Captain_Curmudgeon

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Posts posted by Captain_Curmudgeon

  1. I think that in the afterlife (or whatever) all men will have beards. It's natural. Shaving the face every morning is just irrational, unnatural, and foolish.

    When I was seven, we had in Utah, the centennial (1947). There was a statewide beard growing contest. My father, my uncles, my grandfather, all the males in the ward grew beards. And after the 24th of July they shaved them off. I was struck by how much better they had all looked with the beards and decided then to not shave in my lifetime.

    Yep: that beard I have now was started in 1947.

  2. I have been reading descriptions of how the universe ends, given the instability posited by the GeV value of the Higgs Boson, and they uniformly remind me of something I heard in Sunday School (back in the 40s and 50s) about the Apocalypse: the Heavens would roll up like a scroll.

  3. I saw it on TV (and wasted vast amounts of time watching all the episodes in LV that I'd missed just before watching the final).

    Olympics didn't occur to me but a crappy show on ABC, Wipeout did. I'd really like to see those guys go up against the obstacle course with the Big Balls and all. Not holding my breath, though. One show on ABC and one on NBC. Olympics are more probable.

  4. I'm not an atheist (but I sometimes play one for my LDS naturist friends), but it seems to me that Christmas -- except for the name -- is clearly a pagan holiday slightly detached from the winter solstice. Jesus wasn't born anywhere near December and it's only very recently that anyone thought so. I recently saw (but didn't read) some article about how atheists can turn the solstices and equinoxes into proper holidays for themselves. That's nice. Gets the atheists, the pagans, and the Christians all on the same page and putting up those "Christmas" lights.

    Easter is another kettle of fish. It's sourced in the spring equinox but that led to Passover and that led to the whole Christian Easter business (you might want to look into the origin of the work "Easter").

  5. The nudists were on to something. They can't take away your privacy if you're offering it freely!

    We still are on to something and you're close, MoE. If your senses of modesty and dignity are not tied to clothing, then you can be modest and dignified without clothing.

    I've rarely seen an immodest nudist but I see immodest clothed people every day. Jesus said you don't have to weave nor spin nor wear clothing to be properly arrayed (or attired).

  6. The Pew Foundation does a lot of interesting research and I'm grateful for it. But something like this leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

    Very surprised that pagan/earth religions have a strong (and growing) presence. And do they get chaplains?

    (This may be a gripe leftover from my service in the Navy. We got herded in with the Protestants and most of the stuff they were doing didn't make a bit of sense to me. On the other hand, I was forced to attend only at OCS.)

  7. Just the idea of GAs pulling practical jokes was enough to get me laughing.

    Imagine your favorite GA coming back to his seat after some solemn address and sitting down on a miked-up whoopee cushion.

  8. I was wondering if spooky action at a distance (entanglement) could have applications for instantaneous communications over vast distances...

    Saw an article that involves that (and an other interesting issue: can we detect spooky action with our eyes / mind). But it appears in a bastion of science, so I don't know if anyone here should read it.:hyper:
  9. I don't mark in my scriptures; I've always been a little uncomfortable doing so, not just because their scriptures, but because I can't stand marking in any book. I just bought a new leather Bible and Triple and it came to nearly 100 dollars. I'm going to keep them completely unmarked.

    When I took "Bible as Lit" from Brother Bob Thomas at BYU, he had us buy the Cambridge edition of the Bible. Hard cover, good margins, easy to take notes.

    I think it was a good choice to break us away from our usual views of scripture and allow us to approach it as literature. But, descendent of Anne Hutchinson that I am, I think we should all approach the Bible on our own and not be dependent on what others have thought about it. And the Cambridge Bible is good for that, too.

    (See my novel, I Isaac, if I ever finish the rewrite.)

  10. The concept behind the Crusades was not to protect pilgrims, but to regain the Holy Land. Of course, some Crusades didn't accomplish that, like the one that sacked Constantinople (Eastern Orthodox Christian), instead of Jerusalem.

    Or the one that landed in France and killed off Christians. Or the one that never got underway but resulted in many thousand Christian children being sold into slavery (in France, again).

    Rodney may have the "brief" part down pretty good. Less successful with the "history."