Do The Limbo

The front page of the Austin-American Statesman today had an article about how the Catholic church is reconsidering its stance on the concept of Limbo.

Apparently its not a Caribbean dance with a stick you like to watch women do when drunk (how low can I go). Instead, it is a place where dead babies go (after they die) if they hadn't had a bath yet. Also resident in limbo are maybe some people who might have been saints if they had been born after approximately 32 A.D., but had the misfortune to be born earlier than that. (Dumb asses - I'm sure if they were truly saintly they would have waited till after Jesus died...)

Anyway, The Church, in its infallible wisdom, has decided to give the whole thing a second look. It seems that even though there has never been an official Papal Bull issued on the subject, it has long been viewed in some Catholic circles that the unbaptised babies can't go to heaven, since they haven't had the special dispensation for Original Sin (you know, when Adam showed Eve his trouser snake and Eve took a bite...or something like that. Anyway, the sin of everyone's daddy is apparently visited upon the sons and daughters unless some asexual man holding a death cross pours some special H2O in your direction).

Since there were only Heaven and Hell as choices (because if you give man a third way out, he'll take it), this meant that Limbo was some sort of "outermost" ring of Hell - kind of like living Detroit, but in the good part of town.

However, this category includes aborted fetuses (in another view of this church, when the seed of man quickens the egg of woman, a soul is created). And for some reason condemning these aborted fetuses to hell just seemed a little too harsh. So they created Limbo. (What made it even worse was that fetuses who didn't make it to term and were aborted naturally died due to God's Will, and people's heads really started spinning when they determined this meant that The Big Guy himself was purposefully condemning new souls to Hell...)

I could go on, but really, what's the point. The remarkable efforts of Theology (which really shouldn't be an -ology at all) to try to reconcile the myriad of contradictions and inconsistencies inherent in pretty much all religious dogma just kills me. (And so I'm probably already living in Hell, which come to think of it would go a long way toward explain some things...)