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The Twins

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The Twins  When I was a child, I was known as one of “the twins.”    I am a twin.  This was the most important fact of my childhood. My brother Jerry and I were same sex twins and we looked identical to everyone.  Still being identical was fraught.   The party line was that we were not identical. My mother explained this by explaining the when we were born, there were two placenta.  This fact was huge in the world of my child raising; it reflected my mother’s status as a nurse.  So despite the many signs of our being identical, we accepted the statements of my mother, that held doubt about our status.   Still we were very much alike.  More so than any other fraternal twins that I knew or that I learned about.  We appeared alike to everyone, even a dachshund that lived next door to my wife and I when we lived in Dayton, Ohio - we lived there from 1978-1981.   This annoying dog would bark incessantly at all strangers, yet when my brother visited us from New Jersey, he was quiet.  At the
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I was leaving church after singing at a special mass where the bishop officiated.  Satisfied that the choir performed well, it was time for me to zone out. As my car left the parking lot a man’s  voice boomed, “What the bleep was that?” The voice came from the empty passenger’s seat, about where a man’s head would be.  Slowly a man appeared filling the seat  He was dressed in robes and had long hair and a beard.  It was Jesus! Me: So are you really Jesus?  JC:  Yes, neat trick to materialize out of nothing.  But let’s talk about what we just witnessed.   They treated the statue of Our Lady of Fatima as an idol. I thought you Catholics were sensitive to accusations that you put too much importance on statues and pictures.   Well that went out the window today! And then there is Fatima itself.  You know that Fatima was meant to be a joke.  A few guardian angels were bored so they thought they would play a trick on the kids.  But the joke got out of hand.  There is no “the Angel of Peace.
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Are Catholics Idolators?

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Raised a Catholic, I attended Catholic school through high school.   When I started high school, the Catholic Church was just emerging from the tumult of Vatican II.   We considered our Church modern and enlightened.   So the Mass was now in English.   Science was ok, as was liberal democracy.   The old superstitions that came to the US from Europe were supposedly left behind.   When the council ended, there was a real hope that the Church was soon allow birth control.   This was before birth control and abortion galvanized conservatives so much so that many bishops support a pussy grabbing twice divorced thug for president.     In my day, we Catholics were sensitive to criticisms from Jews and Protestants that we were idolaters, with our statues and holy pictures.   Fortunately the post Vatican II suburban Church had mostly left this behind, to be encountered only when we visited grandma in the old neighborhood.   For me the older generation began to die off when my mother’s mother di
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