[innocence] may the force be with you

As we creep inexorably into the New Feudalism, the novel Lord of the Rings, which I've just been reading parts of again, seems fairly analogous.

It was also Memorial Day on Monday.

No one chooses to go off to war but if there's a threat, it must be met. And brave men and women do that. And it is true that it steels the soul and forges bonds - about all it has going for it.

The greatest error of the Timid is to think they can manage perfectly well by themselves, thank you very much. Really? We're managing the world well at the moment? And we can change it without either regulation or revolution? We can stop the new feudalism, in which the Home Secretary proceeds with the plan of "derogating" from Article Five of the European Convention on Human Rights for our own good?

Personally, I put my faith in the Force but the Force is like buying an Aston Martin or a Rolls - it has its price. You're not just buying a car but a whole lifestyle. You no longer wonder about the car starting each day or how it would fare in an emergency skid or in an accident. It's all taken care of, as long as you do right by the vehicle, according to the instruction manual.

But it costs and costs big.

And when you're travelling along a fair road and that road's downhill and the other man in his Lada 10 seems to be doing just as well beside you, at a fraction of the cost, you can start thinking: "I wonder if maintaining this is all worth it."

The Christian Club is exclusive, with but three entry requirements. You need to:

1 believe that you need to be redeemed in the first place;

2 believe that you can be redeemed in this manner;

3 abide by club rules, which tell you to be charitable to your fellow human.

And that's it.

Very big asks and therefore the reason the Club is so exclusive - more exclusive than the Other Side has to offer because there are so many natural barriers to entry.

So all this garbage about Holy Crusades and Inquisitions and bibles chained to pulpits and written in Latin to exclude the common man; all this Intermediary guff like pontiffs and High Priests and so on, the selling of relics, all the wars invoking the name of Jesus and sporting red crosses, rampant evangelism, bible bashing prudery, Somerset Maugham's target in his excellent tale of the stern and unbending Mr. Davidson in "Rain", devastation of native communities in the name of the Lord - all of that has zero to do with the simple Message contained in a few short pages.

A short tale from earlier days:

We used to take the kids for swimming lessons at the local pool at my northern school and the issue was that one of the new girls [about 12 years old] didn't actually wear a top but swam in her undies.

For three weeks she blithely swam almost as nature intended and strangely, none of the other kids said anything and none of us knew how to deal with it.

Then, in the fourth week, she came in a costume and a modest one too. I was appalled and I hope you do see why. In this I'm 100% with Maugham. Because what was destroyed this day was innocence, based on no discernible biblical text but on a vague sort of prudery born of a notion of what Jesus might have approved of.

You know the 80s film Never-Ending Story? And how the characters in a child's fantasy world were destroyed by the Ravening Wind named Disbelief [or Loss of Innocence]?

That's one of the main dilemmas with Christianity. Another two main problems with its image have always been:

1 the hijacking of the intellectual property through the centuries by States and by the Other Side so that frightened people inadvertently rush into the arms of the Enemy rather than the Protector;

2 the insufferable serenity of believers, nay, the insufferable enthusiasm of the Happy Clapper.

There's a reason for the latter.

I don't know of a Christian who would put it this way but in fact you are being "possessed" by a spirit the moment you click on the button "I Believe". It's a mechanism which works more infallibly than the better known phenomenon of clicking on a porn picture and automatically inviting in the embedded Trojans and other viruses to your computer system.

And someone else's new-found enthusiasm is as inviting to us as a root canal operation, particularly if we're doing life hard ourselves.

When the Happy Clappers compound that with their take-it-as-read platitudes like "Jesus loves you", that's fine for the already devout who've seen the Light but for the great unwashed out here, amongst whom I still count myself one, it's nauseatingly counterproductive.

There's a reason for that too.

JC always went after the Lost Sheep, more than the already Safe and Protected and therefore the bulk of new Christians are people who weren't coping, who didn't have the standard meathead lifestyle or suburban bourgeois decency. In other words, there had to have been something they at least perceived as wrong in life in order to have made this move.

I'm not referring to Christian households here - they're another matter.

So I suggest that the Jehovah's Witnesses and the like could do with a PR refresher course before belting on one's door in the middle of a long afternoon squawk, just to thrust The Watchtower into one's hands and to invite themselves in for a "chat".

I suspect after this I'm going to be doubly damned - I'll certainly be struck off the vicarage guest list and cast into Perdition by the Moral Majority whilst my own bunch of sinner mates and nightcap-sipping sweeties quietly slip away to someone else less Strange.

And what of folk such as Jack Rensimer and Halls of Macadamia? They know I'm for conservative values, patriotism, G-d, the armed service men and women - in other words, like my own father was - and yet I have a damned strange way of showing it in my posts.

Sigh. I don't know what to say, really.