: Heh.
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29th June 200927th June 200924th June 200918th June 20094th June 200916th May 20096th May 2009
: Stoled from Jenn
5th May 2009
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29th April 200910th April 200913th March 200912th March 2009
: From Neese's Website
From http://www.neesesausage.com/products/def  This is the original recipe from Mr. Thede's wife, Annie Smith Neese. It hasn't changed in 100 years, and it's still delivered fresh every day and contains no preservatives or additives. For those who like a little zestier taste we made Neese's Hot Sausage. Just like all our sausage, it's fresh, never frozen and totally without preservatives. This is our original recipe with a smooth taste and just enough sage added to please sage lovers A fully cooked southern favorite with our special spices. It's 96% fat free and, believe it or not, a favorite of kids who love it on a sandwich or warmed in the pan for breakfast. By the way, it doesn't taste like pudding and it doesn't look like liver. This is a regional variation on Liver Pudding and it has a different recipe, including spices and seasonings. For some folks in western North Carolina there is no substitute.  Lots of folks think this is a northeastern product, but in fact it's amazing how much Neese's Scrapple people in the South buy. It's also rewarding to hear people from the North tell us how good our Scrapple is. There are lots of folks who don't know what C-Loaf is, but if you grew up on the farm you know it and love it. Try some even if you live in town.  This old-time favorite has a flavor some swear you can't find anywhere else in the world. But you can find it in your favorite supermarket.
14th February 200911th February 2009
: A Science Fiction Tale
In the year 2024, a slower-than-light arkship sets off with a cargo of 14,000 Chinese, 9,500 Native Americans, and 12,005 Russians. They set forth on a 103 year journey to an Earth-like planet just past Alpha Centauri. By the time they arrived, they had all become Irish. 21st January 2009
: Uh . . . huh . . .
My roommate just informed me that "Your Dr Pepper cannot save you now!" He's been saying stuff like this all night! Man. I think when he took a nap, earlier, some great force, ancient and stupid, moved into his mind. 17th January 2009
: Today I learned the following:
Commenting on a Livejournal post expressing disagreement is trolling. No attack needs to be made, nor does any implication of the post being 'dumb' need to occur. Simply disagreeing and explaining why will suffice. If I am white, and I express any sort of opinion at all, I am "jizzing" my "privilege" all over the place. One must be currently oppressed, or have been oppressed in the recent past, to have a valid opinion. It is not racist for someone to read something I wrote, then dismiss it entirely while making sure to mention that I'm white, as that fact obviously negates any possible validity my post may have had. In fact, by calling me white, the person is simply stating the well known fact that all white people are ethnocentric racist bigots, and as such, anything any of us write, say, or believe is apparently invalid because of this fact. (I assume that's the implication, at least, otherwise why throw in the word "white" into a list of insults about my post?) From this, I can assume that hating white people (or at least dismissing any sort of primarily white Western culture as entirely offensive) is the minimum that a person can do and still live a conscionable life. PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT! WHITE PEOPLE ONLY READ PAST THIS POINT! This is urgent information for all the white people I know. Pass it on to your white friends, as soon as possible. The colored folk saw through our facade of tolerance! They know how racist we really are! They realized that all our "progressiveness" was a trick to distract them, while we systematically appropriated and destroyed their culture! Quick! We have to ruin their history and beliefs faster! We have to steal their culture and force our own, superior culture onto them, to remove their sense of identity! What they want doesn't matter, we have all the control, here. They and their culture will be assimilated and destroyed! We've got them convinced, for the moment, that they're lower than we are, more base than us white people, less worthy than the mighty Caucasian race. If they'll start thinking they're our equals, we'll be in danger of losing our White way of life! Our privilege must be protected at all costs! Remember, fellow white people: When you see someone who is not white (this includes Irish, they're only fake-white), steal their culture immediately. It can be tricky, but if you do it right, they'll instantly collapse to the ground, drooling and babbling incoherently. Within a few days they should die from exposure. We'll defeat the non-white threat yet! Current Mood:
 completely fucking insane8th January 2009
: And I'm awake.
