See, that wouldn't have happened if they had schools like Bob Jones University or Liberty U.

-Kerry O.

"Women are the most powerful magnet in the universe. And all men are
cheap metal." Broadcasting executive Larry Miller, quoted in the book "Men are Lunatics, Women are Nuts"

Oh look-- the American Pharisees are using religion to drum up discontent again. WWJD.


-Kerry O.

I had an incident today at Wally World with Loss Prevention people, so it's not like they are psychics.

I bought 4 items, one of them a DVD box set with the usual embedded loss prevention device. When the cashier was scanning the items, she missed that fact that it didn't ring, but it DID make the loud sound saying the tag had been neutralized. When the total came to far less than it should have been, I said "Wait-- something's wrong here, the total should be a LOT more than this. Are you sure the DVD's rang?" She said "I think so, it made the sound." I asked, "Please check."

Without acknowledging my honestly, she did, found the mistake and gave me the new total, which I paid.

When I went to leave the store, I suspect one of the Loss Prevention people noticed the exchange and naturally suspected I was up to no good. They wanted to see all the contents of the bag and the receipt, which I was still carrying with the change. You could tell by the body English that they thought I was up to something.

I can only imagine what would have happened had I not been paying attention, either. Never mind that the DVDs didn't trigger the alarm because the tag had been deactivated or that it was the cashier's mistake-- Fox News would probably have reported that I was carrying a neutralizing device in my other shoulder holster.

Or teleported it into the bag after I left the cash register.

-Kerry O. "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

And metal tubes? It was obvious to Faux News' crack team of military analysts that the OWS protesters were attempting to build centrifuges to enrich uranium!

I wonder why Faux News wasn't fretting about the OWS protesters' Second Amendment rights?


-Kerry O., "Keep searching, boys-- I just KNOW there's a nuclear-powered submarine in here somewhere..."

What a Jerk. I think I would have gotten his name, and then called the police and reported him for verbal assault or peddling without a licence.


No, that just makes one a target. I just as soon stay COMPLETELY off their radar. Like that old aerospace ad in one of the Engineering magazines I get, "Because if they can't see you, they can't hit you."

I asked the landlord for (and got) a peephole installed in my front door. I've taken to not answering the door if I don't recognize the people knocking as one of my neighbors.

But I REALLY shouldn't have had to do this. C'mon, it's not like there isn't a single person tall enought to open the front door in this so-called Christian nation who hasn't heard the name 'Jesus' or 'The Good News'.

Then there's always the religious junk mail one gets all the time, too....


-Kerry O.

Not quite the same, because I live in an almost gated community that has only one access road, the front of which is CLEARLY marked "No Solicitation". Yet, the 'missionaries' blithely ignore it because THEY are representing ALMIGHTY GOD and are entitled to an exception.

Religion may not be a commercial product that you buy for some sort of advantage. But it sure is marketed that way sometimes.


-Kerry O.

Try this scenario on and tell me if you would or wouldn't resent what this Baptist tried to pull on me one time:

I'm working long 2nd & 3rd shift hours on my job and I'm awoken from a deep sleep by a loud knock at the door. There stands a 'missionary' with some 10-15 yr old kids with religious pamphlets. I told them "No thanks, I'm not a believer and I don't want to become one."

"Well why not?" says the haughty adult missionary.

"I'm sorry, but I don't buy the Bible's explanations for human nature. Or the nature of creation for that matter."

"Weeeeeeellllllll, SIR, just WHO do you think created all !this! HMMMMMMM?", said the HAM.

"I'm not having the discussion with you. Please leave.", I told him.

Whereupon he turns to the kids, "See, you'll run across people like THIS".

I just slammed the door because this kind of manipulation ALWAYS makes me angry.

Anyone want to lay odds on what would happen if I, as an Unbeliever, went door to door using kids as props to proselytize for Atheism?

And when was the last time you heard of an Atheist Priest covering up for another Atheist Priest who was molesting children?


-Kerry O.

For a long time, I've wondered if the most aggressive of these 'aggressive spiritual predators' were merely people with acute cases of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Consider: they've made a pact with an entity whom, when they gaze into the pool, tells them they are created in his image.

This alone empowers them to do pretty much what they want because as the Chosen, they will receive unlimited forgiveness for their trepasses against the people who have not made said pact.

It also empowers them to, with a straight face, tell their neighbors how they MUST live. Nevermind that said neighbors are people of great principle and have excellent human values and empathy.

Some make a big show of feeling sorry for the poor Unbeliever who is damned to hell, but many times, you can tell by the haughty posturing that it's _really_ just Schadenfreud being manifested.

