I don’t believe in God. I do, however, believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), an invisible and undetectable being who resembles spaghetti and meatballs and created the world. I am a devout Pastafarian.
The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was revealed to the world by Bobby Henderson last year in a letter he sent to the Kansas State Board of Education, which had just voted to teach “alternatives” to evolution in high-school science classes. Henderson demanded that since God was going to be taught in science classes, the FSM ought to get a look in too. Students should be taught that the gospel of the FSM explains gravity, for example, since He is hovering above us and holding us down using His Noodly Appendages. Proof is that humans have got taller. As the world’s population increased, there were fewer Noodly Appendages to go round, so it has been easier to grow.
Ludicrous, but any more ludicrous than a white-bearded man sitting in a throne behind pearly gates who creates a paradise called Eden from which he promptly ejects its two sole human occupants because they ate an apple and thus condemned humankind to eternal suffering? As Pope Benedict moves to abolish limbo, just a few weeks after he had the nerve to accuse Islam of being irrational, how can anybody take any teaching of the Catholic church remotely seriously? Limbo was needlessly cruel to innocent babies, but abolishing it in the face of religious market forces is lame.
The Muslims, you see, don’t have limbo. They send all babies straight to heaven. Competition is tough out there and the priests in Africa were getting a hard time from mothers for whom high infant mortality is a miserable fact of life. If Muslims and Catholics believe in the same God, but the Muslim babies go to heaven and the Catholic babies don’t, wouldn’t you rather your poor dead baby was a Muslim? Now I don’t mind people having crazy religious beliefs (well, actually I do) but the least I expect is that they stick to them. The Catholic church is getting like Fianna Fail — no core values.
The theologians are trying to pass limbo off as a tiresome loose end: it is merely a “hypothesis”, not doctrine as such. Don’t let them fool you. Limbo is crucial to Catholicism. Man is born with original sin as a result of the Fall. After death he was therefore unable to enter heaven and see God. Jesus, son of God, had to die and be raised from the dead. Thereafter, anyone who was baptised and died in a state of grace could go to heaven.
Then the whatboutery started. What about good people who died before Jesus rose from the dead like Abraham, Moses and Jacob? What about the Good Thief to whom Jesus said: “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with me in paradise”. What about babies? Some problems were easier than others. For the Old Testament guys, they invented limbus patrum, in which they waited until Jesus rose from the dead. Then they all went to paradise. Their limbo was simply a waiting room from which they were released in 33AD. For the Good Thief, they just moved the comma. Now it reads, “Truly I say to you today, you shall be with Me in paradise”. A little bit of punctuation can go a long way and the Good Thief had a two-day wait in limbo.
But the babies, the poor little babies that everybody agrees couldn’t have committed any sins, what about them? St Augustine, of whom the Pope is a fan, was militant on the point: babies go to hell. Only the first circle of hell, mind you, which, Dante assures us, isn’t too hot, but still hell.
It was an important point. If you let unbaptised babies into heaven why should anyone be baptised? Innocent babies were the thin end of the wedge. Let them in and druids or Buddhists or anyone who is simply good could get in. Remove the obligation to be baptised and you put the whole church out of business.
St Thomas Aquinas realised this was a bit harsh and invented limbus infantium. The babies couldn’t go to heaven, but they weren’t to be put in hell either. So they went to limbo, a state of natural joy that just wasn’t heaven. Mothers lamented that they would never be reunited with their unbaptised babies. If religion offers anything, it should offer hope and comfort.
But lo! The baby thing started to get to Pope John Paul II. The fate of aborted babies and millions of other babies worried him. A commission was established and is about to recommend that this “theological hypothesis” be replaced by the “compassionate” doctrine that all children who die do so “in the hope of eternal salvation”. They still can’t say that unbaptised babies definitely go to heaven — original sin remains — but they now allow for hope that God in his mercy will find a way to draw the babies to him.
Of course, I am pleased that the church has finally seen sense in the matter. But I am having trouble reconciling Benedict’s willingness to change this harsh and cruel “hypothesis” with his characterisation of moral relativism as the major evil confronting the church.
Moral relativism holds that there is no absolute and universal moral truth. Values are only applicable within a certain culture, a certain place and even for a certain person. What’s right for one person may not be right for another. Pope Benedict vehemently disagrees with this, asserting that there are absolute truths and moral standards.
But if moral standards, as Catholic conservatives believe, should be perfect and unchanging, how come they can drop limbo because people regard it as illogical and unnecessarily cruel? And where does this leave other “hypotheses” which have caused even more misery, such as the ban on contraception and the demonisation of homosexuality? Will these just get quietly dropped along with other beliefs like the necessity to “church” women in order to “purify” them after childbirth? In the liberal west, people happily ignore the ban on contraception but in Africa the prohibition on condoms contributes to the spread of Aids, which is killing millions. Sooner or later another commission is going to have to deal with this deadly issue.
Face it, these theories, be they doctrinal or not, are only of a slightly more complicated variety than the Flying Spaghetti Monster. By the way, the second of his eight “I’d Really Rather You Didn’ts” says: “I’d Really Rather You Didn’t Use My Existence As A Means To Oppress, Subjugate, Punish, Eviscerate, And/Or, You Know, Be Mean To Others.”
Now there’s a hypothesis that makes sense.
