Midterm elections, part 1.

(Part 1 because I’ll have a lot more to say about them before they happen.)

For my non-American readers, the “midterm elections” are the Congressional elections in the middle of President Bush’s four-year term. Pundits like to use them to gauge how the president is doing. If Americans vote greatly for the opposition party, this supposedly means they aren’t happy with the president. In reality they’re unhappy with the Congress, because it’s not at all an easy thing to unseat a Congressman.

The Congressman has an unfair advantage. In D.C., he spends his entire two-year term digging up financial support for the next election, networking with a lot of people who will give him lots of money in exchange for his “ear”—a reference to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where Antony gets the Romans to listen to him for a few minutes so he can rile them up against Brutus and Cassius. Thus his “ear” is really his Congressional vote, but nobody calls it that. Especially the Congressman, who wants to maintain the illusion—to himself and others—that he’s independent.

But you aren’t independent when you’re begging for money. I once worked as a campaign volunteer for Tim LeFever, a lawyer from Dixon who was running for Congress against Vic Fazio (who may have been majority whip at the time; I don’t recall). I watched LeFever speak and shake hands with serious contributors who expressed great satisfaction that he was going to go to Washington and do something about “those feminists and liberals and homosexuals and minorities.” LeFever was probably personally disgusted at some of the sentiment, but he needed the money. So he shook hands, nodded as if he agreed, and collected the checks.

Fazio beat him easily. He already had enough pull in Congress that many people were paying for his “ear.” And if he hadn’t been listening to them (or at least done a fabulous job of pretending to listen to them), they’d have financially backed LeFever.

Not that money wins elections. More ranting on this later.

Naughty words in the pulpit.

Brian pointed out that perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to refer, in my sermon, to how frequently I had seen a lousy chapel speaker pull a sermon out of his ass.

To lessen your horror, I should mention that I did not at any point use the word “ass” in the sermon. But I did use the word “crap” twice.

…And there was a brief discussion about male Corinthian temple prostitutes… but that was to give historical context.

True, there’s something to be said for watching your language in the pulpit. There are a lot of folks who freak out at semi-inappropriate language (there’s one guy in Dixon who will write the newspaper angry, incoherent letters whenever someone uses a term even as innocuous as “fart”) and there are some people who shouldn’t be encouraged to use any naughty language, and even my minor obscenities would cause them to stumble. (So don’t direct them to my blog. Or to me, outside the pulpit, ’cause this is how I talk.)

I will say that this reminded me of when I used to say naughty things when I was a teenager, and Mom would respond with, “That’s awful. Would you say such things in front of the pastor?” But after driving a few of my youth pastors to violent profanity, I determined that most pastors have probably heard much worse than I ever spouted. Or had even heard of; at the time I had no idea people did those sorts of things with sheep. (They must’ve picked up that kind of language in bible college.)

Not that relativity is an excuse.

So—next sermon, less ass.

Unless it’s about Palm Sunday. I can’t help what Jesus sat upon.

Preached.

Yesterday I spent the day researching and writing a sermon. Today I presented it.

It was on gifts of the Spirit, love in particular, working together with fruit of the Spirit. You can download it off the church’s website if you care to hear it; it’ll be there once I get the sound file formatted.

Most of the responses afterwards were the usual, “Good job; that really needed to be said; people really needed to hear that.” In other words, what psychologists call projection.

“People” needed to hear it? Everyone needed to hear it. I needed to hear it; otherwise God wouldn’t have directed me towards the subject matter. To say that others needed to hear a sermon is the same as saying, “I am beyond sin and temptation; I have arrived; you, o lowly sermon-writer, have done me no service, but let me throw your fragile ego a bone by assuring you that the weaker or more immature members of our church probably profited by your labors. I thank God daily that I am not like those publicans and sinners—I fast twice a week and tithe all that I possess—they needed to hear from God, but I didn’t.”

Projection. In this way, people can keep their fleshly desires well-protected from their Spirit-prodded consciences, and never the twain shall meet.

