Tag: cultural musings

The Masters of Futility

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I was all set to write about how hard it is to argue with people who know very little but believe they know a lot: only thing is, most of what they know just isn’t so.

As futile as this is, it is nothing, nothing at all, compared to what was endured. from 1952 to 2015, by the Washington Generals.

Remember them? They were created to be the patsies for the Harlem Globetrotters. During their 63-year history, they won just six games while losing more than 13,000 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Generals ). Changing their name and their uniforms many times didn’t help. They last defeated the Globetrotters–by accident!–in 1971, snapping a 2,495-game losing streak.

You would think, during the course of those zillion games, they might have caught on to some of the Globetrotters’ tricks and not been fooled by them anymore. But the Generals were created to be fooled. They displayed no capacity for learning–worse than Charlie Brown with the football.

God asks us, His servants, to do many difficult things.

But He does not ask us to be the Washington Generals.

Dum Peple Who Arenot in Collidge

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Wold yuo beleave it, that stopid lee his whife she crying for yung peple who gots al nosetallgick for Old Time things thats way older than thay is and how culd thay miss somthing that thay never seen? and she says its so sad boo-hoo! that these hear yung peple missed out on beter times that wil nevver come again.

Well istnt that jist stopid! It jist gose to show how dum peple are if thay are not in collidge getting Smart . As a interllectural, i kno that those Old Times thay were horibble! No Gay Maridge, no trans Peple,  yiu culdnt get a bortion, no Rapp Musick, no Micro Agresion, and al that loesy christinitty with Churches and stuf–And hardly nobody went to collidge back then so thay was alyaws short of Interllecturals and thay didnt have noboddy smart to tel them watt to do! but then allong come The 60es and my prefesser he sayes The Country it started to wake up then and now we got way more Smart Peple.

That stopid lee he is vacuming and it makin me hongry and i founed some nice Hankerchiffs yestredday i think i wil ete them now.

Conspiracy Baloney Aimed at Our Lord

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

We watched the new X-Files last night. Patty is crazy about The X-Files. I’m not. All that conspiracy stuff gets to me.

When the show was over–complete with liberal TV wallah’s definition of “a conservative,” Heaven help us–I checked my blog… only to find still more conspiracy theorizing, this time by a reader.

It is not possible that anyone could be so dense as to spend a minute or two here and not realize it’s a Christian blog. But anti-Christians have this enormous sense of entitlement that empowers them to bad-mouth Christians’ most sacred beliefs, and no manners, either–they’re like someone who barges into your living room and pees on your couch.

So this guy comes on to tell me there was never any such person as Jesus Christ. Nope, you don’t have a Savior. Jesus, you see, never existed. He and the whole New Testament were “written in secret, by the Roman aristocracy–” what? all of them?–“as an antidote to Judaism.” It was all a conspiracy, you dig? A Roman conspiracy against the Jews!

But, Mr. Conspiracy Monger, the Romans had no need to conspire against the Jews. They had this thing called the Roman Army, and when some little nation like Judea bugged them, they sent the Roman Army over to kill them. End of problem.

There is evil at large in this world; and although its face is human, it serves spiritual wickedness in high places.

And in the end, God wins.

When Snow Time Was Happy Time

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Well, we’ve got 28 inches of snow here in Central New Jersey this morning, and I don’t reckon to be going anywhere.

Whenever it snows any serious amount, I remember what a pure, intense delight it was to wake up in the morning and discover there would be no school that day. I’ll never forget that feeling.

Ah, sledding! Whooshing down the hill at Tommy’s Pond on the ol’ Flexible Flyer. We could keep that up for hours.

The pond was a lot of fun at night, too. Everybody came out for the ice-skating. There was a fire to warm your hands, a bench or two for when your ankles gave out, and whole families gliding around on the ice.

Snowmen standing guard in every yard, snowball fights and snow forts–and oatmeal never tasted so good as it did when you had it for breakfast on a snow day. My wife adds: “Pancakes for breakfast, and we could all have breakfast together because it was a snow day and my father had to stay home from work. That was when he could spend all day playing with us.”

Yeah–and my aunts took me to every lake and pond for miles around for the ice-skating. We got to be true connoisseurs of frozen bodies of water.

I guess I ought to point out that a lot of cities, towns, and counties have banned sledding in recent years, because every human activity in which one just might get injured ought to be banned for our own good, and it’s been many a year since I’ve seen anyone ice-skating on Tommy’s Pond–or anywhere else outdoors, for that matter.

Oh, well, maybe I dreamed it. But if I did, it was a good dream.

Jesus Christ, Lord of All

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

This image, found in many ancient Byzantine churches, is called Christ Pantokrator, which means “Christ the Ruler of All Things.”

This includes the 28 inches of snow that fell on us yesterday, and the brilliant sunshine that now spreads itself over glistening expanses of pure whiteness.

