Invitation to a Close Encounter

Posted on by Vincent

I was invited to an evangelical-charismatic church service lasting a couple of hours. The invitation arrived by email:

“On Sunday, if you would like to come with us to our church (it is an experience not to be missed!) we would love it …”

The church hasn’t found a building of its own: that’s another story. So the congregation of 200 was seated in a school gym, facing a band (drums, three guitars, trombone, keyboard, female vocalist); a screen for the words of the songs and other visuals; lecterns, mikes. There was chatter, children wandering around, a sense of freedom & anticipation.

An “elder”—young man casually dressed like everyone else—cracks a joke into the mike, quietens the chatter, mentions the six different children’s groups in other rooms, indicating when the migrations to and from those are to occur. Then bursts forth the first thunderous song of praise, and the next, till we are all in a frenzy of jumping, clapping, rejoicing at the love of Jesus and our good fortune at being able to express it and address Him. All ages are represented here, including several frail white-haired ladies, who aren’t going to let age hold them back.

I wasn’t personally caught in this wave of joyful affirmation, certainly not this early in the proceedings. But I owed it to the sense of community, the general embrace, to be present, and not behave as if I had been dragged there in handcuffs. I was surprised not to raise any inner barrier, not to hold myself at a distance; but there was nothing to object to, really; though in the Church of England service, so traditional and nostalgia-friendly, my critical inner monologue is seldom quieted. The Jubilee Church, in its simple affirming way, its emphasis on Jesus’ love, its proud indifference to hierarchy, ritual and fine points of doctrine, provides all the critique I could desire— of other forms of Christianity. Naïvely, I thought at first it was a one-off manifestation, unique to this seaside town, but as the service continued, I realised that such an artless-crafty confection as Jubilee Church had to be a franchise. And so it turned out. Searching online, I have no difficulty in discovering clones everywhere, for instance here, in St. Louis, Missouri:

We are a group of people that love Jesus and are passionate about connecting people to Him.
. . .
At Jubilee services you’ll hear relevant music and teaching from the Bible presented each week in a compelling and applicable way. All of our locations run programs for children.

Expect God. We can’t change lives but Jesus can. We expect the presence of God in all of our meetings! God’s presence brings joy, healing, hope, and life. We come together to meet with and worship the Creator of the universe and to be changed by Him.

Expect Honesty. You don’t have the time to go to a fake religious ceremony, neither do we. Every sermon is real and honest. All teaching at Jubilee is from the Bible and applicable to real life. We don’t need gimmicks and hype, we need truth.

Expect Love. Urban, suburban, black, white, rich, poor, young and old, anyone can worship with us. At Jubilee, our vision is to grow in our diversity.

What to Wear? Come as you are. Let your tattoos show or wear a suit and tie. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t shaved in a few months or if you prefer a clean cut, you’ll have friends at Jubilee. Authenticity is important to us. God loves you as you are and we do too!

Can there be any negatives to this, I thought. Meet me in St Louis! We will dance the “Hoochie-Koochie”. I will be your “Tootsie-Wootsie.” People get together, the formula works, the energy’s generated, it gives a great feeling, they call it Jesus. They are gentle people, it won’t make them break any laws or offend their agnostic neighbours.

But when we arrived at the school grounds, a picket line blocked our entry with placards and impromptu sermons of their own in the form of  “Shame on you!” and so forth. All very English and more or less polite, perhaps because they were outnumbered by a bunch of good-natured English policemen, who had everything in hand, and looked relaxed. I imagine their role was to identify professional trouble-makers and stop them spoiling the fun. And if the police weren’t there, you can be sure the congregation would be boosted by some uninvited guests. One of the conventions of Jubilee Church is to let a person speak as the spirit moves. And since “authenticity is important to [them]”, I don’t know how they would deal with hostile heckling. I don’t think they would tolerate growing in that kind of diversity.

The picket line was actually a Carnival, if Socialist Worker Online is to be believed, which it’s not, I suggest, but I’m grateful to them for the pic and the linked report, which I believe more or less true apart from the spin. The background is this. A member of the Jubilee Church congregation has started a movement which aims to venerate human life from the moment of conception and give the unborn a voice, to say “let me live. Don’t let me be chopped up in the womb, my only destiny to have my little hands and feet photographed to scare fallen women (or at any rate women who have fallen pregnant), when they seek abortion, already agonised by the clash between maternal instinct and the practical demands of this tough world”. That’s my paraphrase of course, not the words of the self-appointed spokespersons for the voiceless foetus. Whoever provides the voiceover for the silent inevitably overlays his own prejudice upon the unknowable. Giving voice to the silent is a venerable practice, for God is silent, apart from the many prophets who have put words into His mouth.

