Category: Uncategorized

2 comments

As I have made abundantly clear in this blog I have been having ongoing issues with Apple’s Magic Mouse maintaining connection with my MacBook. Lately my entire system has been simply randomly locking up (even if the mouse isn’t even connected), forcing a hard reboot.

This kind of behavior is new to my experience with Apple. In fact, the lack of having to constantly reboot was one of the perks I enjoyed after the continual rebooting I had to do with Windows; lately all that is changing.

But my problems are nothing compared to what Ben is going through. Between his phone, his watch, and his Mac I’m expecting one of them to be violently thrown against a wall any day now. And multiple trips to the Genius Bar have solved nothing. Their standard response to any of these problems? Wipe and reinstall. Wipe and reinstall. That’s a Microsoft response, Apple; not something we expect from you.

I used to enjoy going to the Apple Store. Now I dread it.

As I wrote earlier, I’ve all but given up any hope of getting my bluetooth issues resolved. But this raises the issue of that legendary Apple quality that prompted so many of us to join the church to begin with. How many iterations of an OS do we have to go through before any of these issues are addressed—if at all—much less resolved?

I’m not about to abandon Apple; returning to Microsoft would be a nightmare in my opinion, but it looks to me like Apple is going through a rough patch. It’s not as profound as in the 90s, but there’s trouble afoot. Whether the folks in Cupertino are aware of it and simply choosing to ignore it is a question that’s up for grabs, but based on the steadily declining quality of the software side of the house over the last several years, it’s obvious that too many lines of business are taking their toll on quality control. I hate to haul out this old trope, but if Steve Jobs were alive today, none of this shit would be happening.

At this point, I’d even be willing to forego the now expected yearly updates and pay for OS upgrades again—as long as these ongoing, lingering problems were finally cleared up.

0 comments

2 comments

“And fuck Nancy Grace, too!”

0 comments

While it’s been proven that our memories are categorically unreliable and subject to change, I still find it amazing at what seems to come washing up when you’re lying wide awake in bed at 4 am.

Take this morning for instance. For no particular reason whatsoever, a memory of sleeping in my great aunt’s attic came flooding back to me.

Like we’d done every other summer since I was a baby, my mom, my sister and I went back east to spend a couple months with my grandparents in upstate Massachusetts. In 1968, we deviated from the usual pattern of flying into JFK where we’d meet the grandparents and they’d drive us to the house. That year, we flew to Green Bay to meet the grandparents there and spend a few days with my great aunt; my great aunt who never married. (In some families it runs, it other it gallops; just sayin’.)

The bits of that trip that stand out to me are odd to say the least. I’d recently developed a childhood interest in human anatomy, thinking one day that I’d grow up to be a doctor. I had books, I had plastic models (having received The Visible Head as a birthday gift about a month before our trip), but of all the anatomical models that I had or wanted, the one that always seemed to elude me was The Visible Woman. (The Visible Man was the one that started me on this particular path about a year earlier.) Guess what I found in Green Bay?

After having built the model, I showed my mom (who I remember being in bed, laid up and recovering from something flu-like) and she wondered if she could see “where she had her surgery.” Surgery? “Down there,” she said.

Now this is where memory selectivity obviously comes into play. I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of my mom having gone into the hospital for a hysterectomy—unless it happened concurrently with me coming down with a major flu three years earlier; something that sidelined me for what seemed like weeks and explains why I remember my Dad’s mom being around for an extended period.

Anyway, back to the attic. I can recall the smell vividly—and the fact it was only marginally a bedroom; rough-hewn wood floors, exposed wood joists (and surprisingly for Wisconsin—even with it being an old house—no roof insulation whatsoever). There was a lot of stuff stored in there along with the two twin beds and I loved the energy of the place, but there was one there item that totally creeped me out—to the point I had to have my mom remove it so I could sleep: my recently-deceased great grandmother’s cane that had been propped up against the dressing table on the other side of the room.

