Christianity In Ten Words

Thomas Jefferson is often held up by the more rabid Bible-thumpers as a ‘Good Christian,’ who helped found the United States, and is validation for their “on Christian values,” and other judgemental views.  Jefferson however, edited, and had printed, a personal copy of the Bible, in which he removed every story of Christ’s ‘miracles,’ although he never admitted why he had done that.

While viewed as a Christian, he had the following to say about religion, and God.

“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support religious worship or ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion.”

“Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”

***

When Christians talk about being “persecuted,” what they really mean is that they are discontent at no longer being able to use social and Political power to force their views, their morality or their dogma onto other people as they once did.  They can no longer burn people at the stake, prosecute people for blasphemy, and have much less of an ability to oppress minorities, and “keep them in their place.”

The dogma, ignorance and authoritarianism that is required for Christianity to maintain control has greatly diminished, and religious authorities and their institutions no longer have the power, nor the respect that they once had.  This makes them feel as if they are being unfairly persecuted, although they have no understanding of what the word means.

• Religion is about internal spiritual experiences, and that is all.
• There is no world other than the material world around us.
• There are no beings other than the living organisms on this planet or elsewhere in the universe.
• There is no objective being or thing called God that exists separately from the person believing in him.
• There is no ultimate reality outside human minds either.
• We give our own lives meaning and purpose; there is nothing outside us that does it for us.
• God is a projection of the human mind.
• God is the way human beings put ‘spiritual’ ideals into a poetic form that they are able to use and work with.
• God is simply a word that stands for our highest ideals.
• God-talk is a language tool that enables us to talk about our highest ideals and create meaning in our lives.
• Religious stories and texts are ways in which human beings set down and work out spiritual, ethical, and fundamental meanings in life.
• Our religious talk is really about us and our inner selves, and the community and culture we live in.
• Religious talk uses the familiar language of things that exist outside ourselves to make it easier for us to handle complex and subtle ideas.
• Faith therefore isn’t belief in a God that exists outside minds.
• Faith is what human beings do when they pursue ‘spiritual’ ideals.
• Saying that someone follows a particular faith is a way of talking about their attitudes to life and to other people.

It’s Not Catching

Doctors at a hospital in Brooklyn, New York have gone on strike. Hospital officials say they will find out what the doctors’ demands are as soon as they can get a pharmacist over there to read the picket signs!

***

Marriage is like a deck of cards.  When you start out, all you need is a couple of hearts, and a diamond.  After a few years though, you’re hoping for a club and a spade.

***

I called the animal shelter today and told them that I’d found six kittens in a suitcase in the woods.  They asked, “Are they moving?”  I said, “I don’t know, but that would explain the suitcase.

***

A professor at the University of Oklahoma was giving a lecture on ‘Involuntary Muscular Contractions’ to his first year medical students.  Realizing this was not the most riveting subject, the professor decided to lighten the mood slightly.  He pointed to a young woman in the front row and said,  ‘Do you know what your asshole is doing while you’re having an orgasm?’  Her answer: “He’s probably at the shooting range with his buddies.”

***

A drunken man with a suitcase and a newspaper arrives at the railway station and sits on a bench near a priest. The drunk takes a bottle of whisky out of his bag, drinks a lot of it and then reads the newspaper quietly. At one point he asks the priest:

“Excuse me, Father; do you know why people get sick with spondylosis?”

“Of course”, the priest answers in a cold and sarcastic courtesy. “The factors that cause spondylosis are: a messy life, the companionship of doubtful-quality women, the excessive consumption of alcohol and tobacco, drunks ending up in brothels… All these lead to spondylosis”.

“Wowww! I would never have believed that…” replies the drunk and then reads his newspaper again.

After the priest thinks for a while at what he said, he again addresses the drunkard, but this time in a gentle tone:

“Excuse me, I didn’t mean to offend you. How long are you sick with spondylosis, my son?”

