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Our Daily Thread 3-8-13

Good Morning!

It’s finally Friday!

Quote of the Day

“Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at the touch, nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at  evening.”

Oliver  Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I had a dilemma this morning. It’s Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s birthday, but it’s Mickey Dolenz’s too. Hmmmm….. Bach, Monkees……. Bach, Monkees……

And then I said to myself “Hey, why not both?” 🙂

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Now who has a QoD for us?

75 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 3-8-13”

  1. Good Morning AJ, et. al.
    It’s Friday!
    You know what that means?
    I’m just waiting for ol’ slowpoke, then off to the Y.
    Elvera & her sister are going to Greenwood to see their sisters.
    And Lions for me.
    I need to sharpen the mower blade. Grass is beginning to grow. 😦
    Springtime has it’s downside.

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  2. Good morning! This past Monday I had the pleasure of seeing my grandparents home again after many years (maybe the last time was while in high school). The house has been redone so not much looked the same. I did see the attic and the storm cellar which reminded me that as a child I always wanted to see those areas, but I was never allowed to. Was there anything as a child that you wanted to get into that the adults in your life did not give permission to do?

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  3. I should have said “see inside those areas.” After all these years I am still curious about them, but it would not be the same since other people live in the house now.

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  4. Does “That #$%& river” count?

    My parents didn’t want us down at the river. So of course, I spent all summer down at the river. 🙂

    I’d come home bleeding, and mom would say “You were down at that #$%& river again, weren’t you?”

    I never understood all the fuss. Sure I needed stitches 4 times, but if it wasn’t the river that did it, it would’ve been something else. Like the cast iron radiators, broken bottles, or my friend with a 2×4. I was gonna need stitches no matter where I played.

    🙂

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  5. Yesterday R in Richmond and B in Pittsburgh and G in Los Angeles all started planning our summer reunion ( I was swamped at work and couldn’t play with the others). R posted this for us. I think it is precious. Who wouldn’t want this woman for your grandmother!

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  6. Let’s see…. I wanted to go to Mexico with a friend after I graduated. My dad said no. I said I would join the Navy and see the world like he did. He told me Young Lady you will do no such thing. I said Yes sir and I still haven’t been to Mexico.

    See? All BG’s misbehaviour MUST come from her Daddy.

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  7. I wanted to play baseball, but in my day they didn’t have girl’s teams. I ended up playing with other outcasts back behind the bleachers with a stick and several crumpled up paper cups for a ball.

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  12. Good morning. I have no financial interest in the book. I have spoken to the author (a former Catholic priest) on the phone. I consider it useful to believers and non believers. THE AMATEUR’S GUIDE TO DEATH AND DYING: ENHANCING THE END OF LIFE by Richard Wagner. I will shortly let the hens out and see if they are still alive. If I am still alive, I will go to the gym and return. I am digging a trench so the chicken run does not get flooded. It’s a slow process, but religion (including Christianity) is slowly vanishing from human life. I seriously doubt the human race will survive this century, though the artificial intelligence creatures we are laboriously creating may survive us. Will they invent gods? Will the regard humans (who created them) as divine creatures?

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  13. Kbells – we lived on an acre of land and it was flat. Great for playing sandlot baseball with the rest of the neighborhood kids. we couldn’t field full teams, but we could get about 10 -12 kids together to get a decent game going.

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  14. Which reminds me of my favorite religious joke, told to me by my father, whom I detested, sort of slew, and who actually helped invent the Internet, though he was just a bit player, so to speak.

    ============================

    World leaders gather the finest computer scientists and order them, “Create a computer that thinks.”

    After weeks of labor, the nerds report, “The task has been completed.”

    The world leaders gather to view the supposedly intelligent computer. After much argument and debate, they have decided on the first question. The Secretary-General of the United States addresses the microphone to the intelligent computer.

    “Humans have long wondered, ‘Is there a God?’”

    The computer begins to sizzle and smoke. The nerds examined circuits and programming code frantically. Finally, the say to world leaders, “It is working on it. We will summon you when it is ready to answer.”