Watch the big-time TV preachers sometime-- far from being creatures existing in sackcloth-and-ashes humility, they live the lives of Keeping-Up-the-Joneses, and arrogantly preach 'The One Truth' from their pulpits high above the mere mortals, for when they are there, they probably would tell you they are a conduit for the Almighty Himself.

I've always liked this passage from Gibran:




-Kerry O.

Thomas Jefferson said it well so many years ago:



I think that if your faith brings you comfort and you derive something from it, far be it from me to not accept that it's right for you.

For most of my life, I've felt injured by circumstances involving religion and if I were a Believer, I'd have a difficult time forgiving God for a particular hidden birth defect I had to survive.

Since I don't, I just chalk it up to random chance and just got on with life.

And on my really bad days, I just half-way jokingly recite that fictitous Vulcan prayer from Star Trek:



Actually, it's not as bad as it sounds.


-Kerry O.

As usual, all you have to offer in the way of arguments are veiled personal attacks.


:::::Plonk::::::



-Kerry O.

Fair enough, Roberta. Life has a funny way of testing all of us-- if we're lucky, it's a long strange trip to places we sometimes never planned on going. And if we lose our faith along the way, there is often a reason we only understand after a loss.

Remember-- God sometimes writes straight with crooked lines. :)



-Kerry O.

Of course it is. All one has to do is post it on the Internet and declare it to be true.

Works well, too, as long as you're preaching to the choir. Or oneself.

But hey, just get some religious nuts to start killing people again in the name of God, or kidnapping people into slavery. Then get back to us and let us know how that worked out.


-Kerry O.

Well again, Roberta, I'm merely disagreeing with you and holding out, as evidence for my position that one can learn more morality and beneficial knownledge from other sources, things that people have done in the name of Chirst and have used the Bible to justify.

Slavery is a good example. Even our Founding Fathers weren't immune from its wiles. The Bible flat out condones it.

As stated in my last post, the Bible also condones mass murder as long as it was ordered by Old Testament Fundy God. Yet, the same Moses who was commmander of the armies who slaughtered the people of his own wife, brought down from the mountainside stone tablets inscribed with, among other rules, 'You must not kill.'

My grandparents were Fundies, yet they were very racist and could site Bible verses that they claimed justified their prejudice.

That's basically all I'm saying: that one can interpret the Bible to justify all kinds of evil, and that more wars and killing have happened because of a clash of beliefs than for almost any other cause except for the lust for power. And in doing so, I'm showing you why I, who was raised Christian, can't abide its many contradictions and its version of 'Truth'.


So as far as laying a guilt trip on me? Won't work, I know all the arguments and answers from having spent a lifetime of my own family having done the same. :) And I still love them even though they can't fathom how I got to be 'the way I am.' They still came to see me in Intensive Care when I almost didn't make it, and I'd do the same for them.

Because in the end, that's all the really matters-- our connections to our own humanity and our abilities to relieve suffering, not some book that men wrote a long time ago.


-Kerry O.

No, I was quoting a passage from Milton. You're new here, so you don't know about the past discussions about 'The Paper Pope' or the O.T. massacres sanctioned by your God (which, BTW, none of your compatriots has ever successfully defended against).

I might also add that telling unbelievers that they can't do things like run for a public office, declaring 'A War On Atheism' or censoring free speech are tricks your creed pulls in America, not mine.


-Kerry O.

JMO, but I'd say one can learn a LOT more about human nature reading Milton's Paradise Lost than listening passively to Christian rock bands.

For instance:



-Kerry O., "Turn off the iPod and pick up a Kindle."

If the 'government bureaucrats' were really that interested, they already have something much more efficient for the purpose.

It's called 'Facebook'.

Or, like this dialogue from the tee vee show Dead Like Me:



-Kerry O.

I think that if anyone took the trouble to check, more illegals have been deported by Obama's Dept of Justice in the three years he's been in office than for the entire 8 years under Bush/Cheney.

And _another_ Texas Governor of more recent vintage wearing the Conservative Uniform (or should I say 'flying the Conservative Jolly Rodger?:) has flip-flopped on his support of the Dream Act, giving the children of illegals money to go to college at a time when natural born citizens are finding it increasingly VERY difficult to get the same for their children.


-Kerry O.

You have to wonder how this country would have turned out had Fox News been in business during colonial days. How about:



I wonder if our OP thinks THOSE people should have been 'In Jail Where They Belong'?


-Kerry O.


-

It was on Fox News, so it's now a Law of Nature like pi (which means it goes on forever and ever and ever....).

And it's kind of funny that this same 'news' media is playing the guilt-by-association card, since one of its part time employees who lost a national election and then quit a high government position to do what is essentially the flip side of the coin. I'm sure that employee would say that 'It's not the money, but the principle of the thing'.

In other words, it's the money.


-Kerry O., "There's going to ba alot of people with American Pi on their faces before this election cycle is through."