In the future I’m just going to have to answer such “compliments” as “People needed to hear that” with “And what did you need to hear?”

Update. I made a rather memorable statement in the sermon, and followed it with, “Embroider that on a pillow.” And just for fun, I decided to make such a pillow. You can actually order it here. Enjoy.

Update II. Download the sermon here. I can’t help the static.

Moved.

Pretty much the rest of everything was moved today.

Then, after a full day, I went to the movie night, where for some reason we’ve not yet determined, the sound didn’t entirely work. But the kids appeared to like it anyway. We showed them Ice Age, which is an entertaining movie but hardly the sort of thing that die-hard creationists would encourage at a church function. We fed them popcorn, cotton candy, and soda, and then we went to Round Table and ate pizza and talked about denomination politics. (Well, they did. Certain individuals in the church have a tendency to talk about nothing else.) And that was that.

Tomorrow I am writing a sermon and doing little to nothing else.

Two boys in particular went insane from all the sugar. As I understand it they were borderline insane already, and without parental supervision they simply ran amok. If you don't potty-train kids they’ll simply throw their poo like monkeys; why should the other forms of discipline be any different? If you don’t discipline your kids, of course they’re going to turn into little lunatics. One can see why the parents wanted them out of their hair for the evening, but I have little sympathy for the parents of such kids. They obviously don’t care enough to raise them.

I really don’t like moving.

And I say that especially to all the smart-alecs who asked me, “Are you having fun yet?” as I was shlepping another box or desk or file cabinet or bookcase or chair or computer or other item up the stairs. No I was not having fun. Moving isn’t fun. Moving sucks.

Today I spent all the live-long day moving Brian’s office and my office from the Vickery Center (which is at the bottom of the hill, at the end of Vine Hill Road) to the Lower Terrace (which is behind the café, next to the Upper Terrace and the library, on the Bethany University campus). We didn’t choose to move, but since Bethany University is moving all their graduate studies programs into the Vickery Center (which used to be Vine Hill Office Park until Bethany bought it and renamed it) the Teacher Education Program decided they wanted our wing of the building, and for whatever insane reason they decided to move in during the middle of the semester. They’ve got 10 times as much stuff as we do, so it’s gonna suck to be them too. But today, it sucked to be us.

Twenty years ago, the Lower Terrace used to be a dorm. It was one of the buildings that was already there when Glad Tidings Bible Institute moved to Santa Cruz, bought the campus, and changed its name to Bethany Bible College. It looks it, too. The walls are rotting and flaking, and I hope the several layers of paint in the bathrooms aren’t hiding black mold. It stands a good chance of getting condemned one of these years, if the health department ever notices.

But on the upside, my office has a really nice view, and a deck right in front of it.

Lots of people from the church said they would help with the move. They didn’t. It was just Brian and me, pulling muscles and griping all the way. I expect I’ll see all of them tomorrow at the Kids Alive movie night, and they’ll either have convenient excuses or will have forgotten. But you know, it’s better that they didn’t bother to show up at all than do what they usually do:

1. Show up.
2. Spend 20 minutes determining who will do what.
3. Move three boxes, or fuss with curtains so they don’t have to lift anything heavy.
4. Put the boxes down.
5. Have a 50-minute conversation.
6. Move one more box, or stand and watch other people move one more box.
7. Go have dinner to celebrate all their hard work.
8. Send the bill for dinner to the church.

We’ll see how much of such shenanigans happen tomorrow at the Movie Night.

Stupid Internet Survey: What kind of coffee am I?

What Kind of Coffee Are You?

You Are an Irish Coffee. At your best, you are: wild, spontaneous, and outgoing. At your worst, you are: too extreme and reckless. You drink coffee when: you want to keep drinking booze. Your caffeine addiction level: low.

What Kind of Coffee Are You?
created with BlogThings.

Not entirely sure how I managed to score for Irish coffee. While I like Irish coffee creamer, I don’t drink alcohol and I’d hardly call myself reckless. But that’s just stupid internet quizzes for you.

