Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Lambeth Conference


Canterbury Cathedral (112)
Originally uploaded by Wayne Huzzey

It is depressing to have to listen to the travails of the Church of England, which took up the whole of today's BBC Sunday programme. Really, it should not have done. From a world wide perspective, the C of E just isn't important.

Were it not for King Henry VIIIs divorce it would never have existed and it only got as big is it has because the British were colonialists. It claims to be both Catholic and Protestant, which means it is founded on an impossible proposition. Those of its members who think themselves to be Catholic and orthodox ought to get the matter clear in their minds and join the actual Catholic church, which would resolve their confusion. Those of a more Protestant inclination have plenty of choice - there are Baptist churches, more or less independent, where the emphasis is on Scripture. There is the United Reform Church, with a Presbyterian organisation and linked to the Church of Scotland. There is the Methodist church, which seems to be made up of perfectly reasonable people as far as I can tell. There can be few C of E members who would not be perfectly comfortable, or even more comfortable, in some other church.

The difficulty is that the break-up of the C of E in England itself would have important constitution problems. Where they would lead to is impossible to predict but it could take the country into dangerous territory. Business unresolved in the sixteenth century may finally have to be dealt with. But this is not the sixteenth century and the outcome will be very different than it would have been then.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...

Battery trains fool’s gold

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows. “I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair? ” My reply was as follows... Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre veh...