Author: Crowhill Report

I’m sure you’ve all heard that riddle. My daughter’s cat has not.

She likes to sit on my lap while I work, which can quite be an annoyance. But since I have a desk that can move from sitting to standing, I sometimes frustrate her efforts by standing.

Voila, no lap to sit in.

But she doesn’t know that, so she jumped up and tried to claw her way to my non-existent lap, which was not fun.

P&C drink and review another Pastry Archy offering, Oatmeal Cream Pie: an imperial honey wheat ale. Then they review arguments for the existence of God, starting with Anselm’s ontological argument.

They move on to several of Aquinas’ arguments, which mostly revolve around the concept of an infinite regress.

Then there’s “can you get something from nothing,” and the idea of gradation. When we compare things, are we assuming an ultimate standard? What about morals, and miracles, and ….

They can’t cover it all, but P&C review some of the more well-known arguments and add their commentary.

Most of you are probably aware of the imprecatory Psalms, which contain some shocking language, such as this.

O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock! Ps. 137:8-9

Some people try to excuse this in various ways, while others will have none of it. There’s no room for this sort of sentiment, they say.

Chanequa Walker-Barnes seems to believe this sort of language has a place, and she’s updated it for modern believers in Critical Race Theory, and other racist ideas.

Dear God,

Please help me to hate white people. Or at least to want to hate them. At least, I want to stop caring about them, individually and collectively. I want to stop caring about their misguided, racist souls, to stop believing that they can be better, that they can stop being racist.

You can see more here.

When the internet was only a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, I saw a show about how technology would open up new ways to pay for things. For example, you could watch a movie with normal commercial interruptions, or you could take a survey, and the sponsor of the survey would foot the bill.

Somewhere along the way, we lost most of those revenue innovations. Things settled on just a few models: Free supported by ads, pay per use, and monthly membership. There are exceptions — like just now, when I got the offer in the subject of this post from Spotify — but generally speaking, despite our ability to do really cool things, people don’t.

I think that’s a shame.

We used to watch this with our kids when they were young. If you’re blessed with munchkins in the house today, here’s a decent diversion.