Comment by abustamam

> There is actually no perceivable or material difference between something that is considered "sacred" and that which is not. It really hinges on whether some subset of some splinter of some religion considers it so.

What? To many people, the Bible is just a book. To Christians its sacred. This doesn't mean it's immutable (the original Bible wasn't in English after all), it just means it's important to them.

For the records, the records themselves could be sacred, but the practical implications of them are not sacred. But if Catholics have a sacred record of everyone who had been baptized at a church, then that should be different from their mailing list. God did not instruct the chrich to email everyone who was ever baptized there. Plus, at some point in the church's age, there will be more dead people on the list of people who were baptized than alive people. It doesn't make sense to send an email blast to more dead people than alive, so they must trim the mailing list every so often.