Fie

60 hours of misery is enough!  Fie on you, streptococcus pyogenes.  I defy you in the name of my immune system. Do your darnedest. I shall defeat you! Fie on you!

Noah's Ark: salvation, anthropocide, or xenocide?

My beautiful and super amazing Megsie came home today and informed me that it's her turn this week to tell the story at Sunday School at the relatively kewl Union Church this Sunday.  With her she brought a box with wooden models of Noah's Ark, including a gangway and lots of little pairs of animals.  Megsie (regretted to) inform me that this was the story which she had been assigned--the story of Noah's ark.

Here's the relevant Bible passage.

This is a story I grew up with, and felt pretty familiar with, which I haven't looked at in a while.  So I went back and glanced through it again today with my current eyes.

I think it's more interesting if you just toss out, to begin with, the question of whether it's factually true or not =).

I asked Megsie where are the models of all the dead people?  Is that a bit macabre?  Why is it we teach our children this story, where every living thing on the face of the entire planet is wiped out, but we don't teach them the other creepy stories from the old testament, like mere genocides, or prostitutes being hacked into pieces and fedex-ed all over the country and so forth? Maybe this story has a greater sense of redemption than those?

Actually, it seems to me that it does.  It feels like a story about a newish God learning, growing, and regretting.  First she regrets the existence of humanity, with all our evil.  But at the end, he/she regrets even more having come that close to wiping us right out, and vows never to do such again.  Which vow, so far anyway, it seems he/she has managed to keep.  Although a few times just barely.

Perhaps it means that there's hope!

Anyway--here's my question (and I think it's a rather interesting one):  Is God killing off the entire human race in Genesis 6-8 closer to anthropocide (by which I mean the killing of all of humanity), or xenocide (by which I mean the killing of an entire alien species)? Or maybe it works out to both?

(Now if I can just convince Megsie to introduce the story to the children as "Noah and the Xenocide by flood")

Non-anonymous, and (more or less) having a name

110,000 results on google for the specific (and perhaps excessively wordy) phrase "non anonymous"

They could have just said "onymous". By the way, apparently neither the adjective "onymous" nor the adjective "anonymous" have comparative or superlative forms (that is: "onymouser" and "onymousest"). Which is actually quite interesting. It seems one either has a name or one doesn't--there's no more or less having a name. Is there?

Well--why not? One could write a short story around the idea of "onymouser". I shall have to submit this idea to my author/goddess in residence.

I definitely feel onymouser than I did, say, five years ago.

Faster than even I imagined.

"As proof of the way that the Kindle has changed reader habits, [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos brings up an amazing statistic. Earlier this year, he startled people by revealing that of books available on both Kindle and paper versions, 35 percent of copies sold by Amazon were Kindle versions. Now, he says, the number is up to 48 percent. This means that a lot of people have bought Kindles (Amazon won’t reveal the figures) and that Kindle owners buy a lot of books."


  -From this article


(just sit, for three minutes, and ponder the implications.)


(for instance--maybe my grandkids are going to look at paper books the way I look at rotary dial phones.)


(and in October they're coming out with a kindle 1 which can access the web wirelessly in 100 nations, unlike the one I currently have, which only works that way in the U.S.  And here I am moving to Australia in December.  sigh.)


  

If you love me

I think this song brilliantly captures certain elements of the Son-Rise philosophy.  And Van Morrison .... ahhhhhhh.

Pam Hogeweide interviews William Paul Young on genderbending God the Father in his book The Shack

Pam, you rock for doing this interview.  I hope all my Christian friends read it.

I continue to like Paul Young more and more, after really disliking the book.

Paul says

If the reality of a relationship with a God who is Spirit is lost in gender referencing imagery, then we have indeed erred, whether we have turned to female goddess imagery or male Zeus/Gandalf imagery

Read the interview here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-25065-Portland-Progressive-Christian-Examiner~y2009m10d2-Interview-with-Paul-Young-of-The-Shack-gender-bending-God-the-father