David Cameron gave a fulsome apology -- again -- but clearly wants to draw a line under a murky period in a dirty war. But is justice served by openly admitting a catalogue of state-sponsored law-breaking and then denying full disclosure of that in a public inqury?

Or, as many have said, is it time to put the past into history and move on?

On this week's Sunday Sequence we heard from former Presbyterian Moderator, Dr John Dunlop, security correspondent and author, Brian Rowan, and former Victims' Commissioner, Patricia McBride, but, what do you think?

Pay attention to the moral language used by the chief medical officer: anyone who can pay "should" pay. Is Dr McBride suggesting that some people have a moral obligation to pay, even though they do not have a legal obligation to do so (at present)? Or is he making a more strategic, less ethical, point: we "need" people to pay if the NHS is to provide the services people expect?

What do you think? Do people who can afford to pay prescription charges have a moral obligation to pay? What kind of paying regime is consistent with the basic philosophy of the NHS?

Pirates, you soon realise, are everywhere. Their 'Jolly Roger' motif is found in the most surprising of places - skulls and crossed bones on baby bottles, skateboards, comforters and executive ties. There are pirate radio stations, pirated DVDs, members of the European Parliament from the Pirate Party - not to mention the swashbuckling, rum-swilling mutineers of the Hollywood franchises, nor their contemporaries who patrol the seas off Somalia.

My new book - Mutiny! Why We Love Pirates and How They Can Save Us - rose out of the question that pressed me: what, if anything, could all of these different pirates have in common? My hunch is this: pirates emerge whenever things that should be held in common are enclosed into private ownership.

The decision to 'turn pirate' was thus an act of self-determination. They would no longer put up with the awful inequality on board. Pirate ships were run on democratic principles, and 'booty' was shared equitably among the whole crew. If pirates were injured in service, they were paid handsomely from the common purse (a lost limb might gain them £20,000 in today's money). The clichéd picture of the pirate with the hooked hand, wooden leg and eye patch tells us that those who were injured or disabled were still accepted.

Yes, pirates were thieves, but their thievery was no more than what they had been trained to do, and no more than what the Royal Naval ships were doing on both sides too. Pirates rose up from a place of oppression and alienation, and created spaces within which there was freedom and equality. They fought to return the commons to the people.

We can see this same principle in the emergence of pirate radio, which grew out of the refusal by the BBC to broadcast any more than a couple of hours 'pop' music each week. We can see it in the work of 'Henry Hill the Book Pirate,' who published uncensored news 'for the benefit of the poor' and had his illegal printing presses smashed repeatedly by the Crown authorities in 1707. We can also see it in the way Somali pirates began - their fishing waters poisoned and emptied, and their waters now a shipping channel for container ships transporting billions of dollars of consumer goods to the West.

However, as well as examining piracy in the material realm, in the book I look at how pirates can function in terms of religion and personal development too. Drawing on pirate themes in Star Wars, Peter Pan and the Odyssey, I think we can see how pirates within literature function to help us break out of personal and spiritual enclosures too. Wasn't Jesus' mission essentially to break religion out of the enclosures that legalists had erected around it, and return it to 'the commons?' In the clearing of the temple, wasn't he removing the profiteers and gatekeepers who sought to make money from the faithful, freeing up access to anyone who needed forgiveness, regardless of wealth or status?

In a world where consumer capitalism is utterly dominant, it can be hard even to imagine spaces where the profit motive is not the primary driving force. But as we lurch from one economic crisis to another, and as the church continues to be rocked by revelations of improper use of power, it feels high time for pirates to emerge again and do battle for the commons once more.

Kester Brewin
Mutiny is available as a paperback, hardback and e-book here: http://www.kesterbrewin.com/pirates

The web has given a new voice to pro-democracy groups previously silenced by dictatorial regimes. It has allowed separated families to stay in touch. It has democratised education and changed the way we share new knowledge about the world and around the world. But it is also giving a platform to religious and political extremism. It has ushered in a new age of cyber-bullying and cyber-terrorism. And some brain scientists sat social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook can blunt our sense of morality and make users indifferent to human suffering.