My great aunt was also a collector of glass. The window sill of the south-facing dining room was covered with various transparent, sparkling items of every color you could imagine. When the sun hit, the effect was magical. I remember being especially enamored of two aquamarine birds, and asked her if I might have them. She said yes, and I immediately took them upstairs. I don’t know what ever happened to them; they might’ve made it the rest of the journey to Massachusetts and back to Arizona with us, but I think it far more likely that my Mom made me give them back before we left, claiming there was no room to pack them for the remainder of the journey.

Another memory of that trip was one particular bath—and it stands out only because of the smell. It was my first exposure to Dial soap. To this day, the smell of Dial invokes the memory of that bath in that bathroom that was just down the hall from my great aunt’s kitchen. Funny thing, memory and how it is so intimately tied to our sense of smell.

I remember nothing of our departure from Green Bay, and only bits and pieces of the drive to Massachusetts. I know we crossed the Mackinac Bridge and drove through Michigan into Canada. We came back into the US at Niagara Falls, and of course stopped there to take photos. I remember it rained a lot, and I did a lot of napping.

 

I know we must’ve overnighted at least once on the drive (at a Howard Johnson’s no doubt), but I have no real recollection, nor do I remember anything of our arrival at the grandparents’ homestead. I do know that once we got there it was a busy summer—only because I have pictures to jog those memories.

 

It was my first time fishing (there was a small pond on the property), and the summer included a trip to Old Sturbridge Village, the completion of my first 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and more than one fancy lunch with friends of my grandmother on what seemed at the time like a palatial estate (bitch had an olympic size swimming pool in her back yard)…

 

And one more memory of that summer that will probably fall under the “TMI” category…

Driving back from our weekly grocery shopping in the neighboring town, I was riding in the back seat of the car by myself, listening the radio playing reports of what was going on in Woodstock (yes, it was that summer) and my mom and grandmother were discussing how wrong the Vietnam War was and how Mom and Dad had agreed that they’d personally pack me up and ship me off to Canada if I came of age and the war was still going on. I was thumbing through some magazine they’d picked up on the trip and ran across a picture of a young, shirtless, and very hirsute Burt Reynolds. I had no idea who Burt Reynolds was, but I knew I liked what I saw and before I knew it I had my hand down my shorts and a short time later ended up some some very soggy underwear…all flying under the radar of the people in the front seat.

Or so my memory would have me believe.

0 comments

I’m a Bernie supporter, but I have to agree 100% with what John writes below:

From AMERICAblog:

There’s a common misconception that elections are job interviews; and that candidates need to “earn” our vote, as if we’re doing them a favor by putting them in office. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Elections are selfish. They’re not about the candidates, they’re about us. They’re about choosing someone who will have inordinate influence over our lives and our livelihoods for the next four years.

To the degree that the job metaphor is apt, picking a president is more like picking a nanny for your kids. Except in this case, it’s down to two candidates, and one is going to get hired. Your only options are to pick one, pick the other, or don’t pick either and let someone else make the choice for you.

To take the analogy a bit further, let’s call the first nanny Hillary. As hard as you try, Hillary just doesn’t move you. You see, there was another nanny named Bernie, and you adored Bernie. But Sadly, Bernie didn’t make the cut. So now you’re left choosing between Hillary, who doesn’t excite you, and another nanny named Donald, who is categorically crazy and hates your kids.

Your only choice is to hire Hillary, hire Donald, or let some stranger choose which of the two is going to have ultimate say over the most important thing in your life.

I’ve seen people talk about how Hillary Clinton is “bad” on fracking, and Wall Street, and money in politics, so they’re just not going to vote for her in November unless she does something “big” to win them over. But how is Donald Trump on all of those issues? Far worse than Hillary, in fact. And how is Donald Trump on the civil rights of gays, women, blacks, Latinos, and Muslims? How is Donald Trump on climate change, immigration, criminal justice, gun violence, privacy, health care, and caring about the middle and working classes? And how is Donald Trump on a woman’s right to choose? Awful, awful, awful.

If you choose not to support Hillary in the fall, because of some misguided notion of what she “owes” you, then you choose to cede the election to a man who will destroy every cause that Bernie Sanders, and you, once claimed to care about. And while you may be in a position in life that it won’t affect you directly if Trump bans Muslims, repeals Obamacare, and does everything he can to hurt gays, blacks, Latinos and women, is that really why you felt the Bern this election—because you put your own disappointment over the needs of the many?

