Welcome to Cooking with Rent A Friend! Today we’re going to be making an easy recipe that everyone will love! We’re going to be making some cookies. This is an old family recipe; it goes all the way back to our first parents Adam and Eve. But don’t worry- this isn’t Grandma Eve’s Apple Cobbler Surprise!
[audience laughter]
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Welcome back to the GOSPEL! To refresh your memory, here’s the hot rockin’ acronym that’s been lighting up the top of the Pop Metaphysical Charts:
G– God made you to have a personal relationship with Him.
O– Our sins separate us from God.
S– Sin cannot be removed with good works.
P– Paying the price for sin, Jesus died and rose again.
E– Everyone who trusts in Him alone has eternal life.
L– Life with Jesus starts now and lasts forever.
So far we’ve taken a good look at the person we call “God.” He made you to have a personal relationship with him. In a previous episode I unpacked some of his defining traits, but summing up the eternal God in a two page semi-weekly blog is like drawing New York City on a Napkin.
This week, we’re going to take a look at the second letter in our acronym, whose name I am not allowed to say on account of it being copyrighted, trademarked, and owned by Harpo Studios. But I think you know the one I mean. You may remember this vowel from the start of the Canadian National Anthem, or from the end of the names of some of your favorite cereals and canned spaghetti’s.
To the casual observer, theology can seem like a dense underbrush of spiky vines, meshed grasses, towering trees, stinging insects, and near lethal allergens. This is how the rain forest in the Amazon Rain Basin appears to me. I’ve not been there, but I spoke to a friend about it. She went to the Amazon to work on a medical boat, providing assistance to the poor villagers who live on the river. Apparently I was absolutely correct.
It’s a miracle that anyone survives living there.
Their average stinging insect is the size of a single engine plane. To be fair, the Chicago Suburbs has all the allergens, stinging insects and humidity of the Amazon, but far more traffic due to construction, and where they have trees, we have political corruption. But I digress.
OK, let’s see here: We’ve taken Pascal’s wager, met an elephant, we’ve thought (And therefore we are), we’ve had dinner with Hitler, and seen how nature and the universe at large prove the existence of God. Whew! I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’ve hiked all across the existential map. Or at least the Metaphysical Map.
I wonder how Dora the Explorer does it every day? That kid must be slamming cappuccino like there’s no tomorrow. I’ll bet that backpack of hers contains nothing but RedBull.
Now that we’ve seen why it makes sense to believe in God, the next logical question is “WHICH God?” The Hindus alone have 330 million of them (Which gives you a possible 900,000 holidays per DAY. The Hindu greeting card industry should be the wealthiest and most powerful in the universe!) 
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I recently wrote a series of articles where in I explained why Matt Walsh is an idiot. In
short, it was because he decided to spend valuable time on social media- time he COULD
have spent teaching people why they should not murder babies or allow the government
to remove all of our freedoms- ranting at length about how he feels Young Earth Biblical
Creationists are morons who hate science.
I suppose we should consider it from his point of view. Perhaps he looked around the
world and said, “People are murdering babies at state funded slaughter houses at a very
alarming rate, and people need to be educated so they can move and vote to stop these
senseless acts of murder. As a conservative with a sizable platform, I am in a position to help LOTS of people see how abortion is murder. On the other hand, do people know how STUPID Biblical Creationists are? I guess the babies can fend for themselves for a few more days…”
Perhaps he had to flip a coin.
Lately, the church attenders in our nation have wondered how, if it’s so obvious that Genesis 1-3 are meant to be read as literal history, that so many people with college degrees have decided that it is a literary device meant to teach a spiritual lesson and not real history. Their point is a good one- why would educated people fail to miss the obvious historicity of Genesis 1-3 and then themselves write all kinds of theories about how Genesis is a metaphor for the ancient pagan temple dedication, used by Moses as a literary device to describe how God formatted the world in the guise of a temple, like maybe the Egyptians would have done.
It is something of a quandary, and I think I can clear it all up by having you ponder one facet of literary history: Moby Dick.
Every now and then you see a news story which you are almost certain was originally from the Onion, or Babylon Bee, or other satirical news sites and somehow accidentally got spread as real news by people who didn’t check the source. It seems like these stories are happening with increasing regularity since the Cubs won the World Series and Trump was elected president of the United States. I mean, both of those are news stories which, if not for a full year of stories leading up to them, would easily have been dismissed in just the way I am describing.
This is a rabbit trail, but follow me here. Imagine you were in a coma since 2015. You had accidentally wandered into the theater showing Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, fully expecting to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Your brain, unable to deal with the blunt force trauma, blacks out and you wake up in time for Christmas 2016.
“What did I miss?” you ask.
And someone replies, “Well, the Cubs won the world series and Donald Trump is President of the United States.”
Would you believe it? This is what I am talking about. Continue reading
