Blue-Rinse Dreams and Banoffee Pie

I was reading one of the articles in Ron Ferguson's 'Blue-Rinse Dreams and Banoffee Pie' this morning before going to church and the following quotes from 'Time to ban this steamy book' really spoke to me:

"I don't want to be saved from adult choices by zealots who want to do a bit of censoring or hand-chopping on God's behalf ... For Christ's sake, is the deity so weak that he needs to be defended by obnoxious creeps with a humour-bypass ... Christianity has had a privileged position for far too long. Religious adherents need to make their case in today's market place of ideas by the integrity of their thinking and the attractiveness of their exemplars and not by blasphemy laws, historic privileges, threats, serial taking of offence and fatwas."

It just hit me in light of what I've been thinking about lately with so much time wasted by the church trying to stop people from doing 'things that are wrong'. Are we not convinced that the message we have is good enough? One of the ones that is doing the rounds here (influenced heavily by US televangelists, this is Canada, not the US) is that the 'downfall' of our society started when they took the Lord's Prayer out of the schools. What a load of baloney!

Anyway, for those who don't know it, Ron Ferguson is a retired Church of Scotland minister, who lives in Orkney. He has a weekly column in 'The (Glasgow) Herald' and 'Blue-Rinse Dreams...' is a compilation of these columns. I usually receive one of these books from my parents at Christmas every year, for which I am really grateful. I just love reading his stuff. I would've probably enjoyed listening to his preaching every week - funny, thought-provoking, relevant. For an example of his sermons check out another of his books: 'Love Your Crooked Neighbour: Thoughts on Breath, Bread, Breasts and Brokenness'.