(More)

0 comments

0 comments

People are horrible.

Before April 21st:

After April 21st:

1 comments

Why, oh why didn’t I get one of these when I had the chance?

0 comments

1 comments

Apple, FIX YOUR SHIT!

2 comments

From Skeptic Ink:

There were several interesting articles and images that all gave me the inspiration for this post. So, let’s talk about the idea of life in our universe beyond our solar system.

The first question to think about is how many other planets are there. The answer is lots. No, “lots” doesn’t even begin to cover it. I got this image from NASA (click the image to the source… it’s big).

Phil Plait, over at Bad Astronomy did a calculation to determine just how many galaxies Hubble could see. Note that isn’t all the galaxies in the universe, just the ones the Hubble Space Telescope could potentially see.

First he calculated how many galaxies were in a small piece of the above image. It’s about 50. That piece was 1/100 of the actual image. So, the image above contains about 5,000 galaxies.

Then he found out that the image is 10 square arcminutes. The entire sky is about 150 million square arcminutes, which means that there are about 15,000,000 pieces of sky the same size as the above image. At roughly 5,000 galaxies per, we get a total of 75,000,000,000 galaxies. That’s 75 billion visible galaxies with the Hubble.

The Milky Way has about 100 billion stars (though some estimates approach 400 billion).  If we assume that an average galaxy has 100 billion stars, which is fairly safe, then we get 100 billion * 75 billion stars in the universe.

That is 7,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 7.7×10²¹ stars.

How many could potentially support life? Well, a lot depends on A) how you define life and B) what conditions we consider for that life.

Right now, we know of only one planet that unambiguously has life. There is significant potential for life elsewhere in our solar system. Though it would likely be limited to the bacteria level or extraterrestrial equivalent. Still, if we find life on Europa, Titan, Enceladus, or even Mars, then the options for life on extrasolar planets just got even better.

But let’s talk about that life on other planets. How would life appear?

Well, that’s an entire topic of research called Origins of Life (OOL). The results are very impressive so far. There are multiple ways to get the basic organic compounds needed for life, without life needing to be present. One of the main sticking points has been ribose sugars, the main component in the backbone of DNA and RNA. Some new research suggests that is much less of a sticking point than previously thought.

Cornelia Meinert (Meinert 2016) and her team discovered that a relatively simple reaction, catalyzed by ultraviolet light, forms ribose and a variety of other sugars… in space.

Ice is common in space, we regularly track large balls of space ice and even landed on one of them. So, that’s water. Another needed component is ammonia, which seems to be common in space as well. Finally, we need a source of carbon and that comes from methanol (methyl alcohol). Which is, you guessed it, common in deep space. These are all inorganic sources of these materials, no life required.

The idea behind the paper is that a planetary nebula, that is a pre-solar system, has all these materials much more scattered than in a solar system with planets. There’s a lot of supporting evidence for this in our own solar system.

In our solar system, excluding the sun, Jupiter has 3 times the mass of every other planet combined. It has methane, ammonia (including ammonia ice), even benzene rings (link to Voyager probe results). So, in a pre-planetary nebula, all of these compounds would be present.

Much like the famous Miller-Urey experiment, the researchers took these compounds, exposed them to near space temperatures (78 Kelvin, which is -319 F), hit them with UV light, then warmed them up. The result was 56 unique compounds (not including the isomers of those compounds), most of which, we would think required life to manufacture.

The question then becomes, how did the material formed in space get to Earth. That’s where theLate-Heavy Bombardment comes in. The hypothesis is that between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago, the inner planets underwent a very heavy period of asteroid and comet impacts. The suggested impacts are stunning. By extrapolating lunar impacts to Earth, the estimate is over 20,000 impacts large enough to form a 20 kilometer diameter crater. As an example, Meteor Crater in Arizona is just over 1 kilometer in diameter.

Larger impacts would also have happened, including multiple impacts resulting in 5,000 kilometer craters.

This is in addition to other research about the common origin of RNA, lipids, and proteins.

