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I am not a Christian, I am a Protestant!
“*huff!* I am not Christian, I’m a Protestant!”
Well, that was not precisely the way the lame rebut went down. However, what it does mean is they do not really know the source of their belief, nor could they make a well-reasoned apologia for their religion.
I suppose that is why the visible church today has become the butt of jokes that it has. I often find myself defending Christians when I myself am not one. I am embarrassed for them because of their lack of knowledge, and have frequently felt the need to protect them in debates because of that naiveté. You would think that of all people, they would know the words of their Messiah, who he was speaking to, the culture from which he sprang. You would think they would not dismiss two-thirds of their Holy Books as useless, because their God who does not change suddenly changed his mind.
Here you have a visible “church” that moved in great power for three centuries before its power vanished, never to return. Yet its devotees never ask why. More, they will drive a thousand miles to bring in a new convert to their powerless fellowship so that they can worship impotently together.
They will tell you of miracles that happened over there or over here, but they cannot demonstrate one miracle in front of a disbelieving audience. They dress their clergy in gold and purple to perform solemn rites that their god never asked for. They build vast empty cathedrals that are just as empty of authority as they are themselves. They sing majestic paeans to an almighty God that hasn’t stepped off His pedestal in 1700 years. They dance in victories they never participated in nor won.
So why do l love these people so much?
News you can take home with you
Here is what the news readers tell me is important for me to know today, and my usual asinine reactions to these memorable highlights.
1. HEAD OF ARAB LEAGUE URGES MEMBERS TO CONFRONT EXTREMISTS
Unless they are attacking Israel
2. WHAT COULD IMPERIL UKRAINE TRUCE
Uh, Russia?
3. EBOLA DRUG SHOWS PROMISE
And it will be introduced in 15 years from now.
4. WHY FEUDING LAWMAKERS MAY WORK TOGETHER, BRIEFLY
Because they are debating their next pay raise.
5. POLITICS TRUMP PROMISES ON IMMIGRATION
What promises?
6. STATES: EPA SHOULD SET TOXIC ALGAE STANDARD
The EPA is too busy telling the States how to run their environmental programs right now.
7. WHO YOU CALL WHEN THE WATER RUNS DRY IN INDIA
Oh, I care. I care.
8. HOW FAR US GAS PRICES HAVE FALLEN
Not far enough.
9. AT JOAN RIVERS’ FUNERAL, A STAR-STUDDED SENDOFF
Glitterati feting departed glitterati. Joe Montoya was buried in a paupers grave yesterday, attended by the mortician and back-hoe operator.
10. SERENA WILLIAMS WINS 3RD CONSECUTIVE US OPEN
Who is Serena Williams? A female footballer?
Some days . . .
It has been an odd morning for me. Usually, I sit here with my coffee watching the activity outside my window, and browsing the web for news of friends and the world. I don’t answer many email nor make comments on social sites at this time when my brain is still cottony from sleep. But I do write of waking up, my plans for the day, comments on the news and such.
But today my fingers went down an unexpected path that took up the whole morning. It was a lamentation on my own lack of spiritual depth, and of those who seek to enlighten me. Eight or ten pages into the mini-rant, I stopped, and realized I didn’t want anyone to see it. It was personal and painful, and not very edifying to anyone but me.
I have learned over the years to not wear my religion on my sleeve. I do not do piety very well. And I have learned to keep the doors to my personal sanctuary shut. My writing this morning left those doors open, so I hit the [Delete] key, then prepared Sunday brunch. I wasn’t going to write today because I have some pressing chores, but here I am, still in sleepwear and barefoot, writing fluff.
Fluff it is, and fluff is what you get.
Anyways … (dj?) Made eggs and sausage muffins this am. They are quick and easy. A small tube of five biscuits, four Jimmy Dean turkey sausage patties, two slices of American cheese, two hard fried eggs for me, and two runny eggs for Snookums. My glucose is still off the scale, so no fruit juice this morning, which is a minor tragedy to me. But it went well.
And today is take down the Sukkah day. The High Holy Days have come and gone, and the sukkah is starting to look like an afterthought in my yard. If my energy lasts, I’ll vacuum out the rescue mobile, disinfect the kennel carriers, wash the bedding, and get myself ready for the next transport.