    Two weeks later, the leaders are summoned again. The regard the computer with anxiety.

    The computer speaks. “You asked, ‘Is there a God?’” The answer is:

    THERE IS NOW!!!!!!

    ===================================

    Of course, there isn’t. Yet. Time to smash your smart phone before it starts telling you what to do.

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  15. AJ — Charming CPE Bach piece — not sure if I’ve heard it before, but I love it! And the Monkees one…well, that one I’ve heard a few times. 😉 Good choice, going with both videos today; they both put a smile on my face. 🙂

    Kim, I think my mom would do something like that dancing nana; my MIL, never in a million years. 😉

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  16. QoD — I wanted to go off to college, but my parents wanted me to attend the local public university and live at home. So that is where I went to school, but I moved into an apartment for my last year of school. I was already engaged to be married at that time, so I suppose my parents didn’t put up too much of a fuss at that point since they knew I’d be married and gone within the next year anyway.

    Or maybe they were glad to see me go, as I had majorly ruffled their feathers at least once during my college years. 😯

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  17. Good Morning, Y’all!

    Can’t think of a specific example for the QOD…but in retrospect, my parents usually had a good reason for naysaying things. Good parenting, I suppose. Hope I have done as well for my kids…

    Happy Friday!

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  18. “who actually helped invent the Internet, though he was just a bit player, so to speak.”

    Cool! Did he get to meet Al Gore? 🙂

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  20. Kim, your idea yesterday of match-making The Kid and my GD, that is a fascinating thought 😉

    Random, I think the movie Oblivion, about to be released deals with some of those issues. AI robots and humans I mean. Looks interesting, but I have only seen the trailer.

    QoD: I have been to Mexico and into the attic, having trouble thinking of a place I couldn’t go to when I was a kid. We did have a “haunted house” down the street that always intriqued. It was an old victorian house, one of the oldest in town. An old women lived there so of course we thought she could be a witch or something. She was a great sport about her reputaion though; every Halloween she turned all her lights off and dressed like a witch, lurking on here front porch. Most kids would run off when only about halfway through the overgrown yard. But for brave kids, if you made it to the front door she would leap out and scare you–total delight on Halloween–but reward you with a lot of candy and a popcorn ball (unwrapped and razor blade free).

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  21. I wanted to get my driver’s license when I was 16 and my parents said I must wait until 18 (it ended up being 21). I was the oldest. They let my sister get her’s at 16, and when my brother turned 16, they bought him a car.

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  23. Oh yeah…my folks wouldn’t let me visit my friend John unless they drove. I went everywhere by bike and they never questioned my safety…except going to his house. You had to go about a mile on a busy 4 lane and cross an overpass…

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  24. I could go everywhere but my older sister’s example kept me safe. I did not want to do the things she did that caused my parent’s pain.

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  25. I was not allowed to go into the basement–except while retrieving something for my mother–because black widow spiders lived in there and they would bite me and then I would die.

    I wrote about that on my blog earlier this week, about fear and how my mother unwittingly, I’m sure, drove a spike of terror deep into my soul.

    I’m better now.

    But I still don’t like going underneath houses.

    She also wouldn’t let me play the oboe because the reeds were too expensive. So I played the clarinet instead. About eight years ago, I borrowed an oboe from the local high school (perk of being an active parent in the music department), figuring I had enough money now I could buy my own reeds.

    I cannot adequately explain the pure joy that bubbled in my heart and soul driving home with that instrument. I taught myself to play, loving the experience, but alas, could not control the instrument enough to keep it in tune and play well with others.

    So, I returned it at the end of the year. My husband, seeing how much fun I had, volunteered to buy me one of my own, but I couldn’t justify that expense. So, I play my clarinet, savor oboe concertos and continue to think, my mother should have let me follow my heart no matter how much an oboe reed cost.

