Category: Random Thoughts

Ribs on a hillside

Ribs on a hillside. You’re now just bleached ribs on a hillside slowly sinking into the soil. The rest of you has been recycled, by vultures, by micro organisms, by sun and wind and rain and time. You were once a deer bounding across the meadows running free in the morning breeze. Then one horrible night as you leaped in alarm to cross the highway before the approach of the blinding light there was a flash and tremendous bang and you were dead. I saw your remains on the side of the road being torn slowly apart by coyotes in the night and vultures in the day. I saw them strew your remains across the landscape dragged this way and that until all that remained was ribs on a hillside. The ancient cycle grinds inexorably on.

Staring into the void

Evolution has made us by simple natural selection so that we want to live and recoil at the prospect of our end. Then the cold reality wherein it occurs of an uncaring unknowing universe simply erases and discards us and our lives, our hopes and dreams and fears like trash and debris. We are snuffed despite our struggles to avoid the end. That is what the naturalistic worldview gives us. That is a horror show. That is incredibly unfair but the cold, mechanical, uncaring universe doesn’t know and cannot care. It seems nearly enough to waken God from his slumber of non-existence to make things right in the sterile void of a naturalistic interpretation of the universe revealed by science.

She taught us to read

February 16, 2022

When I think of my first grade teacher Mrs. Flanders, she taught us to read. That’s pretty amazing! Imagine teaching twenty six year olds to read all at once. When you contemplate that it’s really quite an astounding achievement. First grade teachers are deeply under appreciated.

Whimsical Notions on a December evening

No material object could do what UFOs apparently do. Therefore they are not material.  There does seem however, to be intelligence behind them. That suggests they are intelligent, immaterial beings, or spirits. Why would spirits visit earth, though? That suggests they are spirits who are connected to earth. All of that suggests it’s possible they are spirits of the departed come here from elsewhere in the universe. That suggests that somewhere in the universe the heaven exists. 

Change

We don’t live in the forest anymore and we never will again, even if we invent a way to get to the stars and find untouched new worlds with wild, untamed jungles.

Riches

As I sit on the porch watching the morning sun rise on a beautiful Indian Summer morning and sipping my coffee I reflect. Bill Gates has nothing on me. I am the richest man in the world.

Thoughts on Jupiter

I sit on the Southeast porch where my grandfather sat long ago after the day’s work was done and night began to fall. Through the silhouetted treetops I see Jupiter rising in the southeast sky. I know it is Jupiter because I looked on a sky map last night. My grandfather would have known. He knew a fair amount about astronomy and the planets. He sat where I now sit many nights close to seventy years ago. He was a farmer. My Aunt once told me that he wanted to grow corn on Venus. In 1950 we didn’t know much about Venus other than it was about the same size as the earth and closer to the sun. It was easy to imagine a world much like our own, with oceans, jungles, rivers, wildly growing foliage and who knows what animals and other creatures all hidden by the clouds that set free our imaginations. How disappointed he would have been to learn that Venus is closer to our visions of hell than a beautiful, fertile world ripe for farming.

September thought on a Tuesday morning.

Freedom means being free to make choices. It means being free to make choices about your life, about what you want, about where you want to go, about how you want to do it, and freedom to to pursue those choices. It does not mean freedom from responsibility. That would be responsibility to yourself, to your family, to your friends, to your neighbors, and to the world, and possibly to the universe and God. That has never worked and never will work.