linden@eng.sun.com (Peter van der Linden) (10/19/90)
If, like me, you travel through life hopefully and with an open mind for all new encounters, you surely won't be disappointed. So it was that last week I found myself waking up in the Earl of Wharton's old country seat in the Yorkshire Dales. I happened to catch some of the English morning news on tv, and an interesting interchange took place. The newsreader was giving details of a new church report that described how large numbers of young people are leaving the church and abandoning organized religion. Then the newsreader introduced a guest speaker to comment on this phenomenon. I was expecting a bishop, an inner-city priest, or at least a professor of religion. But no! To my astonishment, they wheeled on an anthropologist to comment on the religious crisis. I was flabbergasted... to me, this represented the clearest tacit admission that the BBC thinks religion is all a load of hooey, best interpreted as the superstitions of primitive people, and argued over not by archbishops but by anthropologists! It got even better from that point... The anthropologist said that he believed religion started to go downhill at the point when the supreme deity changed sex from female to male. If you go back just a few thousand years (claimed the speaker) the god model was feminine in nature; a wondrous, nurturing, caring, reproductive goddess. At some later point the model of omnipotence changed to masculine, and became aggressive, jihad-inspiring, awful, and hard. And that's where religion took a left turn downhill. Well, it's a great theory. The old pagan deities were the best. Has a kind of comforting veneration for tradition, doesn't it? Quite unlike anything you ever see on morning tv in the good ol Silicon Valley, eh? Flame on these ponderings all you like:- we'll just make more. -- Edited by Brad Templeton. MAIL your jokes (jokes ONLY) to funny@looking.ON.CA Attribute the joke's source if at all possible. A Daemon will auto-reply. Jokes posted instead of mailed often don't have a valid reply address.