Posts tagged god
Posts tagged god
As for Sam, he had from the very start had ideas of his own, thank you very much. When he was five, Howard had read the Adam and Eve and serpent story to him. Sam was at that point obsessed with defining, in all narratives, who was “the bad person,” and so Howard asked him whether in that story there was a bad person.
Sam thought about it very gravely. “Yes,” he said, his face serious.
“And who was that?” asked Howard.
“God,” said Sam.
I genuinely believe that the Catholic Church is not, to put it at its mildest, a force for good in the world… but I want, first of all, to say that I have no quarrel and no argument and I wish to express no contempt for individual devout and pious members of that church. It would be impertinent and wrong of me to express any antagonism towards any individual who wishes to find salvation in whatever form they wish to express it. That, to me, is sacrosanct as much as any article of faith is sacrosanct to anyone of any church or any faith in the world. It’s very important.
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It’s perhaps unfair of me, as a gay man, to moan this enormous institution which is the largest and most powerful church on earth; has over a billion, as they like to tell us, members, each one of whom is under strict instruction to believe the dogmas of the church, but may wrestle with them personally, of course.
It’s hard for me to be told that I’m evil because I think of myself as someone who is filled with love, whose only purpose was to achieve love and who feels love for so much of nature and the world and for everything else. We certainly don’t need the stigmatization, the victimization that leads to the playground bullying when people say you’re a disordered, morally evil individual. That’s not nice. It isn’t nice.
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Do you know who will be the last person ever to be accepted as a prince of the church? The Galilean carpenter - that Jew. They would kick him out before he tried to cross the threshold. He would be so ill at ease in the church. What would he think of St. Peter’s? What would he think of the wealth and the power and the self-justification and the wheedling apologies?
The Pope could decide that all this power, all this wealth, this hierarchy of princes and bishops and archbishops and priests and monks and nuns could be sent out in the world with money and art treasures, to put them back in the countries that they once raped and violated. They could give that money away and they could concentrate on the apparent essence of their belief and then I would stand here and say the Catholic Church may well be a force for good in the world, but until that day, it is not.
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I suppose I’m slightly disappointed that Ann Widdicome in particular should say, ‘Oh, I knew they’d bring up condoms and child rape and homosexuality.” It’s a bit like a burglar in court saying, “You would bring up that burglary and that manslaughter. You never mentioned the fact I give my father a birthday present.”
Yes! Yes! Are you getting the message? There is a reason we hammer home these issues, because they matter! There’s such an opportunity, owning a billion souls at baptism, it’s such an opportunity to do something remarkable to make this planet better and it’s an opportunity that is constantly and arrogantly being avoided, and I’m sorry for that.
Stephen Fry on the Catholic Church, Intelligence Squared debate
We do scant justice and honor to our God if we want, for instance, to deny that Mahatma Gandhi was a truly great soul, a holy man who walked closely with God. Our God would be too small if he was not also the God of Gandhi: if God is one, as we believe, then he is the only God of all his people, whether they acknowledge him as such or not. God does not need us to protect him. Many of us perhaps need to have our notion of God deepened and expanded. It is often said, half in jest, that God created man in his own image and man has returned the compliment, saddling God with his own narrow prejudices and exclusivity, foibles and temperamental quirks. God remains God, whether God has worshippers or not.
(via hitrecordjoe)
I’ll pray to you in secret, because so many people say that they’ve lost you or that they’ve found you, and I’m between those two things.
I don’t know what you look like, or who to really believe, but I know you can’t be cruel. Maybe you aren’t what they say at all. Maybe you’re just part of everything; you are who I am, and I am you also. Just like each one of us, really. People say they love you, and when you turn away, they gossip and fill your mouth with words you couldn’t ever have thought to say. It happens to all of us.
This spiritual dilemma - it may not even matter if you exist or not. Maybe it only matters that I still look for you under rocks and under leaves. Maybe it only matters that I search for something.
