Monday 25 July 2011

Ghana Looks Nice

I see via Thinking Anglicans that Ghana must be a lovely place to visit - just don't wear a pink triangle (although some might be forced to wear a pink triangle if government authorities, Christians and Anglicans in particular have their way. Well I assume they need a means to identify the people they want to persecute. It must be terrible to live there should you be one of those they exclude and would wish to round up.

I was looking at some of the Facebook comments received by Colin Coward by people who can hardly string a sentence together, never mind make an argument. No, it's not just because they are Africans or have appalling textspeak spelling. It is like they live in a different logical world as if this Bible they quote had one day landed on the world's lap and set up an instant book of rules, rather than being sets of opinions at times over time. This notion that 'God made Adam and Eve', instead of thinking about evolution and why evolution is more successful when it 'carries' minorities, and also about ourselves as self-conscious, speaking, projecting and therefore empathetic (unless some bypass is created, by the worship of power, dogma, force) animals. The difficulty I have is when Colin responds to them in roughly the same premodern language (except to say the Bible makes errors - but that's to half-accept their argument, to then say it has exceptions). It just encourages them.

But something else caught my eye about this hellhole for some called Ghana, and it is the contribution they wish to make towards completing or concluding the otherwise endless indaba project (as misinterpreted in Anglican use). It is this idea of contributing the wisdom of the matriarch to deciding something. Hell no, this really is not a good idea. Matriarchs and patriarchs in congregations and on committees - who think they are indispensible and cannot stand down - do untold damage in not letting a wider group move on and change, and the only reason I can think that you might want such a source of wisdom is that you don't want ever to move on and do something different.

I have a live track of Pink Floyd called Keep Talking, featuring a voice from a machine we associate with Stephen Hawking. Good idea. I thought this was Rowan Williams's idea too, if as a centralising process to create his project; but perhaps he welcomes ideas like this from places like Ghana in the advancing of his international Anglican Church, when it stops talking where it is, something that would be an ethical nightmare for all of Anglicanism. Ah, but the Church comes first; what the Church says is ethical say some postmodernists with a premodern outlook.

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