1. Yelling at random people on a street corner calling them whores and whore mongers.
2. Trying to outsmart them by using clever turns of phrase which really do not make your case, just make your opponent unable to answer.
3. Quoting scripture. What is scripture to someone who does not believe in the Bible? Also scripture quoting is usually employed in a barrage to show off and to try and remove any possible personal discussion from the witnessing.
4. Using "Science". God cannot be proven via the scientific method, the other good news is that he cannot be disproven either. Here you think: Wait, I am sure she meant to say "but the good news is". No I believe that not being able to prove the existance of God is a good thing because the second we prove him belief is no longer neccesary defeating the whole point of seeking Him.
5. Handing out tracks. If a person is supposed to be brought to a personal knowledge of Christ you need something personal there. Come on, would be Apostles, get your hands dirty. Get down there with the sinners like Jesus did. Open up. Give of yourself in order to give God.
Witnessing is a personal act that requires you to care about the person on a personal individual level. I mean, you must care about him as a person, not just as a potential soul you can help usher into the kindom of God. When people figure out it is just about winning souls they will became jaded with Christians and what a person thinks about Christians they start thinking about Christ.
Edit: I noticed a typing error which changed the meaning of what I was trying to say. Originally I had said "I mean, you must care about him as a person, as a potential soul you can help usher into the kindom of God." What I had intended to say was, "I mean, you must care about him as a person, not just as a potential soul you can help usher into the kindom of God." It has been corrected in the post to reflect my sentiments. 09:46, 25.8.11
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Don't Leave your Brain at Home When you Go to the Health Food Store
My blog is, at least based on the title, supposed to in some smallish way, every once in a while, promote scepticism and critical thinking. So, as Brian Dunning, my favorite skeptic, would say: let's turn our skeptical eye to nutrition. Nutrition is one of the fields most rife with pseudo science. Everybody seems to think that because we eat all day how we feel about something should be good enough evidence what we aught to do. Well, the scientific method still aplies to nutritional science. So I present you with my favourite episodes of Skeptiod about health and nutrition. I recommend you choose the listen option on the transcript page because Skeptoid is a podcast and meant to be listened.
Just because some people have a glutein sensitivity and should stay away from it does not mean it is not good for the rest of us. Bring on the glutein!
Organic food is good, right? Well, that does not mean non-organic is bad.
Do we really know as much about what we should and should not be eating?
Then there are fads. Most of them blow over, many are harmless but useless, others are weird but many are even dangerous, in my opinion.
Then again, how many of us truly understand how our bodies work and go out and buy into immune system boosting supplements.
As you can see, I have discovered the joys of putting links into my text. I commend anyone who has decided to begin a journey to better health but don't go in like a country girl into a big city or you gonna get raped.
Just because some people have a glutein sensitivity and should stay away from it does not mean it is not good for the rest of us. Bring on the glutein!
Organic food is good, right? Well, that does not mean non-organic is bad.
Do we really know as much about what we should and should not be eating?
Then there are fads. Most of them blow over, many are harmless but useless, others are weird but many are even dangerous, in my opinion.
Then again, how many of us truly understand how our bodies work and go out and buy into immune system boosting supplements.
As you can see, I have discovered the joys of putting links into my text. I commend anyone who has decided to begin a journey to better health but don't go in like a country girl into a big city or you gonna get raped.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
My Other Blog
(Note: Feb. 4 2012 This blog no longer exists. Fitness magazine no longer hosts reader blogs.)
I started a blog on fitnessmagazine.com. I figured that I would post the first entry here. It is going too be about getting into shape. Sorry, St. Cynic,I do not mean to rip you off by starting to write about health and stuff too. I am sure your posts will be much more informational.
Here it is:
Sneaking Into My blog
I felt pretty lame when I chose “Ninja Fitness” for my blog title. Still I think it works. It is eye catching and describes my love of martial arts and my habitual sneaking around at the gym. I try to slip by unnoticed as I go to work out. I have been working out on my own for years, running under the cover of the night or lifting weights in my living room. Other than mixed martial arts class I have not worked out where other people can see me for years.
