Today Pope Benedict the XVI got rid of limbo as the place for the unbaptised souls of children.
Enjoy heaven, babies!
I mean, really, how can anyone take any religion seriously after this? One morning, a guy wakes up, eats some breakfast, notes the weather is turning cold in Rome, and then decides to dispose of religious element before his morning intestinal evacuation.
I’m not an atheist but the do have good T-Shirts: “When you can explain why you dismiss all other gods, you’ll understand why I dismiss yours.”
This is why my interpretation of Christianity always goes back to the mystic, the gnostic. It doesn’t have any logical understructure, and by virtue of this, doesn’t require an immutable codex of laws and behaviours. It merely says “The mysteries can be revealed and in the mean time, stop being a selfish snot.” If you build a religion on an edifice of “Here’s it all laid out once, rationally perfectly” you’re just asking for time or science ( or both ) to bring the whole circus tent crashing down.
I guess I’m really soured on the Christian religious machine after watching the sad, but wonderufully produced documentary, The Eyes of Tammy Faye. I highly recommend it. Tammy seems a genuinely nice, decent, Christian woman who, for all her work, decency, dreaming, and devotion seems to have gotten steamrollered at every corner. People deserve peace.
October 5th, 2006 at 9:01 am
For simlilar reasons, I belong to a Christian branch which makes pretty modest claims about what it knows and embraces people of widely divergent beliefs. I was recently told by a fellow-parishioner, right in church, that “The DaVinci Code” was probably closer to the truth than the beliefs of George W. Bush.
But no limbo for babies? If anything is more hubristic than the ideas that we can know what happens to people’s souls after they die and that we can decipher God’s plans for the unborn, it’s the idea that then we can change our minds and the result will be meaningful.
October 6th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
so what’s the current word on the practice of indulgences? i’d been saving up some money to buy my soul’s way out of an assault & battery i’ve got planned.