God’s place in a humanist society (2) [Locul lui Dumnezeu într-o societate umanistă]

“I wish I go to church, but my mum doesn’t take me. I was told it’s very beautiful inside…,” I heard a little girl (four or five years of age) saying when the bus we were in passed by this St Peter’s Church in Brighton (all the churches in this city – here).

She was talking to a teenager, probably some kind of baby-sitter or cousin (I just felt that she was her sister) who promised to her “I will take you some day.”

“Can we go now?,” she insisted. Of course, the anwer was negative :-( But – hopefully – maybe her dream was eventually fulfilled one day. Only God knows how many children throughout the UK are just curious to enter a place of worship, just to see ‘what is it all about’…

I’m as curious as this little girl about how many of British children ever get the chance to hear about the Lord (anything else than the antichristic flood of ‘secret Gospels’ in contemporary books and movies), and how many of them ever entered a church for ‘worship’, apart from going there to various ‘cultural events’.

Many people in this country complain about the awful teenagers of today, but do these people realize that the poor children – no mater how self-destructively they would behave – simply carry the burden of their parents’ sins?

All these respectable Brits (?!), ‘who never hurt a fly,’ and consider themselves law-abiding citizens don’t realize that their children don’t know what else to do with this ‘earthly paradise’ which their parents build for them than to destroy it.

This British (but not specific to the UK only!) paradise of the secular consumer is but an antechamber of hell. Most of today’s ‘wicked British teens’ had respectable parents who – like the parents of this little girl whom I heard in a bus – never offered to them another meaning of life than ‘having fun,’ which seems to be some sort of supreme humanist value in this country, as well as throughout the whole ‘civilised world.’

What other thing should these children know apart from the fact that a church is a great place where to throw a party, as long as even the so-called ‘Anglican Bishops’ seem very fond of partying?

And while Catholics eventually remember to baptise their children (not for the sake of saving their souls, but because otherwise they couldn’t attend a Catholic school), the Anglicans don’t even have this ‘incentive.’

Obviously, as an Orthodox Christian, I seriously doubt the validity of all these heretical baptisms, but this is not the issue here. I just witness another sad fact in the UK – baptisms of children are on the wane.

While only roughly only two thirds of children are baptized, among the Catholics in the UK (some data about this – here), the figures are even more dreadful among the Protestants – places where 40% of children take the baptism are considered ‘very religious’ ones.

Fewer than one in six children of Anglican parents are baptised in the UK these days… Taking this into account, I dare asking those who put the blame on the ‘youth mobs’, as if they appeared out of nowhere: why do you wonder how godlessly teenagers behave in this country?

[For all the episodes of this series, and all the posts on this blog go to/Pentru toate episoadele din această serie şi toate postările de pe acest blog mergi la: Contents/Cuprins]