It is good for us to see Christ in majesty, and to remember that God the Father has promised to put all things under Him.

Just a little thought to start your day.

I Hope God’s Listening: ‘The Maker’

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

This comes from my chess buddy, Jessicafischerqueen–it’s Canadian singer Daniel Lanois performing The Maker.

Why am I posting all this music? I’m not really a music kind of guy.

Well, I’ll tell you–to me, it just feels and looks like our whole civilization’s going down the tubes, getting devoured by the ungodly and the wicked, farther down each day… and what can we do, you and I? What is there to show for our conviction, our reasoning, our rhetoric, our passion, or our works? Nor does our cleverness seem to be getting us anywhere.

We need for God to hear us. We need for Jesus Christ Our Lord to set things right. Let fire out of Heaven consume the false prophets of this age.

And we need to sing louder.

By the Waters of Babylon

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?  –Psalm 137:1-4

It would not seem unusual for Christians to feel like this, these days. Only the difference is, the Old Testament Jews were carried off captive to Babylon; but for American Christians, their home country transformed itself into Babylon. And it’s worse for Christians in Britain, and the other European countries that once were called Christendom.

Yes, we might sing, with Don McLean, the refrain from Psalm 137. How, indeed, do we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

Maybe like this.

Yes, I think: very much like this.

Britain’s Fear of Christians

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I told you, you can learn a lot about an era, a nation, by examining its popular culture.

Last night we watched the first episode of a recent (2015) British TV series, Midwinter of the Spirit. It’s about a Church of England woman minister who becomes an exorcist. It’s really rather well done, although the premise does sound kind of lame, if not absurd.

But the thing that most impressed me about it was the way the screenwriters have the other characters react to members of the clergy. The other characters, from all walks of life, behave as if Christianity were some weird tribal cult from the heart of the Amazonian rain forest, complete with shrunken heads.

We have also seen this in other British TV productions: Midsomer Murders, for one.

England was not like this when I was born. This has happened during my own lifetime, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. They’ll still pop into church for the odd funeral or wedding, but for all practical purposes, Britain, cradle of saints, has been de-Christianized.

How? How did that happen? And what do these de-Christianized Brits believe in now? I’m almost afraid to ask, but I want to know. What do they believe in now?

A prediction: phenomena traditionally described as demonic possession will increase as a culture drifts farther and farther away from Christianity, and into God knows what.

Is It OK for Christians to Watch Pagan Movies?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

When this sort of thing starts making sense to you, it’s time to ease up on the movies.

You probably already know I’m going to say yes, of course it is. And pagan TV shows. And to read pagan books, etc. But not all Christians would agree with me.

In Acts 17, Paul delivers a sermon to the pagan know-it-alls of Athens, in which he quotes “your own poets.” Obviously Paul was familiar with pagan Greek literature, and used it to make his Christian message more understandable to his audience. Not that many of them listened, but that was hardly his fault.

How can we effectively carry out our mission, the Great Commission, if we don’t know what we’re up against? If we don’t know how to communicate with this world’s audience? If we have no idea of how they see things, no idea of how they think?

Popular culture can do much to educate us in these areas.

To be sure, you don’t want to be watching so many of those pagan movies and TV shows, if it’s gotten to the point that they’re starting to make sense to you. For instance, it’s useful to know how deeply the Evolutionary Myth has soaked into our culture. It is not useful to start believing in it yourself.

If you can learn how to decode the cultural messages buried in movies and TV programs, you can learn much. At the very least you can learn what to watch out for.

You don’t have to feel guilty for watching a movie.

Just don’t let the movies get to you.

Zillionaire to Build Robo-Nanny

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Mark Zuckerberg, the grand panjandrum of Facebook, has vowed to build a robot “to look after his house and keep tabs on his newborn daughter,” The Independent has reported ( http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/mark-zuckerberg-to-build-robot-butler-to-look-after-his-child-as-part-of-2016-new-years-resolution-a6795376.html ).

I’m old-fashioned. I thought your wife did those things. Or you could do them together.

This is a milestone–or will be, if it works out all right and the robot doesn’t wind up shoving assorted Zuckerbergs into the microwave–in the quest to create true Artificial Intelligence: an enterprise that is not even logical, much less potentially successful.

Sinful, fallible, psychologically vulnerable, misinformed, under-informed or even ignorant, wishful-thinking human beings cannot create any kind of intelligence superior to their own. We can build computers that can do certain simple things–like playing chess, for instance–without making bonehead moves of the kind that human players make because they’re tired, distracted, or whatever. But we can’t build a computer that can use chess as a way of thinking about love.

We cannot build robots that are wise.

We cannot build robots that are better than we are.

“Artificial Intelligence” can never be anything but artificial. It is not true intelligence, but an unthinking simulation of intelligence.

But hey, who listens? Go ahead and let the bot mind the baby. How much worse can it be than public school, or television?