BIH

As any good Catholic knows, this means Burn In Hell. What happens to Catholics who don’t follow the rules. I was raised Catholic and from about the age of 6 or so was subjected to the various trials and tribulations associated with being a Catholic. This meant going to Catechism every Saturday morning (missing cartoons), attending Mass every Sunday and of course, the Holy Days of Obligation. This amounted to some pretty serious indoctrination. I don’t remember being baptized but I do remember the whole process of Holy Communion and Confirmation. The drill was pounded into our little heads in much the same fashion as the multiplication tables were in those days. Anyone who lived in the 60’s can recall that process and can probably still spout the tables from reflex more than conscious thought. Well, Catholic dogma was ingrained in much the same way so it takes a real conscious effort to get past the Pavlovian responses and actually think about things. I suspect the non-Catholic sects used a similar process, just different dogma.

So how does one go about teaching an old dogma new tricks? Keep reflex from flexing? You either re-indoctrinate with some other system which only changes the players and not the game or you spend some major time and effort taking responsibility for what goes on in your head. QED, if you don’t mind being harassed by those souls who still slobber at the ringing of the bell. And the conditioned guilt that you are really dabbling in realms not meant for the individual without professional direction. Things that will definitely make you BIH.

Along with many others. I can still recall sitting in church (it was meant to be a gymnasium but funding convinced the church fathers a chapel was more necessary) waiting my turn in the Confessional and trying to come up with sins. Telling lies was always handy and easily come by. That the Commandment forbids bearing false witness against your neighbor, a very specific kind of lie, didn’t diminish its use as an old standby. Not honoring mom and dad…another classic because what kid didn’t sass their parents from time to time. Ok, what normal kid who wasn’t thoroughly cowed into submission but that’s another story. By the time I was 11 or 12, impure thoughts began to be a real goody. No one ever could tell me just what this was in violation of but it was always good for at least one Apostles Creed. It did fit nicely with the Church’s attitudes about sex. So you went into the darkened phone booth and whispered your crimes in an appropriately contrite voice. Then you got a lecture about not doing those things any more and your Penance. Generally it was a list of prayers you had to repeat. Evidently by calling on the Father, Mother Mary and all the Apostles you would somehow be absolved and said Holy emanations would strengthen you so you wouldn’t be tempted anymore.

It’s pretty amazing how fast your basic bright 12 year old can zip through 10 Our Fathers, 20 Hail Mary’s and 2 Apostles Creed. Rosaries took longer but not much and they were generally reserved for REALLY bad stuff. It helped they had been part of the indoctrination, you hardly had to think of them. And for the ten seconds it took you to walk to the door you were safe from BIH. Talk about your basic miracle. And of course, being a kid, you knew you were invulnerable and immortal so nothing was going to happen to you before next Saturday when you could get cleaned up again.

More to come later in BIH2

[edit on 8-3-2008 by medjhiesco]

(con't)
Now I can’t say if all Catechism classes were like mine but from talking with other classes, I think they were close. About 85% of the teachers (the nuns in particular) were real big on the BIH bit. I remember it scaring the living bejesus out of me when I was 6 and 7 but after awhile it began to fuel the strange imagination I had. Its no wonder I love to read and write fantasy and such. Their descriptions of Hell were incredibly detailed and very vivid. Considering the list of things that earned you your ticket to Hell and how easy it is to write that ticket, I’d consider it another miracle if there were more than 20 people in Heaven. What eventually put me onto the game was the time and effort put into presenting the negative side and just how little playing time Heaven got. The stick was definitely favored over the carrot.
Not surprising when one considers the rest of the story. First they emphasized that it was pretty much all about the hereafter. This was just a testing ground, tryouts for the big time. Worldly things were to be taken with a grain of salt (except your weekly tithe) and one was to concentrate on living a pure life so you could get to Heaven. Inevitably followed with the grim admonition about BIH. I definitely got the impression that one should behave properly not for the reward but because the alternative was so gruesome. I will grant there were those who did focus more on the positive benevolent nature of God but they were clearly a minority.

So this set a new pattern for the emerging mind to follow. The contradictions. The Bible is loaded with them. Catholic dogma even more so. I started to wonder about them and by the time I was 14 I was called to a special plenary session with both pastors. I think my telling a bishop he was full of male bovine feces, in church, may have had something to do with it. Father Andy was your basic old school, hard-line, Polish priest. Father Bertheum was fresh from the seminary. We had a rousing hour of discussion that ended with Father Andy telling me I was going to BIH unless I gave up my intellectual pride. (And a faintly veiled suggestion I refrain from showing my face to him until I did). Father Bertheum told me, after Father Andy had departed, that I would make a fine Jesuit. All I needed to do was accept on pure faith. I didn’t go back to church or catechism, which frightened my mother to no end because Father Andy had called her.

Being young and immortal, I wasn’t terribly worried about what the Church said about my soul or its probable destination. But it did set a life long pattern, a quest of sorts, to try and reconcile what my heart learned from the basic teaching of Yeshua and the policies of various Christian religions. It included studying the history of Israel in his time. There is amazingly little information there. Very odd considering both the Roman and Jewish penchant for record keeping. Greek too for that matter. That lead to the history of how the Church formed, how it grew, how it evolved through the centuries. Pretty heady stuff and much of it colored heavily because the winners get to write the history. It has only been in the past century that conflicting presentations were tolerated. Then the Dead Sea scrolls, the discovery of the writings at Nag Hamadi, the discovery of the Gospels of Mary and Judas. So it was back to the early history and the books deemed not ready for prime time by the Council of Nicaea.

If I thought there were contradictions in the Bible before, those banned books made it even worse. But the ideas, the patterns have begun to flow. For which, I am certain, I will BIH. Probably a good thing there isn’t a human on the planet who really gets a vote on that one. For decades I thought my predilection for, my need to find patterns was a curse. It certainly plays hob with day-to-day life. But there is a method to the madness.