(no subject)

[which_chick]

Yesterday's news: Yield curve inverts. CNN Money has the story here.

Also, I played The Bible Game last night. It contains distressingly tiny amounts of actual Bible knowledge and is mostly composed of non-Bible challenge activities. The challenges are video-game-ish and I suck at them (example challenge: Outline blocks on Tower of Babel to make them crumble, kind of a tetris effect.) compared to the computer generated characters. The game show format is remarkable for the sole singular feature I found amusing as (forgive me) hell: The Wrath of God. Think Whammy in Wheel of Fortune, only you get a rain of frogs, a swarm of locusts, masses of flies, and so forth. Playing the game show (called "Do Unto Others") is like being a pharoah, almost. You see a lot of The Wrath of God in this game, to the point where I just started to laugh at the rains of frogs. I mean, they're totally random and there's nothing you can do about them. You didn't deserve them. I can understand dying in DDR if I fuck up enough. I can understand dying in, say, Quake II if I fail to account for the snipers. I can understand getting eaten by the ghosts in Pacman. However, my mental concept of video games does not allow for random fucking rains of frogs. It doesn't make narrative sense. Anyway, given the frequency with which this game employs The Wrath of God, it was clearly designed by someone who'd read his Jonathan Edwards.

Comments

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

I have believed for a long time that God will sort things out.

So I have faith that the people I love who do not believe, which includes the majority of my friends at Otakon etc. will be taken care of.

And I don't mean taken care of like taken out and shot or anything.

I always found it interesting that my fundy, judgemental M.I.L. never knew the beliefs of her churches, for example the belief that babies are sinful. A baby is one of the most selfish beings on the planet. But it's okay for her to believe that babies are automatically "saved", but not the old sinner down the street that she doesn't like, or even the good person who does lives a godly life but doesn't belong to a specific baptist church.

One of the saddest things about people like that, people who are so busy judging their family and neighbors that they don't look to their own behavior, is their effect on their family. Karl's dad left him a note in his will about how he hoped Karl and Becky would be saved. It was like a blow. he judged his own son (who is a believer, by the way, but doesn't follow exactly what his father did), something we are told Not To Do. No "I love you", nothing like that. I suppose it seemed like a good idea to him when Karl's dad wrote it. But it was an awfully cold thing to leave his children at a time when they needed comfort.

[staceman.livejournal.com]

That's the biggest thing that disturbs me about the so-called Christians; They're so busy judging others, that they rarely look at themselves. And they feel that they don't have to; they feel that since they simply go to church and are doing right by their peers and their pastor, that they are surely great, godly people. The truth is, they really don't even truly understand their religion. The God thing, ends up being nothing more than a big name to drop to associate themselves with, and a big scary monster that's gonna get you if you don't believe and live like they do. (God is gonna GET you! Rawwwrrrr!) All in all, religion is just a way to make them feel superior to others, and to another extent, a drug to make them feel better about the mystery of what happens when they die.

Since we're disclosing our belief systems here, I'll take a stab at trying to explain what I believe. I believe in a higher power that designed/created us. I don't believe that it wants/needs to be worshipped, nor does it judge or punish- I believe that it designed us to be self-punishing. (this is probably starting to sound like George Carlin's "Big Electron" theory!) It's like we're machines, programmed, if you will. Actions and consequences, good or bad. When we go against the programming, bad things happen, not unlike throwing a monkey wrench into delicate clockwork. It works like logic. I believe that things like, for instance, how stress can affect your health, are good clues to this.

As for the bible, I believe that it is indeed full of good things, common sense things that go along with how we are designed and programmed by the higher power. But of course, it is an interpretation by *people*, and thus was subjected to things like personal bias by the people who wrote the particular books. Good intentions, horribly bad presentation. Not to mention what may have got lost in the various translations. You can't deny that a lot of the stuff is really out there. (http://www.landoverbaptist.org has some fine examples of really bad verses, that you can even get on T-shirts and coffee mugs if you so desire!) One good example, among a load of others, is Revelations. However, I don't think that it can easily be passed off as total bull. Amongst all the crazy symbolism, I believe are things that have came to pass, happening now, etc.. But, I believe that it was all simply a logical calculation, someone many many moons ago sitting down and thinking of possible outcomes that could come about if people as a whole were to continue on certain wrong paths. I also believe that the bible isn't really neccessary reading, I believe that many common sense things, as I mentioned, are programmed into us, and naturally come to you through clear thinking and perhaps meditation. But in today's world, clear thinking is tough, with all the distractions, peer pressure, and temptations of doing things to excess.

Unfortunately, things like this are very difficult for me to put into the right words, so I'm not sure if I quite explained myself correctly. Take it as a brief, flawed summary of what I believe. ;) It all makes my brain hurt, and I don't like discussing it much. I know what I know, if ya know what I mean. :)

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

My big problem with Revelations is that here is a sermon preached to a specific group of people. And it's being taken as prophecy about the end of the world. I truly hope that nobody ever does that to some of the sermons that i've heard from people.

Just like Paul preaching to a group about covering their heads because the women of a specific congregation, freed from the constraints of head coverings for the first time in their lives had been sporting more and more elaborate hairdos to out do each other, needed to be thinking about what was being preached, not having better hair than the next woman.

Do I think that the Revelations of Saint John is a prophecy of the end of the world? No.

But again, that's my opinion.

There's a lot of common sense in the Bible. People don't tend to read it though.

[sara-merry99.livejournal.com]

The problem is that a lot of the common sense in the bible is hidden by the culturally specific, the mythological, and the just plain...don't know the word...horribleness of it. I mean according to Leviticus it's an abomination to wear mixed fiber clothes, kids should be stoned for disobeying their parents, and gays deserve death. Yuck!

The signal to noise ration in the Bible is not so very good, in my opinion. And I say this as a committed Jew (though one who is having issues with some of the theology).

[staceman.livejournal.com]

http://www.cafepress.com/landoverbaptist/75553

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