In the entire Bible, the color yellow is mentioned how many times?
Only three and they are all in Leviticus 3.
Striking Words From Last Week’s Sermon (but not found in the text)
====
This is a strange place to minister. The biggest Hindu temple in America’s here. Eckankar is here. They plan to build a forty-two million dollar mosque here. Something strange is going on in Minneapolis. A very dynamic Christian location and pagan throughout.
It’s just a very strange thing here that we Christians should be keyed up for. It’s like Ephasus. Or Tarsus or Antioch.
Sometime people say, “Whoah, what’s happening to America?” and you say, “Well, it’s like when the church exploded in the first century, that’s what it’s like!
Just pagan and pluralistic and debauched. Yes! There’s a place to minister!
They say “Oh, what happened to our America?”
Be careful lest you turn America into your kingdom. We’re citizens of Heaven. And we want to be salt and light and if God would be pleased to bring great revival that affected all branches of culture so be it. I’m not counting on it.
I pray toward it. I stand the window in my study and look at that city there, less than a mile away, and I pray “God, rock it! Rock that city with the Holy Spirit. May the Christians in this city – there’s so many of them – open their mouths with boldness and speak the Gospel into peoples lives and move by your spirit and take this city!”
I do pray prayers like that. But that sort of Mega-Corporate-Culture-Altering thing happening is not what I’m about. I’m about faithfulness to the word of God.
And in the Bible, my eschatology says it’s going to be pretty bleak at the end. And I want people to stand, and having done all, to Stand! When there’s only ten of you in the city.
So I don’t know what God’s going to do. Let’s pray for great glorious moves of his spirit, not moves of men but moves of God.
I was surprised, after yesterday’s post to find out that I was (apparently) the first person Google history to ever utter the statement:
Of course you know: This means prayer
Which seemed to me to be a rather obvious alteration of a well known catch-phrase.
Upon thinking about it, however, I realized that having this statement occur to one’s mind required a mix of (hopefully) proactive Christian thinking and knowledge of 50-Year-Old Looney Toons (i.e. Bugs Bunny) media.
Evidently, this is rare.
Last week marked the end of my third year of blogging, and as I’ve done in the previous two anniversaries, I will mark it with a Friday Everything.
Everything I Ever Needed To Know I Learned From This Year’s Friday Everythings – The Entries with 2,3,4,5 and 6 Words
Mohamed was not perfect. *** Dear God, help me. *** We can always hope. *** Pray to Jesus. *** Don’t lose faith. *** Accept the will of God. *** There’s always danger. *** God is indeed great. *** You can’t believe everything you read. *** Loneliness will blind you. *** Lighten up while you still can. *** Insufficient data coming through. *** We super powers have it tough. *** There’s no delaying the inevitable. *** I hate snakes. *** Nothing shocks me. I’m a scientist. *** DON’T call me Junior! *** “X” marks the spot. *** Dance on your own time. *** We can’t plan on everything. *** People change in six years. *** People do strange things for religion. *** There is no combat without movement. *** One victory is not a habit. *** Analyze, then build. *** Be creative in your thinking. *** Influence is power. *** I’m in favor of surviving. *** Strange dreams are a safety valve. *** Don’t interrupt. *** Eagles aren’t forks! *** Don’t stray off the track. *** Don’t leave the path! *** May your beard grow ever longer. *** Third time pays for all. *** Every worm has his weak spot. *** Lucky numbers don’t always come off. *** It is horrible being all alone. *** Never laugh at live dragons. *** Where there’s life, there’s hope. *** Cram is much better than nothing. *** Even a burglar has his feelings. *** May your shadow never grow less. *** Share and share alike. *** Orthodontists speak fluent ‘Brace’*** We’re all victims of Data. *** I love eggplants! *** Take away my pride. *** Take away my cynicism and anger. *** Help me to take responsibility. *** Courage is found in unlikely places. *** A good guy, Occam. *** Power to the people. *** Nothing is completely okay. *** Beauty is a gift.
