As we all know, if you offend the peaceful religion of Islam, then you invite violence against yourself. (I’m sorry, but does that really make any sense to anyone?) Hence, political cartoons depicting Mohamed with a bomb in his turban are terrible and can get you killed.
Well, the BBC doesn’t want to incite any peaceful Islamists to violence, so their new hospital show, Casualty, won’t be depicting victims of a bomb attach by Islamist terrorists.
The BBC has dropped plans to show a fictional terror attack in an episode of Casualty to avoid offending Muslims.
The first show of the hospital drama’s new series was to have featured a storyline about an explosion caused by Islamic extremists.
Okay, get ready to laugh!!
Now the bomb will be set off by animal rights campaigners instead.
My friends, all 20 of you who check this blog every day, real life is funnier than fiction! See, because it’s generally a liberal cause to not want to offend Muslims. But animal rights whackos see theirs as a liberal cause as well – so now they’ll be offended that they were chosen to replace Islamists in a bomb plot. They might have protests and stuff. Some nutty misguided ones might even threaten the BBC. Wouldn’t that be the icing on the cake? Trade one terrorist group for another (completely fictional, in both cases, though.)
Wouldn’t made a lot more sense if it was an abortion clinic bombing – then they could scream the full hour about radical Christians, and we’d just keep our mouths shut. Sure, Bill Donohue would write a letter of protest, but we’d hunker down and not worry about it. It’s win-win for the BBC – offend Christians and promote the pro-abortion message! Tell you what, BBC. Revise it again, and I won’t even charge you for this idea. I’m telling you, though, it may not be a good idea to offend the animal rights establishment!
Also on a personal note, I see that Tropical Storm Erin formed in the Gulf of Mexico today. There are myriad jokes I could place here about my wife, as she’s named Erin…but my instincts are telling me I better not. Gerald over at the Closed Cafeteria also has a wife named Erin (and he’s been quick to note that when my Erin comments on his blog that it’s not his wife commenting) and may be considering doing the same thing.
In any event, no matter what happens, it’s Bush’s fault.
Since I’ve been reading my daughter her bedtime stories, starting when she was about 6 months old, I’ve followed story time with prayer time, praying the Our Father and Hail Mary. The first really cool milestone was when Caroline learned “prayer hands.” Next, she started touching her head and shoulders – an early sign of the cross. Now she’s much more verbal, and one afternoon a few months back I heard her just randomly blurt out a line of the Hail Mary. So, that evening, I started our prayers, but I would pause every few words and she’d fill in the blank (that’s called a Cloze procedure when it’s done in reading instruction.) From there, I started pausing and letting her add in multiple words. I shot this video about a month ago and just now got around to putting it online. Appropriately for the Assumption of Mary, here’s little Caroline exhibiting her memorization abilities as she says the Our Father and Hail Mary – with my apologies for the poor audio quality.
This evening I had the opportunity to participate in a gathering (which I will not detail here, draw your own conclusions about that.) During the course of this event, which was of a group of Christian protestant men, one of them talked about how he had grown over the last fwe months. He said, it’s one thing to “get saved” – to have the experience of coming to Christ. It’s another thing in your everyday life to be “being saved” as the Lord develops us, refines us, and prepares us for eternity with him. As he said, “I’ve been being saved a lot this summer.”
I felt like jumping up and inviting him to swim the Tiber! Clearly, this is a guy who has a pretty Catholic view of salvation, not overly fixated on a single experience of salvation as so much of Protestantism (particularly fundamentalism) is, but recognizes that every day is indeed a process of salvation that continues on for one’s entire life. Naturally, as I know my audience, I try and avoid the word “saved” because it makes it sound like I am pushing an assurance of salvation position. But this person’s statement was timely and intelligent. I wonder if he knows how Catholic it is?
Contrary to popular belief, the name of the holiday is not “July 4,” any more than we celebrate the 4th Monday in May, the first Monday in September, November 11, Winter Solstice, Spring Equinox, the fourth Thursday in November, and so on. Isn’t it interesting how this is the only holiday we refer to by its date?
I got a whole stack of sales circulars in the male yesterday, and every one of them touted “July 4th Savings!” I didn’t see “Independence Day” referenced anywhere on there.
Why? Because independence isn’t “sexy” anymore! Back then it was a revolutionary idea – that a group of colonists could declare themselves independent of the imperial government overseas and a free nation! Today, it’s codependence and interdependence. The latter is not a bad thing – but we live in a country where the primary person responsible for me is me, and for you is you; at least that’s what the Founding Fathers (and yes, they were fathers, no matter how politically incorrect that fact is) had in mind. Today, the nanny state is trying to control more and more of our lives…
But as you have your cookout and watch the fireworks (on TV for those of you in the drought-stricken areas) please at least take a minute to consider the peril those men put themselves in when they signed that document 231 years ago, for you and me to have the right to sit here and tell the world our ideas without fear of reprisal.
Recently, a family with which I and several of my co-workers are familiar experienced the suicide of one of their members. The family is Jewish. I immediately commenced prayer for the soul of the deceased. Hopefully by some extraordinary means this soul ended up receiving salvation at the very end, but I digress.
My co-workers are all protestant, and it disheartened me when one of them said, “well, we couldn’t save him, but maybe we can save his mom and dad.”
First of all, this individual is not under any illusion that we can save anybody; rather they simply meant that we had not effectively evangelized the child, but perhaps we can evangelize his parents successfully. Had I not been busy, I probably would have gotten into a deep conversation about whether God breaks His covenants…y’know, that whole “God’s Chosen People” thing…but I refrained.
Believe it? A researcher says that your baby learns how to lie to you at 6 months old, initially by crying when nothing is wrong to see what will happen. Then it evolves from there. Certainly, I have seen my two-year-old being deliberately deceptive – if she goes into another room and is doing something she knows she shouldn’t be doing, she immediately changes activities when I walk into the room. Or, when she’s loading up a diaper but is too busy playing to have it changed, she denies having filled her pants.
For a baby of 6 months, though, I wonder if it’s so much being deceptive as it is checking to see if mommy’s still there even though baby can’t see her. I have a hard time believing it’s deliberate deception at that early an age.
This is interesting. A few Episcopal bishops/meteorological experts have stated that God sends floods for two reasons: disrespect for the planet and decadent lifestyles.
Now, the idea of moral outrage coming from an Anglican is pretty interesting in and of itself. But to suggest that flooding is caused by anything other than a lot of rain and inadequate drainage is rather disturbing from the standpoint of that whole covenant thing God had with Noah – that He wouldn’t destroy the earth by flooding again.
Y’all know I’m a La Leche League dad if you’ve been reading for a while. Caroline doesn’t receive physical punishment from us, and she won’t (except in extreme cases, and my wife doesn’t agree on that stipulation.) Gerald over at The Cafeteria is Closed has now posted asking for input regarding how we discipline our kids. Remember that Gerald’s recently married and has no kids yet…2 kid-related posts in a day sure makes me wonder, but alas, he denies it.
To clarify a little more on the LLL principle for discipline: LLL stresses that a key part of parenting is “loving guidance.” Strict physical disciplinarians are of course paying perhaps too much attention to the word guidance. On the other side of the spectrum you have the parents who want to be their kids’ best friends, and let them get away with anything and everything, sitting and smiling at their precocious youngster while he drives everyone else in the room up the wall – they are paying too much attention to the word loving, but no guidance is going on. Loving guidance means shaping the child’s behavior while not reacting violently in the heat of the moment – responding to the negative behavior rather than the anger you’re feeling as a result of the negative behavior. That said, I do believe that when a child is out of control and being belligerent, endangering himself or someone else, etc., and there’s not any other way to get the situation under control, that is when physical discipline could be appropriate.
The thing is, I have seen several kids whose parents are very strict, always chastising, physically removing their children from a situation rather than guiding them verbally – and those kids are just as out of control as the ones whose parents sit around and let them do whatever.
“I wish you could look in that casket because she’s so beautiful,” said Graham, clinging to his walker. “She was a wonderful woman.”
Ruth Graham died Thursday at age 87 following a lengthy illness. Her husband’s closest confidant, she was remembered as a spiritual stalwart and modest mentor who provided a solid foundation—both biblically and geographically—for her globe-trotting husband.
I’m a guy with a lot of respect for Billy Graham, because of his presentation of the truth. He didn’t ram it down people’s throats. He instead met them where they were, shared it, and simply left the next step to them. Evangelization is not the Catholic Church’s strongest point lately, although I do believe it’s improving. Ruth Graham epitomized the strong, supportive wife concept that we’ve come to perhaps believe is extinct in the world of radical feminism.
Here’s and aside, though. Any time a protestant tells you that it’s wrong to pray or talk to Mary, the saints, etc., ask them if it’s okay for Franklin Graham to do it.
“I thank you mama for your example, for your love, for your wit, for your humor, for your craziness,” he said. “I love you for all of it and I’m going to miss you terribly.”
At times, protestants show that the Communion of Saints isn’t all that foreign to them.
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