62 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 9-20-12”

  1. Good morning all. I hope you have a great day. Mine started early. My bedroom is on the front of my house and the city can’t have anything so ugly as garbage cans hanging around all day so the loud, squeaky truck came buy about a quarter of five. I got up and paid bills, so now I am depressed, but the good news is I can budget because I know how much will be coming in!

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  2. Good morning. Another insomnia morning. This will be the last post of my imaginary country series; prepare to ignore. I will post a joke intended to offend atheists and Christians equally; it’s kind of long; prepare to ignore. I will tell it today to my tiny “flock” in the unlikely event anyone shows up; I am prepared to be ignored. I have an AQOD in my morbid dwelling on mortality, as I prepare myself to be ignored or punished by God.

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  3. 7 of 7 (Final post in a series imagining a society what a society would be like if children were raised without being told about God. Remember. Ignore it. Don’t read.)

    Have a great writer imagine the experiment.

    Although I won’t say that such an experiment is completely impossible to bring off in today’s world, the odds are daunting, to put it mildly. Thus I fall back to a slightly less overwhelming scheme: find a very great and imaginative writer to envision such a society. I’ve suggested one, but you may have a better suggestion. People are always writing crazy books. Orwell’s books were quite crazy, but many people consider his last two books (1984 and Animal Farm) to be great books indeed.

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  4. Good morning, Kim. Update on Brooklyn: She is continuing to improve. People all over the world are praying for her. There is a Facebook group called Brooklyn Orange if you’re interested in following her progress more closely. It is inspiring to read about how many people are holding her up in prayer.

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  5. It is so much harder to watch a child suffer. I can’t imagine what her parents are going through. There is a young woman in town (34) she had a colonoscopey and they discovered cancer. They have taken her appendix, part of her colon, done a full hysterectomy and they still don’t think they have gotten it all.
    We should all be thankful for the good health we have

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  6. Alternative Question of the Day (AQOD).

    What is the closest you have been to death?

    Although I am not especially adventurous or daring, I can think of at least a dozen circumstances and situations where it might have been all over for me. In fact, I have kind of a bad feeling about today. (I am taking a long drive this afternoon to Oak Harbor to meet with my small flock. I may be smashed up on the way; my heart may give out; the killer Cascade quake may decide this is the day to rock and roll; one of my cult may decide to turn on me; lightening may flash from the sky and sizzle me (I had a close call when I was about 15; this time He may decide there is no point in letting me lead people astray any longer.) But first, your tales of close calls and (I presume survival; otherwise, I will really be freaked out.)

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  8. I am going to tell a joke. I am telling it both on Wandering Views (and on a my secular blog. The joke is about Christians and atheists. If you are a Christian, or if you are an atheist, the joke may offend, though it is not a “dirty” joke, so I do not expect it to be deleted. It may weary you, or irritate you for not being funny. I will tell it at my secular meeting. I am trying to get it down to no longer than five minutes, so my followers (one of whom is running the meeting) will not turn on me and throttle me to shut me up.

    Please do not read any more if it will offend you or if it will not amuse you. It also involves apples, pigs, farmers, and Whidbey Island. These are all reasons for avoiding reading the joke. For example, if you are an apple, pig, farmer, or Puget Sound island, you may be offended and/or not amused, and perhaps wearied.

    Perhaps your software can be revised or upgraded to indicate X number of people are ignoring me.

    A Christian and an atheist pig/apple farmer on Whidbey Island.

    One day a Christian on Whidbey Island woke up, looked out his window, and saw a beautiful fall day, crisp, tart, with a beautiful blue sky with a few white clouds floating in it. He said to himself, “What a beautiful day. I think I will go for a walk. I will get some healthful exercise and appreciate the beautiful day God provided for me.”

