“Clear Bible teaching on homosexuality?”

This is basically an answer I recently gave on a well known forum, and I felt it might be worth wiider exposure…..

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I’m afraid I would say that there definitely is “clear biblical teaching on homosexuality”.

The Bible doesn’t address ‘people being LGBT’ because from a biblical viewpoint, ‘being’ is not what’s going on. The Bible comes at it from a different perspective altogether. ‘Gay’ is not something people ‘are’ in the sense in which they are for instance ethnically different; if it were that kind of being there wouldn’t be a Christian problem.

Thing is, Christianity has no problem with men loving men or women loving women, right up to what David sang about Jonathan’s love being ‘greater than the love of women’. The issue is whether ‘sex’ is an appropriate way to express such love. And the logic of the biblical teaching is that sex is decidedly a heterosexual/male-with-female thing because that’s how God has designed it, the complementary anatomy that allows the couple to become ‘one flesh’ not only as a couple but potentially ‘one flesh’ in the children that may be procreated. What passes for sex in a same-sex couple is just inappropriate, a rather absurd misuse of the sexual anatomy.

And a very key point, this is not about mere ‘being’ and it’s also very much not something people can claim they have ‘no choice’ about. On the contrary, it is very much the point of sexual acts that they are things people DO, and when you do things, especially things as deliberate as sex, then they are CHOSEN BEHAVIOUR. Very much not like say ‘being black’ which truly is neither ‘DONE’ nor ‘CHOSEN’ very different to the usual gay claim or presentation.

Insofar as there is any underlying ‘being’, it’s not as simple or neutral as hair colour and the like, but is about complex matters of broadly ‘urges and desires’; and that puts ‘gay’ in a completely different moral category to things like ethnicity (which again please note is something people can’t meaningfully have ‘urges and desires’ about). On top of which urges and desires are so widely variable that one cannot say without qualification “Oh, I ‘naturally’ have such and such urges and desires, it must be OK for me to live them out, act on them”. Fine if your ‘urges and desires’ are things like charitable giving, not so good when the urges and desires may be to steal…

JK Rowling and Transgender issues

Following the Cass report on transgender matters thought I’d share this Twitter/X quote from JK Rowling and a few thoughts about her place in this

@jk_rowling

“You’ve asked me several questions on this thread and accused me of avoiding answering, so here goes. I believe a woman is a human being who belongs to the sex class that produces large J.K. Rowlinggametes. It’s irrelevant whether or not her gametes have ever been fertilised, whether or not she’s carried a baby to term, irrelevant if she was born with a rare difference of sexual development that makes neither of the above possible, or if she’s aged beyond being able to produce viable eggs. She is a woman and just as much a woman as the others. I don’t believe a woman is more or less of a woman for having sex with men, women, both or not wanting sex at all. I don’t think a woman is more or less of a woman for having a buzz cut and liking suits and ties, or wearing stilettos and mini dresses, for being black, white or brown, for being six feet tall or a little person, for being kind or cruel, angry or sad, loud or retiring. She isn’t more of a woman for featuring in Playboy or being a surrendered wife, nor less of a woman for designing space rockets or taking up boxing. What makes her a woman is the fact of being born in a body that, assuming nothing has gone wrong in her physical development (which, as stated above, still doesn’t stop her being a woman), is geared towards producing eggs as opposed to sperm, towards bearing as opposed to begetting children, and irrespective of whether she’s done either of those things, or ever wants to. Womanhood isn’t a mystical state of being, nor is it measured by how well one apes sex stereotypes. We are not the creatures either porn or the Bible tell you we are. Femaleness is not, as trans woman Andrea Chu Long wrote, ‘an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes,’ nor are we God’s afterthought, sprung from Adam’s rib. Women are provably subject to certain experiences because of our female bodies, including different forms of oppression, depending on the cultures in which we live. When trans activists say ‘I thought you didn’t want to be defined by your biology,’ it’s a feeble and transparent attempt at linguistic sleight of hand. Women don’t want to be limited, exploited, punished, or subject to other unjust treatment because of their biology, but our being female is indeed defined by our biology. It’s one material fact about us, like having freckles or disliking beetroot, neither of which are representative of our entire beings, either. Women have billions of different personalities and life stories, which have nothing to do with our bodies, although we are likely to have had experiences men don’t and can’t, because we belong to our sex class. Some people feel strongly that they should have been, or wish to be seen as, the sex class into which they weren’t born. Gender dysphoria is a real and very painful condition and I feel nothing but sympathy for anyone who suffers from it. I want them to be free to dress and present themselves however they like and I want them to have exactly the same rights as every other citizen regarding housing, employment and personal safety. I do not, however, believe that surgeries and cross-sex hormones literally turn a person into the opposite sex, nor do I believe in the idea that each of us has a nebulous ‘gender identity’ that may or might not match our sexed bodies. I believe the ideology that preaches those tenets has caused, and continues to cause, very real harm to vulnerable people. I am strongly against women’s and girls’ rights and protections being dismantled to accommodate trans-identified men, for the very simple reason that no study has ever demonstrated that trans-identified men don’t have exactly the same pattern of criminality as other men, and because, however they identify, men retain their advantages of speed and strength. In other words, I think the safety and rights of girls and women are more important than those men’s desire for validation. I sincerely hope that answers your questions. You may still disagree, but as I hope this shows, I’m more than happy to have this debate

