I don't feel bad for him. Why do you feel bad for him? Because he's not getting any Christmas loot? (I like the mom's reasoning: Christmas is about Jesus, so you don't get any presents! Starting now!)
No presents zomg.
"Mom, I don't believe in property..."
However, if the family hasn't been going to church every week already, the mother's argument for faithful obedience to religious authority strikes me as a little trumped up.
Why do you feel bad for him?
Because his mom is violent and controlling and thinks he's an idiot.
An actual Catholic mother would have looked at him, wounded and scarcely holding back tears, and told him that she'd pray for him. I conclude they're either faking or Episcopalian.
In 9th grade I told my Sunday school teacher I was an atheist and she took it like a man.
I know it's tagged "Catholic," but with that strong upper-midwest accent and the way she acts, I think you're right that they're not Catholic. Emerson can probably help here.
I'm rooting for Lutheran.
Just to pick a team, reallly.
Goooooooo angry Lutherans!
Does she have an accent? She seems normal to me.
Norwegian Lutherans get the media, but Minnesota has more or less equal numbers of German Catholics.
12: No, Unitarians live in fear of their child becoming religious.
How did you find this, ogged?
This is what you get when you hire a Jesuit to make a sex tape.
Swifty at Long Sunday has a good thing up. He contacted a NYT reporter who described Guantanamo torture without calling it torture. He's also written a different NYT reporter who described identical treatment in China (by the Chinese security forces) as "torture".
Does she have an accent?
-- Never mind.
Good point about there being upper midwest Catholics. Given the people I've known, this accent screams "Lutheran!" to me, but of course that's not necessarily so.
I found it on some check-out-these-wacky-videos site that I check periodically.
I feel sorry for the kid too. Jeez, mom. Way to sell mercy and forgiveness.
I'd like to think 5 is right, but these modern Catholics are hard to tell from fundie Protestants any more.
If my son told me he was Christian he sure as hell wouldn't get any Christmas presents.
That's a really deracinated North Central accent. Might as well be Waukegan.
The waistline and body language of the guy in the yellow shirt, and the decor of the house, those are classic. no caste tchotchkes, which is a marker in itself. wish I could see the newspaper. Star-Tribune? Sentinel-Journal?
Could be either Catholic or Lutheran/Protestant, but probably not one of those Southern cults. Angry religious moms dropping the f-bomb? sure. Nordo-Saxons never really took to fake Anglo word prudery.
Fifteen years from now, Michael will be selling State Farm, or working at the dealership.
No, it's further north than Waukegan. (Assuming you mean Waukegan, Illinois.)
Michael will be selling State Farm, or working at the dealership.
Dude, harsh. Maybe he'll go to graduate school in theology, or something.
24: Her accent is pretty mild compared to the full Gunderson, and the son barely has one at all. I'd say south of the Minneapolis-Milwaukee line (not counting suburbs).
I just checked the three most recently active threads; can it really be the case that we're not discussing Vonnegut's death?
He claimed long ago to have told a woman who asked him in a bar what he was doing these days. He said, "I'm committing suicide by cigarette." 84 isn't so bad.
Well this is almost completely off-topic (saved by an atheism reference), but if you guys don't regularly read ask.metafilter, you are missing out.
Comedy gold:
http://ask.metafilter.com/60453/Is-engaging-in-oral-sex-normal-behavior-for-girls-these-days
Somehow metafilter almost completely dropped out of my life sometime last year.
28-9: Is it true that they write up these send-offs ahead of time? Because, if not, CNN.com coming up with "He called the book's success 'a nice glass of' champagne at the end of a life'" isn't bad quotation-digging for the graveyard shift.
Yeah, I believe it's well documented that famous people obits are pre-written. I seem to recall a major news site posting an obit before its subject had died not that long ago.
I conclude they're either faking or Episcopalian.
Nah, Episcoplalians would have ordered him a copy of this and then made him do a test on it.
I agree that this all seems very upper midwest. Don't forget, we've got some pretty deracinated Catholics in this neck of the woods. Once, during confirmation, when we were visiting other churches, we went to a Catholic proto-megachurch in the deep 'burbs. Do you know what the musical accompaniment to the service was? A jazz band! Well, of all the nasty things to see in church! (And, for their coffee hour, they just had rows and rows of store-bought doughnoughts.) So I could see either Catholic or Lutheran. Probably not Methodist though, even though we've got plenty of those around here.
When Lutherans get confirmed (and it's my understanding that it's not de rigueur, as it is for Catholics) is a bishop necessarily involved? Also, 3 is right; the apparently lax attitude about going to church says not Catholic to me.
The other burning question is, of course: Uh, Mom? Do you kiss Jesus with that mouth?
Ugh, that poor kid.
