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how turtles got their shells

long time ago, in the very distant past when birds could talk, snakes walk, asses talk, lions ate grass, and all animals lived together in friendly communes, turtles had a soft smooth shell.

One day news reached the commune of a party that was to be had high up in the sky, near the sun so to speak. Even back then, only birds could fly so when the turtle heard of this plot, he asked his bird friend if he could join the party. A committee of birds was selected to see how to make this possible. Among the options proposed was to have the largest bird haul the turtle to the party and back. The hawk said, hell no. The vulture said not on backyard, the eagle made no comments but there was no doubt the answer was no. A second plot was needed and real fast. It is here that it was decided they would donate feathers to the turtle and do a crash course in flying. This was done in no time and the whole party left for feast.

As was the custom in those days, whenever animals or people went to a feast, they used nicknames. So all the birds had their nicknames some flattering some not so much. The turtle for its nickname said it would be called all of us. And it is here that the rain started beating the turtle.

You see, when they got to the feast, every time food was served, the animals would ask for whom it was meant and the response, you guessed it right, was all of us- the turtle. And so the turtle ate while the rest of the birds watched in dismay. It went on like this till it was time to return and the birds held a quick meeting to exact their revenge. As soon as they left the venue, and had been told their goodbyes, they each and all plucked their feathers from the turtle who without this aid came a tumbling down landing on a rock with it shell cracking it in the process and since then all turtles have had hard shells.

If you have read up to this point, I will tell you the story of bats. where did they come from? When, where, why and how the first bats become airborne is another mystery buried by Deep Time.

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it is that time of the year

or is it the moon that some of you have been encouraged by your imam or is it the profit that you should fast. That the lord likes it when you fast. Chapman Cohen wrote

ar more suggestive, however, than the association of religion with what we may call the normal social forces, is its connection with conditions that are now clearly recognised as abnormal. From the earliest times we find the use of drugs and stimulants, the practice of fasting and self-torture, with other methods of depressing or stimulating the action of the nervous system, accepted as well-recognised methods of inducing a sense of religious illumination, or the feeling that one is in direct communion with a supernatural order of existence.

Religion and Sex by Chapman Cohen

but i think it is Zera Yacob who said it best

God does not order absurdities such as ‘‘Eat this, do not eat this; today eat, tomorrow do not eat, do not eat meat today, eat it tomorrow. . . neither did God say to the Mohammedians: ‘eat during the night, but do not eat during the day.’ ’’

Go yea and enjoy food, whatever you tastes are.

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movie time

I know Jim said I should keep to book recommendations only and not venture into songs or movies that my recommendations on those two areas are really not great but as we say here, Jim can go hang :). And in the spirit of not braining, we can watch a movie. Besides, for most people, the pandemic has caused a lot of misery, a distraction here and there ain’t a bad idea.

In the 1960s, 4 young boys are growing up in New York and as many young boys are, they play truancy a lot. Only this one occasion, it goes overboard. Someone gets hospitalized and so they are sent to juvenile detention or jail or whatever such places for boys are called. They are guests of the state for 18 months. A really long time. Many things happen in these places but rehabilitation ain’t one of them. Violence. Sexual abuse. I don’t know what else.

So 18 months later, the 4 boys are released & they get busy with school. One becomes a lawyer and joins the DA, another a clerk with a newspaper and two are street punks or whatever it is called. Years later, two of them bump into one of the guards, offs him in a diner and here the movie gets interesting. There is court case and with an ending both expected and unexpected.

If you have 2 hours which you don’t know what to do with ( I have friends who want to go to heaven and live for eternity but don’t know what to do with themselves on Sunday when they don’t go to church), then Sleepers can help with that. It is an old movie, where old means 1996.

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this is promising to be interesting

I am reading E. Anthony Rotundo’s American Manhood: Transformations In Masculinity From The Revolution To The Modern Era and the very first paragraph has me hooked. He writes

…….manliness is a human invention. Starting with a handful of biological differences, people m all places and times have invented elaborate stories about what it means to be male and female. In other words, each culture constructs its own version of what men and women are—and ought to be.

E. A Rotunda, American Manhood: Transformations In Masculinity From The Revolution To The Modern Era

and in this age of I feel in the deepest of my hearts that I am a woman, this should be arsenal in their armory. Maybe I have the cart before the horse here, but this is a bold start.

Keep it tuned here for more.

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on hell and heaven

Bart Erhman says Christians belief in these two places are misplaced, based on erroneous thinking or reading of the bible and ancient stories. He says Jesus had no such beliefs.

In other troubling news, a guy from Indonesia has been spamming my comments section with viagra sales. Now I have not made any orders to Pfizer for their wonder drug nor i have done a web search anywhere for efficacy of viagra.

Rains are here now. Today it rained in the morning and I couldn’t go out to run. The weather forecast for today and the rest of the week is more rain and cloudy days. I can’t imagine running on a treadmill for 2 hours. I think even hamsters get bored. I would die from boredom even if i had music and tv as i run.

