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

[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.