More religious glurge from Mom

Next in the continuing series of Revtim venting about his mother’s fundie beliefs…

She sent me the attached glurge, and I have to respond. I won’t respond to my Mom, because she already worries too much about her late husband burning in Hell, and she doesn’t need to worry about me.

For a moment I was pissed because this was an obviously false story, but after a second reading I think it could be meant as analogy that isn’t meant to be taken literally. I’ll give that a pass.

What I really find stupid about this crap is the idea that “God sacrificed his only son.”

Even if the Bible were 100 percent true, it ain’t much of a sacrifice when all the sacrifice means is that he arrives in Heaven next to your side after dying. How is it a sacrifice at all, if He has eternal life? The folks in the attached glurge made a much bigger sacrifice, IMO.

Yes, I’m sure it was intensely painful, but He’s God, He can take it. And the last 20 centuries in heaven as an aspect of the Almighty God probably gone a long way towards recovery.

That’s not even a good analogy. It would make more sense if the father had created the virus and the kid would come back to life 36 hours later no worse for wear.

You have got to be fucking kidding me. Emotional and spiritual blackmail does not temper the soul.

:smiley: This is the perfect response for Mom.

Imperfect analogy aside, though, it’s not a bad little plot; it could form the kernel of a neat SF short story.

Daniel

It’s a Wednesday night and you are at a church prayer meeting when somebody runs in from the parking lot yelling, “Turn on a radio, turn on a radio!”

And while the church listens to a little transistor radio with a microphone stuck up to it, the announcement is made: “Two women are lying in a Long Island hospital dying from a ‘mystery’ flu.” Within hours it seems, this thing just sweeps across the country.

People are working around the clock trying to find an antidote. Nothing is working! California, Oregon, Arizona, Florida, Massachusetts.

It’s as though it’s just sweeping in from the borders.

And then, all of a sudden, the news comes out. The code has been broken. A cure can be found. A vaccine can be made. It’s going to take the blood of somebody who hasn’t been infected, and so, sure enough,all through the Midwest, through all those channels of emergency broadcasting,

Everyone is asked to do one simple thing: Go to your downtown hospital and have your blood type taken. That’s all we ask of you. When you hear the sirens go off in your neighborhood, please make your way quickly, quietly, and safely to the hospitals.

Sure enough, when you and your family get down there late on that Friday night, there is a long line, and they’ve got nurses and doctors coming out and pricking fingers and taking blood and putting labels on it.

Your wife and your kids are out there, and they take your blood type and they say, “Wait here in the parking lot and if we call your name, you can be dismissed and go home.”

You stand around, scared, with your neighbors, wondering what in the world is going on and if this is the end of the world.

Suddenly a young man comes running out of the hospital screaming. He’s yelling a name and waving a clipboard. What? He yells it again! And your son Stinky tugs on your jacket and says, “Daddy, that’s me.”

Before you know it, they have grabbed your boy. woo-hoo!

Hold on! And they say, "It’s okay, his blood is clean. He’s a mean little bastard, but his blood is pure.

We want to make sure he doesn’t have the disease. We think he has got the right type." Five tense minutes later, out come the doctors and nurses, shaking their heads and holding the bite marks on their fingers … some are even laughing. It’s the first time you have seen anybody laugh in a week, and an old doctor walks up to you and says, “Thank you, sir. Your son’s blood type is perfect. You mind if we off the little SOB?”

Then the gray-haired doctor pulls you and your wife aside and says, “May we see you for moment? We kinda have to beat the kid to death slowly in order to froth up the blood properly. OK by you?”

“H-how long will you have to beat him?”, you ask.

And that is when the old doctor smiles and he says, “Oh, three or four days! With a cat-o-nine-tails Would you sign?”

In numb silence, you do.

Then they say, “Would you like to have a moment with him before we begin?”

Hell, no—but they lead you in anway, where Little Stinky lies strapped to a table saying, “Daddy? Mommy? What the fuck is going on? You bastards!” You take his hands and say, “Son, remember that nature special on PBS where the lion bit thew wildebeast to death?”

