Whether I like it or not, I exist under the auspices of the kingdom of God even in early 21st-century secular England.
This much was made apparent as I climbed the steep hill which leads from the train station to home last night. The word of the Christian god spread outwards from its voicebox of stone and filled my ears with a message of dread.
The message was thus: even two millennia from his memetic origins, Jesus still has the power to fuse groups of humans together and inspire frightening loyalty. Even if you, apostate/infidel, expunge every atom of religiosity from your body, secular England still has no choice but to run its business to the background noise of worship.
That is apparent, even when we consider only the milder strains of the disease - for that's what it is, a disease of the mind. Shops couldn't open on a Sunday until very recently because of Jesus - or the Jesus that is propagated by a select band of devotees.
In this character's name, all manner of liberties are curtailed and arbitrary rules created - don't eat before speaking to him, don't invoke his name in vain, consider homosexuality to be improper (very improper, something worth killing over), pretend that you're going to hell unless you've been dipped in a particular container of water.
Yet for all that, I only dwell upon the voice of God echoing across the town and through my ears when I've endured a particularly sobering day. The presence of the bells registers otherwise, but does not cause any protracted thought processes. When I feel anguished or hurt, though, and the anguish or hurt co-incides with the repetitive thump of God's proxy, the overwhelming sentiment is one of hopelessness and despair.
Is this what I've been pared down to? The conduit of the morbid bells, exalting their jealous patriarch? The vehicle by which they copy themselves, handing on misery vertically and horizontally?
