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Our Daily Thread 2-18-13

Good Morning!

Happy President’s Day!

Quotes of the Day (What can I say, there’s just too many to choose from.)

“Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

“Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples’ liberty’s teeth.”

“It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.”

George  Washington

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QoD

Do you have the day off?

50 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 2-18-13”

  2. A Fairhope woman went missing Saturday. 49 yes old. She was found Sunday evening in a church parking lot beaten, bloody, and disoriented. Details are sketchy. It is upsetting on several levels.
    Dallas is great but the mornings are early and the nights are late. Yesterday I heard JR Martinez speak. Fantastic. Last night ended with the Doobie Brothers. As I usually do I have gotten some interesting stories from immigrant cabbies. I always love their stories. I have a long day and am meeting up with some great FB friends at lunch.

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  6. You have President’s Day, we have Family Day here in Saskatchewan. Friends are supposed to be coming up to spend the day with us – looking forward to it!

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  8. Well, RR definitely had a thing for jelly beans — he almost single handedly put jelly bellies on the map — if you look at photos of his desk, you’ll see a jar of them.

    I have the day off.

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  10. I have the day off.

    As for presidential trivia, I don’t know too much. Ricky’s question doesn’t say if the person in question was a president, or just the son of one president and BIL of another.

    I’m trying to think how Jeb Bush could be the answer to question RW asked @8:05. I think Chas misread the question. I think John Q. Adams would fit the bill, being the son of John Adams. But it doesn’t look like his brother-in-law was President.

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  11. I don’t know if it still is, but when we lived in the DC area, about half the people were off for Presidents Day. That day, all the stores had great “Washington’s Birthday Sales”. They lowered prices to get rid of the stuff they didn’t sell at Christmastime and to clear out inventory for spring.
    I usually tried to stay away from that. But I did buy a 1973 Pontiac for $2900 at one of those sales. It was supposed to be a $4500 car. That Pontiac was a great car. It started rusting the first year I had it. I had it painted twice, but mechanically it was great. The downside was that gas was selling for an outrageous .73/gal. and the Pontiac got 14 mpg. But it would go. A great beltway car.
    I’ll bet CB knows what I mean by that.

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  13. It is sort of a trick question. Hint: Our man served as a Confederate General under Stonewall Jackson and Richard Ewell during The Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862.

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  14. The 70’s must have been a good year for rust, Chas. We had two Chevrolets from that era that rusted out long before the engines went. We heard that there were issues with the paint. This was long before companies were forced to reimburse for any of that kind of thing.

    Mindy had some good songs, but her life was out of control from the beginning. The whole thing was very sad. I hope her children have more stability and people who can guide them into a better life.

    I am never great on trivia. I did see the aticle on the presidents. I knew the jelly bean connection, but that was because I was because it was such a big deal at the time.

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  19. I have the day off only because my boss is at a funeral. Our daughter, however, has the day off from school and no classes on Tuesdays so she drove up and surprised us Saturday night!

    Wonderful to have her and the sweetness of the church body was evident yesterday when she came with us. So many had prayed for her concussion that everywhere she turned she was hugged and greeted and loved on. What a terrific reason to drive six hours home!

    (Of course the weather is warm and clear in California–which is getting a little worrisome. We need rain).

    So, we’ll go out to breakfast and maybe hike today. It’s been ages since I felt free to just do nothing important, though I am being interviewed on a blog today so I have to keep checking in there. If you want a chance to actually win my book, comment on this blog–there’s not much action so you might have a good chance! 🙂

    Meet and Greet with Author Michelle Ule

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  20. It really makes me think how much we need the Body of Christ. My children have no grandparents and lived most of their lives far from relatives. This daughter, however, has grown up in our church because we’ve been here 12 years (my husband and I look at each other in shock. 12 years in one place?).

    She has a place in her emotional back pocket where she can go and know she’ll be loved and accepted. That’s an huge part of her self-confidence as well as her tender heart in the world.

    It makes me think, too, of Mumsee’s kids–same thing. They have a church body in which they can serve, where neighbors invite them over (okay, to work, but that’s good). They interact with all ages and know Christians in “real” life outside of the church building.

    That’s absolutely golden. Good job, Mumsee’s church.

    I’ve been reading in Mark lately (anything to get away from Job . . . not!) and was struck by how Jesus was mobbed at the crowds at Capernaum. They nearly drove him into the Sea of Gallilee in their enthusiasm for healing.

    Jesus could have set up a hospital and just healed people all day long. Better yet, he could have just healed everybody carte blanche and the world would be perfect.

    But no, he went individually–he met people one by one. And then he invited 12 men to join him in the work.

    Why?

    Maybe because Jesus realized the church needs to have hands and feet; the Kingdom of God is about relationships with God and with one another. He’s used us to reach out to others in their lives to point them toward God.

    Over there in the book of Job, we’re learning that God uses pain and suffering for his glory in our lives. That no one is immune to what God is up to and we all need to be sensitive to HOW God is at work in our lives. He uses suffering to point us to him.

