Bizarre -- but Sadder Still . . .
Every now and then, a truly bizarre story cuts through the more pedestrian weird stuff in the media. The story of the transgendered individual who died in a voodoo ritual to cleanse the "spiritual grime" from his soul certainly qualifies.
When one sees how many people will believe anything other than Christianity or some other more traditional belief system, it gives the lie to the notion that Jesus rising from the dead is just too unreasonable to believe. Because if you can believe that voodoo cleanses your spiritual grime in apparently dangerous rituals, then you can believe anything.
So why do some people, indeed many people, persist in so far going down philosophical roads like this?
One answer might be that, for all the demands made by their newfound religion or belief-system, it is at least still "theirs," or so they think. And if there's one thing we know about human beings, it's that they oftentimes would rather sit in their own stew than to try anyone else's system, including God's. That would require giving up their autonomy, and well, we can't have that.
The tragedy is that, in pursuing our own agendas, our own will, we actually enslave ourselves far worse than anyone else could. In chasing ourselves, instead of loving God and neighbor, we may think we are truly liberated. But the results say something much different.
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