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The post Hello world! first appeared on Graham D Brown.
2 years ago
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Pastor Power?
I am currently reading the, now deceased, Catholic writer and monk, Thomas Merton, who makes some fascinating observations.
One of the things I’m trying to get to grips with in Ghana, is the way its people are prepared to dismiss scientific facts and to accept superstitious or biblical explanations.
In some senses the USA can afford not to give its youth a scientific education as it is already a technologically developed culture. But Ghana, which has given up its traditional way of life to become a modern economy, is now stuck in a halfway house. If it is to move to a modern economy it needs to develop scientific and critical thinking.
Merton (in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander) talks of a “sense of guilt over the church’s former resistance to science”. He believes the church was struggling to keep its power over secular society in which independent thinkers were developing new ideas outside of the influence of the Church.
I wonder how much of that applies in a country like Ghana, where individual pastors can hold great power and wealth. I also wonder whether fear of the truth is really a fear of a godless world?
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Your observations on social control as it relates to order and chaos are interesting and seem to make sense. My feeling is that chaos is the natural way of things and that the imposition of order is only ever temporary, that is why empires rise then always fall; it is why gardens need constant attention. If you leave nature alone it 'runs riot' and all sorts of random factors exert influence.
ReplyDeleteThe same is now happening with the global economy. No matter how much governments, bankers, financiers and academics tried to order and control it the random factors crept in and it moved towards chaos.
I always felt Holland was a very ordered country though it has a reputation for being 'liberal and free'. Yet the government sanctioning and licensing in the area of sex, drugs and personal freedom is as much about state control as it is about freedom. Having said that, I love Holland.
SL