Okay y’all, I don’t usually do this, but I have a couple of links for you:
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/04/uhoh.html
Firstly, a very topical (and scarily coincidental) blog entry on the Dilbert Blog about the mistakes that have been made in the transcription and transliteration and re-writing and re-recording of the Bible over the last zillion years (you’ll find out why this is so topical in a moment.)
Aaaaand (Drum roll please)…..
http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/thesimpsonsmovie/
The Simpsons Movie!!! Omg! July 27th 2007! How do they know that? Or is that just a made-up date, like how they told us we’d be moving into Brisbane Square in June but now they’re making a conservative estimate (AKA stupid guess) of September? I don’t even really care about the new building, I just want a new computer and XP! (anything has got to be better than crappy Windows 97 or NT). But yeah, the Simpsons movie! wow! Awesome!
So anyways, back to the first point… Today (Good Friday) we visited the Buddhist Temple out at Underwood. It was beautiful, I was disappointed that my camera still hasn’t arrived back from the insurance people (they said it might be here Thursday or Friday, but as Friday is today and it’s a public holiday, my last chance before the long weekend was yesterday) because from the very first moment that you drive through the gates you feel like you’ve stepped into another country — perhaps Tibet… There are grey stone statues lining the drive, and the actual temple rises high above rows of steps bordered on either side by carefully manicured trees and clear fountains (no water restrictions?!). It’s just beautiful. There’s an aura of calm that surrounds the whole place. Everything is clean, peaceful and quiet.
Our friend used to be the gardener there, which was a huge job as the gardens are very important. They weren’t so impressive today… it looked like a war zone in which only the Temple Building remained unscathed. They’re apparently doing renovations and re-landscaping the gardens as well. I want to go back and see once they’re finished.
Noelle & I were wandering around and noticed Clare talking to some random guy at the entrance to the main worship room. I said, “who’s that guy?” And Noelle said she doesn’t ask questions like that anymore. I was curious, so we wandered over that way, and surreptitiously stood by until we became a part of the conversation. The first words I heard of the conversation were from Clare, and that was “So it’s magic.” The man she was talking to gave a non-committal, non-word answer before Clare said “Well, if it’s magic, then how can it be proven?”. I thought the man was a Buddhist, but what they were saying didn’t really fit and so I listened in a while longer and it soon enough became clear that the man wasn’t a Buddhist, he was a Born-Again christian. He then started talking about how Born-Again Christians were not humans, they were a different creature all together. He said he was two beings – a human and a spirit, in the one body. Then he said that when the holy spirit first entered him, he spoke in tongues. Apparently everyone in their church spoke in tongues when they were first ‘re-baptised’. He also explained that he could think and speak at the same time, and, according to him, no other human being on the planet can think and speak at the same time. We ended up having a dead-end discussion about beliefs (according to him, it’s knowledge, not belief) and Noelle said “What about all the contradictions in the Bible? We are told to shun homosexuals and that they’ll be condemned to hell, but then it also says “Judge not lest ye be judged, for on judgment day he shall do the judging”” or something along those lines. To which he responded “God has given me the right to judge. We don’t say homosexuals aren’t allowed, but when they come to church they’re healed, and they give up their life of sin. They no longer practice homosexuality.” So apparently, the rules do apply unless God tells you otherwise. Ro said “Anyone can ask for God’s forgiveness” and he got a mite irked by this. He claimed to be perfect, which allowed him to judge others, but then said taht the first time he received the holy spirit he then went straight from church back to the bar for another drink. So Clare said “if you were perfect you wouldn’t have done that. You would never sin. If that were true.” and he said “The flesh isn’t that strong!”
It was a pointless argument, i’m not being very eloquent here in my retelling of it, but at one point I mentioned that the stories in the bible were suspiciously similar to those in the Anceint Sumerian texts written some years beforehand, to which he responded, “well you sound like you know about as much about it as I do!”, and I’m still not sure if that was an insult or a compliment. Him being perfect and all. In the end, mum came up and did the finger-across-neck gesture that stood for “get out of there!” so we finished off and wandered away again, with a weak excuse of “do you know where the bathroom is?”. Lucky that, or the discussion would have never finished. He gave Clare a little brochure, which she recited from in an indignant tone in the car on the way home. I wasn’t as incensed as Noelle & Clare, but I was a little frustrated by his dogmatic, single-minded categorical refusal to take any other points of view into account. He even said, “I brought my grandson along today because he wanted to see the place. But look at that (pointing to an eight-armed statue)! That’s unnatural.” Nevermind that it might have stood for something, nevermind looking further and actually doing some research and having some knowledge of the religion. He asked Clare to read the pamphlet and if she wanted, to come along to one of their masses. Clare said, fine, you do something for me. Find out about Buddhism. Read up on it. Which I thought was very reasonable. How can you condemn something that you know nothing about?
Other than that, the day was nice. We had a picnic by a little pond with lily-pads and a curvy bridge, in which some kids were fishing. They didn’t catch anything, and we pondered over the probability of there being fish in the pond in the first place. A little while later I saw a fish jump out of the water as if to say, “Haha! i’m the greatest fish alive! No one can catch me!” It made me feel glad.