bar talk

Liberal newspapers have had conservative columnists, and conservative newspapers have had liberal columnists since I spread out my Daddy's Trib on the frontroom floor and tried to figure out the front page editorial cartoon, and later rolled up my thick Sun-Times under my arm to take to high school with me.  CNN has that snippy Santorum and Fox has Juan Williams.

Columnists aren't what they once were though. Back in the day the Trib and the Sun-Times would regularly print the same established political columnists week after week. Anymore it seems that they just reach into the grab bag of political columns and pick out  one or two a day.  A pity because the point  of reading a political columnist is you know who the guy is, you know how he feels in general; so his words have much more import, it's like the difference between asking your old pal or asking some stranger on the next barstool.  Another thing is that now that we are so polarized a lot of guys just print their party line instead of making flinty observations.   


Actually Uncle Ken is an atheist, and he casts a disapproving eye on agnostics as wishy-washy new age types who give unbelief a bad name.  I brought it up as a bit of bar talk, that is as something to be batted around to see where it led without ever coming to any conclusion because a long night and many beers lay ahead.  Griff (Old Dog knows Griff) speculated about  his mother who is very religious yet very feminist squares things, does she believe that God is a woman? 

Well could God, the Abrahamic god, be a woman?  Since He has no reproductive parts or chromosomes how do we determine His sex?  I was beginning to expound on the subject when a young woman took the next barstool and Griff wanted to include her in the discussion,  Including other participants in potentially controversial bar talk is something I discourage.  The last time Old Dog made an appearance we were discussing incest and bestiality and Griff maintains that a young woman on the stool who had a dog was looking at us nervously.

Anyway her boyfriend soon showed up and he had an opinion as did one of the pool players who approached the bar to get another beer.  When I turned around Griff was gone.  So was the young lady who went off to play pool, her boyfriend and I carried on a bit, but he was a young guy and pretty soon the subject of the patriarchy up and things got a little PC and uninteresting .

I thought it might be interesting for Beaglestonians to bat around though.  You know how I hate bible study, and it seems a little incongruous  for me to ask what a book (The Good Book) that I don't believe in has to say about a God I don't believe in, but since we have a bible scholar in the house, does the bible ever explicitly say that God is male?
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Watched The Death of Stalin Saturday night.  A little historically inaccurate (I scoured through the internet in vain to find a mention of the 1,500 peasants shot trying to view Stalin's corpse), but it's a movie right.  I'll give it three and a half stars.