…look – I’ll level with you…here’s the thing…the point of this place…if it has “a” point…is not for me to run my mouth & assume anybody might be likely to give a shit
…& given the amount of effort that various people who very much aren’t me have put into making it a place you might find something you thought was worth checking out rather than just wittering on while lobbing about links to things you’ve probably already read just because they made me cranky…well…I wouldn’t want to alienate you when you’ve been kind enough to lend us your time to have a read about the place
…so…if the lack of a capital letter in the title doesn’t sit well with you there’s a pretty good chance your day’s going to go a whole hell of a lot better if you pull the rip cord now…maybe try the DUAN from last night or a C U Next Tuesday
…because if there is a god there’s a fair chance the bearded old bastard (well, stands to reason a being with no parents would have to be a bastard – non-existent parents can hardly enter into wedlock now, can they…) might want to regress to his smiting ways if the old omniscience is picking up what I’ve been putting down since I heard about Terry Jones
…mind you, Terry’s god wasn’t such a terrible sort of a deity I suppose
…well, he has a point…it’s not called a liturgy for nothing…although I guess if church had been a bit more like this maybe I’d have kept up my attendance
…hell, even a bit of this might have been enough
…but those aren’t the churches of my youth & the tenets of my faith turned out a little more along these lines
…so, I tended towards the view that Dan Simmons outlined in Hyperion – me & Abraham, we don’t exactly see things the same…his god asked him to sacrifice his own child & when he’d demonstrated he was willing to go through with it & the deity stayed his hand in an act of beneficence apparently Abraham was grateful for his mercy?
…sounds fucked up if you ask me – that shit is back to front as far as I’m concerned
…if you’re the deity & you’re all omnipotent & literally everything gets to be the way you say it because your word is law then me & my wavering faith are so much chump change on your scale & demonstrating your bona fides would be so easy for you it boggles the mind so why the hell should I have to kill a kid…let alone my own fucking kid…just to assuage some insecure bullshit where somehow the creator requires validation by his own creation
…so what I’m saying is, if there is a god & they want to sit in judgement on me then there better be some due process involved because I got questions…& they start with “why you gotta be such a colossal dick about every fucking thing you no-excuse-having-excuse-for-a-fucking-absentee-landlord?”
Terry Jones directed Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian” – among a host of other things from being a scholar of history & something of an authority on Chaucer along with some Ripping Yarns & all sorts of other frankly rather wonderful stuff including this sort of thing
…so maybe god’s got about as much class as the ambulatory tumor squatting in the Oval Office & took it badly because towards the end there he sure as shit had some laughs at poor Terry’s expense
…he didn’t just afflict him with dementia but a truly cruel variant that goes by the catchy moniker of FTD with a liberal helping of aphasic symptoms
…so that mind & that voice were taken from us even before he was taken from the bosom of his family…while this moron & the malignant band of misanthropic parasites that cluster about him like so many bloated corpse-flies are still peddling their mind-rotting garbage all over town as though it belongs anywhere in an adult conversation like abject denial of reality is a superpower & not a dissociative disorder
…daddy dearest isn’t even talking about 2020 most of the time…but he accuses Biden of not being able to string together a sentence…& that Clinton had “this big machine” behind her like he was some plucky underdog who bootstrapped his slack ass over the line with literally no assistance…let alone assistance very much involving machines both literal & figurative that spanned not merely from sea to shining sea but clear across the Bering Straits all the way to the actual fucking Kremlin
…sure, we need that shit more than Terry…just like we need the fucking National Prayer Breakfast assholes & their “Jesus – plus nothing” bullshit
https://www.c-span.org/video/?31405-1/republican-convention-prayer-breakfast
[Bush Snr]
https://www.c-span.org/video/?162337-1/national-prayer-breakfast
[Bush Jnr]
…because it might be plus nothing but it’s minus the entire fucking point of the whole goddamn book even including the bits that never would have made it past a publisher these days
…& if the supposed author of either testament were of a mind to stand by his work either in the sense of creation or just mankind or even just those fucking testaments then you’d think he’d have put his almighty foot down on something other than another fucking Python like some frat-boy recreation of that “don’t tread on me” bullshit
…but no…we get “interesting times” in “a dangerous world”
…& it’s no better across the pond
Nandy takes on the trolls, first Piers … then Boris?
…thank fuck for Bill
…amen?
Same:
…so what I’m saying is, if there is a god & they want to sit in judgement on me then there better be some due process involved because I got questions…& they start with “why you gotta be such a colossal dick about every fucking thing you no-excuse-having-excuse-for-a-fucking-absentee-landlord?”