It is still very green here, we haven’t had a frost yet, and probably won’t until December. I need to mow the grass short so that the spring Bermuda grass doesn’t have to compete with the overgrowth next year. But I think that will happen later this week. I have a lot of maintenance to do on the tractors. I didn’t properly prepare them this Spring, and they are paying me back for that lapse.
So what’s with the new year? I dunno. I don’t even care to make a list this year. I have stopped making long-range plans, and I have scaled back some of my larger gardening projects. I just don’t have time to do much of anything, so if I can’t mow it, it goes ..
So’s … on this sour note, my week begins …
A late good morning!
A small, sane corner of the universe.
Shabbat morning dawns a dark and cool 64° (20C), the acrid smell of the central heat firing up for the first time this fall assaults the nose. A barn cat is sitting on the porch watching Kippur eat his morning birdseed, safe inside his cage, and safe inside the house. Snookums brings the first offering of hot coffee this morning and its warmth helps drive away the sleep ache from my fingers.
The news today seems to be a mishmash of asinine actions. The Lesbian mayor of Houston, Texas, saw what she thought would “shame” the religious folk into her bathroom accommodation regulations by trying to subpoena sermons from several Houston pastors. It backfired on her, as it should have, but rather than just dropping the suit, she changed the subpoena from sermons to ‘other’ writings and such. It didn’t fly very well either. The US has had a long tradition of leaving the churches alone, and most Americans agree. I think I am going to enjoy watching her get out of this one.
And now we got a political hack for an Ebola Czar. Isn’t that the CDC’s job? And isn’t the CDC a cabinet agency? Doesn’t the Director sit in cabinet meetings? Stupid. Nay! STOOOOOPID!
Even here in my bucolic corner of paradise, in an easily overlooked town, Ebola has touched us. Two students and two adults were in very close proximity to the nurse on Frontier flight 1143. The CDC said their was no danger. Then the parents voluntarily quarantined the children and themselves. Then the CDC threatened to quarantine them 21 days. The CDC then told the schools there was no danger. Then the CDC decided that the schools needed disinfecting. So … three local schools closed mid-week, and will reopen Monday.
Soooo. I sit here in the morning gloom, watching the morning unfold. Soon I will have to rouse from my $49 Office Depot ‘Executive’ chair, and prepare for morning services. But now, it is just me, and thee, and a cup of coffee.
Good morning!
The Cycle of Life in Three Paragraphs
Well, the Holy Days are almost done. Tonight we combine Shemini Atzeret and Simcha Torah that I have discussed in previous pieces. Then we return to the normal cycle of events. Day follows day, week follows week, the New Moon follows the New Moon, and years follow the years. Mystically, this is the first month of the year, 5,775 years since the founding of my religion, so the sages calculate. Yeah, I suspect that a few of my more scientifically inclined friends jaws will drop here. But for many of us, we find no discrepancy between scientific accounts and Biblical accounts. However, it is more than I care to go into here.
What does all this observing of the cycles of life portend? Quite frankly, we only opine. We don’t know with any degree of certainty. The cycles certainly appear to mirror specific prophetic events that are to occur at some future time. It is a bit like unraveling the Unified Field Theory. Many claim to have deep insights into both, but few actually do. Einstein felt that if you cannot explain something to a child, you really do not have a very good grasp of the subject. I agree.
Anyway. Talk radio plays in the background this sunny and breezy Autumn morning in the land where all is still green. Kippur the budgie happily sings along to his favorite advertising jingles. Snookums is in village “gathering her food from afar”. And I sit here, bemused with the moment where my mind touches both the mundane and the heaven, and lament over taking the last sip of the mornings coffee.
Good morning!
Cycles within cycles, within cycles
It was the last rainy morning today, but a moderate breeze blew the rains east, leaving a few scattered showers in its wake. By evening, the skies will clear and the temperatures will fall to the 60’s, which is darned chilly for us. The house is filled with the aroma of lamb cooking as Snookums prepares lamb and lintel stew for our guests tonight. This is day six of Sukkot, and if you all are getting as weary of hearing about the holy days as I am, there is only one more day to go to end Sukkot.
