A Quickie Post

I have along-awaited doctor's appointment today. Hopefully I will get an answer to at least one of my health problems.

Sure, let's go on to the 95 Theses. I don't have time right now to do that, but if you want to start, go ahead.

I would like to make one comment about your feeling for your 'country' of mountains and fond feeling. I have that too. I have that for my family. Most people have that for their family, their immediate area which they have known forever, and feel, in a mystical way, has also known them. But if my entire family up and moved to the middle of some other country, my 'fellow feeling' would follow them, not the fields I used to play in.

It isn't a bad or unnatural thing to feel a fondness for sights that are familiar to your eyes, and associated with memories that are dear to your heart. If my family moved to the middle of nowhere, there is a part of me that would always romanticise and long for a familiar view, but just in my definition (which is why definitions are so important) of patriotism, that doesn't equal patriotism.

You do have a good point about how God organized the nations into nations and the tribes into tribes. He did that in the old testament. In the new, even when it comes to family and family feeling as I describe having, he says, whosoever loveth his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.

And to Peter, who asks permission (I think it is Peter anyway. One of the apostles), to bury his mother, he says, let the dead bury the dead.

I think the difference in attitude comes from the urgency of Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand kind of thing. Somewhere in the prophets, in reference to the last days, I believe one of the prophets, in the KJV version which I have been using when I quote the Bible as I believe that the KJV is your preference? - in channelling God, says, I will overturn, overturn, overturn .... with reference to how things are and how they will be with the coming of the messiah.

Jesus said he didn't come to bring peace to the world but to divide. Division and the sort of civil unrest Jesus describes his coming as bringing, is the result of old conceptions being turned on their heads and people being challenged to the breaking point as to where their loyalties lie. Jesus wasn't advocating violence or condoning violence done in his name - he was saying what happens when people have their conceptions turned upside down and are forced to make choices.

It's also occurred to me over the years that in many ways Jesus was remarkably like the Greek Stoics, but that's another story.

Anyway, until later, my friend.

Layla