While drinking my hot beverage made from the beans of a tree and paying my water bill I started thinking more about water.  Coffee bean trees grow because of water and my coffee is brewed in water.

Water keeps our exquisite Earth alive.  It saves us and our earth from being lifeless mineral globs.  Of course, we nor the earth would be alive long if all the earths water was contaminated.  I wonder why we care more about oil,  than clean water?

The critter above seems to be savoring that little orb of clean water the way I am savoring my coffee right now.  I am a lifeless mineral glob without my Java.

Water plus carbon and a few other minerals makes us.  To give anything life, to keep anything alive it must have water. Someone came up with a way for cars to run on water.  Who would interfere with that technology and why, someone devilish?

Water is so life giving that I think maybe God is water and we are drilling for –> well,  you get my point?

Soldiers going off to wars to die for some cause.  What a strange world we have created.  We get feelings of pride and gratification or at least a feeling of safety from their sacrifices.  I wish we had a world where, no one ever has to endure the impending doom soldiers in war face everyday. I hate the idea of someone dying for my safety.  I wish extremists of every form would just bring it down a notch.  Go hug a baby or something.  Back off the medication or take more — or something.

Being good is insurance for when you’re dumb — Alexis Ohanian

“Don’t be Evil” — Google

Do you think that an otherworldly influence is trying to get a message to us?   Or am I reading too much in to all the earthquakes and volcanoes.  Religious extremists say that bad things happen because of our heathen ways and disregard for our maker.  George Carlin said the earth is going to shake us off like a bad case of fleas.  I look at these pictures and that is one pissed off volcano wreaking havoc and causing millions to just stop.  Maybe the message is we need to stop for awhile and hang out on cots and talk about stuff with strangers in large rooms.

or else…

See more volcano images and havoc at –> http://blogs.tampabay.com/photo/2010/04/iceland-volcano.html

PS:  this woman and her daughters were highlighted in a blog I did in December.  Well…

The thoughts of this person are worth sharing.  There is a book called The case for God.  I haven’t read it, yet.  This commentary makes me want to. (the black words are Johannes and the blue words are mine.)

Johannes says:

There’s a tendency to disparage people who believe in God as weak, groveling sheep. Kindness is often equated to weakness as well. It’s easier to debunk only evangelical Christianity, rather than Judaism or Islam or Hinduism or the Quakers or Gnostic tradition or Episcopalians. But let us not forget that Western mathematicians Goedel, Newton, Gauss or scholars like Emerson, Kierkegaard, and more had their own particular way of discovering what God meant to them. Kierkegaard was an affluent depressed Danish philosopher who wrote some very interesting papers on faith. He loved his woman so much that he didn’t marry her.  He didn’t want her to have to deal with his depression.  He wrote that faith can only exist where there is doubt. You don’t have to have faith in a table because you can see it and feel it and put stuff on it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson lost his memory in later years and it embarrassed him.  I once read that fish have no memory and that is why it is ok for them to live in a bowl.  Everytime they swim to the other side of the bowl there is a whole fascinating and undiscovered world.  I had a betta fish in a bowl on my desk here. I was so sad when he died.  I used to put a mirror next to his bowl sometimes and he would try to fight his reflection.  No one taught him to fight it was just inately in him to do so.  I think some people are like that.

I’m getting off track.

Ms. Armstrong’s work is another scholarly breath of fresh air to people that Christianity is more complex and God was often viewed as more apophatic than paternal deliverer of goodness to your prayers. what is apophatic? One of her main points indeed is that both logic and myth have their place in thought, just as reason and emotion have their place in humanity. otherwise we’d be conformist robots.  We’d run around killing and pillaging those who don’t think like us. I think they call that religious wars.

