A technique that allows someone to evade religious functions, scripture lessons, and the such on the basis that it's against your religion. However, this is not restricted to atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Hinduists, or the such, as one can pledge allegience to a certain obscure or obsolete sect of the offending religion (the one you're trying to evade the dogmatic vapulations of). One can plead on a lack of proper personnel to fulfill the required sacraments of the sect, or plead on deeply-held beliefs. Here are a particular few that I suggest would be the best in a Christian context:
- Abecedarians - those who claimed that, since knowledge of the scriptures was passed on by the Holy Spirit, it was wrong to learn or read said scriptures.
- Docetists - those who believed that a mere phantom of Jesus was crucified, not the real thing.
- Monophysites - those who believed that Christ's human and divine natures were one and the same.
- Muggletonians (the silliest one, in my opinion) - those who believed that the Father, not the Son, died on the cross, and that the Aaron of the Book of Revelation was Lodowick Muggleton, a Seventeenth-Century tailor. Weird.
- Nestorians - those who believed that Mary should not be called the Mother of God, as she was the mother only of the human side, not the divine side, of Jesus
- Origenists - those who believed men's souls are created before their bodies. Today, these people would be rabid anti-abortionists
- Quietists - those who believed that man should occupy himself wholly with the continuous contemplation of God to the point of being detached from infulence by his senses or by the world around him. These sorts of people envy those vegetables that are paralyzed from the neck down that used to be humans
- Sabellists - those who believed that God is indivisbile but has three successive roles. Best for evading that bullshit about the Holy Trinity.
- Sandemanians or Glassites - those who believed that justifying faith is no more than a simple assent to the divine testimony passively received by the understanding. Before you question the meaningfulness of this, keep in mind that Michael Faraday was one of their number. Not to say that intelligent people are more morally correct than the rest of us, just that they tend to look at things more logically.
- Supralapsarians - those who held that God put Man into a position where he would inevitably sin, and that his Creator would thereby have the opportunity of redeeming or punishing him. Use this when you want to say "Don't punish me, let God do it" so you can evade a fatal beating or two.
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