(no subject)

So, over in another blog, Dwindling in Unbelief, the blogger is compiling a list of "How many folks did God kill, vs. how many folks did Satan kill, in the Bible?"

Obviously, Satan only even shows up in Job, so his total is 10. And God's is, of course, somewhere well in excess of two and a quarter million in enumerated deaths alone. Not counting "destroyed cities" and the like.

Far as I'm concerned, from how I understand Jewish theology, this really isn't much of a paradox -- nobody ever said God was nice.

To quote Sondheim:

You're so nice.
You're not good, you're not bad,
You're just nice.
I'm not good, I'm not nice,
I'm just right.

Also, from the way I understand Jewish theology, Job is one of those books, like Jonah and, arguably, Esther, that's really supposed to be a fairy tale more than something that you're supposed to take LITERALLY. So, really, Satan oughtn't get credit for even those ten. Which, again, is fine theology the way I see it -- Satan doesn't have the power to kill. And even in the book of Job, Satan is using God's power, not his own.

And, as can be expected, most of the comments to the thing are fairly moronic. I'm pretty sure that there's an inverse correlation between how fervently you hold your religious belief and how much theology you understand. So most theological arguments end up degenerating into competing camps of people yelling variations of "YOU'RE GOING TO HELL!!!!"

However, there are a couple interesting things there, and I responded to one of them.

Tom said...
That's quite paradoxical. As a human, our entire concept of cause and effect presuppose a time frame in which any given event takes place. Think about it...for you to claim that something 'caused' or 'created' something else, you have to have accepted the premise that the cause came before the effect.
So, in order for your Creator to live up to his name, time must have existed. Humans simply cannot fathom a "beginning of time", because the term 'beginning' implied that there was time BEFORE that event, in which that certain event never took place. Again, causation presupposes both existence and time. Either god is subject to the the constraints of time and therefore is not omnipotent or he does not exist at all.
( That was an interesting enough comment that I decided to follow up with this: )

(no subject)

Oh, and having thought about it, I think I got the story of the four rabbis wrong: one died, one went insane, one became a heretic, and Akiva came out unscathed. Mier wasn't part of the project.

And I think I'm getting the details from a work of fiction: Milton Steinberg's amazingly mindblowingly brilliant book As a Driven Leaf. Which is a brilliant piece of historical fiction, in which Steinberg takes the, like, four pieces of information we know about ben Abuyah, and turns him into a fully-realized character.

Frankly, I think that future generations could do worse than to declare that a divinely-inspired work, and put it into the Bible. Various people tried to excommunicate Steinberg for writing the thing, which is always a good sign.

One final piece of advice for fellow sufferers of the Creeping Crud of January 2007:

So, like many of y'all, I'm down with a Creeping Crud with the following characteristics:
1. A bad cough. This is its primary and most significant feature.
2. An intermittent fever, never getting to dangerous levels, although occasionally getting to the "Wooo, wobbly" levels, and the "lying awake at night coming up with really GREAT ideas for a TOON game, that I can't remember ANY of any more" level. And also getting down to normal, just to mess with you. Oh, and I also woke up having sweating enough that it was dripping out of my hair.
3. Body aches and pains, probably from the fever.

And that's it, mostly.

The problem is that the cough is nasty. Cough suppressants barely touch it. Expectorants don't do a thing. And while there is no nausea with this Crud, you occasionally cough so hard that you start retching. A sore throat presents, simply because of the stress of coughing so much. You can't sleep because of the coughing.

So, I've been trying to find ways to deal with the coughing, especially if it can get me to be able to sleep.

I've sort of found something, somewhat.

If I lie face down, with my head and arms hanging over the edge of the bed, it seems to suppress the coughing. It's hard to sleep in this position, but not as hard as it is to sleep while coughing.

I've got my massage table set up next to my computer, and when I start to have a bad coughing fit, I go over and lie down on it, with my head and arms hanging off the top edge.

Um.

It's not a GREAT solution, but it's the only thing I've found that does anything at all. So I pass it along to anyone else suffering from this crud. If you're anything like me, at this point, if I'd suggested gargling with a live chicken, you'd be willing to try it. . .

(no subject)

When I was a kid, my parents would watch All in the Family. One of the main things I remember about it was how much the opening impressed me.

See, it stated that "All in the Family is filmed before a live audience," and I thought that was amazing.

See, I understood that people had evolved millions of years ago, and so I couldn't figure out who was making the show if it had been filmed before there was a live audience. I mean, I figured that, okay, the writers and cameramen and stuff might be dinosaurs, but how did they get actors who looked like humans? And, for that matter, how did they know what humans would LOOK like?

Eventually, I figured that it had just been filmed before anyone had come up with the idea of a "live audience", and, back when they were filming All in the Family, they just packed the auditorium with corpses for some reason. I couldn't figure out WHY they would do that, but it made more sense than the "dinosaur" theory.

Fortunately, we DO have ice packs in the freezer

I coughed so hard I pulled a muscle in my neck. I'm icing it now, and it's feeling better.

But, owie.

Now that a good friend has terrified me. . .

So, a dear friend has pointed out with the enthusiastically hypochondriac glee of the second-year medical student that, if you squint hard enough, what I've been describing on my LiveJournal could be the early stages of whooping cough.

Thanks, dear friend!

But if the codeine-containing cough syrup works, then it's probably not whooping cough, right?

How long does codeine take to kick in? More or less than fifteen minutes? Should the cough suppressant effect kick in before the wobbly dizziness?