Say for one moment that I believe in fairy tales.  I can totally buy that there would be an enchanted castle with a spoiled prick of a prince turned into a beast who must make someone love him or else remain a beast forever.  In a world of magic, this would be an entirely plausible scenario.  That being said, the logistics of Beauty and the Beast are full of gaping holes that I find very distracting.

Let’s start with our douche-tastic prince, for example.  If you’re a prince, then you naturally rule a surrounding kingdom.  You’ve got servants, family, probably some equally stuck up friends.  There are also your “loyal subjects” scattered throughout the area.  The point is, you’re pretty damn famous.  If you up and get turned into a ferocious beast, the townsfolk are going to be talking about it the next day at the marketplace. 

Which makes me wonder, why is everyone in Belle’s “poor provincial town” so surprised to learn that just a hop, skip and a jump (or a night’s march with burning torches and pitchforks) away lies an enchanted castle with a beast prince in it?  Surely there would be at least one person in the town who remembered the local celebrity pissing off the vagrant enchantress.

The way I see it, there are only two possible explanations for this mass ignorance:

1)   1)  Some sort of biochemical weapon was released into the air, simultaneously giving the entire population amnesia.

2)   2)  The prince was turned into a beast so long ago that the event has faded from the history books and nobody currently living has ever heard the story.   

Considering that Belle’s town doesn’t have cars, telephones, televisions, or iPods, I’m going to go ahead and say that option #1 is pretty unlikely.  This leaves us with option #2: the beast is older than dirt.  How is it then, when he finally returns to human form (in a scene so beautiful it still makes tear up every time), that he winds up looking like this:

Holy hotness.

Clearly the cosmetic companies of the world should be scrambling to find our enchantress in disguise and coercing her into releasing the secrets of an everlasting youthful glow, a face without wrinkles and tresses so beautiful they should be in a John Frieda commercial, because that prince looks like an underwear model. 

Screw the fountain of youth; get me ten – twenty decades in beast form.  Yeah it would suck to be that shaggy for an extended length of time, but you’d get to live an incredibly long life and come out looking hot as hell at the end of it all.  That is, of course, assuming that you find a Belle to love you and release you from your hairy prison.  Good luck with that.

There's only one tiny problem with option #2, which princess_riceball pointed out to me.  The Enchantress tells the beast that he only has until his 21st year to find someone who loves him in all his beastly glory.  This means that the answer MUST be biochemical warfare.  Either that, or one beast year is equal to at least ten human years.  Drat, there goes my slim but not impossible shot at eternal beauty. *Cue sad music*

Please keep in mind that while I find these minor plot inconsistencies annoying, I’m not really complaining.  They say “age ain’t nothing but a number,” but would I want the beast to reform as a wrinkled and shriveled old man in the end?  Absolutely not.  As a child, that would have absolutely crushed my childhood sense of wonder.  Plus it’s creepy.  Nope, give me my blond-haired, blue-eyed Adonis any day.  I’d be lying if I said that he wasn’t one of the reasons why Beauty and the Beast is my favorite Disney movie, and, in my opinion, a timeless classic.

***Note: This discussion only pertains to the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast.  I’m sure there are many other versions out there, perhaps ones that discuss this whole time issue, but those aren’t the versions discussed here. 

Religion and I have always been frenemies.  From my days as a Catholic school girl in elementary school to my wedding in a Lutheran church, my relationship with religion has been complicated at best.  Those of you who have read my blog from the beginning know that I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with religion.  I’ve always thought that there would be a “later” or a “someday” when I would sit down with religion and attend some sort of spiritual couples counseling until I felt satisfied and at peace with my decision, but now that Dan and I are going to be having a baby, my “someday” has arrived sooner than expected.

My husband is a borderline atheist, so he doesn’t have much of an opinion about whether or not we raise our child with religion in his or her life.  I, on the other hand, would not feel right about not giving our child any sort of spiritual guidance.  When our family celebrates Easter and Christmas, I want my child to know and understand why those are such special days.  I want my child to know that there’s a higher power out there, and to take comfort in that fact when life throws us curveballs and we struggle for a sense of understanding and explanation. 

I want my child to know these things, at least until he or she is old enough to make his or her own decision about religion and faith.  In my opinion, spirituality is a very personal decision, and if my child’s views end up differing from my own, that’s fine by me.  That being said, I’d at least like to give him/her a baseline to start from.   

But what is that baseline?  At this point in my life, I haven’t been able to find an organized religion that coincides with my beliefs.  I believe in God and I believe in heaven, but I don’t believe in the devil or in hell.  I believe in miracles and I believe in most of the general morals and values portrayed in the Bible, but I believe that the Bible is a book written by men and should not be used as religious law.  I believe in tolerance and I believe in gay marriage, and I think that God loves every single one of us regardless of race, creed, sexuality, or any other difference.  I don’t believe that priests or other holy officials have more of a connection to God than the rest of us, and I don’t believe that one needs to attend Church in order to prove their faith and commune with God. 

None of the churches I’ve been to and none of the religions I’m familiar with match my specific beliefs.

At this point I’m leaning toward teaching my child these basic beliefs at home without the help of an organized religion.  There are plenty of children’s Bibles and VeggieTales videos to help me convey the fundamental values and the difference between right and wrong. 

But when my child is in high school and all of his or her friends are going through Confirmation, will my child feel left out and left behind?  When it comes time for my child to get married, will he or she feel lost without a childhood church to hold the ceremony in?

I am not a person of religion; I am a person of faith.  But is that enough for my child?