    After he had walked a few miles, he found himself in an apple orchard. He admired the apples on the trees – red, green, and gold. He thanked God for providing him with the beautiful apples and the beautiful island where he lived. He noticed an apple on the ground. He picked it up and examined it carefully. He said to himself, “It seems fresh, ripe, and unspoiled. Normally, I wouldn’t take an apple from an orchard without asking the farmer and perhaps offering to pay him, but if this lies on the ground very long it will probably just spoil. So I might as well eat it before it goes to waste.” He then consumed the apple with great delight, thanking God for this gift.

    As he walked a little further, he came upon a man holding a pig up to one of the apple trees. He presumed he was observing a farmer who owned the orchard. He politely asked the farmer, “That’s a fine looking pig. Do you mind if I ask why you are holding it up to the tree?”

    The farmer replied, “He likes the apples. They are too high for him to reach on his own, and he is not able to climb trees very well, so I am holding him up so he can reach them.” Even as the farmer spoke, the Christian saw the pig grunting and straining to reach an apple. As pigs go, it wasn’t that large (perhaps a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, a variety often kept as pets, and smaller than most breeds but still big enough to be a hefty load for the farmer). The farmer gave a mighty heave and the pig grabbed an apple with its snout and scarfed it down with great sounds of enjoyment and delight.

    The Christian felt empathic delight at the hog’s enjoyment of the apple, so like his own only a few minutes ago, though he admitted the pig’s table manners left something to be desired.

    Even so, the Christian was till a little puzzled . Rather boldly, he asked, “I don’t mean to offend, but that seems a slightly strange way to feed a pig. Doesn’t it take a long time to feed him apples in that manner?”

    The farmer shrugged, causing the pig to squeal a little. He said, “Oh, what’s time to a pig?”

    “I guess that’s true,” admitted the Christian. As by now he felt he had gotten to know the farmer a bit, and found him a pleasant and easy-going fellow, he continued the conversation. “Isn’t this a pleasant day? A day like this makes me glory in God’s creation.”

    The farmer replied pleasantly, “I agree it’s a lovely day. However, in the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that I am not a religious believer.”

    “I am sorry to hear that,” said the Christian. “I find it hard to imagine that all this beauty and plenty is just an accident. Also, just speaking personally, I worry that Jesus might return and I will not be ready.”

    “Oh,” replied the farmer, “I certainly enjoy the beauty of a fall day on Whidbey Island, but I can’t help wondering if the terror of a hurricane or the horrors of a tornado – both events I have experienced in other parts of the United States – are the creations of God as much as a beautiful day? Frankly, I rather prefer to believe that the universe with all its wonders and all its horrors is an accident rather than an intentional creation of a kind of super being that might just as easily be considered a monster as a creature of love. However, now that we are on this topic, I have a question as well. You said, ‘I worry that Jesus might return and I am will not be ready.’ My question is, ‘How long has it been since Jesus died?’

    “Oh, not quite 2,000 years,” replied the Christian.

    “That’s a long time,” replied the atheist apple and pig farmer.

    “Well, when I contemplate eternity, it doesn’t seem that long,” replied the Christian.

    The farmer replaced the pig on the ground. He shook the apple tree and as apples tumbled down the hog began to grab them with delight, “That pig IS kind of heavy,” admitted the farmer. “I think you were right about holding him up to eat the apples being kind of dumb. And to play off what I said about time and pigs, perhaps one can also ask, ‘What’s time to a Christian?’”

    The atheist farmer continued, “Though frankly, I prefer to live in the present, raising my apples and pigs, and not spending my life obsessing about a probably imaginary being that may may not have actually lived, certainly wasn’t born of a virgin, certainly did not scramble up from the grave, and certainly did not have divine powers.”

    I hope that you ignored me. If you didn’t ignore me (despite many warnings), whose fault is that?

