elder adventure

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We had the best day Monday! Did a couple of errands, bought a rotisserie chicken at Sam's, filled the gas tank of Linda's car, then headed for Culver's out on Tyndall Parkway in Callaway with our coupons. We'd never been to Culver's, wanted to try it but thought the only location was out at PCB on Back Beach Road near Breakfast Point. 

However, we try to help the Bay High Million Dollar Band in season, and the Bay High Tornadoes football team, when they're having fundraisers, as is the case now. The football team's current campaign includes getting an enormous Culver's coupon sheet for a $25 donation. The coupon offers every imaginable kind of deal, lists the Callaway location as participating, and today we took our coupon and went for it. 

We had crispy chicken sandwiches, fried onion rings, and small cokes at their dine-in room, which is spacious, clean, and nice. The staff were welcoming and helpful, brought our food to our table. Using another coupon, we bought cheeseburgers to bring home for supper. Double deluxe they call them. 

As we were finishing our meals, the staff brought us a sample taste of their flavor of the day custard, soft ice cream, double strawberry. All tasty and an adventure for a super-elderly couple out for a few hours of fun. 

We are delighted and will go again soon. Considering the length of the drive from St Andrews to Callaway and back, and the cost of gasoline, we'll probably always make the double purchase when we go, have lunch out there, and buy supper to bring home. The coupons are valid until 7/30/2027 as I recall.  

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Today I read a NYT Opinion essay about theology, theodicy, and salvation by Peter Wehner interviewing David Bentley Hart, a scholar whose translation of the New Testament I bought when It was first published several years ago. It takes an impressive person to do that, a Bible translation, and, because this NYT essay was recommended by a close friend, I went online and read it. 

It's long, as NYT, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic essays tend to be. I appreciated it, maybe especially because I identify with Hart's overall position on the religion spectrum. Hart, who bows up at religious dogma and religious authority; and also with Bart Ehrman but who let the theodicy issue get the best of him instead of sorting it out; and also Apple's hero Steve Jobs, who told a college graduating class to do their own thinking. Well, another: the anonymous person who first wrote my favorite proverb "Seek The Truth, Come Whence It May, Cost What It Will." 

But I'm wandering again, my thought was on D B Hart. His responses to Wehner's questions were substantial, often involving my "say what?" and going back to reread a paragraph. But Hart's thinking is based on false premise. I'm not going to go too far with this, because my thoughts are my own and not other people's. As a starting point in his thinking, instead of going back to the Beginning, "yeh-hi" and staring out into the far reaches of the Universe with its two trillion galaxies in the observable part alone, Hart's thinking starts too far in, accepting way too much of human developed religious tradition, assumptions about God, God's characteristics (goodness, ...), salvation, eternal life; in answer to fears that only own us humans because we are self-aware, fears that don't possess the animals who didn't eat the forbidden fruit (maybe with sufficient further evolution After People, porpoises, pigs and octopuses will develop self-awareness and religion to calm their new fears. Hart goes to some length to dismiss Stephen Hawking and other scientists, with argument about material and spiritual that SH&c would consider irrelevant. 

So, where is Hart? He is not an atheist. Different from his experience of the institutional God, Hart's God is a philosophical image. In universal terms his God is "too small." I don't think so, but Hart may be comfortable resting where his intellect and search has taken him. Where am I in my own search? IDK. True to the proverb, the Cost has been obliterating; and starting with a blank slate, I'm still too stunned by the immensity of Creation, to imagine, image, a Pantokrator who/that is concerned about the things that we imagine God is concerned with. Like Hart, I am appalled at the varieties of Christians for whom Christianity is not a way of life here and now, but an egocentric rules-bound guide for getting their sins forgiven and saving their souls into paradise. 

Again from my Theology-101 professor, "Who or What is God?" There is no unanimous answer among believers. IDK, and for all my searching, I don't expect ever to Know. I believe God is as shown in the Gospels' image of Jesus; God is Who/That loves the most repulsive unlovable; and Who/That, in Jesus, tries unsuccessfully to get us to do the same; this is where Hart and I agree.

RSF&PTL

T90