Tonight is our turn to host. It will be a bit too chilly to dine in the Sukkah, so we will go out for a brief dedication ceremony that I’ll not force upon you here, then return to the house for desserts following the meal.
However, this doesn’t end the holy days. There is a mysterious day that we are commanded to observe, called mystically Shemini Atzeret. The Eighth Day. We are not instructed how to observe it, we are just commanded to not it. I have many ideas of why this day is hidden, most of which are extremely lengthy to go into here, so we simply gather together to note the day. That evening, we finish the holy days with a ceremony we call Simchat Torah, or Joy of the Torah. It is not a biblically ordered holy day, but since we begin the yearly readings from the Torah Scroll next Shabbat, the Torah needs to be re-rolled. It is a festive event, and the congregation takes turns dancing around the room with one of the two Torah Scrolls we have, followed by the rewinding of the scrolls to begin the New Year.
After all that, routine once again rules the day. The Shabbats come and go. The New Moons (Rosh Chodesh) come and go. The tides ebb. The tides flow. And cycles that are too vast in scale for man to perceive rule.
Good morning!
Sukkot, frazzled wimmen, and Ebola
It is almost noon before I get a chance to sit down and write a few paragraphs this morning. The drizzling rains are still drizzling, and today the landscape actually has a few puddles, meaning that the waters have finally soaked deeply into the arid soil.
My tummy is still pleasantly burning a bit from the spicy breakfast sausage Snookums made up for me. Long rain spells bring out a desire for hot chocolate and classical music, but this sucky diabetes is running off the glucose scale this week, so black coffee will have to fill the gap. Still, it is a treat since I normally have just two cups in the morning.
Tonight is the 5th day of Sukkot. Various members of my congregation host a night each of the seven days and we travel to a new house each night. Tomorrow night 
is my night, and Snookums is happily working herself into a frazzle. Don’t know what it is about wimmen and special days that they will rise early, dust, clean, cook, buy, and then collapse each night in happy fatigue as they prepare for the event. Then everybody shows up, has a good few hours, and then the cleanup starts. Nevertheless, the dust will have hardly cleared before she starts thinking about how she will things next year to make it even better.
And I? Well, for starters, if Snookums is happy, I am happy. That is the natural order of things. So I practice saying the blessings, prepare to finish the sukkah decorations, and keep the grumbling to myself. Today I will try to find a time between the rain bands to install decorative lights in the sukkah to give the effect of starlight thru the open roof. Why? Because it is pretty, and will illuminate the sukkah, and it pleases Snookums.
However, since it is raining, we won’t serve meals in the sukkah. If the rain stops, we will do the blessings out by the sukkah, and retire to the house for the festivities. So … schlep extra tables from afar, buy some posies to make the place pretty, and try to find time to remember just why I am doing this. The reasons are many, but far too complicated to go into in this little morning blog.
Today’s news: Health worker gets Ebola, and right off the bat the ‘experts’ know why. I am nonplussed.
With that, good morning!
My family (and a practice blog)
I have friends in the animal rescue community who are real mavens at taking pictures of dogs.
But I am not sure they would have anymore luck that I do with captureing them in their cutest poses. They instinctively know how to move 1/8 of a second before the shutter clicks. I realised today that I didn’t have any photos to release in the even they went astray and thought it would be a good idea to get some pictures. The beagle is purebred, so probably just saying she was a beagle and was microchipped would be all that was necessary to put on a flyer and send to the shelters around here.
‘Becca is the beagle. I greet her with “Becca da beegal … ” as a fun way of calling her because she always associates that with friendly time. Not that she is real big on games. She is about the most serious and single minded dog I have ever owned, and once she gets something on her mind, her ears seem to shut off.
She has a strong drive to be the pack leader of the other dogs, and we have had to be very stern with her and her agression. She doesn’t realise that the other two dogs are very feral, and have been rescued after surviving in wild Texas areas.
‘Becca is the first dog I have ever paid for. I bought her a short time after a puppy Snookums really loved had to be put down because of serious neural injurys. Snook didn’t want a dog that resembled the one that passed, and beagle are small and cute as puppies, and that is the one she wanted. She is just about three now.
