Sunday, March 04, 2012

Father Brown versus the Catholic church

Ok so I was baptised a Catholic, but I never took the communion thing. My family were not religious, when we were growing up. I think I was dragged to church at some stage, and perhaps I even went to Sunday school for a couple of months, but I think this had more to do with doing the right thing rather than anything to do with this God dude. Luckily in those days the churches didn't like young children so much, so that helped me keep out of their clutches.

On the Iplayer is a collection of stories about Father Brown by  G. K. Chesterton. Father Brown solves mysteries, even though he is a fat little priest. On one hand I really enjoy the stories, however on an intellectual level, the endings of the stories always seem to involve propaganda for the Catholic Church,  The priest knows more about real life than the rational men of science. To be fair he doesn't use supernatural reasoning. Personally I think a priest detective would miss all the clues, because he would spend all his time ranting about condoms and gay marriage. 

I am slightly against Chesterton, because when I was young I wanted to know about anarchism (as you do). In the days before the internet, all I found was the book " The Man Who Was Thursday", that frankly is not a good introduction to anarchism, but an interesting book.

Now that I look on Wikipedia I see that Chesterton used to carry a sword stick around, so he was a sound man.

Please note that although I don't like this nasty religious business --  I don't feel that this should stop me winning the Templeton prize, for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities, because I could do a lot with the money and prestige..