zoomtarded

So Bubba Ho-Tep is on right now. I’m gonna blog it. It starts with Elvis lamenting his inability to you know, ready himself, sexually. Elvis, by the way, is not dead but living in a nursing home in Texas.

I am sure you have seen the following commercial by now but because I am always about a year or two behind all trends, I will offer it up to you. The Beauty Myth is a scourge. Hopefully ads like this will tackle it, even if there is something worryingly broken about us relying on the beauty industry to relieve the oppression created by the beauty industry.

In the movie, a kleptomaniac old lady has just been bitten by a giant bug who forced her out of her bed and didn’t die when she walloped it repeatedly with a walking stick. This is not so difficult to understand when you remember that the bug was owned by a ghoulish old farmer monster thing. So far, I have to admit that this nursing home is not going to be the ideal place to send Neuro’s parents when I want to get the money from the trust fund early.

Michael J Fox is an icon of my childhood. I can distinctly remember as a 6 year old boy desperately wanting to be as cool as Marty McFly. I admit it, I really wanted to be the dork he played in Family Ties. I am not really the kind of guy who likes reading biographies of celebrities but for some reason we ended up buying Lucky Man and it shocked us. It was a brilliant read, honest, interesting, not ghost-written, painful account of his early-onset Parkinsons disease. Judging from his biography, Fox is the most famous advocate of embryonic stem cell research since other notable victims like say, John Paul II were unlikely to support that kind of experimentation. There is a constitutional ammendment proposed in Missouri and Fox has made a quite compelling ad encouraging people to oppose it.

This is a quite brilliant movie by the way. Elvis swapped identities with an Elvis impersonator to try and get some space and calm. But the Elvis impersonator lived drink and drugs even more than the real Elvis and died, leaving the real Elvis trapped as a two-bit Ersatz Pressley. His best friend in the nursing home was JFK.

Women were throwing themselves at me because they thought I was Elvis. Except I was Elvis.

JFK was “killed” by the CIA and dyed black and sent to the nursing home. Devious baxtards. Elvis just tussled with the cockroach and toasted it with a lamp.

So Fox makes just about as great a case as one can make in 30 seconds but some other people, including JC himself, have come back with a response. It all makes very interesting watching.

I would say that this is an untypically reasonable debate for American politics. Hey! I’ve never been to America but I trust my Guardian-reading, Irish Times-imbibing opinion is accurate when I state that all American political debate consists of a legalist fundamentalist calling a dull-minded liberal “godless” while the “liberal” goes along with invasion policies. Of course, I am kidding. I would never let the Irish Times pass my eyes. That sub-Troskyite rag belongs in its own circle of hell. I am being distracted by the movie. Kemosabe is ambushing the old folks while they have breakfast. JFK is feaked out because Lyndon Johnson is coming to finish him off. Anywho, the debate is brought back to its natural gutter level by Rush Limbaugh, right-wing shock-jock idiot who has claimed Fox intentionally held off his meds so his shaking would be worse.

Elvis got his mojo back. The old rascal.

Its really shocking to see Limbaugh mimic Fox so brutally. Even after all that has gone before, the cynicism is jaw dropping. Limbaugh is the kind of guy who has made a career out of winning, regardless of the cost. He is not medically trained. He has no basis to declare that Fox was exploiting his illness for political gain. While Limbaugh is not a doctor, he does know more than his fair share about inflating symptoms for malicious purposes. In June he had to make a deal with Californian police because of his addiction related prespcription fraud. Hypocrisy is obviously not something that is just native to evangelical Christianity! (Zing!)

It turns out that the late President Lyndon Johnson is not out to kill JFK. Instead, it seems an Egyptian mummy is sucking the little, tiny souls of the OAPs in the nursing homes and killing them. But a pensioners’ soul is shrunk with age and so the loo-roller needs to kill someone every night. JFK and Elvis decide to go to ask not what their nursing home can do for them but ask what they can do for their nursing home and go to war instead of letting some mummy’s lips “suck the life out of their arsehole”. If you haven’t ordered this dvd already you are not even worthy to be called toilet water decoration.

The nature of blogging, of the internet, of mass media, is that we try and address issues as monumentally huge as embryonic stem cell research in 60 second bites. But thankfully, there are some people who have taken the time to digest the issues at hand and make them comprehensible. We call these people ethical philosophers. My wife could be one of those but she is really turned off by the sex and the drugs and the philosopher worship so instead she is a glorified PA. But she dealt with a connected area once and you should read it. You will never have any doubts ever again and really, isn’t that the way to live? Completely and totally sure you are right in every possible way.

