Hmph. You must be over Weird Relative quota or somethin’…all my weird relatives live in the city…it’s the mostly normal* ones that live out in the rural areas…
*normal meaning that they run one of the local bookstores, can fix darn near anything including boats, planes, and cars, can and do read heavily, and encouraged me in reading everything I could get my hands on in my younger years. YMMV.
Oh, and if one of my relatives did something that stupid…I wouldn’t even consider never speaking to them again. I would consider never shutting up about it until they bought me a new copy.
I recall a fundie church I once went to; they had a big get-together and burned a bunch of occult books.
But of course, they did it voluntairly.
That was just disgusting what your grandfather did.
Did you tell your parents?
Maybe you could tell him its not nice to throw things…
My mother got a little leary when she saw me reading Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary,” but she would never do anything like that. As someone else already read, that least he was trying to save your soul. :shrug:
Hell, my dad once caught me reading his collection of underground comics from the '60s. Fritz the Cat, The Checkered Demon, Mr. Natural, he had 'em all. He wasn’t too pleased, but mostly out of anticipation of awkward questions in the near future. I mean, how do you handle an eight year old asking, “Daddy, why is the man peeing in the other man’s mouth?”
The next day, the comics went into storage for the next, oh, twelve years or so.
Any way, the upshot is that despite that, I grew up to be a perfectly well adjusted adult. Now if you’ll excuse me, my tutu is riding up my butt crack again.
I was reading The Devil’s Dictionary when visiting a friend at an NYU dorm this summer, and the security guard there noticed the title and recommended, in all conspiratorial seriousness, that I check out a certain part of the city “where all the witches are.”
I used to date a Wiccan, which made his comment especially amusing.
Didn’t mean to offend you. To be honest, it’s just that area of rural OK that I know about it, and most of the people around there are relatives (albeit mostly distant ones) so no offense outside the family is intended.
I have a few fundy relatives (I’m from Texas) that are about as weird and ignorant as Chekmate’s grandpa, but none of them would have taken a book out of my hands and thrown it away like that.
I think.
I may start a thread on how I found out my dear aunt and uncle and sons are so racist, they want to move from their home town because “There are too many blacks moving in.” They’re also the most fundy of my relatives and refuse to accept human evolution. It can’t be a coincidence.
Well, this is not a religious experience, but it is about being caught with a book…
When I was about 9 years old we had silent reading time in class, and one day the teacher came around to see what we were reading.
I was reading Forever By Judy Blume, which is aimed at “young adults” and is about a girl’s first sexual relationship.
My teacher took it and looked through it with another teacher and laughed at all the “naughty bits” in it, then gave it back to me and told me to bring another book next time we had silent reading.
This reminds me of when I was working at the restaurant last summer. I was talking about the Darwin fish on my car, and one of the waitresses stopped and stared at me with her mouth hanging open and said “You don’t actually believe that crap, do you?” and then she asked if I believed in God and I said, “You don’t actually believe that crap, do you?” in the same condescending tone of voice.
I actually think the fact that I didn’t believe it was more shocking to her than the way I said it.
Fortunately I don’t have any fundie relatives. My family might be more fun [for me] if I did.
Since we’re diverting into “recount your own horrific experience” storytime, I’ll share my own.
My sister in law is a major fundy. She was down visiting last year and she, the wife, and I went to the movies. There in the parking lot was a car with a Darwin fish and a Christian fish. I thought it was a nice statement of the harmony that can exist between religion and science, but her take on it was that “those people must not know what they believe, they’re obviously confused” :rolleyes: A sharp look from the wife prevented me from challenging the SIL’s “reasoning”
“Obviously confused” indeed.
aside to chekmate: I just finished reading Demon Haunted World last Saturday. What a wonderful book. Sagan had a truly inspiring view of the wonders of the natural world. It made me sad all over again that he is gone.
A couple months ago I was on a business trip to our office San Jose, and while eating lunch with a couple of coworkers there (all engineers) we got on the subject of hot sauces. I mentioned that the chili plants had evolved the hotness as a defense mechanism, and humans were the only animals who actually liked the hotness. One of the guys said “Oh, I don’t believe that evolution myth!”. I just said “really!” or something like that, I was so surprised. Most engineers I’ve met have had the creationism educated out of 'em.
The week I was working with this guy it was clear he was a religious far-right conservative type guy, who believed that “society has the right to protect itself” from such horrible dangers as Eminem using foul language, and censorship was the way to go.
What scares me most about these fundies is that because they beleive so strongly in something that they have literally and figuratively stopped thinking for themselves and their most ferverent desire is for you, yeah you, to stop thinking as well.
