Dude! Joe's Jottings, Mostly Junk

In reply to this comment: I thought one of the beauties of being Episcopalian was that they had their dogma, but you could believe whatever you damn well wanted, and no one would much say anything to you.

Its not quite like that, per se.

The Church of England had to undergo changes in style in the late 17th through the 19th centuries, in that it had to adapt to meet the needs of what had suddenly become the richest country in Europe. In doing so, it had to acknoweldge changes in science and technology (which led to Britain's wealth), and in thought. The age of Reason was upon them, and they applied Reason to "dogma" just as easily as they applied it to mathematics and law.

The result: Dogma could be changed to meet the new knowledge. Nothing was upheld unless it could stand its way to rational argument. The difference between religious Reason and scientific Reason is the starting point. With science, you start from an already proved scientific fact or with a observable result. With religion, your axioms start from an article of faith, or philosophically reasons to see if an interpreted truth stands up to observation and also can be derived from and supports a axiomic Truth accepted on Faith. The only official word on Truth was the Bible itself, and the book of Common Prayer (which has remained, in England at any rate, mostly unchanged since Cramners first edition, aside from some textual changes to match the poetry of the King James Bible).

In fact, the book of Common Prayer itself was both the result of that change in thought (early on) and cause for its progress. Faith was no longer strictly in the hands of what you were told. Nothing was hidden from the masses and kept in the hands of some over-educated elite. Everything they read was either in that book or in the Bible itself. The people had the tools to challenge church authority at the local level, with the result that they rarely had to. In a sense, Anglicanism was the first "Open Source" religion in history. And it remains one of the few.

It was here that the "literal" truth of the bible was challenged in favor of the more appropriate philosophical and mythical truth. This hit its peak when the dinosaur bones were discovered, leading to the idea that creation didn't take exactly 7 days and started in some specific date in October, 4114 BC. The definition and interpretation of Creation itself had to change to fit the facts.

[There are those who still don't understand Evolution in the Creation context. They CAN co-exist. Evolution was a tool for creation just as much as Geometry and Mathematics. Mutations happen to create the plants and animals that have survived; could not *some* of those mutations have been the result of a divine intervention? As such, it is possible that Creation itself is an ongoing process, not something that finished on the "6th day" and that was that. We don't live with the results of Creation, we live *IN* the Creation. Personally, I find that kind of nifty.]

In short, a Religion has to either change itself to address the truths of the world, or try to change the world. Its not that you can beleive anything you want, its that you have to have a rational justification for your belief, that can stand up to proper argument. Note that this requires the ability to argue and not just gain-say "no it isn't" simply because it goes against your own beliefs; to argue you have to put belief on hold and only deal with Reason, provided both sides accept the initial axioms of Faith or Observation.

Anglicanism has always applied rational thought to its "Dogma" and as such rejects much of what other Christian faiths perport as being absolutely necessary in favor of a more balanced view that the world changes, people change, and there are deeper truths that are more important than the surface stuff these others believe.

As an example in the current controversy: the shallow truth is that this newly elected Bishop is Gay and Gay is Bad. The deeper truth is that this newly elected Bishop is a man, with faults as all men have, but is well educated, deeply cares for his congregation and his (pre-coming-out) family, and is a man of love and compassion that is shown in his actions.

The other Bishops decided it is better to be led with Love than to be ruled by cold sterility.