Tag: humor

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Deep Thoughts or Daft Ideas? Part III

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Less an Introduction Than Yet Another Excuse

This is the third installment of my rambling and quite possibly heretical attempt to reconcile Trinitarian theology with string theory. It’s taken me two years to get to this point, which is not entirely my fault…but mostly. At this rate I will never catch up to the voluminous output of the Early Church Fathers and Doctors, but then a lot of them had secretaries and stenographers. I have a 10 year old laptop, an open-source word processor, and I’m not as likely to be put to death or exiled for my flights of theological fancy. Even so, the very thought of being tortured by Tomás de Torquemada, that most notorious Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition and primary designer of the modern bicycle seat, and subsequently burned at the stake for my sloppy logic and leaps of misguided faith has given me serious pause. Please accept my heartfelt apology.

The Early Fathers of the Church.
I don’t know who’s supposed to be whom here. I do have to wonder what these fellows really looked like, don’t you? and what they wore when they weren’t being painted years after they’d died by someone who never saw them in the flesh. Even so, just based on this one image, I’d find it difficult to argue with them, and I’ve argued with Stephen Hawking (although to be honest, he didn’t know it at the time.)
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DEEP THOUGHTS OR DAFT IDEAS? INTERLUDE

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Buzzkill

The inestimable creativity of Douglas Adams notwithstanding, the answer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” might be something other than “42”

Gaudi's best and most famous work is hardly different from silicone breast implants at some level.The astute among you will have noticed that my last post was well over two years ago. If you were waiting for the second installment of my thought project linking Trinitarian theology with String Theory, you have no doubt been scratching your head and wondering if I’ve been felled by some kind of personal tragedy. I have, but it is way less serious a matter than you imagine.

What happened is this: I went to work on the next post almost immediately. I did quite a bit of research, poring over the writings of early Church Fathers to glean an authoritative understanding of the Triune God, His component persons, and their inter-personal relationships. It was difficult work. Reading the early Church Fathers is not unlike reading U.S. tax code, slightly more momentous perhaps, but dry as a Baptist county. When I was finished, I went back over the text to make a few adjustments and ended up accidentally deleting the whole thing in a disastrously irretrievable way. Continue reading

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Heaven and Hell

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Hell on TV

Contemplating the Stick and the Carrot

One of the problems with trying live a good life is that we don’t really have a clear idea of what Heaven will be like. Heaven after all is supposed to be the reward that motivates good behavior. If we don’t really have a good idea of what it is like to be in Heaven though, we can’t be very motivated.

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Twelve Signs of Depression – Trumping Neurosis

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Depression: The Prison of Our Own Devising

Depression - The Prison of Our Own DevisingI haven’t been very active here of late. Even though I’ve managed two posts over the last several days, it was nearly two months between posts before that. There’s a good reason for my lack of productivity. I thought the reason was Donald Trump, but it turns out that I’m probably just depressed. Continue reading

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Humility and The Book of Job

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Favorite Lines

My favorite passage from A Cup of Pending is this one from Chapter 3:

“… and that’s the third great lesson of Job. There’s no justice in a world where God makes bets with the Devil for his own amusement.”

Irreverent, sarcastic, a little caustic – this is the kind of line that defines my writing and my usual demeanor. My second favorite passage comes a little earlier in the same chapter when Blanche offers to pray for Cliff and makes a mockery of Christian charity in the process:

She still had a grip on Cliff’s hand. A crowd had started to gather around them, circling like sharks sensing blood in the water. Blanche looked up toward the ceiling, suspended acoustic tile punctuated with fluorescent light fixtures. So fervent was her gaze Cliff almost believed God must be on the other side of the tiles, hiding in the conduit and duct work, just waiting for the chance to bless a petitioner. Continue reading

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Six Steps to Perfect Humility – No Effort Required

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Two Approaches to Humility

Old Rusty Car The Hard One

Real humility is a virtuous ideal embraced by most religions and theologies. There are spiritual exercises and practices designed to engender humility in the individual seeking enlightenment and improvement. Humility is a virtue, a first step, a fundamental principle. Humility is the foundation for charity, piety, discernment, justice, and even faith. Continue reading

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Mr. Dancin’ Man

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New Flash Fiction

A new bit of flash fiction in dialect. Enjoy!

antique jukeboxMr. Dancin’ Man

by Jonah Gibson

Vassar was in one a them moods where you don’t give him no shit, no matter what he wants to do, on account of he is gonna do it anyways. So what he does is, he takes all my change offa the bar while I’m sittin there watchin an plugs it in the juke they got over in the corner. He presses buttons an that juke starts to playin every weepy, pedal-steel country song there is—least the ones give country a bad name—an the next thing I know he’s got some ole gal out on the dance floor, pushin her around in a passable two step while he grabs himself a big ole handful of ass. Continue reading

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When Lambs Lie Down with Lions

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Bobcat wearing a fedora and smoking a cigarette

Wildlife: Cool? For sure. Friendly? Not necessarily.

Nature Can Be Cruel

Periodically I run into people who claim to be spiritual rather than religious. They believe in a creator, but they do not believe that creator is to be found in any organized church. In fact most of them seem to believe that any form of organized religion is the antithesis of spirituality, and that adherence to the tenets and precepts of a particular faith is one of the surest ways to remove oneself from god’s presence…or to remove god from one’s own, whichever the case might be.

Although I understand where these people are coming from, and what they mean by that, I must confess that I almost always think that they are just making excuses for their inability to embrace their own essence as beings created by the creator they say they believe in.

Usually these irreligionists point to nature as the place where they feel most at peace and most in awe of the god of their understanding. They are not comfortable in church where too many rules and too much ritual and way too many people get in the way of encountering the divine. They see these things as impediments to experiencing the true creative genius of the god they are able to accept. Continue reading

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Billions and Billions

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Can Finance Ever Be Truly Fascinating?

I’ve been binge-watching Showtime’s in house series, Billions. with Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis. For my money it’s the best thing on TV. Of course I’m an accounting and finance geek, so there is probably a lot of stuff in it that appeals to me but leaves people who are easily bored with such matters cold.

I know they’re out there. Econophobics. The kind of people who get a headache when conversation turns to interest rate swaps or in-substance defeasance of advance refunding bond issues. In fact, I’m pretty sure our president is one, but he has people for that stuff. (Not that he would ever listen to them.) I can’t say it’s their fault. I mean, really, that’s pretty arcane territory for anyone but a financial savant. Continue reading

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Death and the Law of Attraction

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Deathbed Regrets?

 

I wonder if my mother blames herself for using the last seconds of her life to shoot a skunk-eye at a hapless volunteer because he interrupted us. I also wonder if she blames me for attracting the interruption.

I’ve been interrupted so many times in my life that I’ve begun to believe that it must somehow be my fault. I don’t know if Mom shared my view on this, but she never in her life hesitated to take me to task for whatever she thought I had done wrong. It was not in her nature to allow flawed behavior to go unmentioned or uncorrected. Continue reading