Amusing cartoon of the day.

Reverend Fun, by Rowena/Bible Gateway.

Voting by mail.

And it’s about time, too. The election system in the United States is such a mess that, several years ago, when I was living in Nevada County, the county clerk was trying to save money on her budget by asking the public to not use the mail-in absentee ballots because they cost the county $7 apiece. I argued it would be cheaper in the long run to make all the ballots absentee. We wouldn’t have to pay for poll workers; we could vote whenever we wanted and have the ballots in by Election Day. Now all we have to do is require that all campaign contributors be anonymous, and we might have some real election reform in this country.

It appears Santa Cruz County might be going all absentee next election, which I approve of. It has yet to go through the Legislature, and we’ll see where that goes; there are too many idiots who are enamored of touch screens. I voted by touch screen last election; it was like selecting photos, not candidates. There’s just something more satisfying about putting a hole through a ballot, especially when you’re voting for the lesser of two evils.

Strap Saddam down, someone.

There’s a scene in C.S. Lewis’s novel Perelandra where the protagonist, and a man possessed by Satan, are fighting over the soul of a person. But when they’re not debating, they have to rest… except the demoniac doesn’t rest. Instead he pesters the hero by shouting his name, torturing frogs, or masturbating. Basically he’s acting like an obnoxious brat so he can wear down his opponent. This isn’t the genteel, civilized behavior we see in the devil in much of western literature, but anyone who’s had any experience being tempted is sorta aware, or should be, that the devil is no gentleman.

I don’t know if Saddam Hussein has ever read C.S. Lewis; the rumors are he was more of an Adolf Hitler fan. But it’s interesting to see his behavior at his trial and compare it with the book. Yes, he’s making himself out to be an ass. But he has nothing to lose; if he’s guilty (and he likely is) then he’s going to be executed. So the only tactic he has left is to make the court look bad—by acting like a demoniac and daring the court to stop him. Maybe they’ll at least conclude he’s insane and commute his sentence.

American courts wouldn’t put up with this crap for a minute; we’d have the defendant cuffed to the chair, muzzled, and taken to “the hole” whenever court was in recess until he cut it out. But this is a new court under a new government, and with the whole world watching, they’re likely afraid that any disciplinary behavior on their part might make them look too strict. It’s like a foster parent disciplining a child who was removed from a home where he was beaten; sometimes the foster parent doesn’t want to spank the child—even when it’s necessary—because things went too far before.

But I think in these cases people need to make a distinction. Cuffing and gagging a prisoner is cruel and unusual punishment if not merited. In this case it most certainly is merited; Saddam won’t behave. If he wants to look insane, strapping him up like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs and wheeling him into court on a dolly ought to convey the right image.

Much ado about Mohammed.

Some Danish newspaper decides to let its cartoonists draw a few editorial cartoons about Mohammed as part of a special section, and suddenly the entire Muslim world is in an uproar. And it’s not because most of them aren’t funny (and weren’t meant to be) or even that they were (yet some don’t make any sense). It’s that it’s about Mohammed.

To Muslims, Mohammed is holy, and treating him any way other than reverently is blasphemy. And if your government is run by Muslims, blasphemy typically gets you the death penalty. We Americans really can’t relate all that well; we live in a country with a separation of church and state, so we can’t execute people for blasphemy.

I don’t know that I’d even say the editorial cartoons were blasphemous (except maybe that one with the bomb in the turban); they’re nothing compared to the editorial cartoons I’ve seen about Jesus. But in the U.S. we're free to do that sort of thing. Heck, Jesus is even a regular on South Park.

Trouble is, since in the U.S. it’s not a life-and-death matter (it’s more of an afterlife matter) most of us don’t really know what blasphemy is anymore. That’s why Christian stores actually sell Christian fish decals that are depicted having shark fins, or even eating Darwin fish. (And if you’re not sure why that’s blasphemous, stop and think about it for a minute.)

