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I remember how pleased I was when I came across a student who had never heard of Thatcher. I explained her to him in a gently neutral way: "Now you've read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe? You remember the White Witch who ruled for years so that it was always winter and never Christmas? Well Thatcher was rather like that."

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Originally posted by Robert Armin:
Thank you basso - I don't think I've been honoured by a mention on this thread before.

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Perhaps an analogy would help. Take a dog. You can imagine "being a dog", barking, running around, sniffing, etc. Now assume that a lot of technological breakthroughs occur, and we can actually fully interface a newborn puppy with your brain, wirelessly and continuously. The puppy will grow essentially as normal, but whatever you may wish to call that which shapes its "dogness" into "this particular dog" will not form in the dog but rather in you. This does not turn you as human into a dog, though you will experience dogness. But you can still fully function as a human. This does not turn the dog into a human either, it still behaves like a dog: it barks, it does not speak, etc. Nevertheless, in some sense that dog is you: if the brain interface would be switched off, that particular dog would cease to be (and likely that dog would literally die, not being able to establish a "dog persona" instantly).

The dog - if it could think and speak - could reasonably claim to be you, because even though it is a dog doing dog things, it also is dog according to what you want. And if someone starts to kick this particular dog to death, then in a sense he has killed you: you as a dog. Something of you will die, your dogness. Finally, this dog will likely have your favor. For example, if you as dog are hungry then you are hungry as dog. Hence likely you as human will give you as dog food. To other dogs - if they could think and speak - this may well appear as a kind of magic: somehow you as dog can command a human overlord to do as you please. Yet from your perspective all that is happening is that you as a human and you as a dog are both you and hence act as one.

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Originally posted by Think²:
I really hope you are not intending to start eight different threads on eight different customs at the same time - because I may have to hunt you down wth a blunt fork, a custard pie, three gnomes and a shrubbery.

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This morning, I sang a hymn by Charles Wesley that included the words

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I am all unrighteousness;
False and full of sin I am

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I thought, "Speak for yourself, you miserable old cow."

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Originally posted by Spiffy:

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Originally posted by Pastor.Rob:
Sorry Spiffy you can go to hell too.

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I would, but there aren't any interesting posts on that board right now.

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I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live:
I will praise my God while I have my being.
Psalm 104 v.33

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Originally posted by Gwai:
You foolish good for nothing who have no more chance of success than a ragamuffin with three butt cheeks! Since when I have ever pretended to be innocent? I haven't been to a church since I was banned from our local one for breaking Father Tucker's front tooth, I swear like a sailor, I can drink most of those foul-mouthed sailors under the table, and I slept around like a whore until I became too ugly.

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Another night in Miss Rachel's priest hole was out

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Originally posted by Silver Faux:

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Originally posted by Moo:

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I was going to post that link. You beat me to it.

Moo

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I don't mind the pollen season, per se. I just wish the trees would stop having sex in my nose.

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I cannot at this second, liberate someone I know from bondage or restore them to God's kingdom, but there are no end of people that I can, and must, forgive.

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One – well me at least – hopes the matching crystal pattern was ‘Nada’. Then the table could be set with Nil and Nada, which would have a rather desolate ‘Waiting for Godot’ feel to it.

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Yes, and then eventually it would all start to look like Miss Havisham's wedding feast, with the hosts sitting round glumly, festooned with cobwebs, muttering, "Why don't they come?"

Can't be good for your Feng Shui.

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Yorick, you've got pretty much everyone posting in disagreement with you, including IngoB agreeing with RooK and Tubbs.

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Are you playing some sort of personal Bingo game? Who else do you need to complete the card?

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Originally posted by Divine Outlaw Dwarf:
Presently, I'm feeling like commencing a novena to Lady Ga-ga for deliverance from humourless Christians with persecution complexes. They do far more damage to the public perception of our faith than any sci-fi series ever could.