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  9. I have been within a split second of being beheaded by an airplane propeller.
    I have been in a burning airplane. But I don’t know how dangerous that really was.
    I am thankful for my good health every day. At our age with no serious ailments is very unusual.
    We live a sensible lifestyle, exercise, Elvera makes me eat something green every day, etc. But we are still blessed.
    I used to be very careless in the use of carbon tetrachloride and benzine when I tested asphalt. But I haven’t had to pay for that. Yet.

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  10. Serious question. Have you ever been around children (perhaps friends of your own children) who just irritate the stew out of you? Over the course of her life Chloe has had two friends that I really cannot stand. With both children I can look at the mother’s and realized why the children behave as they do.

    My child will probably need therapy. I explain to her all the time that she lives in a small town and while people may not all know me they know her Nana, and with her last name SOMEONE will know who SHE is and report back to her Nana. This stradegy has served me well except currently she wants to attend college in Chicago!

    I also tell her she can be a brat around the house but in public she BETTER behave and when she is at someone else’s house she MUST be on best behavior.

    Just recently I was talking to ex-Mother-in Law and I was telling her how disrespectful this one child is to me. I made the comment that it was one thing for “X” to be disrespectful to her own mother but it was another to be disrespectful to me. ex-MIL told me to get a handle on it and if she got wind that I had let the child be disrespectful to me again SHE would come over here and beat MY behind…gotta love her!

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  12. On a more humorous note…Homecoming is this weekend. The game is on Friday night and the dance is on Saturday night. Paul doesn’t understand this concept. He said High School Homecoming games were supposed to be on Saturday afternoon and the dance afterwards or on Friday afternoon with dance that night. I had to explain to His Yankee Self that he did not grow up where major life events were scheduled around SEC football and the whole town showed up for the Homecoming game because most of them graduated from the school.

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  14. Good morning. Hubby took a sick day yesterday. It was nice to have him home. Today he goes back to work, then tomorrow he’ll be taking another day off, which he always does when it’s one of the kids’ birthdays. Tomorrow my baby turns five!! 🙂

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  15. Every kid who comes into our home knows the house rules, no disrespect for adults or each other being one. It is amazing how many and how often these kids retrun. I had 12 teenagers over for lunch yesterday. It seems counterintuitive, but kids really like structrue.

    QoD: I have had two near death experiences that resulted in what is called out of body experiences. The first one was in childbirth. I remember being in unbearable pain when suddenly I felt like my thinking me was up in the corner of the room while my body was still on the birthing bed. I was seeing everything from that angle, looking over the shoulder of hubby, doctor, nurses. I remember the doctor barking in the half English, half Tagolog, that she would go into in a panic (she delivered 6 of our 7) telling the nurses to tilt bed down, get my head down and give me oxygen. once they did that thinking me came crashing back from the ceiling into feeling/body me. When our daughter was born soon afterward there was a problem and the doctor again barking orders said, “I almost lost the mother, I am not now going to lose the child.”

    Lesson: I remember being very grateful to learn that if we humans go into too much pain we become sort of seperate from it.

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  16. QoDII: The second time was when I had a heart attack while surfing at 44. I do not have heart disease. It was a very rare form of heart attack caused by an arterial spasm or as my cardio doc said, “a kink in the hose.” I was in the ER all my symptoms were classic in showing heart attack except my EKG was normal through out. (Ladies this is quite common for us). The ER doctor said he would have to run some tests, yada, yada, it was probably my gall bladder. He left and the chest pressure and pain and shortness of breath (bad discription of that btw) got so bad I was at the point of full arrest. I remember looking at hubby and thinking “We can no longer have human fellowship.” And wondering what he was going to do with 7 kids 😉 The natural fear and pain of a heart attack was gone and the Lord was quite present the sense of Love overwhelming. I was at perfect peace. The nurse came in at that point and I don’t know what I looked like, but had the same sense with him. I cannot communicate with him anymore I am going to a different world. He however looked scared. He turned to run out and smashed into the doctor who was running in yelling, “She’s having a heart attack!” (The blood work came back; ladies, always make them take blood if you have chest pain). The doc grabbed my face, forced nitro-glicerin under my tongue and like the child birth experience I came crashing back. My thinking soul as it were returned to my body and the presece to the Lord very diminished. Four doctors and three nurses then ran me across the hospital in quite a dramatic fashion. Hubby was certainly glad, but I felt a little robbed at being back in the land of the living, because where I had been was quite wonderful.

