Throughout my life, prayer has played various roles depending on how holy I was feeling and how much I believed. When I was in high-school, college and on up through my twenties, I prayed all the time. I had this non-stop running conversation with God going on in my head. I prayed for friends, relatives and co-workers. I prayed for the people that I knew who were dabbling in Buddhism, vegetarianism, feminism and environmentalism that God would save them from [...]
I recently finished the book Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen. When I first saw this book, I immediately assumed that it would be awful. I imagined a schmaltzy story where a former career woman comes back to her Mennonite roots and rediscovers love in a pasture. But that was not the story at all. Instead it is a non-fiction account of one woman who returns home to her Mennonite community after decades of living with an [...]
There have been a lot of ups and downs with my garden this year. I have been battling bugs for months attempting to stay organic by handpicking the eggs and the bugs and spraying homemade garlic oil, neem and dish-soap on my plants, but after several weeks of this laborious regimen, I went out to my garden to find a new crop of squash bugs crawling all over my patty pan squash and pumpkin vines and in a fit of [...]
Dear Charles, I sometimes think that the whole world is made of wax… except for the people, who are made of regular old people material. On the off chance that the world is not made of wax, what do you suggest? I grow tired of scooping the waxen air out of my way and typing on a waxen keyboard only to grow hungry and be faced with either a wax apple or a waxy bowl of cornflakes. Remember those tiny [...]
1. Phone call with my mom today. We laughed a lot.
2. I have four awesome kids and a very kind husband.
3. I am thinking about driving to Overland Park on Wednesday after work to listen to Bart Ehrman debate some other guy about the validity of the New Testament.
4. I received a kind e-mail from Nate Phelps – the atheist son of Fred Phelps. Wow!
I have been doing a bit of reading off and on about the Phelps family, and I have nothing but the deepest compassion for the sons and daughters of Fred Phelps. They endured a brutal childhood at the hands of a tyrannical father. This is not a good thing, but it is something that allows me to understand why they do what they do.
6. I still get e-mails almost everyday from people about the ‘apology letter‘. They are always extremely warm and uplifting.
7. Even though I have turned this whole atheism thing into a circus sideshow, it does result in me getting to hear from lots of great people who tell me their own stories of losing faith. Sometimes I think of putting them all on a web site so that everyone who has lost their faith can read them. Of course, I would never do that without getting permission from every single writer.
8. I am much tougher these days. I only balk at reading my comments four or five times a day as opposed to balking at reading them twenty or thirty times a day or not reading them at all for weeks at a time.
9. IT IS OFFICIAL! I have a family member – A REAL LIVE FLESH AND BLOOD RELATIVE – who rejected religion too. This person called a few days ago. It was wonderful to talk to uh… this person.
10. I had a pretty good dinner and now I am going to read a pretty good book.
I asked the CD to pick a random number between 1 and 125 and he chose 113. That matches up with Stacy. Stacy please send me your mailing address to mysistersfarmhouse@live.com and I will send out the book! I think you will really enjoy it.
Everyone else – Thanks for entering and for sticking with this crazy blog through a few uh… somewhat uh… bizarre intervals. I am just trying to keep things interesting for you!
This is the comment from the Stacy that won…
Stacy
Really sad situation and I also thought her speech had some subliminal messages…would love to read the book. Also want to say you are very brave to come out with the truth about your marriage, your beliefs etc….I think when we women get to a certain age it really doesn’t matter what other people think anymore.
Maybe it has to do with the Pope sitting in the recliner with the remote in his hand.
Or maybe it is that scene where he is writing his blog with the water tank in the background.
Or maybe it’s the whole Pope eating a sandwich thing…
Or the papal crest coffee mug…
Or the Pope and his mom watching Jeopardy together!
I don’t know… but I like these people. I really, really do. It’s sort of like the Pope meets Napoleon Dynamite. And honestly… wouldn’t Napoleon as Pope be extremely tolerable?
I originally found this video on a visit to Pochoblog.
Click here to watch the trailer for the full length feature film and read the blog by the film makers.
I read the book “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell over spring-break and I CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT IT! It’s almost like the holy spirit has filled me with a missionary zeal to spread the gospel of Blink to the nations!
The book Blink primarily focuses on the topic of human instincts and how we have a tendency to go to great lengths to not rely on them when we should and to rely on them when we shouldn’t. Humans have all these bodily mechanisms naturally selected over millions of years of evolution to protect us from making bad decisions. Mechanisms like sweaty palms, anxiety, nausea, goosebumps, colon spasms, sphincter twitches, fluttering eyelids, facial ticks, esophageal expulsions, rectum rumblings, gurgling bellies, ringing ears, hair that won’t lie flat, uni-brows, spontaneous lactation, late night snacking, bladder bombs and even the occasional combustible bowel. All these mechanisms are constantly sending us signals about the world around us, but all too often, we choose to completely ignore them and wait to make our decisions based on lab results, further testing, instruction manuals, surveys, statistics, books, opinion polls, sidewalk sales and what other people tell us.
