ACTION SPEAKS LOUDER

There are a lot of petitions around at the moment. Have you noticed? I signed one about a year ago, to try to stop newspapers displaying topless models on Page 3 - something which I think has been anachronistic, disrespectful, disturbingly sexist, and ultimately harmful to society for far too long.

Ever since then, I've found myself on a number of mailing lists which have been trying to get me to add my voice to a growing collection of disgruntled signatories - from the furious people who wanted the BBC to reinstate Jeremy Clarkson (fat chance - he punched a colleague) to the incandescent masses who would now, it seems, quite like to swap Katie Hopkins for thousands of Syrian asylum seekers.

I'm not making a political point by the way, or even a personal one about she who should probably not be named - I'm just suggesting that whenever there's something unlikeable happening, these days the thing to do seems to be to sign a petition. If you ask me, the best thing to do is to stop talking about her if you want her to go away. Action speaks louder than words, and for her particularly, words, any kind of words, are like oxygen being poured onto a bonfire.

Anyway, there are a lot of petitions. The reason is of course, that if a petition receives over 100,000 signatures, the UK parliament has to consider it for debate at Westminster. In the age when signing a petition involves a few clicks on a website, it's not too difficult to get thousands of people riled up by something until the shiny-faced suits have to talk about it on Newsnight.

There's one going round at the moment which is designed to get the current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu arrested for war crimes. It seems quite under-researched and over-simplified to me, something which makes it either dangerous or completely pointless to sign. Again, I'm not making a political point about Israeli policy in 2014 or any other time; I'm just suggesting that you don't go around arresting the head of government of a particularly irascible nation. That would be like poking Vladimir Putin with a long stick.

So, a petition. It's a 'formal written request, typically one signed by many people, appealing to an authority in respect of a particular cause.' Thank you, Google. You may be a massive, bloated, tax-avoiding leviathan of a company, but you're pretty good at replying to my own written requests via your authoritative search engine.

I think sometimes, you've got to do more than just add your name to a list. If you want to see change in your world, you've got to get up and make it happen. We can't rely on petitions to change the world! They're good, and yes, public opinion can sway governments (we've even seen that happen this week) but I'm not sure we need petitions flying about for everything. Eventually, they lose their value. And anyway, there are things that we can do - join a movement, get out on the streets and start telling people what's going on if you must - but let's do something.

One way we can do something is by praying. You might laugh at that - but just like trying to make the world a cooler place by reducing carbon emissions, surely it's worth a go? What's the worst that could happen? The Bible says in fact, that we ought to 'present our requests' by 'prayer' and (guess what) 'petition'! But it's so much more than just adding your name to someone else's well-worded idea. It's presenting a formal request, your formal request, to the greatest authority of all, the most capable change-effector there is. And whether you believe it or you don't, he is actually listening.

So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to write a few letters to the almighty and add my name to the bottom. And then I'm going to go one step further than the angry keyboard warriors; I'm going to listen very carefully for a response and then try my best to do something about it in my little corner of the world.

I think action speaks louder than words.