Manufacturers of God would like to thank you for your belief and patronage of our product. In order to better serve your needs, we ask that you take a few moments to answer the following questions.
Please keep in mind that your responses will be kept completely confidential and that you need not disclose your name or address unless you prefer a direct response to comments or suggestions.
1. How did you find out about God?
__ Newspaper
__ Television
__ Tabloid
__ Word of mouth
__ Bible
__ Koran
__ Torah
__ Divine Inspiration
__ Near Death Experience
__ Communist Manifesto
__ Bhagavad-Gita
__ Burning Shrubbery
__ Other sources (specify): _____________2. Which model God did you acquire?
__ Father, Son & Holy Ghost Triplet
__ Jehova
__ Yoweh
__ Jesus
__ Alah
__ Satan
__ God
__ G_d
__ None of the above, I was taken in by a false god3. Did your God come to you undamaged, with all parts in good working order and with no obvious breakage or missing attributes?
__ Yes __ NoIf no, please describe the problems you initially encountered here: ____
4. What factors were relevant in your decision to acquire a god? Please check all that apply.
__ Indoctrinated by parents
__ Indoctrinated by society
__ Imaginary friend grew up
__ Wanted to meet girls/boys
__ Wanted to piss off parents
__ Desperate need for certainty
__ Need to feel Morally Superior
__ Needed a reason to live
__ Needed focus in who to despise
__ Hate to think for myself
__ Fear of murder by a missionary
__ Needed a day away from work
__ Like Organ Music
__ My shrubbery caught fire and told me to do it5. Have you ever worshipped a God before? Is so, which false god were you fooled by? Please check all that apply.
__ Odin
__ Cthulhu
__ Zeus
__ The Almighty Dollar
__ Apollo
__ Left Wing Liberalism
__ Ra
__ Barney T.B.P.D.
__ The Great Spirit
__ The Great Pumpkin
__ The Sun
__ The Moon
__ A burning cabbage
__ The Bomb
__ Other: ________________6. Are you currently using any other source of inspiration in addition to God? Please check all that apply.
__ Tarot
__ Lottery
__ Astrology
__ Television
__ Fortune cookies
__ Advice columnist
__ Psychic Friends Network
__ Dianetics
__ Palmistry
__ Playboy / Playgirl
__ Self-help books
__ Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll
__ Biorythms
__ Tea Leaves
__ EST
__ Mantras
__ Jimmy Swaggert
__ Crystals
__ Human Sacrifice
__ Pyramids
__ Wandering around a desert
__ Insurance policies
__ Burning Shrubbery
__ Barney T.B.P.D.
__ Barney Fife
__ Other: _____________________
__ None7. God employs a limited degree of Divine Intervention to preserve the balanced level of felt presence and blind faith. Which would you prefer (circle one)?
a. More Divine Intervention
b. Less Divine Intervention
c. The current level of Divine Intervention is just right
d. Don’t know…what’s Divine Intervention?8. God also attempts to maintain a balanced level of disasters and miracles. Please rate on a scale of 1 – 5 his handling of the following (1=unsatisfactory, 5=excellent):
a. Disasters
flood 1 2 3 4 5
famine 1 2 3 4 5
earthquake 1 2 3 4 5
war 1 2 3 4 5
pestilence 1 2 3 4 5
plague 1 2 3 4 5
cable / cell phone providers 1 2 3 4 5
Windows / Apple / Android OS 1 2 3 4 5b. Miracles
rescues 1 2 3 4 5
spontaneous remissions 1 2 3 4 5
stars hovering over towns 1 2 3 4 5
crying statues 1 2 3 4 5
water changing to wine 1 2 3 4 5
walking on water (except Cuyahoga) 1 2 3 4 5
talking flaming shrubbery 1 2 3 4 5
VCR that set its own clock 1 2 3 4 5
local baseball / football / hockey club winning the Series / Bowl / Cup 1 2 3 4 59. Do you have any additional comments or suggestions for improving the quality of God’s services? (Attach an additional sheet if necessary)
Tag Archives: religion
The Ninja Daughter by Tori Eldridge (2019) – BR00166 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪
Plot or Premise
A Chinese-American woman trained as a ninja and now protects abused women in L.A.
What I Liked
The story works on three levels for me. First, there is a mystery to solve involving multiple bad guys, politics, and a new subway being constructed (the motive is obvious, the details are not). Second, she helps women get away from their abusers, and feels a bit in places like the Jane Whitefield novels by Thomas Perry. Third, she is choosing romantically between a nice guy and a danger guy, similar to the Stephanie Plum novels by Janet Evanovich. I had a small sense of deja vu that I knew this storyline as it progressed.
What I Didn’t Like
As the first story in a series, there is a lot of exposition going on. Explaining Lily’s background, her mixed Norwegian / Chinese heritage, and even some of her relationship with her parents. Her angst with her mother is brought up about six or seven places in the novel, while 1-2 would have been fine. Equally, her father’s colloquialisms show up way too often, “doncha know”. Plus, she explains kunoichi about three times, as if we didn’t see it the first two times. The repetition was a bit heavy-handed.