The mummy disguised himself as tree bark! That indignity should never be threatened on JFK’s bum. No!

Even though I am married and therefore incapable of sexual sin, there are some members of the opposite sex who I quite fancy. Now that I work for the Presbyterian church I have to pretend I don’t fancy Michael Stipe anymore. But one lady I have a great big crush on is Nellie McKay. Her first album is among my top ten albums ever and it turns out (but don’t tell my wife who also fancies her because it will ruin the surprise!) she has a new album called Pretty Little Head. She had to fight with evil big corporation Sony to get the rights to this album back so now she joins Aimee Mann in our venerated Hall Of Subversive Anti-Hegemony Fame. She isn’t for everyone, but she is for me. Check out this video and see if she is for you.

I hate it when mummys punch me! Fight the good fight Elvis. He isn’t a zombie. You can take him!

I will let you in on my writing method for Zoomtard. I make a coffee or a tea. I sit down. I try to remember the cool things I have found and the things I thought which I thought were thought-worthy. Avid readers, if they exist, will understand why my posts can be so damned long since I just write them, publish them and edit the typos that I can find and leave it at that. But between now and Christmas, to provide you with a better, fresher, long lasting, less rubbery tasting Zoomtard experience, I am going to try and cap my entries. Still, I am not giving up the Smartypants principle that has guided me since the beginning. Posts should be 1000 words long at least. At least!

But not 20,000, you’ll be glad to read.

In the 6 months since the (Red) Campaign was launched it has brought in £10 million. That is not a large amount in the grand scheme of things but is more than private corporate donations managed to scrounge up for AIDS and debt in Africa over the last 4 years. Go consume to make the world a better place. That is almost as freaky as Dove telling us not to be lured in by the unrealistic ideal of beauty. Still, God has a sense of humour about saving the world so the tactic might work. In my final YouTube of the day, here is a cool ad by One.org, which just proves that if you want to be cool like George Clooney, in the General Election next year there are even more pressing concerns than that bypass around your home town or whether or not private hospitals should get tax relief.

The movie has ended. All is well. Except JFK and Kemosabe are dead. Also, Neuro and I booked a holiday. Yay! LMNOP is a blog I found recently which is just delightful. You will agree. Alot of pleasant sugar energy will be squandered over the coming months because of Richard Dawkins’ new book, The God Delusion. Dawkins is a better read, better funded mirror image of Ken Ham or Kent Hovind. The great sociologist and literary critic Terry Eagleton takes him to town and calls him on his shit.

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right.

I notice that Dawkins is called an author on his website, which is more accurate than calling him a scientist. Move him out to propagandist and I think we’ll have a deal. For the record lads, Genesis 1-3 is not a scientific account of the creation of the space-time universe. Science however, can’t say anything about the question of God, delusion, illusion or just a book filled with his confusion.

Your Correspondent, Wrote the scuttling theme tune to your life

So my wife started working today. In a real job. Where she wasn’t set the task of making witty t-shirts up or reading the census from 1911. On the train in she sat beside a pensioner who was listening to Christina Aguilera mp3s on her mobile phone. Things sure have changed in the four months she was unemployed, taking a rest. Have you ever seen True Lies? I suspect I am Jamie Lee Curtis to her Arnie. She keeps making up fantastical stories about hours spent photocopying and answering phones. I know that can’t be the reality of work in real jobs. If work for the church is one bungee jump followed by impromptu, emergency tracheostomies, surely in the Secular city, work is a fascinating white-water ride. Or is that tracheostomys? Jaybercrow probably will know but he seems to be too busy losing his faith and reading Bruggemann to entertain us with his tales of Canadia.

I was back up in Norn Iron last week at one of their 3rd level educational institutions. It wasn’t Queens, which according to me, means it wasn’t a real university. I think the Ulster University is a step below a typical Irish Institute of Technology. If that opinion offends you, go hassle Jaybercrow because he told me to say it. (LOLZ!) I was under the impression that they only taught Flat-Earthism, Creationism and Early Protestant Reformers And Their Victorious Routing Of Catholics On The Battlefield but it turns out that they do have a few real degrees like Egg-Technology and Agitation Therapy. Agitation therapy is what they do instead of counselling in Northern Ireland. When you speak to a Norn Irish counsellor, their accent is quite, well, agitating. Eventually you get so agitated by the therapy sessions that it brings your other issues into perspective. Your abandonment issues and your God-complex and your erectile dysfunction just disappear. Very promising research going on.

