These contemplations were written in Vienna in May and June 1986. They are entirely unstructured and split into the separate sessions when I originally wrote them. They are, perhaps my first ever blogs although that long ago there was no www around to host the blog \ud83d\ude02 that is how old I am. They can be seen as an early attempt to “feed my ignorance” in precisely the way that this blog later took form. They are, of course, representative of my thoughts back then which have inevitably changed in many ways since that time.<\/p>\n
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Why has no-one found the answers? Why hasn’t God directed someone to the true meanings which would be enough to unite all religions ? These two questions seem to back up DC’s view that “God is the sum of your ideals”. There cannot, I believe, be a physical God. He is in some way non-physical and the above definition seems to be justified by the number of different Gods that there are present in the world. Is everybody’s God different? Yes, I suppose so. Everyone has their own idea of who or what God is. This is obviously going to prove to be a problem to any organised religion because all the members are going to have a different idea of what they are worshipping.<\/p>\n
Christians have this partially answered in that they have the example of Jesus to follow. He showed and told what the Christian life was about. Here we come back to the Christianity of the New Testament. I believe that Jesus’ teaching must be interpreted in the light of present-day circumstances<\/p>\n
The strict kirk upbringing in Scotland barred a number of things which were thought to be evil. The problem here is that, in general, things are not evil, they merely have the capability to be used for good or evil. <\/p>\n
To take an example – the use of Sunday. A number of things were banned on Sundays. This was done, presumably, because these things were evil. I would argue that in few, if any, cases can a total ban be justified. To show what I mean – You shall not watch the television on Sunday. There are a number of arguments against this. <\/p>\n
a) Why is the television any worse than the radio? As far as I know no-one banned listening to the radio on a Sunday. <\/p>\n
b) If the television is so evil, why are there so many religious programs put out on a Sunday? The church has the opportunity to make use of the media. Perhaps if more of the programs were stimulating rather than “Songs of Praise” it would make a positive case for Christians to watch the TV on a Sunday. This is not to knock “Songs of Praise”. It has its purpose, but, it is surely an unnecessary program for the active churchgoer. What he needs is not another dose of the same, but something that makes him think. Mind you, looking at previous parts of this paper, perhaps few active churchgoers would be interested in thinking about his religion. It seems to be more like a medicine with a nasty taste. You’ve got to take it, it does you good, but you spend as little time as possible considering it.<\/p>\n
c) Are the elderly and housebound sinning by watching “Songs of Praise”? Obviously not. Perhaps it gives them a wider insight into religion than a lot of regular churchgoers get, since they are being taken into different situations and denominations each week rather than the ‘safe’ local church they know and love. <\/p>\n
d) Television can be educational. I see nothing wrong in extending your knowledge on a Sunday rather than on any other day of the week. Of course there are programs which a Christian should not watch, but this isn’t a problem of Sunday as against any other day of the week. <\/p>\n
I could extend this argument but I don’t believe that that is necessary. There was no TV in New Testament times. The church must have some opinion on it. Some choose Thou shalt not. It is the easy answer. It illustrates how the opposition to Christianity has changed. These days there is a great chance of soaking up evil from the TV and other media, but there is little chance of being stoned in the streets of Bournemouth for your beliefs. Our present-day violent tendencies make it more likely you will be stoned for no reason whatsoever. <\/p>\n
The same arguments extend to all sorts of other christian “edicts”. Many are very applicable. Most were useful at some point in history. Few, if any, are forever relevant and quite a number have outlived their usefulness. I remember Brindley Boon telling Govan band and his congregation at Manchester that one of the orders and regulations of the SA, circa 1972, was “that only single bandsmen are allowed to chase runaway horses at openairs”!<\/p>\n
Now that is an example of the ridiculous. Not everything is so clear cut. This emphasises the need for the individual to order his own life and we are back with the conclusion of the previous two discourses. Only by deciding his own “orders and regulations”, to a greater or lesser extent, can any man get the right set for him. <\/p>\n
Whether the set which he ends up with is acceptable in the Christian sense is up to him to decide with God. No man can possibly know what is definitively right or wrong. Some things are clear cut, but many are very much in the grey area. To go back to the example of Sunday TV, if you asked a random group of people whether it was right or wrong to watch a performance of Bach’s “St Matthew Passion” on Easter Sunday on the TV you can only get two answers but a number of justifications including<\/p>\n
What a grey area. I have, of course, picked an example which is particularly borderline, but even moving further away from the border there are still a number of justifications on both sides. I’ve made my personal case clear and I can only defend it by saying that I believe it is christianly justifiable and that is the only ultimate deciding factor<\/p>\n
This particular discourse has ended a long way from where it started. The questions posed at the start are still unanswered, however the strongest point coming out, as it has previously, is that religion, christian or otherwise, seems to be personal and SK’s assertions about the size of the Church is being justified if for subtly different reasons. I would not defend the Christianity of the New Testament as the only possible Christianity, but if there are a large number of people all of whom have the same beliefs, it points to the fact that many, if not all, of them have not really explored their personal beliefs. This doesn’t rule out large Churches, since joint worship is always going to be helpful, but the larger the Church, the more likely that a large proportion of the congregation (a majority?) will be “passengers”. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
These contemplations were written in Vienna in May and June 1986. They are entirely unstructured and split into the separate sessions when I originally wrote them. They are, perhaps my first ever blogs although that long ago there was no www around to host the blog \ud83d\ude02 that is how old I am. They can … Continue reading “Contemplation No.3”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[83,103,105,119],"class_list":["post-3377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ignorance","tag-faith","tag-philosophical","tag-religious","tag-worldview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3377"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3408,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3377\/revisions\/3408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}