Though Cowards Flinch

Whether old age or mere passing whim, I feel almost benevolent towards Christianity at the moment. I think in some part this is because, having escaped the vapid Christians and indoctrination attempts of my youth, I have met men of religious faith, mostly Anglican it must be said, whose views are consistent and educated, however much they may be diametrically opposed to my own. Don’t get me wrong, I still meet my fair share of Christian nutters but they are preoccupying me less and less recently.

In some measure this is due to the café culture of the southeast. One is a lot less likely to meet the pernicious evangelists of my youth. I would add that this is a good thing, except that here in a town filled with twenty thousand students, the eclectic faiths are much more common and are even more inane than the worst possible variant of Christianity. Sounding like a cross between a Dan Brown novel, piecemeal Zoroastrianism and a buffet version of Plato, they are the ultimate in individualist pretention.

Often I find Christians to be ill-informed and inconsistent in their viewpoints, but at least they make an attempt to bend their lives to their chosen moral code. With the heterogeneous mix of ‘faiths’ that exist around here, the views are basically constructed to fit the paranoiac fantasies and character quirks of the person doing the selecting. Historically ignorant, with no understanding of the sheer controversy of ideas such as “mind over matter”, this New Age bullshit should be stamped out.

Come the revolution and all that. Seriously though, I’m not a bloodthirsty Stalinist thought-policing type. I just have higher hopes of my contemporaries than the reality they achieve. Still, whatever I may be, at least I’m not using my website to denounce Harry Potter-creator J.K. Rowling for promoting witchcraft. Apparently Rowling is to be denounced for “undermining Christian belief” – and I thought bad writing was enough reason to dislike her.

One wonders, if we’re to refuse a £1m donation from J.K. Rowling on the grounds that she’s undermining Christian belief, what David at Methodist Preacher thinks of the atheists and Marxists in the Labour Party for whom religion in anathema? Are we to be refused membership because we identify with a materialist analysis that posits religion as a dangerous dopamine for the masses? It wouldn’t surprise me from a man who can approvingly quote John ‘multiculturalism has betrayed the English’ Sentamu.

Maybe I’m not feeling so benevolent after all.