But, why would Saint Petey say that?

A conversation on Facebook caught my eye this morning.  An ex-workmate of mine asked an open question along the lines of 'Do you think that it's OK for my partner to go out to bars and party, but to go completely honey-badger stranglingly mental when I try to do it?'

The answer was a resounding 'No!' and that's where it all finished.

Well... Not exactly, most of the people who replied said no, one chap played (hopefully) Devil's advocate and said that maybe he was trying to protect her from sexually predatorial men.

I should probably explain that the young lady in question lives in The Colonies, and once talked me through a list of the firearms that she owns, including her special gun that she uses for hunting ducks whilst she is mounted... I presume she meant on horseback, but you never know with her.

She also told me about the time where she left a 'Store' and found someone trying to steal her truck, I can't remember whether she discharged the firearm that she keeps in her purse on this particular occasion, or just waved it at him, but he ran away, fearing for his life.

So, she can probably look after herself under most conditions, and it wasn't as if she was talking about putting on a leather mini-skirt and boob-tube and twerking her way across the Southern United States, just a few drinks with the girls from work after their shift ended (Or maybe before it started - I know how soul destroying working for that particular company can be - it made me quit to write a book).

Like I said, I was reading through it, nodding away to myself, and then someone had to go and quote the Bible.  Specifically 1 Peter 3:1, which states:

Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives.

Now, I may have mentioned before that whilst I freely admit to believing in a supreme being, I think the Bible, as translated, is a bit of a mixed bag of things that various people thought might be a good idea at the time.  Which is why an awful lot of it doesn't make any sense and people really shouldn't put much stock in it.

But what it is good for is quoting out of context to prove a point -  

Things like convincing your wife not to force you to have a vasectomy: Deuteronomy 23:1 says:

He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.

(apologies to all the surviviors of testicular cancer, or any of our brave servicemen who have had their 'stones' blown off by an IED, but you're not welcome at Church anymore)

Or stopping your kids having 'potty mouths' at home, because Leviticus 20:9 tells us that:

For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him.

And, whilst I'm the first person to shake my head at the 'You mustn't smack your kids' brigade, I'm not as pro-Child abuse as Psalms 137:9 seems to be.

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Actually, thinking about that one, I hope that it means real, rocky stones, not figurative 'stones' like in the quote from Deuteronomy above, that would put a bit of a darker cast on it wouldn't it?

And, that if your Brother, like, dies and stuff 'without issue', that you should totally get his widow pregnant to honour him, or something.. But it's definitely not adultery or anything. Like it says in Mark 12:19

Master, Moses wrote unto us, If a man's brother die, and leave his wife behind him, and leave no children, that his brother should take his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother.

I mean, I love my Sister-in-law, but... Well, I'm afraid that I fell at the first hurdle above...

So, that's prejudice against the disabled, a little light filicide / child abuse / possible peadophilia, and sexual relationships with members your own family given a big thumbs up by the 'Good Book' if you cherry-pick which bits you choose to believe in - Which most people do.

There are literally thousands of these kinds of things that can be twisted and flipped around to serve almost any purpose, and I could go on and on (and usually do) about them.

-oOo-

But I'll leave you with a little project of your own, brought to my attention by the very wonderful author Mr Neil Gaiman.

If you've got a few minutes spare today, and have a bible to hand, or have access to the Internet in your lunch-hour - Go and read Judges 19:20-30 

The Bible really does have a quote you can use in every situation, right?

Decide what to do, and speak out... Indeed.

WinterNado!

Inundated! I've been positively inundated with people who are gleefully telling me that next month is going to herald the shutting down of the entire United Kingdom.

It won't be because some chap in the US Congress has decided that 'Oh yes, and I managed to bankrupt the World' will look good on his CV.

It won't be because Michael Gove, Secretary of State for badly planned Victorian Educational systems has decided that all exercise books should be replaced by slates and crumbly pieces of chalk and people who can't even speak English convincingly should be taught Latin.

It will be that we are gripped in 'The Worst Winter for the past ONE HUNDRED YEARS!!!!!'

What can we expect from this MegaWinter or HyperWinter or (My own personal favourite) WinterNado or whatever we're going to hype it up as?

