Thoughts on the Church of England

Recently, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury and wealthy former oil company executive who, compared to most in this country, let alone globally, lives the life of luxury, announced that the Church of England would be giving £100 million away to assuage the guilt that HE has decided it has, for its part in the slave trade.

I saw the article about it on Twitter and I made a reply which has, if not gone viral, certainly had an awful lot of views, an awful lot of likes, and an awful lot of retweets. I don't claim any great insight; I think it's a statement of the obvious. I said:

“what would Christ have done with all that money? Answer? He wouldn't have had it as it would have been given away to the poor as it came in. Think of all those in need of money now, and Welby’s concerned about slavery that WE, the British, pro-actively ended over 200 years ago? Justin Welby, as he repeatedly shows, is a political animal not a spiritual one”

My point then is, what on earth is the Church of England doing having £100 million spare to just give away on the whim of a politicised & therefore unworthy Archbishop?

I know they have old church buildings to maintain and the salaries of their (ever reducing number of) clergy to pay, but that has presumably been taken into account before this announcement, and anyway, having that much spare cash is utterly obscene and utterly out of keeping with the example given by Christ, that any Christian Church of any denomination should amass these kinds of sums of money.

The Church of England has now been ‘modernising’ for 60 years. And of course, when they use the word ‘modernising’, what they really mean is changing to fit in with the transient fads of a secular and increasingly atheistic society.

And what has this constant pandering to the secular atheists achieved in that time?

·        a 90% reduction in regular attendees;

·        An average age of regular attendee of over 60;

·        A reduction in available clergy of 25% (many parishes rely on retired clergy & reduced services);  and

·        Less than 50% putting “Christian” on the most recent 10 yearly national census for the first time

Now I thought it was common knowledge, because it's common sense, that doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results is a sign, if not of madness, then certainly of foolishness. But apparently not in the Church of England.

Now the one thing I would not accuse the leadership of the Church of England of being is unintelligent. However as Dr John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto has pointed out, it is perfectly possible to be very intelligent and also very foolish, and there is no contradiction in that whatsoever. Knowledge and wisdom are not synonymous.

For the last several decades there has been a group think among the leadership, - and of course via training, now among many of its clergy, - that you can describe as ‘secular’ in the broadest sense of that term.
More specifically a politicisation of the Church of England. And very specifically the following of certain politically left-wing secular, materialist & often atheistic societal fads & tropes.

It used to be said of the Church of England that it was the Tory party at prayer. This has not been the case now for many decades. It is now very much the Liberal Democrat party at prayer. Well educated, wealthy, middle class, out of touch with the masses, and pandering to every secular woke fad that comes along.
I’m afraid that, while the liturgy still uses ridiculously archaic terminology like, I don’t know, God, Jesus Christ, Holy Trinity, and recites the Lord’s prayer and Apostles creed (words suitably altered of course), it has become a mere veneer, trying to hide the Church of England’s blatant secularisation & politicisation encapsulated by, as I said in my opening remarks, the wealthy former corporate executive who lives the life of a king, certainly in comparison to Christ and his disciples, let alone 90% of the global population, Justin Welby.

Back in the late 1960s & early 1970s when the move was made away from the 1662 Prayer Book language of thees and thous, it was said that the old language is why attendance was falling. This turned out to be untrue and I suspect those advocating for it suspected as much and were operating politically. Politics rather than spirituality is behind most major change in ALL Christian denominations.

I highly recommend Andrew Doyle's new book ‘the new Puritans’, because the Church of England has now turned into a far-left puritanical cult.
What's the difference between a cult and a religious denomination? At the basic level, numbers! And when you look at the number of people within the population who attend church even once a month, let alone more, the numbers are fast dwindling to those of a historically relevant yes, but currently irrelevant, cult.

To borrow from people in the political sphere when they can no longer be a member of or vote for the party they have voted for all their lives, ‘I haven't left the Church of England; the Church of England has gradually left me.’