The songs played by the loud band, accompanied by 200 ragged voices, interspersed by spontaneous outpourings of praise or prayer from the floor, could be seen if you like as the warm up for the pastor’s sermon. He’s actually called the senior elder, and it’s called a “preach” or a “talk”, but no matter. It was the best sermon I have ever heard, perhaps the greatest piece of modern oratory. His invitation to Close Encounters is recorded on a website. He links Adam’s longing for a partner, one of his own kind, to God’s; then mentions God’s covenant with Israel, which was like a marriage ceremony; then God’s longing, God’s love, expressed through Jesus, who chooses the Church as His bride. On the way he paraphrases Hosea 1:2: “And the LORD said to Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the LORD.” He represents the whole of Christianity as God looking for a loving relationship with us. He chooses his words carefully, stays very clear of saying “Everybody wants to get laid.” Still, he ends up suggesting that we each find a partner in the next ten weeks, if we don’t have one to hand, to discuss the ten-week project of exploring how God wants to love us. Using his own marriage as an example, he invites us to consider that in relationships, we have to change, to ensure they keep working. “Hint: God is changeless.” Ah. Homework for this week: find a partner to share your journey. Get together with another member of the congregation, but if they are already paired off, why not a threesome?

Though the “preach” is available online to download, remember that it came at the end of the service, after the invigorating warm-up. It may not be so effective consumed cold. Colin was preaching mainly to the converted, as is always the way, but I see it could work on “even those who say ‘I don’t even know if Christianity is true’”. Did it work on me? I felt the pull, the warmth of the invitation. An orator knows how to press buttons, knows we all have them. I’m a tough nut to crack, resistant to community. My idea of the divine is closer to nature-mysticism, and that flourishes in solitude.

Oratory is powerful. Crowds united in common purpose are powerful. They can wreak mischief as well as benefit. The strongest impression I took away from Jubilee Church was the energy awakened in its congregation. There was only one doctrine: that this energy comes from God, who wants to act through His Church to bring about His will. To this end the Jubilee congregation have linked with others in Lesotho and Albania for charity and missionary work. They are trying, so far unsuccessfully, to get their own permanent premises, so that they can work with the community locally, for example in youth work. And there is this business about “giving a voice to the unborn”, which has aroused a certain backlash, not just amongst the self-styled socialists. To its credit the Church distances itself from the initiative of its anti-abortion activists, whilst supporting their aims.

Doing good to people without them asking first, without waiting for them to accept offered help, without checking that they have the same idea as to what’s good for them—this is what we might call “do-goodery”. We could also call it, in some cases, being a damned nuisance. Botherations tend to generate opposite and ever-escalating counter-botherations, such as the one I witnessed. During the quiet parts of the service, the discordant sounds of the “Carnival” at the school gate could be clearly heard. More than one speaker wryly mentioned that it was salutary, not to mention Biblical, to suffer persecution.

So you could say that a good time was had by all, except some women who didn’t want to listen to their unborn child. They came to get separated from its voice, its growing and unwanted presence. It seems to me more likely that the anti-abortion people were more motivated by unsolicited do-goodery, inspired by the high energy generated in church, than what they call the voice of God.

 

53 thoughts on “Invitation to a Close Encounter”

  1. Sounds very Evangelical. I think I've been to a few churches like that; certainly seen footage of enough of them on TV. They're flourishing like hot cakes here in America. They usually sport the largest congregations, and their churches are stadium sized amphitheaters where the preacher has to be displayed on a giant scene screen above him, so that everyone can see. They're very dramatic and positive in their approach. They project an air of love and tolerance (although, as you touched on, someone of their political involvements suggest otherwise.) Still, all and all, they're one of the brighter, friendlier, brands of Christianity out there.

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  2. My breath stopped at the mention of Fernando Pessoa. I am hooked.

    I hope to read the entire post in bits, throughout the later half of my day. Much looking forward to it.

    🙂

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  4. Yes, Bryan, it was very Evangelical, but I felt one would not get the experience of this one on TV. You had to be there. It was so interactive, face-to-face, personal. I think it will stay small and persecuted, in accordance with the New Testament unconscious wish of its members; or the less fertile ground in this island, in which Christianity no longer finds a welcoming climate. Which is strange, because in accordance with the inherent nostalgia and olde-worldery of England, the Church of is still Established, still has the reigning Monarch as its Head (ever since Henry VIII in the sixteenth century, with a few hiccups like Cromwell.

    When I was a lad in short grey flannel trousers, we knew that the longest word in the English language was Antidisestablishmentarianism. That was 60 years ago. It still rules, even though the churches (whose stones have often been standing more than 1000 years), struggle to find the congregations to maintain their reason for existence.

    Jubilee Church could probably find one of these historic buildings going spare. But it wouldn't want that. Its strength is to show up the other churches as hollow. As I quote from the piece above:

    “You don’t have the time to go to a fake religious ceremony, neither do we.”

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  6. As much as I tend to eschew most organized religions, I am also aware that there are some much less odious than others. If their whole point is to make people fell good about themselves, then I approve. It's the ones who are full of hellfire and damnation and finger pointing that I curl my lip at. Like those twits outside with the signs. “You don't go to our church, so you are going to hell.” I'd be tempted to lob a few bricks.

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  8. Davoh, you're right. It is about communication and communion. Some people like to mix them. Communion with God at the same time as communication with others. For me, communion tends to occur alone and under the sky. Then I try to communicate it. Which is why I write this blog.

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  9. Rev, they might be glad if you lob a few bricks, so that they may feel persecuted, and all the more righteous. They like it that you think them odious.

    Where I disagree with you is in your assumption that the ones who are full of hellfire and damnation and finger-pointing don't want to make people feel good about themselves.

    All religion is about feeling good, it seems to me. Why else would anyone make the heavy investment? It makes people feel good to be a lustful wicked sinner when the get-out-of-hell card is freely available, and offers salvation, redemption.

    I refuse to judge because I know that the human animal is capable of imagining anything, especially the odiousness of one's enemies. One can get a great kick out of enemies. It seems that Jubilee Church is not averse to the thrill of enemies, & lobs its own bricks to encourage them.

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  11. Davoh, you're right
    Um,might be half sinister.

    There are, in my backyard, several flocks of birds. Known to me by the names of – Rosellas, parrots, pigeons, shrikes .. et al.

    I watch them squabble among themselves.

    have yet to see co-ordinated “tribal warfare”.

    … and human beings think animals 'stupid'?

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  13. (and please don't, at this point, push this particular discussion based on “real” into the practicalities, engineering, imagination; of 'flight into space'.)
    Ooops, apologies, Vincent.

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  15. You are right, of course. Those people set themselves up to be martyrs for the attention. Religious or ideological zealots of any stripe mostly just posture and scream for the shock value because they have no real lives of their own. And it would be hard to carry enough bricks to take them all out at once.

    But it's sure fun to think about it…

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  16. Dang, or should I say 'Snap'. I wish I had not encouraged you, Rev. We have an unwritten rule about comments … So I cannot tell you what the rule is. But you can guess.

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  17. Having now read the whole essay, I see that Fernando Pessoa has little more to do with your piece than as introduction. Still, it was nice to see the name. 🙂

    I simply can't abide the God-abiding. Religion should have nothing whatsoever to do with what is public or related to government. To each his/her own religion but leave me the hell out of it, please.

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  18. I struggle emotionally with what you say, Gina. I wonder why you say it here, as if the expression of hate for something, or at least wishing it out of existence, is some kind of stable position to take. Please don’t think I want to pick a quarrel with you. It is quite the opposite.

    My point in writing the post was to express how I felt, emotionally & rationally, during and after attending a church service which was alien to my prior experience but was endorsed strongly by certain people for whom I have the highest possible regard: a regard which transcends their beliefs and religious practices. I found myself able to empathize with the congregation, see them as no different from me. I find that to be an important part of living this life.

    It is not easy to acquire empathy. For five years I have lived in a little street with a mosque two hundred yards away, where many of the neighbours speak little or no English, despite in some cases having lived in this country since the nineteen-fifties or sixties – bearded patriarchs and shrouded matriarchs. Little children come every afternoon from all over the district to be taught enough Arabic to learn the words of the Koran. My neighbour, whom I consider as a friend, went to Mecca for the full pilgrimage, or hajj, and I saw how it has transformed him. I cannot understand Islam, I cannot understand the ways of the people who live in this street. They are closed to the ways of the society they live in, not assimilated at all. Some never acknowledge my existence, as if unfortunately they share their neighbourhood with the devil. Others are sweet and friendly, even though we are not able to communicate in language.

    I could never say that I can’t abide them. I am not a Christian, I have no duty of allegiance to Jesus and his teaching of “Love thy neighbour”, but I feel it as a profound imperative within me. And so I make the same internal effort every day, as I walk out of my front door. But it’s not a special situation. It’s hard to love, in general, hard to live with others, in general. I find them unknowable, but fall back on the belief – call it a religious belief if you will – that they are like me. And so, it is possible, with effort, to abide them.

    So I think that really, Gina, you also are like me, despite what you say. I certainly find myself very much like you.

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  19. Given the full context of what she's saying, I think Gina is referring to religious involvement in matters of politics and law, which here in America has become deeply entangled in the matter of religion itself and the tangles tend to have prickly thorns on them. The final sentence of her paragraph expresses a live and let live attitude, even if the first doesn't seem to.

    As exasperating as it can be at time, I almost can't really fault the Christians for their aggressiveness on some of these issues. From their point of view, they're sticking up for what's right unequivocally, and there's nothing in their code which calls for them to respect those who from their perspective are openly perpetrating evil.

    Take abortion, for example. Those who defend it argue that Christians should mind their own business and respect their right to choose. But that's easy for them to say. Choice is their whole position, hence the name “Pro-Choice” To the Christian, murder is being committed, and from their point of view there's no reason that they should stand idly by while an atrocity is happening.

    Consider the group NAMBLA, the “North American Man Boy Love Association”. I don't know if this group is still operating, but as their name suggests, they feel that there's nothing wrong in a sexual relationship between a grown man and a small boy. And since they think there's nothing wrong with what they're doing, they think people should leave them alone and respect their “right” to do it. Of course, to the rest of us who feel that there's something dreadfully, dreadfully, wrong with what they're doing, we would never dream of stepping back and letting them do what they wanted. Well, this is how abortion looks to a Christian. Whether we agree or disagree with that assessment is another matter, but our understanding of the situation has to begin there, not with the foregone assumption that everyone should mind their own business because “everyone” knows that there's nothing wrong with what they're doing.

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  21. Well, I didn't want to upset anyone but let me ask everyone a question.

    If I say I cannot abide blacks, or gays, or Jews; if I joke about lobbing bricks at blacks, or gays, or Jews, with the purpose of taking them out …

    … I'd guess you would be shocked. And why is that?

    If we substitute religious people, it's different, right? Why is that?

    To me there isn't a difference, and it's not about “causing offence”, not about political correctness.

    It's not even about treating oppressed minorities one way, and over-powerful majorities another, though some would see it that way.

    It's about prejudice: seeing types, when I ought to see individuals who vary from one another as much as everyone else.

    The prejudice arises from seeing a group, and judging them all from the actions (or alleged actions) of individuals.

    The prejudice also arises from “knowing how these people are”, knowing how they think, what they do and how they are motivated, as if they were clones of one another, or like ants in a nest co-ordinating their actions.

    Everyone is different. And yet we are each members of the common species, capable, if we try hard enough, of understanding one another.

    In an earlier, unpublished draft of this post, I considered saying something about comments, like hoping that it wouldn't become a forum for airing entrenched positions, particularly anti-religious ones. But I've always been very lucky with comments, & never want to discourage them.

    Sorry for this little sermon. Carry on saying whatever you like.

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  22. (I feel like I'm playing both sides of the net.) I suppose that some might argue that being Jewish or Black is a matter of birth, while religion is a matter of choice. Call it hair-spliting if you like, but you can't equate ideology with race. By that logic, Nazis, Terrorists, and say… Freckled People people are all “members of a group” and therefore all deserving of respect and tolerance on those grounds alone.

    Now, I'm certainly not trying to equate people of any religion with Nazis or anything else, and I certainly agree that we should respect someone else's beliefs insomuch as they respect our own. And I agree that your sharing with us your experience with the Jubilee Church shouldn't be seen as an occasion for people to air their grievances against religion. I saw that from the beginning, and I respected that with the 1st comment I left. And my 2nd comment was even meant to be somewhat of a defense of what's generally considered to be “religious intolerance”. It pains me as much as you to think that simply sharing the fact that you attended a church at someone's invitation should engender hostility in people.

    I'm just making the point that we shouldn't set up an argument where we equate disagreeing with an ideology or a religion or any people who have organized themselves enough to be declared a “group” with racial prejudice. A religion is an idea, or a codification of ideas, and as such, it's open to honest scrutiny and debate. A person's race is not. A decent person may, possibly, legitimately, think that a person is wrong for being a Mormon. No decent person can think that a person is wrong for being black.

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  23. And yes, I know that you're talking about lumping people together instead of treating them as individuals. This is quite true. But the matter of choice comes into this as well. Some people might be inclined to draw certain conclusions about someone who chooses to be a communist, in a way that they couldn't legitimately draw conclusions about a person on the basis of the fact that they just happen to be French or Asian.

    Should we then lump everyone together who decides to be a communist? Of course not. People have diverse motives for getting involved in such things, just as people have diverse motives for getting involved in different religions. So it would be grossly over-simplified to say, “All communists are like such and such” But yes, I don't think that would necessarily display the same level of bigotry as racial prejudice, because the matter of choice may give the person some legitimate grounds for drawing certain conclusions, just as one might assume that people who go mountain climbing might be athletic risk-takers.

    This are fine points of disagreement, but worth mentioning, I think.

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  25. Overall a somewhat resonant post. I am a current member of the Unity church, which, though quite liberal, still holds onto ideas that I consider a bit fictional. I joined near the end of last year to please my wife. We recently had an ex-baptist guest speaker / minister / performer, who “brought the house down.” Her enthusiasm was unbridled, her gusto, revivalist in tone.

    I found I enjoy the church, this church, even though I am not truly like-minded. I am inside, looking in from the outside at a place that I will never fully fit, but one I appreciate nonetheless.

    I found one more thing somewhat notable, as I believe it is a recurring theme with you:

    Doing good to people without them asking first, without waiting for them to accept offered help, without checking that they have the same idea as to what’s good for them—this is what we might call “do-goodery”. We could also call it, in some cases, being a damned nuisance.

    This comment, combined with your St. Louis reference, reminded me of a small anecdote I have not thought of in years.

    I don’t remember what exactly I was doing at Lambert airport in St. Louis now. It has been too long. I remember a specific event, though. I was waiting for my baggage to arrive. The bags fall from a conveyer where they are ultimately deposited onto a carousel. It revolves at possibly 1 mile per hour at most. That specific carousel, and the airport in general, was very crowed on that day. Bags from many flights dropped, mingled together in a confusing stew. It was difficult to verify which bag was yours without removing it from the revolving platform, which was also difficult.

    There was a girl there, apparently alone. She looked to be maybe 12, and I think mentally challenged. She also had limp. She stood almost due opposite from my position, right in the front row where the bags fall. Looking confused, she struggled to remove a loud multi-colored large duffle bag from the conveyor, and failed. It circled around again. She tried again. Again failed. Watching what I thought may be my own bag zoom passed me, I made my way to her position. Fortunately, my bag was headed that way also. It was hard to squeeze through the wall of people trying to claim their own luggage, but I finally made it there, where I found the girl still struggling to retrieve her luggage.

    When her luggage came around again, probably its fifth iteration at least, I pulled it off the conveyer and she took it. Even without it revolving past her, she was really too frail to handle it alone without great effort. I also got my bag. She and I walked out to the street together, where her family met her. The child whispered something into her guardian’s ear. Her guardian “blessed me,” and thanked God “there are still a few gentlemen in America.”

    Your words reminded me that I failed to apologize for my officious do-goodery, and now it is too late. I don’t know where to find her.

    I certainly have little use for protests (as a recent post will attest) I would never equate this tale with that of fetus, of course. What rights should be judge to belong to a fetus? For that matter, what rights should we force on anything that it too young to represent itself?

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  26. John, now you have reminded me of my own uninvited do-goodery which also both involved luggage.

    It was on the Paris Metro in 1962. I was bearded, wore a jacket which as everyone told me at the time resembled Fidel Castro's. I was too ignorant to have any idea who he was. It was a NATO uniform jacket I'd acquired cheap from an Army surplus store. I had no money and I'm sure it showed.

    A feeble old lady was struggling with a heavy suitcase at the bottom of the stairs which led to the exit. Nobody helped. My idea was to be self-effacingly humble, provide the help and clear off before the expected profuse thanks.

    I may have muttered “Pardonnez-moi Madame” before seizing the suitcase from her and bounding up the stairs with it, where I of course waited at the top guarding it till she arrived. There was a bend in the stairs. She may not have seen me waiting till she got half-way up.

    She was so feeble that her cries of “Stop, thief!” or rather the French equivalent, were hardly heard by the indifferent passers-by. She was so distressed, so out of breath, by the time she reached me, that I merely apologized as profusely as possible, and hastened off without waiting for thanks (or possibly, arrest when she got her breath back and called an official).

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  27. Bryan, I agree with you that we should not equate one thing with another, but to distinguish types of prejudice, on the basis of whether this or that kind of person had a choice to be what they are, carries its own problems.

    In general, Michael Jackson being the only exception, one cannot choose to stop being black. Apart from that, when you look at religion or political extremism, choices may have been dictated more by circumstance than reason. The default decider for most of us is to survive and swim with the tide; not to examine from first principles. This has certainly been the case with religion, normally parentally determined—At least till teenage rebellion was invented, which was actually in my lifetime. The OED finds no written use of the word “teen-ager” before 1941. And whilst there is a choice whether to practise paedophilia, the predisposition is inculcated by being the recipient of abuse in childhood.

    So unless we take all the world’s children away from their parents when they are weaned, to crèches run on right-thinking humanist principles, we must accept that choice is a bit circumscribed.

    But in any case, I cannot control my prejudices. Prejudice is one’s attititude , before making a judgement—pre judice—under due process, . Speaking for myself, I have strong prejudices, and in a sense I can’t help them. I’m proud of the positive ones. I struggle endlessly with the negative ones, because they are unfair. I don’t display them, because it would be unkind.

    But I say this more from respect to your taking the trouble to explain your views, than to stoke up the discussion with more controversy.

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  28. Yes, you're right to a degree. Religion is often more the matter of circumstances than deliberate choices. That was kind of floating around in the back of my mind as I wrote the above comment, and it even harkens back to my own statement on a comment here a few months ago: “They both more or less believe two separate, interchangeable, fairy tales, and they believe them for completely arbitrary reasons that are really just a result of their birth-place and the culture they were raised in.”

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  29. Oh, good!–That we can agree on things.

    It only remains for me to apologize to Dear Gina.

    Gina, did I wilfully misunderstand you? I want to say yes, because the alternative is to admit I am stupid. OK, I am stupid. I used you as the excuse for saying what I wanted to say anyway. By way of compensation, I want to dedicate a future post to you, which will be all about Fernando Pessoa.

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  30. I have no animus for anyone's professed beliefs. I don't discriminate against race, gender or even freckles. As far as i am concerned, you can believe whatever inane thing you desire. But the very moment that you try to impress your beliefs on me, indicating that I am living my life incorrectly because i do not believe the way you do, then the bricks start flying.

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  31. Sounds like Attitude & Pepper Spray to me, Rev, & I take it with a pinch of salt. I reckon you to be too kind a man to react disproportionately to such a mild form of aggression.

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  33. Geez, Vincent, you guys must have a charmed little world on your island over there if you assume that religious aggression is always “mild”. I'm reminded of Eddie Izzard's “Cake or Death” routine about how laid back the church of England is.

    Even in America, religious aggression is muted and restrained by our laws and our culture, and for people like Rev and I, it really is mostly a mild annoyance when it butts up against our interests. I'll grant you that.

    However, there are certainly places in the world where religious aggression is far from mild. You do realize that, don't you?

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  34. And you know, even though, as I said, religious persecution isn't by and large a problem here in America, how you know what Rev has had to personally deal with in his life? How do you know his father wasn't some Bible-thumping tyrant that beat him with the belt till he was black and blue and sent him to bed with nothing to eat if he refused to say Grace at the dinner table? I knew more than one person like that, growing up.

    But it's like you insist that such people don't exist, that religious people are always, always, always these kind benevolent souls, these “mild” aggressors who wouldn't harm a flea. Then you chastise Gina or Rev or John or me for having any hostility whatsoever to religion or daring to even suggest that religion might have ever caused the slightest problem in this world. You even went so far as to call us bigots above!

    Of course now, you're probably going to tell me that this is not what you said, or not what you meant. But when you presume to tell Rev that he's overreacting to what you assume MUST BE AND CAN ONLY BE a “mild form of aggression”, there really is no 2nd way of parsing it.

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  35. I’m glad you brought this up, Bryan. I think in some ways I do live in a charmed little world. And the reason I always try to use ‘I’ rather than ‘we’, is to rely upon direct experience and not assumption or hearsay. I’m glad you brought it up, the possibility of having been traumatized by religious persecution in the home, school or orphanage which amounts to child abuse, and which can have the effect of generating a prejudice whereby one declares hostility to all religion everywhere, or anything resembling one what sees to be the source of one’s own persecution.

    By the same token, a child subjected to sexual abuse may become a sexual abuser in its turn, or at any rate a paedophile in orientation.

    I am aware of and never cease to be astonished at things reported from America, in the spectrum of violence, intolerance and general aversion to reconciliation and compromise. I cannot pretend that they happen only in America. I’ve been to Jamaica too, and know from my wife’s experience (she spent her life there till we met) what is considered a normal religious upbringing, and what would be abnormal.

    The point I was careful to make was about the nature of prejudice. If my own experience were to include abuse of the kind you suggest, and it was completely associated in my mind with religion, then I would perhaps be prejudiced against all religion, or everything that reminded me of my own experience. But I would need treatment. It is too much of a heavy burden to take through life: on oneself and on the rest of the world. If I have been beaten black and blue through not observing a religious ritual, and take it out on others forever after, my mental attitude may be little different from that of some kind of terrorist.

    Now, since you bring it up, let me respond mildly to my reference to “mild aggression”. It was Rev’s sentence “But the very moment that you try to impress your beliefs on me, indicating that I am living my life incorrectly because I do not believe the way you do, then the bricks start flying.” I admit that the image I had in my mind was evangelists from America stopping me in the street. They hunt in pairs and wear suits. Their aggression is mild, because of course they are out to win converts. I brush them aside politely.

    But then I fleetingly wondered, dear Rev, if you were being more personal. Normally you respond light-heartedly, but there was threat in your mention of throwing bricks, as if to warn that you didn’t want to read anything positive about religion. Gina’s response was in the same vein.

    The historical influence of Christianity on America and Britain is profound. In Britain it has dwindled enormously, to the point where we have thousands of ancient churches, expensive to preserve, but most people cannot remember what they were ever for, or what relevance they had. You have to be well-educated, e.g. in history, to understand it.

    I can see that Christianity in America is associated with power. WASPS, white anglo-saxon protestants. I heard about them fifty years ago. That power is expressed in politics. Yes, but that’s a whole different argument, about the nature of democracy, majority & minority, and not about Christianity.

    There’s a huge danger, when considering religion, of treating it with prejudice, as if it were one thing, either Good or Bad. Or of getting a distorted, one-sided view, seeing only institutions, only outward observances, only beliefs. Of failing utterly to respect that for a huge proportion of the society you live in, people interpret their best, kindest and most moral feelings as having something to do with God.

    I did not of course call anyone a bigot. I talked about prejudice and accused nobody but myself. I won’t have that kind of brick-throwing here, Bryan!

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  37. Honestly, I got the same impression from Rev's statement, something like the Jehovah's Witnesses who come to my door. And you're right; that sort of thing is fairly benign. But my point is, you never can tell.

    As for me, I've had experience with religion that were far from mild. And note, I'm not talking about bad experiences with people who just happen to be religious; I'm talking about bad experiences WITH religion. There's a difference. For example, years ago I was mugged by a black man. He didn't do it because he was black, he didn't do it in the NAME of being black, and I don't hold the incident against all black people. Religion is a different story.

    Suppose in the above scenario with the father we replaced the Bible with the bottle (and I've seen plenty of THAT.) Witness enough of such a thing and you'd rightly conclude that alcohol was a destructive influence in people's lives. Well, I have seen religion destroy people, and unless you've seen it firsthand it's hand to understand the connection. And yes, I've seen religion be a positive influence in plenty lives too. But it isn't just a simple matter of people taking religion the “wrong way”, anymore than it's a question of people drinking the wrong way. It just doesn't gel with some people's temperament. It has a mean, nasty affect on them.

    So if someone like Gina says she can't abide relicgin, then I respect the just as I would if someone who had had bad experiences with alcoholism says they cant5 abide drinking. I know where she's coming from. To rebuke her for that would be like saying, “Well I've only seen people have a good time drinking so what's the harm in it?”

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  38. Well I can see that I’s possible to hold that point of view, because you hold it! There is often no point in arguing with someone else’s point of view.

    The point of view that I’ve expressed earlier that we cannot help our prejudices, but in so far as they are merely prejudices, based on limited and possibly traumatic experience, it is best to keep them to oneself and not declare them as if they have some kind of universal validity or justification.

    That is merely my point of view. I would apply it equally to the question of a general Prohibition on alcohol, or the suppression of religion in public or private.

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  39. No one's talking about a suppression of religion. I think you're missing the point of what I'm saying. It's just like how alcohol isn't bad all the time, or even for most people. It's just that you put some people together with alcohol, and it's like putting blasting caps with dynamite. Some people are like that with religion. And someone who's been in the blast radius of one of these people might have some negative feelings about it, and they might be shy about dealing with dynamite in the future.

    And I'm also trying to make the point that it isn't just like someone having a bad experience with someone of a certain group, and then developing a prejudice against that group.

    For instance, take this business with these priests molesting children. Now here is a case of someone having a bad experience with someone who just happens to be a member of a religion. The fact that the priest is Catholic is incidental. Although we could argue about celibacy, and how some people enter the clergy because they believe God can cure them of their deviant sexual impulses, I don't think that by and large religion is to blame for what these men did, because they weren't following their religion in committing these acts. Now, if there had been a passage of the Bible telling people to molest children, that would be a different story.

    On the other hand, there very much is a verse in the Bible which says, “Spare the road and spoil the child.”, and I have known plenty of people who have used that as an excuse to beat the ever-loving snot out of their kids. But again, the Bible can hardly be blamed for the excessiveness with which these people take to the task. But yet these people are turning to religion as an enabler. They believe that it justifies them, and it's precisely the idea of faith superseding sense and even what might feel wrong, that seductive simplicity in saying, “I just do what the good book tells me.”, the gives these people all the excuse they need not to explore their problem further, or to seek any kind of legitimate help. They convince themselves they're doing the right thing in the name of religion.

    Finally, we have cases like September 11th or the Jonestown Massacre. Now we could argue endlessly that these are misguided people who aren't following religion that way it's intended. We could also argue that people aren't supposed to drive when they've been drinking. That's not what you're “supposed” to do when you drink. But yet, if someone gets behind the wheel drunk and kills someone, you can't simply ignore the part alcohol played in the equation. Likewise, when a handful of men climbed into the cockpits of those planes “holy”, you simply CAN NOT dismiss the part religion played in what they did.

    So am I saying religion is a completely bad thing? If that's what you think, then I've failed miserably getting my point across. I'll say again, religion has been a positive influence in millions of people's lives. But it's been a devastating influence in many lives as well. As long as there's religion (which will probably be as long as there is people), things like Jonestown and 9/11 will happen, just because that's what religion does to some people.

    I'm not talking about outlawing or prohibiting anything. I'm saying that you have to acknowledge the bad with the good, which you seem reluctant to do. Time after time, you defend religion with this idea that it's some harmless thing that just makes people feel good about themselves- so where's the harm? If necessary, I'll scour your entire archive looking for quote after quote of you saying things like that. I'd rather you just admitted it though. My only counter-point to this is that that isn't the whole story by far.

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  40. I don't care for all this talk of “prejudice” either. There's a difference between a prejudice, and learning from experience. If I hated all black people because I was mugged by one black person, that would be a prejudice. I would be making a broad assumption about a group based on an common, incidental, characteristic of one person that wronged me. If, on the other hand, a person grows up with abusive alcoholic father and they LEARN that alcohol can have a bad effect on some people, this does not mean that they have a “prejudice” against alcoholics or alcohol. It means that they have learned something in their life.

    Likewise, if you have religious neighbors that refuse to take their child to the doctor because it goes against their beliefs and you watch as that child suffers and dies, and you SEE and you LEARN about the kind of tragedy that can possibly result when people cling to superstitions, that does NOT mean you have developed a “prejudice” against religious people. You have learned something in your life.

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  42. I didn't expect you to care for all this talk of prejudice.

    When I was at school, and even into my adult years, I remember discussing things with Christians. How did they justify this practice, that behaviour, this form of worship, that belief, and so on.

    The reply was always: “They are not real Christians.”

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  45. Not at all, Bryan. But–to repeat myself–we have different views. There is nothing wrong with that. I'm not trying to change your views. I don't accept all your arguments, but I don't have to analyse and refute them one by one. We can enjoy the conversation or not. We can learn from it or not. We can listen or not, speak or not.

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  46. Wow. See what happens when I go away for a day? From now on I promise to keep all of my bricks, real or metaphorical, firmly in my pocket.

    Didn't mean to cause a rhubarb.

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  47. Rev, bless you for the bricks! they have caused Bryan and me to fall upon one another's necks like Joseph and Benjamin, in a poignant exchange of private emails. Unless Bryan says otherwise.

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  49. We tend to think of squabbles as destructive, but I am not sure it is so. Squabbles create memories. If we overcome them, they create, at least in part, good memories. They create history and shared history creates a sense of fellowship.

    Bryan and Vincent are just bonding again.

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  50. (grin) You two are all about that male bondage thing, all right.

    There seemed to be an underlayment of hurt feelings, both in and out of this blog.

    Touchy subject, that.

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  52. Apologies, dear Rev. Temporarily removed. It is I who is having the mental breakdown, but all is under control, if I am mentally qualified to make that claim. All will be revealed, as the striptease artiste promised to the extremely Reverend Cardinal.

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