    Lesson learned: The best is yet to come!!!

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  18. Great stories Adios! Wow. Thankfully (?) I have never had a near death experience.

    I also like your rule of no disrespect allowed in your house – great idea. So simple and easily understood by kids, even when they are allowed to rule the roost at home.

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  19. I married a Marine. No tomfoollery allowed in our house. I recall an incident in our life. The word no no was ingrained in our children at a very young age. I remember Helen telling her younger Sister Sarah. “Sissy, those are grandma’s no no ducks” When Andy was a junior in High School, he had somehow gotten into his head that he was going to take the GED in lieu of graduating high school. I looked him straight in the eye and said, ” You will graduate!. This is not an option on your part. You either graduate or move out now”. He finished school. Later on he told me. Dad, I am glad you put your foot down and made me finish High School.

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  21. Thanks Kare, I forgot to sign Adios 🙂

    It is September so all the kids who come for lunch pass through the kitchen, grab something to eat and hang out in the living room preoccupied by various electronics. I stay in the kitchen and listen (I do this while driving them too) it is amazing how much you hear since they forget you are there. After I have a backstory on each I ask them about cross-country, choir or football, their little sister or why they might have to move. They take my knowing this stuff as clairvoyoance. But they enjoy the specific attention. By november they one by one start to slide into the kitchen to chat. By New Year’s I am invited to meet, matches and concerts and by May and June they never make it to the family room they are all in the kitchen for group therapy, so to speak. Teenagers CRAVE serious, authentic, adult conversation. And if I am not at their graduations, well, life is not all it should be 😉

    Lesson learned: This is our 7th child’s group of friendes. This always works like this. Want to change your kid’s world for the better? Show up!

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  22. More great ideas and advice from Adios! I miss having teenagers around – that was the best part of my kids’ growing up! Here’s hoping we are able to get involved with the youth at church again one day.

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  23. Absolutely, Adios, on all the kid stuff.

    And thanks for your descriptions of near death. We’ve always said my mother-in-law felt so much the presence of the Lord she just ” released ” in the ER even though they got her lungs and heart going. She had just spent a fantastic weekend with her family, visiting us and our new baby and had given a joyous testimony in our church the night before. Why stay in pain if she could have the beauty of the Lord forever?

    We miss her, of course.

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  24. There in lies the difference Michelle. Those of us who are children of the King look at death as merely one more step to take as we enter into our Savior’s presence. We have one thing the unbeliever does not have. We have hope. I have seen many saints enter into the presence of our King. There is always a sense of peace and commitment. I once knew a retired Navy Warrant Officer from our church in Ohio. His name was George. George had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He told one of the elders how blessed he felt to know the day he would die. On the night before he entered into glory, some members of the church, family and friends were there to visit him and Jean, his wife. After they left, he asked Jean if she saw them. Jean thought that he was talking about the family and friends. George said no. Jean asked who then. George said the Angels were there. He passed away that night. Just like Lazarus in Luke 16, the angels had come to take George home.

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  25. Thanks for sharing your stories, Adios. Wow, two close calls!

    What blood tests did they do when you were having your heart attack? I never had any blood tests, only an EKG, the time I went in to get chest pain that was worsening checked out. (I did not have a heart attack, thankfully.) I had gone to a walk-in clinic and the staff took my chest pain seriously and promptly got me in a wheelchair and flew me through the halls and around corners in a literally dizzying pace, getting me to the emergency room in the hospital part of the facility. I got to triage and felt like I was going to fall out of the wheelchair, I was so dizzy. They took my blood pressure and it was 80-something over 40-something (it’s usually low 100’s over low 60’s, and 90’s over 50’s when I’m pregnant, which I was at the time).

