Tag: cultural musings

Christians’ Letters to the Volcano Goddess

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Gee, I wish this weren’t true.

At Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, there’s a legend that, if you remove anything from the park and take it with you–say, a nice chunk of lava, as a souvenir–the volcano goddess Pele will be terribly angry and take painful vengeance on you ( http://www.thehawaiiplan.com/is-the-lava-rock-curse-real/ ). This prompts a lot of tourists to mail their souvenirs back to Hawaii, along with letters of apology to the goddess.

This has been going on for many years. The park visitors’ center used to have a display of agonized letters from repentant tourists, but that has been discontinued.

The letters are from real people who had really suffered–and thought the reason for it was the anger of a pagan goddess. “Dear Goddess Pele, I am SO SORRY that I took that rock! Ever since then I’ve had nothing but bad luck! My husband divorced me/ our car blew up for no reason/ my kid’s dog ran away/ our son voted for Obama/ my father-in-law fell off the roof…”

I’m not making it up. People believe that this volcano goddess is real, and has the will and the power to reach across the Pacific into Ohio or Illinois and mangle the lives of those who have offended her.

What does that say for the job done by our churches? You go to Sunday school as a child and then you go to church, and yet you sin against the real God without thinking twice about it. You would never write a letter of apology to God.

But people go to the trouble and the expense of mailing heavy rocks all the way back to Hawaii, along with abject letters to a pagan goddess begging her to forgive them and to lift her curse.

What does that say about our churches?

The ‘Stone Age Tribe’ That Wasn’t

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Dear Worldly Wisdom–Here we are in our cave, exactly where you expect to find us. Not only do we not have words for “war” or “conflict in our primitive, unspoiled Stone Age language. We also have no word for “sucker.” (signed) Your friends, The Gentle Tasaday

In 1971, Science and the nooze media went into ecstasy over the discovery, in the Philippines, of a “Stone Age” tribe that had apparently been totally isolated from the rest of humanity for over a thousand years ( http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_stone-age_tasaday ).

I remember that, I saw the documentaries: “the gentle Tasaday,” who didn’t have words in their language for war or fighting or conflict, totally unspoiled, front-page news for National Geographic and PBS–proof positive that Rousseau was right about The Noble Savage. Yep, that Fall of Man stuff is for the birds, Christians just invented it to be mean. In reality, man is basically good and pure and noble, and it’s only that stinkin’ Western civilization that corrupts him and turns him into a villain.

Ah, the settled science of those days!

And then in 1986 the Tasaday were denounced as a hoax–just a bunch of Mindanao villagers posing as a Stone Age tribe.

Well, really: from the Tasaday caves to the nearest modern village was only a couple of miles. How isolated could they have been?

Filipino politics is an intimate part of this story, so the controversy goes on to this day. It’s possible the Tasaday had been living in that sector of the jungle for a century or more, having fled their original home. But it is not possible that they’d been there for a thousand years and turned into hippies who wore leaves instead of tie-dyed T-shirts.

The Tasaday population today is reported at 200 or so. It doesn’t seem the gene pool would be large enough to carry them through a thousand years.

You know something? Whenever Science and the nooze media get together on a story, it’s just about gotta be humbug.

Yea, let God be true, but every man a liar… (Romans 3:4)

Is the Bible Just Stories?

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A liberal friend, who professes to be a Christian, often chides me for believing “Bible stories” that simply aren’t true–Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, Moses and the Exodus, and more. The stories aren’t true, he says, because Science says they can’t be and Science is always true.

It doesn’t seem to him that he recognizes Science as an authority superior to the word of God. I’m sure he would deny the charge. I know he would say the Bible is “essential truth”–just minus those embarrassing details involving miracles, etc. Like, we all know the witch of Endor didn’t call up Samuel’s ghost for Saul! We all know the walls of Jericho didn’t fall the way it says so in the Bible. Don’t we?

If the Bible is not God’s word, then we don’t have God’s word. Period.

Does the Bible ever use poetic language, or figures of speech, or verbal formulae that are not meant to be taken literally (such as the formula “forty days,” repeated so often in both Testaments)? Yes, it does. The Bible uses every literary device known. When God says “The cattle on a thousand hills are mine,” He doesn’t mean that the rest of the hills, starting with Hill No. 1,001, are none of His concern.