While starting from a lower base in terms of numbers in the UK, it is hardly surprising that the Roman Catholics and eastern Orthodox Church are not haemorrhaging adherents to anything like the extent of the Church of England or indeed, other secularising Protestant denominations.
What we are learning is that without maintaining the transcendent mysticism of God, the ethereal nature of Language and traditional doctrines, - secular atheism and politicisation wins out remarkably quickly. Indeed, the modern C of E has encouraged it.
Programatic secularism is the term that the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, used to describe this deliberate programme of gradual steps toward moving the church into the secular and away from its traditional spiritual doctrines.

So, the time has come for the Church of England to be disestablished, because the number of adherents and therefore its spiritual usefulness to Society, no longer warrants it.

Our new king, Charles the third, said recently that the Church of England has a special role in the life of our nation. All this comment goes to show is how out of touch he is with the reality. He is 75 after all. He’s living in the past. It used to have a special role but outside all the ceremonial function at coronation's, royal weddings and in his private chapels, which of course is all King Charles ever sees, it no longer does, as the latest national census clearly shows.
That being the Head of the Church of England is one of the props to the institution of the monarchy itself, is not a good enough reason to continue pretending that it is either relevant, or, required to have special status. It should be disestablished and made to stand, or I sadly suspect, fall, on its own two feet. I don’t like saying that, but we need to be honest about it.

The sad thing is that many ordinary members of the Church of England, those who attend regularly and give their time, resources and efforts to support their local church, are not like the hypocritical politically motivated leadership at all. They are being led by donkeys, hypocrites and charlatans who care more about political ideology, patting themselves on the back for how kind & caring they are in secular terms, than the poor.
Don’t tell me that the Church of England has got £100 million to give away for assumed guilt about something we abolished well over 200 years ago, and in the same breath tell me they care about the poor in their own society.
It is an arrogant elitist institution, or at least is being led by arrogant elitists, and that must stop.

The traditions, liturgy, doctrines and practice of the Church of England have gradually been watered down, secularised, over the last few decades. Why?
Supposedly to make the church more accessible – but accessible to whom?
To stay ‘relevant’. But relevant to whom?
As all the data demonstrates, to those who neither believe nor care.
In attempting to pander to secularists, political ideologues & full-on anti-theists, all the church has done is reduced the number of its formerly constant adherents.

And now, the C of E is setting-up a commission looking into whether or not God is gender neutral and perhaps we should stop saying ‘Our Father’.
So they will, presumably, be altering the Holy Bible itself, altering the words spoken by Christ himself when he spoke of ‘my Father’.

The Church of England just becomes more secular & more politicised, and shrinks ever toward a cult that cannot abide, let alone proclaim, its own God-given ethereal & metaphysical traditions in anything other than post-modern atheist materialist terms, which dooms it to reducing into oblivion at worst, cult-status at best – and that’s not much of an ‘best’ is it?

Thinking out loud on why the existence of a Creator is just as likely as not

 An attitude which you often hear is: ‘The only way to know, or experience, or believe in a Creator, would be through the human construct of material scientific evidence. We have no such evidence and so can conclude that no Creator exists.’

Now, while this is understandable on a basic level, I suspect that this is human-centric, hubristic, single perspectival thinking, which is almost the definition of foolishness, in cognitive science terms.

So here are my thoughts & conjectures.

My eyes can only capture a limited spectrum of light. My ears can only hear on a limited spectrum. The human brain is limited to the concepts and modes of thought that it is capable of reaching.

Think of an ant colony in the desert. It has neither seen a human nor can conceive of a being so long lived and so much more intelligent. We are beyond their comprehension. Yet we exist.

The universe is so vast, it is inconceivable to me that we are the only sentient beings capable of self-awareness, and high-thought functioning.

A Creator may be to us what we are to the ant colony. A Creator maybe in a space or have an existence our brains simply cannot comprehend. Other sentient creatures in the universe may have evolved further than us and may have a closer more direct knowledge of, and link with, the Creator.
We only have human language & human symbols to explain our understanding of what the Creator is to us, but they are not likely to be accurate representations. Maybe if we evolve to a higher level of understanding and consciousness, we will become more directly aware of the Creator and see the Creator more clearly.

Maybe, as our life span is to a mayfly, so our concept of time is but the blink of an eye to the Creator.
Maybe the Creator is one of a species of beings beyond our understanding.

