Before the rain came, I saw the Christmas lights. It was a cold evening and D wanted to take a quick, short walk around the neighborhood (just a couple of the near-by streets). She mentioned that we should have walked around to look at the Christmas displays so many of these few blocks of houses have up in their yards. I mentioned that there was still time (it was only 8PM or so) so I hurriedly put on my shoes and walked with D, looking at the seasonal sights. A great many had those inflatable displays up, the ones that are flat during daylight hours, emerging into 3 dimensions only after dark, when air is blown into their holes.
Okay, so I enjoy simple little things like that. It was cold out, but I put a jacket on and we began. The walk took us past house after house decorated with colorful lights and fanciful Xmas scenes. Some were animated, with moving Santas and North Pole train wheels and walking, talking penguins (OK, so I made up the talking part, though you'd think that would be easier to accomplish than the walking) and even a grinning Grinch. Though not as spectacular as those "candy cane lanes" in many cities where nearly every house for blocks and blocks is decorated to the point of overkill (and huge electric bills) is was still something to see.
And speaking of things to see, I was watching Little House On The Prairie, the episode where the blind school burns down and Alice Garvey and Adam and Mary's baby are incinerated.
There is a scene just before the fire starts where Adam is helping put some of the children to bed and asks whose turn it is to pray. The kid, a little black boy, doesn't think to ask the simple question Why am I blind? Who'd want to bow and worship an all-powerful being that lets that tragedy slip under his radar?
One Christian website responds to the logic of this:
If you see a blind man, kick him; why should you be kinder than God-Arab proverb.
...with this nonsense:
John 9:2-4 2 And His disciples asked Him, saying, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" 3 Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned. But that the works of God should be revealed in him, 4 "I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work.
The Work of God is Not to Blind & Blight
It is to Help & Heal!
John 9:7
Life Isn’t Always Fair
Job 21:6-16
Luke 16:19-31
James 1:3
Matthew 5:45
Qualities an Environment Would Need to be the Ideal Environment
1.Law-Abiding World -- Genesis 1:26
2. Challenging Environment
3. Certain Survival Mechanisms Awaken People to Fundamental Needs
Every Instance of Human Suffering Results From Some Quality of This World Which is Necessary For Making it a Proper Environment For Human Life
What Would YOU Change?
Well, first of all, I'd get rid of blindness for starters, which would make me, with all my faults, a much better god than your invisible one.
Anyway, after the child prays, God refuses to stop the blind school where he and his fellow blind children live and learn from burning to the ground. Then he makes sure that Adam, who brought up the praying thing to the kids, has the good fortune to have his baby die in the worst possible way, by fire. You can't say the Christian God doesn't enjoy that, cause he created a hell that burns forever and makes sure its victims can't even escape through death.
Mark Twain had this asshole Father's number:
I will tell you a pleasant tale which has in it a touch of pathos. A man got religion, and asked the priest what he must do to be worthy of his new estate. The priest said, "Imitate our Father in Heaven, learn to be like him." The man studied his Bible diligently and thoroughly and understandingly, and then with prayers for heavenly guidance instituted his imitations. He tricked his wife into falling downstairs, and she broke her back and became a paralytic for life; he betrayed his brother into the hands of a sharper, who robbed him of his all and landed him in the almshouse; he inoculated one son with hookworms, another with the sleeping sickness, another with gonorrhea; he furnished one daughter with scarlet fever and ushered her into her teens deaf, dumb, and blind for life; and after helping a rascal seduce the remaining one, he closed his doors against her and she died in a brothel cursing him. Then he reported to the priest, who said that that was no way to imitate his Father in Heaven. The convert asked wherein he had failed, but the priest changed the subject and inquired what kind of weather he was having, up his way.
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