On the Horns of a Dilemma
Little did Western missionaries envision the future when they entered the Dark Continent and brought the salvation of Jesus Christ to the savages. Nothing held back their own savage determination to expunge any vestiges of a godless culture, a pagan way of life that knew not God.
The people of Africa, as elsewhere in the world found themselves accepting of the mysterious powers of a new god brought to them from afar, spurring them to abandon their belief and trust in their old gods through the ardent determination of the white man.
Now the God of the West is enshrined world wide, a gift from Great Britain, France, Italy and Spain, Russia and Poland to the world which had worshipped at false shrines. How ironic it is that the convulsions of a world-altering ideology brought Eastern Europe and Asia to its knees in adoration of a manifesto that left the worship of God in the dust. How like life it is that the ideology itself now lies in the dust of history, while God is once more embraced.
And now it is the tail telling the horns in which direction it need face. The world wide communion of Catholicism and Protestantism has its great vigour in those once pagan countries which were brought to Christ. And their tight embrace of literalism and their fanatic belief in the strictures of the structure of scripture are not to be played with.
While the place of religion in the daily lives of Europeans and the West in general has declined, it has become ever more important and more rigid where it was exported.
The church's anguish in having to recognize changing times in a rapidly changing world eager to embrace or merely to accept as acceptable that which formerly was maligned and spurned is playing to great acclaim in the theatres of the absurd. Religious fundamentalism is triumphing, reasonable acceptance of the kindness of the divine purpose is in steep decline.
Where Europe and North American wishes to accept the ordination of women, the Catholic church remains obdurate in denial. Priests and nuns must continue to marry into the church, leaving the possibility of marriage, of gender partnerships as nature intended, unfulfilled. Natural desires fester, become diseased and wreak their havoc on deranged hormones.
Where the Anglican church searches its collective soul over an egalitarianism welcoming same-sex marriage and gay ordination, insisting that this all brings them closer to the sanctity of God's purpose and the divine messages of His dearly beloved son, it struggles to accommodate and keep within the family the scornful but yet so plentiful members in Latin America, in Africa who will see no dilution of His great message.
To accept the more casual morals, the societal mores of Western thought and practise is to welcome an irremediably permanent schism between East and West, North and South.
What would Jesus do?
The people of Africa, as elsewhere in the world found themselves accepting of the mysterious powers of a new god brought to them from afar, spurring them to abandon their belief and trust in their old gods through the ardent determination of the white man.
Now the God of the West is enshrined world wide, a gift from Great Britain, France, Italy and Spain, Russia and Poland to the world which had worshipped at false shrines. How ironic it is that the convulsions of a world-altering ideology brought Eastern Europe and Asia to its knees in adoration of a manifesto that left the worship of God in the dust. How like life it is that the ideology itself now lies in the dust of history, while God is once more embraced.
And now it is the tail telling the horns in which direction it need face. The world wide communion of Catholicism and Protestantism has its great vigour in those once pagan countries which were brought to Christ. And their tight embrace of literalism and their fanatic belief in the strictures of the structure of scripture are not to be played with.
While the place of religion in the daily lives of Europeans and the West in general has declined, it has become ever more important and more rigid where it was exported.
The church's anguish in having to recognize changing times in a rapidly changing world eager to embrace or merely to accept as acceptable that which formerly was maligned and spurned is playing to great acclaim in the theatres of the absurd. Religious fundamentalism is triumphing, reasonable acceptance of the kindness of the divine purpose is in steep decline.
Where Europe and North American wishes to accept the ordination of women, the Catholic church remains obdurate in denial. Priests and nuns must continue to marry into the church, leaving the possibility of marriage, of gender partnerships as nature intended, unfulfilled. Natural desires fester, become diseased and wreak their havoc on deranged hormones.
Where the Anglican church searches its collective soul over an egalitarianism welcoming same-sex marriage and gay ordination, insisting that this all brings them closer to the sanctity of God's purpose and the divine messages of His dearly beloved son, it struggles to accommodate and keep within the family the scornful but yet so plentiful members in Latin America, in Africa who will see no dilution of His great message.
To accept the more casual morals, the societal mores of Western thought and practise is to welcome an irremediably permanent schism between East and West, North and South.
What would Jesus do?
posted by Pieface | 5:46 PM
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