Thursday 15 October 2015

Pope Francis Says There's a Place for Animals in Heaven

 
The brain was someone’s baby but if you don’t have a soul, do you count? Catholic animals don’t have souls*, which I learned at a catholic christening for a real baby with a soul, sin, correct amount of feet and all. But the church was the next day and I didn’t know about the soul thing when I was sautéing the brains, thinking about babies.

On p.314 in De Dikke van Dam under ‘brain’, Johannes van Dam says that in Papua New Guinea, fathers used to have to kill a man they knew the name of and eat his brain on the baptism of their child. He says that on the (Dutch) colonists’ suggestion that they stop, they were dismayed. How were they name their young?

This would have been too good to be true, however, and is also wrong. The brains were for funerals only. The girls and women of the Fore tribe would eat relatives’ brains when they died. The men, the rest of the body.

But everyone has their own rituals, even the Catholics. I was surprised that we were in church to be told that the only one of us there that was sure not to have a devil inside of him was, in fact, full of devil as the devil himself. Talk about a ceremonious kick when you’re down and unable to defend yourself at two months old. But that’s why we have Samaritans. And concrete church infrastructure to save your soul. If this were the real world though, like the one in which we pay taxes and have to get up early on Mondays, wouldn’t we think it a little strange that the only institution that can see the devil is also the only one that can protect you from him?

Oh wait.

And we thought cannibals were bad.


*According to many. Others contest this.


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