Holy Moses!

I think that most of the people at Elsdon believed something like the "common culture" version of the afterlife, until Rev. Anderson came along and told us what the Bible has to say about it. It was not long after he dropped that bomb at an M.Y.F. meeting that he left and went back to school, and it wasn't long after that I split for Alaska. My first impression was that the good reverend had made some kind of mistake, and it took a few years of reading and thinking about it for me to come around to his way of thinking. Somewhere along the way, I came across that statement Jesus made about the Apocalypse coming in one generation, which confused me even more. I guess Occam's razor caught up with me eventually, although I didn't know that's what it was called. Isn't that the one that says the obvious explanation is the most likely explanation? Anyway, the most obvious explanation, but the one that few Christians are willing to consider, is that the prediction of the impending Apocalypse was just plain wrong. Either Jesus was mistaken, or the Bible does not accurately reflect what Jesus said.

The reason Salome was pissed at John the Baptist was that he went around telling people that she was a shameless hussy, or words to that effect. Salome was King Herod's daughter or niece or something, and one day she danced so pretty for Herod that he offered to give her anything she wanted, which turned out to John's head on a platter. I have heard of the Essenes, maybe that's the cult I was thinking about.

According to the Bible, the Israelites were not carried off to Egypt like their descendants were carried off to Babylon centuries later. They came wandering in out of the desert during a time of famine and were allowed to camp in the suburb of Goshen. There they became fruitful and multiplied to the point that the Egyptians were beginning to worry about them taking over the neighborhood. You can find the whole story in the Wiki article that we recently read about the Israelites. At some point during the Israelites stay there they, and everybody else in Egypt, became the slaves of the pharaoh because there was another famine and the pharaoh was the only one who had any food. When the citizens had nothing left to trade for food, they sold themselves.

I am willing to accept the possibility that the whole Exodus story is bogus, but that leaves us with the question of how the Israelites managed to take over Canaan at a time when Egypt allegedly had dominion over the whole region. As somebody said on Wiki, if the Exodus story was true, the Israelites would have been fleeing from Egypt to Egypt. I think the Bronze Age Collapse theory plugs in nicely here. One thing for sure, the Israelites did in fact take over Canaan. I don't think anyone disputes that.

Rev. Schact certainly did not introduce communion to the Elsdon congregation, although I seem to remember that she increased the frequency from quarterly to monthly. The Catholics do it at every mass, but the Protestants generally do it less often. The Methodists always used grape juice instead of wine because Methodists are not supposed to drink alcohol. I don't remember any wafers at Elsdon, we used little squares of bread. The Catholics use a wafer that they call "The Host", which is supposed to contain both bread and wine, and is magically transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ when it touches your tongue (transubstantiation). Protestants generally believe that the bread and wine only symbolizes the body and blood, although some of them believe that it is, for all practical purposes, the same thing (consubstantiation). Wars have been fought over this. One of the principal issues of the Hussite war in Bohemia was whether or not to use both bread and wine (communion in two kinds), or just the wafer (communion in one kind).

Methodist ministers are not assigned to a church. The congregation has a board of directors that hires them and can fire them. I think most Protestant denominations and Jewish congregations do it like that.

Religion and morality seem to have evolved together, kind of a chicken and egg thing, and it is only in the last few hundred years that anybody has tried to separate the two. As a Deist, I believe that religion in a human activity, so morality would come from people, not from God. In a manner of speaking, though, all things come from God because He is the creator of us all.