    Though, I’m a pretty good clarinet player. 🙂

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  26. Linda, I’m a firstborn, too, and I remember I wanted fashion boots at whatever age I was when they became popular, and my parents said no, I think because they thought I was too young, if I remember correctly. But then when I finally did get some much later, all three of my younger sisters also got them, and didn’t have to wait until the age I was when I first got them. Things seem to get relaxed for the later-borns, I think, or they did in my family’s case.

    Third Arrow is sitting here with me, watching what I type, and she just reported that she remembers she and the older siblings weren’t allowed to go behind the bushes in our yard when she was 5th Arrow’s current age (9) because they were told they’d be too close to the road, but now both 5th and 6th Arrows are allowed back there. 😉 Third Arrow has a much better sense of humor about that than I did when I was a kid. She’s sitting here smiling and chuckling. 🙂

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  28. It wasn’t anywhere I couldn’t “go,” but I wanted to take shop in eighth grade and had to take home ec instead.

    In seventh grade, we had one semester of each, and then in eighth grade we could choose which we wanted, and have it for the full year. For me it was an easy choice: in shop they made fun things with wood and plastic, and home ec was cooking and sewing pillows. Sewing didn’t interest me, and I’d been teased at home about my cooking so I assumed I wasn’t good at it and I didn’t enjoy it.

    Mom signed the permission form that I could take shop . . . but then I made my mistake. I mentioned that I’d be one of only two girls in shop (the other a known tomboy). Permission was rescinded; I had to take home ec. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut!

    In home ec we had to choose a fabric and a pattern and make something. Brave girls made a blouse, but most of us made a skirt (no sleeves). I wanted to make a red skirt to wear for graduation, but there was no red fabric at the store. I settled on a light blue with tiny flowers. When I graduated (from a class of about 90 kids, and thus 40-some girls), I was the only girl wearing a skirt and blouse and not a pastel dress, and I was glad at least that my skirt was pastel and not red (though those little flowers kept me from at least having a solid print like everyone else’s dress). I had no friends in eighth grade, though I informally tutored two international students who didn”t know much English; my only friend had moved early in seventh grade. And it had simply never occurred to me to wonder what the other girls were wearing and whether I would “fit in” with what they wore. Those years of wearing old-lady slacks while they wore tight blue jeans were awkward, but walking across a stage in front of a few hundred people, visibly unmatched, was very embarrassing. I don’t know what I would have worn that day if I had taken shop instead . . . at least in making my own skirt, I had a “maxi” length like the other girls. If I hadn’t, I probably would have had a knee-length dress and still not fit in.

    I really don’t blame my mom for not wanting me to be in a class with all boys and one tomboy; even at the time I didn’t blame her, but I did wish I hadn’t told her, since I’d been waiting eight years to make the fun things the eighth graders made in shop!

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  29. I was too much of a scardey cat to do too much my parents didn’t like. My brothers more than made up for that with their own antics. The comments put me in mind of when they gave each other rides in the dumbwaiter that was in our grandparent’s home. It broke and their were some very unhappy adults leading to some very unhappy children. Of course, I was always the innocent one and innocent ones seldom get caught even when they do wrong. No one suspects them. 😉

    Fun video, KimH. My DAD would do that. I am fortunate to know many great older people who have a good sense of humor.

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  30. Michelle, my sister always wanted to play the violin. But we were a big family and any extracurricular activities just didn’t happen, so she never got lessons. As an adult (in her late twenties) she took lessons for a while. Her teacher tried to teach her some point or other (the ability to “hear” something, I think), and told her that child students usually picked it up fairly quickly, but adults sometimes took a few months. After several months of lessons, my sister still couldn’t get that one point, and she realized she couldn’t afford lessons anyway when she quit work to start a family, so reluctantly she stopped taking lessons, never having met that childhood goal of learning to play the violin.

