A Log Fit For Burning

Mercedes of Ann Arbor broke my tape deck so I usually drive around listening to myself fart. But I got an Ipod for my birthday. I’ve been digitizing all my Roger Miller records so I can listen to him anywhere but I don’t really like listening to music with earphones on. Because I like my music kind of loud. It just helps me hear things better. And I have self-diagnosed tinnitus, which is probably why I stabbed myself in the ear with a pencil when I was very young. So, yeah. I try to make it so that I won’t be deaf in the future. And I don’t like using headphones when I’m driving. Call me irrational, it just doesn’t seem very safe. But lately I’ve discovered the podcast, which I don’t mind listening to at low volumes. I miss not having a radio, so I’ve been getting my Thom Hartmann a day late. And I’ve been listening to Leighton’s podcast, which is very good. Check them out.

There’s something beautifully hypnotic about this

Just so I don’t seem insensitive to racial tension, I give you this stunning commentary:

Then, of course, there’s this

I hear people say things like this every so often :
“The 10 commandments are a good set of rules to live by”
or
“They’re the basis of our laws, our society”
I don’t think that either one of these assertions is correct. Before I get to that, there’s the dilly-of-a-pickle question about what the ten commandments are. Most people have heard the story at one time or another. It pretty much goes like this (I might fumble a detail here or there, I’m working from the top of my head. But I’ll let you in on a little secret to help you to not worry about that : it’s not a true story) : The Jews were slaves of the Egyptians. A Jewish woman had a baby in Egypt and named him Moses. She lined a basket with tar and put her baby in it and floated him up the Nile river. Moses was found by the Pharaoh’s daughter and he was just so cute that she had to keep him. Maybe she’s the one who named him Moses. Because how would a baby know it’s own name and be able to tell it to an Egyptian? Anyway, Moses grew up in the court of the Pharaoh and I think he got a job as a foreman on a pyramid construction site or something. He had a brother named Aaron. I’m not sure if Aaron was his biological brother or if Aaron was another baby found floating around in the river. Or maybe Aaron was the biological son of the princess. Regardless, Moses (as an adult, no longer the nautical baby) killed a guy. An Egyptian, so it didn’t really matter to God. I think that’s when he went to hide in the desert until the dead guy’s family and the authorities forgot that there was an unsolved homicide at Moses’ pyramid job site. Probably 40 days. 40 days is just about long enough for anything in the bible. They always have to mention that there were also 40 nights. I guess that’s so you don’t think that Moses was in the desert for 960 hours of uninterrupted daylight. So, he was in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights and he sees a bush that’s on fire but it’s not being consumed. So, he does what most people would do : he takes his shoes off and starts talking to the bush. The bush tells Moses that he (the bush) is God. Or YHWH. Or JHVH1 or whatever. He (the bush) says that Moses should go to Pharaoh and say “let my people go”. God tells Moses that he wants to prove to everyone what a big strong god he is, so he’s going to harden Pharaoh’s heart so that Pharaoh will say “no” and then God will be able to torture a bunch of people. It’s my humble opinion that he should have left that bit to himself. I guess he wasn’t very concerned about appearing benevolent back then. So, Moses gets Aaron to go with him. They say “let my people go”. Pharaoh might have said “sure” but God hardened his heart and he said “no”. Then Moses threw a stick on the floor and it turned into a snake. The next day, all the water was turned into blood. And all the fish died. So Pharaoh decided that he should free the Jews. So he called for Moses. But God hardened his heart again because he wasn’t done showing off. God changed Pharaoh’s mind nine more times in this fashion so that he could torture the Egyptians more. Next, God sent hordes of frogs to overrun Egypt. Then he gave everyone lice. Then he sent insects to eat all the crops. Then he sent an epidemic disease to kill all the livestock. Then he gave everyone boils. Then he sent fire and hail down from the skies. Then he send a swarm of locust and then he made the earth stop spinning for three days so that Egypt was in total darkness. Then, God’s finale. He told the Jews to wipe the blood of a freshly killed lamb above the doors of their homes. He sent an angel to kill the firstborn son of every household without the blood on the door. When the angel saw the blood he would pass over the house. This is what the celebration of Passover is about. Finally, God allowed Pharaoh to say what he wanted to say from the beginning : “You’re free. Get the fuck out of Egypt.” But old God had one more trick up his sleeve : he made Pharaoh change his mind again when the Jews were on their way out. He sent the Egyptian army after them. They, for some reason, ran toward a sea. Lucky for them that they were God’s Chosen People. God parted the waters and allowed them to run across the bottom of the sea. Then he waited for the Egyptian army to get to the middle of the sea and he drowned them all. God told the Israelites that he would send them to their rightful home, the Promised Land. Canaan. The Land of Milk and Honey. They sent some scouts there and there was some kind of problem. I think there were giants living there. I don’t remember exactly. You can rent a hotel room and look it up if you’re so inclined. I’m pretty sure they were scared by the giants. So they came back and said “There are giants up in that motherfucker. Let’s go somewhere else”. This made God super mad and he flipped out and made the Jews wander in the desert for 40 years or 400 years or something like that. But he didn’t punish them too harshly. After all, we’re not talking about Egyptians here. He told them that they would return to the Promised Land one day. They actually did not that long ago but that’s a different sermon. So, the Jews were wandering around in the desert and God told Moses to go up mount Sinai (you thought I was never going to get to the ten commandments). Moses did. He was up there for 40 days and 40 nights, I think. God gave him two tablets full of rules to take back to the Israelites. When he got to the bottom of the mountain he saw that his own brother, Aaron had made a giant golden calf and that everyone was worshipping it.

