It's crap like this that makes my youngest daughter Sadie, the one with no price, a devout atheist.
Again this falls into topics I should not give a care about but that ultimately piss me off:
charlatan religious zealots
Generally out to earn a buck and occasionally true believers, do more damage to the culture and economy than wall street....In Utah theaters - the new movie "zach and mira make a porno" has been band from showing, as was broke back mountain, but Saw V is playing. Saw V.
Good God.
The good news is that as an adult of Baptist decent, I do not share the guilt that my Catholic counter parts bathe themselves in. As a former-if-ever Baptist I know we are all bound for hell and not redeemable but for the forgiveness of Jesus if we request it, remain on fire, and die right before we have a chance to do something else horrible with our defective
existences, and that the path to redemption is confusing and likely painful. A path that may make life not worth living. A path full of tests that no human could possibly pass never mind get an A in.
Therefore... guilt is not really an option, despair, dogma and desperation are the only true refuge. There might also be mercy for people who are stupid or just don't know, although the purist Baptists will debate that everyone has an opportunity to jump on the boat albeit brief. I wonder how they reconcile babies that die in the womb - did anyone evangelize in time???
Again, arguments not worth having since they are dumb.
I spent some of my growing up with my Baptist grandparents in Texas in the summers. Church was scary and uncomfortable. Sunday school always digressed into some old lady insisting that my pets will not go to heaven, which was entirely confusing to me since our house hold growing up was constantly experiencing events that required us to lament over the benefits of being in doggie heaven, or kitty heaven, which in all honestly was not usually due to the death of a pet, but due to the fact that my mother tired of some aspect of pet ownership and either told me that they went to heaven or ran a way.
(As a sad side note - I spent quite a bit of time wandering around the neighborhood calling my random pet names, thinking that running away was standard fare for pet ownership. Everyone on the block knew, and I was the patsy. They thought my mom was nuts, which she was, and they felt sorry for me, which I didn't notice.)
Somehow my Grandparents were fabulous Baptists. They were good people, if not a bit racist and judgemental. But people that I adore and miss every day of my life. People who gave me a sense of family, love, ethics, and honor, despite my misfit status in the family. They were people who lived with integrity, which i did not understand the full extent of until after they died.
(As another side note - Every time I visited my Grandmother, she need to ask if I had had a bowel movement. She only asked once, and it was usually the first night of my stay. Clearly she had anxiety about my regularity. My Granddad was a wonderful man. He wore big baggy overalls and was always kind. He smelled like a hug and knew just how much sweetener to put in tea to make it perfect. He let me do farm work with him every day but tried to protect my fragile feminine sensibilities which meant I couldn't be around for castration ..ever, but watching him cut the heads off of turtles, shoot armadillos or snakes, was of course, fair game.)
The farm was a beautiful place, full of religion, televised wrestling (back in the days when folks like my grandma thought it was real), incredible food, hard work, and All my Children.
So that huge introduction is really to say that these pics are part of some spam mail I received and I re-post them for my passed grandparents although I do not share their particular brand of faith, I'm hoping they will remember my quandary regarding animals and heaven and where ever they are...they will laugh
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