Redefining Logical

profanity, obscenity, curse words, jesus, atheism, atheist, muslim, islam, mahdi, shi'a
Chris Geiser, at Food for the Soul, has redefined "logical", proving the existence of god, Jesus and hell via profanity.

Yes, profanity.

(note: Mr. Geiser does not feel the need to waste time dividing his posts into paragraphs. I do.)

I just saw a trailer to a movie called Drag Me to Hell. It looks really scary. A while ago I visited the movie's website and it is rather eye opening. It has one of the better website flame graphics I've seen, but I'm not sure I would call it "eye opening". Maybe it's the way all the text isn't jammed into one tiny space that Mr. Geiser finds eye opening.

When secular people atheists! go to see that movie and have heard to the? whole gospel preached to them before wow, who's letting that happen? i mean, the whole gospel. yeah, it's long., I am sure they will probably think about what they heard from the faithful believer who told them the good news. no, no we won't. we don't stop to think about these things while enjoying harmless entertainment. hello, just a movie!

Hell sure seems like it is the real deal. uh, it does? have you been there? wouldn't that be a better post than this one? And it is because it is logical and biblical. hell isn't really biblical, nor is it particularly logical. though thanks for the chuckle. I think that if God, Jesus, or Hell didn't exist, people wouldn't be using God or Jesus Christ's name as curse words when they are mad or scared nor say "What the H-ll" when they are made made what? made scared? what? or scared, either. allow me to explain the nature of profanity to you, Mr. Geiser. it's cultural. the entire purpose of profanity is to be offensive and shocking. in a nation of christians, profanity invoking christian themes will be popular. atheists use those words because everyone else does. this does not reflect any belief in god, jesus or hell. what do you think "fuck!" is all about anyway?

let me put it to you another way: if people found blinking as shocking and crass as mentioning defecation in public, then "oh, blink!" would be the sort of thing you say when you drop a heavy box on your foot.

Nobody uses Allah, Buddha or Mother Nature as curse words. i dunno about that. different cultures do consider different things offensive. actually, i looked up Arabic profanity and got a very amusing list of insults and obscenities. most of them would be equally insulting to an english speaker, but some of them are distinctly different in flavor. Rooh fi siteen alf dahya, for example, apparently means get lost in 60,000 disasters. i guess 50,000 disasters isn't quite enough, but 70,000 is excessive. I know people don't say ,"Mary mother of G-d" as a curse word anymore but they did when? as far back as my grandmother that was an expression of surprise and fear, not an insult or an attempt to be offensive...and why did they, if the whole story of Jesus coming to earth through the virgin Mary wasn't true? i'd just like to say "duh."

I would like to note something else. Muslims, or at least Shi'a Muslims, do believe in Jesus, just not as god. They believe Jesus was born of a virgin, was an important prophet, ascended bodily into heaven and will return at the end of days, some time after al Mahdi. Yet they never invoke Jesus as a profanity, thus disproving Mr. Geiser's theory that we profane what we believe in.

No one thinks of those things when they aren't born again because they are blind and must be gently told that they are wearing someone else's eye-glasses. what? what does that even mean? am i blind or merely wearing the wrong prescription? and how would i not notice that i had someone else's glasses on? trust me, wearing the wrong prescription is immediately obvious. Condemnation awaits them John 3:18, not only from their own doing but because Satan has a play in it too. damn satan, always fucking things up. Satan's work can be destroyed through the light of the gospel in a dark place. so, not in the rather overly lit room i am in right now? guess i'm screwed. Revelation 21:8. John 3:16.

Help a Sister Out

emmissary, violence, profanity, sex, classics, books, everyone poops
Emissary has made a most shocking admission: she only reads children's novels because grownup novels are too dirty! (And then she found out that children's novels have nice gay people in them, and that's dirty too!)

I am both shocked and appalled at the thought of a grown woman limiting herself to children's novels*, so I would like your help in compiling a reading list for Emissary.

Here are Emissary's requirements:

Well, first of all, I got the book from the children's section (instead of the teen or adult). I tend to read books from there because "adult" material usually means a lot of sex, violence, and profanity.

So, no sex, no violence, no profanity. I presume she doesn't read any religious literature, such as the bible, the book of mormon or the q'ran, because those requirements would certainly exclude those books, but be that as it may, I've tried to help her out.

Sense and Sensibility/Pride_and_Prejudice by Jane Austen. No, wait, sex and violence.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. No, wait, violence.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. No, certainly not.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Is she offended by criminals/criminal activity?

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Oh, right, no sex. Well, you don't actually read about the sex, so maybe that's okay.

Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. It's filled with the "n" word, but that wasn't really regarded as a bad word by the establishment (you know, white people) at the time . . . we'll put this one in the "maybe" column.

No Hemingway, Faulkner, Flaubert, Fitzgerald and certainly no Lawrence, Hugo or Hardy.

JRR Tolkein? Nope, his tales of the triumph of good over evil through sacrifice and love are entirely out. There's violence, you see.

It's sad, really. Emmissary has made every novel worth reading in the last, well, ever, unreadable, and must resort to books like Everyone Poops, because she's decided that every depiction of sex, violence or profanity is offensive, regardless of the context. It doesn't matter that sex and violence are part of the human condition, and that any book that attempts to explore the human condition must necessarily explore them. It doesn't matter that some people talk like truckers on meth, and any honest portrayal of them cannot scrub that clean. It doesn't matter to her the beauty and truth she is missing, as long as her bookshelf remains pure.

I really can't think of anything sadder.

*I read a lot of children's novels because my 10 year old niece has recently discovered the world of books, and I like to know what she's into. Horrifying. Not due to content, I couldn't care less which characters are gay, but the writing tends toward the barely literate, if not the outright dull.

**Hat tip to my friends, who shamed me with their memories of the classics.