“Me? No, Father… I’ve never been sick with it. I just read in the newspaper that the Pope is sick with spondylosis…”

***

A woman was arrested and fined for bringing her own popcorn, candy and soda to a movie theater.  The good news is that she came out a few bucks ahead of if she’d bought it all at the snack bar.

 

Flash Fiction #161

PHOTO PROMPT © Rochelle Wisoff-Fields

LOUD AND CLEAR

Uh-huh….
So your grandson got an interview for the assistant quality-control position.
Uh-huh….
It’ll be straight day-shifts, and Monday to Friday, and a raise.

Great!  Look, I’d love to stand and talk, but Hubby’s bringing home his boss and wife.  I’m a little tied up right now.  I’m trying to make her favorite salad to impress them.  It has kale and watercress and pine-nuts.

I have to run to the store to get balsamic vinegar.  I don’t know how it will taste, but it’ll look great in my crystal salad bowl.  Call me later.  I’ll tell you how it went.

***

Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story.

A Poem About My First Car

There won’t be much poem
I had to tow the thing home

It was a dark British green
An ugly shade to be seen

It was never much fun
The damned thing wouldn’t run

It was a ’52 Morris
It wouldn’t start for us

I got it for free
The owner overcharged me

It came home from a farm
The chickens did it some harm

We towed it home with a rope
I never had any hope

I didn’t take time to love it
I just quickly said ‘Shove it’

Mr. Snake-Oil did offer
An older trade he did proffer

I can’t think of a rhyme for ‘learning experience.’  If you haven’t already, but would like to read about my early automotive adventures, click to go back to read about My First Cars.

’18 A To Z Challenge – D

 

 

 

 

 

It was inevitable, destined, pre-ordained, foretold even, that the blog post for the letter D, would be about

DESTINY

Do you believe in destiny?  Do you believe in providence, or fate?  Do you believe in prophesy or divination?  Do you believe in shwarma karma?  Do you go to astrologers, card-readers, fortune-tellers, or palm-, or tea-leaf readers?  See me early next month when I publish my F Is For Fools Alphabet Challenge post.  At the end of it, there will be a $100/ticket raffle for the Eiffel Tower.  Like Stevie Wonder said in his song, if you believe in things that you don’t understand – that’s Superstition. (Click to listen)

Like the belief in the unprovable God, I don’t believe in any of the above.  According to some of the smartest guys in the world, the flow of time is continuous and one-way only.  While a lot of con-artists people have claimed to be able to see the future, and a lot of gullible marks buy into it, no-one has ever proved that they’ve done it.

The Bible and the Christian religion are full of ‘The Prophets.’  I see a bunch of guys who made a lot of vague statements, and then took credit when something obvious occurred.  Even the Prophet(?), Elijah, who ‘predicted’ the birth of Christ, got it wrong.  He stated that the Messiah would be named Emmanuel.  He gave his ‘prophesy’ to a Hebrew king as a guarantee that he would win an upcoming battle.  Instead, the king lost the war, his city, and his life.

Ever the cynic, my Father told me that fortune-tellers made ‘predictions’ like, “You will pass water twice before you return home.”  Well, piss on that!  There are many things in life that we can’t control, but instead of paying some swindler to predict the future for us, we would all be better off getting off our tuffets, (What??  It worked for Miss Muffet.) and working toward something rewarding ourselves.  For anyone who doesn’t, I predict a destiny of poverty and disappointment.  There are profits in being prophets.

I can’t predict that all you lovely readers will return in a couple of days – but I prophesy that I sure would like it if you do.  C’mon, help me turn some profits in my stats.  😀

Note: This was published later than usual for me because of an internet outage in my area.  Please forgive me; I haven’t forsaken you, my lovely audience.

Flash Fiction #160

PHOTO PROMPT submitted by Courtney Wright. © Photographer prefers to remain anonymous.

FLYING HIGH

This isn’t Area 51.  This isn’t even The Excited States, home to the conspiracy theory, and Emperor Orange Foolius.  This is safe, staid, Southern Ontario.  How do you get ‘alien abduction?’

There are no footprints leading away.  Do you think he flew?

Wellll….

What do we do?

Whadya mean?