As for Noah’s Flood, I think we are at liberty to interpret that in more than one way. Mockers and scoffers like to demand, “Well, if the Ark landed on Mt. Ararat, how did the kangaroos and the koalas and the emus make it all the way back to Australia? Huh? Huh?”

God’s word does not lie. Neither is it ridiculous. The people living at Noah’s time, somewhere in the Near East, didn’t know from Australia. As far as they were concerned, the Flood truly did cover every land and wipe out all the life upon the earth.

It is not incumbent upon me, or you, to “prove” that the Great Flood actually drowned Australia, Antarctica, or the Americas.

If the choice is only to believe everything the Bible says, taking every word of it with a robotic literal-mindedness, or else to believe everything I’m told by scientists in the name of the great idol, Science–well, that would be an easy choice to make. It would be the Bible, every time.

But God does not demand that we make such a choice.

Only liberals do.

How to Write a Politically Correct Fantasy

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Let’s face it: the way things are going, soon we won’t be allowed to write anything but politically correct fantasies.

Here are a few handy guidelines which, if followed, should keep you out of re-education camp.

Make sure the villain in your story belongs to no identifiable group of people, animals, plants, or extraterrestrial life forms. Your heroic fantasy/adventure novel must be a safe space for all, wherein no one ever feels threatened and no one’s feelings are ever hurt.

Do not describe any actions or events that anyone could possibly construe as threatening. Your exciting heroic fiction should contain no violence of any kind, no scenes of strenuous activity that could be construed as ableism, and no heated dialogue. Keep it all chilled.

Conflict is psychologically unsettling, so have no conflict in your story. Let’s face it: if somebody wins, then somebody else loses, and that somebody’s feelings are going to be hurt. It’s best to avoid conflict altogether. If your story must describe any kind of contest or competition, make sure you show each and every character as a winner. Kind of like when your kids were little and everybody got a trophy or a ribbon just for showing up–and a heartfelt “Good job!” to go with it.

For absolutely the best results, leave all your pages blank. Yup, don’t write anything at all. Unless, of course, someone else finds your silence offensive and hurtful. Then you’ll have to say something, which someone else again will experience as a microaggression on your part, and probably that’ll make you feel bad because you didn’t mean it, and your apology only makes things worse, and oh I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do! Eeeeyaaah…

[transmission interrupted]

So Dinosaurs Weren’t Real?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Yeah, I could be writing about Campus Sex Week, and how it’s yet another Planned Parenthood project funded by you and me, and our new RINO Speaker of the House says sorry, it just ain’t possible to defund Planned Parenthood: heck, it just ain’t possible to do anything except real bad stuff that our LOL president wants…

Or I could write about the continuing torrent of abuse being poured on Ben Carson by noozies and other left-wingers who are probably levitating, with their heads spinning around 360 degrees, as they write it.

Well, maybe later. But this morning, just to show you that I do recognize that not all the lunacy is on the Left (although you can’t find any leftist thought that isn’t lunacy), I wish to mention, briefly, the Internet phenomenon of Dinosaur Denial.

Just run a search of “dinosaurs aren’t real” or anything like that, and you’ll find page after page of blogs and websites by persons who insist that dinosaurs never existed, it was all a hoax, and you must be a simpleton if you believe a single one of those dino fossils is legit.

In one example, the blogger insists that all the fossils, thousands and thousands of them, “were made up by people who wanted to travel the world and needed an excuse from the government for funding.” ( http://sochamc.blogspot.com/2011/01/blog-post.html ) Dinosaur fossils, he adds, are only found in exotic, hard-to-get-to places, “never in North America.”

Almost every dinosaur you ever heard of was found in North America, including Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus… it’s quite a long list.

It’s a very silly argument, which he does back up with some profanity. But I don’t mean to pick on him. This particular aspect of reality is denied by many individuals.

