Tag: religion

Make-A-Death-Wish

The Portly Politico5 Comments

UPDATE:  In case anyone missed it, The Make-A-Wish Foundation REVERSED their decision to require terminally ill children and their families to be fully vaccinated in order to receive their wishes: https://theportlypolitico.com/2021/06/29/decency-prevails-make-a-wish-foundation-rescinds-mask-requirement-for-children/

Read The Foundation’s statement here: https://wish.org/news-releases/reemergence

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The Make-A-Wish Foundation, which grants children with terminal medical conditions a “wish,” has announced it will require all wish recipients and their family members to be fully vaccinated against The Virus.

No vaccination, no wish fulfillment.

Naturally, this requirement is absurd, and represents a new low in the race to virtue-signal in The Age of The Virus.  At this risk of sounding macabre and insensitive, The Make-A-Wish Foundation is requiring children who are already dying to take a vaccine against an illness with a 99.5%+ survivability rate.

It’s a purely symbolic action that achieves nothing beyond making it more difficult for dying children to enjoy one last bit of whimsy before they cross over into the arms of Jesus.

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Hard to Swallow

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A big H/T to Neo at Nebraska Energy Observer for the inspiration for today’s post:  in his latest edition of Sunday Funnies (“Sunday Funnies:  Juneteenth & Other Things“), Neo includes a tabloid-style headline that reads, “I Was Nearly Krilled!: Lobster diver says he was swallowed by humpback whale.”  The pun “krilled’ is circled in orange.

I looked it up, and it’s a real story:  Michael Packard, a fifty-six-year old lobster diver from Massachusetts, was briefly trapped in the mouth of a massive humpback whale.  According to Packard, he was in the mouth of the great beast for about thirty seconds, before the creature surfaced, shook its head back and forth, and spit Packard into the air.

Here is the relevant excerpt of Packard’s account, as quoted at NPR.org:

Packard told WBZ-TV that he was about 45 feet down in the water when he suddenly felt “this huge bump and everything went dark.” He initially feared he had been attacked by a shark.

“Then I felt around, and I realized there was no teeth and I had felt, really, no great pain,” he said. “And then I realized, ‘Oh my God, I’m in a whale’s mouth. I’m in a whale’s mouth, and he’s trying to swallow me.’ “

Packard was still wearing his scuba gear and breathing apparatus inside the whale’s mouth, which he said was completely dark. Fearing he wouldn’t make it out alive, he thought about his wife and sons.

After about half a minute, the whale rose to the water’s surface and began shaking its head from side to side.

“I just got thrown in the air and landed in the water,” Packard recalled. “And I was free, and I just floated there … I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I got out of that.”

The story sounds incredible—and, according to whale experts, the odds of it happening are extremely rare—but it is within the realm of possibility.  Humpback whales lack teeth, and instead filter feed through baleen, long, hair-like “teeth” that filter out sea water and trap small prey, like shrimp and krill, inside.  Humpback whales often feed using lunge feeding, during which the whales “open their mouths, accelerate and ‘take in 10 SUVs worth of water and fish and then everything else,'” according to Iain Kerr, quoted in the same NPR piece.

Apparently, Packard just happened to be swimming in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the great whale accidentally sucked him up with tiny sea critters.

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Reclaim the Rainbow

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Orthodox Christian, America Firster, former US Senate candidate for Delaware, and current babe Lauren Witzke posted a meme to her Telegram page a few days ago featuring a rainbow with the Cross emblazoned in front of it, with the captions “June is Christianity Month” and “Reclaim the Rainbow.”

It’s a clever meme, of course, because June has become Pride Month, a month dedicated to forced corporate celebrations of abiological and immoral lifestyles.

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TBT: The Desperate Search for Meaning IV: Vanity

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In the spirit of yesterday’s post, which also dealt with a passage from Ecclesiastes, I thought I’d dust off an old post from my The Desperate Search for Meaning Series, which I completed back in 2019.  A double-shot of Ecclesiastes, and the long-winded (but condensed here) wisdom of Pastor Monday is always a nice treat.

With that very brief introduction, here is October 2019’s “The Desperate Search for Meaning IV: Vanity“:

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The Passing Seasons of Life

The Portly Politico8 Comments

My pastor delivered an interesting sermon this past Sunday (23 May 2021) entitled “Recognizing the Passing Seasons of Life.”  The sermon pulled from the famous passage from Ecclesiastes 3, explaining that “To everything there is a season” and there is “a time for every purpose under heaven.”

