Collin's Updates

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—H��.

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��Hey. Are you awake?

—N��󲵰��.

—Yeah, I can't sleep either.

—Whadja wanme to doaboutit.

—Talk to me. Something that'll make me sleepy. Tell me about that boring book you're reading about Anglophobists.

—A�Բ��پ��ٲ�.

—Them. What did they do, then?

—Oh my god…it's �� it's three o'clock in the morning.

—Oh come on.

—All right, but it's not gonna be as fun as when I talked about that ballerina memoir.

—I know but I can't sleep��.

—Uhh…well. The Anabaptists…they believed in the separrrrrr…ation of church and state. And uh…they thought you should only be baptised when you're old enough to make a choice. You know, instead of as a baby.

—OK, that sounds sensible.

—Well, yeah, when you say it out loud it does all sound pretty reasonable.

—But the authorities didn't like it?

—Apparently not, they drowned them all.

—What?? Where?

—Well…just over there, actually. (points out of window)

—That's horrendous. Here?

—Yeah, all these little towns along the lake. They tied your wrists and ankles together and threw you off a boat. Or burned you, obviously, that was the other one. They'd pull bits of your flesh off with hot pincers, then rub sulphur in your beard and set you on fire.

—T��ǲ�� bloody Catholics. First the church bells outside our window all night, and now this.

—Well �� actually, no, most of this was the Protestants.

—But I don't understand, why did everyone care so much when you got baptised?

—It's a good question, I can never really work it out. You feel like it was probably not all theological. Like, the Reformers were quite new themselves, so I think they felt they had to be strict about their own rules and dogma, to establish themselves. But then also, the Anabaptists probably made them feel a bit hypocritical.

—What about?

—Well, because there really isn't any scriptural basis for infant baptism. It doesn't happen in the Bible.

—So how come everyone did it?

—It's just tradition. Which is fine, people like traditions. It's just that Zwingli and the Reformers had said they weren't going to follow tradition any more, they were going to go right back to what was in the Bible. Only they couldn't really do that, it was just too difficult convincing the city authorities to push through all those huge changes. Then along come these Anabaptists who are really doing what you said you were going to do��.

—Mmmm…I guess��.

—So like Conrad Grebel �� he was from Grüningen, just over the other side of the lake there �� he said, ‘We were listeners to Zwingli's sermons and readers of his writings, but one day we took the Bible itself in hand and were taught better.��

��⳾��…G��

—Grebel was one of the main guys. It's pretty cool actually, Anabaptism is one of the few properly Swiss religious denominations and he was one of the ones that started it all. On the 21st of January 1525, when Grebel baptised one of his mates in a house in downtown Zurich. It spread, obviously, into Germany and the Netherlands, and the Dutch Anabaptists got called Mennonites and they took it to the US, and there was Münster and all that �� but it always stayed big round here. And actually the baptism stuff isn't what really makes them important, for us I mean, it's more the disestablismentarianism. That's kind of the argument in this book, that what they really contributed to the modern world is this idea that true religious radicals should be supporting the separation of church and state even more strongly than the secularists do, because it's the only way you can make sure religion is ‘pure��. Which is pretty cool if you think about how the argument is normally framed today, don't you think? I said �� honey? Honey! Are you��?

*loud snores*"