It unusual for it to snow six inches (15.24 cm) here on the coastal plains of the Carolinas. However much it has snowed in the past, it sure didn't seem to take this long for it to melt. Granted, most of the snow has fallen off the trees, but my lawn and most of my driveway still has abundant snow on it. It keeps hanging around. Maybe tomorrow the temperatures will get high enough to cause most of it to melt.
It was situations like this that reveal my lack of character in the way I conducted myself in my two marriages. I expected my ex-wives and children to cope with stuff like cold weather and snow in the same way I do, by just waiting for it to leave. More and more as I get older and reflect on my attitudes I realize that my way of perceiving the world is and never will be up to snuff for the marriage ga-me.
It worried me in my youth, and caused me to think I might be crazy. I went to extremes to find out that isn't really true. It's more like I'm autistic than insane. I played with the notion that I am is possessed by Asperger's Syndrome, but I took a test on the internet that claimed to distinguish whether this was true, and I didn't even come close to having that disorder. That figures. If it were true I'd play piano mo' bettah.
I composed a post to one of the e-mail discussion groups I'm subscribed to that says something I've wanted to say for a while. My writing it was not so much an act of daring do, but to clarify how I think about this topic. The quote is from the Gospel of Thomas, one of the so-called Gnostic Gospels. Here it is:
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3 Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and it is outside you.
When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
This saying reminds me of Bill Nye, the science guy trying to dumb down to what he appears to think children will find intriguing on TV, and by his idiotic behavior cause kids to wanna grow up to be just like him. What child would wanna get into science as an adult if doing that caused them to become like that buffoon? It's about like some people here attempting to discover the "secrets" of a illiterate society from thousands of years ago via a modern education that dismisses the methods the ancients used to get there.
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I made the above comments because the academic approach some of the members of this group take toward a very unacademic, informal group of people who weren't satisfied with the status quo. That of being slaves to the Roman Empire.
According to Elaine Pagels, tenured professor at Princeton, and author of the seminal book entitled The Gnostic Gospels, three-quarters of the people who lived in that world were slaves, and that fact alone is why many of the ancients found the Messianic claims of Christianity attractive. Not only were they saved in spirit, but saved from physical slavery by the main careactor of the Jesus stories.
The Jesus stories, to me, currently, are the real beginning of the contemplation of cognition in the homo sapiens species. It was when these stories gotten put in written form that they could be discussed by groups that were illiterate. The people who were literate could read the stories to them, and as opposed to the oral tradition, the written stories were consistently the same.
The later efforts of the Roman Church were to make the stories absolutely and irrevocably the sa-me by killing those who didn't agree with them. The various "Inquisitions" serve as an example of that, and the Reformation happened to resolve the power play of the Catholics.
The main body of early Christians didn't appear to be buffaloed by the formalities of the ruling churches of the time. They were mostly slaves who viewed the Jesus stories as literal and real and by believing in the Jesus they took that way, they would be freed of slavery. Who wouldn't love the comfort of believing that?
I feel like a child in elementary school raising my hand to gain the recognition of the teacher crying out, "I know! I know the answer to that question." Modern educated people who can read the original writings for themselves in order to make up their own minds. That's who. Despite that, most don't. No blame.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
