Being a web developer by trade, I am accutely aware of the issues presented in building a cross-browser compatible website. This is because our clients demand that their website always looks the same no matter which web browser is being used. What they are blissfully unaware of is that, despite there being set standards for writing website code (as laid out by the W3C et al), web browsers are not forced to render said website code in a particular fashion, and this allows for a considerable amount of creative licence on the part of the browser programming team – and more often than not the programming team in question is the Internet Explorer programming team.
Firefox has its bugs, as do Safari and Opera, but you can pretty much guarantee that the vast majority of your cross-browser development pain will be caused by Internet Explorer – or as I like to think of it: The Church of England Browser.
You see, religion works in much the same way: you have one set of code (the bible) and yet each of the browsers (religious denominations) chooses to interpret that code slightly differently. And yet, just like a website, I think it is entirely probable that the person that wrote the code would have had in mind a specific way in which it should be interpreted and therefore might not be too happy about the way some browsers just do whatever they damn well please.
This is turning into quite the analogy, so let’s leave the web behind a minute and focus on the theological for a moment.
The bible clearly condemns war. Well, actually, the Old Testament is full of war, but that’s different to the Christian faith and principles of the New Testament. Perhaps we do need the web analogy still. Think of the Old Testament as Web 1.0 and the New Testament as Web 2.0. Web 1.0 is not invalid and many of it’s principles remain true, but other elements have been superseded by Web 2.0. The same is true of the bible.
Jesus and his apostles, of New Testament fame, quoted liberally from the Old Testament, thus proving its relevance to those of a Christian persuasion. And whilst it is true that God actively helped the Israelite nation in warfare, one must remember that in doing so he was merely using His people as His tool to execute His judgment. In fact, the Old Testament itself talks about beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning shears and ceasing warfare. The United Nations was particularly taken with this notion, and had the words of Isaiah 2:4 stuck on their building as some sort of motto, which they completely ignored by failing to turn any of their weapons into farming equipment. I digress…
How is it, that this straightforward piece of “code” can then be rendered by some religious “browsers” as: kill everybody? How can you have Catholics of one nationality going to kill Catholics of another nationality, with both claiming that God is on their side? Hmmmmmmmm. I detect a browser error. He cannot be on both sides, and therefore I suspect He is actually on neither side.
Jesus shunned politics, yet he had a clear and uncontested royal lineage that could be traced back to King David. He rightfully could have claimed his kingship, and indeed this is exactly what the Jews expected him to do. In fact, they tried to enthrone him as king, and he ran away. (John 6:15). Why? Because he chose instead to devote his life to talking about the future kingdom of God (Luke 4:43) – he even told us to pray for it in the Lord’s prayer – rather than focusing on the meaningless politics of the day which could never have brought any lasting benefits to humanity as a whole. He underlined this with a simple statement: “I am no part of this world.”
So then, how is it that the clergy of the Church of England are so involved with politics? Religion has shaped the governance of this country (and many others around the world) for eons, and it still refuses to let go. You see this particularly in the US of A, where politicians preach their manifestos from the church pulpits, creating an interlaced mush of religio-politics that must surely confuse the hell out of the parishioners – they usually look pretty confused to me anyway.
I think we are witnessing another browser error.
Here’s the thing: as sure as you know that Internet Explorer is a pile of festering turd completely incapable of following any standards whatsoever, you also know that there is a Firefox out there. Yes, it may be a little buggy in places, but it is rendering that code out the way it was intended to be viewed, and that’s all that matters.
Likewise, if you wade through all the religions, there simply must be one out there that is correctly distilling the truth. The problem is that you can’t just whip along to mozilla.org and download a copy, but I’m pretty sure that using purely the two principles discussed above, a diligent searcher will be rewarded with the Firefox of truth.
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