    Anyway, the EKG was normal, and no one drew any of my blood. I don’t know if they just didn’t do things like that in those days (1996), or they didn’t think my case looked that bad (I drove myself to the clinic–I know, not a smart move), or what, but I’m just curious what blood tests should be done in case a heart attack is in my future (my dad’s dad and my mom’s brother both had heart attacks, so it’s on both sides of my family).

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  27. We have had so much smoke in the air from your forest burning in various areas that they had to cancel the local homecoming game and dance. It was nice to get up into the mountains and out of the smoke for a while. It has been thick for the past month or so.

    In further news, a local pizza hut (about two hours away) was robbed at gunpoint. the gun guy put three employees into the cooler while he rifled through stuff. They used their cell phones to call the police, who picked him up in the parking lot. See? Cell phones have some use.

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  28. I haven’t had a near death experience, exactly. I have had a couple of times when I could, maybe even “should,” have died. (First one I know of was when I was a child and we were all in the car. Dad hit the accelerator hard and Mom and my sister both gasped or screamed. “What happened?” I asked, and they said, “That big rock almost hit our car!” I hadn’t seen it. The next time we were driving in that area, they pointed to the boulder that was taking up a big part of one lane, as big as our car–that’s the one that almost got us, and would have except that Dad sped up.)

    I have a very close friend who had her appendix burst, and it was a few days before she got the problem checked out; she almost didn’t make it, and was in the hospital for some time. When I went to visit her, she looked me in the eye and said, “I could be before the Throne right now.” I nodded and both of us held eye contact. That she barely (but temporarily) missed something better than survival was implicit in the look we exchanged, I think.

    Yesterday’s question: I’ve never seen anyone die, but I have come close. Dad died three weeks before my seventeenth birthday. He had been ill for sometime, and in the hospital for a couple of months. He was home (against doctor’s wishes) and in his bed. I was washing dishes, and my family was in the living room (to my right) and Dad was in his and Mom’s bedroom (to my left). I’m not sure if I heard him breathing hard or what, but I stepped in to check on him and saw him struggling for breath. I went back in the living room and told Mom, “I think Dad needs his oxygen turned up a bit.” She went in and I returned to the dishes. Mom went to run some bath water and then went into the bedroom again. I heard her say his name once, twice, then once more frantically. My hands froze in the dishwasher. Then she said his name once more, with sorrow, and with “Darling” afterward, and I knew. Then she said louder, “Kids, come in here; I think your dad is gone.” We went in. I checked his pulse. Nothing. I checked his pulse on the shunt (where it had been exaggeratedly strong), and still nothing, and there was no denying it then. I said, “We’re looking at a dead body, but he’s looking at glory.” My mom called our pastor, and my brothers, and life as we knew it was over; but the next chapter for him is unfathomable. Mom went too, nineteen years later.

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  29. Actually I think I had a close call with a near-death experience just this morning.

    I causally started to read Random’s interminable pig and farmers post when I begin to get neurological distress calls from outlying posts of ganglia in my cranium; shut-down sequences were being initiated from all higher centers of thought.

    For a moment, I felt the icy breath of the Angel of Death himself, upon my neck.

    Fortunately, while he (the Angel of Death) was organizing the paperwork in preparation for my processing, I had a stroke of genius.

    I started reading (OUT LOUD) the pig and farmers post.

    Sure enough, within moments, he (the Angel of Death) fell into a sort of coma. I propped him up against a bale of hay, managed to get some orange juice down his throat, and he seemed to begin to revive.

    But while he was still woozy, I cleverly erased my name on his paperwork, and substituted in the name of a certain chicken. This particular chicken has been giving me a lot of problems lately – specifically trying to organize a union in the chicken house.

