SO - we are living in a ''neo-pagan Scotland'' (John Macleod, May 19) where there are ''sad and filthy people'' who follow football teams, watch cookery programmes, read horoscopes, try to win money on the lottery, read junk fiction, and take drugs, etc.
John Macleod longs for the days when the ''lively Presbyterian culture gave us advances in medicine, physics, engineering, and transport''. Does he really think that these notable advances were any better than those we are now experiencing, which bring us cheaper, more nourishing food and better, faster communications, and (this is the one I really like) a more open, supportive society for those who have been abused. How many of these child abusers - many of them ''good'' churchmen - would have been exposed in his utopian era when it was easily hidden?
The vast majority of people today, dare I say even the poor, at least experience some highs in their lives, thanks to football, junk fiction, and drugs (including cheap drink and fags!)
John Macleod says we are a sad rabble. He says we are filthy. At a recent school assembly I was gobsmacked (that means ''very shocked'' to those people who live in the past!) when the stand-in minister talked to a whole school of children from the age of five to 18 about how sick they were in the mind (as a teacher I was very tempted to walk out in protest). Is this ''lively Presbyterianism''?
Fortunately the sermon was so boring, as usual (why don't these ministers talk at a level children can understand?), that my own children who were there couldn't even remember what he'd been saying - however, they won't be in attendance at the next assembly!
I am a great believer in live and let live, but I've had enough of being talked down to by ministers and people like John Macleod because they, from what I've not only read and heard, but seen (and here I don't mean the drink and the fags!), are the saddest people of all.
John Macleod may think we are hurtling towards ''Hell'' (why give the word the honour of a capital letter?) ''in a hand-cart'', but it is only pathetic, inadequate souls who need a crutch and can't stand on their own two feet who have that ridiculous fate awaiting them.
Why don't these people stop trying to convert those who are better adjusted to the real world than they'll ever be and just be thankful that we don't take it upon ourselves to try to sort out their sick minds? I know I'm a better person than Mr Macleod and these ''lively Presbyterians''!
Frank Eadie,
The Schoolhouse,
Scarista, Isle of Harris. May 19.
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