    I had a vague interest in the piano (I didn’t want lessons, per se, but would have liked to know how to play). My husband took lessons (which he hated; he wanted to be outside playing basketball) and sometimes plays a bit (he doesn’t hate it now), and one of the girls is really good at it but rarely plays. The family all says she’s really good at it, has a natural gift but won’t believe she is as good as everyone says. After all, your dad and your piano teacher and your grandparents are all “supposed to” say you’re amazingly good and they think you’re unusually talented, right? (Me, I like hearing her, but I don’t have enough of an ear for music to “judge” how good she is.)

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  31. I never did get a chance to mention all the clothes fads I followed. I did the hot pants, hip huggers, poor boy tops, mini-skirts and just about everything I could afford. That wasn’t much since I bought all my own clothes after eighth grade, unless it was a hand me down from another family. I do remember buying a Nehru shirt and my mom telling me it was too faddish. They never gained much popularity and I didn’t get much use out of it.

    I ironed my hair once and thought it was not a good idea. I really didn’t need to anyway, since my hair was almost perfectly straight.

    Those who know me now, who didn’t know me then, would be very surprised. That is why I don’t get too excited about the latest fashion fads or the young adults who try them out. There are far too many more important things to be concerned about and work to change.

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  33. Michelle,

    I was an oboist. I lucked out I guess…my dad is an excellent double reed player and has played professionally for years. He taught me the instrument and how to make my own reeds. That solved the cost problem.

    Unfortunately, I was more interested in the guitar 😀

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  34. QOD: There weren’t too many places I was not allowed to go. Like the dead end. I could go there, but I was not allowed to go there barefoot. So I put on sneakers and stepped on a nail that went through my sneaker. I had to get a tetanus shot.

    There was a ravine, full of rocks and all kinds of debris. I don’t remember my parents telling us that we couldn’t go in the ravine, but we did get the strong feeling that they’s rather we didn’t play in there. There were so many other things to do that the ravine didn’t hold much for us anyway.

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  35. I played clarinet until middle school. I used to practice all the time and my band teacher didn’t like the fact that I had other interests besides clarinet. I was also into cheerleading. So she used to berate me for not practicing enough and I decided that since I was going to get yelled at anyway, I did stop practicing, And when she humiliated me in front of the whole band by making an example out of me by moving me from first clatinet to third clarinet, which she made clear ro everyone was a demotion, I decided that I did not need to play the clarinet anymore.

    I picked up drums in high school and since I could read music thay put me on mallet percussion so I played vibes and xylophone and bells, in band and stage band, and I loved it. I ended up in the All County band and then was asked to be in a drum and bugle corps, which I loved. I still prefer banging on things. One of these days I’d like to learn how to play a hammered dulcimer.

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  36. We used to play on the freeway. Well, before it was built, that is. It was a huge construction site not far from our elementary school (and not far from home, either). They had literally mountains of dirt piled so high you could see everything from the top. When it rained, the mountains dried with deep ravines, making climbing them so much fun.

    I don’t know that my parents even knew about that. It was back in the days when kids had more freedom to jump on their bikes and go where the wind blew them.

    🙂

    As for musical instruments, when we got into 7th grade my best girlfriend and I signed up for band. She said we should ask to play the trumpet. Cool, I thought. We played baseball in the backyard and were “trumpet” kind of girls, I thought.

    So on the first day, the band teacher was going around the room asking each kid to say what instrument they wanted to play.

    When they got to me, I said “Trumpet.” Everyone broke out laughing. I was mortified!

    My girlfriend was sitting next to me so her turn came up next.

    “And what instrument do you want to play?” the teacher asked.

    “Flute,” she said sweetly.

    Boy, was I mad at her. What a traitor.

    We both wound up switching to the art class (you had to take either art or music). But we hated art and the teacher was dreadfully strict. 😉

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  37. Kasko, I think drums would have definitely been our first choice.

    But even my tomboy girlfriend and I figured it would be a little over the top for girls. 🙂

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  38. Okie dokie. Over on Prayer Requests, I said I would fill in more details over on this thread “sometime this morning”. As I’m running out of morning, I’d better get to it!