Most of the uproar is supposedly about blasphemy, but I think most of the problem is this: You’ve got a country where the people aren’t allowed freedom of speech, and the one time they’re allowed to say something publicly is in opposition to some non-religious westerners who don’t really understand what blasphemy is. This is the one time they’re allowed any freedom, so naturally they’re gonna go overboard with it… and burn some things, kill some people, and riot. That’s how oppressed people behave.

Compare this reaction to American Muslims, who may be likewise offended, but they’re behaving themselves.

Deep down, the oppressed Muslims would really rather burn and kill the despots who rule their lives. But they gotta take what they can when they can get it, and misdirect some anger before it eats them alive.

As someone who lives in a free country, I hear my God blasphemed all the time. Most of the time I don’t get bent out of shape about it because the blasphemers usually don’t know what they’re saying. There’s no point in chastising the ignorant. I’ll argue with those who do know what they’re saying, but I won’t kill them and set their houses on fire, because that’s not my place. God can defend himself much better than I can; and what’s better, he’ll be a lot more merciful than I would. Vengeance is his.

Amusing comic strip: Soul for a puppy.

The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch.

Honk if you love hostility.

The appropriate response to a honking car is a raised middle finger.

I don’t greet people that way… although I used to, many years ago. Unfortunately, a honking car still provokes that sort of knee-jerk (or finger-jerk) reaction in me that I find I still have to suppress, because it doesn’t happen often enough for me to have completely unlearned it.

But it still happens. Happened today, actually. Why? Well, for some idiotic reason, when people drive past someone they recognize, they honk at them.

Now, the car horn is there for only two legitimate reasons: (1) to warn someone or something that your car is on the verge of hitting it, or they are on the verge of hitting you; (2) to remind the daydreaming driver in front of you that the light is green.

Some would add a third—to tell your date, who’s still inside the house, that you’ve arrived—but that’s just rude, and in my father’s neighborhood it’s a behavior that will guarantee Dad will come out of his house to correct you, bringing a camera in case he has to prove to the police you were hostile. But let’s not get into Dad’s hobbies right now.

In general, using your horn for any other reason than the two legitimate ones is a form of rudeness. That’s why the one-digit salute. And it’s very tempting to respond that way.

Consider it from my point of view: When I get honked at, it’s usually because someone sees me walking. I am a pedestrian; I walk just about everywhere. When you’re driving past me at 40 miles per hour, I haven’t necessarily seen into your car to know who you are. You could be some psycho for all I know. I am also not insulated from the loud, obnoxious sound by being in a car. I get to hear the horn full blast, coming directly at me—sometimes at my back, because I was recognized from behind and didn’t have the opportunity to recognize you first. Sometimes I’m listening to my iPod; sometimes I’m thinking, or praying, and I just had my train of thought firebombed by a car horn.

And why on earth does it matter that you’ve recognized me anyway? So you recognized a pedestrian. Big freakin’ deal. I recognize lots of people. I don't blast an air horn at them to say hi. I wave. Wave, you noisy bastards.

Comments back... for now.

Update, 12/11/2024: And comments are off again. Weren’t worth the hassle.

It’s quite possible that I’ve lost my senses, but I’ve decided, on a provisional basis, to allow people to post comments on the site. With one caveat: I may delete them.

That’s right. Instead of spending way too much of my shrinking amount of free time responding to each and every post, with supporting quotes in the original Greek, I’m just going to delete them. If you want to bellyache about your right to free speech, that’s fine; but this is my blog, which means it’s all about the freedom of my speech. Get your own blog if you want to rant unedited.

Just so you know, I will likely delete the following things, so if you post them, don’t expect them to stick around long.

