Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

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BACK in 1917 a forgotten suffragette, Agnes Maude Royden, described the C of E as “the Conservative Party at Prayer,” and like the Tories today the Church is at all-out war with itself.

At the root of the latest problem is the C of E’s decision to allow clergy to use regular public worship services to bless those in same-sex partnerships, starting this Sunday. This prompted the presiding Bishop of the Anglican Network in Europe, the vacuous bigot Rt Revd Andy Lines, above, to lambast House of Bishops for ignoring the “pleas of the majority of the Anglican Communion, nearly half of the clergy and laity in General Synod and nearly a third of their own members”.

He lamented the decision to:

Push ahead along a highly divisive path which arrogantly rejects the authority of scripture and cravenly follows the latest trends in Western secular culture.

The ridiculously-named Anglican site, Virtue on Line, went further, quoting an unnamed cleric as saying that “The Church of England is now formally broken,” and added that:

The Mother Church has done the unthinkable, despite legal and theological challenges same sex blessings will be allowed to take place in churches across England.

It will mark the final degradation of a once proud, faithful church that claimed Archbishops Matthew Parker, Thomas Cranmer and William Temple to name just a few, now rolling in their graves at the thought of their beloved church embracing sexual sin …

The C of E’s capitulation to the culture is now complete. Homosexual marriage is only a hop, step and jump away …

‘The Church of England now has no belief that can be described as doctrine and the Tories have no ideology’

I learned of Royden via a 2012 Evening Standard piece that is as true today as it was then, but even more so:

The Church of England now has no belief that can be described as doctrine and the Tories have no ideology, only the 25 policies pulled like rabbits from their present conjurer’s hat. Both are damagingly divided into irreconcilable factions; the C of E has a new Archbishop of Canterbury whom its evangelists regard with unremitting enmity and the Tories have a leader widely regarded as a hapless nincompoop.

The Standard added:

To the outsider, what happens within and to the C of E hardly matters any more. Who cares what priests and bishops say? What is broadcast by the BBC in its obligation to the Church reveals it to be the creature of sentimental men and silly women, neither now of any education, politically correct in the most nannying sense, frightened of the intellectual rigours of theology and doctrine, its evangelicals warped with intolerance …

As we now enjoy a society that is both post-Christian and post-Conservative, the remnants of the Tories and the C of E cast about for rallying cries and windmills against which to tilt, and both, in recent weeks, have, in bigotry and prejudice, hit upon the bogey of homosexuality with which to unify in old and stale intolerance.

All I can is “wow, kudos to the the unnamed writer of that brilliant op-ed!”

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