Our Town, Smalltown

Individual interpretation of Scripture has lead tosome of the grossest discrepancies in history. When doing Crossroads it was quite incredible approaching settlemennts and with typical North American earnestness, seeing signs; "REPRESENTED IN SMALLTOWN, USA" and a couple of hundred denominations denoted.

What has this done for us?

What legacy has the European enlightenment left the Great Experiment?

This is quite farcical, but at least ecumenism is stromger in a country where religion has no cultural tags or remebered grievances.

 What happens in practice is that legalism is returned to and adherents become even more religous than that which they were trying to leave behind in Europe. Constructing a systemitic view of reality on the back of with a few 'trump card' scriptures as their base gurus soon rise; as well the inevitable hypocracies when the new laws that are constructed to keep order are transgressed. 

What equally disturbed me was seeing a child's Catholic Apologetics card linking,  "I will lead you into all Truth" with the majesterium. I have found on my spiritual search that one thing is certain - Christ and any othe prophets did not come on Earth to establish more rules. They are about providing plumblines to the divine which are generally not straight! Christ could have done easily given Divine sanction to the the Whore of Babylon, the Roman Emporer, but chose not to,streching out His Divine arms in the Ultimate show of vulnerability. As we have seen (in Justicio) great men and women are made to decimate established juridical structures - to 'sense' the need of the people to move on. In the same way evil men, like Joseph Stalin, have half a finger on the pulse of the people, lacking the full picture. The are only able to stay in power by lying about how terrible it is on the other side.  This is made even more apparent as we look to North Korea.

With the all of the world's information now available to any individual let us hope we are now on the verge of some incredible advances. As the Police at Downing Street apparently found out it is technologically and technically no longer possible to lie.