Wooden Heresy

Introduction

This is an interesting A Seven Days In Excavation from 2017, which contains a lot of observations on Christianity. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic, but I left all that behind many years ago.

This was fascinating because I had never noticed that churches didn't use wooden vessels, although crosses are very wooden.

If you want to visit Seven Days In, it is here. It has had over two million visits as you can see from the figures above. I would love to get those visitors on my Vocal stories, but it's more like a thousand a month rather than a thousand a day.

Wooden Heresy

Reading Rob Young's "Electric Eden", I'm discovering a lot of interesting things.

Christian rituals apparently don't allow the use of wooden vessels, as it is too close to the "pagan" rituals from which they were appropriated. Wood was seen as a vital living spiritual essential in pre-Christian Britain. It provided fire, material for weapons, homes, utensils, and was alive and grew and was all around. Omnipresent ... remind you of anything?

Then it got on to human sacrifice. In early times, the top dog/king/leader was sacrificed to the gods to ensure a good harvest. So being the leader of the tribe was not exactly a career move with a future. As time progressed, slaves/captors were substituted (obviously someone didn't fancy being offed themselves), and when the Romans came, human sacrifice was outlawed and animals replaced humans under the sacrificial knife.

Today this has become to Sunday Christian Ritual and Harvest Festival, but its roots are in the human sacrifice practised by people who came up with the idea that killing the top dog might be beneficial to the community. While I'm not an advocate of extremes, putting the Prime Minister out to pasture would be a great idea at the moment, but she's hardly an inspirational or even competent leader; the gods would not be happy with her.

And I suppose this is all leading up to talking about faith, which can be very dangerous. Actions are based on arbitrary directions from an unproven source.

I have faith that the sun will rise, that a light will come on when I press a switch, that a letter will appear on my screen when I touch that letter on my keyboard, that my bus will turn up on time (sometimes), because I know there are mechanisms behind it that will cause it to happen. But as for God (well, I follow him on Facebook and Instagram) but I have not seen any evidence of God's existence. God may exist, but God's existence for me is decidedly unproven; I am agnostic.

Anyway, the song has to be George Michael's "Faith". It's Friday, the weekend is here, and Glastonbury is going to be all over the BBC this weekend, and there are some good bands on, and you can watch them on your big telly.

Conclusion

I can't remember who was on at Glastonbury, but it's something that has failed to fascinate me for many decades.

I stated what I think about faith, because I need proof of something before I can believe in it.

Anyway, things are what they are, and I thought my Vocal audience and friends might be interested in these observations that got me thinking from Rob Young's excellent book (it clocks in at six hundred and fifty pages, as you can see here below in front of my screen where I am writing this piece)

Thank you so much for reading. I really appreciate your support.