And yes, the emphasis is added by me. From MPR:
As the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti is in a difficult spot – it needs aid, but deeply resents foreign meddling. Many have mixed feelings toward Christian groups that funnel hundreds of millions into missions in Haiti.
Christian missionaries alone run or support an estimated 2,000 primary schools attended by some 600,000 students – a third of Haiti’s school-aged population, according to government figures. Church groups also run vital hospitals, orphanages and food-distribution sites.
“There are many who come here with religious ideas that belong more in the time of the inquisition,” said Max Beauvoir, head of Haiti’s Voodoo Priest’s Association, which represents thousands of priests and priestesses. “These types of people believe they need to save our souls and our bodies from ourselves. We need compassion, not proselytizing now, and we need aid – not just aid going to people of the Christian faith.”
Two-thirds of Haiti’s 9 million are said to practice Voodoo, a melange of beliefs combining animism from west Africa and Catholicism.
Of course you know: This means prayer.
—- Short on time? Skip to the bottom two lists. They’re my main point. —
So all of my adult life (starting right after college) whenever I went to the grocery store, I’d get a big bag of hard candy, mostly mints. People knew me as the guy to ask if they needed a mint. Every morning I put three or four in my pocket and eat them during the day. My kids had a name for the container that I kept on the high shelf – Daddy Candy.
And then six years ago as a new years resolution, I stopped doing this. My reason was this – it seemed like every two or three weeks, I’d get a sore throat/cold/cough/headache sickness. I wondered if all of the sugar was hurting my immune system or something. So I stopped. I’m pretty sure I haven’t had a piece of hard candy since. And I have been more healthy. That year I went four or five months with no illness whatsoever. And to this day, I don’t seem to be hit as often, nor as hard by illness.
I have credited this to consuming significantly less sugar.
But here’s what makes me nervous about that postulate. Our bodies are changing all the time. We go through phases that come in and out of our lives. What if I just happened to be leaving the Often-Sick part of my life at the same period that I stopped eating hard candy?
We think things go like this:
1. Problem is caused by behavior.
2. We stop behavior.
3. Problem goes away.
But what if it really is like this:
1. We have a problem.
2. We try several things to fix problem.
3. Problem goes away on its own because we’re leaving that phase.
4. We give the credit for the solution to the most recent fix attempt.
The unanswerable question is – how often does this happen?
The next time you’re talking to someone about some kind of significant difficulty and, as a part of showing support, they mention a much smaller problem they’ve experienced, and you’re tempted to think “Oh, you really have no idea what I’m going through”, consider:
Perhaps you should show grace and assume that “. . . And considering that my difficulty was only a small fraction of yours, I can’t imagine what it was like for you” is subtext in their attempt to help you.
Since this one is parenting parenting focused I decided to put it over at my other blog.
Well, it’s alright now. I learned my lesson hard. You see, you can’t please everyone, so you got to please the LORD.
I promised commentary about my last post. Here are seven:
1. First of all, I obviously cherry-picked the comments that I thought were the most interesting. My hope, however, was that I kept only those comments that were a part of the threads I was trying to highlight and took out nothing that was pertinent. In addition, my hope was that I didn’t take the comments out of context.
2. The main reason I put up the post was to make clear the results of Vox’s way of thinking.
3. (Regarding the first thread) I put up a verse that looks like it helps prove Calvinist theology, Vox said that it could be read another way. I showed that seeing it that way lead to silly results. So Vox is forced to go with the “Well, the Bible contradicts itself there, then.”
As I mentioned in my comment, this makes me nervous. Rather than concede defeat, Vox denigrates the Bible. He states that this is not new. But I say it is, for him. He has previously stated that due to translation difficulties, specific verses may not be completely reliable. But he has never (as far as I know) stated that the Bible is self-contradictory. I think he was forced to go there. His only other choice is to agree with Calvinism.
