Sure ya do... it wouldn't be mockery without it. What's it gonna cost me? I
just tagged a spare Sarah McLachlan / Lisa Loeb ticket (March 5 -- anyone
else?) at the Bren this morning (Adam, who picked hers as one of the ten best
albums of the year, deigned-not to invest funds in a live performance...)
> Gullible (adj) - a trait possessed by the one who exists soley for the
> entire world to mock.
And that's why we play along... what is mockery without levity? insult.
Besides, stranger things happen all the time. Usually to me.
Adam says that maturity is acknowledging that the universe mocks everyone
equally. I parry, "mockery requires self-awareness" -- so at least 97% live
their lives in mock-free bliss, cowering before an angry god instead.
Rohit
PS. Just so it's in the archives, here's a portrait of an angry god the
Friends of Janet Jackson ( http://www.frindsofjanet.com/ ) and the Friends of
Al Gore (gore2000.org) must be enduring right now: aren't you happier you 'Got
Rohit? (TM)' instead?
http://www.lovejesus.org/angrygod.htm
Sinners in the hands of an angry GOD
A sermon by Jonathan Edwards
Preached July 8, 1741
[...]
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much in the same way as one
holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is
dreadfully provoked; His wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you
as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; He is of purer eyes
than to bear to have you in His sight; you are ten thousand times more
abominable in His eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You
have offended Him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince;
and yet, it is nothing but His hand that holds you from falling into the fire
every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to
hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this would,
after you closed your eyes to sleep; and there is no other reason to be given,
why you have not dropped into hell since you arouse in the morning, but that
God's hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given, but His
mercy; yea, no other reason can be given why you do not this very moment drop
down into hell.
O sinner, consider the fearful danger you are in! It is a great furnace of
wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire if the wrath that you are
held over in the hand of that God whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much
against you as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender
thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it and ready every
moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any
Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off
the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you have done, nothing
that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.