Your Correspondent, Using The Law To Nag

So the Zoomtardage has been thin on the ground recently. Don’t blame me. Maybe my favourite Dublin blogs like Planet Potato, Stigmund, Angry French Belle and Yellow Snow are to blame since they’ve all seemed to pack it in. I caught the lacklustre off them. And don’t even talk to me about my wife, Neuro, who hasn’t told one joke since she stopped writing her blog. I didn’t marry her for crap like devotion and attention and support. It was the one-liners, impersonations and most importantly, the huge trust fund that served as bait for this hellish trap. HELLISH TRAP! Neither was Bob’s comment tango the cause of the Zoomtard delay. As intimidating as it is for someone to take what is written here seriously, it actually encourages me to write more. However, stupid stupid work place with all its demands on my time has been the reason for the gap in posting. It’s been busy down at the old God-exchange.

Scaling The Summit
There is a church in Illinois that is supremely well known called Willow Creek. The guy who founded Willow Creek is called Bill Hybels. Bill Hybels is a legend. Bill Hybels is the kind of guy who bungee jumps without the bungee just to prove he is harder than his sons. Bill Hybels is one side of modern evangelical Christianity’s personality. Its yang if you will to clever old Eugene Peterson’s ying. Peterson likes harpsichord music and early translations of Beowulf. Hybels likes books by Jim Collins and probably that tv show with Alan Sugar. Anyway, Willow Creek have this Global Summit conference every year. Its like a conference, but more challenging and I guess that is why they call it a summit. Work packed me off and sent me to the Global Summit where I got to hear Jim Collins explain how to lead people when you can’t encourage them with a pay cheque, the brilliant Ashish Nanda slowly unfold the wisdom of grooming new staff from within your organisation (encouraging to me, the local boy made good, who became a Christian in the church he now helps to lead) and got to hear Bono talk at length about his passion for the Scriptures and how his frustration with churches has turned into something kind of like awe once they understood how the AIDS crisis was a Kingdom of God issue.

This was one hell of a mind blowing conference. Sorry, summit. Everyone else was great, even though I had heard Hybels say most of what he had said before because Zoomtard is one well-connected fellow. And because he attended a Hybels training day in March. But just like the EAI conference at the end of last month, what was really encouraging was that the focus was not on making converts to Christianity. These men and women were concerned with the already here and still on-its-way arrival of the Kingdom of God. People who become disciples of Jesus are a natural outworking of the advancing Kingdom but numbers are not the point. Transformation is. Christians ended slavery. Christians have won the victories against racial hatred in our age. But still I think of Christian and I think judgemental and bigoted and self-interested and self-righteous. Then I stop looking in the mirror and think of other Christians and think much the same thing. This discrepancy is because for every Martin Luther King or Bill Hybels there seem to be a dozen Christians fighting over who has the most perfect doctrine or who is the most at fault or concerned with getting people to “tick a box for Jesus” rather than become agents in the biggest subversive cell in the world. Its still a sleeper cell but the more I come into contact with the work of people as diverse as Tom Wright, Mark Greene, Bono or Bill Hybels, I think it can be roused from its slumber.

The Troubling Art of Being Northern Irish
I was in Norn Iron last week, I was in Norn Iron last night and I have to be back in Norn Iron on Thursday for a talk I am giving. It just seems rude to me that they haven’t welcomed my constant visits with reunification. Never forget the equation of Irish Nationalism folks, 26 + 6 = 1. Last night, the church went on a road trip to a Presbyterian church who wanted to know about this new fangled idea of a church in the Republic of Ireland. As if people in the Republic would be interested in something like God. “Sure all they do down there is shout at each other in funny, cute accents and have babies and eat coal.” I am being unfair for my own amusement. Shame on me.

The church that welcomed us were actually brilliant. Everyone in the church looks forward to these road trips immensely because the banter in the cars going up and down is great and because we are always welcomed like the long lost wing of the family now returned. Stepping inside the porch yesterday was like visiting a girlfriend’s granny for the first time and being welcomed as if you were Kofi Annan, George Clooney and Padre Pio all wrapped up in one dashing figure. (These Presbyterian ladies probably don’t know who Padre Pio is though) We talked about what we are doing and why we think it matters and we sang some songs in Irish (first time ever in that church!) and answered some of their excellent questions (the people in this church were on the ball).

