Name and Shame

[davidn]

Over the past couple of weeks there's been a bit of (as we say) a kerfuffle in the Church of Scotland. I first heard about it through diarytypething and can't really summarize it better than she did - basically the situation is that an openly gay minister was democratically elected to be the leader of a church in Aberdeen, causing an uprising among the few people who didn't agree, and the result of their complaint is that an online petition (because those always work) from the wider church has gone up in an effort to overturn the decision by getting signatures from people who have nothing to do with the congregation that elected him.

Unfortunately it seems that the list is, firstly, large, and second, really quite efficiently moderated, and my own entry, from a Jim McBastard from the Church of the Holy Bigots in Texas, 100 years ago, lasted all of four minutes before it disappeared. But simultaneously usefully and depressingly, it does mean that we can check ze list of the real entries to see who supports the cause. After some tentative poking at names that immediately came to mind, hoping at each keypress that Firefox's search bar would turn red and eventually being relieved, I thought I was safe, but was then extremely disappointed to find that Manson Merchant was in at number #998. If he'd just waited a couple of minutes he could have got the thousandth. I knew him as a young-at-heart minister who was very popular with the youth group (for an example of his mentality, his method of punishment for having caught a girl in the boys' dormitory during a trip away was, after a mock trial in which I not-at-all-deliberately failed as her defence lawyer, to take her outside and 'execute' her via the medium of a large barrage of shaving cream pies), so to see that he seems to subscribe to this rather backward view was surprising to say the least.

Now, I don't believe that everyone on the list is... wrong, automatically, because a development like this would be difficult as it's quite a large move for the church away from some rules and values that it's meant to have held for a couple of thousand years. But when I was younger, our church was always more about its own community and acceptance of people (and any wrongness in my head a few years ago was never taught to me and was purely my own fault), and at that time I was completely unaware of problems like this being caused by somebody writing down what might have been some reasonably good health ideas a few millenniums ago. I've heard many suggestions for possible mistakes in translation and misinterpretations or loopholes in Leviticus before, and some of them are plausible, but... I think for the most part it's a lot of work to try and dodge around it rather than just admitting that we're oppressing people for no reason other than it says it in this irrelevant and obsolete book of laws (though I admit I wouldn't exactly say that on top of a hill under a tree in a thunderstorm, or anything).

Still, later this month as the unfairness of being able to have a decision overturned like this becomes clear, maybe it'll cause a huge split in the church whichever way it turns out. That would be quite exciting.

And as this post only contains borrowed content anyway, here's the most brief yet accurate summary of Top Gear ever, from stubbleupdate. Cheer up.

Comments

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

I think last week I was just really angry that some people were getting involved in something that has nothing to do with them - for example, the thousands of people from other churches and other countries who signed the petition. That, and the fact that Christianity is supposed to be about love and acceptance, so it seems contradictory that they want to openly denounce anyone. Maybe it's the influence of Catholicism on my upbringing (my parents are a "mixed marriage" and although they're nominally CoS, my mother's theology is well, interesting), but I've always believed that we're all a bunch of miserable sinners, so when people use their religious beliefs to justify going after one particular type of sin to the near-exclusion of all others, it isn't a balanced view of the teachings. Have you ever seen a church that put as much energy into campaigning against greed as some will put into the witch-hunts against sex education or gay couples? It comes off as a hypocritical attempt to make others' behaviour seem worse than one's own.

I'm trying to talk someone into staging a low-key protest during the General Assembly, because I've got a fantastic idea for it. We'll get a bucket of rocks - or possibly, for our safety and ease of transport, bits of sponges spraypainted grey to look like rocks - and invite the person without sin to step forward and throw the first stone. So far I haven't found any co-conspirators, but everyone thinks it's a fantastic idea.

[davidn]

It does sound like a fantastic idea - although potentially dangerous to your health with the first variant, if someone really does take it a bit too literally...

Acceptance and just... being a good person is what everything seemed to be about in the church I grew up with - the whole idea of religion causing splits in the world instead of bringing people together was something that I was to learn later on, unfortunately. And now that you mention it, I can't think of the more heinous sins being particularly campaigned against either - but I think that might be just because they're obviously wrong, and the things that those churches put so much energy into are things that have very good arguments for them and therefore need a bit of effort to demonize!

I've also just remembered that on the same trip away I mentioned in the post, somebody put a bottle of Tabasco sauce into the minister's tea. That'll show him.