God As Cable on Demand

For people who are attracted by the Sarah Palin Phenomenon, this article uses that hook to draw readers into a brief examination of the Pentacostal Movement as it stands today, and in the identities of the various offshoots into which it has morphed in recent times while still retaining its basic features, though actually there is very little said about Palin herself.

It would be an interesting and informative article if one had the patience and the interest to follow it through closely to the end, but I was not one of those people. I didn't need to be, because I consider myself to have figured out all that I ever needed to understand about Religion, which was so easy to do that I had managed it even before I became an adult, so long ago.

So to me, despite the warnings that this article tries to convey, Pentacostalism remains only as one of those things that a lot of people gather together to share but which do not merit any of my attention, much less my attendance. There are many such activities that are best avoided. Rock concerts, ball games, and marching in armies come quickest to mind.

And in fact, out of all the people that I believe I still know, though I rarely see any of them in person anymore, I can only think of one person who is a Pentacostal. She is R., the oldest daughter of S., another of our very interesting neighbors up beyond the bend, But I don't know why R. Is a Pentacostal, because I've never seen or heard her do or say anything that reflected her being really into it, or that would distinguish her from being in any other religion, and sometimes I wonder whether it's just something she got into to allow her to set herself apart from her mother and her three siblings. And she IS apart, though she can by no conceivable stretch of the imagination be considered to have arrived in Valhalla, because, unlike her mom and her siblings, who are all much more sensibly situated, even if unsteadily, right up the road, she lives in New Jersey.

I didn't think I had seen Pentacostalism anywhere in action, outside of niovies, though, as described in this article, I now realize that in the days when my dish was working (it's been broken for going on two years now) , I had seen snatches of it numerous times in all those religious channels that could never be avoided and that had caused me to marvel while calling it "Lounge Chair Religion." And that kind of thing must be what the author is speaking of when she speaks of God as being seen by the Pentacostals as being "cable on demand," dispenser of instant forgiveness and material prosperity. Is that a vestige of the Catholic institution of Confession, since Protestantism is an offshoot of Catholicism, and Tentacostalism is in turn an offshoot of Protestantism?

The marveling that I mentioned was due to seeing how the entire congregations of all those megachurches that I saw portrayed on the dish were esconsed in semi-reclining and well-padded individucal sitting devices, little different from what they would've used in their TV viewing rooms. I could never get over that sight -- so different from what I remembered of my own church-going days, which always, in the Big Church upstairs, featured high-backed wooden pews or benches that were definitely unfriendly to the backside and the back. though they were still a cut above the slatted folding chairs in the Little Church downstairs, where Sunday School took place.

I guess, at least in Pentacostalism, ideas have changed as to the dispositions in which the faituful are best placed, while receiving the Ultimate Messages relating to the Sky Chief.