4. It is a Christian’s job, even if he isn’t sure of inerrancy, when he finds passages in the Bible that seems to conflict with each other, to work them out – To try to find a meaning in the passages where they can both be true.
5. Twice Vox says that it is more common that people who believe in the inerrancy of scripture more commonly fall away from religion, than those who are more liberal minded. To that I respond in two ways: 1. I disagree, and I’d welcome any data to back up his statements, and 2. I hope Vox isn’t stating this in order to more fully prove that inerrancy is wrong. Because obviously there is no logical way to get from “This makes people break their faith” to “This must be false.”
6. Vox has put himself into the position that a Bible verse can prove that those he disagrees with are wrong, but that no verse can prove that he is wrong. This is a weasel position.
7. Vox makes this statement: “Considering how often people here have trouble following my thoughts, I have absolutely no problem believing that you and me and everyone else have trouble comprehending His”
Except for one thing: He’s not God. If God wants to make himself known, he will be known. This is the primary reason for the existence of the Bible. And God is watching over his word. The one who seeks Him will find Him.
Vox’s inability to be understood says nothing about God’s ability to be understood.
Have you ever noticed that in a long comment stream, it’s sometimes difficult to read because there are so many conversations going on. There recently was a very interesting comment discussion over at Vox Populi from a blog post entitled Not So Fast that yielded quite a bit of interesting food for thought and revealed much about it’s host.
But just try wading through the 200+ comments to see what was going on.
I here provide the good parts version. I’ve weeded it down to under 30 comments, and stripped out all the referring quotations. See if you find it as interesting as I did.
===
Vox Day <from blog post a day earlier>
I think Jesus was the fix for a design gone haywire.
Markku <in the comments to this previous post>
Can’t be.
1Pe 1:19-20 But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot: Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you.
Vox Day (in the Not So Fast Post)
Markku is under the impression that he managed to catch me making a mistake about God’s knowledge of the design imperfections of His Creation. I think I can demonstrate that this is not correct:
Markku’s interpretation is potentially correct, as it indicates that God was aware from before the beginning of the possible need to send Jesus Christ to redeem Man. The Redeemer was chosen from the start, but not revealed until later. But this does not make his interpretation necessarily correct because it is perfectly plausible that God would have understood that Man was capable of falling and had a backup plan prepared in case of such an event.
And now the comments from this post.
Jamsco 1/8/10 9:13 AM
Good job, Markku.
Vox, what do you do with
Revelation 13:8 (ESV)
8 and all who dwell on earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain.
I read this to say that God knew before creation that some (many) would not be saved. How do you read it?
VD 1/8/10 9:29 AM
I would say that such knowledge from the time of creation is a reasonable interpretation. Perhaps even a likely one. But still not a conclusive one. Since the world is repeatedly described as evil, it’s also possible that “the foundation of the world” refers to the fall of Man, not Creation, and that the only reference to the book of life is that it is “of the Lamb”.
Jamsco 1/8/10 9:43 AM
So following this line of thought . . .
God didn’t know who was going to be saved. And then Adam sinned, man fell, and then God suddenly knew who was going to be saved?
VD 1/8/10 11:37 AM
Or decided, if you like.
Jamsco 1/8/10 9:46 AM
and following from that . . .
You’re saying that God knew right after the fall everyone in history is going to choose Jesus, but he didn’t know before the fall that Adam and Eve were going to eat the fruit?
VD: 1/8/10 9:46 AM:
I’m not saying anything of the kind. How could you possibly conclude that? And anyhow, I leave the silly statements about spiritual certainties to the Calvinists and omniderigistes.
Ben-El 1/8/10 11:47 AM
It’s rather clear to me that Jamsco meant to say, “You’re saying that God knew right after the fall everyone in history whom is going to choose Jesus.”
Jamsco 1/8/10 12:07 PM
Ben-El is correct. My apologies. Vox, would you agree with the revised statement?
