Access Key Details Note- this page has a lightweight liberal stance and serves as a pointer to useful websites which are informative, useful, and not extremist.
Faith.... I was brought up in a none-church going family, but still spent several months at a Church of England primary school. As a teenager, school friends introduced me to an Evangelical church, and I was involved with a local "Youth for Christ" group.
Then I found it easier going at the local Methodist church and became a "member", also being involved with the 1966 Billy Graham visit, finally transferring to the Church of England when the local Methodist church swapped its churches for apartment blocks. Along comes my family and it all comes to a halt! The regular church going that is. I have happily visited a Coptic church, a Catholic church, several Anglican churches, and a local Mosque. Religious references on the web tend to come from the slightly less liberal arms of the faiths but you may find these notes useful.
The very first church I remember visiting I now find was a Primitive Methodist Chapel, still open but with a membership in Apostolic figures. I also now discover that the cemetary on the other side of the village was/is a "Primitive Methodist" burial ground.
However my first offering here is from a Church of England: the Morning Service (audio only) held at St Anns Church in Manchester on 4th October 1959, the Sunday before a General Election, with a good sermon from the then Bishop of Manchester, Bishop William Greer. He mentions the growing inequalities between rich and poor. The link is to a 23MB zip file of audio tracks and some notes on the recording.
And then, a book that is nowhere to be found in the internet, "The Roots of Methodism" by Fitzgerald, a Wesleyan minister. Highly recommended to former Methodists and any still existing as a reminder of what it was all about, where Methodism started.
In many areas there are no longer any churches openly identified as Methodist.
I have scanned this lovely book, which is a good read, and here it is as a pdf
Roots of Methodism 1903 pdf
The book was published in 1903 and Fitzgerald died in the early 1930s so no copyright issues.
As a separate web page I have provided a list of the books recommended at the back of "Roots of Methodism" with internet links that you can cut and paste to read the many classic works - and I have added a couple that I like.
A book about John Wesley by Roy Hattersley A brand from the burning is also excellent and recommended reading.
The modern Christian church owes many of its beliefs to the fall of Jerusalem early on and the loss of early church leaders and dispersal of some Christians who were influenced by local customs where they settled. Later on the beliefs became encased in aspic as Constantine -for surely political reasons- took strong charge of the doctrines, even inventing new words. Politics and religion are strongly linked and the winners write the histories.. I recommend the books on the history of Christianity by W H C Frend, very academic, very enlightening especially "The Early Church" and "The Rise of Christianity" (Those two links go to Amazon.co.uk).
It is always pleasant when a major reference work is made available on the Internet. The Church of England has released its services as below- confusingly each church can within some limits have its own forms of worship and there is quite a spread available. Services at other Christian churches can be very different but they are not on the internet.
Book of Common Prayer ||
Common Worship ||
New Patterns for Worship
My favorite service has more or less fallen into disuse- Compline. And I very much prefer the older 1928 Service of Compline, no longer held on the Church of England site but this link is from a copy at archive.org. There is also a more modern language Compline.
I'd love to link to some good Christian resources - but virtually everything is offline and copyright. If you have not read the Bible before or for a long time I recommend you start with Luke. Matthew and Mark, the other synoptic gospels, are also good starting points. One group of Christians avoids man made creeds and concentrates on the Sermon reported in Chapters 5, 6 and 7 of Matthew. Readers should be aware that Matthew was probably writing for people who were fully aware of and followed the Jewish traditions, more than the Gentiles that Mark probably wrote for.
Here is the King James bible and commentary from biblestudytools who also have the 1951 Revised Standard Version, . or read the slightly later 1971 Revised Standard Version.
Then you can also read the English Standard Version (2001) or the 1983 New International Version. There are others to choose from- now you see why taking a few words of text from one translation and building a finely detailed morality from it can be hazardous...
I found the 1945 New Testament from Ronald Knox very useful and his translation of the bible is online together with the Latin vulgate and the Douay version for comparison. Monsignor Ronald Knox was an ordained Anglican priest, son of the Anglican bishop of Manchester, a writer of detective stories, tutor to Harold MacMillan and inspired the Mercury "War of the Worlds" when a decade earlier (16th January 1926) he produced a play for the BBC involving live reports from London riots....
People calling themselves "Christians" often do not attend worship, and even of those who do, few follow the most extreme right wing elements which rather incorrectly call themselves Christian. Christianity encompasses many viewpoints and practices, with variety even in single denominations, so that one Church of England may be very different in some ways to another (and equally so with Catholics and Independents)
The same is true of Islam where not all attend prayers or fast, and very few support the "extremists". There is a variety of views, and as with Christians there are a few who proclaim loudly that anyone disagreeing with them cannot be of the True Faith.
In addition to the Holy Qur'an, Islam values collected sayings of Muhammad (pbuh) [hadith] with varying collections being given authority by differing sects; some include the sayings of his companions. Individual hadith are classified by Muslim clerics and jurists as sahih ("authentic"), hasan ("good") or da'if ("weak"). However, there is no overall agreement: different groups and different individual scholars may classify a hadith differently. Different branches of Islam (Sunni, Shia, Ibadi) refer to different collections of hadith, and the relatively small sect of Quranists reject the authority of any of the hadith collections. Varying authority is given to traditions (sunnah) and to differing extents, differing collections of scholarly comments and reports.
See the wikipedia article on Jurisprudence covering the various levels of authority.
Quran- written in Arabic this is intended to be read and memorised in Arabic. As such there is no widely accepted English translation.
[quote:" If the Arabic language is quite beyond us, we are not to blame nor should we feel badly. We can recite verses in Arabic by learning the sounds, and then find out what they mean by resorting to translations. We must never be led to think, though, that these translations are an exact version of the Arabic in another language. Any translation of the Quran is only an approximation of the meaning of revelation. You are free to read translations of the meaning of the Quran, remembering that the words of Allah were revealed in Arabic. You should not feel downcast or guilty that you don’t know Arabic. Try as best you can."].
Each chapter on its own, recalling there is no official translation, AAIIL version.
Courtesy of archive.org, a single 10MB pdf download originally on quranproject.org: Saheeh International Translation edited by A B al-Mehri. ISBN 978-0-9548665-4-9. If you have not yet read it properly, take a look. (Like the Bible, taking a single sentence and constructing a whole outlook is generally not helpful, study the whole.).
Despite some unfortunate attitudes by a few followers of Christianity and Islam, it is for the individual to come to their own understanding and faith, and not for others to use abuse or violence against those they disagree with. Win others to your cause by being and doing good.