The point is, we find these compounds all over the universe. And the universe is truly immense. It is the height of arrogance to assume that life only exists on Earth and that humans are the only intelligent species in the universe.

Now, a discussion about whether we would ever find that other life is a totally different prospect. But even with one planet per galaxy with life, that’s 75 billion planets with life in our universe.

1 comments

0 comments

1 comments

0 comments

I could’ve written this myself.

Dear Apple,

It’s me, your biggest fan, Ben. Technically we have’t met, although I’ve been to your Genius Bar a few dozen times. I also stood outside the Moscone Center eating a burrito during WWDC once, so maybe you saw me then.

Anyway, in case you’re wondering who really I am, I’m that guy who won’t shut up about you, who preaches about you to his friends non-stop, so much so that they swear I work for you (but I don’t). Who meticulously sells off each old Apple device so as to subsidize each new one, losing money every time. I’m the guy who has owned every iPhone, every iPad, every Macbook. Who bought a freaking car just to experiment with CarPlay (and what a bad decision that was). If my complex lifestyle doesn’t fit the minimal design of one of your stock apps, I try rearranging my lifestyle, convinced that there is wisdom in Apple’s simplicity. I’m that rare specimen—or perhaps not so rare anymore—who believes in the marriage of art and science, who has faith in the magic of technology. Oh, and I’ve spent a quarter of a million dollars on Apple products since 2005.

In other words, Apple, I’m not just a fanboy. I am the fanboy. Which is why it kills me to admit that, as of this moment, you are seriously starting to piss me off. I’ll explain why, but before I do, hear me out.

I came to you in my darkest hour. A freshman in college in 2005, my clunky IBM laptop had just been stolen, and I needed a new computer. Rather than buy the same computer again–minus all my photos, software, and journal entries, which were gone forever–I decided to convert this crappy ordeal into a fun learning experience, so I bought a Macbook Pro instead. It was my very first Apple computer, and the first Macbook Pro model you made.

But that Macbook–that sweet, cherubic Macbook–changed everything forever. All of a sudden, there were no error messages, no popups, no annoying warnings or scary alerts. I literally had no idea what to do with all the free time I saved as a result of not fixing things. Occasionally, I’d be using my Apple computer and just burst into spontaneous laughter out of sheer joy at not having to troubleshoot yet another ungodly error. Your customer service was “uh-mazing” said my Mac friends, but I had no way of knowing because I never had a single problem with anything.

At first it was weird: what did all these buttons do, and where were all the other buttons? Also, what the hell was a Finder? But pretty soon, something changed: I fell madly, head-over-heels in love with this machine.

In fact, it was more than that: it was like discovering that I had been in an abusive relationship with Microsoft and PCs for the better part of two decades, and you, Apple, were my salvation. You see, the thing I had always loved about PCs was that whenever something went wrong (which was generally about once every 30 seconds) I knew how to fix it. I was the troubleshooting king. I prided myself on knowing what every error message meant and how to get around it. With enough Googling, the right workaround, and some perspiration, I could solve any PC problem.

In other words, it just worked.

Flash forward to 2015. A decade later, things are still looking promising for Apple. Despite the loss of Steve Jobs, you guys are the most valuable company on earth. Hell, you’re worth twice as much as the next-richest company, Exxon Mobil. iPhones are literally more valuable than oil shooting out of the ground.

But Apple, despite your incredible success, I have noticed an unsettling increase in bullshit that I have to deal with as a user of your products. What first began as a trickle has become a veritable flood. Just yesterday, I counted twenty-two errors across four devices, some of which (according to your support forums) have been known problems for three years.

Twenty-two. That’s way more than zero, which is how many problems I had with my Apple devices as recently as a few years ago.

A lot of this has to do with cloud services. When I bought my first Macbook Pro in 2005, people still did many things offline. We stored music on our hard drives, had Netflix send us movies in the mail (Jesus Christ), and occasionally even bought software at the store. I still remember driving to Best Buy to purchase Microsoft Office like a nincompoop, which for many today is a non-issue. In that environment, Apple was king. You made dynamite software…

But the days of software are waning. Now, the average tech user is probably connected to the Internet 24/7. As a result, cloud services have become far more important than traditional software.