No more masturbating to Kurt Vonnegut, right?
Does that go for his books, or just pictures of him?
36: "lax attitude about going to church says not Catholic to me"
Really? You know a different set of Catholics than the ones I grew up with.
36: "lax attitude about going to church says not Catholic to me"
Really? You know a different set of Catholics than the ones I grew up with.
The Lutheran Church don't have a bishop when I was growing up.
The official Lutheran-Catholic doctrine now is that the Reformation was an unfortunate mistake on both sides. Talk about taking the fun out of history and its bloody wars. My late Lutheran mother occasionally attended Catholic services on an ecumenical basis.
Jesus, what do you mean "lax"? Catholics are required to go to church once a year within six weeks of Easter, and if they fail, they have to say a Hail Mary! Do you call that lax?
Also: that video is hilarious. Nice find, ogged. (Although, pace you, I sort of hope it's fake. Then I don't feel so bad about it.)
The Lutheran Church don't have a bishop when I was growing up
Seriously? Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Methodists all have bishops. And the Church of the Nazarene, which is an offshoot of the Methodists, has "District Superintendents" instead.
41, 43: Catholics IME were all or none when it came to Mass. Either you keep holy the Lord's day (including holy days of obligation) or you're out-and-out lapsed, and you don't go at all. The exception would be the Chreasters, who only go on Christmas and Easter, and whom priests tolerate only because they're good for the coffers. I always associated irregular churchgoing with Protestants. I'm not sure what the penance generally is for the sin of not attending, but I suspect that a single Hail Mary might be good for a drop of cool water when you're roasting in the fires of Hell.
I can verify that the Lutheran Church does indeed have bishops. They're as elusive as unicorns, though.
An actual Catholic mother would have looked at him, wounded and scarcely holding back tears, and told him that she'd pray for him.
My mom's reaction was somewhere in the middle. She jingled the ice in her martini glass and told me to read Aquinas. I think I was twelve.
The Frowner family position on religious faith is that, of course, serious grown up people have serious grown-up religious faith, and if you don't have it, you're by definition still childish and just fooling around. Curiously, it does not matter much among Frowners what faith is held, on the CS Lewis-ish principle that people who behave properly are really actually Christians even if they don't know it yet.
The Frowners of my generation are all frivolous dilettante atheists who have warped their lives totally out of shape to avoid being serious and grown up, unsurprisingly.
I should write a book, come to think of it. The Faith of the Frowners, it could be called, and it could explicate my family's approach, so internally-consistant-yet-deeply-puzzling-to-outsiders. Maybe it could be a self-help book.
Oh, what I meant to add was that we do not discuss matters of belief, because if we did then the parental Frowners would be obliged to believe the younger Frowners frivolous and immature and therefore believe that they had been brought up wrong, probably through overindulgence.
50: Well, of course you're not supposed to talk about it with your family. That would be like talking about your feelings or something dumb like that.
51, exactly. Feelings get in the way of duty and should be ignored as much as possible, not be indulged through discussion.
Do you know what the musical accompaniment to the service was? A jazz band!
One of the earliest Catholic services I remember attending was a folk-rock Mass complete with several long-haired friends of Jesus on guitar.
53:
Yep, with the folk-rock acoustic guitar thing at Catholic services; if I remember correctly, these were alternative services held Saturday evenings. Early 70s.
It wasn't until the late 70s/early 80s that I attended what may or may not be considered High Mass, complete with the swinging of the incense burners and Latin verses. Creeped me out.
49:
people who behave properly are really actually Christians even if they don't know it yet.
Egad. What a hideous formulation. I was told once in grad school that I was really an ethicist, but didn't know it yet.
Man, that pissed me off. I fought, I sneered. I had no sense of humor.
54: I used to love the old Easter season services, with the endless latin litanies and the swinging incense burners, and the priest carrying the host around in the ciborium, and going up and down the aisles sprinkling people with the magic holy water wand. Great theater. The incense used to make people sick though.
56: I admit it was fascinating. I'd forgotten about the sprinkling.
These masses I attended were in New England, French Canadian, so if it wasn't in Latin, it was French. Attending group rituals conducted in languages one doesn't understand is particularly titillating.
There's a Lutheran jazz service somewhere in NE Portland.
Not too far from my house, actually. I've been tempted to check it out, but I'd prefer to hold on to the idea of Lutheran jazz as a delicious improbability than have to lose it as a known impossibility.
58: parsimon, where was that? I've been to French services in the NE Kingdom, but I've never come across any Latin up there.
60: Mid-state Massachusetts. A big French Canadian presence there, at least in the early 80s: factory towns, furniture makers, French and Polish. Irish to a slightly lesser degree.
The memory is a bit fuzzy, but I could swear that the French services were full-on ceremony.
