Manc Street Preachers

That pun in the title is so awful a piece of my soul died as I typed it. 

Circumstance driven by mail-related tomfoolery meant that I had to my hometown in southeast Manchester, which meant leaving my gaming PC behind (on which Call of Cthulhu is installed) meaning that I had to delay my little project on hold for the weekend, so I thought I’d use this blog entry to get on my soapbox about something very wrong in the Democratic People’s Republic of Manchester.

In spite of me implying that a large part of Greater Manchester is a haunted backwater in my last post, it’s probably my favourite place in the world. It’s probably just excessive hometown pride, nostalgia for my childhood or fear and hatred of our evil Southern oppressors (in their grand London townhouses, furnished with diamond sofas and fuelled by orphan slave labour gathered in comically oversized nets from the streets of Hackney) but I can’t think of many other places that I have that much fondness for. 

The bumbling face of terror

 

But one thing that I cannot tolerate about Manchester, and every other big city, is the prevalence of obnoxious street preachers. I don’t feel particularly strongly about religion, I personally believe that it’s impossible to prove or disprove the existence of the divine but that’s just me, it’s not my place to judge on matters of faith. What I do feel strongly about is public nuisance; every other day some church or fellowship or whatever feels the need to stand in the middle of Manchester’s Market Street, impeding pedestrians while screaming hostile personal abuse about how everyone listening is objectively and factually wrong and immoral in the way they live their lives. 

I will never understand the mindset that leads somebody to that course of action. You don’t win supporters, friends and converts by hurling blind, insulting and loud assumptions at the very people you are trying to convert; all that does is make your worldview and faith look mental, there’s a reason why advertisements on TV don’t start with “Hey dickhead, your friends hate you and your wife is actively plotting your murder. You should buy our products because it’s not like you have anything better to do.” 

The patron saint of crazy street preachers

 

I’m aware the extremists are in the minority but it’s sad to me that we live in a society wherein harebrained attempts at attention by these lunatics has driven civilized and reasonable debates and discussions about  where we stand in the cosmos away.