Or, "Springtime in Celina, Ohio"

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And completely unrelated to any of that, we got our living room cleaned up. Yay!

It's too bad the homosexual debates have fallen off since the elections, they're among my favorite sources of hypocrisy among messianic Jews er, my fellow Christians. Jesus never mentions it at all, no one knows what the heck Paul was talking about -- there were several Greek words for "homosexual," and he failed to use any of them ("man-bed"?) -- and Sodom was destroyed (at least in parable) for wanting to rape at all as opposed to who they wanted.

And then there's Leviticus.

Of course, Leviticus wasn't written for the average person in the first place, but for Jewish Levitical priests. Even so, the old testament was replaced by the new, not merely supplemented, so it's doubly inaccurate to quote. Compounding this further -- and the source of my amusement today -- is the way Leviticus is cherry-picked. We don't keep Saturdays holy (yes, Saturdays, not Sundays as altered by the Holy See), we don't consider menstruating women unclean (a subject apart from not trusting anything that bleeds for three-to-seven days and doesn't die), we largely tolerate tattoos (even if a lot of them are silly and shallow for something that permanent), and we eat shrimp. Glorious, succulent, cholesterol-laden shrimp.

GOD HATES SHRIMP.

A simple site, yet elegant in its parody. I laughed so hard I'm surprised I didn't wake up the neighbors. Ah, the things one finds in Fark discussion threads (props to BearToy).

...the coven of cardinals in Rome, for electing a 78-year-old man Pope. Why bother? At that age, he's not a leader -- he's a placeholder. I wonder what they're waiting for...

Take the quiz: "WHAT RELIGION BESTS SUITS YOU?"

Holy Roller
Jumping, dancing, praising and speaking in tongues are just some of the many things you do to honor your god. If you meet one of the un-saved, you pray for them. You are kind, caring and full of Christ's love. Perhaps a bit obsessive, but at least you're true to your faith. PRAISE THE LORD!


...uh-huh. I don't know about jumping, dancing, or speaking in tongues. Or being obsessive... Then again, considering they're plugging the Church of Satan, I'd suppose they have their preconceived notions much as we have ours. And boy, do they really take the piss out of the Wiccans, you'd think two religions so often maligned by the same groups would have some sort of common bond. Interesting, too, how there's no mention of other major world religions (Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, etc.). I mean, sure, there's only so much you can do with a ten-question quiz, but really, it's a bit simplistic.

My own opinion is that, if there is a god (and I believe there is), then free will is the only reason for us to exist. There would be no reason for any of this, including Heaven and Hell, if we couldn't choose our own path.

My mother is one of those who thinks everything is predestined. I haven't yet gathered the cojones to throw that back at her when I do something she doesn't like. But someday I will. And pay dearly for it.

My friend Mike thinks that we do have a predetermined destiny, but we get to pick the route we take, kind of an odd combination of the two. Ultimately I find myself with the same objection: as you get closer to the destination, "fate" is decreasing your opportunity to screw up, eventually to zero -- making the journey pretty irrelevant, especially since it doesn't change anyone else's destiny either.

On the more scientific front, there's this. I hadn't even thought of a cosmic chain of cause-and-effect from the Big Bang as a possible cause of predestiny. Interesting that quantum physics might allow us to get around that. Even so, it's the only worthwhile argument for predestiny I've ever heard. Still lacking, but it's better than "God gave us rules AND decided whether or not we'll break them."

Then again, I was bound and determined to try eating ravioli cold earlier, but once the can was open I put it in the microwave, against what I thought was rigid self-determination. Maybe there's something to this whole "fate" thing after all.

No, wait, that's not it. I just licked the fork and remembered how much I hate cold tomato sauce.

I think I put too much rum in my eggnog. Or not enough eggnog in my rum, as the case may be.

And now for something completely different.
For those wondering, I ganked this from sdphreak.

cold is love
brought to you by the isLove Generator

Es muy interesante. No idea what it has to do with the price of coffee beans in Peru, though.