Galactic Wanderlust

Some stars could support as many as seven habitable planets

www.universetoday.com/147294/some-stars-could-support-as-many-as-7-habitable-planets/

Please forgive the crude headline. Our focus as a people is on the wrong things. We pay too much attention to things that tickle us emotionally while bankers toss a trillion here and a trillion there like someone scattering fertilizer. Maybe that’s what the paper money is going to end up being worth. Maybe that’s what we should do instead of burning the bills when they’ve become too tattered and…

Getting the last word in

A while back I was a rep for an investment company. We’d schedule appointments and meet with people to try to get them to buy our stuff. I did this for about six months. We had a script we’d run through, and sort of adapt to the person we were talking to. The schpiel took about two hours. Early on, they’d pair us up with a coworker to go out to our appointments. Sometimes we’d get the sale. A lot…

I thought I was “okay,” for years, for decades…until I realized that I wasn’t. And that had to be okay.

My grandfather had a nervous breakdown in 1962 from exposure to polishes and solvents he was working with and from badly-handled grief from losing his 18-year-old son in 1944. I was born in 1963, and I never got to know the man who raised my mother and aunt. He spent time in the state hospital…

‘Authoritative’ translation

Note: I wrote this prior to leaving Christianity.

In the centuries since the King James Version was authorized in 1611, many have come to refer to it as the “authoritative” translation. This notion of authoritativeness is so pervasive that many hold the KJV in higher esteem than the Hebrew and Greek texts from which it was translated.

There was a time when a grade-school education included a…

All that was ever missing was the cheesy houndstooth coat

Sometime in ’83 after I said the prayer,someone asked me if I wanted the people I was talking with about Christ to have a good understanding of “the message,” or to just hear it. Since I was new to all of this and was trying to defer to “the experts” (people raised in the church or who had more experience with this evangelism crap) I asked someone the same question. They said, “Well, I think they…

The Second Coming

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at…