Worked with the crazy-religious assistant manager again tonight.

She tuned the kitchen's boombox to some station called "The Refuge." As you'd expect, "The Refuge" is a Christian rock station and, as you'd further expect, they blast the same generic hook-filled crap as every other Christian rock station.

I didn't bother to complain, as the music at Giovanni's is almost always horrible. The assistant manager and a few others like Christian rock and emo indistinguishable from Christian rock; everyone else seems to like heavy metal.

Imagine my joy when one of the cooks put in a Modest Mouse CD the other day. I ended up with a burned copy of "Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks" the next day.

(Everything is GO for the Modest Mouse concert this Saturday, by-the-by.)

There were also some horrible ads on The Refuge. The one that offended me the most featured some guy calling Heaven and trying to get in. Every time he attempts to reason with the concierge (or whoever was supposed to be on the other end) he gets hung up on. The moral is that you're supposed to accept God unthinkingly.

Best part:
Caller: Well, I'm a pretty decent guy compared to most of the people at my office.
Concierge: We're not comparing you to other people, we're comparing you to God.
Caller: But that's impossible! I—
*Click*

I've always wished that the Roman Catholic church was more comfortable with excommunication, and the same goes for all the other churches too. I know the collection-plate economics that most churches have to deal in force them to bend the message to fit the audience, but if you truly believe something, then it's cowardly to let worries about your congregational market share affect your official beliefs.

That's not to say that a religion shouldn't change with the times. I'm glad that I grew up in a Vatican II church and not some earlier incarnation. And the party line continues to change, ever so slowly: partially because older parishioners and priests are dying off.

Elsewhere, the synods are going through the same process in real time. It's all like something out of Kuhn, almost.

But I want all the religions to tell me what I'm believing now, and if I take issue with part of the platform I should have to talk to the priest. If half of Catholics believe that Genesis actually happened, and half don't, why isn't one of those halves at a different church? Or is that not an excommunicable offense?

I love reading about heresies, especially the little ones. The Catholic church in Freiburg that got booted around the turn of the century for rejecting the authority of the Pope. Gibson's Retro-Catholicism. The Arian and Macedonian heresies. Here's a definition of "Heresy" from my favorite religious text, the 1914 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia:

There are, therefore, two ways of deviating from Christianity: the one by refusing to believe in Christ Himself, which is the way of infidelity, common to Pagans and Jews; the other by restricting belief to certain points of Christ's doctrine selected and fashioned at pleasure, which is the way of heretics.

That sound like any Christian you know? I don't condone the flaying and crucifixion of heretics (that always seemed odd: crucifying heretics) but it would be interesting if the various denominations gained some backbone. Most people would stick with their current church and affirm whatever they had too; as one LCF luminary once noted, "it can just be a social thing."

In all honesty though, I worry about the rise of non-denominational churches. Many of the mega-churches are non-denominational, and for those of you who don't know, many of the mega-churches are crazy. Look at Willow Creek, where parents receive letters from dead children, or so Rock Show Girl tells me.

If there's little check on whims of parishioners in the traditional denominations, a vaguely Christian church, like a vaguely Christian radio station, has no checks at all. Without some written articles of faith to alter or amend, these churches could end up encouraging an enthusiastic but increasingly outdated faith.

Or maybe this is all so much unasked-for gnostic humbug. As Penn and Teller put it, Elvis didn't do no drugs.