Good News
Scott Adams accepts Pascal's Wager.
Bad news: Christians who heard the good news immediately started nagging and haggling. "You have to 'be saved' OUR WAY or it won't work!"
Christians. God is bigger than any of us. God made Scott Adams' brain and God knows whether Adams has sincerely repented of his unbelief, and any other errors he can remember having made in this lifetime, and has been forgiven. Adams has a different sort of brain than we have. That is why we've loved and learned from his writing for so long. That analytical left brain is probably not going to start hugging people and speaking in tongues. We are told that St. Thomas had his doubts, too, and yet he became one of the most effective of the apostles. Don't sweat it. If God really needs for an analytical mind to have an irrational experience, God will supply that experience; if God does not supply that experience, God is not finding it necessary. It's none of our business which.
I have been baptized. By immersion, though not in a river. And the truth is that I don't remember which of the two applicable Bible verses was pronounced at the moment of my baptism--I remember both being used in the service--because what I heard when I was actually baptized was splasshhh. I don't find anything in the Bible or the Constitution that says that people can't be baptized again, or can't be married to the same person again; there used to be a couple who thought they were making a statement by having more than one wedding for every year they were married. One ceremony is enough but people can go through more than one, in order to have a celebration with friends. While my husband was alive I thought about having a wedding party in Virginia for an anniversary some year, and I'm not opposed to having a baptism in a river in Virginia some year, as a celebration...but I would not consider repeating either ceremony just to please some control freak who thinks that there is only one way to become a Christian, or a wife, or a nurse or anything else, and they control that way. That way of thinking does not come from God or even from any kind of earthly enlightenment. It comes from some sinful mortal's selfish ego, and it needs to be crucified.
In any case I have loved the work of a lot of writers and musicians who weren't Christians, and have prayed for them as I read or listened, and it's a source of joy to claim Scott Adams as a brother in the faith.
Music, Local
A blogger I follow only irregularly, because this is the kind of thing he does, posted a monster playlist of forty-eight songs (some of them are spoken word pieces) by Matthew West. I usually either get up or go to sleep before sitting through forty songs at one video link, but here I am, midway through number 40 of 48, middle of the night, eyes wide open. I think there's a little too much drum, but as the carol so famously reminds us, for many years drumming was the only accompaniment a lot of (Christmas and other) carols got. This is the Christmas album. Let's just say the man from Franklin, Tennessee, is seriously into Christmas. If you think Christmas music is over, go ahead, click over, and click around to hear his year-round songs.
Revenge
Why lie? Part of me just loves this vintage X post (click to enlarge the screenshot). It's still floating around the'Net because part of a lot of people loves it. It appeals to something deep in our human nature.
I don't know whether this is a news report or a parable, but...A fellow who was in hiding from the law, because he was an illegal immigrant it turned out, shot a police officer eight times. The police rallied around their own and shot the man 68 times. The coroner pronounced that he died of natural causes. Someone asked how the coroner figured that, and the coroner said, "Because when you have 68 bullets in you, you are naturally going to die."
I remember someone telling a similar story in the Friday Market, many years ago. The teller said he came from a different county, and what his town was known for--I didn't understand clearly how long ago he said this had happened--was that an escaped mental case had molested a nice local girl. "And nobody could charge any one of us with killing him, because we all did it, every one!" As in Fried Green Tomatoes? I never knew for sure.
Urban legends like that probably have happened somewhere, and part of us thinks they should have happened. There's an old story, which may once have been true, about a large extended family in my town: You can pick a fight with one of them, if you're stupid enough. It will be a fair fight. One to one. The rest of the clan, or a significant number of them, will be there just to see fair play. And then, if you aren't thoroughly defeated in that one fight, another one of them will have something to say about your having picked a fight with his brother or cousin. And if you are still standing when that one has finished with you, the next one...and so on. In the generation about which that story was told, there were twenty-five or thirty boys and almost as many girls. (Schoolyard violence was apparently expected, but it was gender-segregated.) So it will not end well. Part of me thinks, "Oh ha ha, very Southern Gothic," and part of me remembers a fight that stopped when the relatives of the kindergartners involved started to stand up and watch, and thinks, "Wouldn't it be cool if we really were like that today."
It's called "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," and it eventually leaves everyone involved blind.
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