ohmidog!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A lot of us think our dogs were gifts from above, but here’s one that truly was.

A seven-year-old boy in Salinas, California, got a new puppy after it escaped from the clutches of a hawk and fell out of the sky into his backyard.

KSBW reported that the two-month-old puppy was dropped an estimated 30 feet before it was discovered by a seven-year-old named Taylor.

The dog has been adopted by Taylor’s family and named T.J. Heavenly.

The family believes that T.J. Heavenly somehow worked himself free of the hawk’s talons.

“If you look at him right now, he’s so wiggly,” Elaine Bouchard told the TV station. “And his nose; he’s such a little bulldozer, I can see him wiggling right out of the talons.”

The dog was taken to a veterinarian to get treated for wounds and dehydration before the family took him home for keeps.

“When God drops a puppy from the sky, you keep it,” Bouchard said.

Whether you’re Catholic, Presbyterian or just plain gullible, you might have seen and fallen for this series of photos that seems to capture two neighboring churches having a theological debate, via their church signs, on whether dogs go to heaven.

But nay, my friend. Do not be decieved. See the light, which, you might notice, is exactly the same in each shot, as is the cropping, as is the background — including one car that is parked in the same place the whole time the alleged sign debate is going on.

Fall not for nefarious pranksters, for they are evil. Either that or they have idle time on their hands, and we know what that leads to, because we read it on a real church sign once.

Yea, verily, the devil’s workshop (now available online).

This particular one — the place where these false images are fashioned — is called Church Sign Generator. You can find it on the Internet, should you care to venture into that sinful rat’s nest of temptation, deception and pop-up ads. (May God strike me down if I ever resort to them.)

There, sheep-like, we (by which I mean humans) flock to get the wool pulled over our eyes, failing to recognize false idols, fraud and, sometimes, jest.

We (by which I mean me) are not truly bothered by Internet-generated church signs, though we’d argue that being able to put any words you want on one takes away some of the thrill of spotting real church signs that contain humor, wisdom or interesting typos. (Like seeking kudzu dogs, that’s one of my hobbies.)

Some of the Cumberland Presbyterians — especially since they seem to come out on the losing end of the debate — are less than thrilled with it though, calling the text that appears on the signs “inappropriate.”

The misleading series of photos is most often passed along via the forwarded email — forwarded emails being the Internet equivalent of swarming locusts.

“This forwarded e-mail continues to rear its ugly head time after time,” writes editor Pat White in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church newsletter, “so I am resurrecting this message that explains that this is not a theological issue for the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.”

“These signs are a prank,”  he adds. “If you receive one of these forwarded e-mails, please respond to the sender to be sure they understand that this is not a true Cumberland Presbyterian church sign.”

Alas, his remarks are too little, too late.

As with with locusts, once forwarded emails go viral, the damage is done, and the Presbyterian Church, or at least the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, or at least the Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church – if there really is one — is left looking God-fearing but dog-hating.

White does not address whether all dogs go to heaven, but we are quite certain they do.

We read it on a church sign once.

It was 50 years ago today that this classic episode of The Twilight Zone, called “The Hunt,” originally aired.

The clip above shows the last third of the episode.

Hyder Simpson has just about realized, by then, that he is dead.

Him and his dog, Rip, had left the house long about supper time, and the dog, he picked up a coon trail, you see. Rip plunged into a creek in pursuit of the raccoon. When Rip didn’t come up, Hyder went in after him, and he didn’t come up neither.

When next we see them, they are awakening in a meadow. It slowly dawns on Hyder that no one can detect his presence, or Rip’s for that matter. After seeing his grieving widow, and the casket holding his earthly remains, Hyder sets off for the great beyond — not sure what that’s going to be, seein’ as as he never went in much for hymns or scripture.

He and Rip start walking, first coming across what bills itself as heaven.

He’s told he’s welcome there, but that dogs aren’t allowed.

Needless to say — Rip and Hyder havin’ them a right powerful bond — Hyder declines to enter, and he utters the following lines, all of which you can use next time a motel, restaurant, park, shop or other establishment devilishly declines entry to your dog:

“I don’t reckon in there is any place for me … any place that’s too high falutin’ for Rip is too fancy for me.”

“What kind of outfit you runnin’ don’t allow no dogs?”

“A dog’s got a right to have a man around just like a man’s got a right to have a dog around.”

Hyder and Rip hear out the man who describes himself as St. Peter, but (and note how Rip detects something isn’t right) they decide not to go through the gate. Instead, they press on.

Eventually they come across an angel who offers to usher them into the real heaven.

“Ain’t gonna set foot in heaven without Rip.” Hyder tells him.

