Right, right, I forgot about infant baptism, the horror! That someone would want to dedicate their child to the faith in which they tend to raise the kid! Blasphemy! Hee.

And then there's LDS baptism where you can get baptized for people who are not you. Including dead people. So that's handy! But also definitely in UR doin' it wrong territory!

Ha. The summary is of course, religion: freaky.

That googling also found a hymn called "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb," which I can't stop humming now, although it's sometimes sliding into Turkey in the Straw.

So, VW, if you were raised, like....Lutheran or something, but believe in Jesus and all that, and were baptized and so on...that's "washed in the water" because you were just, um, raised that way? Even though you believe?

...the whole schisms in the Protestant church befuddle me, I admit. So who counts as blood, and who counts as water? I mean, clearly us Catholics are right out, I'm clear on that one. Infant baptisms throw you right out, I have that clear. But what else throws you out?

I need to make this VERY clear that this is NOT how I believe...

Like anything, this depends on who you talk to. But, much of the evangelical movement believes that you must be "saved," "born again," "washed in the blood of Jesus," to go to heaven. These are all phrases that essentially mean the same thing. You have to have a "come to Jesus" moment where you realize that you are a sinner, and you ask Jesus to save you from that sin and live in you (as the Holy Spirit). So, if you have not done that, you are not going to heaven.

ETA: And that's the distinction I take the song to be making.

And then there's LDS baptism where you can get baptized for people who are not you. Including dead people. So that's handy!

This has been becoming an issue between LDS and Jewish groups again lately, because LDS members keep getting the lists of the dead from Auschwitz and baptizing people from the lists, and then Jewish groups get annoyed and say that it's disrespectful and hey, the LDS church said ten years ago that they'd stop doing that but it keeps happening, and then the LDS people say that they'll take those names off the official list of the baptized, but they don't actually do anything to stop their members from baptizing all of them again.

I think that, at last count, Anne Frank had been baptized a few hundred times.

Of course, if this is true, then well, like centuries of people will just go to hell because there wasn't anyone who believed this way until Martin Luther came along.

It's so eye-rolly that I can't even stand it sometimes.

It's also why I say, "There's gonna be a whole heck of a lot of surprised people when we all get to heaven!"

"Theres gonna be a whole heck of a lot of surprised people when we all get to heaven!"

LOVE this!

Personally I can really get my back up when someone starts insisting on an all loving creator who'll throw you out on a technicality.

Once at church camp someone asked the Pastor-o-the-Week about blasphemy and he said (and I've never been able to find some awesome source for this, so it might have been all his), "The only blasphemy is underestimation of the Diety."

Which has always stuck with me. And is a lense through which I take a look at any bold religious declaration. "Are you selling God short here? Do you REALLY want to do that?"

I love that too, Trudes.

I'm not saying everybody needs to believe in God, but if you're going to do it? DO it. Don't try and develop some sort of pocket-sized almighty that you can wrap your puny human brain around with ease.

The entire history of religion in America is, pretty much, UR DOING IT WRONG, HEY LET'S SCHISM! (With periodic waves of immigrants arriving and saying "HEY! THEY'RE DOING IT WRONG HERE! THEY'VE SCHISMED!!!")

(I just recently finished listening to this really fantastic lecture series on American Religious History. Did you know that the Oneida silverware company started out as a freaky Christian sex cult in upstate NY? And they only started the metalwork thing to fund their freaky cult commune? Basically the Oneida family patriarch believed that sex was holy and you should have as much of it as possible, but orgasms and marriage were evil. So they got a lot of early converts who came for the promiscuity but left once they realized it wasn't going to be any fun. It didn't last long.)