This ‘cradle-Catholic’ sounds off about dreary, dreary ‘good news’

I’m sitting here in the kitchen at my aunt’s in deepest, darkest Gascony just about to have my second bowel of milky coffee, having risen from my sick bed briefly after three days of a bad cold. But that isn’t the point of this ramble (or as Donny Trump would have it this ‘weave’).

My aunt, 93 and not in the best of health, is sitting across from me waiting for her daily late-morning visit from a nurse. At breakfast and until just now she was listening to a Sunday morning mass being broadcast on the radio (or as I am now slowly obliged to call it, ‘the wireless’).

This surprised me, as although she is, like me, a ‘cradle-Catholic’ and was educated by nuns, she had - again like me - long, long ago escaped the snares of the left-foot establishment and declared herself an atheist.

But that isn’t the point of this ‘weave’, either.

The point is this: WHY are christian hymns and songs - well, let me be fair, WHITE christian hymns and songs - of every denomination, from RCs to Plymouth Maniacs to bells ‘n smells Anglicans, so sodding DREARY? It’s always like walking in the rain with no coat and nowhere to go. Yes, that cheerful.

On a related note, why does preaching the ‘good news’, ostensibly intended to cheer folk up, rely so heavily on doom, inducing fear and dread, restrictions, taboos, frightening young children and a kind of incomprehensible voodoo bollocks?

My favourite piece of bollocks ‘The Trinity’, explained to uncomprehending seven-year-olds as ‘three persons in one god’ ( and NO, it’s NOT three gods, just three persons in one god), is a case in point.

Of course, little ones are not supposed to understand, just accept, repeat and believe and shut the fuck up (as I was when young and now and then I queried this ‘n that). Once - when I was 17 - I queried the ‘virgin birth’.

My headmaster at the time who also gave us sixth-formers religious instruction, an Irishman called Webster Wilson (who sadly was a figure of fun at the OS, but who took me for German and I rather liked him and with whom I got on well), asked me:

‘Do you believe God created the world and the laws of nature, Powell?’ Yes, I told him, tho even by then I didn’t. ‘Well,’ said Mr Wilson, ‘he can also break em then, can’t he!’

As I say total bollocks. Yes, there are certainly more sophisticated christian apologists, but if you are apologising and defending bollocks, it’s still bollocks.

NB the piccy is of my second bowl of coffee. I was delayed posting the piccy and one or two ‘readers’ have arrived early. Forgive me, you are not going off your head – leave that to me – but my shortcoming.