Afterlife Lotto

I admit it. I bought 4 Mega Millions tickets. I got 2 for the Wednesday drawing and 2 for the Friday. “But Ben, why would you throw away 4 perfectly good dollars.” Two reasons: 1. There is not much risk on the front end. I will not miss $4. 2. The potential rewards are freakishly […]

Legacy Code

I had my Imagine meeting this morning. It was our second to the last meeting. Not sure what comes next, but I’m open to possibilities. We are reading the book Naked Spirituality by Brian McLaren. I had procrastinated all week and as of noon yesterday, I had not read the second half of the book […]

Imagine, part 5

TnT, pride before the Called So after moving to Virginia, we started attending a medium size Methodist Church. It was such an unlikely pairing; formerly hardcore Pentecostals meet the mainline church. But as I mentioned in the previous post, we loved it. I started attending a Bible study. At the time, I had a skater […]

Imagine, part 2

On three: One, Three, Two… I know, I know, I already published part 3. I winged part 2 at the meeting, but I want a complete set so here goes Paradise Lost So purely from a faith standpoint, I had a pretty great early childhood. But unfortunately as I got older, the adults around me […]

Imagine, part 3

Four Years in the Desert Young adulthood kicked off with the end of college. By some miracle, I graduated from Bethany on time with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. I wanted to go to grad school to become a therapist, but my student loan dept (modest by today’s standards) freaked me out. I needed a […]

Tooth-tify

Yesterday was a friend’s going away party at work. We had lunch at Uncle Julio’s, a local Mexican restaurant. I was munching away on a basket of chips when I thought I bit on a course piece of cornmeal. It wasn’t cornmeal. It was my tooth. Crushed that sucker to bits. All that remains […]

Git Off My Lawn

Yes, I am becoming that guy, the old man shaking his cane at the neighborhood kids for playing in his yard. It hit me yesterday when I reread my own posting. There is a core of white hot anger at my core that has to do with the way that organized religion #$@#%!! (made sweet […]

I Can Do All Things (Phil four thirteen)

Go to church long enough and the same topics and scriptures are repeated. If they use the lectionary it is roughly every three years or so. At most churches it is somewhere between 3 and 5 years…except around Christmas and Easter, they are repeated annually. Rarely do you hear a good sermon about Jael driving […]

Thought Crimes

I went to a small Bible College with an enrollment of roughly 500. It was a conservative college right smack in the middle of Santa Cruz County. To say that our neighbors did not share our world view would be a gross understatement. We used to joke about ourselves saying that we lived in the […]

Integrity or Exhibitionism

I was talking with my therapist last night. The subject as always was on religion. About half way through the hour, I realized that we were not on the same page. I was talking about my anxiety about being honest about my spiritual state with people I am close to. I told him I really […]