VD: 1/8/10 12:27 PM:
No, I wasn’t quibbling about grammar. You should know that. You can’t seem to grasp that I am not like you. I am not claiming that anything MUST be one way or another. I am simply asserting that YOU DO NOT KNOW what God does or does not know, much less what He did or did not know despite the verses to which you are appealing.
Jamsco: 1/8/10 12:07 PM:
Vox, it wasn’t just grammar. The revision completely changed the meeting.
It’s like this. I say the verse means A.
You say, no it could mean B.
I say well then, B implies C.
You say, sure, okay, C then. (you did this at 11:37)
I say well doesn’t C imply D?
And then you go all ranty on me.
I’m just following your statements to the point where I hope you see that B can’t be the right way to read the verse. I didn’t say that you were saying that B is the right way to read the verse.
<end of this part of the thread with no response from Vox, but another interesting thread starts up and things take a different turn>
=====
Azimus 1/8/10 10:24 AM
Precisely what language would the Bible be required to use for you to support Jamsco’s read?
VD 1/8/10 12:04 PM
That’s really not the issue. Since the verse contradicts other verses and is also in the nature of an aside, I would ignore this one in favor of the others. Jamsco, on the other hand, will tend to ignore the verses where God changes His mind, repents, and generally takes a dynamic approach. But since these are mere matters of speculation and partial understanding, not critical matters of faith, I don’t see it as particularly important which way a Christian falls on the issue.
I have never insisted that I must be correct about this. I don’t pretend to know God’s essence or even God’s will except in a few very specific matters. It’s His game and His rules, not mine. But throughout the broad theme of the Bible and history, I see no sign that everything is a scripted play. To me, it all looks much more like an experiment that has a few scripts set to run in important places.
=======
Jamsco 1/8/10 12:12 PM
Vox, you’re making me nervous. Do you actually believe the Bible is self-contradictory?
==
VD 1/8/10 12:27 PM
To the best of my understanding, small parts of it are contradictory. I don’t see how you can claim that God has a perfect plan of which He repents, or that He planned to decide to destroy the Earth, then changed His mind.
This isn’t news to you. I have never said that the Bible is the flawless and perfect expression of the Word of God. Or rather, most Bibles are not because they cannot be, given the small differences between one Bible and another. As a physical expression of God’s Word, it is limited by our capacity to encompass and transmit it; anyone who is multilingual can easily see the differences between one Bible in one language and a second Bible in another. This doesn’t alter the truth of the original message in the slightest, it just means that we should not fool ourselves into thinking we can understand it in its fullness. Paul and Jesus both tell us this.
So, I’m not troubled by exegetical inconsistencies. I don’t have to pretend that the words are different than what they clearly are and appeal to allegories or anthropomorphy whenever an apparent contradiction arises. What matters is the broad thematic sweep and the clear and specific commands, not the details in the asides.
VD 1/8/10 11:52 AM
Jamsco, Genesis 6:5 quite clearly contradicts your idea that God knew every single person who would be sinful prior to Creation:
And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.
It is also one of the many examples of God changing His mind and deviating from His plan. He said that He would destroy man, and then He did not. Are you willing to argue that He also planned to destroy man prior to Creation? And why would it grieve Him if He planned for man to be wicked to such an extent?
Jamsco 1/8/10 12:15 PM
This is not contradictory. Here’s how to resolve it (from here -
http://cicministry.org/commentary/issue58.htm
)
:
On the second point, the language used in Genesis 6:6 is completely understandable without assuming a lack of foreknowledge on God’s part. Allow me to make an analogy. Suppose a man has a teenage son who is prone to wildness and indiscretion. This son desires a sports car. The father warns him saying, “Son you are only going to get into trouble, you will get tickets, you will probably wreck the car and injure yourself and others.” Yet the son persists, and is unrelenting in his demands for the car. Finally the son has nagged his dad for the car for an entire year and has reached the age of 17. The father, against his better judgment yet feeling the son needs to learn his own lessons in life, buys him the car. Sure enough, the young man gets tickets and eventually gets into a bad accident with multiple injuries. The father, visiting him in the hospital says, “Son, I regret that I bought you that car.”