1st biblical rule of surviving in the desert : bring a shitload of gold

This made Moses angry. If there were any Egyptians around he probably would have killed one or two of them. But instead he smashed the tablets that God had given to him. On the tablets he smashed were written what people generally call “the ten commandments”. The Catholics, Protestants, and Jews all have their own slight variations on this list but they’re all pretty similar. Here’s the Protestant version :

1.Thou shalt not have no other gods before me
2.Thou shalt not make graven images
3.Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain
4.Remember the Sabbath, keep it holy
5.Honor thy father and thy mother
6.Thou shalt not kill
7.Thou shalt not commit adultery
8.Thou shalt not steal
9.Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor
10.Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods (that includes wives AND oxen)

Read them for yourself in Exodus 20

I’ll get to the “it’s a good collection of rules to live by” and “our laws are based on them” arguments in a little while. Because after Moses broke them God told him to go back up the mountain. God told Moses that he was going to give him a set of replacement tablets. The replacement tablets had a TOTALLY DIFFERENT set of rules than the first. The bible calls these rules “the ten commandments”, not the first ten. These are the ones you don’t hear about in church. These are the ones that you won’t see people clamoring to be put up in courtrooms. However, these are the tablets that, according to the story, were put into the Ark of the Covenant. Go see it for yourself. It’s stored in a Pentagon warehouse. If you don’t have clearance then get a free bible from the Gideons and read Exodus 34. I’ll paraphrase them for you.

THE REAL TEN COMMANDMENTS
1. Thou shalt not worship another god
2. Thou shalt not make thee no molten gods

- Fairly similar so far. The two differences that strike me is that the first time around God wasn’t worried about people worshipping other gods, he just wanted to be the most important god. Sort of like how you’re not supposed to fly a flag higher than the American flag. In the new first commandment he says that you can’t even worship another god AT ALL. I guess that whole golden calf thing really took him by surprise because the first time he banned only graven images but the second time around he seems a little obsessed with cast statuary. Anyway, on with the list :

3. The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep
4. All that openeth the matrix is mine
5. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest
6. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks
7. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread
8. The fat of my feast shall not remain all night until the morning
9. The first of the first fruits of thy ground thou shalt bring unto the house of the Lord thy God
10. (My personal favorite) Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk

Rule #1 : Either ‘Thou shalt not have no other gods before me’ or ‘Thou shalt not worship another god’. The new commandment is more restrictive than the first draft. But they are not laws for which you can be arrested. As far as them being good rules to live by, I’m not so sure about that, either. If you don’t buy the concept of the Abrahamic god then these rules have absolutely no bearing on you (unless you live in a place where you can be arrested for not being of a certain faith). If you do believe in the Abrahamic god and strive to keep his commandments then this seems like a silly rule to make a guy climb a mountain twice to get. Belief in the Abrahamic god doesn’t allow for pantheism. So there’s no need for a commandment. It’s just redundant.

Rule #2 : Either ‘Thou shalt not make graven images’ or ‘Thou shalt not make thee no molten gods’. Maybe it’s because during my one year at art school I took a shine to sculpture that this seems like a really silly rule to me. It apparently is silly to the Catholic church too, because their churches are filled with graven images and molten gods. Walk around a cemetery for five minutes to get an idea of how few people take the ‘graven images’ rule seriously. Neither rule is illegal in the U.S. I can make as many graven images and molten gods as I want. In fact, I think the ‘graven images’ rule is a terrible one to live by. The ‘molten gods’ rule might be a good one to follow. Not because you might make God mad but because you shouldn’t go around making statuary and then worshipping it. But making art is a pretty good pastime. Just don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s a god after you make it.