    I was angrily accused of “outing” Niece, Fiance, & Niece’s Best Friend (a young gay man), by mentioning them in a comment on my Facebook post. That comment, which said that we had welcomed them into our home in the past & continued to invite them) was in response to another’s comment.

    I admit that it was unwise to be responding right there on Facebook, & due to the turn the comments had taken, I should have deleted the whole thing a lot sooner than I did.

    But I’ll also say that Niece has been so vocal about being so proud to be a lesbian (or bisexual, depending on which day it is – & yes, I know that was snarky), & wanting to march in gay pride parades or go on “slut walks”, that I had no idea she & the others weren’t fully “out”. Also, the vast majority of my Facebook friends would have no idea who I was talking about anyway.

    I received two scathing emails, one from Niece, one from SIL, accusing me of being highly disrespectful, of “outing” them, which one must never do, & Niece’s email included a “How dare you!”

    According to SIL, it is still a dangerous world for those in the LGBT community, with people still at risk of losing jobs, or experiencing violence against them, & she fears for those she loves who are part of this community.

    I was completely flabbergasted! Emily didn’t warn me or say anything about my comment (which I know she read because we discussed it later), so I guess she didn’t realize how it would be taken either.

    My response to Niece & SIL was that it was out of ignorance (of the situation), not malice. SIL replied graciously, but I haven’t heard back from Niece. Both of them have already said that I have “lost” Niece, she is breaking off any relationship with me.

    Which brings me to the matter of Niece’s wedding. She wrote that she took my silence (I hadn’t gotten back to her yet) as not being able to fully support & celebrate their marriage. She even wrote that loving her was not enough. 😦

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  39. I was also told that our hospitality was not appreciated because they were uncomfortable due to our “religion”. We didn’t preach to anyone, we talked, laughed, ate some delicious food, & enjoyed their company. Both Lee & I are so surprised to hear that they were uncomfortable. (Or is she just saying this now to hurt us?)

    As Janice mentioned in her prayer, real tolerance is not what is wanted – we must offer full acceptance, completely embracing everything they say or do. Any deviation from full acceptance is hatred & rejection.

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  40. Kbells: “who actually helped invent the Internet, though he was just a bit player, so to speak.”
    Cool! Did he get to meet Al Gore?     .

    No. My father worked (at some remove for “Dr. Strangelove”). His task was helping blow up the world, though that was not he sought, and I am sure he was relieved when it did not occur in his lifetime.
    “Dr. Strangelove,” if you’ve never seen it, was a satirical movie about the “cold war” and how the United States and the Soviet Union had enough nuclear weaponry and delivery systems to destroy mankind. Some of the characters were based on real people. Wikipedia: The character of “Dr. Strangelove” is an amalgamation of RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn, mathematician and Manhattan Project principal John von Neumann, German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb.

    Yahoo Voices: One of overlooked gems in a movie chock full of them is that of the character who sets the doomsday events in motion: General Jack D. Ripper. … Part of the reason that Ripper is often overlooked is that General Ripper is very much a genuinely frightening character. Even more horrifying is that he was based on a real life General who may actually have been even more insane.
    That real life inspiration for General Jack D. Ripper was General Curtis LeMay. Like his counterpart in Dr. Strangelove, General LeMay was usually seen chomping on an overly large cigar, perhaps as a [phallus] substitute like the impotent Ripper.

    My father’s job was helping the computers that would have launched a counter strike if we detected incoming Russian bombers and missiles. In those days, computers with less power than a smart phone today filled four story buildings.

    My father never met Al Gore. Consider Al a red herring. Although he never met Richard Nixon, either, my father, hated Richard Nixon with a passion, long before “Tricky Dick” became Vice President and President. My father died before the Watergate commotion, but I can imagine him gloating and snarling with glee, “I SAID you could never trust the *******.”

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  41. Donna – the mallet percussion was considered “girl drums”. I never got to play the snare. And it was much better than playing the bass drum.

