Well, it begins...again.
Atkins. I've got thirty pounds I would LOVE to drop by fall, and Atkins works well with my metabolism. Now, if I can just stay SANE. There are sweets that one can eat sparingly (Russell Stover has several excellent goodies). I'll keep you posted.

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We are having RAIN! We are suffering the worst drought in Alabamastan since 1924, so even spitting on the ground helps. Texas gets floods, and we're bone-dry.

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Spiritually, your wise and loving Aardvark is in a staredown contest with The Almighty. What big eyes You have....

I wonder who'll blink first.

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David is recorded as having been in a snit with God. The whole Uzzah thing. God didn't Smite David for his impertinence, and David got over it. The accretion of superstition and opinion upon the Faith Once Delivered (atheists note: I did not just repeat myself.) utterly astounds me.
To read the image of the Christian Faith as represented in Twain's writings is staggering when compared to the Actual Teachings. Read "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven". Better yet, go HERE and buy Will Vinton's Claymation classic The Adventures of Mark Twain. Not just a kiddy romp; it conveys much of the darkness of Twain's later years, when he blamed God for taking his wife Livy. Stormfield's race with a comet garners him trouble in the afterlife. You will laugh.
To be plain: buy the DVD. AND read the story.

Back to cases: The amazing collection of junk that passes for Christian thinking saddens me.

Don't get mad at God.
God helps those who help themselves.
Cremation is bad.
The devil is So-o-o-o-o powerful.
Forgive and forget.
Getting angry is BAD.

...like that.

Anger is wired into our circuitry, as surely as is sex or hunger for food.
The scripture says "Be angry, and sin not". Anger is not sin. What you do with it can be.

I personally blame the hymns that we sing. There is no better way to insinuate an idea into your brain than to link it to music. Tragically, there are MANY bad ideas, and MUCH bad theology linked to hymns. Considering the "Heaven as Escape" motif from the Depression Era (Albert Brumley was a hack in my book, but a popular one. The Stamps-Baxter machine has churned out scads of theologically glurgey ummmmm...fertilizer, that is sung by millions.) The most harmful is the Heaven is Escape stuff: "I'll Fly Away", "This World Is Not My Home, I'm Just a-Passing Through", "There's a Rainbow in the Cloud". Mercy, I get ill just writing the titles.

There is precious little actual "Heaven" talk in the Bible. The majority of the teaching of Jesus was not about getting you into Heaven, but getting Heaven into YOU. The Kingdom of God is transforming to you, and to the world around you. Living as a Kingdom person makes you other than the world, and sets you apart. As your life attains Kingdom order, that order spills over to those around you, and opens opportunity for sharing what God has done in you through Christ.

Bottom line: We are to make disciples of the nations, not whine about escaping the mean ol' nations by flying away to heaven. I can't find THAT attitude anywhere in the Bible.

If it's not in the Bible, then as Christians, it shouldn't be in us.