It's 4 AM. I have officially been attempting to fall asleep for three hours, now. I've had similar problems all week. It's annoying. And it's tending to mess up my plans for the day, when I don't wake up until noon or later. I could wake up earlier, but with no specific plans for the day, it seems like I'd be hard pressed to keep myself from taking a nap come afternoon. And that would just further kick my sleep schedule in the teeth. And here I promised a pretty girl I'd actually sleep tonight. Stupid brain. Sleep now, please. ::knocks self in the head with anvil:: Edit: 5:40 AM Edit: 7:50 AM 6th January 200930th December 2008
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I've got a bluetooth headset. I love it. It's insanely useful, and I use it all the time at work, at home, or where ever.
Around the little speaker, there was a rubber ring attached that I assume was there for comfort. About two months ago, the rubber broke in one place, and began to hang down a little. It became more and more annoying, as I tried to bend it back up to where it belonged. Everytime I wore it, I had to push the little hanging piece of rubber back to where it should be. About three weeks ago, it became so loose that the loose rubber would push it slightly off my ear fairly easily. I was constantly adjusting the headset, trying to keep it where it belonged, constantly pushing the rubber back up to its rightful place. If I was lucky, I could wedge it between the headset and my ear, and it would stay for ten or fifteen minutes before falling back down. Yesterday, I finally gave up, and tore the rubber off completely. It's completely comfortable to wear, again. It feels just fine, and it no longer tries to fling itself from my ear. I've had no problems, since then.
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So I'm watching The 700 Club for some reason. And wow, everyone on this show speaks at the exact same, slightly slowly than usual speed, and with the same incredibly even cadence, and in the same almost half-whisper.
And they keep telling me to pray things that I don't think are very healthy to pray! But whoa, this speaking . . . After writing this post, the woman who was speaking moved from "talking about Jesus" into "trying to sell me something." Her voice sped up to at least twice as fast, and she began speaking in (what I would consider) a human tone of voice. It's almost so relieving that I want to buy the thing just to reward her for speaking normally! 28th December 2008
: Cornbread!
I got a nice cast iron skillet for Christmas, and, as the only possible righteous thing to do with it first, I made cornbread! Excuse the poor picture quality, I took them with my phone.  Right out of the skillet.  Cut. I love the color contrast. It's just beautiful! :D  A slice of it with the chili I made, to go along with the cornbread. The chili was also very tasty! I made it out of a very bizarre combination of foods: a pound of ground beef cooked with a quarter of a white onion and a few cloves of garlic, a can of Manwich, a can of Bush's "Chili Starter" beans, a can of pork and beans, a LOT of pepper, some kosher salt, a lot of garlic powder, a lot of chili powder, some fresh cilantro, and some hot sauce I found in the fridge. Cooked for 20 minutes, then sprinkled with monterey jack cheese. It wasn't nearly spicy enough, but it was insanely good. The next time I made it, I'll have to remember to pick up some cayenne pepper! :D
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"He who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law." Romans 13:8
"God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him." 1 John 4:16 These are simple truths. And yet there are pages upon pages on the internet, claiming that people who read these phrases as they are written are sinning. That the phrase "deifies love, instead of holiness." That thinking that God loves everyone is just a happy, white-light, positive, namby-pamby cop-out. That the real God hates some people, that God's love is discriminating. My favorite is the assumption that since we don't know what divine love is, we have to assume that the "love" in those sentences doesn't mean what we think it means. That since the Bible both says that God is love, and the Bible has places that make God seem VERY unloving, then we have to redefine our word "love." That's insane. These are our words, we use them to communicate concepts to each other. The idea that our word "love" is wrong doesn't even make sense. We invented the word "love" to describe what the concept we wanted to describe. If there was supposed to be another word, there in those verses, instead of "love," then there were MANY WORDS TO CHOOSE FROM. But no, the word used is "love." People will go all over the place yelling at me for trying to 'interpret' the Bible. But then they'll look at those two simple phrases and somehow try to claim that they don't mean what they say. Literally. That God is love. And that if you love your neighbor, you have fulfilled the law. If you claim that means something different, then you are 'interpreting' those phrases to mean something else, so another part of the Bible works literally. I choose to 'interpret' those parts of the Bible, so that this part is meant literally. Because the concept embodied in "God is love' is greater than any concept thought up that requires the literal interpretation of a contradictory, violent, spiteful, confusing God that regularly destroys entire nations to make a point. The concept is greater because I can feel it. Because my heart knows it. Because God has given me the ability to do that. He's given you the ability too. I can see it in you. All of you. God, I wish I could help you. I do love you, you know. 25th December 2008
: Merry Christmas, everyone.
