| Religious Disclaimer |
| I dared to mentioned the word 'spiritual'. This being a word which invokes prejudice, bigotry and notions of irrationality, I feel I must qualify it by clarifying my own position regarding religious belief. |
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When I was young, my immediate family did not attend any kind of church although I went to a strong Church of England primary school and was a regular choir boy at the main Church with which it was associated. However, without any specific intent to do so, my interests and intellectual outlook developed along pragmatic or scientific lines.
As a child and adolescent, partaking in acts of worship seemed to be something which was expected of one, but which personally left me cold. I was never able to grasp the reason for vainly repeating a formal ritual week after week, and year after year.
Furthermore, the teachings themselves seemed to be a confusing mix of logically incompatible beliefs. They came across to me as some kind of uneasy fusion between Bible stories and pagan folklore. They preached the words, sentences and verses from the Bible but believed something quite alien to what these words, sentences and verses actually said. My failure to make any sense of this, finally turned me off religion altogether.
This left a vacuum within my conscious mind which I could see was filled for others by their religious beliefs and rituals. Nevertheless, I felt that if these people could have been completely honest with themselves, they would have had to concede that the empty rituals and the never-quite-reconcilable beliefs with which they filled their vacuums, never really fulfilled them. The vacuum within my own mind continued to make its presence felt. So in my early twenties, during my three year degree course, I started to investigate the so-called non-conformist religions to see if there was anything in them which could fulfil my vacuum, and also make sense.
The various religious groups I encountered seemed to share one thing - a propensity for exaggerated blind emotion. This invariably manifested itself as a kind of group psychosis in which individuals lost themselves in a swirl of 'praising the Lord'. Through emotional singing. In endless contentless prayers spontaneously incanted in quivering sanctimonious voices 'thanking the Lord for his love, sacrifice and salvation'. But this also left me cold. I desperately wanted to fill the vacuum in my mind. I was prepared to undergo whatever emotional surgery was needed to do it. But I was just not an emotional person. I proved incapable of psyching myself into becoming one, or of 'trusting in the Lord' to make me one.
I have mentioned my interest in short-wave radio. Naturally one cannot sweep the short-wave bands for very long before encountering a whole cacophony of religious broadcasts. They arrive from every corner of the world. Of every type and flavour. They even infested the pirate stations which once broadcast from ships anchored off the coasts of the British Isles. To my increasingly fastidious mind all these religious broadcasts projected the same orthodox ritualism or emotive nothingness. All, that is, except one. This one seemed to have a kind of pragmatic practicality to which I could relate. I started to listen to this broadcast regularly.
I sent for and studied their free magazines and literature. I also enrolled on and completed their free Bible correspondence course. Seven years later (in 1973) I was baptised into the church behind the broadcast. As a member of this church I attended their local services every week for a further seven years. Then, in 1980, I left. During the 14 years that I was associated with this church almost all my spare time was taken up with intense Bible study. My wife had a positive dislike for this church and would have nothing to do with them. The reason I left was not because of my wife's attitude. Neither was it because of any violent differences in fundamental beliefs. It was a for very practical down-to-earth reason.
This church produced its broadcasts in well-equipped in-house studios and had them transmitted by radio stations all over the world. It had an international team of reporters feeding the writers of the magazines and correspondence course which were produced and printed at its own in-house press facilities. It ran a multi-campus international college which provided the ministers for the church's local congregations world-wide. All these, together with various other endeavours were financed by the 'tithes and offerings' contributed by the ordinary church membership.
The church taught its members that they had an obligation to pay tithes to the church ministry according to the tithing system given to ancient Israel. Each member had to give 10% of his income to the ministry and put by another 10% to finance his travel, accommodation and incidental expenses to attend three main annual festivals. Every third year he had to give another 10% of his income to provide for the church's widows. Thus each member was required to give up 23.3% of his gross income. This rule was later relaxed to require only 23.3% of one's net income.
Neither the government tax system nor free market forces took account of the fact that church members had to exist on 23.3% less than others. These assume that one is employing the full net amount of one's pay for the purpose of supporting one's family and home, and for providing the means required to function and present oneself in a manner appropriate to one's occupation. This did not seem to be a problem to members who had their own businesses or who were in executive positions. However, for those on low and middle incomes (including myself) it became quite miserable, although few had the courage (or as the ministry would have it 'the disloyalty') to speak out and openly admit it.
Much of the church membership was made up of 'single' men. Some were simply not married. Others (of which I was one) were married but their wives and children would have nothing to do with the church. The misery of such a depleted income was fine if simply to be an obedient member of the church was one's quest in life, and provided it did not cause others to suffer hardship. But it did cause others to suffer. Tithing caused my wife and daughter to have to do without far too much.
However, I was determined to explore this apparent opportunity to fill the vacuum in my mind. The church taught that God always rewarded the faithful tither. So I stuck with it. I became very unpopular both with my immediate and extended family. After 7 years of hardship I decided that I had given it long enough. My own personal experience was proof that it had not worked - at least, not for me. Since tithing was one of the most central doctrines of this church, I could not remain a member. As soon as I left I was able to expand a business I had tried to start 4 years earlier. It prospered over the next 12 years and I was able to extend my home sufficiently to accommodate my family properly. It also enabled us to take some good holidays together for the first time in many years.
Once I left this church I realised that while I had been in it I had had an ever-present sense that something about it was not quite right. But I did not know what it was. It wasn't the people. They were genuine enough. It wasn't the ministry. Although to us lay members they seemed to live uncommonly well on our tithes (as did the widows), I feel in retrospect that they taught what they genuinely thought was right according to the text of the Bible, and that what transpired as a result, simply happened.
I now believe that what I had sensed as never being quite right was the stand-point from which the church viewed the Biblical socio-economic system and the context in which it implemented it. Being Americans the ministry could interpret what they read only in terms of their American way of life. They could implement what they read about only in terms of the capitalist socio-economic model with which they were familiar.
The socio-economic circumstances of the ancient Israelite farming his given portion of the Land of Canaan cannot be sensibly compared with, or directly mapped onto, those of the dispossessed wage labourer in a modern capitalist economy. The mechanisms through which each gains his needs and luxuries of life are fundamentally different. Consequently, paying tithes from one's wage income is also fundamentally different from giving tithes from the increase of one's land.
Although I left this church, I retained respect for the practical approach it maintained towards reading and uncovering the notions and doctrines which appeared to be buried within the text of the Bible. They revealed what to my analytical mind seemed a cogent candidate for that 'higher reality' which I felt had to exist beyond the constraints of physical law. But I had to reject their dangerous attempts to implement those ancient ways within today's wholly incompatible socio-economic environment.
Though far less dominant than it had been in the other religious groups I had encountered, the 'emotional thing' was still there. The singing of hymns. Ministers praying aloud to congregations in services and with individuals in private. I even adhered strictly for many years to a decree that all members should rise at an unearthly hour of the morning every day to put in a solid hour of personal prayer. I truly wanted it to work.
But it didn't. I had to face the fact that I am not an emotional person. I am simply not made that way. Whether this is my genetic inheritance or due to my formative environment I don't know. But that's the way I am. As soon as I left the church, the emotional stuff left me, so I must now describe myself as non-religious. Nevertheless, I soon discovered that the sense of moral justice I had always possessed had become elevated almost to a sense of mission. However, this was destined to lie dormant until the painful realities of 1990s unemployment stirred its indignation.