• Smartass one-liners. Any responses, witticisms, comments, or critiques that I don’t really find substantive. If you’re gonna post, have something to say.
• Nut mail. And by “nut mail” I mean “people who don’t agree with me, but can’t disagree respectfully, or make any sort of sense.” It is my blog, after all.
• Non sequiturs. For those of you who don’t know Latin, comments which we might call “random,” and don’t have anything to do with any blog entry I might have written.
• Responses to things I have put on your blog. The comments aren’t meant for you to comment about your blog, they’re to comment about my blog. It’s about me, remember? Me me me me me me me.
• Responses that are longer than my posts. If you have that much to say, stick it on your own blog.
• Complaints that I deleted something. That’s annoying.
• Anything I find annoying.
• Anything I bloody well feel like deleting. That should cover it.

Got the idea? Good. Get to commenting. I’ll get to deleting.

The Sabbatical Diet?

Update, 12/11/2024: The Sabbatical Diet’s inventor, Robert Robinson, died in September 2021 of Covid. Insert your own morbid jokes here about how at least his diet didn’t kill him.

I get a daily email newsletter from Christianity Today, which is great because for a long time I couldn’t afford the magazine, and the newsletter had the content plus a few extras. The guy who does their weblog is great at gleaning every last religion story off the internet and posting them. That’s a full-time job in itself.

The ads that come with the newsletter are another thing.

There’s some schmuck who’s currently promoting what he calls the Sabbatical Diet. In a nutshell, it’s “eat like a king six mornings per week and like a pauper one morning per week.” His words. His book goes into further detail, his website offers testimonials, and at first glance it looks like a lot of bad science. If you follow the program you’ll “achieve perfect body structure, slow aging and reverse and improve the Syndrome X Diseases (Diabetes Mellitus, Hypertension, High Cholesterol, Artherosclerosis)”. Again, his words; he’s supposedly a doctor but he can’t spell arteriosclerosis. Achieve perfect body structure? Slow aging? Next he’ll be telling us that we’ll turn white and delightsome.

Bad science; and bad scripture too. He has a scripture page in which he mangles a few verses in order to back his claims. Most of it comes from Exodus 16, and some poorly interpreted bits of Acts 11; if I went into the other passages I would just get more annoyed, so I’ll stick to those bits.

Exodus 16 is where God tells Moses he’s going to feed the Israelis “bread from heaven,” which they rename “what’s that?” or manna. Every day they could gather a liter per person; on Friday they had to gather two liters because God was taking Saturday off. If they kept any overnight, it went bad. Manna apparently still can be found in the desert, but unlike Exodus, it doesn’t go bad overnight, and you can gather it on Saturdays.

This doesn’t strike me as eating like a king: It’s eating a loaf of bread every day, and it’s the same thing every day, which is why the Israelis eventually got to grumbling. You won’t starve, but you won’t look forward to mealtimes either. Kings historically have eaten themselves stupid. Plus, the Israelis had the same thing on Saturday—so technically the Exodus 16 diet is eating like a pauper daily. But it’s better than starvation, and it was meant to condition the Israelis to be dependent on YHWH.

Acts 11 is where Peter has a vision of a sheetful of non-kosher animals, which he’s instructed to kill and eat, and where he rightly says, “No.” This passage is not about how it’s okay for Christians to violate the kosher laws; it’s about how “what God has made kosher, you must not call non-kosher.” [11.9] God was conditioning Peter to preach the gospel to the gentiles—and according to then-current custom, gentiles were treated as if they were unclean, but God never said they were. He never said any such thing. The non-kosher animals were an object lesson. It's only because Christians can’t control our gluttony that this passage has been reinterpreted to say we can now eat whatever we want. (Don’t believe me? How many pastors do you know that aren’t overweight?)

That said, the Sabbatical Diet guy misinterprets Acts 11 and says we don’t have to eat kosher—as if God meant for us to eat dog and vulture and blood puddings—and says if he didn’t mean any such thing, he used a very poor example to make a spiritual statement. Apparently this guy doesn’t realize sometimes God uses the outrageous to get our attention; he must not have read the prophets nor Jesus’s parables.

If one wants to actually read the bible and find out what it says about diet, one cannot help but return to the kosher laws. You want to find a biblical diet? That’s it. Anything else is an artificial construction, meant to either sell books or get around the bible. This guy is doing both, and promising some rather miraculous results if you follow it.