Is the internet good for our souls (if you believe in such a thing) or a danger to our moral health? Tell us what you think.

You can listen again to that interview here. (Spool through to 62mins.)

A few weeks after the interview was recorded, Jonathan found himself embroiled in a public controversy about his own personal life, when a gay Christian blogger called Azariah Southworth revealed that he'd had a sexual encounter with him. Azariah Southworth's decision to "out" Jonathan Merritt appears to have been prompted by Jonathan's recent public comments on the same-sex marriage debate.

And Azariah Southworth has been explaining his decision to out Jonathan Merritt in a podcast interview with Peterson Toscano and Zack Ford.

Read more about the background to this story here.

In this week's Everyday Ethics podcast, I speak to Peterson Toscano about the personal dilemma now facing Jonathan Merritt (spool through to 19mins for both interviews)

You can also hear my interview with Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary (at 10.00 mins)

Listen again to Father of the Big Bang.

The first thing you see when you arrive at the $35m museum is very large toy dinosaur, right outside the main entrance. Inside, there are many more. Dinosaurs are a bit of a theme here. My guide, Mark Looy, one of the co-founders of the Museum (with Ken Ham and Mike Zovath) explains that dinosaurs were chosen as a key focus of the museum because they attract such intense media attention, interest children and young people, and illustrate some of the decisions about global history that need to be made by biblical Christians. And there hasn't been much of global history according the museum's young earth creationists: in essence, they agree with James Ussher, the 17th century Archbishop of Armagh, that the world was created just six thousand years ago (Ussher was more precise: 23 October, 4004BC). Which means that dinosaurs existed alongside human beings -- and they entered Noah's Ark two-by-two. (Maybe that's why one of the dinosaurs is wearing a saddle; visiting children can have their photograph taken sitting on its back.)

While ten full-time staff continue to work on the Ark project, more than 250 full-time staff are employed by Answers in Genesis in its various ministries, including the museum. Some of these are speakers and demonstrators, travelling to churches and schools across America (and sometimes across the world) to spread the young earth message.

Professional scientists, as you might expect, regard the whole thing as baloney: the Creation "Museum" is a pseudo-scientific theme park and the young earth theory is as far-fetched as astrology. But that dismissive attitude only seems to re-energise those working here in Petersburg: after all, the Bible they read tells them to expect the contempt of the world.

What struck me most about my visit to the Creation Museum was not the science (or pseudo-science, depending on your point of view), but the moral vision of this organisation. Part of the exhibit includes an alleyway covered in graffiti -- an image of a world that's lost its way. The narrative linking these exhibits tells a moral story: a world without the Bible will be plunged into moral chaos. In order to restore the world, the narrative tells us, we need to return to the Bible. And that Prodigal-like return involves us in a hermeneutical decision: do we take the Bible seriously (by which, they mean "literally") or not? Young earth creationists start with that commitment to read the Bible literally, as the inerrant Word of God; they then accommodate "science" to that a priori assumption.

When I talked to one of the Museum's educators, it wasn't long before she was linking their work to culture wars about abortion and homosexuality. This isn't surprising. Young earth creationists believe both are examples of the moral decay that results from an abandonment of biblical values. They fear a world in which non-biblical or post-biblical values might hold sway. That's why they resist modern evolutionary science so much: because it appears (to them) both to threaten the coherence and integrity of the biblical worldview and to devalue the explanatory power of the Bible in their hands. Since their faith is so fundamentally grounded in an inerrantist reading of the Bible, such a significant challenge to the Bible represents an existential and moral assault.

So far, I've been to Philadelphia (America's fifth largest city), Washington DC, Nashville and Dayton in Tennessee, Los Angeles and San Francisco. While in LA, I fell victim to that city's appalling air pollution: you can see the smog hanging over the streets. I caught a bout of acute bronchitis and had to spend eight hours in a downtown hospital's Emergency Department. It's nothing like "ER"; no, I wouldn't recommend it. LA isn't really a city; it's a clump of cities linked together by freeways. I visited Pasadena to meet Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary (now the world's largest seminary) and had lunch with three world-class historians of science at CalTech (the California Institute of Technology).

