The Church

 

Subject: The church


It was interesting, watching the coronation yesterday how the clergy still have the whip hand when it comes to bossing the place with ecclesiastical rights based on gods divine power over people. In the Abbey they ran the show not just the order of service but in the way everyone was subservient to them. It’s strangely medieval to watch these placid men (mostly men) floating around intent on effecting strange rights on people who seem bewitched by ceremony and ecclesiastical pomp. Robed men with strange headgear wafting around the stage performing their divine obsequiousness was an act we should consider dumping for something more modern, after all almost everything else is. Yet the church still seems to wish to mystify us, as was the fashion when the story of gods creation first broke, the cleric setting themselves apart from ordinary mortals in dress, as well as thought, swinging their incense burners and chanting a dead language which only a very few can follow. It’s an extension of the need for mysticism in telling a dodgy story which must avoid, at all costs, interrogation. The mournful chant lulls us into respectful silence as we sit, or kneel, eyes lowered to the ground perhaps embarrassed to consider the consequences of what’s going on in gods name in other parts of the world.
Cult and counter-cult has been the stage for a power struggle for men’s minds for as long as men realised they were an entity. The business of encapsulating minds into some sort of subservience was a characteristic of the struggle between the king and his people and the people and their god. Wars were fought and many thousands put to death or tortured in abominable ways in an effort to exact submission to a divine obligation wrought from a private conversation on a mountain top. The story of that conversation, repeated in a way that any modern propagandist would pay their weight in gold for still enacts its message through vaunted roofed buildings and enhanced acoustics throughout the world, preaching a multitude of religious idioms. From the Muslim muezzin to the peel of bells on a Sunday in the village church, the bond is woven tight “less you not forget” and the clerics still hold massive sway over the publics mind.
I suppose when set against the ‘political lie’ this feat of the nature of gods word and its teaching is much more benign but, as it is in politics, when humans subject it to their own ends we are in deep trouble.