Do we call the Air Force?  Do we call the Mounties?

I say, do nothing!  If Bob don’t come back, I ain’t gonna miss him.  He’s such a pain in the ass, if aliens really did take him, in a day or so, they’ll bring Red Chief back, safe and sound.

***

Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a 100 word story.

Complete And Correct

Used properly, the English language is one of nuance and precision.  Used as many of the great unwashed do….it’s a wonder that even the pizza order is correct.

I have quoted Mark Twain’s admonition that “There’s a mighty difference between lightning, and a lightning bug.”

I recently stumbled across a blog post about euphemisms;

Euphemisms are generally used to change something icky into something more palatable. As George Carlin said, “Sometime in my life—no one asked me about this—toilet paper became bathroom tissue. The dump became the landfill. And partly cloudy became partly sunny.”

I heard Carlin’s debut album, shortly after it came out.  It was funny.  His later work – not so much.  It’s difficult to be funny for 40 years.  He began to make fun of the English language.  I didn’t find it terribly funny, because it was neither complete nor correct.

None of the above are euphemisms.  Early toilet paper was paper….like pages from a Sears catalog.  It beat using a corn cob. Soon, it was transformed into soft, absorbent tissue, used all through the bathroom, for applying skin cream, removing makeup, blotting lipstick, (a single square is faster and cheaper than an entire Kleenex) blowing your nose, or as emergency feminine hygiene material.  It is no longer paper, used only on the toilet.

We used to just dump and abandon garbage – hence, DUMP.  Nowadays, waste is shredded, some is incinerated, compost starter and soil is added and mixed, and the lot is bulldozed and landscaped into a re-usable landfill.

Media weather language is precise.  There are seven words to describe skies – from overcast, to cloudy, to partly sunny, to scattered (clouds), to partly cloudy, to sunny, to clear.  Partly sunny is 10% open sky.  Partly cloudy is 10% cloud.  They are not even vaguely the same.  One did not turn into the other, no matter what George falsely claims.

George lost me as a customer when he claimed that there were 3 words – flammable, inflammable, and non-flammable.  “Why 3??  Either it flams, or it doesn’t flam.”  Just a minute George, flammable means that something will burn.  Inflammable means that it will immediately, vigorously burst into flame.  A block of wood is flammable.  An open pail of gasoline is inflammable, so, there are 4 words, flammable – non-flammable, inflammable – non-inflammable.  If you’re going to bitch about something, even for comedy, it really helps your credibility if you know what you’re talking about.

I was in a medical center the other day, where an information station was set up under an umbrella. Emblazoned on the umbrella were the words SERVICE AMBASSADOR. I find nothing distasteful about the word INFORMATION, but I am entertained by the thought of a group meeting to find a supposedly better (and definitely more pompous) description of the services offered under that umbrella. SERVICE AMBASSADOR: Do you suppose the, ahem, ambassadors who staff that desk need congressional confirmation?

Like ‘toilet paper’, above, ‘Information desks’ have developed to provide far more services than mere information.  Every English-speaking country in the world has Ambassadors.  I can only hope that it was a vain attempt at humor, and not narrow-minded American provincialism that she felt any of them require U S Congressional confirmation.

Loblaw’s food chain came forward, and admitted to price-fixing on bread.  A letter to a newspaper complained that their fraud conviction was ironic.  1 – By voluntarily admitting wrong-doing, they received immunity from prosecution – so, no conviction.  2 – The bread was exactly as advertised, just too expensive.  What they did, was price-fixing, not fraud.  3 – What is ironic, is that the guy who complained, hasn’t got a clue what he’s talking about.

Come on people, Stop, Think, Understand!  English is a beautiful, accurate, expressive language.  Please learn to use it correctly.  That’s what I ask for.  What I’ll probably get….is that guy’s Hawaiian pizza.  😯

Hot Dog

A man was eating a hotdog….. A woman with a small dog walked up to sit in another bench across from the man. Immediately the little dog began to bark at the man while he ate.  The man asked “Would you mind if I throw him a bit?”  ”Not at all.” the woman replied.  The man picked up the dog and tossed him over a wall.

