Archive for November, 2007

25 More Shopping Days

Friday, November 30th, 2007

Well, the Christmas season is full upon us.

With just under a month to go, I asked God what her son wanted for his birthday. She said that, living in Heaven, there really wasn’t much that he needed. In fact there was nothing he needed, so I’d need to work on something that he wanted but couldn’t get for himself.

Now, of course, his wish list has things like “peace on Earth,” but that’s not exactly something that I can deliver on my own. So what do you get for the deity that has everything?

Nothing.

That’s right, nothing. I’m going to give him a little time off. I’ll go a day without praying. And a day without doing anything that might upset him. I’ll make it sort of like that one Father’s day where all I did was give Dad a day of peace and quiet. Maybe you could join me, at least in spirit.

Oh, and if any of you can figure out how to give Jesus breakfast in bed, let me know.

Sanctimony Sanctuary

Friday, November 23rd, 2007

God and I were discussing the Rapture again. For those of you that may not be up-to-date on your theological memes, the Rapture is linked to the apocalypse. The four horsemen come riding in and the world as we know it comes to an end. All the good Christians go straight to Heaven, without passing go, and everyone else gets a few years of Hell on Earth to get scared straight or reconcile themselves to an eternity down below.

The thing that occurred to me is that really it’s kind of a win-win situation. The holier-than-thou types win because they get to go straight to Heaven without having to spend the rest of a lifetime being good. And everyone else wins because they finally get to live in a world devoid of sanctimonious jerks.

God gave me an amused look and then asked me what made me think the sanctimonious jerks were going to be part of the group going straight to Heaven.

Some days I just can’t win.

New t-shirts

Friday, November 16th, 2007

If you’re looking for something new to wear, you might want to check out the Zazzle link in our navigation bar. We’ve just added three new shirts to the collection.

It’s Not Just a Good Idea

Friday, November 16th, 2007

I’m going to take a few minutes today to talk about laws. Not legal laws, like the speed limit, and not established laws of science, like the speed of light, but those aphorisms that people coin and consider to be so obvious that they’re practically indisputable but not so obvious that you can assume everyone already knows them.

Probably the most famous is Murphy’s Law, “If anything can go wrong, it will, and at the worst possible moment.”

Another famous one is Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The tech guy here at unscriptured, Fang, has some laws of his own, the newest of which came about because of a conversation that I had with God and was telling him about. God and I had been talking about how so many of the signs of people being in touch with him had been described away by advances in science. There were a number of examples, but I forget what most of them were. One though was that people hearing voices is often just due to schizophrenia.. The thing that God told me about that was simply that just because someone is schizophrenic it doesn’t mean the voices they’re hearing aren’t coming from God.

It struck me as rather like the old joke that goes, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. I found that comparison interesting enough that I told Fang about it. He grinned, went away and thought about it for a little bit, and then came back with his new law.

Before I tell you the new one, I suppose I should tell you about the two that he already had.

Fang’s First Law: “Those who do not learn from Science Fiction are doomed to repeat it.”

Then there’s Fang’s Law of Automation: “Any job that can be automated out of existence isn’t fit for a human to hold.”

And now, with a nod to Arthur C. Clarke, there’s Fang’s new law, Fang’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently unexplained natural phenomenon is indistinguishable from a miracle.”

I kinda like that.

Drive Like You’re Five

Friday, November 9th, 2007

So today God and I talked about flowers. Which ones we found pretty, which ones smell good, that kind of thing. It was pretty boring really, so rather than tell you all about it, I thought I’d hijack the blog to offer something that’s either a rant or a public service announcement, or most likely both.

Some of you, not the majority but a noticeable minority, change lanes to the left on the freeway apparently just because you don’t like seeing another car in front of you. Once you get into your new, unobstructed, lane, you don’t speed up. You become the obstruction. You do this without concern for the car in the lane you’re changing to that was moving fast enough that they were about to pass you. You cause them to have to put on their brakes or, if possible, make a rapid switch into another lane.

Cut it out.

Pay some attention to what the cars in the other lanes are doing. Display a modicum of manners. You know, just try to act as well as you’re mother taught you when you were five.

Oh the Horror

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

So what with Halloween and all, God and I got to talking about horror movies. The thing that comes up over and over again when you talk about horror movies is how many stupid things the people in them do. They split up, instead of sticking together. They go down into the dark cellar when the lights don’t work. They don’t wait until morning to go after the vampires.

Now, of course the obvious answer for all of this is that if they didn’t do these things you wouldn’t have much of a movie, but God had a little more insight for me.

He says that he’s been watching us since before we became humans and through all of that time he’s never seen a person who didn’t do stupid things. So the thing to keep in mind when watching a horror movie is that the people in them are not necessarily stupid, they’re just having a stupid moment.

And if you were in the movie, don’t be so sure you’d be above having a stupid moment of your own.