Eggsmass

Perfect!

Otherwise - this thread seems split between UK & USA where things are very different. Here in the UK Xtianity, for the most part, is pure folklore; it exists on the same level as Santa Clause, Star Trek and the Easter Bunny. Indeed the Anglican Church seems to hold by the opinion that God is more of a feeling, The Virgin Birth is an allegory and Jesus might not have really existed, but if he did, we're sure he was really nice man. Not that it matters, because their main responsibility is to look after the fabric of the myriad of historic Churches and Cathedrals in their care. Of course the most historic of these Churches and Cathedrals were filched from the Roman Church which built them in the first place.

In more recent years, the Catholic Church in the UK has made some amazing, if bizarre, contributions to church architecture. One of my favourites was built 200 years ago at Eshe Lawde in County Durham, which was built to look like a farm, such was the fear of local persecution - or so goes the legend. The difference is that whilst Anglicans accept the Xtian Myth as some sort of anachronistic metaphor to underwrite their social superiority, UK Catholics are more (how shall we say?) literal in their interpretation of their particular brand of Horse Chocolate. This isn't just evident in the lowly rank and file who make up the gratifyingly dwindling congregations amongst the working classes (in some parts of the UK it's one priest to four or five parishes) but it's there in the extremely well-heeled parishioners I used to see packing out Worth Abbey during my weird stint there in December 1999. Here, the jovial Benedictines daily dine on a diet fit for kings whilst pumping up their ersatz holiness for the BBC, where, in less fortunate areas, I've known good priests go mad on a diet of Embassy Regal and left-over communion wine & holy toast. Worth a visit, if you forgive the pun; also worth a visit is Ushaw College (a spit from Eshe Lawde) where a skeleton crew of four or five trainee priests occupy a Neo-Gothic Pugin masterpiece built for thousands or more. Particularly affecting is a chapel of Holy Relics; stacks and stacks of human bones rescued from the Europe in the war, but sank on route, and later recovered by priestly diverse divers and displayed in a random and gratifying macabre jumble. God knows what it costs to keep this place going just to turn out two or three priests a year - no doubt doomed for nervous breakdown & fag addiction once they get allocated their parish-cluster.

Social class and privilege notwithstanding, the Worth Abbey Church is a classic of Modern Church Architecture - it's a near contemporary of Sir Frederick Gibberd's iconic 'Paddy's Wigwam' in Liverpool, but is more covert in its relationship to its rural landscape of the Sussex Weald. Both look like they've just landed from the Planet Zaaargh, though one senses in Pollen's work at Worth a more sinister sort of Mission than the open jubilation on offer at Liverpool Cathedral. Did I mention the RC Church at Ewyas Harold? That looks extra-terrestrial too, but more of a space shuttle than a mothership.

So - farms and flying saucers; all good fun, were it not for the mind-f*cking theological bullshit that gets spouted therein. So we have these amazing futuristic churches covering for the evil darkness of medieval superstition and ignorance that remain in our midsts, but only just. It will pass, and these amazing buildings (old and new) will (one hopes) remain to find better use in the secular world that awaits. Music is better than religion. I used to love singing Gelineau Psalms with the monks at Worth to the accompaniment of a huge chord-zither in the freezing dark of December mornings. I wasn't religious in the least, but my girlfriend was, and it was for her that I was there (and because Brancepeth Castle in uninhabitable in the winter months, but that's another story). I like the Humanity of such occasions, even the liturgy, which works quite nicely without buying into the belief. As an Atheist at Holy Mass it is the Humanity of the occasion that I am respectful of; but the religious aspect exists, as I say, as folklore: myths, stories and vague ideals aspiring to some wan sort of spirituality which exists in some other realm to the 'real world'. But this is the UK - where, generally speaking, no one really gives a shit what anyone else believes in lieu of a greater tolerance and general bemusement which is why I dare say no one minds too much, and why we find the sentiments of the OP a little, dare I say, extreme?