My father (a Church of Scotland clergyman) used to take particular delight
in burying his atheist friends, with singular relish delivering the line,
"Now they know!"
I once challenged him about this, and he quite reasonably said that either
he was right, in which case they'd have to apologise to him in heaven, or
they were right, in which case it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference.
[Father, like Pelagius and Origen, somehow missed the bit where they taught
about how some people ended up in hell, so he just naturally assumed that
everyone was embraced in the bosom of Abraham, regardless.]
Admittedly, Dear Dead Dad wasn't your typical clergyman, and even Vile Boris
might have approved of him.
R.
> Gawd! Is n't there something about accepting when a death has
> occurred-this
> is just denial??a sort of chocolate box feeling??
> -what was that song Rainbow mountain?
> Cheers grumpy old P
{Father once said, with an unnerving degree of authoritative sentiousness,
to Philip Hobsbaum, "There is much to be said for Calvin." Philip promptly
went off and wrote a long peer-reviewed article (for _The Hudson Review_)
denouncing Calvin, dedicated to my father. Dear Dead Dad later, with a
degree of embarrassment, admitted to me that he'd never read Calvin. [Which
was pretty obvious if you ever heard one of his sermons -- I used to sit
through them and catalogue the heresies he'd come out with. He was a
died-in-the-wool Pelagian, which wasn't an absolutely clever thing to be if
you were a Church of Scotland minister.]
R.}
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