    Random, you need to read That Hideous Strength, by Lewis.

    Sometimes your posts uncannily remind me of the literary equivalent of the infamous ‘random spots on the ceiling’, when the protagonist, Mark Studdock, is forced to contemplate them during his imprisonment.

    You would not happen to be a Deputy Director of NICE, are you, by any chance?

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  30. I was going to give my opinion of Random’s “joke” (what was the punch line again?) but after Drill’s narrative, anything I’d say would be about as dull and anti-climactic as the atheist farmer and his apple-eating pig.

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  31. 😀 Drill. Priceless.

    Random, sorry, but the joke looked a little long, so I’ll have to go back to read through it.

    Honestly, pal, I don’t think I’ve ever known an unbeliever who spent SO much time contemplating God or the lack thereof! What’s all that about, do you think?

    When I was in my agnostic phase (my early 20s), I felt pretty much free of all that. I was always respectful of believers, but frankly, the entire question just wasn’t one I pondered all that much during those few years.

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  32. 6 Arrows, they are looking for troponins (sp?) in the blood. It is an amino acid that runs high during a heart attack. If the it is a major heart attack there can even be muscle tissue in the blood.

    Adios

    Just noticed how conveinent my old WMB screen name is now. It is an nom de plume and a salutation.

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  36. My gravatar is a painting by my son.

    6 Arrows, you are most welcome. And I also hope you never need to it!

    AJ thanks for the geek trailer, I can’t wait!

    Random, I sort of skimmed the joke because it was long. Not sure I got it, so I didn’t laugh, but neither was I offended 😉

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  37. Two ladies just came in my office. The older lady is waiting on a heart transplant and they are selling tickets for a BBQ dinner next Friday. I put my name on the list but I asked her if I could have people pray for her. She said absolutely. Her name is Kathleen. (since we were talking about hearts and all )

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  39. Drill, the angel of death from whom you craftily escaped earlier today could have been doing you a favor. As it is, you are condemned now with the rest of us to endless inane lectures on the assorted virtues of atheism coupled with the wonders of life with chickens and the economics of small scale egg marketing, to say nothing of the ongoing tale of life with an 80% incompatible wife. Think twice the next time the angel appears.

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  40. Kim, thanks for the video you shared on yesterday’s daily thread. I didn’t have a chance to listen to it until today, and am very glad that I did.

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  43. When I was a teen living in Alaska, we built a machine shed – which amounts to not much more than a pole building which housed, of course, farm machinery. To build this, a post hole digger was employed to dig the holes. It meant hours of laborious work, which, after we bought the tractor and auger attachment, meant only minutes of watching the PTO do the work… The poles were then coated with creosote, dropped in the holes, plumbed and dirt tamped in behind them.

    At some point, the vertical poles were topped with ridge poles using the loader attachment on the old John Deere tractor. After that the rafters could be placed across those, then 1×4 stretchers put in place, upon which the sheet metal roof was nailed down.

    The process for raising the ridge poles was as follows. We would balance the ridge pole in the bucket, raise it into place with a level on the top, then mark how much the ridge pole needed to be notched to keep it level. Once it was notched correctly, it would be raised for the last time, then spiked into place. It was during this last process the near miss occurred.

    I was sitting in the seat of the tractor, raising the pole loaded bucket nearly into place, when I tilted the bucket the wrong way. That 20 foot spruce pole rolled out of the bucket, down the arms right toward me. At some point on it’s deadly journey down the arms, the pole bounced enough on one side of the arms for the large end of the pole to just clear my head. It then bounced off the tractor tire right beside me, and onto the ground with a mighty thud.

    Nerves were shattered, words were said, and the pole got chained in the bucket the next time around…

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  44. That was a joke? I thought there was humor in jokes, but that was just a long evangelistic post for atheism.

    Kim- Tell Paul that other schools (like all the ones in these parts) have the game on Friday night and the dance on Saturday night.