If you ever studied advanced mathematics (I mean beyond the standard calculus or linear algebra/diff eq course), there are places where “logic” becomes less insightful — Russell’s paradox is an example or invoking Zorn’s lemma just to create something as basic as counting (natural) numbers. What does it mean to the mind that there are different sizes of “infinity”? Yet Cantor, who formalized set theoretic foundations of all modern mathematics, proved that indeed we do have different orders of infinity. (when you look up Bertrand Russell, Max Zorn, and Georg Cantor you read some pretty heady stuff.  Brilliance and depression seem to hang out together.  I think I’m glad I’m not that brilliant.  They all seem to allow science and fact to co-exist with faith.  I like that.)

Read Ms. Armstrong’s metaphor on music and the limits of human understanding of God. Blanket rejection of faith in such a smug, strident attitude is rather sad and unappreciative of the beauty of a free mind engaging in something fully outside the limited realms of “self.” I think Johannes is trying to tell us to “step outside the box”.

Yes, there is doubt, but faith without doubt is mere credulity as Kierkegaard posits. Faith is not to simply overcome doubt, but it, like love, transcends rationality. Religion ought to be more than just a set of logical beliefs, as music is more than just notes on a page and dry theory or mere vibrations or life is more than books, theories, and philosophers. The theory came after the experience, to explain and justify and to share. I love what Johannes says here. Love is something you can’t see or prove, the color yellow is something you can’t describe to a blind person, yet they exist.

Ms. Armstrong emphasizes that religion is embodied in practice, in action, in process with something greater than yourself. The existence of God is not so much a falsifiable hypothesis, and the semantics of language obfuscate much communication. Religious zealots, the oil industry and the tobacco industry hire lobbyists who do an incredible job of obfuscation. Show me where “love” exists. Show me where “music” exists. Show me where “beauty” is. There are many things outside the faculty of logic and language. Be humble and grateful that there is more. I am

Isn’t this a beautiful picture?  There is a guy in our town named Chip Ford who takes pictures for the Lovely Citizen.

I’m glad there are scientists and philosophers busy trying to find out why a pear smells like a pear or why the beautiful colors represented in this photograph happen.  I guess it all fits in the periodic table somewhere.

My point is Faith should not be mocked because it is based on doubt.  Faith is the driver for scientists and activists and incredible discoveries that people have made through all the recorded eras.  Faith and prayer saved my son.  I believe in the incredible power of faith.

http://knopf.knopfdoubleday.com/2009/09/22/the-case-for-god-by-karen-armstrong/

Loretta asked me why I complain so much about where we live.  An apology was wholeheartedly given and then a mental inventory was done of the times I’ve been derogatory–>pretty often. Loretta and I live here. This has always been her home. Loretta’s stories of life growing up in the Ozarks make me laugh; what a wonderful time she has had.

I grew up on military bases.  As a teen I worked in a restaurant where we wore nametags stating our name and where we were from.  Mine said,  I was from Don and Barbara. (my parents).  Growing up on military bases was fun.  Like small towns except no one is actually from there.

I asked one of the doctors Loretta and I work with why people around here whoot so much. They don’t whoot on airbases, although they salute often.  In return, he asked me if I’d ever been so happy that I just wanted to holler out my joy.  I decided to try whooting and now I find myself enjoying a good whoot now and then.

I actually love it here and Loretta is one of the reasons why.  We have conversations about dreams, pasts, kids, parents, our fold.  Loretta  doesn’t easily allow anyone in to her fold and I am privileged to be in it.  Her wit cracks me up and she lives her faith.  Many people around here talk faith talk, she exemplifies her faith and doesn’t have to talk it.

We are inquisitive and have had engaging conversations about our different pasts.  Her children and her family are her center. Family picnics and summers at the creek or the lake.  I love that.   She inspires me to see what is in front of me and never complains or says a bad thing about another person or place.  I’m embarrassed that I have dissed her home.

Being accepting is the best way to heal this sore world.  Accepting various religions and ethnicities.  Deserts, mountains, beaches,  cold vs hot climates.  It is a good thing we don’t all like the same things or we’d all be piled up in Lorettas town.

but why would someone come to a beautiful place like this and leave trash.  It makes me mad and I tend to say so.