Rule #3 : Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain. Again, not illegal. And it seems to be a silly commandment. If you lived in fear of the all-powerful God of Abraham (he wants you to live in fear of him) then you wouldn’t tend to take his name in vain. But then again, we’re talking about the same god who invented different languages to confuse people because he was scared that if they worked together they might build a tower that would let them climb to heaven. But that’s a different sermon. I don’t see how this is a particularly good rule to follow.

Rule #3.1 : The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. I don’t even know what the hell this one means. I’m pretty sure it’s not illegal but I could be wrong. I like feasting. And I like crackers. Feasting on crackers seems to be a pretty good general rule. If you have some good cheese and beer. But I don’t know that I’d elevate it to ‘commandment’ status.

Rule #4 : Remember the Sabbath, keep it holy. Not illegal. I don’t think that keeping things holy helps the advancement of understanding at all. Terrible rule.

Rule #4.1 : All that openeth the matrix is mine. I’m not sure what this means but I think it has to do with religious people’s obsession with intact hymen.

Rule #5 : Honor thy father and thy mother. Not a law, but probably a good idea if you have good parents. I have great parents and I try to honor them. But some people have terrible parents. Some parents abandon their children. Some beat their children. Some rape their children. Some kill their children. I’m not sure that this is a very good commandment for everyone.

Rule #5.1 : Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest. I like this. I’d like it even better if it was a 5/2 split. It’s not a law but I’m not opposed to the idea of national shut down to observe relaxation. But maybe commanding people to rest doesn’t really work. I dunno.

Rule #6 : Thou shalt not kill. This one is sort of illegal. Well, murder is illegal. People have told me at least a thousand times that this commandment is talking about murder, not just killing. They’re usually defending some atrocity, like the military-industrial complex or the beef industry. I guess my question is this : if God meant ‘murder’ then why did he say ‘kill’? Anyway, I think it’s a great commandment. I try to kill as little as possible. I gave up most meat this year. I only eat Christmas goetta from my from the Burkharts and I had a pork chop which was left in my car. But I kill vegetables. So whatever. Maybe this one should say something like “realize that organisms with nervous systems experience life much in the same way as you”.

Rule #6.1 : Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks. Whatever the fuck that means. I’m pretty sure this isn’t illegal.

Rule #7 : Thou shalt not commit adultery. Not illegal. Probably a good general rule, depending on your definition of adultery. Some define adultery as having sex before marriage. I think everyone should have sex before they’re married. But that’s a different sermon. Maybe this rule could be rewritten thusly : Thou shalt not do shit that you say you’re not doing when you’re in a relationship that’s supposed to be based on honesty. Or something like that.

Rule #7.1 : Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread. God hates yeast and loves blood sacrifice. Who is this guy?

Rule #8 : Thou shalt not steal. This one is totally illegal. And a good rule to live by. Unless you think that property is an impossibility, which it is.

Rule #8.1 : The fat of my feast shall not remain all night until the morning. I think this one has something to do with unrefrigerated leftovers. Maybe if god didn’t hate yeast so much we could have fermented foods that don’t spoil when you leave them out.

Rule #9 : Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Lying about someone can be illegal sometimes. And you should try to not go around lying about people. So this one is good.

Rule #9.1 : The first of the first fruits of thy ground thou shalt bring unto the house of the Lord thy God. I don’t get this one. Cain offered produce to God and it made God mad. Now he wants us to bring him salad? Dumb rule.

Rule #10 : Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods. Not illegal. It’s a pretty good rule, though. You shouldn’t go around worrying about what everybody else has.

Rule #10.1 : Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk. I’ve never had goat boiled in milk, so I can’t comment too much on this one. It does seem a little cruel to both kill a baby animal and to cook it in the liquid that is supposed to give it nourishment.

So, yeah. Of all 20 commandments, only one (thou shalt not steal) is totally illegal. Killing is sometimes illegal. Other times people are required by law to kill. Lying about someone can be illegal in certain situations. So killing and lying each get a half point in regard to their legality. 2 out of 20. That’s 10%. Ten percent of the ten commandments are recognized by our laws. If you only count the ten commandments that people try to hang on courtroom walls with taxpayer money then the percentage goes up to 20. Not too impressive. Even less impressive is that those aren’t the true ten commandments. The true ten commandments are the second set, the set that went into the ark of the covenant, the only set called “the ten commandments” by the bible. Zero out of ten of the true ten commandments are recognized by our laws. That’s roughly 0%.

I guess that’s it for this week. Be excellent to each other. Amen.

Dear fattest city : using the elevator to go from 4 to 3 might be the reason

John McCain wants to be the next President of the United States. He also wants to be able to joke about bombing other countries. If you can’t understand that : GET A LIFE!

Blogging and driving in the first blizzard of spring. A celebration of rebirth. And danger.

Just saw a bird eating vomit : downtown Detroit.