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

I coined a phrase =)

Google currently returns zero results for "American style eschatological eisegesis".  That probably means that I coined it. Hooray!  =P

Changing our make believe.

Color perception is a learned behavior: that is, the way we see and experience the world is mostly make-believe. This means we can change our make-believe toward one which we prefer. But only as we become able to know/understand our current make-believe. H/T Joe Turner

The middle squares are the same color

Video of me on my LOPWMIPFMTIMAC

LOPWMIPFMTIMAC from Recycle Your Faith on Vimeo.

Discussion over at Recycleyourfaith.com

or here: Who's on your list?

What I'm learning latelyish, and make-believe

I can choose to be happy.

I can be present in my body.

I can be present in my current physical environment.

I can be present in my current social environment.

I can fully experience "bad" feelings.

I have an internal place to stand, from which I can observe myself.

I can be kind to myself.

I can be kind to my children.

I can be kind to my wife.

I can be creative, fun, and playful.

I don't have to believe what other people believe.

I don't have to feel what other people feel.

I can connect with other people.

My fears regarding what other people are thinking and feeling toward me are very often seriously out of sync with what they are actually thinking and feeling towards me.

I can be bold in asking genuinely curious, non judgmental questions.

Other people have have fascinating internal lives.

The way I see/experience the world is almost entirely make-believe, and therefore I can totally shift to a new make-believe which I prefer/choose. HOORAY!!

What make-believe do YOU prefer?

Itsy bity poo poo

The delightful little girl here is Sofi, with whom I have the grand privilege of playing for a number of hours each week in her playroom.

This last 10 days I've been with Sofi and the amazing Tracey and Saeid, her mom and dad, in Sheffield Massachusetts at the brilliant and beautiful Option Institute and Autism Treatment Center of America, where we've all been getting trained/helped with Sofi's Son Rise Program. I've cried or nearly cried this last 10 days more than I do during most 10 day periods, and laughed more too. I am so thankful for the opportunity. I've learned a ton, and hopefully changed a little as well in the direction which I desire to change.

Before and after

One of these people is happier than the other (hint: One of them feels "unworthy", by their own description)





For more from the happier one, see: Ray Boltz in concert at JesusMCCC
See also Carol Boltz' blog

LOPWMIDFMTIMAC and Mark Driscoll on Christians Fasting for Ramadan

Maybe I should start a List Of People Who Make It Difficult For Me To Imagine Myself A Christian, to go along with my LOPWMIPFMTIMAC.

In the news recently: Brian McLaren, Ries, and friends decided this year to fast during the month of Ramadan, in an act of peacemaking and solidarity between Christians and Muslims. Mark Driscoll was quoted in response as saying

"Christians observing a Ramadan fast is insane at best ... Sad, tragic, horrific, misguided, dangerous, wrong. If Christians want to pray during Ramadan, they should pray not with Muslims but for Muslims — that Muslims would come to know Jesus. To pray with Muslims absolutely dishonors Jesus."

I feel a bit sad for all the folks who sit under his teaching every week. Sigh.

Confused and Bizarre prosecution of persecuted Hmong

The U.S. government is prosecuting Hmong and Laotians in the U.S. for plotting a coup against the communist government of Laos. This a mere 30 to 40 years after the same U.S. government spent untold dollars carpet bombing the small nation with more bombs than were dropped on all of Europe during world war 2 in an attempt to ... stop communism from expanding in southeast asia.

(oh, but that's right--communists are ok now. We have a new enemy: the "terrorists")

Worse, the Hmong, who were U.S. allies during the aforementioned war, were promised support in exchange for their active help and then abandoned to be slaughtered upon our withdrawal from Vietnam.

I can't figure out a way in which we're not the bad guys in this scenario.

Hope

George Macdonald is the most honestly hopeful person I've ever known.

From "A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul"


September 14.

Things go not wrong when sudden I fall prone,
But when I snatch my upheld hand from thine,
And, proud or careless, think to walk alone.
Then things go wrong, when I, poor, silly sheep,
To shelves and pits from the good pasture creep;
Not when the shepherd leaves the ninety and nine,
And to the mountains goes, after the foolish one.

Religious Apocalypse, American style.

One of the big problems with American Christianity is that we approach the Bible's apocalyptic stuff taking the point of view of the perpetrator/avenger, rather than the point of view of the victim/one-to-be-avenged. This leads to rampant eisogesis. Note how patriarchy attempts to steal one of the relatively few places in the Bible where God is referred to as female, with "father hen".

Despite all that, my initial reaction upon hearing this was "Wow, I really like it."

9-11, Pearl Harbor, and Benamar Benatta

The September 11, 2001 and December 7, 1941 attack on the United States of America have this in common--they were both remarkably successful in driving us to become ever more monstrous and violent in a futile pursuit of safety.

Listen to the story of Benamar Benatta, who was illegally imprisoned and tortured by my government for 5 years.

The interview starts at about the 1 minute 40 second mark, and runs about 3 minutes

Walled World

Hat tip to Brooke at River vision

Here's a link to the larger jpeg

Roger Ebert

describes his experience with A.A., after 30 years of sobriety. Worth reading.

Quote of the week

A senior Obama administration official, in discussing the U.S.' aggrieved stance over the alleged fact that Pakistan has taken U.S. weapons designed to accomplish death and destruction and made those weapons more capable of same (inadvertently aptly characterizing U.S. foreign policy over the last 60 years):

“When we have concerns, we act aggressively.”