    I think that’s advanced Christianity to spoiled Americans who want everything their way or no way, and I’m suseptible to the argument myself.

    But for whatever reason, the God of all Creation needs the church to act as the Body of Christ in ministry–to one another, to our community and to the world.

    I’m just thankful I’m in a church body that acts like a family–and blesses my family as a result.

    End of sermon. 🙂

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  22. It’s some sort of holiday today?

    It’s actually taken quite a cold turn in SoCal where we’re expecting more rain tomorrow with highs in the 50s.

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  23. KBells, You are correct. Richard Taylor was the son of Zachary Taylor and the brother-in-law of Jefferson Davis. He was also a great writer. Many of the best known anecdotes concerning Sonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley come from Taylor.

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  27. This is a good day for birdwatching in our backyard. We don’t usually see cardinals for some reason, at least not in the birdfeeder tree, but so far in that tree today we’ve had house sparrows, two pairs of cardinals, chickadees, a goldfinch or two, a blackbird, blue jays, a flicker, downy woodpeckers, nuthatches, red-bellied woodpeckers, house finches, and chipping sparrows. On the ground underneath we’ve had juncoes. In the yard we’ve had a large flock of starlings and four or five bluebirds. And in the field behind us we had a flock of crows mobbing a redtailed hawk.

    Right now we seem only to have a collie chewing on a big hunk of ice. (She’d rather eat her water than drink it. She does have fresh water available, but she chose instead a piece of the ice from Saturday’s frozen dish.)

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  28. Oh, and over the weekend I finished Michelle’s book. I hope it isn’t to much of a spoiler to say that it ends with a shocker: the girl gets the guy. 🙂 I’m not really a romance book reader, but it was interesting to read it with the background of knowing the research involved, and it was good.

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  30. Cheryl, I have never seen a cardinal. I sure would love to some day. We have blue jays, gray jays, chickadees and dark eyed juncos right now, with the occasional nuthatch. Our reddish birds are the pine grosbeak – they were quite red this year, but not as red as a cardinal.

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  31. Kare,

    When I was a little girl I saw a bright red bird on the back fence, and asked Mom what it was. She told me it was “a red cardinal.” Now, I have no idea what that cardinal was doing in Phoenix; it’s out of their range and the only one I ever saw there. But they’ve been one of my favorites ever since.

    My first winter in Nashville, all winter long I regularly got six or eight male cardinals in my backyard. I looked forward to seeing them again the next winter, but that was my only winter to experience that. As a rule male cardinals are pretty aggressive to each other. (Last spring the one that claimed our yard regularly “fought” his reflection in my car mirror.)

    They’re maddening to try to photograph, though. They are flashy birds and don’t seem to mind being seen, but they just won’t let you get anywhere close, in my experience. What few photos I have that include one show a red speck. This camera is good for birds, so I keep hoping this will be my chance. They’re coming to the feeder tree fairly regularly now, several times in the last few days, though not to any feeder itself. I keep hoping they’ll get to the point where they don’t fly off if a person looks out the window. So far I have to stand way back. But to get a photo of any of the birds, I have to get close enough to the window to put the camera in the top half (above the screen) and zoom in. So far all but the blue jay and cardinal have cooperated, though even the jay has given me a quick shot once and some distant shots.

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  32. When we were in Arizona a few years ago, I saw the coolest bird down by a lake – it had long streaming narrow tail feathers that widened at the end – I didn’t see it long enough to remember what it looked like when I started looking in our bird books when we got home, but I just remember how amazing it was.

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  35. Better than a fly tailed scissor catcher I suppose. 🙂

    I took a couple of cardinal pics at Disney in Nov.. He tried to hide, so they’re not great. We have ’em here in PA too. They’re cool.

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  41. ““Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” [From the start of today’s thread.]

    As far as I can tell, there is no philosophical basis for “morality.” To claim that it comes from “God” is circular reasoning. Also, there is no empirical evidence for “God.” There is empirical evidence for the existence of evolution, though it’s more difficult to grasp then existence of gravity. What we call morality is based on evolution and cultural development. The basics are fairy simple, though the “devil is in the details.”

    Basics: Don’t murder. Don’t torture. Don’t rape. Don’t steal. Help others.

    Most of this is based on a capability we call empathy and on upon how our culture (parents, relatives and society in general) conditions us and trains us.

    As we are imperfect beings living in a confusing world, one would expect this system to break down frequently, whether we are religious believers or secular adherents.

    Bingo! Read the news. You will find many people behaving well, and few noticing, and a few people behaving very badly and getting a lot of attention. This is true of people in close to every group and belief system.

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  42. By the way, more and more religious believers are tinkering with their belief systems (as religious believers have always done, as there is no “direct line” from God reliably telling us what to do) to accept adult human consenting sexual relationships. I am still waiting for someone here at wanderers to find a way to justify this reasonably harmless part of human behavior.

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  44. We all had the day off here. So it basically felt like another Saturday. I did some shopping and some reading, and went to my Toastmasters meeting but only four of us showed up so we cancelled it. Now I’m having dinner, then time to go work out.

