Changing Church Rules
July 8th, 2006 at 15:56
Word on the street is that loads of Churchy people are having a meeting to decide whether having women bishops is “theologically justified”. Apparently they’re going to have a look through the Bible again and see if the pros out-weigh the cons.
I’m fully supportive of female bishops, and I know that in Church circles, my opinion counts for a lot. I can’t see anything wrong with letting the bishop preach about feelings, cloud the big theological questions with needless indecision (“I can’t definately come and see you on Sunday, God, I’ll just act confused and say ‘I don’t know’ a lot, until something I can use as an excuse comes up, so I can’t see you anyway“) and get pissed off when someone happens to say something that might possibly be considered almost disagreeing with their irrational opinion slightly, in a very round about way.
It just strikes me as slightly… hypocritical, that the whole establishment can change their mind over something they’ve harked on about for centuries, when they havn’t had a message from God, they’ve just re-read the same book they’ve been reading for hundreds of years and come up with a different conclusion. It’s like when you go to see a film and think you really enjoyed it, but when one of your friends says that they hated it, and you’re too embarassed to have a different opinion to them, so force yourself to hate it too. Like The Matrix Reloaded.
It’s not even as if the Director’s Cut of the Bible has just been released, and God has stated unequivocally on the commentary that he thinks women bishops are alright. Followed by an anecdote about how they had trouble getting Moses to betray Jesus, as he was busy working on The Torah, so Judas had to step in at the last minute.
Apparently the sticking point is that the traditionalists reckon that Jesus only picked male disciples- and so there could only be male bishops. It strikes me as odd that they’re picking up on this one characteristic. All of the disciples wore old-timey clothing- why don’t they only let people who wear bathrobes become bishops?
Surely the fact that various tedious issues like this can change through time undermines the entire religious establishment? All of these morals, rules and stained-glass windows weren’t handed down by God as a series of absolute values and ways to live, but are merely pantomime that people only sit through as it’s tradition- like sitting through yet another football tournament where England go out on penalties? I’d be very surprised if God could care less whether or not I spent an hour or week in Church singing old songs- I’d hope he’d be more fussed about all of the murders that I have or havn’t committed.
Then again, what’s to stop the Church people reading the one book that’s important to their job again in a few hundred years time and discovering that two thirds of the way through, during the bit everyone skips as they give up reading and just read the last page, it says “Thou shalt plunge thy knife unto thine face of thine innocent pedestrian, as it’ll make a good happy slapping video. Go on, it’ll be a laugh!”?
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