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  43. I was in band, and girls played trumpet. Fewer of them than guys, but no one would have laughed if a girl had chosen a trumpet to play.

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  44. Karen – Since you have Christ in you, and SIL and Niece and her friends do not, I suspect it is your holiness (set-apartness – for Christ) and their lack thereof that is making them uncomfortable. Son can’t stand in the presence of righteousness and holiness. Since Niece is so out and in your face about it, you made a reasonable assumption and their hypocrisy is showing. What they are trying to do is get you to compromise on your standards and moral values. When you don’t compromise, that will be their excuse to reject you. It is not you rejecting them, it is them rejecting you. Don’t let them tie you up in emotional knots. You do not have to walk their lines and live up to their terms. That bar will always move. Your bar is consistent and does not move. Love them, but do not compromise. There will come a point when you will just have to let the chips fall where they may. But continue to pray for them. At some point they may come around.

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  45. In my drum corps, there were about 10 female bugle players. I was the only girl in the drum line (again with the bells) and the rest of the gurls were in the color guard.

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  48. I agree with Klasko, Karen. You cannot let yourself get tangled in knots over this. You have done nothing wrong.

    Just be you and let them be whatever they choose to be. If that means that you get dropped for awhile, then it does. 😦

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  51. Karen, I agree with klasko about the uncomfortableness. You might want to read, “Out of a Far Country” by Christopher & Angela Yuan. That is an excellent book by a son and mother who talk about his coming out and eventual transformation. I think you neice relishes being ‘put down’ by you. You could probably grovel at her feet and still not be doing the right thing.

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  52. As children we were allowed to pretty much roam freely all day long, as long as we got our chores done. We rode both bikes and horses on a major truck highway. My brothers regularly hitched-hiked to get where they wanted to go. I remember two of my brothers going through the ice on a frozen lake. It was about a mile to walk them home, all ice encrusted in their wet clothes. It makes my hair stand on end when I think back on it!

    We learned a lot, though, and lived to tell–sometimes barely lived to tell.

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  53. Karen, I love my gay people but listen to KLASKO. She is right. Their rights end where yours begin. You have done nothing wrong. I wouldn’t put up with their behavior.

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  54. Hitchhiking. My mother threatened to break our thumbs if she ever caught us hitchhiking – and she wasn’t kidding. We never EVER got into cars with strangers. We lived in a pretty rural area.

    I agree Kathakeena – we pretty much were out all day long and had to come home when the streetlights came on. there were about 3 on our stretch of the road which encompassed about a half mile.

    It’s a wonder we lived through our childhoods. My sister and her friends tipped cows and gotr treed for hours. (Served them right.) Then she got grounded. We rode bikes double or barefoot or with flipflops on and without helmets. The neighbors would drive us all into town for ice cream and we sat in the back of the pick-up truck – about 7 or 8 of us. We jumped off rock clifs into lakes and played with firecrackers, and rode the snowmobiles about 40 miles to a ski slope and back in a blizzard (another grounding). We were young and stupid and unsupervised a lot of the time.

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  55. The comics must be time sequential. I have noticed that there are several at the beginning that I have never seen. Toward the end, I have seen most. Every Saturday, the Times-News has about five on the editorial page.

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  56. I am dying to know what “gotr treed” was supposed to be. I’m looking at all combinations of typos and can’t come up with it.

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  57. Donna, I played trombone in the band. I only met one other girl trombone player the whole time I was in high school. It was in a big stadium at an all county band event and her band was seated across the isle from ours. As she walked up the steps to her seat, she saw me and got a big smile and a look that said, “sister!” We sat on the steps between the bands and compared notes on our feminist pioneering experiment. When other girls would ask me now why I did it, I would just say smugly, “I get to sit with the boys.”

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  59. Got her treed. The cows chased her there is my guess.

    I’ve tipped cows. They don’t like it. Neither do the farmers. Both will chase you, and they will hurt you if they catch you.

