So let it be written...
You’d have to be in some kind of catatonic denial to disagree with the proposition that Canada, in comparison with most other countries, is pretty darn good at producing spectacularly flaky news.
The champion, of course, is our neighbour to the south. The United States probably invented flakiness.
And then there’s North Korea, which is just sad, mysterious, scary and strange.
But Canada?
Take Rob Ford, for example, who more than outstayed his welcome as Toronto’s famous crack-smoking mayor, may he rest in peace.
Remember Bubbles Galore?
It was a porn movie about porn movies. No less than five federal and provincial arts agencies in Ontario generously donated $100,000 in tax money so this flick could be made.
It did win some recognition for Canada on the world stage, though, at the Freakzone International Festival of Trash Cinema in France. So, there’s that.
But that was years ago.
The latest jaw-dropper to come out of Toronto is Gretta Vosper, a non-Christian Christian minister currently employed by the United Church of Canada.
Vosper avowedly doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t believe in the Bible, refuses to perform her church’s sacraments and yet is fighting tooth and nail to keep her job as minister of Toronto’s West Hill United Church.
Atheists everywhere must be enjoying the gut-laugh of their finite lives.
What’s next? Teachers who don’t believe in education? Police officers who don’t believe in law enforcement? Doctors who don’t believe in healing? Writers who don’t believe in words?
And why not, right?
After all, this is Canada, where it seems everything goes just as long as you pay your taxes in full and on time (Proof that there is such a thing as an absolute and that at least something is still considered sacred in this country).
Taxes must be paid, lest films like Bubbles Galore don’t get made. The Horror!
Now, I don’t know Vosper. It’s a big wide country; she lives way over there and I live way over here, and I’m not a member of the United Church.
She may well be, and very likely is, a really nice person, for all I know. But it seems to me maybe she should join a different club, given her inclinations.
Should a Christian be a director of Atheist Alliance International?
Uh…nope.
Should an Atheist be preaching from a Christian pulpit?
Again, no.
Do you think Sikhs, Jews, Muslims or any other self-respecting faith would put up with such B.S.?
Not on your life, be that finite or not.
Promisingly, this spinning wheel of madness did slow down a smidgen after the United Church’s Toronto Conference Review Committee recently voted 19 to four in favour of finding Vosper to be “unsuitable to continue serving.” This, according to a story in the Toronto Star under the ironic headline “‘Sad day’ for United Church, says atheist minister Gretta Vosper.”
So now it goes to a formal hearing. If the United Church doesn’t defrock this atheist minister it will have ceased to be a Christian church, period, full stop.
Really, Vosper, if so inclined, should join a service group where she can practice what she preaches without having to pretend she’s something she’s not.
All said, do I care what the United Church does? Well, not really. But I do care about reason, logic and common sense, and fear the day when nothing makes sense anymore and the whole s--t house, to kind-of steal the late Jim Morrison’s phrase, goes up in one big ball of flaming lunacy.
This situation with Vosper has pushed us closer to midnight.
And yet, I cling to a desperate hope that the extinction of reason, logic and common sense is still far enough away that I never get to witness that final apocalyptic event when all the world’s fools swarm, like jellyfish off a moonlit beach, to end Anno Domini and herald in a new era of AI (After Intelligence).
So let it be done.
Tom Zytaruk is a staff writer with the Now. Email him at tom.zytaruk@thenownewspaper.com.