neonlinux

My Movie Exhibit - Bert

Monday, 27. February 2006, 09:15:43

This is one of my favorite movies

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My Movie Exhibit - A hard life

Monday, 27. February 2006, 09:14:53

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ahardlife.swf

=http://my.opera.com/neonlinux/homes/blog/grey.swf]grey.swf

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Child or Son both lost little or least

Thursday, 23. February 2006, 13:02:27

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Let me simply set down a list of words in the NT Documents that can be translated - son - or - child. There is huios

son, descendant, offspring

there is teknon

child, descendant

there is pais

child, boy, servant

there is paidion

little boy, lad

and there is nepios -- baby along with thelazon -- suckling child.

As a result of the healings Jesus did immediately after the cleansing of the temple, the high priests & the scribes became angry. They were upset as Matthew says, when they saw .... the wonderful things he was doing, and the children paidas crying out in the temple Hosanna to the Son huio of David So They said to Him Do You hear what They are saying? And Jesus said to Them: Yes Haven't You ever read that Out of the mouth of babies nepion and nursing children

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My Movie Exhibit - Neonlinux

Monday, 20. February 2006, 15:27:49

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One.swf

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My Movie Exhibit h

Monday, 20. February 2006, 15:26:13

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http://my.opera.com/neonlinux/homes/blog/one.swf">

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My Movie Exhibit - Come in

Monday, 20. February 2006, 06:10:41

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free4444.swf

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My Movie Exhibit - Lightning

Sunday, 19. February 2006, 11:48:18

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lightning2c.swf

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My Movie Exhibit - Error

Sunday, 19. February 2006, 09:51:38

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error.swf

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Jesus & the weird fish cont.

Sunday, 19. February 2006, 07:54:28

I realize that my musings on Jesus & the weird fish is a stretch from the parable of the coin in the fish's mouth, but you are always welcome to another

In fact, I will go further and become more far fetched. The Messiah whom Jesus' contemporaries expected -- and likewise any and all of the messiahs the world has looked to ever since even from the church's all-too-often graceless, punishing version of Jesus' own messiahship -- are nothing so much as religious versions of

Santa Claus is coming to town

The words of that traditional Christmas song sum up perfectly the only kind of messianic behavior that most N.Americans or others, in its self-destructive folly, is prepared to accept.

He's making a list; He's checking it twice; He's going to find out who's naughty, OR nice

and so on into the dark night of all the tests this naughty world can never pass. For my money, what Jesus senses clearly and for the 1st time in the coin in the fish's mouth is that

he is not Thank God, Santa Claus or good ole St. Nick

He will come to the world's sins with no lists to check, not tests to grade, no debts to collect, no scores to settle. He will wipe away the handwriting that was against us and nail it to the Cross as read in Colossians 2:14.

He will save, not some minuscule coterie of good little boys & girls with relgious money in their piggy banks

but all the

stone-broke, deadbeat, overextended children of this world

Whom He, as the Son of man, the Ultimate Big Kid, if you please -- will set free in the liberation of His Death.

And when he senses that.....
well, it is simply to laugh. He tacks a "Gone Fishing" sign over the sweatshop of religion, and for all the debts of all sinners who ever lived, he provides exact change for free. How nice it would be if the church could only recall & remember & reflect upon this and keep itself in on the joke.

The coin the fish's mouth, therefore, is Jesus' first drawing in of utterly fresh air that he himself will ultimately be for the whole world.

Those, of course, are my reflective musings; Jesus probably never thought or felt about the matter in such particular fashion. But the episode is a lark; he seems to be, for whatever reason, more at ease, more relaxed than before. He uses a kind of rabbinical whimsy to set Peter up; when Peter gives the obvious, right response, Jesus delivers a blithely sweeping declaration of independence towards any religious construct; and to cap the climax, he concocts a hilarious mixture of consideration for others

let's not scandalize them

.... the greek word just in case you wondered ... frivolous wonder-working

take the first fish

and financial precision

you'll find a stater

four drachmas which would make it right on the nose. note: each person needed to fork over 2 drachmas for the Temple tax.