This to me looks pretty rational – indeed Rowling is exactly the tolerant caring person we grew to love through the Harry Potter books.

I have a further thought – people opposing Rowling over this issue often scornfully say variations of “What does a fantasy author know of this medical/psychological issue?” Well I’ve been a fan of fantasy and sci-fi most of my life, and one thing I’ve realised is that the great fantasy authors paradoxically have a firm grounding in reality to make the fantastic elements credible. And ipso facto, one of the things I think a great fantasy author like Rowling can contribute is that I’d expect her to be good at spotting unhealthy fantasy in real life situations. Whereas I’d submit in the transgender issues it is the doctors and scientists who have been rather carried away into fantasy, bedazzled by what their surgery, hormones, etc can achieve and not noticing how far short of a true ‘sex change’ their efforts fall.

Anglican same-sex relationship blessings

Well, it finally happened – the blessing of a same-sex relationship in an Anglican church; in theory there’s a long way to go yet and this blessing was limited in its nature, but with a majority of the bishops backing this it is expected that before too long there will be full church weddings for such couples. But should this be happening?

1) IT’S NOT ABOUT LOVE….

Let’s be clear – there is no biblical problem about men loving men or women loving women. Nor is there a problem that there is quite a bit of physicality in the relationship – humans are physical beings living in a physical world, and in Christianity, though marred by sin the physical world is basically good and important, as indicated by the idea of resurrection of the body. We are supposed to appreciate the good looks of others – though of course in balance with other qualities. We are supposed to express love by embracing and kissing people. According to no less than King David the love between two men can be ‘greater than the love of women’….

However, we are not meant to have a sexual relationship with everybody. In Christian terms a full sexual relationship is for and with the person who you marry. As we see from the current controversy, ‘gay Christians’ are proposing marriage (including therefore a sexual relationship) for same-sex couples; opponents are saying that sexual activity is an inappropriate way to express same-sex love.

There is a point here that is often overlooked in these discussions. The regular gay ‘mantra’ is that ‘gay’ is something you ‘just are’, have no choice over, and so can’t help ‘being’. Supposedly it is like ethnic differences, black skin, blonde hair and such. Yet sexuality is very much about SEXUAL ACTIVITY, things people DO or at least want to do, deeds that they very much CHOOSE to do. And anything people can claim to ‘be’ in that context is not simple stuff like skin and hair colour but complex stuff about the urges and desires to do things. In fact I’d submit that morally and legally sexuality is in a whole different category to the things people ‘just are’, and the analogy to ethnicity etc. is a false analogy….

