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

[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.