Food for thought

Today, even in comparatively affluent Scotland, there are many people who are living lives full of misery and despair because of physical or mental illness, unemployment and attendant poverty, discrimination based on gender, age or disability, or simply because they are not valued by a society which equates job title with an individual’s worth.

It was people like this – the outcasts of society, we might today call them the “underclass” – that Jesus said he came to give hope to. To judge from the correspondence in The Scotsman’s Letters pages, such people currently have little to gain from membership of churches which appear in the main focused on persecuting individuals in stable same-sex relationships, at the expense of speaking out against the genuine wrongs of our society.

Neil Sinclair (12 March) will have spoken for many when he said he would “still be a practising Christian if it had not been for the hypocrisy shown by the Church regarding the child sexual abuse scandal”.

One of the important positive legacies of the Enlightenment is that it gave people the freedom to question what official institutions were telling them, and this is what people are doing. Seeing the irrelevant and anachronistic posturing of those who claim to speak for the Christian faith, it is no wonder that so many people of goodwill are attempting to live their lives in the way Jesus advised, but “without benefit of clergy”.

Thankfully, there are still ministers such as Rev Dr John Campbell, who has several times pointed out the obvious truth that marriage is not a creation of the Church, and changing it reflects the competence of democratic government.

Rev Cameron would no doubt agree that the churches have plenty more to “get their teeth into” if they wish to emulate their Saviour – the letter from Bob Taylor (12 March) on giving hope to the so-called “underclass” in Scotland by encouraging aspiration and confidence in all citizens ought to give them substantial food for thought.

Dr Mary Brown

Dalvenie Road

Banchory, Aberdeenshire