Forget about sitting on a cloud - when you’re dead you are going to work! Hard! The Bishop of Durham is an erudite man and has spent a lot of time studying the texts of his religion, and he’s put some interesting thoughts on the topic of the afterlife (from a Christian perspective) to Time magazine.

As an environmentalist and someone who’s been regularly involved in political activism, one of the big gripes for me is when right wing, evangelical Christians use their religious perspective to justify doing nothing about saving the world…and in some cases to stand back in the hope of armageddon in other countries.

The Bishop of Durham not only says they’re wrong, but if they want to be true to their religion they need to be doing the opposite - protecting the globe and not bringing devastation to Middle Eastern countries being somewhere near the top of the list, as Heaven is not going to be up there - it’s down here.

“I have no doubt that every myth is based on some event, and so is the myth of Atlantis,” the University of Rhode Island’s Sigurdsson said. “An event of this magnitude must have left its imprint.”

Everything we learn about myths when we’re kids suggests that they’re set in stone, somewhere in the deep past.  But myths and legends, like fairytales, are mutable.  Try tracking the various iterations of Robin Hood down the years - from nature spirit to anarchist to Royalist and back.

But what are the myths of the 21st century global culture?  That’s not a rhetorical question - I’d be interested to hear.  IN the seventies, Harlan Ellison published one of my favourite collections - Deathbird Stories - in which he examined the gods of the 1970s world:the god of TV, cars etc  It’s an intense collection of stories and had a powerful effect on the young me.  I don’t know if the tales stand the test of time as I haven’t read them in a while, but they certainly shaped my thoughts and my writing.

So where are our current myths taking us?  I think in the mythosphere we’ve certainly got percolating terrorism, the net, of course, and a growing environmentalism which is oddly harking back to prehistoric myths while remaining essentially now.  Serial killers made a brief appearance in the nineties, but they just didn’t have the legs to become truly mythic.

These are the things I ponder when I’m supposed to be writing…