And Apple, let’s be real: you are terrible at the cloud. Even to say that is such a ridiculous understatement that it would be like saying “zombies are mammals.” I mean, yes, they are, but that doesn’t cover the half of it. It seems as if every time I try to use any cloud-related service of yours, whether it’s Siri or the new Photos app or just plain Pages, something goes wrong. Siri has a stroke, Photos hasn’t uploaded the photo I took 10 minutes ago, and Pages can’t save my document to iCloud. Imagine that: not being able to save a fucking document. What is this, the Paleolithic Era?

The saddest part of this is that unlike me, many people have taken forever to switch to Apple, which means they are only just now switching from the error-filled PC world to the error-filled Apple world, and they won’t even notice the difference. They’re prone to abuse by their evil tech overlords. But I know better, and so do others. There was a time when Apple products were unlike anything else on the planet. They were simple, elegant, and they just worked.

Now, they just don’t. Hence the existence of this website, which serves as a testament to all the awful crap Apple users have to deal with nowadays.

For instance! Apple Music is an utter travesty, full of cumbersome UI, cloud syncing issues (surprise), bugs that will eat half your music library, and the list goes on. iTunes on the Mac is a loose and baggy monster full of random crap that no one needs, making it impossible to do the simplest thing such as–gasp–play a song. iMessage is barebones to the extreme and unintuitive to use, with 90% of people I know having no clue how to set it up across multiple devices and email addresses (it’s not hard, but it’s not obvious either). Apple’s Mail app is atrocious on both the iPhone and the Mac, with limited functionality and constant account verification problems. The new Photos app syncs poorly or not at all, and it’s utterly dumb compared to Google’s Photos app, which does magical things like allow you to search for objects and people automatically. Siri is Siri. Apple Maps is cow dung. CarPlay, which I have in my car, is a buggy piece of trash that infuriates me on a daily basis.

Now, Apple, I want to make something clear: I’m very good with computers. Despite all these stupid glitches and questionable product decisions, I make it work. I’m getting better and better at troubleshooting Apple problems and bending finicky products to my will.

But here’s the thing: I shouldn’t have to. That’s the world I left to join you, Apple. That’s the crap I abandoned ten years ago when I decided never to buy another PC. Is that really where we’re at now? Did we really trade Cheech for Chong?

(More)

2 comments

Via

1 comments

Reposted from 3 years ago:

This Isn’t Going Away, North Carolina

There you sit this morning North Carolina, all smug and self-satisfied in your hate, no doubt believing in your little heart-of-hearts that it was God’s will that you mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging assholes enshrined discrimination in your state law. But I’ve got news for you: you were on the wrong side of history when you outlawed interracial marriage, and you’re on the wrong side of history AGAIN.

The more I think about this, the more livid I become. I’m not sure why, because other states have passed similar laws. Maybe it’s because your state—whose motto should now be changed from “FIRST IN FLIGHT” to “FIRST IN HATE”—was a necessary tipping point to open eyes and get the masses’ blood boiling.

And despite your unwavering belief that you’re doing the Lord’s work (who NEVER said a word about homosexuality, by the way) I have a feeling, that this is going to come back and bite you in your shriveled, black, hate-filled hearts. More than 50% of Americans polled are now in favor of marriage equality. Major corporations, sensing the tide of public opinion, are increasingly coming on board and providing the same benefits to same-sex partners as they do to the rest of their married employees.

Your vote was a slap in the face to that, and I sincerely hope that every GLBT person and their supporters (including businesses) leave your state and let it free-fall back into the middle ages. Have you not seen what happened in Georgia with their stance against so-called “illegal” (i.e. brown-skinned) migrant workers? Crops are rotting in the fields. North Carolina deserves no less.

I spotted this in the comments section at Joe.My.God. this morning, and I couldn’t have said it better.

NORTH CAROLINA  
HATES  
FAGS

We get it…you hate us…you really, really hate us.

