In church today -- it's mother's day, and this is where she wants to be, so that's good enough for me.
The Preacher is making yet another doomed run at hammering the square peg of James into the round hole of Baptist theology which is even harder than reconciling John with -- well, anyone. The holy Trinity of weirdness--John, James, and Revelation. I suspect this is not the first time I've logged this. Since I only rarely go to church it seems I manage to turn up every time he's getting ready to make another push to get that rock to the top of the hill.
In his preview of next week's doings, he appears ready to dive into Uncle Remus's thicket of James 3 to chase Bre'r Rabbit. Gonna be ugly. Seems like any respectable preacher would trot out a quote from James now and again just to annoy folk, and other than that skip the whole damned book. Even Martin Luther hated the thing.
Managing to survive that, the Beneficiary and I went to mom's house. My brother and his wife brought over some fried chicken, okra, and mashed taters, and cake and we hung out with them and the parents for awhile.
During the meal, some kind of random military stuff came up and my brother was reminded of that chunk of the movie "Full Metal Jacket" wherein the drill sergeant was making the troops march around with their rifles and grabbing their dicks yelling "This is my rifle, this is my gun! This one's for killing, this one's for fun!".
I explained that was probably a punishment for someone calling his rifle a gun in the hearing of the drill sergeant. In my outfit this offense would get you standing on a table in the middle of the chow hall over lunch grabbing your crotch and slapping your shouldered rifle yelling the mnemonic over and over again for about 15 minutes for the viewing pleasure of the couple of hundred diners. I never had to do it, but I noticed those few who did never had to do it twice, and to this day when someone talks about their "gun" it raises the hackles all over me. The military can be a brutal but always effective teacher.
Dad picked up on the theme and said, "I've been trying to remember, but when I was in the Navy (which would have been about 1945), they made us yell 'This is my rifle, this is my gun! This one's for killing, this one's for fun!'"
This randomly-firing 70-year-old memory amused him considerably.
In fact, he repeated that same story word-for-word, and regular as a tolling bell about every 5 minutes for the rest of the afternoon, to the considerable annoyance of my mom, who is far and away too old school to put up with multiple ribald retelling of dicks and weaponry stories at lunch.
Didn't bother the rest of us any. In fact, as I told my brother, given my history, all the shit I've seen, and the life I've been steeped in, I can't wait to see which rancid chunk of it I pick out to repeat every five minutes when my neurons start dying out. Bet I don't make any friends that day.
Overall Day Score: 8 out of 10.
I never went in the military--it's a longish story having to do with moving back and forth between two states and apparently confusing the various draft boards, maybe slipping through the cracks, so to speak, and the lottery, which came around the time I was 18, and a little dumb luck. My point, though, is that I still wonder if I developed a low tolerance for this sort of humiliating bullshit because I had such a coddled life, or if I'm just that way, in which, in which case it's probably a good thing I avoided the military.
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, I take this opportunity to thank you for your service, whichever sided of the ideological fence you were on at the time. You did what you had to do. The rest of us always wonder, just a little bit, if we could have done it.
Thank you, I appreciate it.
DeleteI suspect you'd have been fine, if not exactly doing happy-dances every day. I started out with the "low tolerance" you noted, as did a lot of people who went in at the same time. It's probably a near-universal feeling. Turns out that the military are no kidding pros at getting past that roadblock pretty early on. The number of people they wash out because of core incompatibility after all is not zero but pretty close to it. One of the key components to military training, in fact, is showing troops that they can tolerate extremes and cultures that would never have occurred to them as being survivable before, and a lot of those extremes have nothing to do with time in the field.
What is it exactly about John and James? I don't know my Bible well enough to follow the subtext here. The whole thing with calling your dick a gun...well, what can I say. Men! I had a boyfriend who called his Spike, after, he claimed, some large piece of railway machinery. I'd be more inclined to a guy who called his, I don't know, daffodil or something.
ReplyDeleteWell, as to James, the difficulties arise when considering the Baptist bedrock of Pauline theology (e.g., that espoused by Paul over the course of his letters) which involves grace without merit or works. James spends most of his time ragging on the Pauline idea of getting into heaven without actually DOING something useful (i.e., working your way in, not just believing your way in). This is more than an outlier. It's practically an entirely different religion. The rhetorical gymnastics involved in getting it in line with the rest are pretty impressive.
DeleteMeanwhile you have your basic four books of the Gospel (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) which are part of a Bible that the Baptists consider to be the inerrant Word Of God. The first three have their problems with agreeing with one another, but have enough common sources that they're called "The Synoptics" (Greek for "Read Together"). John, on the other hand, wanders off on his own and often seems only vaguely related to the first three, and directly contradicts them in a variety of places, not least of which is when Jesus actually died. It was clearly written by a theological hack who was trying to hammer the Gospel stories into whatever weird variant of belief he had running. This makes the "inerrant" word of God pretty problematic, as John is so blatantly errant that they usually just give up and mash all four of them into a single story that Mel Gibson can film.
As to naming conventions for dicks -- never got into it, other than as required for Basic Training. This may be related to the fact that the only time it ever comes up (ha!) is backhandedly when I'm talking about my memory -- which I refer to as my "Second Shortest Thing". This generally fits with my overall view on sex, which is that the reason it feels so good and is so much fun is to make up for it looking so stupid. If you're doing it right, anyhow.
You're very knowledgeable on the New testament... theology degree or just religious background? And yeah, I like your attitude to sex. It does look dumb. Never involve mirrors, that's my tip.
DeleteAlso got a strong background in the OLD Testament, too, but no, none of the above.
DeleteActually it began when I had a minor-league argument with a preacher once upon a time, as one does when one is an ex-fundie that the preacher is trying to return to the flock.
Anyhow, I discovered that while I had pretty strong ideas concerning the silliness of religion and superstition in general, given the limitations of Wave Mechanics and the Standard Model, my actual knowledge about Judeo/Christianity in particular was pretty spotty/Mark Twain Sunday-school level. So I got curious and did a deep dive into hard-core research (took a month or two spread over about a year as the only time I'd bother is if I happened to get interested in a particular chunk just that second, and I usually didn't). It turns out there's no upside to arguing it as True Believers have a Bayesian prior on the matter of 1.0, which means when you ask them what evidence could possibly change their mind, the answer is "none" which is literally true. If God himself turned up and slapped them upside the haid and said "Quit it!" they'd just write it off to Satan trying to distract them.
So, I've learned that it's best to just smile, nod, and ignore them, at least to the degree they're not actively interfering in my life. But I learned a bunch before I arrived at that realization. Interesting, but of no value, so far as I can tell.
This, it tuns out, is mostly how I actually learn about anything. Just nosy.
As to the mirrors, I generally agree. I will note, however, that men are almost ALWAYS more responsive to visual stuff than women are. That's why girls sending nudes under virtually any circumstance is generally approved but boys sending dick pix are universally condemned. Unfair, but there it is.