23rd December 2008
: Why I believe in Christ
This post started as a response to grace_in_spades's journal:If you believe in Christ, why do you believe? How did you start? Were you raised to believe? Or did someone just come up to you one day and tell you about Jesus? It quickly became far too long for Livejournal to allow me to post it as a response, so I decided to post it here, instead. It's fairly late at night, so please excuse the fact that it meanders a bit. I had a lot I wanted to say, and much more that I'm sure I forgot. But this is a basic description of my belief and how I arrived there. I was raised Christian. Baptist, actually, though they didn't emphasize the denomination very much. I always just considered myself "Christian," whereas others I knew would call themselves "Baptists" or "Presbyterians" or whatnot. Growing up, I had a lot of questions. These were never answered completely to my liking, honestly. "What if someone never heard about Jesus?" The Bible says that everyone will be told about Jesus. --But this doesn't work. I though, as a young child, that maybe most people would hear about Jesus. But there are some African tribes that have almost no contact, right? In 6th or 7th grade I heard on the news about some tribe that was discovered for the first time. Missionaries almost immediately started going out there, but I couldn't help but think, "What about the people before now?" Later, I began to wonder about more things--no one I knew would EVER consider converting to Islam or Hinduism, no matter how well those people preached. So if my family was Muslim, wouldn't they all be just as resistant to Christian preaching? I was told that if they were Muslim, then when they heard about Christ, they would hear the truth in the preaching, and convert. But there aren't a LOT more Christian converts than there are Muslim converts, and it seems hard to believe that people born into Muslim families are just 'more blind' than people born into Christian families. I was also told, by a few people, that God chose the people that were destined to go to hell, and made them Muslim, as an example to the Christians. That offends me so much that I can't even describe it. It was repulsive to me at the age of nine, and it is repulsive now. "If ten people worship Christ in ten different ways, are they all right? Or is only one of them right?" As long as they do certain things, and avoid certain other things, they're all right. --The problem with this one took me a little longer to understand. Because it's all based on that person or that church's individual belief. Another Christian church might be 'acceptable' to them, but only if they don't do anything that that particular church really disagrees with. And again, the vast majority of all of the people that believe that grew up in a church that believed that. It's the same problem as above, but within Christianity itself. Some churches dunk into water, some sprinkle. Most of the churches that dunk don't think that people who are sprinkled will go to hell for the lack of dunking, but some of them do! Most of the people who were sprinkled don't think that dunking is a sin, but some do! A lot of the churches that believe that all alcohol is a sin claim that it's evil to take communion with wine, and some churches that use wine believe that it's not "real" communion if you use grape juice. So which to believe? Both sides will then claim that if you really have the Holy Spirit within you, if you really know Jesus, then you'll believe them. No matter which side you choose, the other side will shake its head sadly, and say that they'll pray for your soul. And often, both sides will have fairly good scriptural evidence to back up their beliefs. (Though I will take a small stand here and say that the claim that the word "wine" in the Bible is actually "juice" is plainly and blatantly wrong. I will expand on this later.) After awhile, I decided to try to read the Bible myself. To see what the scripture itself said. This led to a fairly big question: "Some places in the Bible say different things than other places do. Which places is right?" Those places don't contradict. One or both of them are supposed to be interpreted in this way. --Of course, the way that one of them was supposed to be interpreted, or which one should be taken literally and which one differently, differs between different people, different churches. Again, both sides claim that if I "knew Christ," like they did, I would understand that they were correct, and the other side was wrong. So I decided to study it. Seriously. First I studied the history. And I learned a lot of history. A lot of history. I realized, for the first time, honestly, that the Bible was written over time. I had known that, before, but never really realized it. That different books were written by different people, sometimes people who drastically disagreed with one another. That sometimes they told stories differently, either because they believed them to be different, or to hold up their position better. I learned that in the early years of Christianity, many churches used different books from one another. Most of them used two or three, perhaps all four, of what we call the Gospels. Some of them had more Gospels. Some had different ones than the others. I learned that different towns and cities would have an unofficial canon of books that they believed were holy, and when people from another city claimed that "No, these are the books that are holy," they would get into fights. I know that eventually, the