The Latest in Health News

Just in:

Democrats, realizing the success of the President's "Cash For Clunkers" rebate program, have revamped a major portion of their National Health Care Plan.

President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Sen. Reed are expected to make this major announcement at a joint news conference later this week. It's called...

"CASH FOR CODGERS" and it works like this: Couples wishing to access health care funds in order to pay for the delivery of a child will be required to turn in one old person.

The amount the government grants them will be fixed according to a sliding scale. Older and more prescription dependent codgers will garner the highest amounts.

Special "Bonuses" will be paid for those submitting codgers in targeted groups, such as smokers, alcohol drinkers, persons 10 pounds over their government prescribed weight, and any member of the Republican Party.

Smaller bonuses will be given for codgers who consume beef, soda, fried foods, potato chips, lattes, whole milk, dairy products, bacon, Brussel sprouts, or Girl Scout Cookies.

All codgers will be rendered totally useless via toxic injection. This will insure that they are not secretly resold or their body parts harvested to keep other codgers in repair.

........ brought to you by Fox News Channel ~ and the people watching believe it!

Blame Jim

Jesus Seminar Has A New Home

The Jesus Seminar is back to frustrate the literalists for yet another day! It was because of my involvement with the Jesus Seminar that I was officially investigated for heresy in my previous presbytery.

It wasn't their fault. It was just that what they were saying made sense to me and I began openly investigating the questions they were asking. So these colored bead lovin' scholars will always have a special place in my heart.

They are in the news. They are moving to Willamette University. Check the article in the Christian Century:

Revitalized Jesus Seminar gets new home
by John Dart

The Jesus Seminar began making headlines in 1986 as more than 70 biblical scholars voted on which sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels probably derived from him and what words were more likely put in his mouth by Gospel writers or early church tradition.

The volunteer group, a part of the Westar Institute in Santa Rosa, California, drew upon years of mainstream scholarship to inform their views. But founder Robert Funk, a New Testament scholar, said that such critical findings rarely surfaced in churches, much less among the general public.

To counter televangelists in the 1980s and to gain news media attention, Funk asked seminar members to cast votes by dropping red, pink, gray or black balls into a box after hearing presentations and discussions. Eventually, less than a third of Jesus' sayings received red votes of authenticity. Many sayings were blackballed—an outrage not only to many believers but also to some academic colleagues who called the provocative method unscholarly.

The Jesus Seminar was ridiculed by detractors, but as its research lost its novelty it faded from the news. Funk died in September 2005, and because he took no salary as Westar executive director, it was not evident that the nonprofit group could carry on. "Many people predicted its demise," said Andrew Scrimgeour, the dean of libraries at Drew University and new chair of the Westar board of directors.

However, the outgoing board chair, Lane C. McGaughy, this year engineered a major money-saving relocation to the private Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, across from the state capitol. A longtime professor there, McGaughy convinced university president Lee Pelton, already a supporter of the Jesus Seminar, that the academic group and its Polebridge Press would fill the university's desire for an additional research center and an expandable university press.

"Westar was never on the verge of closing shop," McGaughy said. A core of Jesus Seminar fellows and lay associates "decided that Westar is an important voice for disseminating the results of serious scholarship on the Bible to the literate public." Its leaders had the respect of many biblical scholars not associated with theologically conservative schools.

Most people who looked into what the Jesus Seminar was saying "realized that our work was more mainstream (and boring) than they had thought," said one participant. "The shock value was lost."

Indeed, for years best-selling authors John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg were prominent in both the Jesus Seminar and the Society of Biblical Literature. Popular author-scholars such as Karen Armstrong, Elaine Pagels and Phyllis Tickle are Westar backers. The board was chaired for a while by John Dillenberger, who was instrumental in the founding of the multiple-seminary Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.

The Jesus Seminar still fills requests from two dozen congregations yearly to lead one-day conferences at their churches. A $3.5 million funding campaign, chiefly to endow a chair for Funk's successor, already has met 44 percent of its goal, Scrimgeour said in an interview. Finally, the gift of a rent-free building from Willamette and the academic ties to the university are proving "a boon to our budget," he said.

In a related development, New Testament scholar Stephen Patterson, who has taught for two decades at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, will join the Willamette faculty in the fall of 2010, taking the endowed chair once held by emeritus professor McGaughy.

Patterson heads a new Westar project, the Seminar on Christian Origins. "Re describing Christian origins is as important as redescribing Jesus," Patterson said via e-mail. "For more than half the world's Christians, the church is the voice of divine authority on earth," said Patterson, an expert on the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. "Before there was orthodoxy, there was variety. We want to explore that."

Participants in an earlier seminar on the Acts of the Apostles have concluded that that New Testament narrative was written in the second century, rather than in the 80s or the 90s of the first century. The seminars on Acts and Christian origins "are dethroning the popular perception of the Book of Acts as reliable history," contended Scrimgeour.

Theology professor Arthur J. Dewey of Xavier University in Cincinnati, who writes editorials for Westar's bimonthly magazine, The Fourth R, said the two seminars "may well change the image of Christian history even more radically than . . . the Jesus Seminar."

Check out their website and consider attending the Fall meeting.

May You Have A Successful Ramadan!

Tomorrow marks the beginning of Ramadan.

It is during this month that Muslims fast. It is called the Fast of Ramadan and lasts the entire month. Ramadan is a time when Muslims concentrate on their faith and spend less time on the concerns of their everyday lives. It is a time of worship and contemplation.