But at the end, over tea and coffee and sandwiches with the crusts cut off, one of our number was told by one of their number that she thought we were anti-Catholic. Anti-Catholic!? Hearing about this on the way home irrationally annoyed me and the aggrivation lingers this morning. How could you think we were anti-Catholic? For the love of all that is Roman, I set up a training conference at a Catholic seminary so that Protestant students from this girl’s college could understand Catholicism better and relate to their Catholic brothers and sisters. I am doing my MA in theology under a Catholic priest. I hope to start a Divinity degree next year at a Catholic seminary. My sister is a Catholic theologian. My parents are practicing Catholics. I am a baptised, communed and confirmed Catholic. One of my “constellation” (Bill Hybels-ese for the group of people who inform and inspire you) is a Catholic philosopher. And the partial list I have offered in my defence could be presented by any of the seven people who visited that church last night.

The reason this irritated me so much is not, of course, because there is any hint of truth in it or that the girl in question was in any way malicious in her accusation. But what annoyed me was that you just can’t win with Northern Irish Christianity. We didn’t say anything that could be interpreted as anti-Catholic last night but because we didn’t begin with a preamble whereby we stated that Catholics are Christians too, she feared we in the group, (maybe the majority group) in evangelical circles who don’t have that simple truth as a foundation stone. We have a pretty lovely little patch of land we call home here in Dublin’s suburbs. We meet with and pray with and work with the Catholic and Church of Ireland clergy regularly. They are our friends. It is taken as a given that we are all brothers and sisters through Jesus. It doesn’t need stating. But we go to a similar nice place on the edge of Belfast and because we don’t state it is taken as a given that we are the opposite.

It is a Catch 22 though. We didn’t go there to start a theological dispute. If I had begun my input with, “Vatican II is amongst the most exciting developments of the 20th Century and I advise you all to investigate the writings of Chiara Lubich…” then there might well have been outrage from hardliners in the congregation.

I am an ecumenicist. That is a word that is misunderstood everywhere. By that word, I mean to declare that I believe all churches are in error. I believe that Presbyterians should work with Baptists and Pentecostals and Anglicans and Orthodox and Catholics, not because I have hope that those other churches can be reformed, but because I have the even bolder hope that my own denomination can be reformed. I believe Christians of all persuasions should pray together, work together and live together because if we are rigourous, Presbyterianism, Catholicism, Anabaptism and any other -ism you care to mention is a heresy. We are all simply Christian. We all have sinfully wrong ideas about God and he accepts us anyway.

In Northern Ireland, true inter-Christian relationships are a long way off because you still have to declare yourself one one side or another. I guess the problem is that sides still exist. It would be such a frustrating situation to live in if you had to navigate through icebergs of hardliner exclusivists on one side and softheaded uniformists on the other. It seems as anachronistic as placing an iceberg slalom course on a motorway. We have work to do together, we have direction and momentum. Navigating around big cold blocks of frozen water probably isn’t the safest way to go about things.

The Epilogue
There was a moment of Dave-genius on the drive home last night. You’ve heard the urban myth about the philosphy student who sat down to his end-of-year paper to read the question, “Why?”? He simply writes, “Why not?” and then leaves the exam hall and gets a 1:1. Dave told the follow on story of the Christian philosophy student who when faced with the same question wrote, “Jesus.”. The student failed, but then got a million euros when he sued the college for discrimination. Classic.

Classic like Breathing Earth, a site that charts carbon emmissions, births and deaths around the globe and these thoughts from Malcolm Gladwell on child prodigys and why they often are just mediocre when they grow up. I intend to be an OAP-prodigy. I am going to win the Tour De France at the age of 70, at my first go.

Your Correspondent, Come and listen to what he has done.

Photo blogs can be even worse than theological sketchpads. Don’t worry though. I’ve found a good one for you: Bluejake.

From a Subversive Influence, here is an interestingly subversive politco-theological pondering. I wonder if its got anything to it.

Neuro is suspicious of Nooma. All the more reason for you to go check them out seeing as most things that seem cool that Neuro is suspicious of turn out to be really evil. Like when Furbies turned out to have peanuts in them and all those people died of anabolic reactions. Neuro never liked Furbies. Decry it while you still get cred for it. Go check out the Dust episode here, which is one of the videos Zoomtard wholeheartedly stands over.

