Catholic Fundamentalism began with the bizarre Word of Jesus in Mt. 19:24: “. . . it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter The Kingdom of Heaven.”
I was young, and wanted to be rich. If I got rich, the only way I could get to Heaven would be if a camel could go through an actual needle’s eye. It was not enough to know that some said “The needle’s eye was a narrow gate in the walls of Jerusalem that camels could not get through unless they were unloaded.”
At the time, I was a Protestant Fundamentalist. I was paralyzed. “What’s the point of making money if it keeps me from getting into Heaven?”
I could make a huge, hundred feet long needle! Its eye would be large enough for a camel to walk through. A nagging voice said, “You couldn’t sew a button on your shirt with that needle.”
Then, I considered: “I could cremate a camel, fill a five gallon pail with its ashes, dilute the ashes, and micro-pump them through the eye of a needle, a fraction of a drop per second.” The same nagging voice: “That camel wouldn’t be able to walk.”
Then, this thought came to me: “Take an egg from an ovulating camel. Put it on a microscope slide in a drop of amniotic fluid. Fertilize it with sperm from a male camel. While the fertilized egg is dividing and redividing, it’s the size of a grain of salt!
“Put a needle onto the slide. The fertilized egg will pass through its eye like a ping-pong ball through a basketball hoop. Then, put the fertilized egg back into the womb of the mother camel. For the rest of its life, it will be a camel that has gone through the eye of a needle.”
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An actual camel could go through the eye of an actual needle! The most bizarre passage in Scripture made perfect, literal sense. Jesus’ bizarre words came true in our age, for the first time in 2,000 years!
Taking other passages literally grew into Catholic Fundamentalism. The six day, recent creation of Genesis? “God wrote and downloaded The Creation Program with 3-D pixels. He did so in Six Programming Sessions. We write our lines and play the parts we choose while we are stars in The Big Movie. When our performance is over, we meet The Critic.”
Catholic Fundamentalism takes computer-literate moderns through the eye of a needle, straight into the heart of The Church Jesus Founded.
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“The New Road to Rome” may be downloaded at no charge catholicfundamentalism.com
