Behind every religious war is an economic or political war.  The religious beliefs of the people are merely a convenient and effective means of motivating them to do what they otherwise would not, murder, torture, steal, to the benefit of their leaders.

     Cortés leveraged Christianity to steal the gold belonging to the Aztecs.  Bush used Christianity to steal oil belonging to Iraqis.

     Islam is being used in the same manner except perhaps with even more ambitious goals.

     This is why people need to be in touch with their God on a personal level, through prayer and meditation and careful thoughtful consideration of scripture, because they will be mislead by their fellow man if they are not.  Man will mislead them as to the meaning of scripture, take it out of context, and do whatever else necessary to mislead people into going opposite of what God commands.

     For myself, when I am in doubt I remind myself of Jesus’s words:

     Been off Doxycycline for a week but still alternating between diarrhea and constipation.  I’ve read some people are affected for up to two months.

     Energy levels seem to be down.  Probably from not properly digesting foods.

     I try to put these pleasantries into the context of Romans 8:28, but I’ve got to admit it’s difficult to see how this can possibly be used for good.

     Just watched a Star Trek Next Generation episode, “Brothers”.

     Brothers Forgive…  Wouldn’t know, I was adopted out at three days.  It’s my understanding I have three brothers somewhere.  I’ve never met much less known them.  I wonder how they get along and how they’ve faired in life and how much we might have in common.

     Apparently Sisters, Sons, and Daughters don’t.

     I just turned 57 on the fourth.  I figure at least 2/3rds of my life is over, maybe more.  Perhaps it’s for the best.

     The God I know is a loving God.

     My God would not instruct his creations to strap themselves with explosives and go in and blow up more of his creations, AKA Isis in France.

     My God would not instruct his creations to go bomb his creations in other countries such as Iraq, AKA George Bush.

     My God wants to use us for his purposes, which are loving and life affirming.  My God doesn’t want us to use God for our purposes, which are greedy and hateful.

     Prior to Adam and Eve partaking of the forbidden fruit, it would seem that the second law of thermodynamics didn’t exist.  I suggest this because there is no way that I can imagine an incorruptible world in which increasing entropy exists.

     God’s world was ordered perfectly, perhaps the entire universe, and Satan has been eating away at that order ever since.

     You can’t have increasing entropy and not have corruption, so God’s original uncorrupted and incorruptible world, and presumably the universe in which it sat, must have had no entropy, else entropy, increasing disorder, would have lead to corruption.

     With no entropy, there was no arrow of time, since it is increasing entropy only that distinguishes the direction of time.

     And this forbidden fruit was of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  And when Adam and Eve ate of this fruit, they gained this knowledge, and God didn’t want this.

     This is hard for me to fathom since our religious leaders today want us to know what is good and what is evil.  Why would God not want us to know this?  Why would God give us ten commandments if he didn’t want us to know good and evil?  Why did he give us his word in the form of the Bible?

     God also after banishing Adam and Eve from the garden, protected it with Cherubim with flaming swords, lest Adam and Eve then eat of the tree of life and live forever.

     Yet, God promises eternal life to us, if we have faith in him, repent, and accept his gift of his Son’s life, eternal life.  It is difficult for me to understand why he wants us to have eternal life if he didn’t want Adam and Eve to have it.

     Genesis is an interesting book but one that is so full of metaphor that it is difficult for me to grasp.

     The Gilbert O’Sullivan Song, “Alone Again (Naturally)”, is stuck in my head, going round-n-round, reminding me of one of my life’s greatest fears.

     ARRRGGGHHH!

     It is rare that I dream of technical issues but this morning I had a dream where the case fan had failed on our main server and the temperature sensors were saying it was like 1000°F but I knew that was impossible because at that temperature the CPU would be slag.

     However, the core temperatures on the CPU was only around 200°F which while too hot and will cause them to throttle, isn’t hot enough to turn them into slag.

     So the delimma was, “do I let it run in crippled mode, or do I shut it down until I can get a replacement fan.”

     The reality is our servers have multiple case fans and the case is pretty much at ambient so the failure of one fan would not be catastrophic and fans are readily available at Fry’s, etc, so not that big of a deal.  But it sure seemed like a catastrophe in the dream.

     Just got back from the post office.  It is SO dark and gloomy, and not because sunset has happened, rather because the cloud cover is so thick, that some of the street lights have turned on.

     I’ve never had a boil that didn’t self resolve before within a week or two and never any that got bigger than maybe 1/3rd of an inch.  And of those maybe half a dozen in a lifetime.

     This monster…  Got to be about an inch, like having an extra testicle embedded under my skin at the crease at the top of my right leg.  Sore and painful.

     Monday they cut it open and drained it and packed it with guaze.  Wednesday they repacked it.  Friday they repacked it again.  Now I’ve got an extra orifice packed with cotton.

     The Wednesday repacking, the doctor didn’t use any analgesic so it felt like a wasp sting while they were working on it.

     Friday they were good enough to shoot some numbing agent, lidocaine I think, into it before they started manipulating it so not painful this time.

     After the Wednesday repacking, I bled through the guaze in two hours.  After Fridays hardly any blood at all even over night.  Hopefully that means it’s really starting to heal finally and Monday they won’t have to repack again.

     The antibiotics they’ve had me on, 100mg Doxycycline Hyclate twice a day, have upset my whole digestive system.  Fortunately, last pill tonight and I’ll be done with those.  I bought some yogurt in hopes of helping my gut bacteria recover faster.  I’ve read that some people have had diarrhea for up to two months afterwards.  I’d rather not.

     All told this has been about a $600 boil.  Maybe it’s just me but this seems like a ridiculous amount of money for a boil.

     The little problems in life like this, the ones that can’t be solved except by just going through the process, take the focus off the bigger problems, but then there may be a lesson there in that going through the process is pretty much how the bigger ones need to be addressed as well.

     I look it as both a mental and spiritual exercise.  Mental in as much as the process for little problems is the same as for big so it’s a bit of mental training.  I think the most difficult part mentally is the sheer boredom of it all.  It takes mental energy away from much more interesting things.  And spiritual because if you can learn to trust God with the little things it makes it easier to trust God with the big things, like death and dying, and the loss of loved ones, that are inevitable.

     This is a session done at the KEXP studios live by a group called “Wimps”.  I enjoy their music.  It’s simple but honest.

     It’s funny to reflect on what RIAA and the record companies were all telling us when Napster came out.  They told us that music would die as the result of free Internet distribution whether it was piracy or groups just making their material available free.

     Actually the only threat has turned out to be to their profits which are still exorbitant. The music has proliferated like never before in my life.  There is SO many good artists making great art.  Not only that, but I’m finding out about groups that existed even back then but got no exposure because either the labels didn’t like their politics or they weren’t willing to sign shitty contracts.