[UA] What Do You Beleive?

[Eric]

> This brings up a question which had just been eating
> at me.  I know there's a couple of pagans on this list
> and there's certainly one or two Catholics.  I,
> myself, am a snarling athiest (although, about 2am in
> the morning I have a nasty tendency to Really
> Beleive.)  What religions do we have represented in
> this mailing list?

    I was raised a Presbyterian, drifted away in my teen years, and drifted
back nine years ago when I started dating my now wife.  It's a pretty good
religion as they go.  You get to drink and smoke and have heterosexual sex
even before marriage.  Women get to be ministers and ministers get to marry
people of the opposite sex.  In the sixties it was decided it was okay for
divorced people to get married again, and right now we're trying to decide
if it is officially okay for gays to have sex.  My guess that by the end of
this decade it will be; all the votes keep coming out 51% to 49% against and
many measures have been settled by the vote of a single delegate.
    Not that much of that comes up on a week to week basis.  The business
and politics of our church is mainly who can we help and how.  How much
money to send overseas, how much to spend in the local community, how much
to spend on ourselves.  When you are church full of middle class white
people located in a middle class white neighborhood, you have to go looking
for people who need your help.  And of course once you start looking, the
list gets long in a hurry.
    The thing I like best about our church (and the churches of my
experience have this in common) is how it cares for its sick and elderly
members.  Even something mundane like having a kid, people show up on your
doorstep with food and clothes and toys.  When one of the member's kids came
down with leukemia, other government workers in the church transferred their
leave to his mom so she could spend more time with him.  And so on.  In a
community where we didn't know the names of our neighbors three doors down,
it was and is nice to be a part of a place where people care about your well
being simply because you care about theirs.
        -- Eric



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