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reflections on blogging

Lately I don’t want to brain much so today I will just write on my blogging journey. I have been blogging here since August 2012. I have written on politics, religion, science topics, books i have read, posted videos, songs, photos of the places i have been to and all. And of late, I have made it a point to make sure some of you get tired by just reading about my runs or hikes or rides. Except Brian who rides much more than I do.

In the beginning, god debates used to interest me but not anymore. While I know I haven’t exhausted whatever arguments god botherers have designed to prop their god, I am unlikely to meet a new one that hasn’t been covered already in all the ones I have looked at.

And as I have said elsewhere, I have made friends online. Some have been around this blog from those early days, being critics, supporters and sometimes broadening my perspectives on different topics. Some we have lost. Some have gone to their maker. And some maybe have just disappeared in the thin air.

In the spirit of no braining, I want to repost one of the blogs from 2013. The passage below is from Atheism Explained by D.R. Steele

God cannot be destroyed. He can’t be injured against his will or made to suffer against his will, and he knows this. If this is true, then God can’t be afraid of anything. He has never known fear at first hand, though he may have known fear in his imagination, the way we know fear by watching a horror movie . But if God has never been fearful, then God has never been courageous . The virtue of courage consists in overcoming or disregarding or perhaps suppressing one’s fear or one’s inclination to fear. Bravery, then, is a virtue that God can never achieve .

The same applies to most o f the human virtues. Most virtues, like courage, involve self-control and therefore have no application to God, who experiences not the slightest flicker of appetites or impulses which might cause him to deviate from doing whatever he infallibly decides is best. God cannot be tempted, so he earns no points for resisting temptation. Nothing, to God, is an effort, so he can never become lazy or irresolute, and deserves no praise for being steadfast!
If God is all powerful and almighty, then God has never faced any onerous tasks, has never shouldered any burdens, has never had to give up one thing in order to get another ( except where the alternatives are logically incompatible ) , has never felt involuntary pain or even a twinge of discomfort or anxiety, has never had to make a difficult decision, has never solved an intellectual puzzle ( since he knows all the answers in advance ) . God has no curiosity, since he knows everything instantly, without making an effort to find out.

God has never had to work hard at anything, has never been surprised or disappointed. God has never had to make a choice, since that would presuppose at least a moment where he had not made up his mind. God can never be careful or considerate. God can never pay particular attention. God has never experienced, at first hand, the joy of understanding an elegant theorem or experiencing a great work of art. He has heard it all before.
Creation of anything by humans, for example creation of a song or a book, has its joys and its sorrows . But for God, the Creator of the universe, there could be no joy, or sorrow, or sense of accomplishment. He created the universe just by willing it and before he willed it, he knew how it was going to turn out. Aside from that, joy and sorrow are characteristics of evolved conscious beings with bodies, forever enmeshed in the struggle to survive and reproduce.
Such emotional flurries could have no place in the life of. an eternal, indestructible Supreme Being. Theists say that God is wholly good. This implies that he has never known at first hand malice, lust, greed, or envy. Furthermore, God, defined as God who is wholly good, is held to be necessary. If it’s necessary that God is wholly good, then God could never go even slightly bad, he could never start toying with a bit of shadiness here and there . So God can’t do anything even slightly evil . No credit is due to God for being good; he can’t help
himself.

Only a very few theists are prepared to say that God could choose to do evil, and it’s easy to see why. If God is free to do something evil, then he might, at any moment, do just that. Being all-good would then be revealed as not necessarily true of God : it must have been a mistake all along to think of it as necessarily true & a practical matter we could no longer depend on God to be good. How could we ever know that God had turned bad? What evidence might we find to give us an indication of any such turn of events? It does seem to be essential to the God concept that God is impotent to commit evil. Even mild naughtiness must be beyond his powers. We begin to wonder whether this entity can really be a person .

Have a good week everyone.

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on the devil and other news

aka Satan.

Nan says the dude has no real existence. The cuddly one says it is a mistake to think the devil is a myth.

I think the author of this article is not serious. He claims, boldy, that

As C.S. Lewis once observed, even among critics, the teachings of Jesus reflect the highest standard of morality known to man.

which makes me think he hasn’t really considered what he calls the highest standard of morality.

The mythical Dave the author quotes can believe as possible or true natural explanation even when these have not proven as long as they don’t require a miracle. In a world of particles colliding where some of those particles result in thinking beings, wrong and right become very useful indicators as some things are either beneficial or inimical to the continued survival of such species of organisms.

Regis tells us modern man is concerned with, following Maslow, self actualization instead of seeking salvation- individual salvation, so to speak. I see no difference between the two except in the means.

If god exists, Regis must tell us what has taken her so long to provide manna to end starvation? Or to make wine so we all can make merry. Man has been struggling in darkness to solve the problems of man. Were it not for nationalism, short term vision, greed, we could have made progress in how we deal with some of the crisis that face us.

Have a devil free Monday and a good week everyone.