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Originally posted by ken:
[...] This would be Joseph Chamberlain, father of the much nicer Neville Chamberlain and much more sensitive Austen Chamberlain? (And great-granduncle of Harriet Harman)?

The Joseph Chamberlain whose narrow nationalism and rapacious imperialism led him to betray his liberal principles and sell out to the Tory Party?

The Joseph Chamberlain whose resignation from the Cabinet over Gladstone's Home Rule Bill split the LIberal Party, and sustained the union of Britain and Ireland for at least thirty years after almost all Irish and half the British voters made it clear that they did not want it, so making the Irish rebellion and civil war almost inevitable?

The Joseph Chamberlain who lead the charge away from Free Trade and towards protectionism and Imperial Preference that was one of the subsidiary causes of both the First and Second world wars and perhaps the major cause of the economic depression between them?

The Joseph Chamberlain whose "Tariff Reform League" turned to paranoia and anti-semitism and was one of the founding institutions of the sad shambles of British Fascism?
The Joseph Chamberlain who was involved in planning the infamous Jameson Raid (an English terrorist attack from what was then Rhodesia against South Africa that was one of the causes of the Boer War) and then betrayed Jameson and his men, lying to Parliament, and then was found out when his conspiratorial telegrams were made public?

The Joseph Chamberlain who promoted Lord Lugard's policy of "indirect rule" in Africa, setting up an artificial structure of "native chiefs" in places such as central Kenya or Igboland that had never had them before, disenfranchising the growing black middle class of Sierra Leone, the Lagos Colony and the Cape Colony, keeping millions of Africans out of the government of their own countries for the next fifty years, artificially boosting the rule of a small aristocratic Muslim military elite over what is now northern Nigeria, and setting the stage for the ethnic and political turmoil of modern Nigeria?

The Joseph Chamberlain who desperately tried to ally Britain with Germany during the run-up to the First World War?

The Joseph Chamberlain who pushed through the Aliens Act, the first explicitly racist and explicitly anti-semitic immigration law for over a generation of Victorian liberalism?

The Joseph Chamberlain who was in many ways the political forbear ancestor of Enoch Powell (one of his greatest fans and author of a biography of him)?

The Joseph Chamberlain whose policies were heartily taken up buy AK Chesterton (cousin of the much more famous and much more intelligent and much nicer GK) who founded the League of Empire Loyalists out of the wreckage of post-war fascism, which was basically Chamberlain's imperialist racism, minus Chamberlain's economic radicalism, and with the addition of a hefty dose of irrational anti-semitism (Chamberlain hadn't been so much anti-Semitic as anti-everyone-not-English), and in turn went on to found the National Front and spawn the BNP?

The Joseph Chamberlain who's Unionism, Imperialism, and opposition to Free Trade split the Liberal party and made it unelectable for over a century (maybe for ever, they still haven't recovered) - with the exception of those elections in which Chamberlain also split the Tory Party over Imperial Preference and handed the election back to the Liberals for one last hurrah?

The Joseph Chamberlain who never joined a political party he didn't destroy?

I'm sorry, but when it comes to foreign policy, someone who was personally (if indirectly) responsible for the Boer War, the racist government of Southern Rhodesia, the Great War, the partition of Ireland, the strange death of Liberal England, the Great Depression, the Second World War, apartheid, the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe War, the Biafra War, the BNP, and Harriet BLOODY Harman, can in all honesty be called "'a dipstick of humungous proportions".

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Work it, ken.

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Faux comment, real funny:

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Originally posted by Silver Faux:

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Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:

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Originally posted by Silver Faux:
Well then, what is the stupidist thing you ever immediately regretted doing?

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Pointing out the correct spelling of "stupidest"?

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I don't think that word means what you think it means.
The word "stupidest" refers, of course, to the most stupid thing within a given grouping.
The word "stupidist" refers, on the other hand, to a professional who fashions an entire career out of stupid.

Did you never watch John Wayne's movie, The Shootist?
Do you not know that a podiatist is a professional who fashions a career out of becoming close to smelly, mouldering feet?

The question in the OP was, what have you done, then immediately regretted, that instantly qualified you for a career as a stupidist?
But I don't think that word means what you think it means.
You prolly think I jist got drunk and made a stoopid spelling errar.
Pedantist.

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Originally posted by Sine Nomine:

But you know....when some really bow-wow person comes over you can’t help but think “What about me makes this person think he’s got a snowball’s chance in Hell? Am I giving off some sort of troll pheromone? What’s the matter with ME?”

I know that’s wrong. I know it. But spiritual growth is slow and painful. One step forward, two steps back..

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I cannot expect people to believe “
Jesus loves me, this I know” of they don’t believe “Kelly loves me, this I know.”
Kelly Alves, somewhere around 2003.

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If inner beauty ever becomes the rage, I've wasted a bunch of money on a personal trainer.

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Originally posted by Yorick:
This is a manifestation of Yorick’s Second Law of Thermoidiotics. When one’s guest is cautioned about their dinner plate with the instruction, ‘Careful, it’s very hot’, they are instantly rendered incapable of resisting the urge to touch it in order to find out.

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Originally posted by Silver Faux:
Dumpling Jeff, do you think there would be a market for a deep-cut, square line woman's top with words printed just below the cleavage:

"I know they
look hot!
Now STFU!"

My guess is, if all of those words would not fit on the shirt, the lady doesn't need one.

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Originally posted by ExclamationMark:
Those who want to do it one way with a priest will do it, those who want to do it on their own will do it.

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Originally posted by Ariel:

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Originally posted by Sine Nomine:
(One – well me at least – hopes the matching crystal pattern was ‘Nada’. Then the table could be set with Nil and Nada, which would have a rather desolate ‘Waiting for Godot’ feel to it.)

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Yes, and then eventually it would all start to look like Miss Havisham's wedding feast, with the hosts sitting round glumly, festooned with cobwebs, muttering, "Why don't they come?"

Can't be good for your Feng Shui.

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Originally posted by John P:
I did sunbathe but with a sock over my appendage, being fearful of sunburn.

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Somewhere in Heaven Forester is frothing over the fact that he wasn't the one to write that line.

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I cannot expect people to believe “
Jesus loves me, this I know” of they don’t believe “Kelly loves me, this I know.”
Kelly Alves, somewhere around 2003.

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Originally posted by Sioni Sais:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
To lower the tone a bit...

This falls in the category of "vulgar curiosity," but can anyone imagine why an elderly man of a particularly rugged, macho type, with a white beard and mustache, looks like a stereotypical sea captain, would be wearing pointy women's shoes with kitten heels? in the winter it's women's boots of the almost FM variety. To church. For at least four years.

Obviously I can't ask him, having some semblance of shame left. But ....

Please somebody tell me there's an orthopedic benefit or something.

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The women's boots may indeed be comfortable and affordable. Then again, if he's spent that long at sea, anything could be possible. Maybe he shot an albatross?

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Just

Coleridge, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!

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Originally posted by Patdys on the baby bath bap thread:
Ultimately, I think Christians only agree on two things.
1) Jesus Christ lived, died and rose again.
2) Other Christians are complete tools for believing the crap they do.

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So you didn't go with: 'It's now an undead zombie chicken, and if you step out of line, mummy and daddy will set it peck your brains out' then? Seems like an ideal opportunity to me.

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(Do I get a bonus for posting a Sine & Ariel quote which Kelly Alves also posted? )

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Float?...Do science too

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Originally posted by Gildas:
Whilst we are on the subject of flashy lights can I point out that parking on a narrow road with two lanes, effectively reducing it to a one lane road and forcing the opposing traffic to engage in games of docey-fucking-doe, whilst you pop into the newsagent for your copy of the Swizzaway Currant Bun and a packet of fags makes you a complete and utter anti-social tosser and is not remotely mitigated in the slightest by your leaving your hazard lights flashing.

One day I will take your fucking wing mirror off. When I do, do not expect me to stop and leave my telephone number and insurance details tucked away under your windscreen wiper whilst I wait for you to emerge with your cancer sticks and right wing tabloid bilge.

Try walking to the newsagent in future you dozy lard arsed twat.

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by RooK:
And, as I said, feel free to be as smug as you like.

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This is self-deprecating irony, right? Right?

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Originally posted by RooK:
Please pass on my sympathies to your family, mousethief. You have just been exposed to a lethal dose of smugions from too much exposure to me. Before you die, your hair is going to fall out and you're going to hate everyone stupider than yourself.

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Originally posted by mousethief:
All my hair has fallen out and I already hate people stupider than myself. Some progostician.

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Originally posted by RooK:
Shit. Maybe you're the one that irradiated me.

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Look upon my works, ye hirsute, and despair!

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Originally posted by Chorister:
Spike asked on the 'what if' thread:
What if God had sent a daughter?

To which Mousethief replied:
All her disciples would have left her the first time she got PMS.

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Originally posted by Firenze:

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Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
A fine hobby for one in the home of St. Patrick.

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Ah, the Herp that once through Tara's halls...

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Originally posted by Esmeralda:
That is not a quotable quote, it is rampant sexism.

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Well it made me laugh, anyway. We wymmyn need to laugh at ourselves a bit from tyme to tyme. If only so that we can win back a bit of time to laugh at the men.

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Retired, sitting back and watching others for a change.

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Be kind to your local census worker. You don't want to hear Jesus say, "I was working for the Census Bureau, and you did not answer me completely and honestly." ~mousethief

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Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
Besides, jokes about PMS are so old they have whiskers on them. Quaint, like women drivers or traveling salesman jokes.

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Originally posted by Moo:

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Originally posted by mousethief:
... are we saying that Job's wife was right?

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She was half-right. Go ahead and curse God, but you don't need to die.

Moo

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It's the nature of stress to be untidy. If it folded itself up and put itself away, it wouldn't be stress.

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I think one of the things that continually bothers me about God is that he loves me -he should, I feel, really be setting his standards higher...

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
I'm afraid I do still yell at God. I know I'm being ridiculous, and I know 90% of the world has it much, much worse. But I've long since given up the hope of walking with some dignity into the Kingdom. I'll be the one staggering in with a bottle in a paper bag, careening first off one doorpost and then the other, until a divine arm snakes out, grasps me by the foot and yanks me in on my bottom.

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Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
Firenze again on the Gordo's Blunder thread in Purgatory:

"Gordon may have lost the Rochdale granny vote, but he has probably gained the helpdesk one."

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spot on!

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You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty. Mahatma Gandhi

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Originally posted by MiceElf:
Can someone explain how you spank the monkey.

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Most of the time, the devil is a bloke we invent when we want to blame someone after we've behaved badly. E.g.:

Adam: "The woman made me do it!"
Eve: "The snake made me do it!"
Snake: "Hiss." [Translated: You bastards!]

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Originally posted by Nigel M in the Authority for New Testament thread in Keryg:
There seem to be two uses of the word 'canon' in the whole debate: one associated more with the academic history of religions where 'canon' is the final decision of a authoritative group of notables who shake hands on the deal, pass a list to the publisher and say, "There you go my man, now be a good chap and slap a couple of dust covers on that", while perhaps 'canon' understood more within the faith community is similar to the situation where one notable waddles round the library of a another notable he is visiting at several removes and notes, "I say old chap, I see you have the same set of books that I have. Great minds think alike, what?"

Canon as a process, rather than an output. Or something like that.

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Originally posted by lilBuddha (seal clubbing thread in Hell) :
Honestly, I am not sure how most Apple owners can belong to a monotheistic religion and not be accused of idolatry.

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