Empire forced all the Christian leaders to decide on a single canon, and that which books would be in this canon was a HUGE argument. I know that the Gospel of John was almost left out, because many people thought it contained Gnostic teachings, the greatest "heresy" of the time. I know that the concept of Jesus as both fully human and fully God was a compromise, and thatit was the result of a powerful group who believed he was fully human refusing to agree with a powerful group that believed he was fully God, and that after Constantine locked them in a guarded room until they agreed, they decided to agree that they were both right. I know that there were some instances in which bishops were strangled by their parishioners, for bowing down to heresy, and accepting "evil" books. Because, you see, everyone knew that the beliefs they had grown up with were truth. And to them, truth was worth killing, to preserve. Then I studied people. People in different churches. Different Christian churches, different non-Christian churches. And I realized something: they all believed what they believed. They would find, in the Bible, what they believed, and they would believe it. The Bible was, often, a mirror for their cultural beliefs. People grow up in a culture where gay marriage is wrong, but women going to church without hats is ok, so the part of the Bible against gay marriage are incredibly important, while the part against hatless women is ignored completely. Some people wash each other's feet, but most do not, while some people refuse to shave their faces, while most do not. Outside of Orthodox or Ultra-Orthodox Jews, I don't know of anyone who refrains from wearing two types of cloth at once. (I'm sure there are some, honestly, but I've not heard of them.) A fairly blatant example of this is the group of Christians against all alcohol. Even though the Israelites in the Bible used wine in holy rituals, even though Jesus himself created wine, and Paul wrote that "a little wine" was healthy to drink, they claim that it is a sin to drink wine. Their culture, not their Bible, commands this. And yet their culture is strong enough to cause them to go so far as to claim that the Bible was mistranslated, and that those uses of "wine" actually mean "juice." This is simply wrong. The Hebrew word used in the Old Testament is yayin. It is used when Melchizedek, "priest of God Most High," brings out bread and wine. It is also used when Noah became drunk. Later, Numbers 6 contains an edict against the drinking of "wine or strong drink," but later in the same chapter, there is a description of a ceremony in which a Nazirite (an exceptionally aescetic Israelite) may drink wine. Proverbs contains several warnings against "loving wine," but says that you should "give wine to him whose life is bitter," so he can "forget his poverty." Ecclesiastes even says outright, "Go then! Eat your bread in happiness, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart." The word yayin is used in all of these examples. In the New Testament, the Greek word "oinos" is used for wine. This is the word used when Jesus turns water into wine in John. This is also the word used in Romans, where Paul tells us that "it is good not to eat meat or drink wine." (Though in this passage, true, it seems that Paul is saying that anything you think is a sin, is a sin, and that anything you know is good, is good. Fairly progressive, honestly.) Paul does say, in Ephesians, to "not get drunk with wine." And while in 1 Timothy he says that one should not be drunken with wine, he specifies that "a little wine" is good for "your stomach and your ailments." So basically, if you think it's evil to drink wine, there are plenty of places you can point to and claim that you are right. But you have to ignore a lot of other places. And claiming that it's a mistranslation is just plain inaccurate. Regardless, however, people's culture is pushed into the place of "scriptural truth." Some people go against the way they were raised, and choose different parts to believe and ignore, but rarely does someone choose to believe or ignore all of it. When someone chooses to ignore a part that most Christians believe, however, then it escalates quickly into a ridiculous amount of anger, and even hate. Finally, I realized that the Bible was written by humans. That it had to be, or else it wouldn't argue with itself at times. That it wouldn't contain historical errors. That it wouldn't have slightly different accounts of the same event. That it could be wrong, at times. This, more than anything else ever had, made everything work. For the first time, I didn't have to read the Bible and feel that twist in my gut, as I read things that my heart knew to be sinful were promoted as good. As I read things that I knew to be good, or at least vaguely neutral, derided as sinful. My whole life I had struggled with this simple problem: "If the Bible is truth, then why do parts of it sound so very bad?" Because we are human, and as such, we are not good enough to recognize the pure goodness and truth of God's word. It is confusing to us only because we are imperfect. We have to have faith in his word, even if we cannot understand it, even if it seems bad to our sinful, mortal, flawed minds. --This almost makes sense. But it goes against everything that I was told previously! I am told, over and over, that if I know Jesus, if I have the Holy Spirit in my heart, that I'll know the truth when I see it. But now I am told that to know Jesus, I have to accept the Bible