Month: February 2019

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So Adorable

I simply adore it when little kids acting like adults. My nieces and nephews do this all of the time. It is priceless when they put their hands on their hips and try to have a serious discussion with a grown up. Or when they pretend to go to work and do whatever their childs' mind thinks adults must do at work and they have their brow all furrowed.

Adorable. Every time.

On the other hand, adults acting like kids, this is a whole bunch of disturbing. The only exception being Tom Hanks in Big.

I guess you could call it a child's sense of wonder.

They're never cynical or apathetic. Everything is interesting, even the stupid things, and it just reminds you how beautiful everything can be if you just look at it like it's new.

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The Save Yourself in Disaster Preparedness Mindset

I took a course when my parents and I took a cruise, this was a couple of years ago when I graduated from college. It was a real eye opener for me. And it was anecdotal in so far that it was a story the instructor told.

The instructor once said that the fatalities of women in catastrophic disasters at sea was much higher than men. And then he asked the class why.

A lot of the people present at the course — both men and women — were of the opinion that women were just naturally weaker swimmers than men. Those that had other ideas suggested that they either stayed inside their rooms or ran around half-crazed.

For the people that said they were more likely to be in interior cabins, the reasoning was the men were more likely to be in bars or socializing on the deck for longer than women. A crazy person doesn't listen to authority right? Sp for the group that answered with "half-crazed" they proposed that the women were less likely to listen to authorities during emergencies.

Sorry.

According to the instructor the majority of women who die during disasters were reported to be going back after their children and were caught in the worsening conditions and didn't survive.

It sounds plausible — I'd go back for my dog. I don't have any kids yet, but she is my precious baby. I can't bear the thought of her being all alone when facing death, even if I knew that I could not save her.

Of course the men didn't say, "I didn't go back for my kids because I can just make more." It was still the instructor's belief that this was the reason more women die in disasters than men. Women going to be more likely to sacrifice themselves for their children, men were more likely to flee.

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Modern Catholic

I guess you would say that I am a millennial. People in my age range seem to be moving more and more away from religion. Yet, that isn't always the case and a lot of churches are making targeted attempts to bring them "back into the church," though the church may not be their church.

Organizations like that attempt to make it modern and avoid the traditional aspects of the church. I would run from those churches. If it wasn’t for Orthodoxy I don’t think I would’ve ever been interested in Christianity.

They take away everything I want, tradition, and replace it with everything that I dislike.

I want prayer and reverence.

I want connection.

I want spirituality.

What I do not want is a concert.

The only thing I need a worship service to make me feel is reverence for God and a connection to the generations of saints that have come before me. I find that in a liturgical service and a contemporary service feels like a bad concert for a social club I'm not a part of. It's like the "contemporary" services are more to feel good about oneself rather than to actually grow in one's faith.

Getting people in the door is not the goal of a church worship service.

That's the problem with a lot of American churches.

The charismatic megachurch is a phenomenon that is only possible in the First World, where religion and leisure can significantly overlap.

We view the worship service as an evangelistic tool rather than a means for the worship of God and the edification of the saints. You might fill the church with people but what kind of Gospel are you giving them? But the moment you give them the real thing they will leave. Evangelism was the order of the saints outside the church.

In the rest of the world, people are sticking to the form of worship that the Church has kept since within living memory of the Apostles.