***

I bumped into an old school friend today.  He started showing off, talking about his well paid job and expensive sports car.  Then he pulled out a photo of his wife and said, “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”  I said, “If you think she’s gorgeous, you should see my girlfriend.”  He said, “Why? Is she a stunner?”  I said, “No, she’s a fucking optician.”

***

A black student goes to his Mom and says, “I have the biggest dick in the third grade.  Is that because I’m black?”  She says, “No, that’s because you’re 19.”

***

My wife and I were woken up at 3AM by loud banging on our door. I got up, opened the door and there was a drunken stranger standing in the pouring rain, asking for a push. “Are you insane man?!!? It’s 3 in the morning!!” I screamed, slamming the door and stormed back to bed…

“Who was that?” asked my wife.”  Just some drunk asking for a push.” I grumbled. “Did you help him?” she asked. “No, I did NOT! It’s 3AM and it’s pouring rain! ”Well, you’ve a short memory.” she said. “Don’t you remember three months ago when we broke down and those two guys helped us? You should be ashamed of yourself! Now get out there and help him! “She had a point, and angrily, I got dressed and went out into the darkness, calling out, “Hello, are you still there?”  ”Yes.”  “Do you still need a push?” ”Yes please.” ”Where are you?”  ”Over here…on the swing.”

***

Dad and Son are in the living room when dad’s feet get cold. “Get my slippers from upstairs” he says. While upstairs Son sees two of his sister’s friends, so he goes up to both of them, “My Dad told me to come up here and fuck both of you”.
”You’re lying” they retort.
“Okay, I’ll prove it then, Dad, did you say both of them?”
”What’s the point of fucking one?”

***

THE $100 TATTOO

Eric gets home late one night and Sarah, his wife, asks “Where the hell have you been” Eric replies “I’ve been out getting a tattoo”
“A tattoo?” She frowned. “What kind of tattoo did you get?”
“I got a hundred dollar bill on my privates” he said proudly.
“What the hell were you thinking?” she asked, shaking her head in disgust. “Why on earth would an Accountant get a hundred dollar bill tattooed on his privates?”
“Well one, I like to watch my money grow. Two, once in a while I like to play with my money. Three, I like how my money feels in my hand. And lastly, instead of you going out shopping, you can stay right here at home and blow a 100 bucks any time you want”

***

Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar.  They sit.  They drink.  They leave.

***

Government Philosophy: If it ain’t broke, fix it ’till it is.  😦  😯

 

Flash Fiction #159

PHOTO PROMPT ©Jill Wisoff

 

MAMMON INC.

Buddy Bob was railing about politicians, and how they interfere with our lives, especially financially – laws, rulings, regulations, taxes, duties, levies, tariffs – control our every move, and milk us dry.

I told him that he was right – in a way – but it all started here.  Politicians are just the mouthpiece, the head of the ventriloquist’s dummy.  This is corporate America, the center of the real power behind the throne.

You don’t think Donald Trump got elected on his intellect and wit.  Those aren’t telephone lines coming from those castles; they’re marionette strings, pulled by the puppet-masters.  Speak Donald!  Dance Donald!

***

Go to Rochelle’s Addicted to Purple site and use her Wednesday photo as a prompt to write a complete 100 word story.

Don’t Get All Emotional

23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain

http://fishingboatproceeds.tumblr.com/post/122182141428/23-emotions-people-feel-but-cant-explain

Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.

Opia: The ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.

Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.

Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.

Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops.

Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.

Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.

Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.

Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.

Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.

Vemödalen: The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.

Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening

Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.

Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.

Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.

Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.

Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone.

Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.

Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.

Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, which inhabits only one place at a time.

Liberosis: The desire to care less about things.

Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years.

Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.

There’s no sense asking if you’ve experienced any of these.  We’ve all experienced them all, and will continue to, only now we’ve got a label that we can point to.  I will experience my usual, clearly-labeled pleasure if you visit, read, comment….  You know – the usual, happy déjà vu.  😀