It seems that the pesky old Jet Stream is in the wrong position you see, instead of sliding wonderfully across the Atlantic Ocean like a basking shark full of rancid helium and then hanging a left and heading towards the Scilly Isles.  It's barreling away underneath us, dipping a toe in the Channel and then hooning off over western Europe

This causes what Meteororororologists call 'A Localised Area of low Pressure' and the winds from the Arctic all get sucked in to fill the gap with their spiky teeth and icicle claws.  Lovely.

So, they're expecting it to be the worst winter since 1913 eh?  So what was so bad that happened in 1913?

Ah... Well, It seems that extensive investigation shows that in the early part of the year we had 10' snowdrifts in the grim North and virtually no snow in the South at all - What does that tell you? It tells me that it's warmer in the South than it is in the North.  Because I'm generous, I won't charge you for that wonderfully informed piece of information, it's a free gift - From me to you.

So, if we're going to suffer the worst weather 'since' then, it means that it's not going to be any worse, which means that depending where you are in the country, you will probably experience somewhere between zero and 120 inches of snow.  It will probably be colder and windier on the high ground and in the valleys there will be wetness.

Effectively, the same as there always is during a British Autumn, Winter and Spring.  Should it shut the country down as soon as office workers jump excitedly up and down as the first feathery flakes float past their windows?  No!

Will it? Yes, of course it will - The UK is not prepared for any particular weather pattern that it ever has to face.  Whether it be heat or cold, wet or dry, humid or whatever the opposite of humid is, we're singularly unready for anything except the ability to complain at a moments notice.

What if we had really strange weather? how would we cope with these things if we fall to pieces when we can't see the road-markings because of a light dusting of the white stuff?

-oOo-

There's stories of giant hailstones, as big as golf-balls occasionally falling in the UK, you know, breaking windows, scaring horses, playing the drum parts of White Stripes songs on a bit of rusty air-raid shelter - But did you know, bigger things exist, they're called Ice-Bombs - Some of these things are 9" across and fall out of the sky like bricks.

What would happen if these things came as part of WinterNado? - There would be a huge boom (if you'll pardon the expression) in the Lean-to/Conservatory repair market and people with loft conversions will be jamming the helpdesk line at Velux.

-oOo-

It's not just in the Bible that animals rain from the skies you know.  There have been several documented instances of fish, frogs and worms raining down from the heavens.  The normal explanation for this is that the precipitate (The things what are flung from the sky) are picked up by typhoons and waterspouts, carried miles through the air and deposited on normal God-fearing people who immediately think that the Rapture is starting.  There have also been reports of birds falling from the skies, zoologists investigated these reports and found that it was due to a strange avian behaviour called 'landing'

What would happen if these things came as part of WinterNado? - Knowing the luck of the average Brit, the animals that fell from above would be Snapping Turtles and Blue Whales, which, if you were to look on the bright side, would both solve our food crisis and teach children in the immediate vicinity of a 'turtle-strike' not to poke their fingers into things that they don't recognise - Which is good advice to all of us I think you'll agree.

-oOo-

Coloured rain is another popular 'Extreme' weather condition.  Well, I say extreme... I mean it's just rain, that's not clear.  You can have coloured rain in a plethora of designer colours and it's often due to contaminants or Algae in the body of water where the rain originally came from.

What would happen if these things came as part of WinterNado? - The Thrash Metal band 'Slayer' would sue anyone who used the phrase 'Raining Blood' on their Facebook feed - Presuming that the rain was red that is, if it were green then I suppose you'd be fine saying things like 'OMFG! It's, like, totally raining snot.' Which Slayer probably wouldn't care about that much, until their next album came out.

-oOo-

But all joking aside, if it does snow, take it easy out there, allow extra time for your journey, only travel when you have to and all that jazz.  But if you can get away with it, ring into work and say you can't get the car off the drive, or the train's not running, or the motorway is knee deep in freshly fallen marmosets.  Go sledging, have a snowball fight, fill a dumb person's hood with snow and then tell them that it's raining.

But don't, whatever you do, stick your middle finger in something that looks like a giant Pukka Pie with an evil face - You'll never be able to say goodbye to your boss ever again...

But it says here...

So, Religious Texts, what do we think about those?

There are a lot of them about, probably more of them than there are actual religions.  And most of them purport to be the word of whatever god, God or Goddess favoured by that actual religion, whether directly dictated or 'translated' by a selection of scholars and prophets.