In this case, the father’s regret does not indicate a lack of foreknowledge about what would happen. He was quite sure of what would happen, but still had reasons for buying the car for his son. In God’s case the difference is that His foreknowledge is absolute, the earthly father’s only a very strong assumption based on present knowledge. However, the point of the analogy is that expressions of regret, as human languages are commonly used, do not always imply a lack of foreknowledge. We regret many things that are very much predictable or even inevitable
VD 1/8/10 12:27 PM
Now, Jamsco, did God repent or did He not repent? Did He change His mind about destroying man or did He not change His mind?
Jamsco 1/8/10 12:48 PM
The way that you can read this (and all Calvinists and non-open theists Armenians do it this way) without contradicting the revelation passage is this -
God repented = God made it clear that he was aware that this was not the right state – despite the fact that he ordained that it would happen.
========
VD 1/8/10 1:10 PM
That’s not what “repent” means. I am familiar with that interpretation and it is one of the reasons that I think Calvinists are prone to weaseling around that which calls their certainties into question.
I don’t mind that people think they are puppets free of volition or if they want to construct a structure of multiple Divine wills that allows them to avoid contradictions. I’m just not willing to accept them telling me that it can be read no other way. And I find it amusing that I am perfectly willing to say, “yeah, okay, it could be that way” while the other side gets twitchy at even considering the mere possibility that everything is not the way they assume it has to be.
How do you explain the abovementioned Jeremiah 19:5? You, not the conventional explanation. What do YOU think about it? Or Jeremiah 7:31: “They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, and it did not come into My mind.”
He didn’t command it. It didn’t come into His mind. And yet you insist that He planned it? That He made them do it?
<I never responded to this, so I will just say that given the context, we can read this to mean it did not come into God’s mind to command it. Not that he didn’t know it would happen. This is my answer, since I don’t know what the “conventional explanation” is. And why would Vox care about that? It’s not like he’s never gone to Boyd documentation to get some help.>
==========
VD 1/8/10 1:16 PM
<Refering to Juel of Krypton: 1/8/10 12:39 PM – “Your example of an apparent contradiction only illustrates that you are reading Hebrew thinking using Greek thinking.”>
You are making my point for me. It’s Hebrew thinking. And Greek thinking. It’s HUMAN thinking. It is not God’s unadulterated thinking. We can’t handle it. Considering how often people here have trouble following my thoughts, I have absolutely no problem believing that you and me and everyone else have trouble comprehending His.
GaretGarrett 1/8/10 1:24 PM <Apparently an Atheist>
So you would occasionally rather give up on scripture than on your ideology, eh? Good for you.
As a physical expression of God’s Word, it is limited by our capacity to encompass and transmit it; anyone who is multilingual can easily see the differences between one Bible in one language and a second Bible in another.
God would not have used revealed scripture to communicate to us precisely because of the limitations you mention.
VD 1/8/10 1:29 PM
You completely missed the point. If you choose one side or the other, then you will give up on scripture. This has nothing to do with ideology. Moreover, I am obviously not giving up on scripture for the very obvious reason that I am doing nothing more than stating that both sides are possible. If I have to choose one side, I would come down on the aprevistan side <Open Theist> as I believe it to have stronger scriptural and logical support. But I don’t have to; no one does.
The only ones giving up on scripture are those who say it absolutely must be one way or the other.
GaretGarrett 1/8/10 1:44 PM
You don’t call this “giving up on scripture”?
Whatever you call it, it’s a step in the right direction.
VD 1/8/10 1:10 PM:
I don’t think you realize the direction from whence I came…. And I tend to see being wedded to the infallibility of Scripture as an invitation to a broken faith. It’s certainly one reason why I rejected the Bible at the age of five.
