UCTAA churchlight

Site Search via Google

Meditation 1249
Is this the end?

by: John Tyrrell

Your thoughts on this Meditation are welcome. Please sign in to the discussion forum below, or alternatively, use the contact page to provide your comments for publication.

I had planned to get back onto a regular update schedule after I returned from my trip to Thailand and the Philippines. It has not happened. After over 20 years of keeping up this website, I seem to have lost my motivation to sit down and write.

When will that motivation return? Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps next year. Perhaps never.

I hate to admit it, but I am feeling my age and I'm plagued by a host of minor ailments. And I suppose that feeling of age is not helped by the fact that my brother-in-law, same age as me, just died.

It's not that my feelings about agnosticism are weakening, they are as strong as ever. And it's not that there is any lack of things to write about - especially with an American presidential election campaign going on with candidates seeking the votes of the fundamentalist fringe.

Image from a wall of a chamber in a pyramid - taken in 1976 by John Tyrrell

(photograph taken inside an ancient Egyptian granary built by Joseph - according to Ben Carson, anyway.)

It's just that right now I've lost the internal discipline necessary to write thoughtfully. (I like to think at least some of what I've written here is thoughtful.)

While I am waiting for my own inspiration to return, I will be keeping the website alive. I will publish new articles that are submitted (hint, hint). I will respond to correspondence. I will continue ordaining those that want to be ordained.

I've gone through dry spells before, and found my way out of them. And perhaps this time again I will find my way to resuming regular writing.

In the interim, here are some recent news stories and articles that I might have expressed my thoughts on at some length.

- Scandals continue to plague the Vatican under Pope Francis. There are two new books. And the Vatican's response - charge the whistleblowers. Same as Benedict charged his butler for leaking documents.

More Scandal For Vatican With Release Of Tell-All Books (Huffington Post)

Vatican hit by new claims of financial mismanagement and lavish spending (The Guardian)

- Study shows religious children are less charitable than non-religious children.

Matthew 22:39 (The Economist)

Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts, study finds (The Guardian)

- Warning signs in mixed-religion marriages

8 Red Flags in the Secular/Religious Marriage (Patheos)

- Irish school system gives priority to baptized children - secular children get refused entry.

No baptism, no school: Irish parents fight for equal access to education

Ireland’s ‘Catholics first’ school enrolment makes dads like me despair (The Guardian)

- Church of England study finds evangelism turns secular people off religion. (I suspect that excessive atheist proselytizing similarly turns religious people off disbelief.)

‘We need to talk about Jesus’: cue cringing embarrassment (The Guardian)

Please feel free to submit your thoughts on any of those news items, or on anything else that may come up in the weeks to come. Help keep this alive until I get past my current writer's block.

 

Have your say...

Please take a moment to share your thoughts, pro and con, on this Meditation.

comments powered by Disqus