I used to be a really shy teenager. I was scared of other kids I felt awkward and fat and stood back listening to other people talk and emerged my self in this fantasy world where I was fit, strong and gorgeous. Not only that, I was powerful and confident. I was a hero. Rescuing babies from burning building and fighting of an entire street gang on my own. You know the usual fantasies of a teen loner. I read about health and fitness I wanted to take martial arts classes and be more like the girl in my head. When I was a senior in high school I got the chance to sign up for Taekwondo at my school. I worked harder at it than anything I had ever done before. I thought I was terrible but it meant so much to me to succeed and I did. My teacher told me I was a great student and at the end of the second trimester commended me for helping and encouraging the new students that had joined us after the first one. All this gave me fantastic self confidence and made me feel a little closer to the girl I wanted to be. After three years I was a brown belt but unfortunately had to stop taking classes because I could no longer afford them. It was sad but fortunately I had discovered along the way that I was athletic and that I liked running and all sorts of different athletic activities.
Now I am a married woman with a kid and I have gotten out of shape in between then and now. I am at my heaviest than I have been since my pregnancy and the year or so after. I am out of shape and feeling further from that woman in my head. I would like to be like her again. I did some mixed martial arts along the way and hope to get back to it sometime but for now all I have in the near future is a gym membership, which is something I am not used to.
I will be working out at the gym wearing all black and sneaking in during the quiet times. No really, coincidentally all my workout gear is black. I will try to motivate myself to post about it occasionally.
*****
Well, I doubt I will post the future entries on this blog here, but if you feel so inclined nothing will stop you from reading Ninja Fitness. Can nnot guarantee that the link will take you there since I do not know if you have to be a registered user to read them or anything.
I started a blog on fitnessmagazine.com. I figured that I would post the first entry here. It is going too be about getting into shape. Sorry, St. Cynic,I do not mean to rip you off by starting to write about health and stuff too. I am sure your posts will be much more informational.
Here it is:
Sneaking Into My blog
I felt pretty lame when I chose “Ninja Fitness” for my blog title. Still I think it works. It is eye catching and describes my love of martial arts and my habitual sneaking around at the gym. I try to slip by unnoticed as I go to work out. I have been working out on my own for years, running under the cover of the night or lifting weights in my living room. Other than mixed martial arts class I have not worked out where other people can see me for years.
I used to be a really shy teenager. I was scared of other kids I felt awkward and fat and stood back listening to other people talk and emerged my self in this fantasy world where I was fit, strong and gorgeous. Not only that, I was powerful and confident. I was a hero. Rescuing babies from burning building and fighting of an entire street gang on my own. You know the usual fantasies of a teen loner. I read about health and fitness I wanted to take martial arts classes and be more like the girl in my head. When I was a senior in high school I got the chance to sign up for Taekwondo at my school. I worked harder at it than anything I had ever done before. I thought I was terrible but it meant so much to me to succeed and I did. My teacher told me I was a great student and at the end of the second trimester commended me for helping and encouraging the new students that had joined us after the first one. All this gave me fantastic self confidence and made me feel a little closer to the girl I wanted to be. After three years I was a brown belt but unfortunately had to stop taking classes because I could no longer afford them. It was sad but fortunately I had discovered along the way that I was athletic and that I liked running and all sorts of different athletic activities.
Now I am a married woman with a kid and I have gotten out of shape in between then and now. I am at my heaviest than I have been since my pregnancy and the year or so after. I am out of shape and feeling further from that woman in my head. I would like to be like her again. I did some mixed martial arts along the way and hope to get back to it sometime but for now all I have in the near future is a gym membership, which is something I am not used to.
I will be working out at the gym wearing all black and sneaking in during the quiet times. No really, coincidentally all my workout gear is black. I will try to motivate myself to post about it occasionally.