But in heaven, of course, dogs are welcome. And what of that first place they stopped? Well, as Rip’s discomfort there might have attested, that was hell.

It’s the angel who utters this classic line:

“You see, Mr. Simpson, a man, well he’ll walk right into hell with both eyes open, but even the devil can’t fool a dog.”

The episode was the first of eight that Earl Hamner wrote for The Twilight Zone — and 50 years later, we tip our hat to him.

Hamner went on to create ”The Waltons” (That’s his voice you hear narrating the episodes, should you happen to stumble across John Boy and family in a repeat.)

Should you happen to stumble across Hyder or Rip, well, you’ll know you’re in the right place.

When their dog Scamp was hit by a car, a Washington state family checked his seemingly lifeless body, then put him under a wheelbarrow, planning to bury him the next morning.

Paul McKinlay, 61, had been speaking with his son in his front yard in Yelm when Scamp, an 8-month-old Yorkie-shih tzu mix (not Shiatsu, as ABC News reported) slipped underneath the fence and ran into the street.

McKinlay heard a yelp and a thud and arrived at the street to find the dog motionless and the female driver crying.

“We checked to see if we felt any breathing out of his nose, and we couldn’t feel any heartbeat,” said Reta McKinlay.

Her husband wrapped the dog — who they’d brought home for their granchildren this summer — in a blanket. They placed his body under an overturned wheelbarrow so no animals could get to him, with plans to bury Scamp in the morning.

Then, they broke the news to the 6-year-old twins — granchildren who live with them.

“[Paul] was going to bury him the next morning so we went into the house and just told the kids the dog had gotten hit by a car and that he had gone to heaven like in that movie, ‘All Dogs Go to Heaven.’ My grandson was crying. He asked if [Scamp] evaporated like in the movie and I said, ‘Yes, that’s what happened.’”

But when Paul McKinlay went outside the next morning and lifted up the wheelbarrow, Scamp was sitting up.

Four days and $3,000 in vet bills later Scamp, who’d suffered a concussion, broken teeth and a possible jaw fracture, was brought home by the McKinlays — much to the suprise of their twin granchildren, who, just in case Scamp didn’t make it, hadn’t initially been told that the dog was still alive.

Mrs. McKinlay said her husband had been “distraught” that he left Scamp out in the cold, but vets told the couple that the cold temperatures could have kept the dog alive, by keeping his brain from swelling.

“Sometimes God’s just not ready to take something away,” she said.

It’s still two days from Judgment Day — by one evangelist’s count, anyway — prompting a question to arise, and with it some solutions.

The question: Assuming only humans – only believing humans — get swept up to heaven when the Rapture occurs, who’s going to feed their dogs?

The solutions: An insurance policy of sorts being offered by — among others, and with various degrees of seriousness — a New Hampshire man who says he has lined up non-Christian caretakers to feed and house the pets of Rapturees.

“I’m not looking to make a statement here,” Bart Centre, a retired retail executive, atheist author and founder of Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, told the Philadelphia Daily News. “I’m looking to make money.”

(We don’t believe that, and think he’s making a statement, too.)

The company, he says, hopes to profit from the May 21 Judgment Day hysteria, by selling 10-year contracts to protect pets from “a slow death by starvation in the event that you get raptured.” It costs $135.

Far cheaper alternatives are available, including one that only costs $10 and is offered by After the Rapture Pet Care, whose video is shown above.

Co-founder Sharon Moss says on the website that — though they got the idea from a joke — it’s totally serious.

After a woman in England, also an athiest, started a post-Rapture pet care website as a joke, Moss, a Christian, saw it as something that could be a legitimate and much-needed business. The company began recruiting non-Christian pet lovers nationwide to serve as post-Rapture pet caretakers.

Eternal Earthbound Pets, its owner insists, is also a legitimate business venture. Centre, who is the author of ”The Atheist Camel Chronicles,” says his rescuers – confirmed to have committed sins that will keep them from being caught up in the Rapture — will retrieve pets within 24 hours of the Rapture and “keep them as their own family members,” for up to 10 years.

Evangelist Harold Camping

The company was launched two years ago in response to the belief that, under the Mayan calendar, Judgment Day would occur Dec. 21, 2012. But it has gotten a boost from the prediction by Christian radio evangelist Harold Camping that — ready or not –the end will most assuredly come this weekend.

Centre says he has 258 clients in 26 states so far.

My question, though, is whether the Rapture is going to be dog-friendly — whether God, though The Bible doesn’t show dogs much respect, has come around in his view of them. Will all dogs go to heaven? Dogs being the least sinful among us, I would think that would be the case, in which case the post-Rapture pet care companies would have no dogs to feed.