As Christians, I think sometimes we need to have the courage to say, “I don’t know.” I don’t know why God removed the dinosaurs. I don’t know why He didn’t explain it. The Bible tells us everything we need to know. It doesn’t tell us everything we might want to know, be it dinosaurs, the history of China, or how to build an internal combustion engine. But it does tell us how to live with God and with each other, and why we ought to live that way.

And there is nothing in the Bible that isn’t true. That goes for the miracles, too.

It’s one thing to deny Global Warming, aka Climate Change: because those who push it are notorious liars, never known to tell the truth, having been caught in lies innumerable times, and are obviously trying to gain wealth and power for themselves at our expense.

But anyone can, as I have done myself, go out to a likely place and find a dinosaur fossil or some other kind of fossil of another creature equally extinct.

I refuse to believe the secret dinosaur hoaxers ever got around to fabricating a Mosasaur tooth, breaking it into three large pieces, and planting it in the sand and clay hills behind Thom McCann Plaza in Middletown Township, New Jersey, just in time for me to dig it up in 1970.

The World’s Oldest Music

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This is a pagan hymn from about 1400 B.C., produced by an ancient Near Eastern people we call Hurrians. The music score is in cuneiform, preserved on a clay tablet. The instrument on which it is played, here, is a reproduction of a lyre, as reconstructed by archaeologists. If the translation of the tablet is accurate, then we are listening to a piece of music from 3,400 years ago.

Was this similar to the music Saul heard, when David played for him? When David first composed the Psalms, did he set them to music that sounded like this?

It’s possible that what we have here is a true window into the remote past, and a live connection with a portion of the Bible. It may be as close as we can ever come to actually hearing the Psalms as David sang them.

Which is really, really something, when you think about it.

Was It a Sin to Trick Planned Parenthood?

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Rahab the harlot hid Israel’s spies in Jericho and lied about it to the city authorities–an act for which she is praised in both Testaments of the Bible.

Okay, let me see if I understand this. Planned Parenthood is caught on videotape selling pieces of aborted babies, much of it “harvested” with the baby still alive… and the ones who did wrong are the folks who made the video?

Catholic blogger Mark Shea is just one Christian who is saying it was a sin to entrap Planned Parenthood: “All that happens is that PP is temporarily embarrassed and prolifers get a thrill for a day or two” ( http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2012/06/lying-for-jesus-a-faustian-bargain.html ).

Then again, not even that would have happened, had the tricksters from the Center for Medical Progress not caught Planned Parenthood doing its ghoul business.

This reminds me of the argument made against the Climategate emails. Never mind that the ol’ “climate scientists” were using every dirty trick in the book to put over the biggest con in human history: it was the hackers who were wrong for hacking them.

But according to Shea and others, it’s always a sin to tell a lie, even if by telling the truth to the bad guys, or keeping your trap shut when you know the truth, you help the bad guys to do evil.

But the Bible contains a number of incidents in which it is presented as virtuous to deceive the wicked.

Rahab the harlot hid Joshua’s spies in Jericho. The midwives lied to Pharaoh to save the lives of Jewish baby boys. Ehud used guile to assassinate the king of Moab. The Christians in Damascus snuck Paul out of town in a basket, over the walls, deceiving the authorities. When Herod claimed the authority to kill all babies born in Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary frustrated him by fleeing to Egypt with the baby Jesus. And this happened because the wise men, entreated by Herod to report to him after they saw the baby so that he could go and worship him, too, made a fool of him by breaking their promise and going home by a roundabout route that Herod failed to watch.

There are more. Need I go on?

It is not always a sin to lie to the bad guys.

The fact that our glorious rulers still push global warming, and still refuse to defund Planned Parenthood, cannot be blamed on the whistleblowers.

Thanks to those videos, obtained by trickery–a la Rahab or Ehud–Planned Parenthood has lost the ability to deny that it traffics in baby parts.

That’s little enough to gain; but again, that’s not the whistleblowers’ fault.

Mr. Shea, your position is wooden-headed, self-indulgent, Pharasaical, and wrong.

‘Abortion is a Sacrament,’ Libs Say

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Old-time pagans sacrificed babies to their idol, Moloch. I’ll bet they had public funding for it, too.