A Zoomtard Competition
The Atlantic asked this month, in its section on words for things that need words, what we should call the territory that exists between our earphones while we listen to our iPods on the bus.

Does the barrier erected by headphones have a name? As a semipermanent resident of this tiny country, I often wonder.

Answers on the back of a postcard. The prize is a guided tour of your soul. Suggestions must be shorter than a typical Bob Heffernan comment.

Your Correspondent, A Film by Zoomtard

So I had an eventful weekend. There was a concert and a conference and a baptism and then I started a mini-craze about a Croatian theologian. What can I say? My infectious enthusiasm has made them all sick. If you all remember last week I was telling you about the wonderous cacophony made by the band Duke Special and the unique opportunity you have to enjoy it in the privacy and comfort of your own home buy purchasing some CDs. Well I went to see Duke Special last Friday night and I was blown away. Even Neuro would have been blown away and she punches me when I sing Duke Special lyrics. Ask Stigmund, who was also there and can also testify to the terrific, thrilling dramatic experience that was Duke Special live. They had people in the audience who played along with them. Planted in the audience! And they played along with cheese graters and whisks! And they all were in costume! And one was a geography teacher and another was a Boy’s Brigade member. A Boy’s Brigade member!

Born Again Christians Have Holy Love In
After the excitement in the Sugar Club I got up with no small amount of dread to attend the National Conference of the Evangelical Alliance Ireland at UCD. There comes a point in every Christian’s life when they’ve really got to ask themselves, “Am I ready to go small talk again?” Especially when you spent two (amazing) years working for an organisation that had four conferences a year. At least. Plus, the theme for EAI this year was “Out of the Ghetto”. For me, being in “the ghetto” (not a literal ghetto for evangelicals that you haven’t heard about in Coolock or somewhere but a state of mind where evangelical Christians bind together in a holy huddle to protect them from the bad people in the outside world who don’t wear What Would Jesus Do? bracelets) is not like an addiction. Getting out of it is not a long process where recognition of the problem is the first step. Getting out of the ghetto simply involves being normal and not spending all your time involved in Christian things around other Christians who reinforce all the crazy ideas you hold until you can’t understand any longer why they seem so crazy to other people. However, in their foolishness, the advisory committee that consisted of people like Dr. Patrick Mitchel and Sean Mullan didn’t feel a need to consult Dublin’s 14th most read Christian blogger.

My bad attitude went fleeing out of the door when the first speaker got up. Mark Greene, the head of the most excellent London Institute of Contemporary Christianity spoke on the topic of Moving The Church Into The World and it was breathtaking. It was brilliantly presented, practical, deeply thought-through, Biblical and done so that you didn’t feel like a failure as he laid out the sad state of the church and how badly we are equipping our congregations for real life. I loved it. I loved the whole day, even if Greene was the outstanding performer for me (although if Sean Mullan had been first instead of last, in the graveyard shift of 4pm I am sure people would have been equally in awe of what he had to say). The thing that got me at the conference was how we seem to be focusing on the Kingdom of God. There wasn’t any hint that the church’s mission was to go and make more Christians. Or to go and annoy people about morality. The church’s mission is to live the Gospel and so bring about a revolution in people’s lives that will hopefully involve relationships with Jesus but won’t be dependent on that. The vision was big enough to get anyone excited. It was a shame you weren’t there. I’ll invite you next time. You probably won’t get to hear me speak that time though.

The Dove Didn’t Come Out In the Photos
Straight after the EAI conference I went into town to do something I had never done before. I attended an adult baptism. I had never been to one before because, and I’m about to get controversial here, but I think they are wrong with a capital W. A capital W that is in flames and is very spiky and that may growl menacingly as you approach it. Zoomtard readers, it is time to come out to you. I am a paedobaptist and I am proud. I am a paedobaptist and I think I am right.

The courting of Christian controversy aside, I made a friend a few years ago in Trinity who was on a kind of spiritual quest. We used to get together every month or so to talk about God and meaning and history and knowing and all that good stuff. Over the summer, and don’t blame me because I wasn’t even in the country, he became a Christian. This rocks hugely and he has been having a great time switching his degree to Theology and Biblical Studies (you don’t have to do this when you become a Christian by the way, it is optional) and well, being all Christian. I don’t know what that involves either but he does seem to be very happy. So it was his adult baptism, his public declaration of being right with God and I have to admit, the service was amazing. It was humbling. God’s presence was in the room. I thought I would be going with my good theology as a kind of peacemaker between the rude people asking for the gift of baptism a second time and an angry God who is still put out that they took so long to thank him for the gift. It turns out there might have been a slight miscalculation in my theology and it seems God doesn’t agree to just follow a system we might devise.