I'm going to put the next bit in big letters, so there's no confusion as to what follows.

IN MY OPINION ALL RELIGIOUS TEXTS ARE THE WORK OF MEN - NOT A SUPREME BEING.

You could argue that the people who wrote these things were directed by a god, you might be right, I don't pretend to know, but my opinion is up there, in the big letters.

But they exist... The books that is.  We're stuck with them now, so what do we do with them?  Well, as I understand it they were provided initially as a set of stories to teach things like morals and laws, rules for handling certain situations, and ways that you could prove that you were a follower of that particular religion.  In Christianity (I chose this one because it's the one I know slightly more about, but I'm reliably informed that the others are pretty much the same.) You've got your commandments and suchlike and your abominations, things you should do, things you shouldn't do. Fish you can eat, neighbour's asses that you can't covet.

And then there's the contradictions, a detailed book, written by a committee, is bound to have a few contradictions - Even if it was dictated directly by a deity - the entire history of space-time is a lot to remember, even for the omnipotent.

Although you'd think that they'd manage to get his Corporeal Son's last words right at least..

MAT 27:46,50: "And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?" that is to say, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" ...Jesus, when he cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost."

LUK 23:46: "And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, "Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit:" and having said thus, he gave up the ghost."

JOH 19:30: "When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, "It is finished:" and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost."

OK, you're right, I'm being petty - It was probably an emotional time.

And there's the whole 'Who told David to start the census in Israel?' question - There's some confusion, but the two 'suspects' couldn't be more different:

II SAMUEL 24: And again the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah.

I CHRONICLES 21: And SATAN stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel.

No... I got nothing on this one - You'll have to make your own minds up.

Maybe, just maybe, it's a mistranslation.  I mean, the texts that form the Christian Bible were written in a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek with a smattering of Chaldean thrown in to make things interesting, over a period of a thousand years or so. The the bits that were in hebrew got translated into Greek so that the Jews could read them (Most 'modern' Jews didn't speak a lot of Hebrew at the time - from about 100AD onwards) Over the next thousand years it got translated into Gothic (Germanic) Olde Englishe and Latin and didn't get a Modern English translation until the sixteenth century.

Is it any wonder that a lot of it doesn't really make sense, you can imagine scribes translating from a Gothic version, into Latin, for the English market, hitting a word that the previous translator didn't really get right, scratching his head with the end of his goose-quill and saying something like 'Whateth I thinketh he meaneth thereth is-eth...' and having a wild stab at it.  No guarantee that he gets it right either of course.

There are a lot of parts that various people (usually those people who are directly effected by them) claim to be mistranslations.  A popular one is 'Abomination' as I've used above, this was originally translated from the Hebrew words 'Sheketz' and 'toevah' which is a bit difficult to explain really... It kind of means 'Things that THEY (pointing to Johnny Foreigner) do, but WE don't think are right.'  Many things are described a toevah through an awful lot of the Bible, including Child sacrifice, Idolatry (Very big on idolatry being toevah they are), fortune telling, haughtiness (Really, if you feel like doing a bit of reading, try tho Book of Ezekiel, it's a laugh riot - there are flying saucers and everything), eating with Shepherds (which brings up a whole bunch of questions on its own), women wearing trousers, remarriage and... Wait for it... Sodomy - A man lying with a man, as he would with a woman.

Which brings me to the trigger for today's Blog.  My good friend Nathan, shared a piece on Facebook about the Dr Laura letter - Which for those who haven't read it, is included below.

As a note, this is a real letter, written to a real person, but not by James Kauffman, He has a web-page about it and everything.

-oOo-

On her radio show, Dr. Laura said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following response is an open letter to Dr. Schlesinger, written by a US man, and posted on the Internet. It's funny, as well as quite informative:

It also shows that once you've read The Book of Ezekiel, take the Book of Leviticus out for a spin - But have a dry pair of trousers ready to change into afterwards if you have a weak bladder.


Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them.

1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?

6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination, Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there 'degrees' of abomination?

7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?

8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?

9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I'm confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.