The bible never promises miraculous health if you eat kosher; it just says “Don’t,” and if you don’t have the faith to follow that commandment, then why should you trust some nutjob who writes a diet book?

The foulness of the water.

The local water isn’t toxic—that I know of—but it’s really undrinkable.

I think I’ve said before that the tap water in Scotts Valley tastes horribly wrong. I still don’t entirely know why. It’s a more affluent than average community, so you’d think they’d have the tax infrastructure to pay for a better water treatment program. But it may just be that the locals are willing to buy their own water, so they don’t care that what comes out of the taps and public drinking fountains tastes like it’s coming out of an ass.

I drink a lot of coffee, and water is obviously a huge component of coffee. It’s not a component most people think of. I’ve seen many of the locals make coffee from the tap water, with the excuse, “Oh, it’s boiled; so it’s fine.” But it’s not. To my mind, it’s mostly ruined. Every once in a while you can find a blend of coffee that can largely mask the taste of the tap water—or render it ignorable—but very seldom. I’ve been drinking a lot of medium roasts lately, and the tap water turns them into what tastes like Folgers made with used swimming-pool water. I completely ruined a perfectly good 1-ounce sample bag of Colombian because I naïvely thought the coffee would overwhelm the water. It tasted like I had strained old grounds with heavily bleached notebook paper.

When I first moved to Scotts Valley to go to school, I did what most college students did—I went to Safeway™ and bought water. Like my dad, I had always figured buying water was a waste of money when I lived in communities where the tap water was barely less pure than the natural spring stuff. (I don’t know that the Scotts Valley stuff is actually impure; I just know it tastes like a coin collector has been boiling old pennies in it, so I presume impurity. It’s gotta be better than the ocean, but not by much.) Later, I took a five-gallon container to Vacaville on vacation and filled up with their tap water.

Now I have one of those Brita™ pitcher and filters. Works great. I’ll have to get another for the office. Currently I’ve been taking a 1.5-liter water bottle full of filtered water to work, but sometimes I need to make two pots of coffee (especially since I invite others to drink it).

Comparatively, I’ve noticed a lot of people who, when they want coffee, don’t make it themselves; they go to Starbucks.™ Now, I’m a big fan of their coffee, but I can’t reasonably see myself going to Starbucks™ every morning and paying $1.60 for decaf what’s been sitting in the urn for the past two hours. I’ll want more than one cup; and I don’t have the money for a $20/week coffee budget. If you drink a lot of coffee, you have to find ways of keeping your habit economical. But I can see why they frequently excuse this habit with, “It tastes so much better at Starbucks.™” Of course it does. Starbucks™ filters their water.

How much ground could a groundhog hog if a groundhog was ground up?

Today is Groundhog Day, a day in which the citizens of Punxatawney, PA harass a large rodent into seeing its shadow. Or not. Based on the way in which they harass the rodent, the people of Punxatawney will either have a longer winter, or not; something no one seriously believes, but they do it anyway and have a five-day celebration to commemorate it.

Man, would it be fun if PETA invaded.

So about that new job...

I am now working for Barnabas Missions, and though I’m currently not certain what my title is, my job is an odd combination of evangelism and marketing… and anything else that needs to be done around the office. Tomorrow I get to learn how to cook the books. Do the books is what Brian calls it, but in every business, honest or not, legitimate or not, for-profit or not, some massaging of the books has to happen in order to make everything nice and tidy. Not everything fits into the neat little pre-set categories in the bookkeeping software.

Wonder how much the IRS massages its books? And the scary thing is that it reports to the Congress, which doesn’t have the best track record at keeping itself financially honest. Nor do the individual members of Congress, especially with their campaign funds. No, there’s probably a giant cycle of malfeasance going on in there, but since it’s within the government, they can usually get away with it, yet they put the thumbscrews to poor doped-up Willie Nelson….

So now I get to rant professionally about how the church is blowing it on evangelism. Cool.

Amusing comic strip: One more day.

The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch.