An Offer I Couldn't Refuse
I'm not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination so when the neighbors asked Christine and I to be god parents to their little girl I wasn't particularly thrilled. Then I found out they were just doing it because to send Estelle to the catholic school in town, which is by far the best, she had to be baptized. I'm pretty sure the reason the Catholic school is so much better is because the nuns don't take any guff and since the kids are actually paying to attend parents don't mind having the nuns discipline their kids. All in all you can tell a big behavioral difference between the public school and catholic schools kids.
Since Christine and I aren't Catholic or married for that matter we're not exactly prime candidates to be god parents but Christine is the one paying for Estelle to go to school so they wanted to give us the honor. Honestly, before I knew about the school issue I thought they just wanted us because they thought we could take her to the states or support them financially. Anyway, they found a church in a nearby pueblo that doesn't exactly care who the god parents are.
I've never liked going to church. It all feels like a big secret society or club and I'm just pretending to be one of them hoping they don't discover the interloper in their midst. I do think all these communities need a reason to get together and build bonds between each other, but churches don't seem to do a whole lot with it. They just get together and talk about how they should do good things instead of getting together and actually doing good things.
In my mind they ought to get together for a big potluck picnic thing every Sunday and people get up and make announcements and such. Then they all have groups and work on community projects like having the men fix the potholes in the road or build a communal grain storage barn. The women could get together and work on setting up a sewing or baking cooperative to earn money for the infrastructure projects that the men build etc.
Basically the churches just seem to be telling them don't do anything bad, and that way you don't have to do anything good to make up for it. Then you can just coast into heaven. I also don't approve all the fear mongering that goes on in churches here and probably the states too. I've been to 3 services in 3 different churches here and without fail the first thing they do is call everyone sinners.
Anyway, I guess I can't complain too much since I can now add "Godfather" to my official list of titles. Far cooler than my pathetic "minister" title even without the power to bless random inanimate objects. I'm such a heathen.