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  61. Hubby slept 7 straight hours today, without the doze / wake up / doze / wake up cycle he normally does. He believes this is the first time since he’s been working overnight hours (since early January) that he’s had that long a stretch of uninterrupted sleep on a weekday. I think he’s right. Despite the good sleep, though, he still looked really rough upon waking. The chronic sleep deprivation is making him feel ill. Continued prayers that these work hours (4:00 pm to approximately 6:00 or 7:00 am) will soon be over — they think by the end of this month, but the original 1-2 weeks turned into 1 month, then they said 2 months, now they’re saying three.

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  64. Karen, and I would go so far as to say they are rejecting Christ in you. God never promised us stable family relations. Let it go. Keep your eyes on Christ where they belong. The world wants nothing of it. Don’t take it personally or as something you can fix.

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  65. KBells, I loved learning trombone in my brass methods class that all of us music ed majors had to take in college. I found that instrument a lot of fun to play, more than any of the other wind instruments I tried in my methods courses.

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  66. I can’t remember now if maybe the band teacher may have made some crack or not, but this was probably before there was much of a women’s movement out there. We were simply ahead of our time. 🙂

    Karen, so sorry for the angst, but Klasko and others are right, I think, about what (or Who) they really are finding offensive.

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  67. Oh, I definitely agree with Klasko & you all. This will not be allowed to this steal my peace. And yes, Mumsee, I’m keeping my eyes on Jesus. 🙂

    Kathaleena says, “I think you neice relishes being ‘put down’ by you. You could probably grovel at her feet and still not be doing the right thing.” I think you’re exactly right. There is a spirit of offense loose in our society.

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  68. Guitar. But not nearly as well as I’d like.

    My high school music/choir teacher gave me lessons during study hall. She was one of the best players of a 12 string that I’ve seen to this day. The way her fingers moved amazed me.

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  72. Karen, I am the wicked devil sitting on your other shoulder. The situation is complex and difficult, like any situation involving conflict among people you love, regardless of whether “sexual orientation” is involved. I admit I am tone deaf about why Jesus is 1) considered supernatural and 2) how he provides guidance for any situation as complex as the one you describe.

    I forget how old I was when I read Huckleberry Finn, but chapter 31 hit me like a thunderbolt. Huck is taking the escaped slave Jim down river. He feels guilty because all his life he has been taught that black people are not real people and that slavery is what God wants. It’s too long to quote all of it here but it is easily found on line. For example: http://www.americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/book/the-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn/chapter-31

    Jim is sure the “right” thing, the Godly thing to do is turn Jim in for escaping. “I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking- thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. . . . It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

    “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”- and tore it up.”

    I read this about the same time I started learning about Roger Williams. He was a real-life analog of Huckleberry Finn. He watched Christians killing each other in England. He gave up a promising future and sailed off into a life so unknown and terrifying most of us can’t imagine it. When he saw his fellow Puritans killing other Christians (such as Quakers), and stealing land from aboriginals (and coming close to killing him because they didn’t like what he preached in church), he did the same thing as the fictional Huckleberry Finn; he followed a conscience that was in my opinion superior to the Jesus preaching of just about everyone around him. Ree is a very intelligent woman with a better heart (as shown by her marriage)
    than her dogma, but in my disrespectful opinion, she doesn’t have a clue.

    The situation you describe with your family is nowhere as dramatic and earth-shaking as the fictional helping a slave escape or a factual turning against violently prejudiced Puritan neighbors. I don’t have a clue as to what you should do and won’t presume to advise you in any specific way. But I have known and communicaed with you for years, and I regard you as a person with a better heart compass (and just as much a “true Christian”) as any of the people chastizing you. I will be so rude as to say, “bullying you.” So my advice is, “Trust your own sense of right and wrong and do what you think is correct.”

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  74. While I am causing trouble (my life long “passion,”) and working on convincing poor TJ to kick me out of here, I will tell about a real life situation involving my Christian neighbors and me. They are very devout by every sign I can detect. The both worked for the Boy Scouts all their lives. CR (the husband) is ¼ Sioux Indian. Their church strikes me as a fine church by my (disbelieving perspective) in that it tolerates gays and a Muslim and Jews.