Which, of course, is what all these “protect marriage” amendments are about. You’re not protecting anything, you’re just preventing a small group of people that you hate from entering into your “exclusive” marriage club lest we sully it (GOD FORBID…we should swim in your pool…you’d have to drain it). Now, if y’all really had the courage of your convictions you’d make homosexuality itself in North Carolina a crime, punishable by death just like it says in the Bible (let’s run that up the flag pole and see how it flies…I bet it would pass or come damn close). But, of course, you don’t have that kind of courage because y’all are nothing but a bunch of bullies and cowards, as your state’s racist history would attest.

0 comments

0 comments

0 comments

My birthday’s coming up in about six weeks in case anyone’s interested…

2 comments

Stop and think about that for a minute.  We are the aliens to any other planetary civilizations in our glittering night skies. Keeping that in mind, is our behavior toward our fellow human beings really something we’d like to be projecting outward to potential galactic neighbors?

Human beings are killing each other over skin color and god myths, and have been for most of our history. God myths! Is it any wonder we haven’t heard from anyone out there? If we can’t even accept each other’s differences, how the hell would anyone who might be listening in and aware of our existence—no doubt beings far different than us—expect to be welcomed here with open arms? Is our brutality toward each other really the first impression we want to put forward?

Unfortunately it’s too late to change that. As the old axiom goes, “You’re never given a second chance to make a first impression,” and our planet’s first impression consisted of Nazi Propaganda…

I’m sure—based on statistical probability alone—that the universe is teeming with what we would immediately recognize as intelligent life. But based on the radio and television signals that have spread out from our planet to a radius of eighty light years or so, I’m not surprised in the least that we haven’t heard a word back from anyone—much less had the proverbial flying saucer land on the White House lawn. I mean, would you want to make contact with a group of beings who have so little respect for their fellow creatures or their planet that it borders on insanity?

For all we know, there are galactic marker buoys surrounding our solar system warning potential visitors to avoid the third planet at all cost.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that human beings, despite all our science and technological innovations over the past five hundred years or so are aware of only a very, very small part of what is actually going on in this thing we label reality. Further, I also believe that at this stage in our evolution, if we were shown what truly lies behind the proverbial curtain, the our species would suffer a collective psychotic break…

0 comments

Deal with it.

0 comments

0 comments

0 comments

0 comments

Stolen many years ago from Unreasonable Faith and always worth reposting, especially when I’m feeling especially snarky:

“Save sex for marriage.”

Translation: “If I can’t have consequence-free sex, neither can you.”
Acceptable Response: “I pledge myself! Give me a promise ring!”
Unacceptable Response: “So how did that work out for you?” Or, “Where exactly does the Bible say that?”

“All you need to do to go to heaven is ask Jesus into your heart.”

Translation: “You’re going to burn in hell if you don’t say this prayer, little boy.”
Acceptable Response: “Dear Jesus, thank you for coming into my heart and saving me…”
Unacceptable Response: “Dear Jesus, where in the Bible do you tell us to ask you into our hearts? That seems kind weird. And why did the ancient world think the heart was the kidney? Hello? Can you hear me? I guess this is just a one-way intercom. How can I know if you’re still around if you don’t say anything back? Okay, if you’re really there, appear to me right now in person like you did to Paul.” Or, “What exactly does Jesus do in my blood-pumping organ?”

“Amen”

Translation: “Say ‘amen’ back to me!”
Acceptable Response: “Amen” or “Preach it!” combined with vigorous head nodding.
Unacceptable Response: “No!” Or, “Hmm…. That doesn’t sound right.”

“What can I pray for you about?”

Translation: “Any juicy tidbits about your life I can spread through the prayer gossip grapevine?”
Acceptable Response: “Thanks for asking. You’re so kind. My wife is having an affair, my brother is a drunk, and my dog can’t control his sexual desires.”
Unacceptable Response: “Have you ever kept a prayer journal to see if you get more unanswered prayers than answered ones, or if your unasked prayers get answered just as much?”

“I’m not a racist, but…”

Translation: “I’m a racist asshole who attends an all-white church and is uncomfortable around most black people. I love racist jokes and am about to tell you a good one.”
Acceptable Response: Laugher followed by telling a slightly more racist joke.
Unacceptable Response: “You’re a hypocritical racist asshole.”

“God is in control.”