Epilogue:

Let me get one useless question out of the way for future posts as well as this one, OK? To those who ask, "Do I think this really happened?" I will answer yes & take whatever critical scholarship lumps I have to just to get off the subject. Or if you please just have another

I can prove I'm right, of course
I do not find the Quest for the Holy Grail of Cartesian Certainty to be worth my time or energy either. But neither can anyone else prove that I'm wrong unless they are diehard Knights of King Arthur's Round Table which clop along the merry road with coconut shells to sound out the hoof beats singing the Camelot song from said script. Furthermore, there is No a priori system of biblical interpretation including those constructs in use by either side of the street -- Critical or Conservative -- except for the misguided and somewhat obnoxious one that says everything in the Bible must, ipso facto, be literally true as in a propositional factual precise systematic dogmatic axiomatic way....

There can be no one to resolve this vexing challenge one way or the other and I have been at this for almost 3 decades now. The episode ... the pericope... just sits there in the

text

waiting to be commented on, not argued with. If it so happens that you find it impossible to swallow -- as the fish, perhaps, found the stater -- I respect that. Let us just agree to disagree about the moot point and get on with the much more enjoyable business of playing, scripturally, with what is in the

text

Besides should you keep finding my musings stressful it will not be long before you are really drunk.... since my admonition is to keep drinking German sized mugs of

not the insipid American ones....

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Jesus & the Weird Fish

Sunday, 19. February 2006, 07:17:28

As Usual there is alot of background material and resource behind this one. But Hey! I keep that out of view for now.... Think of these posts as snapshots throughout a typical case for Sherlock Holmes....

Watson, The Case is Afoot!

But enough of this hammering home of specific scriptural words. The general thrust of my treatment of the coin the in the fish's mouth -- and especially of Jesus's words,

then the children are free

is to interpret the whole passage as a

proclamation of the end of religion

To me, the episode says that whatever it was that religion was trying to do; whether it is the religion of the temple in particular at that time or by extension all religions everywhere including what may happen in any Church on any given Sunday will not be accomplished by religious acts at ll but in the mystery of Jesus' death and resurrection. As I seriously engage in reflective thought this perception seems to have been so liberating to Jesus that he allowed himself the frivolity of this very odd mireacle indeed. But beyond that, it is also readically liberating to everyone.

The entire human race is profoundly & desperately religious. From the dim beginnings of our history right up to the present day, there is not a man, woman, or child of us who has ever been immune to the temptation to think that the relationship between God and humanity can be repaired from our side, by our efforts. Whether those efforts involve creedal correctness, cultic performances, or ethical achievements -- or whether they amount to little more than crassly superstitious behavior -- we are all, at some deep level, committed to them. If we are not convinced that God can be conned into being favorable to us by dint of our doctrinal orthodoxy, or chicken sacrifices, or the gritting our moral teeth, or any of the various Asian rituals, techniques, religious activities or manifestations of paranormal activity -- we still have a hard time shaking the belief that stepping over sidewalk cracks, or hanging up the bath towel so the label won't show, or making sure to sweep the dust bunnies and cobwebs from under our beds will somehow render the Ruler of the Universe or Feng Shui to be kindhearted, softheaded or both or just plain good fortune for the foreseeable future.

But as the Letter to the Hebrews pointed out long ago, all such behavior is bunk. The blood of bulls & goats cannot take away sins, nor can any other religious act do what it sets out to do. Either it is ineffective for its purpose, or the supposedly effective intellectual, spiritual, or moral uprightness it counts on to do the job is simply unavailable. The point is, we have not have a card in our hand that can take even a single trick against God. Religion, therefore -- despite the correctness of its insistence that something needs to be done about our relationship with God -- remains unqualified bad news:

it traps us in a game we will always & everywhere lose.

But the death & resurrection of Jesus Christ is precisely Good News. It is the announcement, in His death & resurrection that God has simply called off the game -- that he has taken all the disasters religion was trying to remedy and, without any recourse to religion at all, set them to rights by himself. How cheerless, then, when the church acts as if it is in the religion business rather than in the Gospel-proclaiming business. What a disservice, not only to itself but to a world perpetually sinking in the quagmire of religiosity, when it harps on creed, cult, ritual and conduct as the touchstones of salvation. What a perversion of the truth that sets us free as noted in John 8:32 -- when it takes the news that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us as viewed in Romans 5:8, and turns all of this into a proclamation of God as just one more insufferable bookkeeper.

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