Also in LA and San Francisco, I met with lawyers and activists working on Proposition 8. That was the California plebiscite which introduced a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. When it passed, it was a great surprise to everyone, because California is one of the most progressive (and Democrat) states in the Union. Now, two of America's best-known lawyers, Ted Olson and David Boies, are fighting to have the ban declared unconstitutional. Olson was George W Bush's solicitor general, so he's not regarded as a liberal voice in America's culture wars. But marriage equality, he says, is about American justice.

I leave the Grand Canyon tomorrow morning and make the six-hour journey to the airport at Phoenix, then travel to Kentucky for a visit to the Creation Museum to take a close-up look at another of America's culture was: the battle over intelligent design, creationism and the science curriculum.

Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan chat in court during the Scopes Trial.

Scopes was convicted, though the verdict was eventually overturned on a legal technicality. The trial became the first to be nationally-broadcast via the new medium of radio. And Dayton soon became a byword for intellectual intolerance.

Dayton residents today are all too aware of the reputation the town gained in 1925, and many regret the episode entirely -- though most, it would have to be said, are simply uninformed about what actually took place. Dayton's tiny economy benefitted from the two-week trial for about the duration of the media circus, which was very short-lived. Those who concocted the scheme to bring the trial of the century to the town are reported to have regretted their own legal ingenuity before the completion of the court's business. The minimal financial boost was short-lived, but the reputational damage has endured.

Bryan, one of America's best-known politicians at the time (a Democrat, he'd served as Secretary of State and was a two-time presidential nominee), died five days after the trial, while still in Dayton writing a pamphlet about the significance of the case. He was buried in Arlington Cemetary with full military honours. But his final legacy in Dayton itself is Bryan College, founded in 1930 as a Christian university. Today, Bryan is a small liberal arts college with some 800 undergraduates and a full-time faculty of about 50 professors. It employs about 200 local people, and contributes about $35m annually to the Dayton economy.

Outside the courthouse stands a statue of William Jennings Bryan -- the gift of the college on the 75th anniversary of the trial. In the basement of the court you can visit a small museum commemorating the biggest thing that's ever happened in this little town. There you'll find picture boards and artefacts from the event that rocked the Roaring 20s; you buy a copy of the full trial record, or a facsimile of the local newspaper reporting the conviction of the teacher who, we now know, may never have even read any Darwinian evolution, let alone taught It. Walk upstairs and you can sit in the actual seats used by the jury or sit behind the actual desk where Darrow and Bryan piled their science books and Bibles respectively.

The Dayton trial teaches us many things about religious culture wars. Perhaps its greatest lesson is this: it prompts us to dig under the surface of a purported "encounter" between science and religion to find out what was really going on. That's just as true with Dayton and John Scopes as it is with Rome and Galileo.

That said, while I've been visiting Tennessee, the state legislature has passed a new law dubbed by some "The Monkey Bill", which just goes to show that some of the issues in the air at the time of the Scopes trial are still issues for some today.

Land believes the media in the US, with the exception of Fox News, is Left-leaning and biased in favour of Obama. He regards the President as a "statist", indeed a "socialist"' who has massively expanded the federal government. He explains: since the end of World War II, the US federal government's spending has averaged about 20 per cent of GDP. When George W Bush left office, it was 20.8 per cent. Under Obama, it's 25.6. Moreover, under Obama the US national debt increased by 50 per cent in four years -- from $10 trillion to $15 trillion. This isn't just an economic issue for Land, it's also a moral concern. He regards that scale of debt as a form of "generational theft". That's why he believes this next presidential election will be the most important for the US since Lincoln's election in 1860.

He speaks positively about David Cameron, but parts company with him on gay marriage. Many socially conservative Republicans here are struggling to understand why a conservative government in the UK would be campaigning in favour of same-sex marriage. Marriage is open to gay couples in a few US states but 31 others have already passed state-wide constitutional bans on non-heterosexual marriage (while, in a few cases, permitting civil partnerships). Land expects North Carolina to become the 32nd state to do so next month. He also disputes the new polling suggesting that more than 50 per cent of Americans are now in favour of gay marriage: people don't give honest answers to pollsters, he says.