*****
Well, I doubt I will post the future entries on this blog here, but if you feel so inclined nothing will stop you from reading Ninja Fitness. Can nnot guarantee that the link will take you there since I do not know if you have to be a registered user to read them or anything.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Militant Stay at Home Motherhood
When I was growing up my mother worked part time. No one ever told me, until I was a teenager that I could not do something because I was a girl. My mother unintentionally raised a feminist. I really hate the word feminist. It seems to imply female superiority. I do understand that basically it just seeks female equality and was coined in a time when women were the down trodden masses while being simultaneously put on a pedestal and told they had the minds of kids with nice tits. Still I dislike the word.
When I was in college I was having a conversation with a girl in a campus Christian group called Ki Alpha. She was engaged to be married, I think. I was talking about my family and chose my words incorrectly. I said: "My mother is just a stay at home mother." (At the time she was not being licensed for dentistry in the US). The girl became very upset with me and felt like I was belittling stay at home mother hood. She explained to me, in a way I recall as hostile that she was intending to be a stay at home mother and how that was in her opinion the greatest job a woman could have. I explained to her that I meant no disrespect and my mother was a great stay at home mother and all that. That it was a perfectly respectable life choice. I never spoke to her personally again.
Since then I have been a stay at home mother for many years by default. For her it was a choice. Raising kids was going to be her career, her goal in life. She got a college education to raise her kids, that is fine. For me it was not a choice. I never dreamed of being a stay at home mom. In fact I was never really was sure I wanted kids.
I have thought since my conversation what got her so upset with the little, miss chosen word just. Many stay at home moms are always on the defensive about it. I wonder if it was that she had been criticizes for her plan before, maybe she thought having job instead of staying at home with the kids was unforgivably selfish for a woman or that she was not entirely confident in her choice. I will never know the answer to that.
I guess I understand her upsetness in a way because once after a Sunday school class in a Baptist church that dealt in successful marriages. It was taught by a couple who had been married a mere nine years and the husband acted like he needed to convince himself that he was the boss of his wife by saying "Christ, church, Christ, church" all the time (when he said Christ he pointed to himself and when he said church he pointed to his wife). If one is the true leader of something one does not need to posture like that, mmmkay. Their basic message was that after marriage a woman should never work and the man should be the primary, and only breadwinner and their way was the only Biblical way to do it. Needless to say I was extremely upset after this class. A girl asked me what I had thought about the class and stupidly I told her the truth. She told me that I had a problem with submission and I was too prideful. I did not reply to her.
I firmly believe in a parent's right to stay at home and care for their kids and not working. I also believe in my right to want to have a dang job. Maybe all those dear mommies and working women need to get the chips off their shoulders so I can talk about my lack of a career freely with the words I choose with out getting a tongue lashing from someone more righteous. It is so hard to trust Christians sometimes.
When I was in college I was having a conversation with a girl in a campus Christian group called Ki Alpha. She was engaged to be married, I think. I was talking about my family and chose my words incorrectly. I said: "My mother is just a stay at home mother." (At the time she was not being licensed for dentistry in the US). The girl became very upset with me and felt like I was belittling stay at home mother hood. She explained to me, in a way I recall as hostile that she was intending to be a stay at home mother and how that was in her opinion the greatest job a woman could have. I explained to her that I meant no disrespect and my mother was a great stay at home mother and all that. That it was a perfectly respectable life choice. I never spoke to her personally again.
Since then I have been a stay at home mother for many years by default. For her it was a choice. Raising kids was going to be her career, her goal in life. She got a college education to raise her kids, that is fine. For me it was not a choice. I never dreamed of being a stay at home mom. In fact I was never really was sure I wanted kids.
I have thought since my conversation what got her so upset with the little, miss chosen word just. Many stay at home moms are always on the defensive about it. I wonder if it was that she had been criticizes for her plan before, maybe she thought having job instead of staying at home with the kids was unforgivably selfish for a woman or that she was not entirely confident in her choice. I will never know the answer to that.
