Today's Topics:
Going to hell: Baptists keep count
slack in prison...
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Date: Tue, 21 Sep 93 10:04:03 -0400
From: Eric Haines <erich@eye.com>
Message-Id: <9309211404.AA08466@hemlock>
To: subgenius@media-lab.media.mit.edu
Subject: Going to hell: Baptists keep count
Going to hell: Baptists keep count (from the Ithaca Journal, 9/18/93, p. 1):
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) - God only knows who gets to heaven, but the Southern
Baptists estimate 46.1 percent of people in Alabama risk going to hell.
Since the figure from church research on potentially doomed souls was made
public, it is Baptists who are feeling the fire, however.
The Southern Baptist Convention's county-by-county breakdown of who's bound for
heaven and who isn't - unless they are born again and accept Jesus Christ as
their savior - hit The Birmingham News on Sept. 5. It's been the buzz in some
Alabama pews ever since.
Under the headline: "Baptists count the lost," the front page story included a
detailed map and box listing the 1.86 million "unsaved" by county in precise
percentages.
The Baptists said the numbers were only a guide on where to establish new
churches and find more followers.
But some of the faithful, Baptists as well as others, are incensed.
"It is the pinnacle of presumptuousness to construct a formula for quantifying
the unsaved," Jack Denver of Homewood, a self-described "practicing Christian"
wrote in a letter that was among about a dozen the newspaper published from
irate readers.
The Southern Baptists have done such demographic research for years, said
Martin King, a spokesman for the denomination's Atlanta-based Home Mission
Board, which compiled the study and has national figures he would not
disclose.
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Date: Tue, 21 Sep 93 12:23:56 CDT
From: Rex Black <rex@iquery.iqsc.com>
Message-Id: <9309211723.AA04056@qasun.iqsc.COM>
To: uunet!mc.lcs.mit.edu!Subgenius@uunet.uu.net
Subject: slack in prison...
> From: "Robert E. Seastrom" <rs@iikk.inter.net>
> Maybe, but the fact that you give a rat's ass about mere Federal laws taints
> your otherwise lucid expository with a tinge of pinkness...
Ah, but remember, Brother Seastrom, that there is no slack in the
penitentiary, other than the slack one attains in one's sphincter
muscle.
Rex
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End of Subgenius Digest
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