But I think it's narrow minded hubris to look at this in a purely human-centric materialist way and say, like doubting Thomas, ‘unless I can touch it or feel it or see it or measure it, it doesn't exist. In fact it CAN’T exist.’

It's much simpler to think that way of course. Simple perhaps to the point of naivety and intellectual laziness. But in a universe this large and this unlikely, that way of thinking is probably human-centric hubris.

When those who don’t believe in a Creator/God say, ‘I’ve never seen a miracle’ OR ‘a good Creator would stop anything bad happening to anyone’, they are being superficial & simplistic.
Firstly, some people both throughout history & now, claim that miracles HAVE happened to them. Dismissing them as delusional or charlatans is an ideological not open-minded position. Miracles can take many forms.
Why is that so hard to accept?
And why should each individual not be able to decide for themselves whether or not an experience they’ve had is a miracle?
Why do the materialist atheists get to decide?

In terms of a Creator intervening to stop bad things happening, there are times when we interfere with lesser cognitive creature & times when we don’t.
So, we intervene in the lives of animals, we intervene in the lives of insects, birds etc but at other times, when we could intervene, we don't.
Does that ‘sometimes we do intervene, sometimes we don’t’ behaviour mean we're de facto evil beings? Does that mean we've ceased to exist?

People try and say that you either believe in evolution and rational scientific materialism (the doubting Thomas principle explained above) OR you believe in a Creator. But I don’t see that these things are in conflict unless you have a very narrow way of looking at the world and the universe.

Why is it so unbelievable that the Creator put the evolutionary process in place?
Remember, to the Creator, our experience of time may not be theirs. We think the Earth & Universe are incredibly old but it may be a matter of minutes to the Creator.

Why could it not be that the Creator is pleased that we are finding out how his creation works? Maybe even wants us to?
Maybe this is a journey of discovery that leads us to see the Creator clearly.

Science does NOT clash with the existence of a Creator unless we arrogantly & hubristically assume that we are the highest form of BEING, of knowledge & consciousness, and also that what we know now about the laws of physics for example, is as much as we can ever know; people 1000, 2000, 3000 years ago thought the same.
And why could it not be that there is another dimension where the laws of physics & time are wholly different?

Then there are those who claim we don’t have freewill. That the universe is simply the equivalent of a highly sophisticated pre-programmed computer game.
But a hypothesis like that, which serves no practical purpose, indeed is counter-productive, is what my father called ‘trying too hard to show how clever you are’.
We certainly behave, and MUST behave, as if we have free-will, so I see no practical benefit in claiming we haven’t.

BUT there is a downside to a Creator giving his creations freewill of course, which brings us back to the, ‘a good Creator wouldn’t let bad things happen’ trope.
The downside of freewill is that we will make mistakes, do bad things from time to time. However, these are hugely outweighed in number by the good things we do.
There are far more pleasant, nice, fair, honest, kind transactions between people every day across the world than bad or nasty or UNkind ones.
However, because the good outweighs the bad, because friendliness, kindness etc is the norm, we tend to ignore it; familiarity breeds contempt; we take it for granted to the point of forgetting about it.
The commonplace ‘good’ is ignored and the rarer ‘bad’ emphasised. Just look at the news every day.

And there is the possibility that for this world and our lives to be ‘real’, (i.e. meaningful), there has to be a genuine danger of failure and suffering. Further, to achieve ‘true reality’ that failure and suffering has to be actual, not merely pretend or threatened.
The spoilt brat has never known suffering and is the poorer, less societally useful person for it.

So, in summary, when we look at the vastness of our universe, it seems to me that a Creator, & one who intervenes sometimes & not others, is perfectly possible, even likely. We just can’t properly comprehend them, as the ant doesn’t comprehend us. And we are likely missing the point when we complain that the Creator doesn’t behave how we would want them to behave if they were human – they are NOT - any more than we are an ant.

All of my ramblings here are off the top of my head conjectures, of course, but then again, so are the theories of what sparked the creation of the universe, and what was there before.

It’s conjecture that there IS no more than our universe, and that there IS no more to the existence of the universe than the laws of physics as we know them.

But of course, we won’t truly know any of this until we die – what an adventure!