I RECENTLY attended a day school about Creation Stories of the World – Dualists and Mysticists.

Our tutor was concise and witty but the concepts were complex and we were warned that 'our heads would hurt' by the end of the day!

We covered Zoroastrian Dualism, Christian Gnostic texts, the Jewish Kabbalah and Sufi mysticism. The contortions that the ancient philosophers and theologians went through to explain the parallel existence of good and evil were extraordinary and difficult to follow, as were the ideas expressed by the mystics.

Also challenging was a talk I went to a few weeks ago by Professor Jeff Forshaw on the origin of our Universe from a cosmological/theoretical physics viewpoint.

He covered new ideas around what happened before the Big Bang, the existence of an inflation field as calculated by experiment and computer modelling, which also blew your mind. This was a different approach to the question of the origin of our world.

However, at the end of the day, surely the important thing is not how we got here in the first place, but how we live our lives, that kindness and compassion are really what count in our world, rather than its origin.

Carolyn Jones

(Hon. Sec, Altrincham Interfaith Group and member of Dunham Road Unitarian Chapel)