Which of us can say we wouldn’t avoid tax?

Do you want to pay less tax? It’s totally legal. Faced with such an offer, I doubt many of us would turn round and say, “No, thank you.” Jimmy Carr didn’t when his financial adviser put exactly this suggestion to him. Yet, according to David Cameron, Carr was “morally wrong”, and public opinion agrees. So it seems that the vast majority would both pay less tax if they could and condemn Carr for doing exactly that.

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Would a message from God pass these Catholic rules on revelation?

Herein contains what we might call the paradox of revelation. As its meaning makes clear, you can’t have a “revelation” that tells everyone what they already know. However, having established a religion on those revelations, the teachings revealed through them become non-negotiable, and the ecclesiastical authorities become the arbiters of their interpretation. And so that means no further revelation is admissible if it contradicts what is already believed. Revelation of radical new truths, if accepted as real, thus makes future revelation of radical new truths impossible. To put it another way, what was absolutely valid for the establishing of a religion becomes by necessity invalid once it already exists.

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