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Money $hot said "I...took my son to the Eucharist at Bath Cathedral on Easter Sunday, with the Bishop of Bath and Welles presiding."
First, the tedious pedantry; you took your son to the service of Holy Communion at Bath Abbey where the sermon was preached by the Bishop of Bath and Wells. What's the point of the smug correction? In the case of a simple typo, none. The question of who was officiating at the service is, similarly, an irrelevant detail of staffing and procedure. The absence of a cathedra, the dual see nature of the Bath and Wells bishopric and the precise status of the parish church of St.Peter and St.Paul in Bath is a historical curiosity with little import outside the ecclesiastical structure of the Church of England. Equally, the exact nomenclature of the service you attended merely serves to highlight the denomination of the service you attended, the collective belief of the faithful as to what exactly was being handed out up at the altar rail and the corporate branding , if you will, of the event. However, taken as a whole, I would suggest that these details might suggest that there were elements, facts, structures and relevant influences impinging on the narrative that you were unaware of.
Why bring this up? Apart from special pleading - Bath Abbey is the closest I have to a home parish and regular place of worship - the point is the homeless man you mentioned. If you'd walked around the corner to Manvers Street and the Baptist church near the station, you would have found the local drop-in centre for the homeless in the city centre. If you'd walking up Landsdown hill a short way, you might have come across the shelter and advice/advocacy centre. Neither of these services receive funding from the local authority, both are poly-denominational church charities. They were set up, maintained and supported by the churches of Bath for precisely the reasons that you mentioned in your post about the scriptural attitude of Christ to those that society chose to marginalise. The large congregations that the Abbey can generate on major festivals, the tourist revenue it receives and it's perceived status within the community all mean that the bulk of the funding and volunteer staff for the projects come from its elderly and dwindling congregation.
Point is, you friend may not have received any spare change from the regular attendees that passed him, but the bed for the night, hot meals, legal advice and protection that were all available to him within a short walk, had all been provided in no small part by the same heartless hypocrites. The lack of eye-contact or human interaction - well they're not saints. Sometimes even well-meaning people can be shitty. Sometimes, whatever your considered view of a situation, you'll miss a fellow human being because your thoughts are hung up on the extended family reunion that can overshadow the spiritual element of a festival.
They all gave money to the church though!
And, genuinely, most of them thought that this would help him more.
So, back on topic, what have we learned, children? That whenever this topic gets an airing, mostly what we discover is how much of what we regard as 'self-evident' is coloured by our assumptions, conscious or unconscious. 'Default' or 'natural' positions get questioned, the onus of proof gets batted from side-to-side. Baffled and slightly patronising cries of 'I can see why that's a comfort to you but why can't you see X?' go up from all-comers. Atheists and theists alike seem to see the 'other side' moving the metaphysical goalposts to skew the terms of debate. The theists posit a God and then demand the atheists prove a negative. The atheists request empirical evidence of a construct beyond human perception. Chicken and egg questions like "is divinity a construct of the collective unconscious' desire for a rational universal order or is the 'God-shaped hole' that so many people feel a reflection of a dim perception of a greater truth?' chase their tails like world-circling snakes.
I tend to see the question of the existance of God much like a koan or a divining mirror - our rational quest for meaning sheds more light on our own though processes, assumptions and nature than it does on an external reality. We look outside ourselves for answers and if we are honest, find little more than a greater understanding of our individual selves. Which leads us back to Jack Fear's journey. If reason cannot sum to faith, if the final leap to a divine is anti-rational or outwith the construct of experiential logic and/or debate, then is faith itself irrelevant, separate or misleading or is it rather an intellectual position couched in another language? It's like an equation where one side is a complex system of algebraic unknowns and the other a non-mathematical mystery where meaning seems clear but unfathomable: (x + ny) - god = fish.
I would suggest that we all can share in the debate, the quest or journey if you will, and that sharing experinces, arguments and thought patterns can lead as much to interest, screaming tantrums , incremental enlightenment or confusion as any social interaction. My two-penneth, however, is that any conclusion, be it theist, atheist, agnostic, denominational or individual, is a matter of choice, faith or supra-rational decision and as such is a personal pattern-marker. Revealing it can often illuminate or indicate connected thought trails within an individual's approach to the question, but it is rarely profitable to engage directly with the end-point which tends to prove resistant to external advocacy or short-term reasoning. |
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