I guess I understand her upsetness in a way because once after a Sunday school class in a Baptist church that dealt in successful marriages. It was taught by a couple who had been married a mere nine years and the husband acted like he needed to convince himself that he was the boss of his wife by saying "Christ, church, Christ, church" all the time (when he said Christ he pointed to himself and when he said church he pointed to his wife). If one is the true leader of something one does not need to posture like that, mmmkay. Their basic message was that after marriage a woman should never work and the man should be the primary, and only breadwinner and their way was the only Biblical way to do it. Needless to say I was extremely upset after this class. A girl asked me what I had thought about the class and stupidly I told her the truth. She told me that I had a problem with submission and I was too prideful. I did not reply to her.
I firmly believe in a parent's right to stay at home and care for their kids and not working. I also believe in my right to want to have a dang job. Maybe all those dear mommies and working women need to get the chips off their shoulders so I can talk about my lack of a career freely with the words I choose with out getting a tongue lashing from someone more righteous. It is so hard to trust Christians sometimes.
Friday, December 31, 2010
I have The Internet
So, I have been away. Not a good sentence to start a blog with, it tells you this is going to be boring and I will make excuses and such. Also I might tell you what is going on in my life, which is not what I started this blog for. I started this to talk about my thoughts on various things and that is very different from what I am actually doing. The topic of racism is still at the surface so I think I will write on that.
I thought I had blogged on racism before in my old MySpace blog but after tracing the blog back several years I found that I had not. The main thought of that imaginary blog post was that we evolved for racism. Back in the day when we still lived in caves, huts made of animal skin or what ever. We knew everyone around us and we all looked pretty much alike and there was not a lot of mixing with those other people across the river with the strange customs and odd clothes and those unnatural brownish eyes and what not. Those weird people may even have been enemies so it was safe for primitive ignorant man to stay with his own inbred group and breed a myriad or special genetic diseases only present in Finns (or insert there what ever small group of people). It was a survival trait to be suspicious of anyone who seemed different because they were probably out to get you.
With that sort of a legacy, no wonder we still get uncomfortable when we have to share an elevator or a bus bench with a person that is a different color or nationality. This is a completely inappropriate reaction today. Now we are hampered by our genetics. We have come a long way from those club carrying grunting simpletons that acquired this trait that helped them survive and turn into us. Still we have a long way to go and this trait is in our way.
I don't think there is a simple quick fix. We cannot go and have the racist gene eradicated from our kids to give them an edge in the global community. We cannot just tell ourselves that our feelings are wrong and stop it is not that easy. Still I think we must strive to be better than animals. The difference between animals and humans is that they are at the complete mercy of their genetics and do not even realize it. Humans can realize that they have a problem and struggle against their natural tendencies and better ourselves. Man is where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
I have many friends of different colors, nationalities, cultures and native languages but I still struggle against my tendency to feel uncomfortable with a person who does not look like me. I accept this is a condition that I will never be rid of but I have been struggling against this since my teens, since I was old enough to realize I had a problem. I will keep struggling until I die and am freed from the burden of my outdated genetic tendencies. Best we can do is realize we have a problem and forgive ourselves, but never give into it or believe the lie that natural=good. The second we start equating natural with good we may as well start condoning murder because someone pisses us off, because wanting to kill someone who angers you is perfectly natural.
I thought I had blogged on racism before in my old MySpace blog but after tracing the blog back several years I found that I had not. The main thought of that imaginary blog post was that we evolved for racism. Back in the day when we still lived in caves, huts made of animal skin or what ever. We knew everyone around us and we all looked pretty much alike and there was not a lot of mixing with those other people across the river with the strange customs and odd clothes and those unnatural brownish eyes and what not. Those weird people may even have been enemies so it was safe for primitive ignorant man to stay with his own inbred group and breed a myriad or special genetic diseases only present in Finns (or insert there what ever small group of people). It was a survival trait to be suspicious of anyone who seemed different because they were probably out to get you.