2) NOT A SPECIAL CATEGORY, NOT DESERVING SPECIAL PROTECTION….

Since ‘being gay’ is about something people do and choose because ‘urges and desires’, it isn’t and cannot be in the same category of ‘just being so’ as ethnic differences. On the contrary it belongs instead in the broad category of everything – not just sexual things – people do and choose to do. That category goes all the way from the saintly to the devilish. People have all kinds of urges and desires, which can seem to be ‘natural’ and irresistible, but to have the concept of right and wrong at all, things people do/choose have to be open to challenge and criticism and likewise those underlying urges and desires. It isn’t really possible to just say “Oh, I have the urges and desires to do (whatever) so it must be OK to act out those urges”. Well I suppose it is possible to say that, but there are very few people who would want to live in a world in which it is believed that the urges and desires of a Hitler or, say, the late Ian Brady, have to be accepted as OK just because they ‘are’.

Say it again to be clear – ‘doing because urges and desires’ basically covers everything we do from the good to the evil, but precisely for that reason the rights and wrongs are – and must be – open to question, and disagreeing cannot be automatically regarded as ‘hate speech’ or even hate ‘crime’. People can’t meaningfully ‘DO’ or CHOOSE things like being black African or having blue eyes, but sexual activity is clearly both DONE and CHOSEN so it isn’t in the same category, and when gays claim it is, and claim to be entitled to similar legal protection (not to mention right to legally persecute people) it is a false and badly thought-through claim.

They can of course be entitled to the respect and protection allowed in a tolerant society to people of differing views, religious or philosophical, and differing conduct as a result – but that is way below the kind of position they currently claim. They are indeed entitled to equality – but only equality whereas, in recent years, they’ve actually been claiming a falsely privileged position. This is potentially a serious civil rights issue in the complete opposite way to how gays present it….

Seriously, to make a case that God approves of gay sex, it is necessary to say that God positively designed the gay sex from the creation, as one of the things that in Genesis it says “He saw that it was good”.

It is also really necessary to accept the ‘gay’ claim that God “makes people gay”. But note that, as per the discussion above, the notion of God ‘making’ people to do and choose behaviour is a very different matter to God ‘making people black (or blonde or blue-eyed)’, a much more complex issue. And note the contrapoint that God absolutely does NOT ‘make people’ sinful, though clearly he can and does permit it.

And again, to claim God’s approval it looks as if the ‘gay’ notion must be accepted that they ‘have no choice’ – though given that we are very much talking about the chosen acts of sex, rather than things people ‘just are’ like hair colour, again the gay case seems over-simplified or muddled, or worse….

But what does it mean that God ‘makes people gay’? As I said above, simply people of the same sex loving one another is not a problem, nor is it a problem that they may embrace and kiss. The biblical problem is about the attempt of a same-sex couple to do same-sex ‘sex’, explicit genital acts. So to say God ‘makes people gay’ means something like this –

“God made ‘sexuality’ as a thing for males with females, designed complementary anatomy with purposes way beyond just enjoyable stimulation of certain body parts, purposes which include bringing new humans into being. An important part of human life to be treated with respect. In ‘making people gay’ God apparently positively deprives some men of the urges and desires to do and enjoy that wonderful gift, and instead makes them want, rather absurdly and pointlessly, to shove their male sexual organs up other men’s shitholes and down other men’s throats (and ‘lesbians’ to want to do almost stranger and more artificial things for them to imitate real sex)”.

And honestly, wouldn’t that be a rather weird thing for God to do to people?? And if he did do such things, wouldn’t he be a rather weird God? Do Christians really believe in such a God? In their desperation to argue for ‘gay Christians’, gays and liberal Christians fail to realise that for most people this kind of argument will be seen as a reason not to believe in God at all – at any rate the God as presented in the gay case. The traditional/orthodox view that gay urges and desires are part of the disorder resulting from ‘original sin’ is far more credible….

