Tuesday 30 July 2013

Dog-days doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

There once was a dentist named Thomas
And a hunky optician, Adonis;
With a hangman called Fred
They sold stickers that said:
“Honk Twice for the Lex Talionis!”

The trouble with liberals is that they don’t take sin and damnation seriously enough.  The trouble with evangelicals is that they don’t take sin and damnation seriously enough.

“Turn or Freeze!” The strident city centre evangelist had been reading Dante.

Behind the end zone stands the guy with a placard reading “Romans 3:16”.  He thought it would make a change from “John 3:16”, and be a more apt text for a football game.

Some people say that they have taken Jesus as their “personal” Lord and Taylor – sorry, “Saviour” – when what they mean is that they have taken Jesus as their “it’s-personal” Lord and Saviour.

The Alpha Course is misnamed.  It should be called the Alfalfa Course, after the perennial plant widely cultivated as cattle fodder (and liable to cause bloating).

I hear that the religious right is finally coming around to accepting global climate change, as a trade-off: they can blame it on gay marriage.

It’s hard to find a Protestant in the UK who has a good word for Thomas Crowell, but you never meet a Catholic who isn’t horrified when you inform them that Thomas More could be no less a shit.

That I can’t tell whether or not you are a Christian from your behaviour may constitute either the highest praise or the most damning criticism.

Were Luther alive and tweeting, I guess that in Vatican circles he would be known as the “Teutonic Troll”.  His on-line language would, no doubt be characteristically colourful – something like “OMG!  WUF?  IMHO, FUBAR!” – but he’d be as right about indulgences as he was in 1517.

A recent Horizon programme, “What Makes Us Human?”, reported an experiment that demonstrates that when it comes to lateral-thinking problem-solving, chimpanzees are more intelligent than humans.  Which will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever observed the General Synod of the Church of England.

Lateral thinking?  The Synod cannot even do joined-up thinking.  To wit: in the C of E, on the advice of one woman (a queen), another woman (a prime minister) may appoint a bishop – who cannot be a woman.  Got it?

My year-old granddaughter has re-confirmed that when Jesus said we must become like children, he meant that we should be wild, disruptive, and utterly subversive of authority and discipline.  “Sing me to sleep?  Yeah, right – in your dreams!”

To really know someone, you need to know not only what they desire but also what they fear.  Indeed, often we are what – or whom – we fear.

We do not realise that we have been asleep and dreaming until we wake up.  The same goes at night.

I have seen faith crash in despair, but I have also seen faith rise from wreckage.

Suggested title for a definitive history of the United States: Road Kill: Travels with My Uncle (Sam).

Apparently Moby-Dick is among the top five famous novels never finished.  Which accounts for a lot of those “Save the Whale” t-shirts.

Atlas Shrugged, Jesus wept.

The first thing I plan to do when I retire is to read Joseph Frank’s one-volume biography Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2010).  Then I am looking forward to being re-read by The Brothers Karamazov.

Of course, not only do great books read the reader, they also write the writer.

If Paul didn’t say what Douglas Campbell says he said, one hopes that the apostle would have the good grace to stand corrected.

Just think how often our Lord must have thought, if not said (cf. John 21:25), “God, what an asshole!”  Followed by bath ḳōl.

What position would Jesus play on a baseball team?  That’s easy: he’d be a closer.  No blown saves.

As Bartimaeus was saying to Jesus, “Life’s a ditch.”

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