I’ve always loved Ecclesiastes and its central insight that without God, everything is meaningless.  The perpetual turning of the seasons—the cycle of birth, preparation, harvest, and death—is similarly meaningless—an endless cycle—without God.

Pastor Monday took a slightly different approach, one that is still very important:  we so often abuse, misuse, or waste the time we have.  The season of preparation—planning ahead, planting our seeds, tending to them, etc.—is frequently squandered; as a result, the harvest is lacking.  We all want the harvest without the preparation, but a harvest that lacks preparation is no harvest at all—or a harvest of dust.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Aniara (2018)

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What happens when a luxury transport ship on a routine voyage to Mars is thrown off course, set adrift on an endless voyage across the cosmos?  That’s the premise behind 2018’s Aniara, based on the 1956 Swedish epic poem of the same name.

The answer, ultimately, is quite bleak.  Aniara fits fully into the nihilistic ennui that Scandinavians—materially prosperous but spiritually adrift—relish so stoically.  Seriously, the Swedes seemed obsessed with existential crises and a sense of meaningless in life.  At its best, that gives us the likes of Danish Christian existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard; at its worst, it creates the kind of mindless pleasure-seeking the passengers of the film’s title ship indulge in here.

For all the film’s depressing messaging about the futility of life (to be fair, being trapped on an endless voyage in space, eating only algae to survive, would be a fairly depressing and psychologically destructive experience), it’s a fascinating look into how a society might develop, survive, and perish in the depths of outer space.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Easter Weekend 2021

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

It’s Easter Weekend 2021!  Unlike last Easter, which was “decidedly un-Eastery” in The Age of The Virus, this Easter is starting to go back to normal.  By the time you read this post, I will have had my second shot of the Pfizer vaccine, so I’m either fully medically acceptable to our cosmopolitan elites—or dead.  Gulp!  I’m not sure which is worse.

Regardless, more and more folks are vaccinated, and churches have been reopened for many months now here in the South (they never should have been shuttered in the first place).  I fully expect that tomorrow will see a return, albeit a perhaps socially-distanced, diminished return, to the jam-packed Easter services of The Before Times, in the Long, Long Ago.

Easter is the most important holiday in the Christian calendar, probably in a dead-heat with Christmas.  Just as Christmas celebrates Christ’s Birth, Easter commemorates His Resurrection—the ultimate testament to Christ’s Victory over Death, the Devil, and the Grave.

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Saint Patrick’s Day

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Today is Saint Patrick’s Day throughout the Western world, a day to venerate and celebrate the life, death, and Christian service of Saint Patrick (the day coincides with the supposed date of St. Patrick’s death).  Of course, now the holiday has devolved into a drunken festivity in which everyone pretends to be Irish for a day, downing pints of green beer and wearing green.

The real story of Saint Patrick is far more interesting than the debauched modern celebration.  Patrick was the son of a wealthy family in what is now Britain in the declining years of the Roman Empire.  Irish raiders captured Patrick and sold him into slavery in the Emerald Isle.  Working alone as a shepherd, isolated and afraid, Patrick turned to Christ for solace and strength.

After escaping captivity, God called him back to Ireland, not as a slave, but to deliver Ireland from its spiritual bondage.  After his ordination, Patrick returned and preached the Gospel to the pagan Irish, sparking a major religious revival among the people there.  Ultimately, Ireland became second perhaps only to France in its dedication to the Catholic Church, and unlike its Gallic co-religionists, maintained that devotion well into the twentieth century.

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Faith, Family, and Work

The Portly Politico11 Comments

Scott Rasmussen’s Number of the Day last Friday caught my attention:  according to Rasmussen, 49% of voters say their highest loyalty is to their families.  Another 22% identified their faith as their highest loyalty.

That’s certainly encouraging.  In theory, my faith to Christ is my highest priority, although like many Christians, that’s not always the case in practice.  In practice—and in a practical, day-to-day sense—my family is my top priority, even if they’re an hour or two away.

The two, however, seem inextricably tied.  Some years ago I heard someone (probably Dennis Prager) say that the three keys to happiness are faith, family, and work (most likely in that order).  Faith in God gives us purpose (indeed, God gives us our Creation—our very existence).  Family gives us people who love us, those we support and those who support us in turn.  Work gives us a sense of accomplishment—the satisfaction of a job well done.

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