After a conversation with the Exploding Aardvark tonight I realize I have accidentally come up with a new holiday.
I haven’t been eating much during the day and then at night recently I’ve been going out for Japanese noodles. A lot. Both frequently and a lot of noodles. Tonight I had the hakata ramen, with extra noodles, chashu, and wonton, at Shinsengumi.
I am celebrating Ramendan. Clearly this is some kind of Flying Spaghetti Monster holiday.
The Kabbalah’s Tree of Life as a London Underground map
The Anthropic Principle is the most ridiculous thing I have seen produced by real grown-up scientists.
It’s fascinating in a train-wreck way to watch geeks reinvent wheels. Clearly there wasn’t any need to stay awake during Philosophy 10, much less do any reading on the subject later on when they got big ideas about the place of humanity in the universe.
Via APOD, indisputable evidence of the existence of the FSM:
The ANOINTED WARRIOR wants to be my FRIEND.
He’d also like me to view his VIDEO CHALLENGES if I’m a satanist or have an extensive porn collection (Admiral Kragg).
I think God told him to skin me alive. He has glowing eyes and a sword. The churches I’ve visited have waged spiritual warfare with bible studies that included cookies, which always seemed more effective than the whole glowing-eyes-and-sword thing, but maybe this works for him.
The shtick would work better if all this guy’s friends weren’t heavy metal musicians, dominatrices, art atheists and media Jews. But it’s still funny.
For miss_geek: The SOCIAL HAZARD shirt, including multiple levels of funny those people will never get:
For her kid and everyone else’s, the ARMOR OF GOD PAJAMAS.
Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. […] The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap? — Diedrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
From the Register article I cited yesterday about the “SWAT Team” kids preaching on the beach. Photo credit to Andy Templeton for this excellent piece of photojournalism. The other pics with the article are good also.
The perfectly scrubbed whiteness of these people — even when they’re not white — is alarming. They exist in a perfect bubble of privilege and cultural isolation. Their friends and family are all like them. Their ideal world is a kind of 1903 Tennesse where everyone is inexplicably 2006 “cool”: chastity, whiteness, conservative politics, extreme sports, rock ‘n’ roll music, TV, great new snacks, and women in their place, obediently following behind their husbands even while surfing some massive waves.
The place where dogmatic evangelical religion and cluelessly neotenized teenage privilege meet is the best-gilded turd you’ll ever see. But you’ll smell it, too. Smell is pretty strong around these parts.
Get your office, school, or church with the program using these inspirational sinspirations!
The other six are in my Flickr set here
The conservatives are absolutely right. Marriage in this country is a mess. In the last 30 years, marriage has become one of a menu of options rather than the standard, and marriages are not taken seriously. People divorce a lot, make pre-nuptial agreements in preparation for divorce, re-marry, re-divorce, and pretty much treat the former sacrament as they would an apartment lease.
Marriage is, in fact, under attack. The trouble is, they have the wrong target. For inexplicable reasons my fellow Americans have chosen as their enemy homosexuals wishing to marry. Apparently the tolerance of these unions is corroding the entire institution.
Piffle. The problem is divorce. Easy, painless no-fault divorces and remarriages debase the currency of a sacrament. Who values a contract you can tear up with $100 and an hour with an attorney?
So, if we are to protect marriage from the destructive influence of convenience, it’s obvious what’s needed: A constitutional amendment forbidding divorce. Leave your mate if you wish, but you’re still married in my America. We have a standard to uphold here.
Some people may find this draconian, and it could be a hard sell. There’s a second less preferable option: A constitutional amendment barring re-marriage. If your marriage is so horrible that you can’t stand it one more minute, it can be dissolved. But that was your chance. We can’t have people abusing the seriousness of the institution.
If there’s squawking and whining about this one too, and it’s not politically practical, there’s only one other possibility. Marriages must be made painfully expensive after divorce. Perhaps $10,000 for a second marriage, $100,000 for a third, and $1 million for any afterwards. If there’s no other way to get our citizens to understand the power of marriage, money may have to do.
I know some of you are going to say that this is unreasonable, unworkable, and an unnecessary intervention of government in a deeply personal matter. There are going to be complaints of interference in religious belief as well. But if you ask your government to help you defend marriage as an institution, we’re going to have to do that the best and most equitable way for everyone.
The alternative would be to let people decide what marriage means on their own and just approve and record the union. But I guess you didn’t want that, did you?
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