By the way, a bird just hit the window. Here I am planning the next paragraph and boom, it hits the glass doors. Don’t worry though, it was ok. No animals were harmed in the writing of this Zoomtard.

Back On His High Horse
If you are new to this website, I should let you in on its subtitle, which “A theological skeptchpad”. Zoomtard is fascinated by a lot of things but his chief concerns are theology and the Bible. He gets unreasonably excited by both. He has spent the last seven years becoming more and more convinced that the Bible really is unlike any other book, that its plot is a grand project planned and executed by God and that entering into the plot contained in its pages somehow can enter you into the actual plot which is taking place all around us.

If you understand this, then you can maybe grasp just how apoplectic his rage can be when he hears young Earth Creationists take the introduction to this grand plot and pass it off as science. As if God would begin the story with a meditation on how you build a story. Reading Alan Reynolds’ Reading The Bible For The Love Of God has been a step for me in my maturation process that will allow me to discuss this topic with Creation Scientists without ripping their head off and stuffing cottage cheese down their neck and to talk with other people, sane people, without scaring them with my vein popping intensity.

I have had people ask me whether I think Genesis is true. By that they usually mean Genesis 1-3 since it does stretch for 50 chapters. I always answer, “YES! Absolutely.” They then tend to presume that I am obviously an idiot because no one can take that text (which they may or may not have actually read) seriously because “modern science” had disproved it. What they are really trying to ask when they ask me the question is whether I think Genesis 1-3 is true in terms of contemporary historical investigation. The answer to that question would always for me be “Its a moot point. If you push me to say things that are of no relevance, then no.” I would be more kind than that though. You understand I am just trying to act big in front of you?

Genesis 1-3 was never meant to be a historically factual account of the beginnings of humankind or the mechanics of the start of the space-time universe. If you believe it to be true in that sense you are believing something that could not have been intended by the initial tellers of the story or the people millennia later who wrote it down in the form we have it today. The reason I get so annoyed with Creation Scientists is that you can believe it to be historically and factually accurate and still miss the point of the story. In my experience, reading the story that way increases the chance that you’ll miss what is actually being said.

Genesis 1-3 is profoundly true to human experience. Reading it and understanding it for the first time literally rocked my world. It is true in my life to a depth that Dostoevsky or Orwell could never plumb. This is not a truth like a historical statement of fact or a theory of physics but it is the truth we have to grasp if we are going to grasp the big arching plot that God has written us into as characters. Reynolds is really helpful at this point. There would be no difficulty raised by readers if I claimed World War II ended in 1945AD. Unless you were Muslim, in which case the war ended in 1324AH. He presents another scenario, one where he suggest war is a terrible thing. On this point, there would be a lot of discussion. Thoughtful would be made about the potential benefits that come from war and the occassional neccessity of war. At the end though, we would come to the conclusion that war is indeed a terrible thing.

The first observation, which appears to be obviously true is actually only relatively true. The second of the statements is far more open to debate but as much as it is true, it is always true. It is a qualitative statement about human values. Reynolds goes on to give four statements:

Statements 1 and 3 are different in nature from statements 2 and 4. We can verify 1 and 3. We can check them out and make sure they are true. You or I could both do it just as well as each other. But statements 2 and 4 cannot be proved. Especially by people outside of the interaction. They cannot be proven but they

can be much “truer” for the meaningful living of life than the so called factual statements.

The Bible generally and Genesis 1-3 especially is concerned with statements of 2 and 4. As is our poetry and our literature, our plays and our movies, our music and our art. When we try to explain why we are here, a much deeper question than how, we have to move outside of the realms of empiricism. We can experiment to verify that you are a child’s parent. We cannot experiment our way to verification of your parenthood of that child, the love and devotion and passion and sacrifice that arrived for free when this baby turned up. Real life is lived outside the binary of black and white but there is more truth in the grey.

The Errata
Zoomtard is beginning his actual career as a person who preaches on Sunday. He now works for a church and Sunday is the first time he preaches as a churchman. Everyone is welcome, there is no list at the door, entrance is free, as is the tea, coffee and Grace. Feel free to come.

Some fascinating linkage for you in the form of Genetic Sexual Attraction and Personal Kyoto.

Your Correspondent, Amazing how this grace helps me rebound