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| Re: nonsense about Religion in England (241533) | |||
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Re: nonsense about Religion in England |
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Posted by soton si on Mon Aug 27 11:54:57 2007, in response to Re: nonsense about atheism, posted by RonInBayside on Mon Aug 27 10:15:34 2007. "Probably only about 10% of CofE churches hold to the 39 articles that form it's beliefs, and about 50% of them still just go through the motions, rather than engaging with their beliefs."So it doesn't serve part of the congregation well. Those dissatisfied will vote with their feet and find something else." Partially - the not bothered nature of those who are dissatisfied mean that they don't go somewhere else, they just don't go, and reject what they know of the teachings of the CofE church, even though that wasn't the teachings that they left. A lot of people moved to Catholicism, or different protestant denominations. Others just stop going and put Christian on their census form, even though they just do weddings and funerals. ""Funnily enough the ones that believe and live out those 39 articles are the places where the church is still strong and growing, however the Church and State try their best to silence them and ignore them." Maybe it's the other way around." Nope, it definitely is that the Church and State want to stifle these Churches, but the Church knows that it can't get rid of them, as they'd lose their credibility - I know of several churches where the church establishment dislikes them, but only keeps them in the CofE (even though these churches hold to the rules of the church) as they need the money to support the failing liberal churches. The state tries to stop these churches. One example is Greyfriars, Reading which, thankfully, managed to stop the deliberate putting of a very liberal Bishop in Reading (which would have meant all sorts of attempts to stop Greyfriars preaching it's message - the message that the CofE exists to proclaim), by the state and church authorities. I think they threatened to leave the CofE, and therefore the CofE wouldn't have this nice big church to subsidise other 'churches'. Another attempt, indirectly, was the Religious and Racial Hatred bill, which the Evangelical Alliance (which includes many of these CofE churches that actually are CofE, rather than just old buildings where someone in a robe reads out a book, with a couple of people responding in the right places, but none of them caring what they are saying) and non-religious groups failed to get passed in it's Labour manifesto form. The CofE leaders supported it, even though it had the possibility of making it illegal to publically state the 39 articles and say that they were true. The watered down version took just 30 minutes to draft, and basically removed the bits that would make religious conservativeness, in any form, possibly illegal. The form of the original was so badly thought out, that it's unlikely to have been malicious, but even so. However despite these 2 victories, Church rules and State laws are still, sometimes deliberately, trying to stifle conservative churches from having a say. ""CofE is the offical religion, but definitely not the de facto one," It's not supposed to be." the de facto official religion of the UK is "don't care", it is clearly supposed to be the Church of England, but it isn't. Clearly there's no point in having an official religion if officials don't apply it anywhere and legislation is trying to stop them applying it, in the very few cases that do. It seems that I overestimated the extent of the church-state divide in America, treating it as being like the one in France. I'm sorry for that, however you seem to have misunderstood the situation on this side of the pond as well. |
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