Funny beliefs

I teach a course about unusual religious belief systems. Mostly this just means that they are outside the mainstream. I mentioned it to a friend today and she asked me what was the strangest religious belief I had run across in my research for the class.

I didn't know what to tell her. Some of them are intentionally funny -- like the Pastafarians and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But when you get down to it, most mainstream religions are unusual belief systems unless you are part of the system or almost constantly exposed to it. In most of the West, Christianity does not seem unusual, for example, because we are immersed in it -- whether we are believers ourselves or not. But if you examine it closely ... well, there's a lot that is odd.

I wasn't sure what to say without offending her. For example, I know she was  raised Catholic, so I did not want to suggest that one strange belief might be transubstantiation -- the dogma that the elements of bread and wine consecrated at Mass are no longer bread and wine -- although they have all the qualities that you can see or touch or taste or smell and which normal people would say constitute bread and wine -- but instead are literally the body and blood of a man who was executed almost two thousand years ago and that the highest way to honor him is to eat his real body and drink his real blood. That sounds normal to Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, anyway. And it is a profoundly moving belief which has produced a rich literary, artistic and musical heritage. But you have to admit ...

It is easy to play the absurd-belief-game about a religion that is not your own. When someone else plays it with your religion, you are apt  to accuse them of blasphemy. 

It makes for a very queer religious world.