    Speaking of Friday, “it is already Friday in Australia, so you know what that means!“

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  46. After I retired, I started teaching AARP Driver Safety classes. Over my lifetime I had worked 17 different full-time jobs (can you spell SCUFFLE to make a living), but more than anything else I had been a teacher. The stickiest issue in those classes is when a driver becomes too old to drive safely. As a person getting older, I am now facing this issue for myself. Perhaps it’s like a pastor (at “my” church for real) who delivers many funeral sermons deciding how he wants his sermon delivered when he realizes he is terminally ill.

    Anyway, I am planning maybe tomorrow to answer my own AQOD and tell how I have almost died or been killed on at least 10 occasions. I didn’t plan on it happening tonight. Even the local newspaper warned me: a 21-year old man drove into a tree (not far from where I live) and killed himself a few days ago. I was about mile from my house, a few minutes late, and misjudged oncoming traffic and tried to turn left in a hurry. The brakes on the oncoming car fortunately worked very well. My heart works very well (even though it runs a little too slow these days); I hope the driver who skidded to a halt a few feet from my vehicle has a good ticker also. He didn’t have time to pull a gun and start trying to shoot me. So I am guilty. I am wrong. I am at fault. God did not save my life because there is no God. I am just luckier than I deserve to be. I made it to Oak Harbor (now driving very, very carefully) only two minutes late, and the nine atheists (and one Cherokee hippy with a slight touch of mysticism) had a splendid time, with a general “revival” atmosphere of “how can they believe that?” It’s nice to be around one’s own kind.

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  47. Not only that, it’s a terrible joke, I agree. I’m not really that much into Dante’s “levels of Hell” and all that cataloging nonsense, but for those who like such imaginations, I suppose there is a special place of punishment for those who tell bad jokes. Congratulations to all those who paid attention to my warning not to read it; and congratulations to the brilliant people such as Drill and Ree who deconstructed it. I am glad you use your time constructively.

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  48. The ever sweet and loving Karen said to me:

    Random/Modesty – Has it ever occurred to you that you are proselytizing to us?

    Of course, it has. Everyday, I say to myself, “Perhaps I can giggle some sense into a few heads.”

    Who just entered into a “second marriage” around here? I know Kim has a pretty good sense of humor, so I’m guessing she will appreciate Samuel Johnson’s crack:

    “A second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.”. Sometimes it works. My wife and I knew my brother’s first marriage was doomed the first time we had them over for dinner. My brother’s second marriage seems to be working–after 30 some odd years or so. We will seem first hand in a month or so.

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  49. The thing is, Karen dear, I am not prosetylizing you (or anyone else here) to stop believing in God. As everyone at the atheists meeting agreed, “Some people really need to believe in this.” What I am trying to prosetylize you to be is to be kind and tolerant when punitive intolerance is not called for. (I know that Karen understands this, and I suspect few quite a few people here also do.) Shunning and harassing homosexual friends serves no purpose and causes quite a bit of harm. It’s not quite as bad as Christian Scientists or Jehovah’s Witnesses prohibiting children from getting medical treatment they need, but it’s pointless cruelty. Believe in whatever you want to believe in. If there were a Jesus Son of God, he would not be being who believes in punishing people pointlessly.

    I haven’t made this offer for a while. I keep my word on this. If you are a participant of this blog who 1) is a sincere Christian and 2) does not agree with the prejudice against homosexuals expressed by many here (as long as they follow basic ethics of being faithful and engaging in sex with willing adult humans), please email me. I will summarize (if i get any responses) and I may quote without identifying details, but I will not identify you in any way. People who have known me on wmb for years (such as KarenO) will vouch for me. If you have any other “nonconformist” ideas you are holding back, use me as a medium for safe anonymous posting. If you want to critcize me in the process, that is fine. As I’ve said, after being a high school teacher for many years, it is very difficult to hurt my feelings. I have been tormented by the world’s greatest experts: adolescents.

