To The Australian Alas! Janet Albrechtsen's splendid jeremiad against intolerance ("New religion, old hypocrisies", 13-14/7) contains one very bad false note. That is when she scolds Raelene Castle with this question: "Was she presuming to sit in judgment of a book [the Bible] that is thousands of years old, with a few billion followers?" Well, why not? Treating the Bible or any other text written in human words by human hands as divinely infallible is a kind of "religious correctness" that needs to be firmly rejected. One of the key elements of the great new reformation of the Christian sacred tradition that is needed today is the common sense recognition that the Bible is fallible and that some parts of it need to be flatly rejected while others need to be wisely re-interpreted in the light of the findings of comparative religion over the last two centuries and the coming together of the world's faiths in the global village in which we all now live.
Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic