God in the Quad ?

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sejintenej
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Re: God in the Quad ?

Post by sejintenej »

dsmg wrote:What have the Romans ever done for us?
Medicine - their army medical work was only equalled in the 1800's Also they gave us MDXI

We really have to thank the Muslims who developed mathematics and changed MDXI into 1234....
What happens if a politician drowns in a river? That is pollution.
What happens if all of them drown? That is solution!!!
dsmg
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Re: God in the Quad ?

Post by dsmg »

Sorry, I was referring to Monty Python

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso
Play up Pompey!
rockfreak
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Re: God in the Quad ?

Post by rockfreak »

OK folks. Where is the CofE right now? I write this watching the evening news with a CofE Bishop trying to defend today's synod decision on gay marriage against a very angry lesbian activist telling the CofE to get up to date and come into the 21st century. He regrets today's decision but can't say when the church may change its attitude. Actually, as a 60s survivor I fondly thought we'd abolished marriage. I certainly put mine off for a long time. And as for the male gays I've known over the years, they wouldn't have qualified for a white wedding in church. No way. What was the point? You might have said that Gays are born free but are everywhere in chains. To say nothing of nipple clamps and lots of denim.
But OK, now they want to get married. It's very touching. Good luck. So what does the CofE do? Makes it difficult. Prevaricates. Shuffles its theological feet. You'd think they'd be pleased to still have people coming to communion and services in this atheistic age. A survey came out recently showing that a narrow majority of CofE communicants still vote Tory. For Catholics it's apparently the reverse. So maybe there is some truth in the old saying about the CofE being the Tory party at prayer. Giles Fraser quit his position at St Paul's Cathedral on a matter of principle over the Occupy camp and took a pay cut and a poorer parish. Rev Paul Nicholson (Taxpayers Against Poverty) in his 80s, refused to pay his council tax in solidarity with his parishioners in north London and went to jail. By contrast, when the Disabled People Against Cuts movement demonstrated outside Westminster Abbey, the pompous Dean came out and insisted they move because they were putting off the tourists from coming into his abbey. It costs an arm and a leg to visit Westminster Abbey these days, by the way, if you've tried it. If God, or indeed his Son, did indeed beach up in the Quad today - I wonder where they would stand? I'd say that I think they'd clamber up onto the statue in the Quad with a megaphone and shout: "Elitist boarding schools are unfair! Close 'em down!"
michael scuffil
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Re: God in the Quad ?

Post by michael scuffil »

If I were a Christian, I would despair at a church that thought the issue of same-sex marriage was even worth debating. If I were C of E, I would defect to the Orthodox, at least their churches are full, and their priests are married (to women). As I said, I grew up in a home that ignored religion. I am still personally indifferent, but long ago I developed an observer's interest. I would find the worship of a God who could change His mind to align Himself with passing fashion on the part of His worshippers rather repugnant. The C of E (or many of its members) seems to want to continually re-create God in its own changing image. When a fashion develops (as it surely will) for cross-species relationships, I daresay people will be clamouring to marry their dogs in church.

(The Emperor Hadrian had his boy-lover Antinous deified, which may have raised the odd eyebrow, but he would have been laughed out of town if he'd suggested marriage.)
Th.B. 27 1955-63
sejintenej
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Re: God in the Quad ?

Post by sejintenej »

I have moved away from C of E but a regular guest in France is an ex RC seminary instructor and priest who is now a retired circuit judge. He has written three books about his experiences and is pretty damning about Rome and how the church is organised and run. I also stayed with one of his pupils - now also an ex RC priest - a solicitor who works primarily for the poor and disadvantaged. Both are married with children and I have a lot of respect for their wives - very different but committed in their own careers.

Both are fully committed to God (the judge did the Campostello pilgrimage a few years ago when he was in his seventies and make excellent role models
What happens if a politician drowns in a river? That is pollution.
What happens if all of them drown? That is solution!!!
dsmg
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Re: God in the Quad ?

Post by dsmg »

The Pope is also pretty damning about how the church is organised and run.
Play up Pompey!
rockfreak
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Re: God in the Quad ?

Post by rockfreak »

I suppose much depends on how you define God. Some time ago I was having this very sort of argument on another discussion site and I asked, in my facetious way: "Who is this God dude? Does he support City or United?" Someone posted back to say: "If he's Jewish he probably supports Tottenham."
sejintenej
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Re: God in the Quad ?

Post by sejintenej »

This is RC but are any of the major Christion bodies any different?

"As I see it now at the end of my life, the kind of Church the Vatican and her episcopal appointees have been in the process of delivering, in the West at least, is riddled with a spray of deep-rooted scandals – a significant number of clergy who are criminals, and of high-ranking superiors who, in the name of Jesus and to protect his Church's reputation, have been moving them around, protecting them from exposure and from the short arm of the law. We have an excessively centralized Church which is choking the breath out of small, local communities. We are ruled by elderly men who persist in dressing up like chooks in funny feathers. Theologians, and others with a vision and a bag of pretty harmless ideas, are under constant threat of persecution. The dictates of natural justice are for others to observe and for the Church to preach, but not apply to its dealings with its own. Letters of complaint are ignored. The administration is strictly controlled by rules and oaths of secrecy. Membership is growing old. People are drifting away. The leaders are carefully chosen after they have proved themselves to be excessively trustworthy and sycophantic – reactionary, paternalistic and authoritarian – all men. They have not been listening to, or communicating with our modern world. The dead hand of clericalism, with its club rules, its spin, its closed ranks, its power structures are sapping the life and energy out of the Christian community. Tired old formulas constitute the test of orthodoxy and acceptance. Too much dogma. Too much wealth. Too many old men. Rigid. Dogmatic. Negative. Reactionary. Keen supporters of secular society's establishment, based on principles and attitudes inimical to the Gospel – power, privilege, suppression, secrecy, pomp and greed. Against everything, and with no real solutions to any of the world's problems – poverty, over-population, war, violence, corruption. Basically irrelevant.


http://www.catholica.com.au/gc4/cg/001_cg_300713.php
What happens if a politician drowns in a river? That is pollution.
What happens if all of them drown? That is solution!!!
rockfreak
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Re: God in the Quad ?

Post by rockfreak »

Going back to the start of this thread, can I suggest that the reason Divinity (as it was amusingly called - it's RE anywhere else) was so boring was because you were being asked to study and take seriously what are essentially a bunch of fairy tales which are, by degrees, charming, gruesome or downright implausible.And this a century after Darwin. As the Catholic recluse and author Karen Armstrong says in her book A History of Myth, you're not supposed to take this stuff seriously; it's symbolic. The Old Testament is particularly nasty and some of it consists of a naked propaganda push for a homeland for the Jews at the expense of others - which duly happened in 1948.
Can I suggest that the freedoms we have in the public realm are very much the legacy of the European secular Enlightenment of the 18th century. Freedom of action, of speech, an independent judiciary, due process, habeas corpus, freedom from torture to obtain confessions. Before then we were still in the dark ages. Witchcraft and heresy trials, religious persecution. One of the paradoxical effects of the Enlightenment was the gradual tolerance of other denominations. It became easier to be a Catholic or a dissenter. Bear in mind that the founding fathers of the American constitution were much influenced by the Enlightenment.
I believe that when the French philosopher Montesquieu visited London in around 1720 he said: "There is no religion in England. When you mention religion people start to laugh." Orwell made the same point when writing during the second world war. He said that the English (at least) were largely without religion. The upper classes attended church (presumably to set an example to the plebs) but that the common working man was largely without knowledge of the bible stories. It was part of our general national non-intellectualism. We simply didn't grasp big ideas. But Orwell observed that there was still a belief in private decency which the ordinary person then would probably have said was Christian. Christianity has gone through so many different phases in two millennia: sometimes charitable, sometimes brutal and intolerant. The trick is to say what has been salvaged and what can be said to still inform our national psyche today. Elsewhere, I tried to collect some NT stories which I thought the modern day CofE might present as a manifesto. A favourite quote of mine is one I heard from a veteran Catholic priest in Glasgow: "Stay well away from HQ". Which I take to mean, navigate by your conscience than by the latest edict from the Vatican.
sejintenej
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Re: God in the Quad ?

Post by sejintenej »

rockfreak wrote: A favourite quote of mine is one I heard from a veteran Catholic priest in Glasgow: "Stay well away from HQ". Which I take to mean, navigate by your conscience than by the latest edict from the Vatican.
Which is exactly what Chris Geraghty says - see my quote two messages above. That quote is a tiny part of one of I think five chapters which are hard hitting stuff.
What happens if a politician drowns in a river? That is pollution.
What happens if all of them drown? That is solution!!!
rockfreak
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Re: God in the Quad ?

Post by rockfreak »

michael scuffil wrote:In India they ... burnt their unfortunate widows on the funeral pyres of the deceased husbands.

I read somewhere an opinion that the abolition of this practice was the one positive contribution the British made to India. (I can't think of another, either.)

We gave them the game of cricket Michael. Along with teaching their own upper classes to speak in a faux English accent complete with colloquialisms which was later a rich source of comedy for the British TV industry in series like It Ain't Half Hot Mum.
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