The apostate kidney

What a strange story: a woman donates one of her kidneys to another woman in need. Later, the recipient leaves the Christian faith. Now the donor wants her organ back.

Smith was aghast when she heard of the conversion, and she quickly wrote a letter asking Felks to re-convert to Christianity or return the organ, saying it was donated under false pretenses.

“I feel helpless,” she says. “Part of my body, my DNA, is stuck inside a person who’s going to hell.”

There’s some freaking weird theology going on here. Does she think her DNA is going to be assumed into the afterlife? Do spirits have DNA? Do you need a kidney as an angel?

She also has some strange anxieties, since the recipient is a pagan.

Smith suffers nightmares of her former organ filtering “strange Asian teas, pig blood and witch doctor brews in Africa,” she says. She wonders if the Lord really wanted her to donate the kidney, or if she acted on a “triple-espresso high” she had that morning. She is also concerned that when her body is resurrected, it might be incomplete.

That’s tragic. The kidney is also missing the opportunity to filter the body and blood of Christ, transforming Jesus’ protein into urine. Oh, to never again deaminate the amino acids of the God of Abraham, to never again extract Jesus’ sodium ions, and to have to settle for filtering the ichor of little animist gods…what a sad fate.

I don’t know about this bodily resurrection thing. I would think that running a little lapsang souchong through the ol’ nephric ducts is small potatoes compared to being perfused with embalming fluid and later rotting into a putrid film of bacterial goo. Apparently, the Holy Ghost can reanimate that, but foreign tea is going to have It scratching It’s immaterial and invisible Head.

The theological absurdity goes on.

“I’m all for spiritual curiosity,” she says, “but you’ve got to settle these things beforehand. My kidney belongs to Christ. It will never be Pagan.

Hmm. Yes. Various organs in your body all make intellectual and emotional decisions about what religion they should follow. Personally, I’ve had my organs all committed to different and appropriate philosophies: my colon is a good disciplined Calvinist, my lungs are Breatharians, my right forefinger is an acolyte of the cult of Macintosh (*click*, praise Jobs!), and my penis is observant of some hysterically hedonistic faith which doesn’t require much in the way of intellectual expression. My brain, however, is godless.

Smith’s brain is definitely fundamentalist Christian: inert, uninformed, and irrational.

(via God is for Suckers)

P.S. Some people aren’t getting it. The article is satire, although if you do think about it, there is some weird stuff going on with this whole idea of an afterlife.

The Catholic Church retreats into the darkness, again

George Coyne, the Vatican astronomer, has been sacked. Red State Rabble and John Wilkins speak out on it.

They cite one source condescendingly claiming that Coyne “appointed himself an expert in evolutionary biology,” while Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute (speaking of unqualified gits appointing themselves the status of ‘expert’) calls Coyne an “evangelizing Darwinist,” and blames his fall on his radical theology. It seems to me that Coyne was actually a highly qualified scientist who was well-informed about the general principles of science, and who informed the Vatican about the actual status of the discipline of evolution within the domain of science. What this represents is a case of Catholicism once again rushing to bury its head in the sand—they can’t have someone who honestly represents the uncomfortable facts of science speaking out, after all. I’m sure his replacement will be better steeped in the dogma, will confine himself to a much less forthright position, and appreciates theology more than the science.

I hope George Coyne uses the freedom from one set of duties to reconsider that religion thing. It must be hard to serve two masters, especially when one is about enlightenment and knowledge, and the other is about ignorance and dogma.

An encouraging development

While I’m sure it’s personally difficult for Mary Lambert, this is a good sign: a fundamentalist, literalist church is getting fundamentalist and literal on its congregation.

The First Baptist Church dismissed Mary Lambert on August 9 with a letter explaining that the church had adopted an interpretation that prohibits women from teaching men. She had taught there for 54 years.

Consistency is a virtue the religious should pursue more. When they kick out the women, there goes over half their membership; when they start stoning the adulterers and liars and usurers, they’ll be rid of 99% of the men. The religious problem in this country will be solved.

Meanwhile, maybe Ms Lambert can look up a Unitarian church in her neighborhood.