The precise reason that religion is bullocks

Recently, the Catholic church has been debating the possibility of doing away with the concept of limbo. For the uninitiated, this is the realm in which unbaptized but innocent souls (like babies or those who lived before Jesus did his thing) go when they die; not quite heaven and not quite hell. Its etymology is of Latin descent, from limbus, and it originally meant the border of hell. This was a great concept to sedate the minds of the earthly survivors, who feared that their lost loved ones were suffering in an eternal sea of fire.

Now it seems that this age-old theory is about to be debunked -- by the same group of people who devised it centuries ago. The good ol' boys of the Catholic church have been gathering up in their tree house to determine what to do about the situation. Their former ring leader Pope John Paul even expressed his own desire to remove the concept of limbo from the church before he died. What's going to replace it? Maybe babies who die during childbirth do go to hell.

The fact that these guys can just decide to do away with a concept like, oh, where someone's soul goes when he or she dies, is just the kind of thing that helps shatter the very foundation of their credibility. If there is a god, he's probably looking on and laughing at all of his silly little Catholics, rewriting this and modifying that until life is easy to live again. It's a simple fact that times change and so do standards; thankfully, the Bible changes too. I'm sure if you wait around long enough, it will eventually change enough to fit your standards too. That seems to have been the motto of any significant church movement in recorded history: Don't like what they teach? Rewrite it.

Remember that election a year ago, when a country's faith in a presidential candidate was shaken because of an indecisive streak? The church is no different, except it's been changing its mind for almost two thousand years. How can something be true if all it takes is a meeting with couple of stodgy old guys to change it every now and then on a whim?

If next year they claimed that hell doesn't exist, would Catholics the world over believe and accept it?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051130/od_nm/pope_limbo_dc