Translation: “I only believe this about overwhelming situations. The rest of the time, I believe things are up to us and I act that way.”
Acceptable Response: “Amen.” Sometimes followed by an anecdote about some unexplained or coincidental experience that you attribute to God.
Unacceptable Response: “If God’s in control, then relax and don’t do anything about it! In fact, you don’t have to do anything at all ever, right? But that’s not right, and people still have to do everything, so what does it mean for God to be in control and why does it matter?”

“I believe this because the Bible says so.”

Translation: “I have no clue about the history of that big book I’m in love with, and I don’t care either, because it’s God’s Word, and if God said it, it must be true.”
Acceptable Response: “Amen.”
Unacceptable Response: “It also says to kill homosexuals.” They might heartily agree to that one, which in case the unacceptable response becomes, “It also says to kill your children when they talk back. Have your children ever talked back?” Or, “Explain to me the authorship and transmission of the Bible, and why you think it’s God’s Word.” Or especially, “Jesus said to give anything to those who ask of you – and not only to give what they ask, but more. So please give me your wallet and your car.”

“What’s God doing in your life?”

Translation: “I’m getting ready to judge you.”
Acceptable Response: “I’m conquering pride and lust!” Or, “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, I love Jesus my beautiful King and Savior!”
Unacceptable Response: “God’s been teaching me about how much evidence there is for evolution.”

“Hate the sin, love the sinner.”

Translation: “I’m a flaming fundamentalist.”
Acceptable Response: “Amen.”
Unacceptable Response: “That’s a relief, because I’m a homosexual transvestite in an interracial relationship.”

“We’re in the end times.”

Translation: “My pastor said we’re living in the end times.”
Acceptable Response: “God will punish America for our sins!” Or, “America isn’t mentioned in the Bible because we’re going to crumble soon!”
Unacceptable Response: “Did you know that out of the millions of times Christians have claimed this throughout history, they’ve always been wrong?” Or, “If you’re so confident, I’m sure you’ll be confident in putting some significant money towards a bet on that.”

“He is risen!”

Translation: “It’s Easter! Let’s eat!”
Acceptable Response: “He is risen indeed!”
Unacceptable Response: “Where? I don’t see him.” Or, “Do you have any evidence for that statement?” Or especially, “Like yeast?”

“Jesus loves you.”

Translation: “Jesus does, but I don’t.”
Acceptable Response: “Amen.”
Unacceptable Response: “If that were true, why doesn’t he tell me himself?”

“Do you know where you’re going to go after you die?”

Translation: “This is the question they told me to ask in my evangelism class.”
Acceptable Response: “To heaven to see my sweet, precious Savior!”
Unacceptable Response: “How can you know that before you’re actually dead?”

“What would you say if you stood before God after you die?”

Translation: “I’ve got you now, sinner!”
Acceptable Response: “Please forgive me! I was so fracking stupid! How blind of me not to see you in everything you created!”
Possibly Acceptable Response: “Oops.”
Unacceptable Response: “If you wanted me to believe in you, why didn’t you show some kind of evidence? Why create everything through the painful process of evolution? Why did you let your creation suffer through hunger, neglect, disease, and war? Why incarnate yourself and then commit deicide/suicide? Why were you so bloodthirsty in the early years? If you’re God, you’re not a very good one.” Or, “Which one?”

“Thank you Jesus!”

Translation: “It’s easier to thank Jesus than the people who deserve it.”
Acceptable Response: “Amen!”
Unacceptable Response: “I’m not Jesus.” Or, “You’re welcome.”

“Have you found Jesus?”

Translation: “Are you also a Jesus-lover, or must I convert you?”
Acceptable Response: “I’ve been walking with the Lord since I was two years old, Praise Gawd!”
Unacceptable Response: “I didn’t know he was missing.”

“I’ll pray for you”

Translation: “This conversation is over. My mind exploded.” Or, “I refuse to believe you won this argument.”
Acceptable Response: “Thanks, you’re so kind.”
Unacceptable Response: ”Instead of praying, why don’t you read a non-Christian book?” Or, “I’ll think for you.” Or especially, “Liar.”

Continue reading…

2 comments

1 comments

But then life happened.

1 comments

0 comments