Christianity: WTF Are All These Denominations?
So as many of you probably know by now, I went to a Catholic elementary school. I went to church approximately twice a week (once on Fridays with the rest of the school and once on Saturdays with my dad) and was even an altar server. Despite this, though, I couldn’t tell you the difference between, say, what Catholics believe and what Presbyterians believe.
So this little video was super interesting to me:
I can vouch for the “YOU GOTTA DO THE CHURCH STUFF BRO” thing with Catholicism. It was very heavily pushed in our religious studies that you needed to be a part of the church OR ELSE.
McGee and Me! (Blame YouTube)
As many of you know, I went to a Christian elementary school. We had an hour set aside for “religion” study every day, went to church every Friday morning, and had Bible-themed Christmas plays every December and Bible-themed spring plays every April or so.
Every once and awhile, we’d have an event (a BBQ, a “party”, a something-or-other) that required us to be at school during non-regular hours. To entertain us (i.e., to keep us all in the same room), our teacher or principal would opt to play a TV show or movie on our little TV-on-a-roller-cart. Being a Christian school, we never got to watch anything but—you guessed it—Christian-themed shows! The most popular one for us was Veggies Tales, but I was never really into them at the time. The one that I enjoyed (though “enjoyed” is a relative term) was called McGee and Me!
(Source)
It’s basically about this kid, Nick, who has a drawing of his come to life and together the two of them get into all sorts of “you can get out of this by being a good Christian” mishaps. Actually, they were mishaps you could get out of by just being a good person, but they made sure to add “God” and “Jesus” in there because you can’t be a good person without those two guys in your life, right?
Example: the episode “Beauty in the Least” is about Nick’s Romanian pen pal coming to visit unexpectedly during Thanksgiving. Romanian Pen Pal is, according to Nick, super annoying and plan-ruining when he’s not in pen-pal-letter form, so Nick is a jerk to him and the poor dude gets upset (understandably). But through the guidance of God and the “love thy neighbor as thyself” idea, Nick realizes that he’s been a jerk and does his best to make it up to Romanian Pen Pal and his father. So like I said, it’s basically a “be a good person, dammit” show with a Christian bend. I always enjoyed it, though. It was better than Veggie Tales.
Here, have a link to the first part of this episode on YouTube, in case you were a ‘90s Christian kid and you want to nostalgia yourself to death just like I did tonight. That’s the whole reason for this post, haha.
You’re welcome.
Oh, the Christianity!
I’m sorry. I had to. Long story behind this one.
If there’s a hell, I’m going to it.
Clean sinks and heater grates? No thanks, I’d rather discuss metaphysics
For once, something of real interest came out of the U of I’s incompetence and disorganization.
As you may know (if I’ve told you over Messenger), my lovely little stalker and I discuss metaphysics (mainly the existence of god) during lunch. Well, we did so today—rather loudly, because he was attacking me ‘cause I’m not a theist. After lunch, my partner Mike and I were up at GSR. We cleaned the unlocked rooms pretty fast, so we sat down in the last one, prepared to wait a good hour and a half for Roy to come pick us up.
We’re sitting there in silence for a few minutes until he asks me what stalker boy and I were talking about over lunch; apparently he’d heard us debating but couldn’t catch what we were talking about. So I told him, and what do you know, he’s a Christian, so we start debating.
We debated for three hours. It was awesome. I must say, Mike did a pretty damn good job of defending his beliefs—in fact, I think it was the best theist argument I’ve ever come across. But from the directions his reasoning/evidence pointed, I’ve decided that if there is a god, he pretty much sucks. Best evidence for this: if we are striving to be like god in our virtues, universal compassion is NOT something we should be shooting for.
Eigenblogger 