Hymn to Apollo

Yes, it could have been very bad all the way around. Things get so difficult when you have rational and irrational opposed to each other. (Not that, mind you, I think irrational equals "bad" all the time, but in this case it's true.) :)

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Hahaha! I'm glad that they've finally found your way to your door. I was beginning to think they'd all moved to my town, I've had so many visits from them. Good to spread them thinner, I think.

Is Malkhos physically huge and intimidating?

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I figured you'd be pretty happy to know that not all of them are living in your town.

Malkhos is--sorry, we're not on the metric system here, so I don't know if this will mean much to you--six feet two inches tall and not scrawny by any means.

You know, I've had to deal with this with him before--rolling down car windows and shouting "Mormon scum" at the Mormoms, carrying on in public about the Jesuits and Freemasons--ugh. I doubt he would have been nearly so combative with these two due to their gender and overall attractiveness, but still--I felt like I needed to protect them anyway just in case God didn't intervene for them. He can get pretty nasty in a verbal tete-a-tete.

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Britain is curiously hybrid when it comes to weights and measures. Food is metric. Drinks are metric in shops, but imperial in pubs. Petrol is sold in litres but speed limits are displayed as mph. Weight and height is always calculated in metric units in hospitals, but always expressed in stone, feet and inches in everyday conversation. It's a total mess. I was educated in Hong Kong, which in true undemocratic British colonial style dispensed with all imperial units in the early 1980s, overnight, no debate permitted. Sometimes fascism is so much more effective.

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Well, actually then, we have that in common. Here, we purchase soft drinks by liters; milk by the gallon or half-gallon. We buy gas (petrol to you) by the gallon but purchase oil for cars in quarts. So that same sort of hybrid measurement system exists here too. I don't know why we can't just go one way or the other.

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Why does Orwell keep insinuating himself into this thread? You'll recall one of the few things we actually hear said by a prole is a lament for the pint, since a half-liter is too little and a liter too much.

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Orwell lives, Malkhos. He is with us, always, if we would but open our hearts to him. He characterised British proles quite well. They're still like that.

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That's why I'm so cynical; I've read 1984 too many times.

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Just so people get the right information,,,,,,, J.W don't belive in a hell that you burn in, nor do we look forward "with glee" that anybody die. The very fact that we go out door to door testifies to this fact. If the young girls are like a lot of J.W they we're just a nervous as you were. As far as being Dangerous? Where did Malkhos grow up that two young woman
(with bibles) in high heels are Dangerous? Nice post thank you for sharing that with us.

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Fair point, Mr Humourlessanonymous. A sect of pacifists who refuse military service are hardly likely to be a physical danger to anyone, and I applaud them for it. I suppose he means mentally dangerous.

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Yes, that's right. Where Malkhos and I differ, though, so vastly, is I simply don't see the point in argument. You just can't get anywhere. Blind, unquestioned faith terrifies me, personally. Probably at heart I truly am an atheist.

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It's creepy how certain religious organizations feel the need to monitor private individuals' blog entries and comment on what they believe is misinformation. It could easily be argued that a heresy such as that of the Arians is the most dangerous kind of lunacy, an attempt to lead good Trinitarians astray.

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You've picked up the spirit of it quite well.

The JH are so far gone into heresy, that angle would hardly be worth analyizing.

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Just so people get the right information...

You create an utterly fantastic, sadistic fantasy of hell (for which there is no conceivable evidence you could offer since it is a non-falsifiable hypothesis), where everyone who doesn't believe and think precisely as you do are eternally tortured (it hardly matters if you remove the Biblical references to fire--how can you possibly believe in something like hell, it is so monstrous it is hardly conceivable!). Why exactly in the first place would you want such a falsehood to be true, except you derived pleasure from fantasizing your neighbors being so punished? And then of course, you do yourselves the enormous favor of granting yourselves the power of saving the innocent from such punishment by persuading them to think and believe precisely as you do. That must make you feel good about yourselves.

