Loud Mouth here, fresh from reading a news story about religious protestors who object to stores secularizing Christmas by using the term “Happy Holidays”… As if, for the first three centuries of Christianity, Christmas was celebrated at all. Only pagans celebrated the birthdays of their deities and many Christians opposed all efforts to relegate Jesus’ …
Author Archives: loudmouthinthebalcony
Peek-a-BOO!
Maybe you’ve already received this image of the nighttime sky in an e-mail message. If not, take a wild guess at what that eerie looking object in the heavens might be. Need a hint? Well, according to the originator of the e-mail, this image was captured by NASA. You know the Loud Mouth in the …
For Real, What Is Intelligence?
Conventional wisdom says we must ask the right question to get the right answer. So when I spotted a Chicago Tribune column asking, “If God’s so intelligent, why is every last thing on Earth so messed up?” I almost choked on my salt and pepper potato chip. In the article entitled “God’s Imperfect World”, the …
What’s an Act of God?
The thought of 30,000 unbathed, hungry souls living–barely surviving, really–inside a New Orleans sports stadium with no water, food, electricity, toilets, or air conditioning pales when compared with the conditions on the streets outside. There are reports of corpses on medians and lawns, anarchy and rape. Rape? Did I hear that correctly? A man’s body …
Bravo! What a Brilliant Performance!
One Sunday afternoon last winter, I walked out of a movie theater so overwhelmed by Hotel Rwanda’s larger than life inhumanity that I dared not get into a cab. I was thoroughly convinced that my emotional energy could not fit inside an automobile. Instead, I walked the mile home so that the Chicago “hawk” could …
Truth Is Still Stranger than Fiction
This article first appeared in the August 2005 issue of Sharing the Joy newsletter, published by The Joy Cathedral, Seattle WA. www.thejoycathedral.org I saw the funniest commercial the other day. It was a spot for DiGiorno frozen pizza. The scene: Geppetto’s cobbler shop. He’s scolding Pinocchio. Again. “You’ll never be a real boy if you …
Life is ALWAYS Fair
I’m an armchair computer geek, have been since I bought my first computer (a Commodore Vic 20) in the early 80s. I was one of AOL’s first customers. In fact, I was online before you could charge down a entry ramp to the Information Superhighway unescorted; I used Prodigy as a gateway. “Blogging” is the …