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  50. Speaking of which, Sails: As it is, you are condemned now with the rest of us to endless inane lectures . . .. It’s too late to retell the Frankenstein story again, but in short, many of my high school students had more talent at insult in their pinky finger than you manage to summon after an hour of pounding your monitor screen with a crowbar.

    Here’s the thing. Drill is as wrong as you are. However, when he tears me a new one, he does so with great wit and elegance. You are just clumsy and turgid. (Almost as bad as me.) I am sure you have great virtues and talents, but tearing into me is not one of them.) Leave the job to naturally gifted people such as Drill; consult your pastor, I am sure he gan guide you to more useful and appropriate ways to witness your faith than trying to gum me into shame. Nibbled by minnows? Is that the appropriate term? It’s certainly not the bite of a loving Christin pirahna.

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  51. 7 of 7 (Final post in a series imagining a society what a society would be like if children were raised without being told about God.

    *******Random,
    It’s already been done. The Planet Earth. Original humans.

    By your understanding, no one told them about God. Their children grew up without being explicitly taught about God. But, they managed to reason and believe their way to Him anyway. 😉

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  52. Oh, yes, I asked people who disagree with some of the common pointless and silly prejudices here to email me. I have a “public” email for such purposes that gets spam in Arabic and Chinese and for all I know Martian. Again, I will tabulate totals, quote anonymously but fairly, but not identify anyone who emails me. The email is: eman_modnar@yahoo.com.

    Good night to all. May you sleep the peaceful sleep of the kind, gentle, righteous people. The kind of people Jesus would really love.

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  53. Tammy. It’s one of the best responses anyone here has given to my essay. It’s got flaws, but they’re subtle and slippery. Think about it. And think about kindness and tolerance. You’ve just about reasoned your way there. Think about Roger Williams. He loved God and Jesus, and he got there too.

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  54. I had a little mini-debate with the other atheists about Roger. “He didn’t really believe that did he?” They challenged me. “Hey, I struggled through much of his awful writing,” I said. This was a guy who REALLY believed. Somehow he got to kindness and mercy, too, whilte other Puritans were stealing Indians’ land and hanging Quakers. If Roger could do that in those darker ages, you can, too.

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  55. Random,

    I’m shocked. In all your years on WMB, just how many Christians were into “punitive intolerance” toward homosexuals? One? Two? I was there as long as you (and longer) and that would probably be the greatest number I could count.

    For shame! To let your presuppositions spoil your facts. 😦

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  56. Tonight, I got very stressed out fighting a ceiling lamp. Yes, I must admit, I was sweating, and angry, and very grumpy. And, darn it, the lamp won. Even though I finally found the lost nut, and finally figured out how to replace the dead light bulbs, it turns out that the lamp itself is what is broken. SIGH

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  60. I like the lamp post story. 🙂 I can relate. My front door knob, and 1920s thing that came flying off several months ago, is now re-attached after I bought the rods and other little gizmos the vintage hardware store told me I’d need.

    It still sticks out to far and wobbles. Sometimes I have to jiggle it oh-just-so in order for it to open the door. Sigh.

    I’m sure it will come flying off again one of these days.

    How hard can it be? The woman at the story showed me exactly how to re-attach it. But something is missing. It’s still not right.

    OK, that’s the end of that.

    Now I think I will go and find a homosexual to shun and berate. Wait, I guess if I’m shunning them I cannot then berate them.

    Always a catch, isn’t there?

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  62. Yes, Tammy, most sane, sensible persons over time understood that the empirical world is limited and that beyond it is a very real transcendent deity [or deities in the case of plural theists] who rules the cosmos.

    Christians, in addition, have the revelation of the Bible and of Christ as to God and His moral law.

    Those who believe that all we have is an empirical material world are limited and not a little mad with their view, however much they protest otherwise in a moralistic and fundamentalist way.

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