The Liberal Democrat political party in the area just got me delivering their leaflets round the block of flats I live in. I hate doing it because I have to walk along inhumane walkways, part of the flats' ultra-modern design, perched in the open air above the dizzy heights of the sixth floor in a roaring gale of a wind with nothing but glass keeping me from falling to my death! I don't do heights. Seems like us Brits are meant to do democracy though.
Anyway, it got me thinking that if I actually knocked on doors and asked if anyone actually wanted one of the leaflets before delivering them to my poor defenceless victims I might be a bit less like a spam-mailer (sorry, should I say 'mass-mailer' though that sounds more like 'mass-murderer'). Then again, it might make me more like someone acting in competition to the 'Lib-Dems' since I'd be trying to get people to trust me, their neighbour, rather than trying to get them to trust the political party the leaflets represent (I'm not even a member).
Now say a real politician went round the doors and people took them for a postman and said, after they'd gone, things like 'funny, we didn't think the postal services did things like canvasing for votes'. How bizarre that this kind of thing really happens when people think about not politics but religion. I'd be thinking to myself: When the Christ came from God telling people to love one another and love their neighbours as themselves it was plain as day what He was saying and who could deny that really happened in history (during the Roman occupation of Palestine some two thousand years before this blog). Then I have to remind myself that if I ever mentioned it to someone here in the UK (or perhaps anywhere in the Western World) I'd be most likely to get a response consistent with the kind of reaction of people thinking a politician was really the postman or pizza delivery person. It would be a reaction something like this: But we don't think Jesus actually was from God telling us what to do, surely (they'd say) he was a reactionary rabbi of such-and-such a tradition or just a concoction of a few extremist breakaway religious-nut sectarians. Bizarre. This bizarre society we live in needs to get over ridiculous unbelief and start thinking about and discussing how to actually do what God told us to do.
