This airplane understands how important the right kind of food is for a proper adventure. That’s why they’ve pre-processed, freeze-dried, and vacuum-sealed it before putting it in a box. True adventure food must go through an adventure of its own!
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
The way the metaphor works, you’re being lowered into the water (symbolizing a grave) and being raised (resurrected) as a new creation free of sin. (Symbolically. More literally, the “free of sin” bit lasts about 0.4 seconds until you have your first conscious thought, and then you probably need more sanctification.) The question nobody ever seems to ask is, what happens to the sin afterward?
I mean, that water ought to be downright toxic. Original sin is a big deal, and in most denominations they don’t even try to dispose of the waste safely. In fact, the pastor is often standing in it the whole time.
If you haven’t seen the sort of baptism service I’m familiar with, it involves a bathtublike container maybe a third the size of a Jacuzzi, with a church leader doing serial baptizing. Any Christian can baptize someone, but usually it’s one of the ranking people in the church. Catholics probably bless the water first (it’d be weird if their religion includes holy water and they don’t use it for this) but in most denominations holy water isn’t really a thing. So there’s no confounding variable from that direction; it’s just water plus enough of humankind’s innately fallen sin nature to damn someone to Hell a couple dozen times over. And the pastor, along with whoever goes last, is standing in it.
But that very fact tells us it’s not all that dangerous. Concentrated evil sounds scary, but apparently a normal mustard-seed-sized amount of faith can protect people from it.
There’s a ritual described in Leviticus 16. On the Day of Atonement, the High Priest places all the sins of the Israelites onto a goat (hence our word “scapegoat”), and then sets it loose in the wilderness. The population at the time was a bit over 600,000 (source: the for once incredibly convenient Book of Numbers). So we just have to find that goat (we can use my time machine), make it more intelligent until it’s capable of becoming a Christian, and baptize it. From a safe distance. Because seriously, that much concentrated evil is probably radioactive or something. We’re talking the sins of a nation here; this is a decent fraction of the stuff that motivates prophecies of Armageddon.
Sacrifices aren’t really a thing anymore. If I remember right, the branch of Judaism that eventually became the current one hasn’t done animal sacrifices since the destruction of the Temple back in ‘70. (The apostrophe stands for “A.D. ”) I don’t know how many Jews have lived in the last 1945 years, but it’s a lot. That many person-years worth of sin is going to mean one seriously scaped goat.
So that means, you just have to find the Ark of the Covenant, reconstruct the Most Holy Place, and get whoever’s in charge of the tribe of Levi these days to do the ritual. No time machine required. Then kidnap the goat, convert it to Christianity, and do the other ritual. The new convert rises as a new creation free of sin (in the process thoroughly messing up the parable of the sheep and the goats) and you’ve got a bathtub metaphorically full of more evil than has been seen in one place since the Crucifixion. Use it wisely.
And by “wisely” I do not mean point a squirt gun at the Pope.
WHEN LAST WE LEFT we were storing every sin committed since A.D. 70 by any Jew who was not also Christian inside a large bucket. It’s time to try more.
When you have an almost unprecedented amount of a thing, obviously you look for bonuses that stack. Several places in the Bible confirm that it’s possible to multiply sin (e.g., Isaiah here), but infuriatingly there’s no actual procedure stated for this.
The best I can find is a handful of lines from the Apocrypha, which is not canon depending on your denomination but is at least a really cool word. Sirach 3:11 says “they multiply sin who demean their mother,” which is nice and direct, but the person in question didn’t really have a mother. She was a literal goat, and probably not covered by any commands about respect for one’s elders. 23:11 says how to double a particular sin, but it only applies to oaths and doesn’t look very retroactive.
I think our best chance is in 23:16: “Two sorts of men multiply sin, and the third will bring wrath: a hot mind is as a burning fire, it will never be quenched till it be consumed…” The first one is more interesting than the second, so let’s stop there. I don’t actually know what it means by a “hot mind” but actively trying to increase the amount of extant sin had better qualify.
So after you kidnap/rescue the scapegoat and uplift it to human intelligence, convert them to Discordianism or something first instead of Christianity. Something that’ll want to go along with this. Allow the multiplication to do its thing. (The Book of Ecclesiasticus didn’t say what the sin gets multiplied by, but it’s large enough that it matters when it’s an individual doing the sinning, let alone a civilization.) Then you convert them, get them saved by grace through faith, and steal the water after their baptism. Put it in the chemtrails of jets flying over your least favorite nation or something. Have fun!