Needs saying that the ‘made that way/no choice’ idea does have an alternative explanation in traditional Christian theology, an explanation far wider than just sexual issues; indeed Paul’s discussion of this idea is a major part of the key text Romans 1, and the passage there about homosexuality should not be detached and isolated from this broader context.

In Romans 1 Paul effectively describes ‘la condition humaine’, the mess humanity is in which requires the gospel to straighten it out. He logically follows through from the initial human unbelief, which amounts to an attempt by humans to be their own ‘Gods’ and run their own lives outside divine control, and shows how this works out. He points out that having rejected the real God, men unless insane can’t after all kid themselves they are great enough to run their own lives, so end up inventing false gods, or in the modern world other things round which they integrate their lives and seek meaning – there is a reason why sporting and other celebrities are referred to as idols….

Disjointed from the true God and so from reality, humans find themselves also out of joint with the physical world, out of joint with the rest of humanity, and even out of joint within themselves, becoming ‘captive’ to undesirable urges and desires – the attempt to seize control from God ends up in a loss even of self-control, an inability to resist temptation over a wide field of activity, not just sexuality issues.

A Postscript

Although it is in many ways a logically rather different issue, transgenderism is another area where I have heard the argument that “God makes people transgender”…

Really?? Is a sane and loving God even remotely likely to “make a woman” by a process of making a person with a perfectly good male body, and then putting in that body a mind that is incompatible with that body to the point he is willing to undergo some of the most drastic (and expensive) voluntary surgery known to humanity to produce a body he is happy with???

And seriously, objectively the result is only superficially a ‘woman’ anyway…. What kind of god does that to people…?

As with the “God makes men gay” argument, though more extreme, believing God would deliberately treat people that way is pretty much an argument that God is unloving, insane and frankly cruel. Again the traditional view that ‘gender dysphoria’ is not God’s direct creation but another disordered consequence of human sin makes better sense and allows belief in a sane and loving God.

A PPS - yes, as we’re talking about Anglicans this issue has a lot of connected stuff about state and church; I’ve deliberately chosen to leave that aside for now to discuss simply the basic Christian position on ‘gay sex’.

A reasoned statement

…Albeit a brief one. On a forum I participate in I was asked to provide a reasoned statement and scriptural evidence for an assertion that a state church such as the CofE is disobedience to God… This was my response.

“Yes I think I can give such an argument though in the confines of this forum I can probably only give some key points and for at least one point I want to make I’ll have to link to a more extended treatment on my blog…

I’m actually going to start with a not totally scriptural piece of commonsense thinking. Jesus is the Messiah. To many Jews that meant a person who would be a military figure like his ancestor David and he would free the Jews from the Roman oppressors and go on to create a ‘Godly’ empire by military power…. A few decades after Jesus many Jews followed such a ‘Messiah’ into disaster in a war with Rome.

But hang on – suppose God’s ultimate purpose is not to coerce people into superficial unwilling obedience, or similarly superficial social conformity; suppose his purpose is a greater restoration, in effect to go back to the Garden of Eden with humans walking in a restored friendship with a heavenly father? Is military conquest and legal compulsion and social conformity a good way to achieve that willing change? Or might there be a different and better way?

And of course there is. Jesus states it in John 3 when he tells Nicodemus he must be ‘born again’ by the Spirit. John has already introduced the idea in chapter one when he talks of those who believe being empowered to be born again, ‘not of the will of man’. No secular state has the power to confer that new birth; it can only happen through faith. Involvement of the state is likely actually to confuse things; yes God can and does and has brought people to true faith in state churches, but it’s not an ideal situation, better to do it God’s way separate from state power and influence.

At the other end of John, ch 18, we see Jesus on trial before Pilate. Essentially the point here is that it is Pilate’s job to prevent Messianic/Christian states from happening, so if he believed Jesus had that kind of aim, it would have been “Straight to the cross with the rebel!” But that’s not what happened; Pilate (of all people!) came to be convinced that Jesus had a very different agenda and wanted to free Jesus. In the end he was politically pressured by Jesus’ Jewish opponents into crucifying him anyway, but still made that extraordinary gesture of ‘washing his hands’ of the affair… A key phrase in what Jesus said there was that ‘my kingdom is not of/from this world’.