    They have been trying ever so gently and persuasively for years to get my wife and me to join their church. My wife’s style is to avoid conflict and to blend in without stating her beliefs. So she always talks about flowers and chickens and baking, etc. She hates it when I say, “I am not a believer.” However when the brown stuff hits the fan, she is very tough, as demonstrated when we sued and destroyed a cult/scam years ago.

    When I finally told my neighbors that I am not a believer, they were kind of grief-stricken (as far as I can tell). I don’t know if they believe in Hell, but they certainly follow some version of Pascal’s Wager. That is, only people who believe in Christ (or at least some vague version of God, which is why some of you doubt they are evangelicals). [My insulting and disrespectful comment is all the nonsense and contradictions and vague distinctions of religious belief are so crazy – to me – I don’t know why believers’ heads don’t explode.] Anyway, they seem to genuinely believe only believers in God will go to Heaven (and they fervently and genuinely believe in Heaven), and the rest of us will either go to Hell or simply be extinguished.

    I asked CR and SR (his wife), if they wanted me to forever drop the topic of religious belief (as my wife wishes me to do). I said, “My wife fears you will shun us, never invite us over for dinner again or help us with loaning tools and sharing your (immense) practical skills.”

    They said, “We won’t do that.”

    I said, “I have two questions about the Boy Scouts. (As I say, they were life long employees, fairly high up in the organization.)

    “There are two big controversies in the news about the Scouts. If you were called on for your advice, how would you react?

    “#1 is the issue of allowing homosexuals into the Scouts as members as leaders. What would you advise?”

    CR answered with a very articulate and careful response, worthy of an attorney. Paraphrase, “We always worried in the Scouts about sexual abuse. However, abuse comes from abusers. Abusers of children are no more or less likely to be homosexuals than to be heterosexuals. As long as we maintain and follow careful guidelines and are properly watchful, there is no reason to restrict people because of sexual orientation.”

    I said, “You know I agree and I appreciate that is your position. However, I now have a tougher question for you. The Scouts have always required a belief in God. I dropped out of Scouts after Cub Scouts, and as best I can remember, it had nothing to do with belief in God, though I did decide I was an atheist at about that time.

    “Anyway, as you know, I ‘lead’ the only atheist ‘unfaith group’ on Whidbey Island, while there seem to be somewhere between 80 to 150 “faith-based” groups on the island.”

    Mrs. R commented, “I would say it’s closer to 150. New ones form or change or split all the time.” [I suspect she is correct.]

    I said, “There are atheists in my group with sons almost old enough to join the Scouts. I consider the Boy Scouts an excellent group, one that can benefit any boy. If a boy from parents in our group wanted to join the Boy Scouts, but was unwilling to agree to believing in God, would you oppose them joining?

    Very politely and calmly, CR replied (again I paraphrase a bit from memory, “Our definition of “belief in God” is very broad and tolerant. I can’t see it would block anybody from joining who has some religious belief. But it is an essential part of the Scout code to believe in God.”

    I replied, I think as politely and calmly, “I don’t have a ‘horse in this race’ so to speak. I don’t have a son or grandson, and my daughter is in her forties. So at the moment, you have answered my question reasonably, and at the moment I don’t want this to be ‘the hill that I die on,’ metaphorically speaking. But I am sure that you understand that I disagree. And if someone in my group started to make an issue of it, I would support them, and we might find ourselves in direct conflict.”

    He said, calmly and politely, “I understand” and we left it there.

    I am grateful that I don’t live in Roger Williams’ time when people frequently killed each other over dogma, or in Mark Twain’s time, when people killed each other over slavery (justifying their actions by claims of their religious beliefs). But the conflicts inspired in part by differing religious beliefs are not completely done yet.

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  75. Bad religion and no religion have each done their share of damage. Bad religion may even be the worse of the two. But I don’t know.

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