"An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in England" (was Re: Religion and schools: a query)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Jim heartfield wrote:
>
>> 'Church of England, which is to
>> all extents and purposes agnosticism. Today you would have to say
>> atheism. Church attendance is in single percentage points.
>
>Another old joke re the Church of England was that it interfered
>neither with a man's politics nor his religion.
>
>Carrol

Jonathan Swift wrote in "An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in
England" (1708):

*****   I hope no reader imagines me so weak to stand up in the defence of
real Christianity, such as used in primitive times, (if we may believe the
authors of those ages,) to have an influence upon men's belief and actions:
to offer at the restoring of that would indeed be a wild project....

	Therefore I think this caution was in itself altogether
unnecessary, (which I have inserted only to prevent all possibility of
cavilling,) since every candid reader will easily understand my discourse
to be intended only in defence of nominal Christianity; the other having
been for some time wholly laid aside by general consent, as utterly
inconsistent with our present schemes of wealth and power.

	But why we should therefore cast off the name and title of
Christians, although the general opinion and resolution be so violent for
it, I confess I cannot (with submission) apprehend, nor is the consequence
necessary....

	...Great wits love to be free with the highest objects; and if they
cannot be allowed a God to revile or renounce, they will speak evil of
dignities, abuse the government, and reflect upon the ministry; which I am
sure few will deny to be of much more pernicious consequences....

	...It must be allowed indeed that, to break an English free-born
officer only for blasphemy was, to speak the gentlest of such an action, a
very high strain of absolute power....But if he argued, as some have done,
upon a mistaken principle, that an officer who is guilty of speaking
blasphemy may some time or other proceed so far as to raise a mutiny, the
consequence is by no means to be admitted; for surely the commander of an
English army is likely to be but ill obeyed whose soldiers fear and
reverence him as little as they do a Deity....   *****

It's interesting that Swift's irony undercuts his own avowed and steadfast
support for the Test Act in his real life.  His irony allows no common
position on Christianity and religion -- Anglicans, Dissenters, Catholics,
(otherwise conformist) "freethinkers," et al. -- to escape unscathed.  Only
a certain historically qualified respect for primitive Christianity (though
any effort to restore it now would be impossible and reactionary) and an
attack upon "our present schemes of wealth and power" remain to speak to
us.     Yoshie