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Tuesday, January 26, 2016

That's a Good Question

There are only a few places where God uses a plural (or is it collective?) pronoun like "us" or "we", and I think they are all in Genesis. I remember the question coming up in Elsdon Sunday School at least once. Nobody knew for sure, but the general consensus was that He was talking to angels, or maybe Jesus who, according to the Gospel of John, was with God from the beginning. Well maybe, but it also could be construed as evidence that some of the stories in Genesis have roots in the polytheistic culture of Mesopotamia.

When you get into Gilgamesh, pay particular attention to its version of the Flood story. The head god, whose name I have forgotten, felt it necessary to recruit the assistance of all the other gods and goddesses in his plan to drown out humanity. Afterwards, some of the lesser deities were sorry that they had cooperated in this venture, which might be the origin of the Biblical verse that says God "repented" of His decision to cause the Flood. To my knowledge, it was the only time that God ever repented of anything.

I have never heard of your "county fair and turkey fuck" quote. We've got a lot of strange people around here but, to my knowledge, the only turkey fuckers we have are other turkeys.

When the government collects and redistributes money, some of it invariably gets siphoned off along the way and never reaches the intended recipients. To be fair, the same thing could be said about private charities. I suppose that, the larger an organization is, the more overhead costs they have, so there isn't necessarily anything crooked going on here. I think what got me started on this kick was when you said that, if my house was destroyed by a tornado, I would be happy to have FEMA come bail me out. My contention was that FEMA would probably not bail me out directly, they would send the money on a more indirect route and, by the time it got to me, there wouldn't be much of it left. Truth be known, I don't know this for a fact, I was just speculating. I have heard FEMA being criticized for the way they handled that hurricane relief in New Orleans a few years ago, and for the way they have responded to some of those big wildfires out west but, to be fair, I don't know enough about it to speak with authority on the subject. Of course, that's never stopped me before.

I don't know what kind of help they are giving the people of Flint, but it has occurred to me that they might be further ahead to just drill a well for every household in the city and abandon the municipal water system. I know that Chicago draws its water from Lake Michigan, which is pretty clean, but they still have to treat it with chlorine to make it safe to drink. Although Cheboygan sits on the shore of the Straits of Mackinac, which is even cleaner, they get their city water from wells, and I don't think they treat it with anything. All the rural households have their own wells, and they seldom have problems with them. In the old days, many wells tapped the surface vein, which is the first water you hit below the surface of the ground, and is subject to contamination. Nowadays, though, there are codes that dictate how deep a well must be, and nobody drills their own anymore. Professional well drillers don't come cheap, but they are probably cheaper than the multi-billion dollar cost of replacing all the pipes and pumps in Flint.

I never said that Trump was a Libertarian or even a libertarian. I said that, if we end up with a choice of either Trump or Hillary, I would vote for the Libertarian candidate, no matter who he is. It wouldn't matter if the Libertarian candidate was a yellow dog, or even a gay dog, because he's not going to win anyway, and I would have the satisfaction of knowing that I never voted for either Trump or Hillary.

I'm sure that I've seen photos of you, probably on Face Book.

 

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