    One of my purchases today was a $4 bathrobe for my younger son. ($25 marked down to $14 on clearance and I had a $10 coupon.) Yesterday my husband had us stand back to back, and Al is as tall as I am. I decided he needed a bathrobe that fit like a robe instead of a longish jacket.

    The day started out fairly warm. Now it is snowing.

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  45. “Basics: Don’t murder. Don’t torture. Don’t rape. Don’t steal. Help others.”

    Question: Are animals bound by this moral code too? If not, why not? Why is it that only humans not only have a sense of right and wrong, but also have the reality of right and wrong? (That it really IS wrong for a human to rape another human, but not wrong for a cat or a duck to force sex on another of its species.)

    Random, your problem really isn’t with us, though somehow you amuse yourself trying to pretend it is. Your problem is with your Creator.

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  46. RW legalization polygamy and prostitution?

    I don’t know the answer. I start with DM-DT-DR-DS-HO as the basics. Polygamy has been legal various times and place, incl. Bible times. Probably human nature (from evolution, not God) pushes us toward temporary monogamy, though men generally want as much sex with as many partners as possible. Women have to deal with consequences such as babies, so they are more inclined toward stability, caution, and restrictions.

    Basically, humans are about 100 times as horny for sex as is needed for any sensible purpose. As an atheist, I consider society as an engineering problem. When setting rules, the basic questions are what choices produce the most positive results and the fewest negative results? Although some individuals manage to lead wholesome and constructive sexual relationship lives through their entire life span, probably less than half of us actually are able to do so consistently throughout out lives. Our current marriage laws are a kind of patchwork duct tape mess of stuff that sort of works through long, clumsy trial and error.

    Sex is very dangerous. Unwanted pregnancy, STDs, violence are common problems from failing and faulty sexual relationships. Almost all attempts to manage sexual relationships are wishful thinking. I know of no religious and social system that manage such relationships with consistent success. I’ve stayed married to and faithful to one person. My child still speaks with me and visits me of her own accord. That’s not too bad. I don’t know how to manage everybody else’s lives, and I don’t pretend to.

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  47. Cheryl:

    Only humans are animals capable of abstract thinking and self-consciousness. Although a surprising number of animals are very clever, none of them ask questions such as “Where did the universe come from? Why am I here? What is right and wrong?”

    Animals do follow various “rules” of behavior that can all be accounted for by evolution. Some animals mate helter skelter (Bonobo chimpanzees) for example. Some animals “mate for life.” http://www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow.cfm?id=love-for-life-animals-mostly-monogamous provides some examples. Most animals care for their young. Some eat their young. There’s no “reason” for any of it. If the species survives, the “rule” persists. If it doesn’t survive, the species is replaced by a competitor. Examples and evolutionary analysis of animals that eat their young: http://www.livescience.com/2053-animals-eat-offspring.html .

    “Right and wrong” are inventions of human beings. Random, your problem really isn’t with us, though somehow you amuse yourself trying to pretend it is. Your problem is with your Creator. The “problem” all humans have (that no other animals have) is that we are aware of our mortality. There is no “solution” to this problem. One “solution” is to invent an imaginary Creator, an imaginary after-life, and an imaginary balancing of the books to compensate for the quite real unfairness of this mundane life which is the only one we have. I don’t “hate” religion. I can find examples of religious belief and practice I admire and appreciate, just as I can find examples of religious belief and practice I abhor. I find no empirical reason to consider religion true and I have a deep aversion to ideas and arguments that strike me as deeply false.

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  49. Modesty, I appreciate your response. First, you told us that adult human consenting sexual relationships were “reasonably harmless”. However, when I asked about polygamy and prostitution (examples of adult human consenting sexual relationships) you said, “Sex is very dangerous.” Both of your statements contain truth.

    You noted that you have stayed faithful and married to one person. You have followed God’s plan for a sexual relationship. You are a rarity within our culture. Not only has it been reasonably harmless, but it has produced your daughter with whom you have a good relationship.

    The dangerous part of sex (STDs, unwanted pregnancies, violence spawned by infidelity) comes when people fail to follow God’s plan for sexual relationships. Our civil laws did not force you to follow God’s plan for marriage. You chose to do so, and He has blessed you.

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  50. Ricky, thank you for your answer. I am glad your faith can stand up against plain simple sense. Sex is dangerous because we are animals with very strong sexual impulses, because bacteria and viruses have evolved to take advantage of our biology to transmit and reproduce themselves, because we evolved to be hunter gatherers. I suppose I could imagine God (rather bored) sitting there thinking I will invent an AIDS virus, but I find that a distasteful use of my imagination to imagine such a God, but someone somewhere engaged in such imagination.

    It was nice of God to bless me. I translate that to mean you don’t think God will send me to Hell. No, that can’t be right. Speaking of imagining distasteful things, people who imagine such as place as Hell .. . and then talk about how much love they feel. Oh, my!

    You could start to redeem yourself (so to speak) by figuring out a way for your fellow conservative Christians to reconcile themselves to no worse than anything else homosexual marriage.

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