VD 1/8/10 1:25 PM
<Refering to vinny: 1/8/10 1:16 PM: “The Bible makes so much more sense if you start with the assumption that is was written by superstitious and politically ambitious men before being edited, altered and translated by other men with ideological and political axes to grind.”>
Except it doesn’t because you’re quite obviously wrong. It may have been written by superstitious men, although the Pew Study recently showed that Christians are much less superstitious than those unaffiliated with any religion. But, without question, the writers were not in the least bit politically ambitious. So, not only is your atheism showing, so is your historical ignorance.
Anyhow, I found this attempt to deal with the Jeremiah verses to be amusing: “Is the Lord actually saying that He did not think of something? Even in open theism, God knows all things actual as well as potential. That means that God can know all things in the present tense as well as all possibilities of things that could exist. Certainly God who knew the past sins of Israel would have thought about them doing such sin — as horrible as it was. So, it doesn’t make sense to interpret this as God admitting that He had never thought of something.”
Pure weaselry. Because they assume God must have been able to do something, therefore He didn’t do what He said He did. It’s pathetic.
Starwind 1/8/10 3:30 PM
<Refering to VD: 1/8/10 12:27 PM: “Now, Jamsco, did God repent or did He not repent? Did He change His mind about destroying man or did He not change His mind?”>
Well, what saith scripture?
1Sa 15:29 NASB “Also the Glory of Israel will not lie or change His mind; for He is not a man that He should change His mind.”
The word underlying the English translation of “repent” is Strong’s H5162 na^cham, for which Brown Driver Briggs gives:
1d1) to be sorry, have compassion
1d2) to rue, repent of
1d3) to comfort oneself, be comforted
1d4) to ease oneself
Given that a true prophet of God, Samuel, tells us explicitly that God does not change his mind, then the old English rendering of “repenteth” is incorrect. Almost all the newer literal translations, including the NKJV for example, use “grieved” or “sorry”, consistent with 1Sa 15:29 and the other uses of the words as indicated by BDB.
===
There are perhaps 100 other comments after this, many of them well written and thought out. Go see them if you like. Vox comments only one other time, much further down on another subject.
In my next post, I will comment on all of this.
Every time I see (A) a person doing sign language during a church service or public event or (B) look at close-captioning on TV, I get a little panicky and have difficulty thinking about what’s happening during the service or broadcast.
Because this is how I’d feel if it were my job: The words keep coming!
This was the second Dekker book and just like the first, I recommended it for enterainment, not literature.
I was impressed by this book. It had some pretty good twists that made me want to read it again. But I will warn you – from the beginning to the end, it is a dark thriller that has not very much happiness at all.
Everything I Ever Needed To Know I Learned From The Book “Three” By Ted Dekker
Evil is beyond the reach of no man. *** The deepest questions can drive a man mad. The problem of evil is one of those questions. *** Stay calm and process. *** Washington sees terrorists behind every tree these days. *** Disorder is the enemy of understanding. *** If you stay in the hole too long it becomes your tomb. *** Beauty is a gift. *** The press has a right to know anything that might lend to the city’s safety. *** Murder isn’t exactly your typical confession. *** Murder, gossip, what’s the difference? Evil is Evil. *** You don’t fight evil with evil; it just leads to anarchy. *** Great things always come at great risk. *** We all have pasts filled with mystery and murder. *** You are not your sin. *** You can’t slay the dragon without luring it out of its hole. *** Most people live in their own worlds of delusion. *** There is an absolute. There is good and evil. *** Perhaps the most you can do is try to understand, so that if an opportunity does come, you’re better equipped. *** Four days of hell will tell you a lot about a man. *** Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
For every person in authority, there is another saying, “Who does he think he is?”