How could you think that I considered these women physically dangerous? O'Brien was physically dangerous. It is really no surprise that after prolonged torture, he was able to induce Winston to say, 'Do it to Julia!' But to want, under no compulsion, to surrender your freedom to groupthink, to pretend that it is a virtue,that is dangerous.

"Nice post thank you for sharing that with us?" Doesn't irony like that violate the ninth commandment? By the way, which other literary tropes are forbidden by Biblical law?

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Oh Malkhos would have loved the scene that unfolded in front of our building the other day. I've still got that 'atheist bus' campaign sticker on our car, the one that says "God probably doesn't exist. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life". We saw a little man standing there reading it, whipping himself into a rage, wagging his finger at it and no doubt denouncing it as an act of religious war. His wife dragged him away in the end.

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Oh, he would have hastened out to argue the matter, I'm sure.

I don't know if you've such things in England, but here in the States one often sees a person's belief system put onto his or her car by means of a fish, the one that's representative of Jesus; one often sees these symbols in churches as part of the iconography of Christianity. If you see this on a person's car, it means he or she is a believer. Not to Malkos. "Goddam thumper in front of us. Why don't you ram them?" But on the other hand, if he sees a fish with legs and labeled Darwin, he heartily approves. The Christian response to this was to create a shark-like fish representing Jesus eating the Darwin fish. That makes Malkhos so angry I'm glad I drive most of the time.

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Yes the fish sticker has become common here too. I was amused to see that my wife's friend in the Czech Republic had one on the car he'd bought second-hand from Germany, but he didn't realise what it was. When I told him he set about scraping it off with comical haste, exclaiming "fuck christian fish!"

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stefanie-bean.livejournal.com

I suppose you could always "one-up" them with a bigger fish eating the Christian fish eating the leggy one. Maybe give the biggest fish some flying-fish-type wings. :D

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That would be cute. At least, watching everybody trying to outdo each other would be interesting.

I'm glad to see a reply from you. I think about you every time I look at LJ and hope you're doing well.

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Last time I ran into those guys they tried an unusal tactic. They showed up a the door and without identifying themselves asked me if I believed the world would ever be united in a peaceful one-world government. I told them no. When they asked me why, they didn't seem to quite know what to say when I told them, "I suppose because I'm not a Jehovah's Witness."

I do like some of their art, though. Somewhere I've got one of their tracts depicting the whore of Babylon and the Great Beast.

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Oh cool. I want her already. She looks a bit early 80s. Abba gone bad.

Their illustrations remind me a lot of utopian sci-fi art. Upbeat. Happy people. Racial harmony. Nice weather. I opined on it a while back: http://benicek.livejournal.com/17928.html

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Ishtar riding on the back of the Seleucid Dynasty--who wouldn't want that?

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karinmollberg.livejournal.com

Hahaha! ABBA gone bad almost made my day, yesterso. Great art often does.

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I wonder how much the JW's owe science fiction for their art.

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Now there's my idea of a god!

Did you ever seen the Conehead movie? The main character is an advanced scout from an alien invasion fleet living in disguise as a human. He is visited by the Witnesses, and they start that way, asking him, 'Do you think the earth will soon be destroyed?' Knowing his race's plans, he answered, "Yes!' Emboldened by this the Witness pressed on,'Do you believe that a great cataclysm will leave only 144,000 people alive?' 'I do think there will be nearly that many survivors.'

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That's a goddess you can get behind, so to speak?

If I remember correctly the same tract has a picture of the Great Beast devouring the Whore as well. I can't find that one online, though.

I haven't seen the film, though I can imagine the scene. I'll have to add that one to the list of films to see if I live long enough.

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petrusplancius.livejournal.com

Hereabouts it is almost always two women, a young one and an older one, and they are invariably well-mannered. It takes courage to approach total strangers who in many cases are bound to regard you as tiresome or mad. I find it hard enough to ask people to contribute money to a charity.

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