Hey, Ralfph...nice ramble, fer sure. I’ve been busy building model airplanes and looking for stocks in the newest flavours of late so I haven’t been around much for the boards, just catching up now. The planes I’m building are for donation to the cadet squadron eventually but I’m still workin’ on them. I thought you’d probably have been involved in model planes somewhere along the line, I guess we all have been.
This episode started when I noticed that when they showed the wounded wing of one of the Snowbirds it sort of looked like they were made of styrofoam and beer cans. So with some styrofoam from a vacated grow house and some beer cans (cut open and inside out) glued on with polyurethane glue and a frame made of some driftwood cedar from the river, I’ve got airplanes coming out that are almost totally from recycled bits and pieces. It’s just the way I like to do things, as you know. This is definitely their last cycle, they’re almost indestructible. Try gluing a strip of a pop or beer can to a piece of styrofoam with that foaming polyurethane and you can see how light and tough they are, just go easy on the glue, it’s the heaviest component. I’ve sandwiched the cedar with beer cans at stress points...uh....hey, you’ve got boys.
So much for those planes, now on to higher planes—or not. I am building up to a ramble. I can feel it a comin’ on.
As a guy who literally lived in bars for most of my adult life through job choice, I should know that the verboten topics are religion and politics. And, of course, no arm wrestling...that goes without saying. But, this isn’t a bar, it’s a forum for the collection and discussion of ideas, so, what the Hell.
Anyone who is truly sincere in his or her religion has my respect for the path they’ve taken toward eternal answers. So much for the disclaimer.
Yeah, I too have pondered over the whole idea of the Gods and how we have determined their natures. But, it seems some people spend more time deciding the pros and cons of buying a new fridge than they do in selecting a suitable religion. I’ve honestly looked into a lot of them. I just keep walkin’ out of the show room once I’ve seen the features and the price tags. They all seem to come with extras that I don’t need.
We have born-again Christian fundamentalist relatives: my step-daughter and the son-in-law from that union. Sometimes I wish she’d married a junkie. I could relate better. They believe that the world was created 6,000 years ago and that their God will come to destroy me and give me torment unto the last toenail (really, I’ve been to their website). We don’t even get to die quickly. No, their God is gonna make me suffer alright. Hey, wait a minute...haven’t we evolved past that sort of thinking? Oh yeah, evolution that’s another lie, yeah, right...maybe for some.
I’ve finally got the respect that I feel is due to me as the host to have them say their marathon blessings in a different room before we all sit down for dinner when they visit. It was quite a show they’d been putting on previously. Their God was thanked and praised at the table for every little thing that had happened, presumably since the last meal. It was getting hard to keep a straight face.
The “thanks for the food” is OK but when it turns to groveling then it throws off my meal, especially when you know that they’re just waiting for the world to end and for me to suffer immeasurably and eternally. It makes ya wonder if they’d like the meal to be ready to go—just in case. Ya start thinking about your toenails.
It’s like they’re marking time, waiting for the rapture...it seems to me to be an unexamined life. In their little world, the first time the world didn’t end on time was known as “The Great Disappointment”. I guess I’m not much help when I point out that if those folks hadn’t been disappointed ‘way back then, none of us would be here now. Is that really what you want for future generations? The world should end within your life time? I can’t be that selfish. Aww...at least they don’t have to wonder what I’m thinking.
Early on, I taught my son that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, from Plato. I’ve always believed that and wanted to pass it down through him. When Jonny was about 6 years old, he kept asking me to take him to church. I honestly couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t have known where to start. So, off he went to the Kingdom Hall with our neighbours, whose girls, I suspected, had given him the idea. His first religious questioning came with the “blood is life” idea. He asked me one day, “So what if I get a nosebleed, is that my life going down the toilet? No way.”. He stayed home the next Sunday and we sat close as we watched the Three Stooges together. I’d missed him.
We had quite a good talk about religion just the other day just after the “Christians” had left (and now he’s 14). He asked me point blank why I didn’t believe in God. I told him that I sure as Hell don’t believe in their God. I’ve come up with the notion that I believe in God in the same way that I believe in UFOs. I do believe in UFOs as long as they remain UFOs. Once we begin to put ourselves into the picture and try to identify the UFO it becomes closer and closer to becoming an IFO, an “Identified Flying Object”. Then we can even give it a name and a purpose from our own perspective. That’s when I find it a lot harder, if not impossible, to believe what I’m being told. It’s like that with the Gods for me...when we start to put names and purposes on what we don’t understand, it doesn’t seem to make anything more understandable...just more complicated. I think there’s more to it than that, but I can’t really fathom what it is.
I’m kind of fond of the Jewish God though. They give Him the right to be wrong and not always good. Remember the Holocaust? Remember when “God hardened the hearts” of Kings to get things done in the old testament? One of our Sunday school teachers had the same affliction. You can’t pound Anglicanism into kids, it’s too mellow. The political mechanizations of the wars between the Christian churches mellowed it out considerably. Interestingly though, they left in the cannibalism...maybe an oversight, maybe not.
Ya know, I wonder if Greenspan is still an atheist. He must have been when he was hangin’ with the Ayn Rand Posse. George Carlin, who is right on a lot of things—so was Lenny Bruce—is of the opinion that all religion is a form of insanity. I wouldn’t go in that direction. I would say that a belief in something is a necessity for most people to keep their sanity. But, everybody has to do their own DD. We all need a little madness of some sort: a little magical realism.
Ah yes, religion, what a topic...but life, well that’s another matter. As we all know. There we must sometimes bow to the wisdom of Rudy Vallee (although in disagreement with Plato) when he said: “Life is just a bowl of cherries; don’t take it serious; life’s too mysterious. You work, you save, you worry so, but you can’t take your dough when you go, go, go. So keep repeating it’s the berries; the strongest oak must fall. The sweet things in life to you were just loaned, so how can you lose what you’ve never owned? Life is just a bowl of cherries, So live and laugh at it all.” I really mean it, “Live and laugh at it all” (big adagio finish now) Can’t take it with ya, so “Liiive and Laaaugh at it AAAAAAAAAALL”. That’s all.
Happy Trails,
Lenny |