Everything I Ever Needed To Know About Christmas And New Years I Learned From Calvin
I’m staying in bed until Christmas. I want tons of loot this year, and I figure my chances of being good improve greatly if I don’t get up. *** That darn Santa has got me every way I turn. *** I hate this time of the year. I’ve got to be good for two more weeks if I want any goodies this Christmas! I’ll never make it.I TRY to be good! I DO! My heart is as pure as driven snow! It’s just that, well, sometimes events beyond my control conspire against me! I’m usually an innocent bystand… HEY, I SAW you roll your eyes! So you don’t believe me, eh?! ME?? By golly, each of your eyes will be rolling toward the other when I’M through with you! *** Look, Hobbes, no one SAW us fighting, right? This can be OUR little SECRET, OK? Santa doesn’t have to know about this, right? *** Boy, if it wasn’t so close to Chrismas, I’d pound you good! Oh no you don’t! You’re not tempting ME! I want every item on my Christmas list, so I’m being GOOD. No matter what the provication! Here comes Susie Derkins. Really? Quick, help me find a pine cone I can throw at… …NO! I’m being GOOD! Good! Good! Good! *** SANTA — WEIGHTED DOWN WITH EXTRA TOYS? DROP ‘EM OFF HERE! — CALVIN. *** I’ve been thinking. They say Santa knows if you’ve been bad or good, right? Right. But think how many kids there are in the whole world! Nobody could be watching every kid every single minute! I mean, Santa’s OLD! He probably takes naps! THe way I figure it, Santa must just make a few random checks on us once or twice a week. That’s all? Sure. He’d catch enough bad kids that way to scare everyone else into being good most of the time. He’d create the impression he’s watching more than he really is! But now that I’m on to him, I’m going to smack Susie with a snowball! If I do it quick, the odds of Santa watching me at that exact moment are virtually nil! What if Susie tells on me? Ooh, I didn’t think of that! She’s a girl, so she probably WOULD snitch! Phoeey. Well, I sure hope Santa’s watching now, seeing as I’m being so good. Unwillingly good, but good nonetheless. *** I’m getting nervous about Christmas. *** It’s all relative. What’s Santa’s definition? How good do you have to be to qualify as good? I haven’t KILLED anybody. See, that’s good, right? I haven’t committed any felonies. I didn’t start any wars. I don’t practice cannibalism. Wouldn’t you say that’s pretty good? Wouldn’t you say I should get lots of presents? *** I asked Dad if he wanted to see some new year’s resolutions I wrote. He said he’d be glad to, and he was pleased to see I was taking an interest in self-improvement. I told him the resolutions weren’t for ME, they were for HIM. That’s why we’re outside now. *** I’m getting disillusioned with these new years. They don’t seem very new at all! Each new year is just like the old year! Here another year has gone by and everything’s still the same! There’s still pollution and war and stupidity and greed! Things haven’t changed! I say what kind of future IS this?! I thought things were supposed to improve! I thought the future was supposed to be better! *** and Santa, if I get any lords a-leaping or geese a-laying, you’ve HAD it. Hmm… That might not be politic.
1. Put a third (or a half?) of your content in the title.
2. Hyphens, contractions and de-contracted contractions.
3. If your resulting post is slightly cryptic, don’t matter nothing: Wait for someone to comment and then explain yourself in your response to it.
4. Put up disclaimers.
5. Make a list of that number of things.
6. Link to other posts. Let the reader get most of the content there.
7. Go with Recipes.
8. Always keep an eye out for good midsize quotes that you can use as a post.
9. Ask for help from others.
10. Can you mine emails that have been sent to you?
11. One word: Poetry.
There are times when an act of betrayal is not sinful.
Quick Question. What opinion is shared by Christopher Hitchens, New Atheist and Vox Day, he who is well known for going all hateful on the New Atheists?
Both eschew “Happy Holidays” and prefer “Merry Christmas”.
Well, if two such diverse minds agree on this issue, who am I to differ.
Merry Christmas, Responsible Puppet Readers!
If last year you (A) received a Christmas present from a cousin or aunt and (B) have used or enjoyed this present much, and (C) will be seeing them again this year – make sure you tell them this. You may bring a bonus moment of joy and peace to a subset of your family as you gather.
1,160,000.
Wow. Just . . . Wow.