The white dog is Jenna. Odd name for a dog, but the neighbor boy who found her and talked Snookums into taking her since his gramma would not even let him bring her into her yard named her that. So we kept the name, and he still visits her from time to time when he gets off the school bus. We have no idea of Jennas lineage. She was a tiny white furball wehen we got her, but now she is a bit larger than most german shepards, has springy hair like a terrier, and the markings of a staffordshire terrier.
She is very eager to please, and has sort of become my dog by default. I really do need to work with her more than I do. She almost begs to learn.
The black one is Annie Annie. Or just Annie. We did the double Annie thing because we had a dog named Hannah, and it was hard for her to distinguish between Annie and Hannah. Annie followed Snookums home one day. She was starved to emiciation and I wasn’t sure she was going to survive. Apparently she kept going by eating night crawlers, and even today, she’ll bring one in from time to time that she finds in the back yard. We fed her puppy rich food and protein supplements to get her weight up. I think she has a lot of labradore retriever in her, but she isn’t double coated like a lab is.
So … there it is. Another blogger that is gaga over his dogs.
Bring on the latter rains.
Rain has arrived in this parched parcel of Texas. Long, drizzly, soaking rains that go deep into the soil. It will take three days of this kind of rain to permeate the soil and it looks like we just might get those rains.
So it seemed like a good day to quietly celebrate Shabbat at home. I am not certain yet, but the beagle has finally decided that a rainy day is not reason enough to poop or piddle on the guest room carpet. It has taken a few years to accomplish that. But then, the inclement weather is continuing, so we wait with bated breath.
Kippur, the budgie, is yeeping and squawking with happiness. I don’t know what it is about bad weather that fires her up. We have quite a relationship. Her cage is right by my workstation where we can interact from time to time. Workstation. If you can call what I do work. No hairy eyed boss monitors my ‘work’, no time clock regulates my day, no bean counter measures my output. And that all is just fine with me!
Not much happy news on the newsfeeds. Some stupid teenage girls run off to join ISIS now wish they hadn’t. Too bad. Romance is an expensive hobby. They are now burdened with domineering husbands, babies and a life of drudgery. It’s their fate … not mine. And a local politician has gone negative in her losing bid to be the next governor. Seems that she just can’t run from her past.
The Large Hadron Collider is now being cooled down for a start early next year, after a two year hiatus of rebuilding to double its energy. Cool. Each particle it fires has the same energy as a freight train at speed. Makes me wonder what would happen if one of those supercharged particles got away from them.
And the blogs are thin today as the latest wave of dissenters pulled up stakes from blogger. Some returned, some are keeping both sites going, and a couple are gone. I am not so sure what this portends long term.
With all that, and actually more that is too complex to discuss here, my morning starts.
Good morning!
~r
A little experiment
It has been a “dust-up” day.
My tiff with SU has really caused more of a brou-ha-ha than I intended. Not that I really mind it when the dust flies. A good rebellion clears the air.
But really, I was just trying to resume my ‘coffee’ posts. It is back to the old way of doing things. I just hate making three posts for the same piece. blogster isn’t all that link friendly with facebook, so fluff will also go on WordPress, and more serious stuff on blogger. blogger and WordPress work seamlessly with facebook, and they don’t care who I link to or why.
I should have known that SU wasn’t the place for me. When you get into a forum type of environment, they are usually managed by content Nazi’s who seem to find each other. Smaller blogsites like blogster seem a bit like that too, so perhaps the absentee landlord here has been a blessing in disguise, though I really do wish for a more powerful site where I could both socialize and blog.
Anyways (Yes, thinking of you MzJ!). It is early afternoon. Snooks is preparing the house for my day of hosting the congregational Sukkot on Monday. Stalwart woman she is, she always tries to make me look good. However, the forecast is saying a 70% chance of rain, so we also need to prepare to move it indoors if the situation requires it.
So’s (better than anyhoo?). It is late afternoon, and I remember my vows. “Thou shalt write. Every day thou shalt write of it”
Good afternoon!
~r
Rusty's Armory 