You are Only Allowed to Believe 10 Things

I saw recently that the debate about women priests has popped up again. I do not recollect the context and anyway, the debate probably never really went way. I was most likely just not paying attention (“Sit up at the back and pay attention, Hawker”).

I cannot get my head around this question. Actually, as readers of my Blogs will realise, there are a great many questions that I cannot get my head around. It is not that I am not interested (although that might be the case). It is more that I cannot develop an opinion about which I have any real conviction.

These questions outnumber the questions and beliefs about which I do have conviction. Poor fellow, that I am. These questions are very important to most people. In the Church, for example, they decide which denomination or which branch of the denomination you will join, whether you are high-church or low church and if you have the wrong view or belief on a topic, you will not feel welcome or at least feel very uncomfortable.

So I have decided to make a mid-year’s resolution to only really believe in ten things. I thought of making this five to start with (and still think that five is a good number), but there are Ten Commandments, and there must have been a good reason for making them ten. Jesus had twelve disciples. Now I know that ten is not twelve, but it is more than five. Also as we have all gone metric, even the greengrocer in Brentwood High Street, I will stick to ten.

Now, it is not that you cannot have an opinion about other matters, but these ten will the only ones which are really allowed to matter from now on. Now try it.

It is hard isn’t it? Finding ten beliefs or opinions is not the problem, but there is so much to leave out.

I have a theory (only a theory, you understand) that most of what we believe is clutter. They form a mental attic or garage, where we store up various views that have been collected over the years and never thrown out and never used in any practical sense.

I have nearly completed my ten, but I am struggling. I believe so few things with conviction, that I am not sure that I am going to need ten.

By the way, my opinion about whether you can have ten or twelve does not count towards my ten. (…and believing in the Ten Commandments counts as one). This is my blog, so I make the rules. Fun, isn’t it.