Relative Piety

After only a couple of millennia, the mills of God have seemingly ground one or two Christians into the vague realisation that the term "Our Father" may be thought by some to exude a certain subtle whiff of patriarchy. The Archbishop of York hinted at the discovery during a blah-and-burble at the General Synod, and immediately became embroiled in the usual brotherly negotiations between bigotry and hypocrisy when the chair (or unrepentant chairman, as he may prefer to be known) of a conservative faction squealed that some church leaders were "taking their cues from culture rather than scripture." As a critque of "liberal" Christianity and its mealy-mouthed moral maunderings, this can hardly be gainsaid: the Bible states unequivocally that God created Adam first, in His own image, and male, and that Jesus unequivocally endorsed the Mosaic law with its unequivocal subordination of women to the status of property. It's true that the Saviour rather flippantly proclaimed that souls in Heaven are sexless like the angels; but it surely never occurred to Him that the eternal Dear Leaders of the holy hierarchy might be anything other than a Father, a Son and a dozen male Jews. By the same token, the more Christlike members of the Church's hypocritical wing may perhaps profitably speculate as to whether those who claim to take their cue from Scripture really do spend much time wandering the earth, dressed in garments made of only one fabric and without carrying a change of clothes, preaching the Apocalypse and performing conjuring tricks.