Organized Religion

From the comments, Old Grump wrote:

Wish I could be as comfortable with organized religion as most of you here that share Joe's acceptance. I, unfortunately have many bad experiences with the individuals and organizations that purport to serve God. Every thing from demanding people living in abject poverty to give a significant portion of any income to them while living in lavish homes, committing adultery with vulnerable members and just being accepted as Gods messenger a-la Jim Jones and the Bakers. I can't say I am totally comfortable in my stance but that's where the preponderance of evidence leads me.

It is undeniable that many horrible things have been done by people flying the banner of organized religion. Is that a failing of the people who did the horrible things, organized religion or do they share in the culpability?

The first time something happens the perpetrator is the only one who is culpable.

After the first time, or if members of the religion/church learn about the sin while it is happening and don't address it...then the church is also culpable.

God has imperfect tools to work with. He once called Peter "Satan" (literally, stumbling-block). He betrayed by Judas, one of his apostles. He was abandoned and denied by ten others and the only apostle who is recorded to have stuck with him through the crucifixion is John. 

Then, prior to Pentecost, the apostles huddled like scared rabbits trying to figure out what to do next.

I scratch my head at people who reject organized religion solely because of imperfect people when the imperfect apostles were good enough for Jesus. 

The church has always been made of, and for, broken and sinful people. And yes, I consider myself to be in that group.

Only slightly related

The church exists to serve people's needs. Different people have different needs for "connection".

Foxes and leopards hunt alone. Wolves and lions hunt in groups. There is nothing wrong with foxes or leopards or wolves or lions. They are what they are.

Before interrupting a church service in Minnesota, Don Lemon was going to disrupt a church service in the deep south. That was before he learned that every man wearing a suit-coat and every woman carrying a handbag was "packing heat".

Some people are most at peace and can talk-to-Jesus best when they are alone or with just a few like-minded people. Other people feel out-of-place when they are not in a crowd. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with either type of person. The fishers of men take us all.

Fire in the orchard, fire in hell

Typhoid Mary

Yesterday's helper showed up and worked for five hours with 10 minute breaks on-the-hour.

His job was to make the branches that were on the ground in the weeds beneath the trees disappear. They are a slip-trip hazard and make it more difficult to maintain the orchard.

He kept two burn barrels going

 

The yellow barrel was retired. The black barrel has venting cut in the side rather than holes in the bottom and proved superior.

I dragged hose and humped water for the first three hours, coasted the fourth hour doing random chores and then sat in a chair and watched the fires burn down the fifth hour. Then we dowsed the fires with copious amounts of water.

This is the second time I hired this young man to burn orchard trash. We are done for the season until we get some rain and the grass greens up.

Char from the burn we did two weeks ago, dumped out and scattered

There were some branches in a couple of the trees that had died, probably from some form of canker. I cut the dead branches out of the tree and added them to one of the piles he had staged.

Then I asked my helper if had ever heard of "Typhoid Mary".

He had not. I was overjoyed at the chance to enhance his education. He had never even heard of "Typhoid". Public schools do a poor job of teaching public health.

Cutting diseased wood out of the canopy of an apple tree is a concrete lesson in public health. 

Gospel reading cycle

The Catholic Church follows a prescribed cycle of scriptural readings that cycles through three years. The intent is to ensure that the priests don't selectively skip material that they are uncomfortable "preaching". 

July and August are harvest season for wheat in the Northern Hemisphere and we get to hear parables about harvests during those months.

I want to present three concepts from those readings:

• Fidelity of interpreting Sacred Scripture is paramount. Nothing shall be added. Nothing shall be deleted.
• Hell exists. Many souls will go there. 
• And here is the hardest one, some of our beloved family members will go to Hell.

How many people our age have become "comfortable" with LGBT relationships or out-of-marriage babies or abortion because their child(ren) or close friends are fully immersed in those choices?

 

The distorting effect of "Feelz" criteria results in words like "brave" and "heroic" coming out of their mouths when discussing those kids and they become incredibly hostile if you dare to suggest that maybe those choices are sub-optimal. If you think calling somebody's baby "ugly" gets a reaction, wait until you suggest their baby might go to hell!

 

The most pernicious effect of the "Feelz" criteria is that it results in our replacing God and God's word with our own, fleeting emotional reactions to a "narrative". And may I be so bold as to point out that when we do that we are violating the very FIRST Commandment "Thou shall have no other gods before me".

 

The great falling-away

It is no secret that people have been leaving formal Christianity in large numbers for decades. 

I think that is largely because most people figure "I don't need God because I can handle whatever the future will throw my way."

 

This argument is sensitive to the question "Can you write down a list everything the future might hold?"

 

Of course, they have to answer "No" if only because they cannot live long enough to compile such a list.

 

But then they will weasel and say, "I can handle the things that are likely to happen."

 

The counterpoint is "How can you have any confidence that your sketchy knowledge of history is a solid basis for calculating future probabilities?"

 

The kill-shot is to ask them about "combinations" like "You decided that the risk of flash-floods or wild-fires is zero but have you considered the possibility that business or pleasure might take you to Texas, Utah, California, Greece or Spain?"

 

The goal is not to paralyze them with anxiety but to help them see that they need a little bit of room for God in their life so He can carry part of their load. 

Another tangent

"I will get religion when I really need it." 

