Online Journal

It's now 3:06 in the afternoon today. This morning I attended church with my friend and his wife, with the text of the sermon being the passage in John detailing how Jesus chased the money-changers from the Temple. Rather than give an opinion on whether anger is righteous or sinful by definition, the preacher used it as an allegory for the cleansing of sin from individual lives. I appreciated that it wasn't entirely a social gospel message; the preacher went in to some detail about the structure of the Jewish Temple, with Herod's additions, but it wasn't anything I hadn't heard before, so I soon went off on my own exploration of the Bible.

One of the verses of my song Do You Know My Jesus? references the "shit" that God did to Job, making no distinction between Satan's actual perpetration of the acts and God's endorsement of them, or at least inaction in the face of them. I made no distinction because in practical terms, there is none.

When I was very young, a friend and I pulled the wings off a fly. I'm almost sure that it was my friend who committed the act, and I was only a spectator. But when I told my parents what had happened I was punished for it, and rightly so; it is nearly as barbarous to allow cruelty in one's presence as to perform it oneself.

In the same way, God's role in the Job story isn't blameless, and certainly isn't holy.

Today, while reading through Exodus, I discovered an important part of the plague narrative that had previously escaped my attention. While the Pharaoh is sometimes cast as having "hardened his own heart," the passive construction of the phrase ("heart was hardened") is just as common. On at least two occasions, God himself claims responsibility for the hardening of Pharaoh's heart.

Taken in context, this makes the story of the plagues seem rather like a cat toying with an injured mouse, confident at the eventual outcome and merely enjoying the process. As I asked my friend after the service, should the mouse then be expected to worship and revere the cat?

My friend's response was that the Pharaoh was not expected to worship God, but to obey him... but if God truly so loved the world, his aim should have been for the former, at least in conjunction with the latter.

I still believe that the story is disqualifying in itself if one can possibly identify with the doomed mouse, but even if not it still represents a discomfiting incongruity between God's benevolence predominant in the New Testament and his sadism predominant in the Old, one that might lead a person to reassess just what matter of being they worship.

On a whim this morning, my friend asked if I might like to make this trip's "high class restaurant" visit a brunch meal, and when I responded affirmatively offered to take me to the meal declared as the best brunch in Phoenix by the Phoenix Times, the Royal Palms resort near the Phoenician at the foot of Camel Back, one of the mountains surrounding the city.

The meal was, in a word, extraordinary, and extremely varied, with a buffet featuring custom-made crescent rolls, a caprese salad, a plate of portabella mushrooms, asparagus, and red peppers for a la carte selections, a berry plate, smoked salmon, crab, shrimp, and a host of other items too numerous to mention. Granted, it cost twenty-nine dollars per person, but it was worth it.

On the way home, after dropping off his wife near the house, my friend and I went to pick up the fixings for a dinner I will cook, my traditional salmon fillets with onions, Italian-flavored bread crumbs, and maple-infused bacon.

After a few hours spent playing Arcade video games on his Xbox 360 - namely Ikaruga and Assault Heroes - we were ready to begin cooking, but had to wait for his wife to finish prepping tomorrow's lentil soup and cede us the kitchen.

Food is finished, and was appreciated by all. I'm very tired at the moment, and so will end this journal entry with no further description.