Some More Crazy Fundy Logic

[R. S. Martin]

This letter comes from a woman who is technically my aunt because she is my father's little sister. She is only fourteen years older than me so she is more like an older sister to me.

 

First there's a full page of chit-chat but I know something's coming because she writes about once every five or ten years. Besides, Dad's ill and there's an impending funeral so there's incentive. On the second page, here it comes:

 

When we think of all the organs and blood veins working together as needed I cannot see how anyone would expect this to happen in one great "bang."

 

Am very grateful to say [my son and his wife] are now going to a Baptist Church. It would be our prayer too that you would or could appreciate what God is doing for you. If you ever get a yearning for church I don't know how close to Martins church bus service would be by now.

 

We did not talk about you this a.m. and your Dad does not know that I wrote you.

 

Hope you enjoy what you are doing....[chit-chat]

 

I enjoy letters so a letter would be appreciated.

 

All one can do is laugh at the self-satisfied ignorance. I'm in my mid-fifties, for crying out loud, and she's holding my aged and ill father over my head as some sort of threat and authority figure. I remember when she and her husband (now deceased) were a whole lot younger and her father-in-law a whole lot healthier than Dad is now, and they wanted out from under the injunction: Children obey your parents.

 

I guess I should convert just for the funeral. It would make things so much easier for everyone involved. Except me. I'd feel like the phony I'd be.

 

I'm thinking that woman may be eating a double load of shit. She and her late husband did, after all, leave the horse and buggy church, too. Possibly she feels responsible for setting a bad example for me. Serves her right if she does. (She wasn't a nice big sister, just a big sister who was always there.) However, her example--good or bad--had nothing to do with my own decisions. She's always thought she was so much better than me and that will hardly change now that she's hitting seventy.

 

Now if I thought the light of reason had a chance in that woman's mind, I'd send her the following:

 

I read your letter. You write:

 

When we think of all the organs and blood veins etc. in a body all working together as needed I cannot see how anyone would expect this to happen in one great “bang.”

 

I don’t know why you’re saying this. However, I cannot trust the word of someone who proves to be so badly mistaken in her knowledge base as this. The Big Bang is not at all the same as evolution. The dust of the Big Bang had been settled billions of years before anything resembling organs and blood veins even began to evolve. Astro-physicists study the origins or the universe, how it came into existence. Biologists study the origins of things like organs and blood vessels. Creationists say God created all of it in one big bang by speaking the word.

 

The astro-physicists and biologists have concrete evidence to back up their arguments. Creationists have their holy books and an invisible, imperceptible, and unprovable God. Two astro-physicists you might like to look at are Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Lawrence Krauss. Two biologists are Richard Dawkins and Kenneth R. Miller. In the bibliographies of their books you can find more.

 

Having said all that, I don’t know what any of it has to do with salvation. When I read the Bible and listen to sermons it seems that in Christianity salvation means belief in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross (or tree) and resurrection one or more days later, depending on which gospel one reads. My question is: How can Jesus’ death and resurrection possibly help anyone?

 

In the song “Jesus Loves Me,” it says, “he who died heaven’s gates to open wide.” Why couldn’t God just open the gates the way you and I open doors? I’m told the price for sin had to be paid. QUESTION: How does anyone’s death pay or make up for someone else’s misdeeds? Maybe all of this is just a grandiose explanation to give meaning to the disciples’ grief when their leader was executed.  

 

I don’t expect an answer. I have read the Bible, parts of it many times, and listened to sermons. The answer does not exist. If there were a God with a Holy Ghost to give answers like the Bible promises, I have faith that I would have found the answer by now.

 

I'm not sending that. It would only prove to her--and the rest of the family how desperately I need "saving." The message of reason would be lost. So I'm sharing it here as just one more of those crazy fundy things that are supposed to be convincing.

[Guest r3alchild]

Your one smart cookie.

[Pantophobia]

Yeah, sending something like that would be like running repeatedly into a sliding glass door in hopes that *this* time it might not be a door.

 

Just listen to the way she talks down to you: SHE has Jeebus and you don't. Therefore, you are clearly a dumb child who needs to be told what to do: namely, go to church, because it will explain everything. 

[R. S. Martin]

Yeah, sending something like that would be like running repeatedly into a sliding glass door in hopes that *this* time it might not be a door.

 

 

You're right. I keep thinking if only I say it the right way they'll get it.

 

Just listen to the way she talks down to you: SHE has Jeebus and you don't. Therefore, you are clearly a dumb child who needs to be told what to do: namely, go to church, because it will explain everything. 

 

 

I know. This is just so stupid! She was there. She knows how many decades I went to church and faithfully listened to sermons. If she were thinking straight she would know that if the answer were there I'd have gotten it.

 

I guess that's why she's twisting it to make it an emotional issue. She wants me to "appreciate" what God is doing for me. What absolute and utter hogwash! God never did anything for me. The life (organs, blood veins) he gave me, if he can be credited as a life-giving source, was not worth having. The life I made for myself is the only one I have found worth living.

 

But this is NOT an emotional issue! It's intellectual.

 

She thinks she addressed the intellectual problem by demonstrating how hearts and blood vessels could not work without God running the operations. This is so ignorant. Doesn't take a scientist to understand the basic premises of how our bodies evolved to work this way. It's not taught in our horse and buggy Mennonite schools but I don't know of any list of "forbidden books." We have access to public libraries.

 

She would say one needs faith. That, again, is emotional.

 

You're right. Talking to her would be like running into a sliding glass door thinking that *this time* it's not a door. Thanks for the analogy.

[Fernweh]

She's old and trying to add another wing to her heavenly mansion by re-converting you. It's just earning Brownie Points for Jesus. Those heavenly McMansions don't build themselves you know. Maybe if she gets you back into church she can get that media room upgrade or a 24K gold driveway.

[Burny]

Stop reading my posts and telling my parents. This site is supposed to be confidential and I'm using an alias for a reason!

[RenaissanceWoman]

I'm wondering if maybe she is having doubts of her own. Facing a family member's mortality is often a time of reflection, especially for someone her age. She's getting closer to that day too. This might be her last ditch... "The blood and vessels were made by God, weren't they? There is a God, right? I get to go to heaven too, don't I?"

 

Of course she points out that her son has joined a church. He now has a social group, isn't that nice? (Yes, it's nice, until one day it isn't... but's that my experience.) Maybe that is something she is missing in her own life. She's getting older and losing family members to death, and maybe she is lonely in that feeling.

 

I think that stuff is all coming from her own baggage and fear. I'm just speculating. She could just be a class A manipulator.

 

I'm sorry you are dealing with this. Death in the family seems to brings out the worst in some people.

[R. S. Martin]

"Class A manipulator" fits her.

[RachelSkates]

Very sad indeed! She sounds like a mess. I know the type. People need their gods and then Poof.........they grasp at straws and manipulate anything they can to make it seem real. 

[Deva]

"R.S. you ungrateful wretch! HOW can you not appreciate what God is doing for you!!"

 

That is all I could get from reading that letter.  What a shame.

 

I agree with your decision not to send a reply. It would be wasted on this person.

[R. S. Martin]

"R.S. you ungrateful wretch! HOW can you not appreciate what God is doing for you!!"

 

That is all I could get from reading that letter.  What a shame.

 

I agree with your decision not to send a reply. It would be wasted on this person.

 

Thank you! And if it weren't this it would be something else. Finding fault and being critical is just the way she is and has always been. It runs in both sides of my family. I wasn't even sure it's not normal and I'm just too much of a wimp that I can't handle it. This thread is so good to help me see that it's not. Thank you, everyone, for responding.