If Mickey's a Mouse; Pluto's a Dog; What's Goofy?

I note this week the sale of the century. The CoE Diocese of Truro sold a collection of pre-1800 books to a dealer for 36,000 pounds. They said they needed the room and nobody had checked one out in a long time. (Is there anyone who finds the thought of reading a book from the Henry Phillpotts collection exciting? -sadly, I do) The dealer who bought the collection made 500,000 reselling it - he's closed shop in London and is retiring to the country.

I received an on-line offer last week I fear doesn't have quite the same profit-making potential: spurred on by the Pope's move towards restoring Pre-Vatican II liturgy, a bookseller's offering 1958 Latin missals. Don't think I'm going to take them up on it with an eye towards re-sale.

Twenty thousand English parish churches, some a thousand years old, now lie unattended and locked up. Not everything ancient is as good as Henry Phllpotts library, I'll grant, nor as dubiously useful as Latin missals; what I bemoan most is the passing of the truly goofy: an absent-minded librarian that doesn't realize or ever bothered to know the monetary value of his books; the idealisticaly Book of Acts-communally socialist-leaning vicar who everyone affectionately calls 'red rev;' the Bobby on a bike cycling obliviously and unintimidatingly around the village square -- the lost world of the comfortably eccentric, not a gated nation of the differently suspicious and therefore dangerous and threatening other.

When I visited Cork, about a decade ago, walking down the High, the church bells announced twelve o'clock. Shopkeepers and punters alike headed to Mass. There was nothing forced about it, nothing arrogant; just a naturalness to what people customarily did on their lunch break. I was reading an article by noted skeptic Daniel Dennett where he said "religion is a powerful force in the world. Now more than ever. We need to study it scientifically so that we can anticipate its changes." It didn't feel powerful in Cork; it felt organic, like the description Eamon Duffy paints of pre-Reformation English-Catholic parish life. Yet, of course, in actuality, it's rubbish - there was never any golden age of peaceful villages, then or now. Truth, however, doesn't necessarily diminish the beautiful vision.

Evelyn Waugh wrote about a non-theological unscientific perception of faith in Brideshead when Charles Ryder asked Sebastian Flyte why he believed in Mary and the Virgin Birth. Sebastian replied 'because it's charming.' Sebastian's terrible mother echoed the theme when justifying her place in heaven despite her wealth by saying, 'It's not usual for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle but that's all part of the Alice in Wonderland nature of religion.'

It's the same kind of argument I made against Christoper Hitchens last week that I'll renew in opposition to Richard Dawkins now. In a review of Dawkin's God Delusion, in Skeptic magazine, Norman Levitt writes "that Dawkins gives little quarter to liberal theism, that is to say, the kind of undogmatic, difficent, and even diluted faith, that finds it easy to coexist with atheism in a social context, that eschews high pressure proselytizing, and that offers no objection to evolutionary biology or cosmology or to science in general. In other words, he finds it contemptible that theological propositions get an epistemological free pass even when the theology in question is easygoing and gracious to those who don't accept it."

I plead guilty.

Levitt goes on to write, "What if hypothetically it were possible to create and propagate a religion that really did evoke honesty, kindliness, self-sacrifice, and even tolerance in most of its adherents?"

Bingo. That's it - that's what Dennett, Levitt, Hitchens, Hawkins and the other presently notorious atheists don't get. It's not a matter of a lack of scientific proof and evidence. If the physical questions are essentially unknowable, anyway, who cares about evidence? To follow up Levitt, a non-harmful faith is possible, and perhaps more the norm than not, even if it's never fully universally achieved, the belief in the potential hope of it negates their arguments by rendering them irrelevant. It's the same argument I hold against Scriptural literalism - if you don't insist it's all true in the first place, you don't need to defend it, as much as glean it for wisdom and apply it if you can.

The closest I can describe it in theological and historical terms is from the viewpoint of latitudinarianism, a practice that broadly characterized the Anglican Church in Victorian times, as described by A.N. Wilson in "God's Funeral." Many priests of the day prefaced the Nicene Creed by stating, "I'm prepared to live my life as if," -I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty," etc. Highly charged Anglican litmus-test partisans today would immediately initiate schism against any denomination possessing such a non-doctrinal, non-authoritarian mindset.

The pre-split parish I attended was at its best when it was at its goofiest. When our forget priest got frequently lost in the middle of the sermon and laughed heartily. When the acolyte caught the fire retardent sleeve of his vestment on fire after we'd all been put to sleep by the Taize service. When the girls in youth group cooperatively built cardboard condominiums during an all night lock-in to simulate homelessness while the boys confidently built isolated shacks that collasped within an hour. When I donned the most pathetic Easter Bunny costume in the world and couldn't stop the ears from flopping into my eyes. When one of our girls fell out of the relatively safe bleachers at the evening program on a mission trip after working fixing a dangerous roof all day.

By the time the vestry required members to sign a statement attesting to their doctrinal beliefs, they'd succeeding in choking the very life out of it. There was no room for amazement in the presence of an awesome God; no joy; little humanity.

When Jesus asked Peter if He could wash his feet and Peter said no way; When Jesus said if you don't let me, you're fired; when Peter responded, okay boss, wash my feet, my hands, my head -- that's a charming, endearing and goofy story worthy of raucous praise.