Visual Thinking and Occasional Odds and Ends

The Twins  When I was a child, I was known as one of “the twins.”    I am a twin.  This was the most important fact of my childhood. My brother Jerry and I were same sex twins and we looked identical to everyone.  Still being identical was fraught.   The party line was that we were not identical. My mother explained this by explaining the when we were born, there were two placenta.  This fact was huge in the world of my child raising; it reflected my mother’s status as a nurse.  So despite the many signs of our being identical, we accepted the statements of my mother, that held doubt about our status.   Still we were very much alike.  More so than any other fraternal twins that I knew or that I learned about.  We appeared alike to everyone, even a dachshund that lived next door to my wife and I when we lived in Dayton, Ohio - we lived there from 1978-1981.   This annoying dog would bark incessantly at all strangers, yet when my brother visited us from New Jersey, he was quiet.  At the

I was leaving church after singing at a special mass where the bishop officiated.  Satisfied that the choir performed well, it was time for me to zone out. As my car left the parking lot a man’s  voice boomed, “What the bleep was that?” The voice came from the empty passenger’s seat, about where a man’s head would be.  Slowly a man appeared filling the seat  He was dressed in robes and had long hair and a beard.  It was Jesus! Me: So are you really Jesus?  JC:  Yes, neat trick to materialize out of nothing.  But let’s talk about what we just witnessed.   They treated the statue of Our Lady of Fatima as an idol. I thought you Catholics were sensitive to accusations that you put too much importance on statues and pictures.   Well that went out the window today! And then there is Fatima itself.  You know that Fatima was meant to be a joke.  A few guardian angels were bored so they thought they would play a trick on the kids.  But the joke got out of hand.  There is no “the Angel of Peace.

Raised a Catholic, I attended Catholic school through high school.   When I started high school, the Catholic Church was just emerging from the tumult of Vatican II.   We considered our Church modern and enlightened.   So the Mass was now in English.   Science was ok, as was liberal democracy.   The old superstitions that came to the US from Europe were supposedly left behind.   When the council ended, there was a real hope that the Church was soon allow birth control.   This was before birth control and abortion galvanized conservatives so much so that many bishops support a pussy grabbing twice divorced thug for president.     In my day, we Catholics were sensitive to criticisms from Jews and Protestants that we were idolaters, with our statues and holy pictures.   Fortunately the post Vatican II suburban Church had mostly left this behind, to be encountered only when we visited grandma in the old neighborhood.   For me the older generation began to die off when my mother’s mother di

Every one could hear him shouting, God’s booming voice was unmistakable, “Jesus Christ!” Jesus appeared out of nowhere, “you need me, Dad?” The Lord God was in heaven’s media center looking at about a dozen screens.   Each one was showing a different location of HeavenBook.   God stood holding a set of earphones in his left hand.   The screen in front of him showed HeavenBook Arkansas.   God addressed Jesus:   sorry, no, I don’t need you right now.   I was just ranting about something really stupid that a woman down on earth said to her friend who has cancer.   She said God does not give you more than you can handle.     As if! Can somebody tell these people, that I don’t “give” anyone cancer.   That I am not responsible for the bad stuff that happens to people.   Jesus (JC):   But you did create all of creation, didn’t you? LG:   Sure, I got the ball rolling, but the universe runs itself.   I set the rules but then it runs like clockwork. JC:   So you don’t pay attention to it all? LG

A short riff about “human being”. This is also about abortion.   The other day, I heard respected conservative lawyer, David French explain why he opposes the right to abortion and his basis is more or less that from conception (or soon after) the clump of cells are a human being (or person - the difference is meaningless here) and we can’t kill a human (without a good reason?).   But if so, the concept of human being is so broad as to be useless here. Of course David is a lawyer and lawyers use debaters word games all the time.   They use a word, get agreement concerning something, then they take a different instance of that word - pretend it is the same and play a game of gotcha.   They never go back and ask if they should revise either their definitions or their premises.   Here is what happens with abortion.   The anti abortion advocate gets us to agree that we should not kill a human being.   That to kill a human being is murder.   Of course we all agree (we will leave out a discu

It was a mild February afternoon and I was walking in a park near my home.   When I go for walks, I try to do vocal exercises.   I sing in a church choir and need to do vocalizing to keep my voice in shape.   Sometimes I will sing a hymn instead.   Today I chose a hymn, sung lightly of course.   So out came, “my soul rejoices in God my savior.”   I thought I was alone but then I heard a man’s voice:   Do you really believe this stuff ? I looked around but did not see anyone nearby.   But as I stared at the empty space where the voice came from, a figure of a man began to appear as if from out of a fog.     Me: Who the Hell are you? Him: Let me introduce myself, I’m the Lord God.     Me: You?   Him: Yes.   Me: What are you doing here?   Him:   I thought it was time to see my peeps.   I thought we needed to start a new era of revelations.   I means really, the Garden of Eden?   Original Sin?   And a Savior crucified?   It is all nonsense (except the crucifixion part, the Romans considere