And when that old doctor comes back in and says, “I’m sorry, we’ve GOT to get started! This is gonna be fun. Can you leave?”

Can you walk out while he is saying, “*You goddam motherfucking sonsbitches, I’ll crawl back from the grave and rip your hearts out!? *”

And then next week, when they show the video on FOX of your kid being eviscerated, some folks sleep through it … some folks don’t even come because they go to the lake or the seashore … some folks come with a pretentious smile and just “pretend” to care. Would you want to jump up and say, “MY SON DIED FOR YOU! DON’T YOU CARE?”

If you are totally ashamed of GOD for what HE has done for you pass this on.

I don’t care for the glurge (in fact, I don’t understand it), but I think you’ve confused sacrifice with risk. The physical crucifixion was a spiritual amputation. Jesus brought the sword that cut off the dead limbs. It is sad when someone you love decides to leave you.

Lib, I don’t think sacrifice is risk, I think it is loss of something valued. I do not understand what was lost in Christ’s sacrifice. A few days of not being in pain?

I think the only people who are going to read this and get anything out of it are people who already believe. I highly doubt that it’s going to convert anyone.

My step-father, a devout Catholic, says that the anguish of being separated from the Father his entire life was more painful than any of the torture. It’s a very interesting concept to consider.

OK, plot hole:

Yeah, they need all the kid’s blood to make the antidote. And they can’t give him a transfusion because all the other blood is infected.

BUT

If they’re making the antidote from the pure blood, why not give him infected blood so he doesn’t freakin die,’ and then give him the damn antidote already?!

Yeah, it would all depend on how quickly the virus killed…but if it really IS a quick killer, would the CDC really direct ALL citizens to go stand in line at hospitals with a bunch of other infected people!!! GIVE ME FRIGGIN BREAK!

Yamirskoonir, I thought of that, but they wouldn’t be able to give him the transfusion until he was “bled out”, or they’d contaminate his pure blood. I guess it’d be too late by then. (I’m not saying the story’s true, I hope you realize).

He lost billions of free moral agents who chose not to love. They were His children. They drew their lives from His own breath, and decided that they wanted no part of Him. He is eternal spirit. For Him, the whole of space-time is at once not yet begun, ongoing, and completed. Again, Jesus’ death was both a physical event and a spiritual event. The death of His body was trivial. It was the amputation of His own Being that was significant. And from our perspective, it is still ongoing.

Y’ know, Lib, if you had lived 500 years ago, you would either have been declared a saint or burned at the stake for heresy (or possibly both).

Eve, you rock. That was deliciously offensive. Call me a believer who thinks a response like that is entirely appropriate for a chain email like that in the OP. :smiley:

Whoever wrote that so ripped off The Stand it’s not even funny.

Thank you, Gobear. I know how you meant that, and I love you for it. :slight_smile:

Any letter that makes it’s way to me with these lines, or any semblance of these two lines, in it wins automatic deletion for itself, and a letter saying to never send me another letter like this again for whoever sent it. It wont’ make a blip of difference in my beliefs whether I send it on or not. I know and God knows what my beliefs are, and I don’t have to prove a fucking thing to anybody else.

Ignoring the part about people “choosing” not to love (I cannot choose to love or not love something I did not choose to not believe exist in the first place), that sort of sounds like it’s the non-Christians being sacrificed.

If you are not ashamed of GOD or what HE has done for you pass this on.

I don’t have a problem with the message the email the OP posted is trying to get across. I’m a Christian, and yes, I would die for my faith. I’d be honored to die for the sake of the Gospel (I’d prefer to die an old, old woman of course, but ya know what I mean).

However, lines like THAT above just burn me up.

You’re gonna make a judgment about my love for God based on whether or not I will pass on unsolicited email to someone?! What they’re saying is “If you don’t spam your friends and family with this annoying email that you have already read on 10 other occasions, you don’t love Jesus and you’re obviously ashamed of Him.”

Last I checked the call God has placed on my life doesn’t involve spam.

In numb silence, I punch the doctor in the face and take my son home.