters attached to The Alan Partridge Movie. This has been corrected.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/apr/30/alan-partridge-movie

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The Australian government has listed the koala as a threatened species in parts of the country for the first time. It says the species faces numerous threats including from climate change, disease and habitat loss

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2012/apr/30/koalas-threat-australia-in-pictures

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Source: http://www.thisissomerset.co.uk/pictures/Photo-gallery-Yeovil-Town-player-season-awards/pictures-15960038-detail/pictures.html

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“Check out the UK line,” writes Joe Weisenthal. “The UK was recovering on a fine trajectory right up until early 2010, at which point UK growth hit a brick wall. What happened in 2010? That’s when conservative David Cameron came to power with an agenda of reigning in the debt.”

Meanwhile, the United States is doing better than either the United Kingdom or the Eurozone. That doesn’t necessarily prove anything: We have different economies that have faced somewhat different crises. But imagine, for a moment, how often you would see this chart if austerity had coincided with the UK or the Eurozone recovering more quickly than us.

Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=f6829420496d3281b79d37ef9468f27b

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Post your suggestions for subjects you'd like us to cover on Comment is free

Welcome to "You tell us", the thread on which you can share your ideas for topics we should be covering. Feel free to discuss the news of the day and add your suggestions in the thread below.

You can see the collection of articles commissioned via this thread by visiting the You told us page.

Source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/commentisfree/rss/~3/IiWJJzGt10o/you-tell-us-comment

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John Sides, one of the political scientists who helped me develop this election forecasting widget, decided to explain the project by conducting a Socratic dialogue with himself:

CR: Oh yes, I cannot wait to learn more about your fascinating methodology. But look: I played with the widget. It just can’t be right. If GDP grows 2% and Obama’s approval rating is 50%, he wins 89% of the time! That sounds too high.

Me: It sounded too high to me too. And Klein. This just reflects recent history: incumbent presidents presiding over even modest economic growth and with middling popularity haven’t been defeated very often.

Jay Cost is unimpressed.

Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=17e331c7cb86681a80153f9c6868287f

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