Why can’t we get Planned Parenthood defunded? Why, after the whole world has seen PP honchos on videotape wheeling and dealing in baby parts–some of them “harvested” with the baby still alive–can’t we get Congress to stop giving them half a billion dollars of our tax money every year?

I’ll tell you why: because it’s a religious issue.

Because, to feminists and other libs and progs, abortion is a sacrament.

Don’t believe me? But Democrats and the rest of the Loving Left have been saying this for years. Here’s a bit from 1998:

“The lights were low, and Native American flute music played softly. A counselor held the woman’s hand, whispering words of comfort as she began to surface from a guided meditation. Then the doctor showed the woman a covered silver bowl that held the tiny remains [that is, her baby] of her six-week pregnancy. ‘We ask your blessing, in the name of love…'” ( http://www.forerunner.com/champion/X0002_Abortion_Sacrament.html )

Barf bag, please.

Here’s a more recent example, from 2014:

“I now consider abortion to be a major blessing, and to be a sacrament in the hands of women…” ( http://www.lifenews.com/2014/12/26/abortionist-calls-abortion-a-sacrament-and-a-blessing/ ).

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

This fallen world has long been cursed with premeditated murder performed as human sacrifice–a sacrament of a false and wicked pseudo-church.

Secular humanism apes real religion. It has its holy scriptures–Marx, Darwin, Freud, John Lennon–and its priesthood of politicians, scientists, public school teachers, and interllecturals. It has sensitivity training as a form of confession. It has its own End Times scenario, Global Warming.

And it has abortion.

We can’t pry the money out of their hands because abortion is sacred to them.

But I think we’d better try a lot harder.

Keep Your Loved Ones Sort of Alive Forever

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

It looks like computer technology is finally catching up to the old-fashioned seance. Which is the bigger crock?

This just in–

Some academic computer guy in England says that, in 50 years or so, no one will ever again have to mourn the death of a loved one–because red-hot technology will create “synthetic digital life” which will have the effect of keeping your family members alive (sort of) forever ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11955835/Family-members-could-be-kept-alive-forever-using-social-media-history.html ).

Not really alive. But as good as! You’ll be able to talk and interact with them just as if they were really still here.

This miracle will be achieved by mining the dear departed’s collected words and works as recorded over many years in the social media! Wowee. Would that also include a lifetime’s worth of text messages? As an added bonus, they’ll make your loved one’s avatar so it’ll be able to talk with you, with whatever regional accents and turns of phrase are appropriate.

Could anything be more superficial? “I am the sum total of all my Tweets?” Ugh.

So once again we have Science stepping into God’s shoes. God offers us eternal life, by Jesus Christ? Well, so what–we can do that, too! And our version of eternal life will be better than that stale old Bible stuff, because you won’t need to have any faith. Like, this will be even better than having a robot because you won’t need any storage space.

God save us from the banality of humanism.

‘Woman of the Year’–a Man

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Civil War General Ambrose Burnside was every bit as much a woman then as Bruce Jenner is now. (You didn’t really think I was gonna post a picture of Jenner, did you? My stomach won’t take it.)

It was bound to happen. Glamour Magazine, it has been leaked, is going to name a man its 2015 Woman of the Year ( http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/25/women-cry-foul-glamour-magazine-names-bruce-jenner-woman-year/ ).

The lucky man is Bruce Gender–er, Jenner–who has had all sorts of things done to his body so he can call himself a woman.

For those of you who slept through high school biology, every one of the millions and millions of cells in a male human body has XY chromosomes. Female cells have XX chromosomes. Therefore Bruce Gender is still a man. Not one cell in his body is female.

Now, what is the purpose of all this? Our Progressive friends would have us forced to confess that Bruce Gender is a woman, on pain of being labeled Haters and Bigots and being barred from public speaking. Having redefined marriage, they feel free to redefine truth. As we saw yesterday, they teach your children that 5+5+5 does not equal 15.

The whole thrust of this program is Satanic to the core. They breed confusion, chaos, and fear, possibly to get us into the mood for a global government with them in charge of it. But who can read such depraved and addled minds?

When the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do (Psalm 11:3)?

Well, we can at least stick to the truth and speak it. We can at least do that.