I’ve covered the Pilate episode and its implications in more detail in my blog, and here’s a link

But Seriously… (2) In which Pilate’s exercised!

In the epistles and Acts the ideas are worked out further. Perhaps the most straightforward is in I Peter; in ch 2; 9ff he quotes an OT passage about Israel but deliberately applies it to the Church “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a dedicated nation, a people of (God’s) acquisition….” or to put it another way, yes there is a Christian nation in the world, but that nation is the Church itself. And in further exposition of how this is supposed to work, Peter elsewhere in the epistle compares Christians to the Jewish ‘Diaspora’, the Jews living outside Israel scattered throughout the nations, and uses of his readers a word which almost literally translates as ‘resident aliens’. He also tells his readers not to be ‘allotriepiskopoi’ – managers of other people’s affairs; I struggle to work out how we could do the ‘Christian state’ thing without disobeying Peter over that one!”

The Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence

This is a site that should interest anyone who follows this blog; incidentally they have in fact republished one of my blog pieces there.

The Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence is a study centre dedicated to working in the area of the interpretation of biblical texts of violence. It exists to promote and conduct high-quality scholarship, and to serve the churches in the UK and internationally by offering accessible resources to equip them to read the scriptural texts of violence well.

https://www.csbvbristol.org.uk/

https://www.csbvbristol.org.uk/2022/11/09/book-review-the-things-that-make-for-peace/

https://www.csbvbristol.org.uk/2019/03/26/guest-blog-christianity-revelation-and-violence-at-the-home-office/

Gay Equality

This is a slightly adapted version of a post on a forum I frequent; I was responding to a report of the Rev Richard Coles, retiring from his ministry and expressing disappointment over the progress of gay equality in the CofE.

In this new context I would like to make clear that as I see it the Bible (and therefore God/Jesus/Christianity) is very much in favour of same-sex love which can quite legitimately be very intense. The issue is rather about HOW such love can properly be expressed or in simple terms should such relations be explicitly sexual.

I also hope that I feel appropriately sympathetic towards Richard’s recent loss of his partner – but I cannot help feeling that interpreting their mutual love as ‘gay’ may actually have caused extra unnecessary grief and stress to them. So on to what I wrote for the forum….

Unfortunately Rev Coles has fallen into the standard ‘gay’ category error of thinking that ‘being gay’ is simply something people ‘are’ like being born blonde or being ethnically black African. And if it were so, well of course ‘gays’ would be entitled to the same kind of protection afforded to those of different race etc.

However, it is rather the point of things like ethnicity that they involve no ‘DOING’ or choice to DO anything, nor does ethnicity in itself cause anybody to do things other humans don’t do.

Whereas it is an extremely important part of ‘gay’ that it is about DOING things – the sex acts. And certainly, unless one is claiming some kind of insanity, doing acts of same-sex sex is emphatically chosen behaviour, not just something that ‘gays’ “just are”.

Of course the ‘gay’ response will be that nevertheless, they do the acts because of something they ‘are’. But there is a problem there; not only in relation to sexual acts, but pretty much anything else people DO and CHOOSE to DO, the underlying things they ‘are’ will not be simple things akin to hair or skin colour. If people are DOING something the underlying BEING will be urges and desires. And the trouble with urges and desires is that they are not automatically right just because you have urges and desires to do things. Urges and desires can be bad as well as good; no matter how strong the urges, no matter how seemingly irresistible even, it’s not automatically possible to say it’s OK to act out the urges.

And ipso facto, if the chosen behaviour, the DOING of ‘gay’ sex is about urges and desires, then ‘gay’ is really not in the same category as ethnicity, able to claim in effect to be put up on a pedestal beyond criticism, let alone be allowed to sue or prosecute (effectively persecute) those who disagree with them. Sure they can be entitled to the same protection offered to people of differing beliefs and therefore practices – but as the typical ‘gay’ treatment of conventional Christian beliefs shows, that protection is a long way short of it being a hate crime to disagree with them or challenge their chosen behaviour. Indeed bluntly by seeking to have people sued/prosecuted for disagreeing with ‘gayness’, the ‘gays’ have actually seriously infringed the civil rights of those who disagree with them.

Some often misunderstood legalities about ‘gay wedding cake’ cases….

I recently contributed this to a discussion on another forum about one of those ‘gay wedding cake’ legal cases….

A quick excursion into the legalities here – normally a business’s offer to produce things like cakes with slogans in not regarded as an absolute promise to make whatever is asked for, but as an ‘invitation to treat’ – the customer is then the one who legally makes a positive ‘offer’ in contract law terms, which the business is normally free to turn down. Racial discrimination has rather forced a modification to this in which broadly if the business would have cheerfully served a white person they’re not allowed to turn down a black person for the same service.

Gays have in effect claimed that they should have a similar exception to the normal rule, based on the idea that ‘being gay’ should be legally considered the same kind of position as ‘being black’. Right now this is generally accepted – as per my earlier comment on this topic I think that is actually a mistaken view and that when the issue is properly argued at a ‘Supreme Court’ level there will have to be an adjustment in the gay status – they will have to accept being merely equal as people with a different (but challengeable) worldview.

“Inclusive/Exclusive” and other questionable absolutes…

I’ve recently been involved in a forum where on some issues people treat words like inclusive and exclusive as absolutes – inclusiveness always good, exclusiveness always bad. But surely we need to be careful about ‘absolute’ use of words like ‘inclusive’ and ‘exclusive’ – some things are wrongly included and some things rightfully excluded (and vice versa….). Other words have a similar problem; ‘loyalty’ is generally a good thing – but loyalty to Adolf Hitler would surely be questionable. Or to put that more subtly, true loyalty to Hitler, a loyalty with his real best interests at heart, would probably have resulted in Hitler sending you to a concentration camp as ‘disloyal’!! We won’t be able to properly settle questions by using language carelessly….

Unity with Anglicanism??

This was a response I recently put on a friend’s Facebook page; his post concerned the claim often made by anglicans that “evangelicals have no doctrine of the church“….

The trouble to my mind is that the Anglican doctrine of the church includes the idea of being a national body entangled with the state – in outright defiance of Jesus’ declaration that his kingdom is not of this world. That also makes ultimate Christian unity extremely difficult because most other Christians don’t want to be united with the whole English nation and entangled with English law as the Anglicans still too much are. Work with the Anglicans yes; formally unite with them still united to the state, NO!

Coronavirus and Cygnus

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The ‘Cygnus’ exercise in 2016 was essentially a test carried out by the UK government to see how we would cope with a pandemic virus, and was based on a then recent flu virus which fortunately didn’t in the end affect the UK very much, though some thousands died in the US and one Donald Trump fired off a Tweet to the effect that if he were president in such circumstances there wouldn’t be so many deaths (hmmm! Yet another thing he got wildly wrong!)

A lot of you won’t have heard of Cygnus – I don’t recall hearing much about it at the time. (though I understand legal proceedings are under way to now force it to be revealed) Essentially the exercise showed us so lamentably unprepared and was so ‘frightening’ that it was effectively suppressed. And the government also didn’t actually do anything to deal with the problems the exercise had revealed, they just carried on faffing and posturing about that Brexit malarkey….

Now I don’t want to be too ‘party political’ about this – I’m pretty cynical about all our current crop of politicians and not sure any of them would have done better; and indeed Wiki shows references to enough having become known back in 2016 all parties were somewhat remiss in not following things up better. At the same time I definitely feel that the Conservative party had and still has agendas and attitudes which make them very much at fault; and for sure they can’t blame anybody else on this one. And I for some reason have a mental image that if one of the other parties had done such an exercise and tried to act on it by being prepared, Conservatives would have been protesting like mad about so much expense ‘just on the off chance’….

What Should Have Happened…?

The biggest thing, simply recognising the general threat; specialists in such matters have been warning of something like this for years and the Cygnus exercise was indeed based on a real event which was pretty bad and the exercise showed we weren’t ready even for that arguably lesser threat.

Of course some things can’t be pre-arranged. Each virus is new and some things can’t even be started till the new threat has been identified. But at the least there must be the research facilities ready for investigating new viruses and devising vaccines etc.

But there are things that definitely can be got ready in advance, things that are applicable, or very likely to be, to all such emergencies. There must be one way or another adequate stockpiles of basic equipment at least to deal with early stages of an outbreak, and it must be kept up-to-date. (And no, huge quantities are not needed initially, though maybe quite a lot – see the footnote on the implications of that ‘R number’ and how rapidly the number infected can grow; that could catch out a government that skimped) Government needed to have made the basic contacts with suitable companies who could supply the kit in large quantities when needed – rather than the farcical situation we’ve seen of lots of companies offering help when the outbreak is well under way and finding themselves waiting weeks before the government gets back to them.

And oh yes, finally in early May the UK announced it will ‘quarantine’ those arriving in the country from overseas – shouldn’t that have been happening literally months ago??

At simplest government must have anticipated and planned for what was hardly an unexpected event – as is shown simply by there being the Cygnus exercise….

When this is over we need to call the government to account for this lamentable lapse…. And I think a lot of our voters will need to ask themselves why they voted for greedy and selfish rather than for the real good of the nation.

Footnote – the ‘R number’ –

In discussions of how the virus spreads the ‘R’ number is the number of people infected by each person who gets the virus. If it is 1, then each infected person infects one other, who then infects one other and so on. If it is 2, then each infected person infects two more who themselves each infect two more. If the number isn’t a whole number then it’s a kind of average – obviously you can’t infect ‘half a person’ or, say, 0.7 of a person, but after the first person has infected at least one, then the subsequent infections vary and the overall average per person becomes say 1.7. You’d better hope, as you’ll soon see, that the number doesn’t get much above 2; ideally we want it to be less than one.

As an illustration of how things work, take a story (almost certainly not true!) told of the inventor of chess when offered a reward by his emperor. To try it out, get a chessboard, some bags of rice, some containers so you can get some of the later bigger heaps of rice to fit the squares without spreading, and kitchen scales so that when the numbers get boring to count you can just weigh the grains out to get a reasonable approximation.

To demonstrate R=1, put 1 grain of rice on one of the corner squares of the board; then put one on the next square to represent the 1 person he infects, then so on along the first row, back along the second row till you’ve done all the 64 squares. The total number goes up quite slowly, and just one person failing to pass on the infection will ‘break the chain’ and stop it….

For R=2, put 1 grain on square 1, 2 on the next square, 4 on the next etc., doubling each time. At first it doesn’t seem to bad; by the end of the first row, 7 doublings, you will have, if I’ve done the sums right, 128 grains in the last square plus of course all the ones from the previous squares (=256). But by the end of the second row, only another eight doublings later, it is, I think, just over 32000 grains in the square (though by then you’ll be weighing rather than counting) and 65000 grains altogether. But only the end of the third row, 24 doublings, you’re over a million and the final total (all squares added together) is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615; an awful lot. There wouldn’t that much rice in the emperor’s realm, indeed Googling tells me it’s over 1000 times the total global production of rice and in one version of the story the inventor loses his head…! (Current world population of humans, 6,000,000,000)

R=3 you don’t want to know about! Suffice to say it’s over 2000 just in the first row….

Footnote 2 – in the USA, President Obama set up what amounted to a ‘pandemic task force’ – which Donald Trump scrapped in 2018; he also it seems ignored a considerable book left by the previous government of things to do in a pandemic. This one failure probably makes him the USA’s most harmful president ever….