Okay, okay… Gladwell doesn’t actually use bladder explosions, spontaneous lactation, combustible bowels or hair that won’t lie flat for his examples. But it would have been slightly more interesting if he had.
Let’s take facial expressions for instance…
According to Gladwell’s book, people who study facial expressions - really study them – seem to have psychic abilities. They can study your face (even just a photo!) and tell you things about yourself that would seem impossible. Since the 1980′s, Dr. John Gottman has been studying the faces of married couples in his ‘love lab’ near the University of Washington. Gottman and his staff record the facial expression of a married couple in an hour long conversation and can predict with 95% accuracy whether or not a marriage will end in divorce. 95%! They don’t even need to listen to the VOICES of the couple they are studying! Gottman has become so good at reading facial expressions, that he can watch a couple from across a restaurant and predict whether or not their marriage is destined for divorce. The facial expression that highly favors the outcome of divorce? Contempt. If contempt appears frequently on the face of one member of a marriage – it is much more likely to fail. Gottman calls his intense examination of facial expression – thin slicing.
As I read this book, various episodes throughout my life flashed through my mind. I thought back to the times I had money burning a hole in my pocket to buy furniture for my house and salespeople completely ignored me because they saw me pull up in a beat up station wagon and unload three small toddlers. Their instincts told them that I was too poor to purchase anything and they shouldn’t waste their time on me. I thought about the daily stomach-ache I used to get when I read Pioneer Woman. On an instinctual level, my body was telling me that I was being sold a story that insisted once too often that it was truly authentic. If I had just listened to my twisted intestines, I would have wasted much less time attempting to model my own blog on the carefully contrived image of PW and wandered off much sooner in my own decidedly hostile direction.
The same type of instinctual physical reactions frequently happened to me as I struggled with Christianity. As I participated in church services, committee meetings, reading the bible, and teaching Sunday school – I would often feel exhausted afterwards or I would get a stomachache or just feel like something wasn’t quite right. My instincts were trying to tell me one thing, but they had to overcome my brain that knew the ‘facts’. The facts that I considered to be the unassailable truth like the existence of god and the inerrancy of the bible. Like so many people, I don’t trust my instincts enough when I should and I trust them too much when I shouldn’t.
The research and stories in Gladwell’s book are fascinating. He writes about police work gone fatally wrong due to cops reacting incorrectly to a frightened suspect, because they are frightened themselves and because cops in groups tend to react with a mob mentality (as opposed to a cop that is working alone). He writes about soldiers succeeding in jungle environments where they learn to completely rely on their instincts and ignore the misleading intelligence they are receiving from their superiors for the sake of survival. He writes about art experts detecting forgeries within seconds due to a ‘wave of revulsion’ reaction that long precedes the scientific testing and close examination upon which museums insist. Gladwell has created a fascinating book about how, when and why people should trust their instincts and ignore their brains. Because it turns out – our instincts ARE our brains. They are the first reaction of our brains. We just aren’t very good at interpreting what they are telling us.
I found the following video of Sandra Bullock at the Oscars. The film has been slowed down enough so that the viewer is able (in a manner of speaking) to thin slice Bullock’s facial reaction towards her philandering husband, Jesse James – even though the press had yet to break the story. It would seem that her joy at winning an Oscar is severely diminished by an entirely different emotion. I’m not Dr Gottman, but it looks like contempt to me. And James deserves every bit of it.
For a chance to win my copy of ‘Blink’ by Malcolm Gladwell – just leave a comment.
I will draw a winner Tuesday evening.
Like Aquinas and Calvin, I reserve the right to burn heretical duplicate entries at the stake.
susan: Started my work day watching that HILARIOUS baby jesus prayer. What a way to start a work day which is why I always see what your latest posts are Rechelle. Very unexpected. BILL: Why so much hatin’? jeez..go somewhere else.
Rechelle: Fran P – I think 4 per plant is plenty. I don’t think you will have to do it again unless the rain just keeps pouring down. Hope it works!
Rechelle: GIgs – I have yet to find a replacement for the hole left by religion. For me – that hole is somewhat filled with relief, but it is also filled with plain old emptiness. I don’t miss my beliefs, but I miss some of the ‘extras’ that went along with my beliefs. Fellowship, family, community, I guess it is...
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