During the Fast of Ramadan strict restraints are placed on the daily lives of Muslims. They are not allowed to eat or drink during the daylight hours. Smoking and sexual relations are also forbidden during fasting. At the end of the day the fast is broken with prayer and a meal called the iftar. In the evening following the iftar it is customary for Muslims to go out visiting family and friends. The fast is resumed the next morning.

According to the Holy Quran:

One may eat and drink at any time during the night "until you can plainly distinguish a white thread from a black thread by the daylight: then keep the fast until night."

The good that is acquired through the fast can be destroyed by five things -

• the telling of a lie
• slander
• denouncing someone behind his back
• a false oath
• greed or covetousness
  

These are considered offensive at all times, but are most offensive during the Fast of Ramadan.

This sounds like a good idea for anyone regardless of one's religion.

Do good and avoid being mean.

Best wishes to all my Muslim friends for a successful Ramadan!

Lutherans Vote YES on Gay Clergy

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) has just voted 55%-45% to remove discrimination against gay and lesbian clergy:

Gay ministers will be allowed to lead parishes, representatives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) voted today in Minneapolis.

The 559-451 vote marks a historic change for the 4.8 million ELCA members, including 830,000 in Minnesota.

The vote repeals the ELCA's ban on gay clergy unless they agreed to remain celibate. The new position allows the installation of gay pastors but leaves the decision to call a gay pastor up to individual congregations and synods.

Delegates heeded warnings not to react as the outcome was read, but onlookers in the gallery hugged one another in celebration. Read More

Bolokada Tomorrow!

Got the news that we have over 30 signed up for our drumming class tomorrow and that a teacher in Johnson City is letting us use drums for those who don't have one. Awesome! I don't know how many have said that they will come to the performance. Here are the details.

Come to the workshop and/or the performance.

Bring a drum if you have one to the workshop. There may be an extra drum for you. Come to the performance for sure!

The drumming class is 4-5:30 p.m. and the exciting, dynamic performance with Bolokada and the Tonali Drum Group of Asheville, NC is 7-8:30. Fee for class and evening performance is $30. For the performance alone, $10.

Childcare is provided!

Commie Fire Fighters

Back from vacation. I had a fine trip to Montana. While I was there President Obama visited Belgrade. Not many have heard of Belgrade, but we Whitehall kids used to kick their butts in little league. Now Belgrade thinks it is pretty hot stuff as it is close to Bozeman and has its own airport. I remember though. I remember when they were just snot-nosed punks. Now they get the president to visit them. Oooh, hoo.

They treated the President pretty well, though. Obama is still trying to push through his communist policies. That's right. He is going to make your grandma share a needle with a crack head!

I will make a post about my adventures soon, but first things first. I joined this group on Facebook, One Million Strong Against Our Socialist Fire Departments.

It is time to take back America.

For too long now, fire departments across the United States have been socialist organizations, resulting in taxes on the American people.

FACT: Most Americans never use the socialized services of the fire department. The Obama administration has been very clear about keeping the status quo when it comes to taxpayer-funded fire departments.

It is time to open the fire department up to private industry. We have the best fire departments in the world in the US, but that doesn't mean that anyone (even non-US citizens) should be able to dial up and have fires put out, etc. There are private companies (Halliburtion, Etc.) who could step in tomorrow and take over every fire department in America and charge the consumer directly.

This is AMERICA. NO FREE FIRE SAFETY.

"Better DEAD than fire truck RED."

Rocky Top

Vacation is just about over. Hope you enjoyed the Montana tunes. Now its back to my Tennessee Mountain Home! Good tunes here. Good people. Good mountains. Good life. Here are the Osborne Brothers:

Yellowstone: Coming Home

It is hard for me to think about Montana songs and not think of John Denver. The obvious is Wild Montana Skies with Emmylou Harris. Click the pic to hear it on Rhapsody.

I couldn't find a good Youtube of that and in the search I came across the last song he had written. He was a recording a series for Nature, John Denver: Let This Be a Voice just a few months before he was killed in a plane crash in 1998.

I grew up with John Denver songs. When I think of the west, the mountains, our interconnectedness with Earth and all of its life, spirituality, and music, I think of John Denver. The last song he had written before his death is called Yellowstone, Coming Home.

You can hear the whole song here.

Yellowstone, Coming Home
Oh-ooo oh-ooo oh-ooo oh-ooo

Oh, the Yellowstone, Oh the buffalo free
Oh, my brother the wolf, my lover the moon
Oh, the little one, oh, the joy that I feel
Oh, the love in my heart, a wilderness song

Oh-ooo 0h-ooo oh-ooo oh-ooo


Oh, the waterfall, Oh the river that runs
Oh, my brother the wind, my sister the sea
Oh, the ocean shore, oh the castles of stone
Oh, the mountain top calling to me

Oh-ooo oh-ooo, oh-ooo oh-ooo

Returning, forever returning, coming home
Belonging, forever belonging, never alone

Oh, the mystery, Oh the dreaming of dreams
Oh, my brother my own, my sister my own
Oh, the tenderness, Oh, the longing for love
Oh, the beautiful way, the sweet coming home

Oh-ooo oh-ooo, oh-ooo oh-ooo
Oh-ooo oh-ooo, oh-ooo oh-ooo
Oh-ooo oh-ooo oh-ooo
Oh-ooo oh-ooo, oh-ooo oh-ooo

Montana

You can't have a series on Montana songs without the Sons of the Pioneers now can you?

Permission to Have Fun? Granted.

Another mini-ad!

Drumming, Drumming, Drumming.

I am drumming it into you.

Don't miss Bolokada Saturday!