With the priests, the only thing certain is that it's a lot more common then reported - the majority of cases get covered up. However, because the churches tend to shuffle the priests around rather than doing anything about it, a lot of the cases are just the same handful of people at different times or areas. So the incidence is a lot higher, but the number of priests may actually be less than it appears.
I mean, it's not like someone has sat down and figured out exactly what constituted being taken, not that anyone really could. And yet, that's what the authors actually did. They seem unaware that the idea's pretty heretical, to say nothing of the level of outright hubris it involves.
As to the kids and original sin, they really have to. Baptists have the whole thing about having to be baptized as an adult. The Catholic church had to create purgatory just for the stillborn babies they couldn't baptize in time - imagine trying to deal with that when all children who die before adulthood are similarly condemned, and when you're already rejected the concept of purgatory. You've going to need to jump through some major theological hoops to avoid telling parents their dead child is not so much frolicking in Heaven as boiling in Hell simply because they didn't live long enough to make it to the baptism. The only real solution is just to sidestep the whole original sin problem.
This ends up having some disturbing implications in that if you kill children before the age of majority, they automatically go to heaven, while if you wait it's possible they won't. It also means every abortion is another soul in heaven, so you'd think their only objection to the pro-choice camp is the idea women could choose not to have an abortion. Theology is weird.
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Date: 2008-02-16 07:04 pm (UTC)I mean, it's not like someone has sat down and figured out exactly what constituted being taken, not that anyone really could.
And yet, that's what the authors actually did. They seem unaware that the idea's pretty heretical, to say nothing of the level of outright hubris it involves.
As to the kids and original sin, they really have to. Baptists have the whole thing about having to be baptized as an adult. The Catholic church had to create purgatory just for the stillborn babies they couldn't baptize in time - imagine trying to deal with that when all children who die before adulthood are similarly condemned, and when you're already rejected the concept of purgatory. You've going to need to jump through some major theological hoops to avoid telling parents their dead child is not so much frolicking in Heaven as boiling in Hell simply because they didn't live long enough to make it to the baptism. The only real solution is just to sidestep the whole original sin problem.
This ends up having some disturbing implications in that if you kill children before the age of majority, they automatically go to heaven, while if you wait it's possible they won't. It also means every abortion is another soul in heaven, so you'd think their only objection to the pro-choice camp is the idea women could choose not to have an abortion. Theology is weird.