Dear Amazon, I was pleased to receive your recommendation that I purchase beauty and truth from you. This thanks might be read as sarcasm by more jaded people, but there is much more here than mockery. There exists appreciation: you sell real things and beauty and truth are real. You have gotten an important idea right. Beauty and truth are real. They are objective, outside our minds. In theory, they are the sort of thing you might be able to sell. However, you... Read more
Modern airlines would rather sell us happiness than provide basic comfort. Instead of serving us food, they advocate buying food. They recommend we watch something entertaining while providing us no easy way to watch anything. They urge us to relax while sandwiching us into seats designed for people the size of house elves. However, on a recent flight, I noticed my airline had matched the bromide to the situation: they urged me to sip, watch, and relax just over a bin marked... Read more
There is a wonderful scene in the film It’s a Wonderful Life where the boy is unsure what to do until he sees an important sign: Ask Dad He Knows. I can relate to this, because my Dad is a wise man, the son of a wise man, himself the son of a wise man! Something may have gone haywire in my generation, but at least I have a good heritage! The other day as I looked at American politics, I asked Dad:... Read more
The clowns are watching you. They really are, but evidently you are not watching them. At least one ringmaster has something to say about it. There is an American circus association and they have a magazine White Tops. You probably do not care or Ringling Brothers would still be a circus and not a memory. Yet an experienced ringmaster has entertained thousands of people live and gathers data as he does so. Live entertainment is a biconditional relationship. We forget that as... Read more
Recently I got a LOL from a reader who said: Odin came to earth to defeat the Ice Giants*….guess what? No more Ice Giants. Jesus came to earth to get rid of sin…guess what? LOL.” This seems more an attempt at wit than a try at making me laugh out loud really, but there is an argument here: even as a fictional character Jesus is ineffective. It runs something like this: Fictional Odin came to earth to kill fictional ice giants.... Read more
Jesus Christ was, is, and is to come as King. This is good news, because His Kingdom was, is, and is to come. God has never gone on vacation, or been overthrown. He has allowed us to dissent, rebel, choose badly. King Jesus then begins the process of bringing healing, hope, and health. Jesus said some things so clearly you would think nobody could misunderstand him. You would be wrong. Jesus said: “. . . love your enemies and pray for those... Read more
“Judge not that you be not judged!” Talk to any American and this is the one bit of the Bible that you can be sure they know. A person may dislike Christianity in general, but while they are telling you to stop worshipping your “sky daddy” and are (as an actual critic said of me) a “clueless cult clown slave” for being a Christian, they will then become indignant if you think they are wrong! “Judge not that you be... Read more
Bunnies (and the other animals!) exist and the good news is that they do not exist for me. They are there, being bunnies indifferent to what I am doing. They do not eat with me in mind. One reason I am a conservationist is that I do not think it is my right as a human to force my needs into rabbit space without some thought. God made a world that came to have bunnies and though God made humankind... Read more
Is God moral? A monster? Or both? Read more
God created a good world and put humankind it that world to explore, play, and build civilizations. We sometimes have not done well at these tasks, building cities on the flanks of volcanos, torturing each other, and making a muddle of things. Civilizations make people happier, but also increase our discontents. In the light of eternity, where we will live in the future, all of this might seem unimportant, but it is a school for our souls. A proverb says: It is... Read more
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