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Noel, Noel

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  I'll be home for Christmas It’s time for Christians to take a deep breath and think about the season they’re in in relation to their faith and their neighbours. Yesterday, a non-believer took exception to Christian references made by the US Vice-President (he used the name of “Jesus” three times) in his Christmas address. Social media lit up immediately with the “keep ‘Christ’ in Christmas” reaction and applauded the VP for doing just that. Winter solstice celebrations went on long before Jesus was born; Christians decided to hold their celebration of Christ’s birth during the same time. (See below) Christians today enjoy the right to unhindered celebration of the birth of the founder of their faith largely because the separation of religion and state guarantees it.  By the same token, the state catering for one religion (as in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, for instance) leads to repression of all other faiths. For a state authority like the American VP to make out that th...
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The Devil's Workshop?

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  CONSIDER THE LILIES   Have you ever wondered what could be going on in the mind of a cow lying placidly in a pasture, chewing the cud balls she stored up in her morning feed. Or that lone horse in a pasture you drive by on your way to and from work who—standing on three legs as resting horses do—could be a lonely, living statue ... day after day after day. Surely absolute, unmitigated boredom is the lot of the domesticated animal species we imprison for our pleasure and nourishment.             I’m intrigued by the creation myth in the first chapters of Genesis, primarily because it’s an  attempt to visualize what could make us so different from all other living things. Consciousness—or the knowledge of good and evil as Genesis calls it—is imagined to have been a choice fraught with such danger that the creator predicts that “if you eat of it, you shall surely die.”        ...
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If Daniel had a 13th Chapter.

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Book of Danielicus Chapter 13:  1. I, Commonicus, was asleep in my chamber on the day of the Feast of Thanksgiving during the reign of the King Usacadnezzar, when all the land and all its people quaked in fear of the masked monsters roaming the streets of Usalonica to arrest all aliens in their midst, and the innocent quaked in fear of what must surely follow. 2. And I and my neighbours were much perturbed by the oracles of CBC The National that had long ago begun to cry out news portending that Canatobawan could one day fall to the sword of the mighty Usacadnezzar under whose banner the most ferocious of gladiators were assembled. 3. And I, in fear and trembling double-locked the door to my bedchamber, and slept and wakened and slept and wakened until, while yet the sun had not crested the grain elevators, I woke in great perturbation, shaking as with the ague. 4. It was a dream that had so afflicted me and torn me from my restless bed. But I could neither recall   ...
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A visit to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

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  In the very beginning - gge Are you as intrigued as I am by the Garden of Eden myth? What were the narrators of Adam and Eve’s fruit-choice story thinking when they wrote this decisive line: “You may freely eat fruit from every tree of the orchard,  but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will surely die.” Obviously, the many other trees from which they may eat represent choices other than the forbidden one; the puzzling part is the notion that this one is poisonous, and why the creator would allow it to grow where Eve could reach the hanging fruit seems a legitimate question.           The Knowledge of Good and Evil obviously equates to a mental capability that humans have, but animals don’t. The closest relative attribute spoken of in our age would have to be consciousness . We still have a hard time defining what human consciousness is, but a cursory look at t...
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A Bang or a Whimper

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“Leven zonder vrijheid ist geen leven,” is a Dutch, proverb-like sentence Duo-lingo includes as a learning sample. Life without freedom is no life at all, is easily memorized ... in either language. Another jingle springs to mind: “Free to be, you and me.” which in Dutch would be, “Vrij om te sijn, jij en ik.” (I don’t know much Dutch, but my interest in it is routinely whetted by Agnes’ practising of the language ... plus Google Translator in this case, of course.)             I think we can agree that it’s freedom and not license that’s being referenced here. And although freedom is more easily defined if we limit ourselves to movement—as in incarceration—in a democracy like Canada, defining freedom of speech, for example , isn’t simple at all.             In WWII, Londoners were required by government decree to shutter their windows so no light would show that mig...
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On the Moral Application of Chainsaws

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The Scales of Justice     We all face moments when our consciences and our preferences wrestle with moral dilemmas.   Very few of us will face the big moral dilemmas, like President Harry Truman giving the OK to drop a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, but smaller moral dilemmas face us almost daily. We love pineapple and buy one even if we know that people far away were dispossessed of their land to allow big business to grow this very one at a profit.                In an age of climate-change worries, a twinge of conscience surely afflicts many of us when we take our car even though our errand is only a few blocks away. Or when we shovel a pile of rhubarb leaves, carrot tops and other garden-harvest detritus into the garbage because the composting service is just too inconvenient.                Indeed, effort-saving convenience ...
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Seed, Soil and Matthew's Gospel

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The Parable of the Seed   Thomas Yoder Neufeld, 1979   Matthew 13 is a gardener’s guide to proper soil preparation , planting and harvesting of crops .   Or is it? Jesus’ parables, allegories and metaphors follow in a long tradition of how teaching for retention has been done through the ages. Greek philos o pher, Aesop, wrote the parable of “The Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf ” in about 600 BC, making him contemporary to the prophet Jerem iah, Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel . The Old Testament is primarily an account of the relationship of the Hebrew people to Yahweh and to others through the medium of allegorical stories: Creation, Tower of Babel, Jonah and the Big Fish , even the sojourn in Egypt and the celebrated Exodus through the Reed Sea may be better described as a story told for its allegorical teaching , than as an historical record. (For the debate over the historicity of the Exodus, Just search "Is the Exodus real?" or similar.) The chapter begins with the par...
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