fully and completely, and unquestioningly. (Though if I interpret it differently than they do, they will still say that I must not really know Jesus.) So which is it? Do I know truth when I see it because I know Jesus? Or do I know Jesus because I have faith in something even when it seems, in places, to be so very lacking in truth? And why does knowing Jesus require me to believe the literal truth in what one person wrote, two thousand years ago, over what someone else wrote, two thousand years ago, about the same person? To believe that after all those arguments and debates, in various councils, over what dogmas and what books to accept, the ones that were chosen were the only ones that were truthful? My entire life I've been troubled about parts of the Bible. And for my entire life, I've prayed about it. I've asked God and Jesus to help me understand what I'm doing wrong, what I'm misunderstanding. And with that one realization--that the Bible is human--everything becomes clear. God is beyond words on a page. God is beyond a book. I know Jesus because I've realized this. Because I know, completely and fully, with all my heart, that God is known through you, not through a book. The book can help. The book can be a wonderful tool. But you are divine. You have the ability to know God, to know Christ as an aspect of God, and to know Love as that which binds and comprises both. After years of study, meditation, and prayer, I have found many questions, both profound and trivial. I have answered many trivial ones, but only one profound one, and that is this: God is love. Everything else has to conform to this. When you place the Bible over love, you are not putting God's word over human words. You're placing a human's word over your own heart. Your heart is your most powerful connection to the divine, and you ignore that connection by placing words on a page over it. Christ is there, with you, begging you to pay attention to him, asking you to listen, inviting you into his heart and soul while simultaneously asking to come into yours, and you are ignoring him. You are choosing to be obsessed with words that a human wrote about Christ over Christ himself. When you hurt, when you're confused, when things don't feel "right?" It's because you're reading an unauthorized biography of God and refusing to listen to God himself. You're speaking to God and ignoring him when he replies, because the mortal, human book doesn't agree. Of course you're confused. Who wouldn't be? The Bible can be an incredible force for good. Don't think I'm decrying it completely--I'm not. But you cannot choose it over God. So yes, I believe in Christ. I believe in Christ because the being that is called Christ, in the Bible, is generally described as the God that I know exists. Labels don't matter. Whether you call it YHWH, Elohim, El, Ba'al, Mashiach, Kristos, Yehoshuah, Iesous, Adonai, God, Lord, Messiah, Christ, or Jesus, you're still talking about God. You're still talking about the creator of the universe, the one who knows our hearts, and the one who loves us all. I was raised to believe, but I did not know entirely what I believed until I seriously questioned myself and my religion and my God. I asked these questions of the universe, and of myself, and of God, and God answered them. God loves you. You are his beloved child. If you ask questions, he will help you learn the answers. (And yes, there are places in the Bible where God is called ba'al. It's a Hebrew word for "Master." The Ba'al that so offended the ancient Israelites was the title of a very popular Canaanite god which was the son of El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon. El, by the way, is also a word used for God in the Bible.) By the way, all of this is written assuming that most people who believe differently are simply partially there. They may know Christ, but not completely, because they refuse to let themselves know him completely. They are too afraid to trust him, because they were brought up to believe in a book, instead, and choose the book over Christ sometimes. (Not everytime, thank God, or we'd still live in a culture where women could be killed in the streets because they were raped.) HOWEVER, if you hate, if you choose hatred as your primary means of "worship," if you espouse pain and death and destruction in the name of God, then you do not know Christ. Not at all. You are alone. You are disgusting, and you are an abhorrence. You are an abomination. I will do everything I can to show you how grievously you have sinned, I will spend my life, with God, trying to bring you back from the black despair you have founded your life on, but I will not respect such a life. You are not beyond salvation, but for as long as you devote your life to pain and hate, you have not attained it. If God has shown me anything, anything at all, it is that hatred and the giving of pain can not be tolerated. All of these words are truths that I fully believe, and I say these things after years of prayer, meditation, and study. This final part, however, I say with the full authority of the divine. As I say these things, his Truth and Power flow through me like fire, and more than anything else in this universe, you may be assured that these words are Truth. Do not believe my words simply because they are written; any human words can be claimed as divine. Instead, look into your own heart--you will find God there, and you will understand that these words are inviolable. 8th December 2008 |
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