My Karma Ate Your Dogma

[anahata56]

On Facebook recently, I had the interesting experience of seeing a photo album posted to an acquaintence’s page. This acquaintence was someone I knew from having attended the same church she currently attends, long, long ago

Comments

[wolfette]

there's an old joke that goes

a man dies and goes to the Pearly Gates, where he's met by St Peter. St Peter notes that he is entitled to enter Heaven, but since he wasn't aligned to any particular church, he gets to choose where - which of the Many Mansions - he wants to spend his eternity.

So he arranges a tour. First they pass the Heavenly Choir, sitting on clouds with harps. Then a beautiful garden with fountains and beautiful young men and women serving pitchers of cold drinks. Then a wonderful pastoral wilderness. One by one they explore beautiful places - each the "perfect" version of somewhere beautiful on Earth.

Then they reach a big brick wall. Very tall, with spikes on the top. St Peter motions the man to silence and they tiptoe past the wall.

"Sorry," he says, when they're past. "that's the Baptist heaven - they think they're the only b*ggers in here, so we don't want to disappoint them".

[armygeezer]

If you think about it, the people running the church now are the ones that were denied the "pleasures" of the roller rink back then that are now correcting past mistakes!

[bfly]

I don't remember us ever getting into any group activities that might have been mistaken for dancing. In my childhood church the issue was "mixed bathing." To whit, parties at which girls and boys alike, in bathing suits, were TOGETHER IN THE SAME WATER OH NOES at a church member's backyard pool.

[kestrels_nest]

Terrifyingly enough, this has become a current issue in the religious community that bears the same name as the one I grew up in. To my eye it seems to bear no resemblance otherwise. When I was growing up, high school girls and boys danced circle dances in mixed groups. Now a teenage girl who chats with a boy on a street corner can be expelled from the parochial high school.

Not every group is that extreme, but enough have gone that way that, while that isn't why I left, it is why I will never go back.

[griffen]

This ought to be posted to readers_list. May I?

[anahata56]

Sure!

[griffen]

Done! Expect some folks from there to comment here, as we're required to turn off comments to reposts to r_l, and link to the original post, so that the original person who wrote the piece gets the comments.

[jaxomsride]

I now have an image of the Church Elders spinning in their graves,on roller skates of course.