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If, like me, you travel through life hopefully and with an
open mind for all new encounters, you surely won't be disappointed.
So it was that last week I found myself waking up in the Earl 
of Wharton's old country seat in the Yorkshire Dales.  I happened
to catch some of the English morning news on tv, and an interesting
interchange took place.

The newsreader was giving details of a new church report that
described how large numbers of young people are leaving the church
and abandoning organized religion.  Then the newsreader introduced
a guest speaker to comment on this phenomenon.  I was expecting
a bishop, an inner-city priest, or at least a professor of religion.

But no!  To my astonishment, they wheeled on an anthropologist to
comment on the religious crisis.  I was flabbergasted... to me,
this represented the clearest tacit admission that the BBC thinks
religion is all a load of hooey, best interpreted as the superstitions
of primitive people, and argued over not by archbishops but by
anthropologists!

It got even better from that point...  The anthropologist said that
he believed religion started to go downhill at the point when the
supreme deity changed sex from female to male.  If you go back just
a few thousand years (claimed the speaker) the god model was feminine in
nature; a wondrous, nurturing, caring, reproductive goddess.  At some
later point the model of omnipotence changed to masculine, and 
became aggressive, jihad-inspiring, awful, and hard.  And that's
where religion took a left turn downhill.

Well, it's a great theory.  The old pagan deities were the best.  Has
a kind of comforting veneration for tradition, doesn't it?  Quite
unlike anything you ever see on morning tv in the good ol Silicon
Valley, eh?  Flame on these ponderings all you like:- we'll just make more.

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