spiders and snakes

 Nothing sends Uncle Ken hunting for his bible faster than the chance to prove Beagles wrong.  But it turns out that I did a rearrangement of my books maybe a year ago and I could not find my bible, so I went to the google machine and it turns out that Beagles was not wrong.

I had some dim memory of looking up the story of the apple (which I know was not an apple, likely a pomegranate I've heard) and not finding Eve all that complicit, but I must have been thinking of something else.  I was surprised however that nowhere in the third chapter is it revealed that the serpent is satan.  Maybe that is later in the bible, but I didn't have all morning.

I dimly remember hearing this story in the basement of Elsdon Methodist Church, and I guess Beagles had to be there too because we are the same age, and kind of nodding my head along, but then when she said that therefore, because of that little slip of judgment, everybody in the room, the church, the city, the world, was doomed to hell unless Jesus saves them, I popped right up, wait a minute, I didn't do it, I wasn't there, it was some ancestor a million begats away from me.  Why should I have to take the rap?

Tough titties, or words to that effect, repliethed the Sunday School teacher.  I believe I left the church not too long after that,

People in general don't like spiders and snakes.  Men may be less afraid of them than women, but in general we don't like them either and tend to kill them when we come across them.  I read somewhere long ago that it's because so many of them are poisonous, that we have inherited a fear of them from way back in our inheritance.  Okay I admit that sounds a little dubious.  One of those things that you read long ago and it seemed to make sense at the time so you incorporated it into your body of knowledge, but then years later when you pull it out to make some kind of statement, you think wait a minute, why did I ever believe that?

End of the week, the solstice cropping up first thing next week, Christmas at the end, and then that little blip of New Years, like that last dinner dance aboard the Titanic while we slip deep into the pitiless depths of January and feb.  There is the bright light of the fumigation of the White House on the 20th.