Well, One Can Dream...

[poliphilo]

The dream was mainly about being surprised. Usually when I dream I'm in church it's faintly nightmarish. I step up to the lectern and can't find my place in the Book- things like that. But this time I felt at ease. Suddenly there were no obstacles to my being a Christian again.

I had found a way of squaring my pagan/feminist/liberal beliefs with Christian orthodoxy. O joy. I had a home again. Gold leaf and gothic spires and friendly women bishops.

Forget it. In the waking world it's getting harder and harder to be an intelligent Christian. The yahoo fundamentalists are gaining ground- even in the dear old Church of England- and to be thoughtful about one's faith, to seek some sort of accommodation with science and scholarship and secular morality, is to run the risk of abuse and persecution.

The witch hunters are back.

It's one of the many ways in which the world has grown stupider since the turn of the millennium.

Comments

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

Come to Denmark; we have a female bishop... LOL

-And the C of D does still seem to be among the more liberal churches, even if it is an established / state church. (Medieval concept; will somebody please give me disestablishment NOW!!!)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm in two minds about establishment. It's because it's a State church that the Church of England has- historically- been so inclusive and civilised.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I went off-track, but I want to think a little more about the moment of truth in organized religions.

Taking a very broad view, it does seem as if Fundamentalists are gobbling up mainstream churches, but many people may simply be dropping out because the churches offer them nothing anymore.

As it happens, my mother and my daughter and I were together yesterday, and we began talking about Hell.

My mother said, "I find, at my great age, that I no longer believe in the divinity of Jesus. Then I worry about it, because I was raised a Baptist, and we were expected to know the hour and the minute we were Saved..."

And yet, she says, she prays all the time, to God.

I sense, she said, a loving God, yet there's also a God who tricks me by giving me a mind to think, and I do, and then I'm damned for it.

She says, Why do I go to Communion?

And then she answers her own question: because I feel close to God, through ritual.

--

I think we're living in an extreme time, a sort of Armageddon of the Church, when Zealots furiously defend their beliefs, while more and more people simply give up and drop out, because the mainstream churches offer them social interaction.

Underneath all the weird prayers (in our Evening prayer service, we ask God to protect us from Christ at the Judgement), there's still a yearning to communicate with and know our Creator.

Finally, our religion may be a personal, inner one.

There's no doubt that Protestant (and probably Roman Catholic) churches are undergoing a major shift. They may not survive. But something always will.

We will always need to surround the spiritual with structure.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

For a while- back in the 80s and early 90s- I believed in all that dawning Age of Aquarius stuff.

But New Age spirituality is so wishy-washy, so lacking in any kind of intellectual rigour.

At present I am without any kind of formal religion, but my dreams reveal that I hanker after it.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it's a good thing: At last we've reached a moment of truth.

The hysteria of the fundamentalists smacks of fear--the more logic and sense enters the arena, the more they howl and threaten.

I find it, BTW, grossly ironic that the Evangelicals are attempting to control our President and yet don't have to pay taxes because they are "nonpolitical." I also find it ironic that the government is stripping references to God out of its politics, yet panders to the Evangelicals:

From Time Magazine last week. (You might also like to read "25 Most Influential Evangelicals" from the same issue. Fascinating.)

"The early signals from President George W. Bush have been mixed. Bush's Inaugural Address brimmed with religious imagery, but abortion was the only top priority of the Christian right that he mentioned, in a fleeting and oblique reference near the end. He congratulated the tens of thousands of abortion foes who marched in Washington last week on the gains they made during his first term but promised nothing concrete in his second. The White House then backtracked from Bush's recent comments on the poor prospects for banning gay marriage, but only after major conservative Christian groups fired a warning shot, saying they might withhold their support for plans to revamp Social Security. "

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

So Bush may be distancing himself from the Evangelical agenda. I hope so.

It's essentially a negative agenda. Against gays, against Darwin, against feminism, against the sexual revolution.

Against- in short- the modern world.

[four-thorns.livejournal.com]

what are some of the other ways in which the world has grown stupider since the turn of the millennium? i am interested in your thoughts on this.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

1. The panic (fostered by Western political leaders) about Islamic terrorism. We are tearing up basic liberties in order to render ourselves "safer".

2. The related panic (this may be largely a European phenomenon) about immigrants and asylum seekers.

3. Neo-conservatism.

4. The cult of celebrity.

[butterscotch711.livejournal.com]

2. The related panic (this may be largely a European phenomenon) about immigrants and asylum seekers.

We certainly felt it here. It was the defining issue of our national 2001 election, and continues to be at the top of the agenda for both left and right - for the left because the detention centres we keep asylum seekers in are basically like prison camps. Our conservative government likes to engender this notion amongst Australians that ours is the only country in the world which people come to to seek asylum and we are being swamped.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The world is changing fast and we're afraid of change. We embody our fear in people who look different from ourselves and proceed to give them a hard time.

They're after our jobs and our women.
They are going to swamp us.
They're terrorists.

[saskia139.livejournal.com]

I can really relate to that dream, believe me. I'm an Anglican who just joined a Druidic Revival order. (http://www.aoda.org)

Whenever I dream of church, even if it includes people from my current parish, it always *looks* and feels like the church I grew up in.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I remember a TV play from long long ago called Stargazy on Summerdown. It was set in a Utopian 23rd century England and featured an institution called the Reformed Celtic Church, with priests who dressed in Druidic robes and led the community in prayers to the sun.

Now that's my kind of religion!

[saskia139.livejournal.com]

Mine, too! Where do we sign up?

*plasters self to window like a geranium because sun has just come out from clouds*

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We would need a Tardis I think.

[kaysho.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that more churches seem to be abandoning the "Big Tent" idea of Christianity (all are welcome who seek Jesus Christ) in favour of a model that could be described as, "Only people who are already just like us are welcome."

Which is sad, since it's defining your religion by the people you exclude.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The Church of England used to be defined by something Elizabeth I said. "I do not seek a window into men's souls". The idea was that so long as everyone showed up in the same building and read from the same prayer book it didn't matter what they believed.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

The United Church down the hill from my house has a sign that reads "For people of all faiths and for those of uncertain faiths."

If it's a Christian church (and I think it is, because they decorate for Easter and Christmas), it must be very watered down.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Prince Charles declared some time ago that he desired to be not the Defender of the faith but the Defender of faiths.

As if faith in itself were a good thing. "I don't care what you believe so long as you believe in something."

Prince Charles is a bit of a blissed out old hippy.

Faiths have content and sometimes the content of one faith is in direct conflict with the content of another.