I'm doing 40 things
I took a much needed break from the Bible for a few months. I realized that reading the Bible was killing my desire to read anything, as it is mostly a chore. Lucky for the Bible that for centuries it was the only book to read. If it had any real competition, it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as popular. So 1 Chronicles is mostly 1 Samuel rehash, with a lot of useless genealogy thrown in. I would recommend using Chronicles as a cool place to find names. My current favorite name is now Joshobeam. The only interesting part in 1 Chron was the retelling of the Monty Hall punishment game that God plays with David that I wrote about in 2 Samuel 24. This time Satan asks David to take the census, an important detail. It still doesn’t make sense why God gets so torqued up about this census though. Joab is also really against the census too. Once again no explanation of why. Yet another example of why the Bible needs an editor. On an aside note, a friend of mine who is non-Christian was asking a Christian about some life advice. The Christian rather than giving any decent encouragement or advice copped out and said, “you should consult the Bible for help about this.” What kind of advice is that? There are 1189 chapters in the Bible, would you mind narrowing that down a bit? I don’t know if Christians realize how much misplaced Biblephilia really hurts their mission. From what I’ve read in the Bible so far, the bad advice outnumbers the good advice by quite a bit. I would never advocate anyone raise their kids or treat their spouse according to Levitical law. We’d be stoning our kids and wives all the time. Plus the majority of the OT is non-advice, just merely big laundry lists of descendents, and other non-sequitur events. Chronicles is a good example of this. Simply dropping a Bible in someone’s lap is a really terrible way to spread Christianity
sandblade's Life List
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1. Write a will
1 entry715 people -
2. go through my old files
1 cheer1 person -
3. eat kobe beef
4 cheers12 people -
4. get my motorcycle license
3 cheers316 people -
5. lower my resting heart rate by 5 bpm
4 entries . 1 cheer7 people -
6. Read the Bible
16 entries . 3 cheers2,554 people -
7. Redeck my porch
3 entries1 person -
8. organize my photos
1 cheer1,156 people -
9. learn to do a handstand
1 entry141 people -
10. ride a metric century on a fixed gear
2 team members . 2 entries3 people -
11. Eat at Bookbinder's restaurant
1 person -
12. learn to flyfish
19 people -
13. do a one-handed push-up
73 people -
14. get a patent
69 people -
15. see a sumo wrestling match
19 people -
16. march 4 miles in 1 hour with 70lbs
2 people -
17. Sit on a jury
67 people -
18. travel overnight on a sleeper train
1 cheer26 people -
19. be in the audience of a TV show
1 cheer17 people -
20. Drive the entire length of route 66
14 people -
21. Go white water rafting
1,022 people -
22. run for public office
185 people -
23. Visit Falling Water.
10 people -
24. eat a real truffle
1 cheer19 people -
25. Write a novel during Novel Writing Month
25 people -
26. go to Italy
1 cheer2,014 people -
27. make a pizza
25 people -
28. get a Library of Congress ID card
8 people -
29. take up archery.
1 cheer92 people -
30. see the northern lights
14,567 people -
31. Build an Incredible Treehouse
34 people -
32. Go to the Canadian Rockies
7 people -
33. go on a road trip with no predetermined destination
1 cheer16,364 people -
34. read 26 books this year
5 people -
35. eat a new food every week
5 people -
36. Take vitamins daily
1 entry746 people -
37. Do 10 pullups
3 entries57 people -
38. Ride a bike the length of the C&O Canal
2 people -
39. bicycle Skyline Drive
1 person -
40. Ride the Paris-Roubaix Cyclosportive
1 person
The last time I went in the nurse recognized me by first name. So I guess I’m officially a regular. I’m on the email list, and the local drive coordinator knows to bug me if I don’t respond. All in all, it’s great. I get out of work for an hour, and I get free sandwiches and cookies.
Wow so a lot happens in Kings 2. Elijah gets whisked away to “heaven”?? How does this mesh with the current view of Sheol etc? I don’t know. We see the prophet reins handed over to Elisha. So Elisha is walking around and some boys make fun of him for being bald. So he curses them and some bears run out of the forest and maul the kids to death. Nice one man of God! Which makes you wonder what powers do prophets have and what powers are solely God’s and does God use those powers on behalf of the prophet? If it’s all God’s power, does it mean God killed those kids just to fulfill Elisha’s wishes? The rest of Kings is a relentless succession of craptacular kings. They all basically go like this: “[King] does evil in the eyes of the Lord” “The Lord burned with anger” “Is this not written in the annals of the kings of Judah|Israel?” There are a few good Kings, namely Hezekiah, Joash, and Josiah. The funny thing is even though these kings try to do good, God still punishes them anyway. Joash gets assasinated, Josiah gets killed in battle, and God afflicts Hezekiah with illness. Judah is also still screwed no matter how hard the good Kings try to turn things around. God says teh same thing to Hezekiah, and H’s response is okay, well as long as it doesn’t happen in my lifetime. The interesting thing is bad things often don’t happen to a lot of the bad kings. Manasseh is a terrible King. God burns with anger but tells him nothing will happen to him but the kingdom of Judah will be destroyed instead. Real nice. The funny bits in this book: 1) Joash finds the book of law, apparently they lost it and that’s why everyone was disobeying God, duh we lost the manual. So all that boring Levitical stuff, they apparently misplaced it for generations. 2) Somehow during this time period sacrificing your kids by burning them up as offerings becomes popular. How would that ever be popular in any time period. I can’t imagine how that would work,”hey my religion is really cool, if you burn your kids up, my god does all sorts of good things for you” “um.. no thanks I’ll keep my kids and take my chances with your god.” 3)Tearing your clothes and putting on sackcloth. Once again real popular, but why? On an ending note, there were some cool lines like 17:15, but the overall theme that God is random and mean still carries over from 1 Kings.