The Bottom Line
Good debut, look forward to the next story.
Articles I Like: Review of Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray
The Guardian published a review of an interesting-sounding book, and I thought I would share. The review itself isn’t anything special, I confess, but the book sounds good. It’s not available on Amazon Canada yet, but it appears to be an overview of the history of atheism and all its different forms.
The argument against the first five forms of atheism discussed in this book will be familiar to readers of Gray’s excoriating reviews and the greatest interest for some will lie in his discussion of the two final forms. One is entitled “Atheism without progress”, that is, without any assumption that human beings can be changed for the better…The final chapter, “The atheism of silence”, contains a surprise. It includes a discussion of a nearly forgotten author of a four-volume history of atheism, Fritz Mauthner, who argued for what he called “a godless mysticism”. Gray argues that there is in the end an affinity between the mystical element in Christianity, which stresses that God is beyond words and incomprehensible, and this form of atheism. “A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity and the difference between the two may be less than you think.”
Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray review – a fascinating study of disbelief | Books | The Guardian
Articles I Like: Dread accompanies me through life
Firefox has this little feature when you pull up its built-in home page with a search engine box — just below the box is your recently viewed webpages, nothing unusual there, but between the search and history are three articles that Firefox thinks might be of interest to you. I have no idea if they are actually using an algorithm of the web history and past searches, or just curating interesting stories, but I often find one or more of the stories worthy of clicking. I figured initially that it was just clickbait, but most of the time, when I’ve actually clicked, the article has been worth the click.
Take for instance one from today. The article is written by a philosophy professor and revolves around anxiety. It starts with some powerful events — the death of his parents — that are not powerful in terms of trauma but in their normalcy. He then talks about how it impacted his sense of safety, life, religion even. His view of the universe. And then talks about his journey to understand anxiety from a personal, psychological, even existential perspective, informed by the works of philosophers and psychologists.
While it doesn’t end as strongly as it starts, and it veers into philosophy and psychology in ways that will bore a lot of people, it is a very compelling cerebral contemplation of anxiety. Here are some of my favourite highlights:
I had imagined that with my father’s death, the world had exacted its pound of flesh, a tax so terrible it would be levied only once. But in 14 years, death came calling again. One God – a child’s God, mythical and compassionate – died with my father; another – an adult’s God, a God of reasonableness, the one that ensured this world would not do excessively badly by you – died with my mother.
[…]
Prompted by the production of new traumas and losses in our lives, anxieties can interact and recombine like viruses to form newer ‘strains’ that course through us, surprising us with their ferocity and visceral feel. We should not expect our anxieties to remain the same as we age; by paying close attention to their nature, their ‘look and feel’, we can track changes in ourselves and our ‘table of values’.
I learned that I respond with anxiety to this world’s offerings. I’m a better person for this knowledge of myself.[…]My trajectory through the world is thus informed, at every step, by the anxieties that afflict me.
[…]
Our anxieties rush into the mental spaces we leave open, reminding us of all that can go terribly wrong.
Dread accompanies me through life but it is not without consolation | Aeon Essays
By the Rivers of Babylon by Nelson DeMille (1978) – BR00014 (2001) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸
Plot or Premise
Peace in the Middle East is almost assured and two Concordes fly to New York with delegates for final negotiations. Terrorists try to derail the peace conference by planting bombs on board and taking the passengers hostage. After one plane is destroyed, killing all on board, the second plane is forced to land near Babylon. At the last minute, the hostages manage to escape to the top of a small hill from which they attempt to defend against the terrorists through several days of sorties, knowing that the military probably doesn’t know where they are and therefore can’t swoop in and rescue them.
What I Liked
Long before there was Clancy, there was DeMille. This book takes the international realm and stands it on its ear — there are (excruciating) details of the relations between the characters on both sides of the peace conference who are forced to work together to fight the terrorists. In addition, the battle tactics are first-rate, the writing is almost perfect, and the story is superb as the “hostages” fight in small groups with every weapon they have — gas bombs from the plane’s fuel tanks, sounds from a war movie blasted over speakers to simulate larger weaponry, etc.
What I Didn’t Like
There are a LOT of characters at the start of this book and it is hard to keep track of them all. Up until the end, there are too many small sub-plots — some are good, and necessary to flesh out the experience, but not all of them. There are fewer characters by the end though and it helps speed up the plotting. However, the ending is a little over-the-top, resembling a scene from a Die Hard movie more than keeping with the slightly more realistic tone of the rest of the book. As well, there is a meeting between the hostage-leaders and the terrorist-leader that is absolutely surreal. The likelihood of both parties treating it like a military battle with truces, etc., is virtually nil but it was at least interesting to read.
The Bottom Line
DeMille is the master of the game.