Welby’s Creed points the way

We should all follow the example of His Grace Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Since Comrade Corbyn may soon inaugurate an age of justice and equality, if at some cost to liberty, His Grace has made all the necessary provisions for the future.

He has established himself as an early frontrunner for the job of Atheism Minister in Comrade Corbyn’s government.

His duties will consist in detoxifying the population currently coming off the opium of the people. Since going cold turkey may prove medically dangerous, His Grace has already devised a titration strategy featuring several incremental steps.

The first such step was taken the other day, putting tears in the eyes of all noxious Christian insects (a term Comrade Corbyn will doubtless borrow from Comrade Lenin) and a broad smile on Comrade Corbyn’s face. After the full implications of His Grace’s new policy have been realised, the Nicene Creed will be slightly modified.

Instead of “I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins”, it’ll say “I acknowledge two or more baptisms for the commission of sins”. (The part about believing in one God also needs some work, but that has been put off until His Grace assumes his new office.)

This alteration is only a stop-gap measure, designed to fill in until the complete new version of the Welby/Corbyn Creed has been adopted. In the final draft this sentence will be further changed to say “I acknowledge no baptism for any reason whatsoever, and God shall smite anyone who believes in him.”

For the time being, the new text is required to accommodate the numerous instances of men and women changing their gender (or sex, as it’s still called by the aforementioned noxious insects). This creates conundrums of great theological import.

For this perfectly legitimate and laudably courageous act invalidates the baptism of John, who has now become Jane, a name that never crossed the lips of the priest performing the original ritual.

As a woman imprisoned in a man’s body, John might have been baptised as indeed John. Now, as a woman mercifully released from the confines of her alien body, complete with a fixture that no self-respecting woman should possess, Jane may need to be re-baptised as such, perhaps for fear that her noxious insects of parents may otherwise disinherit her.

Those bishops gathering at Nicaea in 325 somehow failed to provide for such a situation, which goes to show that they lacked not only prophetic powers, but indeed elementary foresight. Their shameful oversight has now been corrected by His Grace, who has sanctioned our hypothetical John’s re-baptism as our hypothetical Jane.

The ensuing change in the Creed will soon follow, with other valuable details added. For, to provide for the real if unlikely possibility that, having lived as Jane for a while, John may want to revert to his original identity, the text will now say “two or more baptisms”. And it’ll replace the outdated, passive word ‘remission’ with the vibrantly active word ‘commission’.

Having thus established his credentials for a post in Comrade Corbyn’s government, His Grace Comrade Welby has provided an inspiration for us all. I for one would like to apologise to Comrade Corbyn for having been misunderstood as his opponent or, God forbid, critic.

In fact, when I referred to him as an evil exponent of a cannibalistic ideology whose election would spell a possibly irreversible catastrophe for Britain, few realised that I was merely trying to conceal my unmitigated admiration for Comrade Corbyn and everything he stands for.

One thing that particularly appeals to me is his idea of requisitioning rich people’s houses to accommodate the socioeconomically disadvantaged. It’s patently unjust that one such downtrodden person, Alexander Boot, has to live in a small Fulham flat, while some noxious insects live in large Belgravia houses, where they don’t even spend every minute of every day.

Yes, the flat is reasonably well appointed, and Fulham is a nice area of London, but the unfairness of it all rankles nonetheless. As a first step towards correcting this injustice I propose that a 10-bedroom house in Belgravia, Chester Square for preference, be requisitioned and given to me. Let those even more socioeconomically disadvantaged than me have the Fulham flat, once they’ve completed a fridge-operating course.

I realise that this initiative will be insufficient to qualify me even for a minor post in Comrade Corbyn’s government. But perhaps our venerable Archbishop will see it in his heart to employ me as his amanuensis at the new Atheism Ministry.

My CV includes all the necessary educational qualifications. At my Moscow university I took compulsory courses – and passed exams! – in such essential academic disciplines as Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism, Scientific Communism, Marxist Aesthetics and – most relevant of all – Scientific Atheism.

I’m ready and willing to serve Comrade Welby and especially Comrade Corbyn, whose forthcoming advent I now see as the dawn of a new era and a welcome step towards the arrival of paradise on earth.

Watch this space and join all the wise men in following the star that now shines not over Bethlehem but from the Kremlin turrets. Long live the new Creed!