Sabbath School 12/03/11 - Satan Takes the Pulpit

Last Friday evening I was blindsided, tricked, coerced, fucking ninja'd into presenting on the next day's Sabbath School. It was Family Life Day and my parents are the directors of the church's family life department, so our family was taking the day. As I said, there was no warning, just an announcement around five-thirty that evening. You would not believe how little I cared for that shit. I just sat there doing nothing, almost swearing that this is where it would go down, this is where the gauntlet would be thrown, the buck would stop, the hammer would fall and I would finally come out and tell them just what I believed, whether they liked it or not. But I ended up reasonig "hell, what will it hurt me to pick up some random book and recite some rote piece of bullcrap at the congregation." The rote piece of bullcrap was from Ellen G. White's The Adventist Home.

I picked "Children in the Home" as my topic, reading from Section XI. It basically codifies the Adventist child rearing philosophy. There is a lot in there I can agree with, including the importance of children helping around the home and things like that, but there is a lot I cannot. There is a very strong emphasis on gender roles, for example, but it is an old book, written when such views were universal. Unfortunately, though, a lot of Adventists (most especially here in Africa) still follow its words as law. The importance of "raising children in the Lord" is also heavily emphasised.

So I ended up doing it, and making it quite convincing, too, adding a few interjections of my own. I have discovered that it's quite easy to lie to a bunch of people whose opinion you don't give a flying donkey's ass about. The crunch came when we were expected to fast on that day, but I had breakfast anyway and managed to sneak in a couple of Bar Ones I stretched to satisfy me the whole afternoon.

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P.S. Please check out the entries for the Astronomican Winter Contest! My fiction entry is somewhere in there. I'm not at liberty to reveal which one's mine yet. Try guess which it is!

Of wimminz deacons

I actually enjoyed myself at church today. Apparently, the Seventh-Day Adventist church now ordains female deacons! So there was quite a debate at White City church here in Francistown, and things did get pretty heated. The discussion soon devolved into one of those arguments you always see on the internet that aren't quite flame wars but neither party wants to budge and so they keep slinging the same arguments back and forth for an interminable period. Sheesh, it ended up taking more than half the time of what was supposed to be an orientation of officers!

But why this uproar, one may ask? Why should there be such a fracas over such a simple and just thing as equal recognition of the sexes? I'll tell you why. This strikes at the very heart of the conflict between biblical literalism and literalism. I mean, face it - the bible clearly says to women: You Are Inferior. You are -4 str, and you should STFU when in church (1 Cor 14:34-35).

This move is a departure from the literalism of old, which is the very foundation upon which the SDA church was built, and as expected, most of the opposition (which was futile because The General Conference Is God) came from the oldsters (one old lady was particularly vociferous in her criticisms). In my opinion, though, this is a most excellent move, hopefully the first step on the road to throwing off the shackles of literalism for another globe-spanning community of Jebus Freeks. I even joked a bit o Facebook that come another five years, they'll be accepting evolution. Well, maybe not in five years. Maybe some time in the next 50-100, when Jebus hasn't come and the whole world hasn't turned on them at the behest of the Antichrist.