Random Thoughts & Updates

Princesses, Past and Present

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Holland Girls

Like her two sisters before her, Female Offspring Unit #3 was in the homecoming court this last Friday night. She looked beautiful and her sisters were there to support and root. Mrs. Blather and yours truly were very proud.

The Problem of Evil

You my recall my series of posts a few months ago titled, “Tragedy: The Mother of All Bad Theology.” (Here, here and here.) They were built around the observation that the Church’s ham-handed handling of “the problem of evil” and cartoonish conceptions of God’s sovereignty are turning an entire generation off to the gospel. I was reminded of that when I read this little tidbit about the late Steve Jobs:

When Jobs was 13, he saw starving children on the cover of Life magazine.  He asked his Sunday school teacher if God knew what would happen to the children. After that he never returned to church and he never went back to Christianity.

Clearly, the young Jobs did not get a satisfactory answer from that Sunday school teacher. How tragic.
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Man Stuff

baseball

This Wednesday night I will be teaching the fourth and final installment of a series of “Equip” classes titled “A Masculine Model of Spirituality and Prayer.” It’s been heartening to see a large group of men there every week, even though it seems that there’s been a crucial Texas Rangers game taking place every time.
As it happens, Game 6 of the World Series will be this Wednesday.
Maybe we should schedule another set of these classes for when the canceled NBA games were scheduled.

It Really is 1979 Again

Below I offered a few thoughts about the anarchists, marxists, Maoists and other usual subjects that are “occupying” various municipalities around the country. I was amused to come across this video footage from a 1979 Wall Street protest the other day:

But I really got a belly laugh out a text message I received this week from a friend who just brought a baby boy home from the hospital. I asked how the new little guy was doing. His reply was:
All he does it eat, sleep, poop and cry. I think he’s one of those ‘occupy’ protesters.

Alert the media . . .

I’m posting something to the blog. It lives!

Actually, don’t bother alerting the media. They’re obsessed with following the pronouncements of a few thousand unwashed anarchists, unrepentant Maoists, and clueless slackers with giant senses of entitlement claiming to represent you, me and the rest of the non-super-wealthy 99% of U.S. citizenry.

occupy_wall_streetcapitalism-is-a-crime

Note the yellow sign above which reads:

Capitalism is Organized Crime. The Whole System Has Got to Go.

Okay. And we should replace capitalism with . . . what precisely?

That particularly sign points to the web site PSLweb.org, which is the official home of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. A review of their literature suggests they would replace capitalism with something akin to Mao’s dictatorship of the proletariat and Cultural Revolution which resulted in the deaths of at least 30 million.

Puts me in mind of something Paul Harvey once said:

Capitalism has been our good servant. But some would trade a good servant for a bad master.

There is much hand-wringing about the “Zionist” “occupation” or “Palastine” in this group’s literature as well. Which brings me to . . .

It’s been amusing to contrast the media’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street with they way they were reporting on Tea Party gatherings last year.

Whenever a large group of Tea Party activists gathered, deeply troubled reporters invariably perceived racism lurking beneath the surface, regardless of how diverse the crowd.

While the press apparently has amazing powers to perceive invisible racism wherever average working Americans gather to call for smaller, less intrusive government–they are willfully blind to blatant anti-Semitism being paraded before them at the OWS protests.