My belief in God goes like this:
Interested in helping out, and would prefer that I commit my life to being of service to others, but is perfectly content to allow me to do what I will. Can help steer the boat, but absolutely will not row. Doesn’t control the weather or smite people with terminal illnesses. Let’s the universe pretty much play itself out, offering a little nudge, here and there, in the form of a changed heart or two.
Now, a lot of people may find that objectionable for a whole host of reasons, but here’s the beauty of it: they’re free to agree or not and I have no opinion on the matter. I have no need to proselytize, nor do I need to question the beliefs (or lack thereof) of others. It works for me and doesn’t generate harm to others. Which, I think, is kind of the point.
…you are of course right about most if not all of that…which I guess I’d like to think is why I made the point that I wouldn’t necessarily expect anyone to give a shit either way about my view on the subject…although, as an agnostic type I generally feel as though gods of all shapes & sizes are pretty much fair game
…one way or another I think it might even be fair to say I lean pro-religion but anti-Church?
…somewhere around that capital letter it seems like most of the good stuff takes a back seat to an institution that is more concerned with itself than its congregation & manages to wind up being responsible for some truly epic quantities of unnecessary human suffering…I have no interest in trying to dismantle the faith of those it rewards…it just doesn’t work for me & some days the incredulity boils over a little?
“pro-religion but anti-Church”
Yeah, I can dig that. My wife and I haven’t been to a church service in…probably 8 years or so. I once was elected to sit on the vestry of a church where we were members. It’s basically an administrative body that handles the “business” of a church. Minding the finances (which wasn’t much–total membership was probably 50 people), keeping current with diocesan issues, facilitating congregational ministry efforts within the church, etc. Almost immediately I began making people uncomfortable because I kept asking them, “hey, so…what exactly are we doing to be of service to the community around us and to the poor and disenfranchised in particular? We’re certainly ministering to our own membership, but our efforts appear to stop at the front door.” I said it at every meeting, every month, despite the eye rolls and the gentle admonishments of “well, here’s how things work…” Eventually, I was able to get the vestry to endorse a congregational project to start a community garden next door to the local food bank so they could have fresh produce for at least part of the year. But, I think they mostly did it to shut me up because there wasn’t really anything in the way of promoting with effort within the congregation. Only a handful of people showed up for the initial groundbreaking (not a ceremony, but an actual breaking of the ground to make the garden) and then after that it was basically my wife and me on our own. We moved not long after that so I needed to resign my position before my term was up and I never again considered taking on that kind of role in a church. I don’t need anyone’s permission to do the right thing.
…I’m not an expert on the subject by any means but I think there’s an idea in Judaism that what really holds humanity back from the abyss is the unacknowledged lives of a few dozen kinda-saints who just go about living right
…a church of folks like the two of you who don’t exactly go to church seems like something I could get behind…as the saying goes “more power to you”?
Trust me, I didn’t pop out of the womb like this. I was a real bastard for a lot of years until the pain of how I was living simply beat me down to the point where I was willing to change. I take no more credit than a person who puts their hand on a hot stove until it blisters and then realizes that’s a stupid thing to do and pulls their hand away. Some of us simply need more supervision than others.
“I don’t need anyone’s permission to do the right thing.”
This is why I don’t bother with chuchiness anymore. I find an organization doing good stuff where I am, and I volunteer for them, or I work at a place that matters to me😉
I don’t need someone telling me “this is the right way,” because I was raised by folks who believed strongly in community & participation in things to help the folks around you (because, frankly, the stronger the community around us, the better off we ALL are😉).
And having spent my teen years being preached to by a hateful priest from another town (who didn’t really care about our community), i also learned that sometimes “church” doesn’t mean/do diddly-squat, it’s the *people* involved that matter.
By the way, when I first saw the thumbnail of the featured image on the home page, I thought it was this:
“we gratefully acknowledge the city of Tokyo”
…thanks for that – it raised a grin I was in need of.
I think that won an Oscar…
Jeeves says I’m wrong. Jeeves is a dick.
The Academy Film Archive preserved Bambi Meets Godzilla in 2009.[2]
there’s absolutely no chance the Orange Vomit knows “peak”
‘Act as if You Loved Your Children Above All Else’: Greta Thunberg Demands Davos Elite Immediately Halt All Fossil Fuel Investments
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/21/act-if-you-loved-your-children-above-all-else-greta-thunberg-demands-davos-elite
it’s the greed