With that sort of a legacy, no wonder we still get uncomfortable when we have to share an elevator or a bus bench with a person that is a different color or nationality. This is a completely inappropriate reaction today. Now we are hampered by our genetics. We have come a long way from those club carrying grunting simpletons that acquired this trait that helped them survive and turn into us. Still we have a long way to go and this trait is in our way.
I don't think there is a simple quick fix. We cannot go and have the racist gene eradicated from our kids to give them an edge in the global community. We cannot just tell ourselves that our feelings are wrong and stop it is not that easy. Still I think we must strive to be better than animals. The difference between animals and humans is that they are at the complete mercy of their genetics and do not even realize it. Humans can realize that they have a problem and struggle against their natural tendencies and better ourselves. Man is where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
I have many friends of different colors, nationalities, cultures and native languages but I still struggle against my tendency to feel uncomfortable with a person who does not look like me. I accept this is a condition that I will never be rid of but I have been struggling against this since my teens, since I was old enough to realize I had a problem. I will keep struggling until I die and am freed from the burden of my outdated genetic tendencies. Best we can do is realize we have a problem and forgive ourselves, but never give into it or believe the lie that natural=good. The second we start equating natural with good we may as well start condoning murder because someone pisses us off, because wanting to kill someone who angers you is perfectly natural.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
News and some meme at the end
My oldest reader, not age wise but the guy who started reading this the earliest asked me how I was doing. I am doing well and was going to write a blog about racism in Finland but got involved in looking for a blog I thought I had posted on my old MySpace blog about the subject. Was thinking of reposting it on here first before writing my new blog. This blog seemed to be a figment of my imagination.
In other news I swallowed my pride and went to social services because we were out of money and the kotiutumistuki (homing aid) was not materializing. I went there yesterday and got the money in my account today. Now we eat FOOD, you know versus not food or something. We are moving to our new apartment Sunday. It will hopefully be warm, as this one has failed to be.
Just to be more fun, I found this thing on http://holynpoly.blogspot.com/2010/11/47-down.html and decided to do it for me.
"Here's a list that originally came from the BBC but I picked up from Ganching.
You copy the list and then bold the books you have read completely and italicize those that you have partly read or dipped into.
Apparently the average person has read 6 of these books. Yes six... frightening"
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo.
Okay, so not counting them, but I am patting myself in the back. No more memes I promise. I will get down to business and write about racism and all that soon.
In other news I swallowed my pride and went to social services because we were out of money and the kotiutumistuki (homing aid) was not materializing. I went there yesterday and got the money in my account today. Now we eat FOOD, you know versus not food or something. We are moving to our new apartment Sunday. It will hopefully be warm, as this one has failed to be.
Just to be more fun, I found this thing on http://holynpoly.blogspot.com/2010/11/47-down.html and decided to do it for me.
"Here's a list that originally came from the BBC but I picked up from Ganching.
You copy the list and then bold the books you have read completely and italicize those that you have partly read or dipped into.
Apparently the average person has read 6 of these books. Yes six... frightening"
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo.
Okay, so not counting them, but I am patting myself in the back. No more memes I promise. I will get down to business and write about racism and all that soon.
Monday, November 1, 2010
The Holy Spirit
"Same river different parts." Is what my husband says when talking about the way his Quaker beliefs see the holy spirit and the way my Pentecostal back ground sees it. Pentecostals focus on the strong events of encountering of the holy spirit, and from what I have seen the Quakers focus more on the quiet gentle, still small voice of daily guidance the holy spirit offers. We are swimming in the gently quiet shallows of the spiritual river basking in the love of God. The Pentecostals are in the rapids in their canoes wearing crash helmets and seem to be having a whole lot of crazy fun, WOOHOO!