 

That statement is the equivalent of saying "I will only buy gas after my call stalls out while driving somewhere" or "I will only buy new tires after I have to pay a wrecker to come and pull my car out of a ditch".

 

Why subject yourself to the pain of having to hit "rock bottom" when you know how to avoid that pain? Is the pain of having to admit that you, personally, are not all-powerful and not all-knowing (facts that are readily apparent to everybody around you) more painful than the pain of hitting rock-bottom?

Presented without comment

 

Moving forward, sometimes slowly but moving nevertheless

I underperformed on work-tickets yesterday

The trip to the gym went well but left me wrung out. When I was in PT after an auto accident, the PT people informed me that the number of repetitions is less important than the time-under-tension.

Taking that into the weight room, I slowly float the weight off the floor, hold it for two or three breaths at lock-out and then I slowly float it down to gently kiss the floor before floating it back up. I figure about ten seconds per rep.

I was rushing a little bit through my last set because I could feel myself running out of gas.

Then we had a visitor who, it turned out, was camping at our house waiting for somebody to call them back.

I got the cabbage planted.

I got one hour of weeding done. And then I nicked my finger. I went into the house and scrubbed the cut and stopped the bleeding. By then, my behind had grown roots and I could not pull myself out of the recliner.

End result: Only half the goal for weeding and no wood cut and split.

Some days are like that.

Today's work-tickets

I have a volunteer to work in the Upper Orchard burning brush. That means I will be doing other things there.

I will lug water to the baby trees, move bigger wood to the side of the orchard where a neighbor will collect it for firewood. I might even get to mulching some of the trees and broadcasting turnip seeds beneath the trees.

If I am feeling peppy when I get home I will do some more weeding in the potato patch. 

Thigh Circumference and Overall Mortality

 

The relationship between thigh circumference and mortality of interest. The association of thigh circumference with all-cause mortality...shown after controlling for age, gender, body mass index, waist circumference, moderate activity, total cholesterol, anti-diabetic drugs, estimated glomerular filtration rate, smoking status, race, baseline cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases. The solid lines represented the hazard ratios of thigh circumference and the shadowed area represented the corresponding 95% confidence intervals  Source

The average thigh circumference was 52 cm or approximately 20.4". Increasing the thigh circumference by 10% (2") reduced the all-causes Hazard Ratio by approximately 15%.

Correlation does not prove causality but this is interesting. Increased muscle-mass is proven to smooth out blood-sugar spikes. In general, physical fitness is related to better cardio-vascular health and reduced risk of falling.

Ernest T. Bass

Yesterday's work-tickets

I humped water to the twelve newest trees in the Hill and Upper Orchard. I also watered an additional 17 trees that were planted last year. The grass on the orchard floor is turning brown in places.

I tore off one wall of a raised deer-blind and took measurements to prefab a stud-wall and cut some sheet metal.

Ernest T. Bass

Ernest T. Bass was a character in Mayberry RFD who was famous for throwing rocks.

Rocks are a weapon of last resort. They have more range than a stick but are less accurate.

A baseball is almost 3" in diameter weighs about five ounces. A typical rock that is 2-1/4" in diameter will weigh about 8 ounces while one that is 2-1/2" in diameter weighs about 12 ounces and one that is 2-3/4" weighs about 15 ounces.

A trained 12 year-old can throw a baseball at 50mph and a distance of 140 feet (Source) and reliably hit a man-sized target at 60 feet.

As a kid, I never played baseball. 

One of the items on yesterday's work-ticket list was to watch some Youtube videos and start throwing rocks. Speed is hard to measure but distance is not. 

I chucked about twenty rocks. They were all more than five ounces. Size-of-rock is one of the variables I need to sort out.

I have a long way to go to get to the skill level of a 12 year-old. I will never get as good as the rioters who were shattering hospital windows three-stories up during the "peaceful" Black Lives Matter demonstration.

There are always new skills to master. 

Today's work-tickets

Go to the gym and dead-lift.

Pull-or-cut weeds for two hours.

Put Chinese Cabbage seedlings outside in partial shade to harden off. Transplant into garden this evening.  

Tidy up the front porch.

Trim some of the branches hanging down and obscuring the view out of the living room window.

Cut and split wood for a half hour. 

Tree roots

 

In mid-November, 2025 I hired a gentleman to run a trenching tool between the walnut trees that were east and down-slope of the Hill Orchard.

Most of the roots he cut were not very big, between the thickness of 14-2 Romex and garden hose. I expected them to be thicker. The trench was 35 feet from the closest tree trunks.

A few of them were a bit thicker than that.

This picture was taken today. The walnut trees (and a swamp) are to the left of the image. The trench is the slightly lighter green strip diagonally through the center of the frame (top-to-bottom), Upslope of the trench, where you would expect it to be drier, is GREEN.

The walnut roots are still leaching toxins into the soil but they are not sucking moisture and nutrients out of the topsoil.

Frankly, I am surprised by how brown and stressed the grass on the left side of the image is compared to the left right side. Bottom-line, tree roots are devastatingly effective at extracting moisture and nutrients from the soil.

You can see this in farm country. Corn growing within 2X of the tree's height will be stunted and runty during dry summers. 

Note for TB: It isn't just the shade. You might consider raised beds with a barrier beneath them to prevent the tree roots from infiltrating the beds. Or, if they community garden managers allow it, trench around your plot...as an experiments...to see if it makes a difference.