Land will be supporting Romney, the likely Republican candidate, in the presidential election and tells me he believes most evangelicals will do the same. They may regard Mormonism as a cult,as Land does ("it's a cult, but they don't act like a cult"), but when the alternative is Obama their vote will go to Romney.

One of the chapters in Land's book The Divided States of America deals with America's special status in the world. America, he says, is not like any other country: it's less a piece of geography and more like a cause ("and that cause is freedom"). Land believes that "America's particular fortune has not been fortuitous; it is a sign of divine blessing". God, he says, has a particular and special interest in the American project: America is called to be a beacon of freedom in the world and God is personally looking out for it. Many in Europe will see that attitude (sometimes called "American Exceptionalism" or the doctrine of "manifest destiny") as part of the problem. Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, equates it with a "theology of empire". But Land dismisses those critiques: just look at the history of the United States, he says, and you'll find all the evidence you need that God is unusually interested in the progress of this place.

Rep. Pete Stark, America's first openly-atheist congressman

Religion is politically important in the US because this is a society with high levels of religiosity, at least by European standards. When asked how important religion is to them, 56 per cent of Americans say it's very important. The British figure is only 17 per cent. It would, however, be a mistake to conclude from this that America is unusually religious. By global standards, religiosity in the US Is mid-range; secularisation in Europe is the exception to the general pattern across the world.

The Catholic population remains stable (mostly due to Hispanic migration) at about a quarter of the population, and the 'other' quarter is made up of smaller religious denominations such as Jews (roughly 2 per cent), Muslims (0.8 per cent) and Mormons (just under 2 per cent). Statistically, the most interesting section of the other quarter is the 'unaffiliated'. This category is one to watch: it's growing significantly, and currently adds up to just under 20 per cent of the entire US population.

'Unaffiliated' includes non-denominational yet spiritually minded people (about 4 per cent), atheists and agnostics (about 4 per cent) and those who happily describe themselves as 'nothing in particular'. These figures come courtesy of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life; I spent a very valuable few hours this week visiting the Pew Forum at their headquarters in Washington, DC, and I'm immensely grateful to Alan Cooperman and his team their for their extremely helpful briefing.

Not that these religious 'blocks' are fixed and unchanging. There is considerable switching: one in every ten Americans is a former Catholic, and 44 per cent of US adults have changed their religious affiliation from their original group membership. Migration, as I say, is bolstering the Catholic population, but it is not significantly challenging America's overwhelmingly Christian identity. Contrary to what some culturally paranoid Americans may believe about how immigration is a threat to those values, it turns out that 78 per cent of migrants are in fact Christian.

It's always dangerous to try to predict the future on the basis of trends, but we might risk a few educated guesses. We can expect the Protestant population to continue to drop, and the unaffiliated category to grow. We already have evidence to show that the 'next generation' of evangelicals will differ significantly from previous generations in terms of the values that matter most to them -- which may mean an end to some traditional culture war issues such as gay marriage (which is now supported by more than 50 per cent of the American population). Contrastingly, recent polls suggest that abortion will continue to be a focused issue of concern, both for many Christians, both also, increasingly, as a mainstream concern.

New research from Pew also shows a statistically significant increase in the number of Americans becoming uncomfortable with politicians talking about religion, so future candidates for president or congress may feel less inclined to invent a religious history for themselves or to draw on their own religious narrative in elections.

One politician who is already down-playing his obviously very genuine religious narrative is Mitt Romney. He is clearly worried that his Mormon faith could alienate many voters, particularly evangelicals. I spoke to one leading evangelical this week who speculated that 25 per cent of US evangelicals would never vote for a Mormon (since they regard the church as a cult). But that speculation is challenged by other research which suggests that Romney's so-called 'Mormon Moment' is an issue for the Primaries which will recede in importance once we enter the general election, which will be dominated by domestic economic issues rather than religiously-based culture wars. Another evangelical told me, earlier this week, that he'd probably vote for Romney 'with a heavy heart'. If I had to make a prediction, I'd say that Romney's faith will not ultimately prove to be a deal-breaker for those evangelicals who typically vote Republican.