I like the rapids, I do. I like strong tearing up shaking encounters with the spirit, I just cannot be sustained from day to day on them. I had a few good encounters like that as a child with God, when I was saved and when I received the holy spirit a different time some years later. These were wonderful experiences of closeness with God that probably resembled, in a small way what Moses felt when he saw the Lord pass by.
The danger of these experiences is sometimes you wish to "feel the presence of God" and forget that he is always present. He never leaves, you can always feel him, talk to him and listen to him with out crying screaming and begging for that next strong hit of the holy spirit, like a heroin addict begging for credit from his dealer. Christians, at least in America, often like to compare God to drugs. There is a song by a Christian alternative group, either Skillet or Thousand Foot Crutch, I forget which that is called "Better than Drugs". This is a cute, if over played metaphor many American Christians like to use but when Christians start acting like drug addicts it is no longer cute, it is alarming. It is alarming when a Christian cannot get by with out having a "profound spiritual experience" complete with crying, gnashing of teeth, writhing on the floor, passing out and spewing nonsense. I am not saying these things are somehow not true manifestations of the baptism in the holy spirit but what I am saying is that they are darn exhausting and alarming to the uninitiated, and even those who know what is going on and often indistinguishable from a classically demon possessed person. There is so much wrong when that high is all you are chasing and attaining it is about begging and pleading with God, like you are still a sinner, to come to you. What is wrong with shutting the frack up and listening for a change?
It works for me and when I stopped chasing that high and just listened and relaxed I started to feel and appreciate the daily presence of God more and I no longer felt unworthy because I had no apparent gifts. What God taught me in the silence is that I am good enough for him to love the way I am and there is no need to worry about any special gifts, just living my life for him is good enough. If I fail to enjoy his presence today, I can still do it tomorrow. He is always there for me and more like a warm cup of tea, a blanket and a hug from a loved one than a syringe full of whatever or a noseful of cocaine. Maybe I am just getting old and just no fun spiritually.
I like the rapids, I do. I like strong tearing up shaking encounters with the spirit, I just cannot be sustained from day to day on them. I had a few good encounters like that as a child with God, when I was saved and when I received the holy spirit a different time some years later. These were wonderful experiences of closeness with God that probably resembled, in a small way what Moses felt when he saw the Lord pass by.
The danger of these experiences is sometimes you wish to "feel the presence of God" and forget that he is always present. He never leaves, you can always feel him, talk to him and listen to him with out crying screaming and begging for that next strong hit of the holy spirit, like a heroin addict begging for credit from his dealer. Christians, at least in America, often like to compare God to drugs. There is a song by a Christian alternative group, either Skillet or Thousand Foot Crutch, I forget which that is called "Better than Drugs". This is a cute, if over played metaphor many American Christians like to use but when Christians start acting like drug addicts it is no longer cute, it is alarming. It is alarming when a Christian cannot get by with out having a "profound spiritual experience" complete with crying, gnashing of teeth, writhing on the floor, passing out and spewing nonsense. I am not saying these things are somehow not true manifestations of the baptism in the holy spirit but what I am saying is that they are darn exhausting and alarming to the uninitiated, and even those who know what is going on and often indistinguishable from a classically demon possessed person. There is so much wrong when that high is all you are chasing and attaining it is about begging and pleading with God, like you are still a sinner, to come to you. What is wrong with shutting the frack up and listening for a change?
It works for me and when I stopped chasing that high and just listened and relaxed I started to feel and appreciate the daily presence of God more and I no longer felt unworthy because I had no apparent gifts. What God taught me in the silence is that I am good enough for him to love the way I am and there is no need to worry about any special gifts, just living my life for him is good enough. If I fail to enjoy his presence today, I can still do it tomorrow. He is always there for me and more like a warm cup of tea, a blanket and a hug from a loved one than a syringe full of whatever or a noseful of cocaine. Maybe I am just getting old and just no fun spiritually.
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