If you’re wondering what was that verse’s second sort of man who multiplies sin: “a fornicator in the body of his flesh will never cease till he hath kindled a fire.”
In other words, it is actually an available option to start with an apocalypse-causing amount of violations of the law of God—
—which has to be one of the most horrible, terrifying, EVIL things you could possibly think of—
and MULTIPLY it
by SEX.
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#puns #overly literal interpretations #I don’t think I reblogged the first part of this #I’m rectifying that now
Bro: You look like a bird. But twice as stupid. And probably high.
Me: Birbs are beautiful intelligent creatures!
Bro: ….
Me: What?
Bro: Nigga… Did you just say “birbs”?
Me: … Maybe.
Bro: That’s it. I quit. You were my last hope for sanity. I don’t want to be in this family any more. I’m going to call Scott Alexander and make him adopt me.
Me: … Scott’s ex-girlfriend is the one who started the birb thing.
Bro: OH MY GOD WHAT IS *WRONG* WITH YOU PEOPLE!?!?
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(the ex in question said in the replies to this post that they did *not* start it) #(but anyway)
Crazy Stuff! I’ve revamped my YouTube Channel! You might even say it’s “New” and “Improved”. I now have a legitimate director with multiple episodes in the works! So excited- check it out! I really appreciated your feedback last time and would love to hear from everyone again.
Yeah, the first thing that hit me when I saw it was “Wow, this looks a lot more professional”. I think you’ve improved your talking speed, too.
The nametags on the photographs were a nice touch. Part joke, part genuine reassurance, part practising the awareness you preach. A lot of things about unusual conditions (even relatively common ones like prosopagnosia, synesthesia, or autism) have this assumption that nobody with that condition is actually in the audience: they’re all over *waves vaguely* there somewhere, not here among us. (Like, I can understand explicitly aiming a 101 thing at people who don’t have it, but it never seems to be a deliberate choice to concentrate on a particular segment of their audience, rather just forgetting there are any other segments than that one.) The nametags make me hopeful that you’re not going to fall into that trap.
(I actually watched the video before you posted this, because I was still subscribed to your YouTube channel and it alerted me. Things like this are why I never unfollow someone for inactivity alone.)
What if aliens visited Earth during the Jurassic Period, found it to be occupied with a bunch of mean, giant lizards and thought “Well, fuck this planet” and never came back?
what if when humans went out into the galaxy all the aliens panicked because if the dinosaurs’ tiny fur snacks now had spaceships and laser blasters and interstellar colonies then what the fuck were the dinosaurs up to???
Let me tell you, O Tumblr of my confessions, why I do not believe in Thunderbirds.
It is because I am a birder.
If a goddamn Citrine Wagtail appears in North America–a Eurasian songbird which, in winter plumage, resembles a rather drab mockingbird, only smaller and with less personality–if one shows up anywhere, suddenly birders appear around it. It is like a magic trick. It is nearly proof of spontaneous generation, except that it causes birders to appear who are in their sixties and have had careers and whom other birders will vouch for (and I am still not entirely convinced this is not the universe joggling our memories to make them fit.) Provide the rare bird and birders erupt out of the ground, and then they tell other birders. There used to be a hotline, but now there are Rare Bird Alerts sent out in near daily digest form from eBird.
If a Kirtland’s warbler should appear on the East Coast, not only is it spotted nearly instantaneously as it alights on a branch, but it is immediately assigned a park ranger to protect it from the paparazzi, as if the bird is a celebrity, which it is. (The Kirtland’s warbler, incidentally, is small, brownish-bluish-grayish, with a yellow belly. It’s big for a warbler, though.) And this is a bird that occurs in a known range in Michigan already.
If there were Thunderbirds lurking anywhere in Illinois, you would be able to find them by going to the place where there were a number of people with binoculars pointing up. You would greet them with “Got anything?” and they would reply with “Yep. Thunderbird.” And then someone with a scope would say “Want a look?” and you would get your lifer look at a mythical bird and thank the nice person for the look, and they would nod and silently judge your worth based on the quality of your optics and you would accept this as part and parcel of the birding experience.
So, no. I am skeptical. I would accept yeti and skunk ape and Chessie long before I will accept anything that could conceivably be put on a birder’s life list. Because a birder could trip over a yeti and it would come out as a footnote in a lengthy discussion three weeks later about their search for the Lewis’s woodpecker, but a Thunderbird? Naaaaah.
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