CHURCHES AND MODERN THOUGHT

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 281, 26 November 1932, Page 14

CHURCHES AND MODERN THOUGHT

The anguish of "Puzzled" will find its echo in the hearts and minds of thousands of Aucklanders. The conception of God that the dogmas and creeds of the Churches offer us is out of tune with the realities of life, and with the .truth that science is gradually winning from Nature. The religion of one age becomes the mythology of the next, and unless the Churches adjust their creeds to modern thought and usefulness, even Christianity will petrify, and bo put on the shelf of time with the other mythologies. The Churches, with their empty seats, are at the parting of the ways; [ they must either look backward or for-1 ward —backward to the decadent magic and miraculous traditions of humanity's childhood, of which Auckland has lately experienced an atavistic fever, or face the future with science and evolve a newer conception of religion that will satisfy the aspirations of the modern man and woman. The Churches continually scold us for our indifference to, and our absence from, their services, and blame our devotion to outdoor sport, to hiking, to the radio and the motion picture, but the one thing responsible for the debacle in Church attendance they studiously ignore, and that is the change of heart and mind of the great mass of the people towards their creeds, their theologies and their rituals. The average workaday man and woman love truth as they see it, and they have ceased to see it in the 39 Articles, the Westminster Confession and the other crude affirmations of dogmatism that the Churches continue to cling to. "Puzzled" expresses poignantly the despair the great majority of common folk feel in the midst of the cruel tragedy of life's struggle all around us, from protoplasm to man, and the ceaseless suffering that humanity and our cousins the lower animals endure. We are told that Providence will cure our ills and diseases if we ask with faith, but we have learned by experience that Nature's processes continue regardless of our supplications, and to realise with resignation that even if Providence possesses the power, there is no intervention, supernaturally. So we have to. make the best of tilings as they arc, and in common charity and toleration help to make a better world for those who come after us. The Churches will fill when they, too, recognise realities and adjust their services to modern thought and belief. EVERYMAN.