<snip>
the father explained to me that that had been the devil making my mother call, so that i wouldn't accept the lord.
<snip>
...my faith, or whatever it was, took a number of years after that to finally vanish into more or less nothing. but i am pretty well convinced that that episode was the mortal blow.
[...]
...............
No doubt, nearly every American who attended an evangelical church (hell, why limit it to evangelicals?) can call up a similarly irritating memory.
..
In 1986, a week or so after space shuttle Challenger disintegrated into countless fiery fragments, a member of my church - a classic "church lady" - remarked that the vehicle's destruction was the result of God's displeasure with humanity "messing around where his sinful self isn't wanted".
Meaning, of course, anywhere outside of the planet's atmosphere.
I remember letting this comment roll off my back - after all, my younger self thought, she's elderly and unhappy and lives alone in curtained gloom like a latter day Mrs. Haversham; it's not surprising she'd be perplexed by spaceflight, something considered impossible when she was my age and yet, a very real fact of late 20th century life. It was no accident, I calmly observed, that she'd retreat into churchy formulas.
Later, in what was a far more devastating blow to my opinion of the church's place in modern life, a "Youth Pastor" delivered a fiery sermon that amplified Sister Haversham's Challenger post mortem. He declared that in the course of Christ's triumphal return to Earth - as the heavenly city and all the angels passed through our solar system victoriously en route to their destination - all our sister planets would be cleansed by fire of "sinful contagion".
Since, as far as I knew, we'd yet to establish colonies on Mars and, as I understood it, sin was a flesh and blood, state of mind sort of thing, I was confused.
Where was this contagion coming from?
The Youth Pastor quickly explained; our space probes, the Voyagers and Mariners and Viking landers, these were the robotic typhoid Marys that brought the blight of sin to the rest of our star system.
Needless to say this was a stunningly bizarre notion which turned my ideas about 'sin' completely on their head. So, it wasn't merely actions or thoughts that were 'sinful' but the very stuff of the world itself - everything was 'fallen'.
I shouldn't have been surprised, this concept had been drummed into me from an early age (not by my family mind you, whose interpretation was more thought/action centered). Even so, as a space technology enthusiast and reasonably rational thinker I was astounded.
In fact, I was so disturbed by the implications of this 'space contagion' concept I consulted with the Pastor in his office to ask for guidance. This turned into a debate that went in unexpected directions as I found myself growing more and more annoyed with his explanations.
.d.
In all probability the airplane is banked and is turning, although your sensations make you feel it is in straight and level flight. Don't act according to your sensations. Check and cross check your instruments.
Pilot's Information File, 1944
...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/