Your adoring fan,


James M. Kauffman,

Ed.D. Professor Emeritus,

Dept. Of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education University of Virginia

-oOo-

Note: To the Religionites who may or may not be reading this, I don't mean to offend, I mean to entertain.  I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't make me the subject of a... Erm... Whatever the Christian version of a Jihad is... Possibly a crusade I suppose, or perhaps inviting me to a bake-sale and then not letting me eat anything with Jam or Cream in it.

Only a bit of fun - Yeah? So no stoning to death for me please, if at all possible.

The Catholic church does not make mistakes

OK, the title is a quote from Dogma, a great movie by Kevin Smith, it was said by the character Cardinal Glick, played by George Carlin, an even greater person who is sadly no longer with us.

If you've not seen Dogma, or heard of George Carlin, then go and do some research now - In fact, go and watch as many of Kevin Smith's films as you can - They're all great, sweary, but great. When you've gone that, Google George Carlin... I'll wait, it's worth it, believe me.

Done? Good weren't they? - You know the stocky chap in the long coat and the backwards baseball cap in the films? That was your actual Kevin Smith! - Hardly a Hitchcock style cameo - But if you're gonna make great films, then I say why not star in 'em too?

Anyway, enough frivolity, I'd like to talk to you about God (was that the sound of a hundred *back* buttons being pressed?). I don't neccessarily mean your actual Judeo-Christian, Monotheistic, Capital G type god, it could be your multi armed, blue coloured one, or your elephant headed one, or any one of a thousand different deities that people have blamed stuff on for the past few thousand years.

As the more eagle-eyed of you will have spotted, I am a regular church-goer and I believe in a supreme being, I have Faith. What I don't got is Religion.

"But if that's true, why do you go to church?" I hear the four people who are still reading this say.

There are a number of reasons really, Mrs Dandy is a confirmed Anglican Religionite, and there are some nice, friendly and most of all odd people there, but mainly it's because I enjoy running the mixing desk (this is the 21st. Century people, it's not all massive organs and people going Ah-ah-aaaahhhhh in a angelic fashion now) it makes me feel like Rick Wakeman - It also gives me the chance to poke fun at the fundamentalists...

OK - That will have made some hackles rise, so let me explain what I mean by fundamentalists - I take the word to mean, someone who believes that the Bible (or any religious text pertaining to a particular belief system) is infallible, an historic record rather than a book of moral stories and hints and tips on how to live a better life.

This becomes so all-consuming to some people that they forget all about the 'Be Excellent to each Other' stuff (See, Bill & Ted, George Carlin again - Isn't it amazing how this stuff all fits together - I don't just throw this down on the page you know?) and concentrate on the 'Thou shalt not' and 'Righteous smiting of the unbeliever' stuff. In short, they get caught up in the Dogma (Oh my Gods it's like I've got a plan for this thing, right?) - The words of the text themselves rather than the meaning.

There're also people who just go to church because they want to be seen to be important, the kind of people who like to slip into everyday conversation 'So, I said to the Vicar....' They really ruffle my cassock - These are the people for whom I really hope there is an afterlife, 'cos they got a big old shock coming to them with the whole rapid downwards motion and the fire and the pitchforks and the 'Oh no it burns - freunlaven!'

On a different note, if you'll pardon the pun, there was a song sung a couple of weeks ago called 'Our God is greater' - Inoffensive little song, quite jolly and stuff. But it got me thinking, greater than what? Is it kind of a religious football chant? Should religion be so confrontational?

So what do I actually believe? Do you really care? Do I care if you care?

I believe that the state of the world we live in is not ALL down to chance - That there's a guiding influence. I'm not a creationist, I believe in evolution, but I have no problem with the idea that the evolutionary system has been pushed in a particular direction at different points in history.

I don't believe that there's neccessarily a plan for everyone, or anyone for that matter. But I do believe that there's something greater than us that on occasion, helps out - I don't mean in the 'God bless Mummy & Daddy and please can I have a Pony' way. I mean in the 'Holy Crap my brakes aren't working, we're all gonna die!' way - Although they do say that everyone becomes a believer in situations like that.

It could all be luck, I don't profess to know - It could be Aliens, Gods, Goddesses, a giant bowl of spaghetti and meatballs reaching down with his Noodley Appendages.

But as far as I'm concerned, there's something there... After all, if there wasn't there'd be times when I was just sat in the car talking to myself - And that would mean I was mad.