Tag Archives: disagreement

Cats vs Dogs by Miz Pink

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There are cat people and there are dog people and much like men and women they’ll never really see eye to eye. Ohhhh I know, there are people who like dogs and cats but I guarantee you they play favorites with one side or the other. It’s like men who are in touch with their feminine side or women who are super-handy with house repairs.

Sir Pink is cat people. Don’t even start with any jokes about his manliness now. I only call him Sir Pink because I’m Miz Pink around here. Trust me, he’s manly. If he could, the housecats we have would be bobcats at the smallest, and pumas and tigers if he could get away with it. Sir Pink, he saw a strange cat on the porch trying to follow Mini Pink model 2 into the house, and he gently lifted it up and carried it away, and got a nice cut on his lip from one of those razor sharp little kitty claws for his troubles. Me I woulda stomped on the porch and screamed and made the kitty run away. Don’t get me wrong, I love our three cats (mostly), but I’d rather have a dog, and the moment one of Sir Pink’s kitty’s meets its natural end, it’s getting replaced by a pooch.

Dogs mostly are predicatable and loyal. I like that. I want a pet that will stand by my side and be happy when I come home even when I don’t have catnip or a toy or food.

Seems to me that there is a similar dynamic in the Christian church as a whole. It probably got cast in its sharpest clearest nastiest form with open armed conflict between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants in the 20th Century but there are less extreme examples as well, and not just in terms of splits on dogma between denominations.

Sometimes we just don’t see eye to eye on anything but Jesus and maybe not even that at times. Make me crazy how many Christians I know who seem to think Jesus was a NRA card-toting, Republican neo-con (or would be if he were alive today). Me, I think more a super educated and spiritually aware hippie who can kick ass. Others think he was just nothing but love and flowers. So, I guess that makes me a dog and cat person with regard to Jesus. Maybe that’s why I actually can talk to folks on both of the extreme ends still.

Anyhoo my point is that…well, it’s like this: I’m a dog girl married to a cat guy and I’m happy enough with that. As fellow Christians we need to focus more on the core needs of the church and the kinds of attitudes and priorities that Jesus taught us about. If we’d focus less on who’s right or wrong on specific little crap I think we’d get alot more done and do it alot better.

Babelicious by Miz Pink

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Ever notice how people just can’t agree? Politics. Whether you really can wear white after Labor Day. Whether Brad Pitt should be with Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston. That kinda stuff. Oh, yeah, and religion. Yeah. That’s kinda serious there too.

It sure gives doubters and unbelievers a whole lotta ammunition to fire about how if people inside a single faith can’t agree, plus we have a lot of different faiths, well it starts to look like either every religious person is right and God just lets everyone in, or every one of us believers is looney tunes. Radical Islam vs. normal Islam. Orthodox Judaism vs. Reform Jews. Catholics vs. Protestants vs. Mormons. Fat happy Buddha vs. skinny dour Buddha. Need I continue?

I mean, I believe Jesus was meant to cut through all that crap. Like how many religions actually give us a savior who knows God and us inside and out? Ya know, as opposed to making us go through reincarnation do-overs endelessly or giving us no plan for redeeming ourselves even though we clearly need it. But that’s just me. But even if you grant me that I’m right about Jesus, how do we sort out the different interpretations of the Bible and all that jazz? Really, I don’t think we do. We’re never going to manage it. Because we’re human. Everything we do or think is filtered through our wants and needs. Probably mostly the want part.

The Bible is inspired through the holy spirit. But it was written by people and translated and retranslated and tweaked and, well, human fingerprints are all over it. It’s still God’s word, but God left it vague in places for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is to keep us focused on praying for guidance and seeking his truth. The essential truth (particularly the New Testament) is still truth, but we’re always gonna disagree on a lot of points.

Even with a lot of Christians in prayer when they ponder God’s ways and his word, we aren’t always gonna come to the same conclusions and that’s partly because even when we know Jesus is the way, the truth, the light, the life and all that, we still want things to be the way we want them to be. I sure don’t always agree with Deacon Blue about some of the stuff he says or even the way he says it or the amount of potty mouth he uses. But I sure see the essential truths in what Deke says (most of the time) and I think he would say the same of me. Some people just go off completely on their own tangents and really mess up the word of God and what Christianity is supposed to be. But people do that with a lot of things in life. People are crazy. We don’t give up on marriage because so many people divorce. We don’t give up on our political system just because we tend to elect major losers over and over. We don’t say psychology is all bullcrap (unless you’re Tom Cruise maybe) just because folks like Freud got a little wacky with their theories.

Remember the story of the Tower of Babel? People wanted to build a tower to reach God and that pissed God off and he responded by making them all speak different languages so they couldn’t communicate with each other anymore. Now I believe that’s a symbolic tale because, well, God had to kinda know the tower wasn’t going to ever be high enough. But I think he did set us on a path to be of different minds and tongues somewhere along the line because, if we couldn’t be of his mind then we just needed to be left to prove to ourselves over and over and over just how messed up we are and how much we cannot agree with each other much less God. Until we finally seek him, or more importantly over the past couple millenia, seek his son to get to him.

So, life is babelicious, baby. That isn’t a whole lotta comfort. But it explains a lot to me.

(Oh, so you thought “babelicious” was “babe” and not “babel.” Getcha head outta your hormones.)