Will Fluffy go to Heaven?

My friend Andrew forwarded me a link to this site, which paints ghastly memorial pictures of Jesus holding your recently deceased pet (done for a fee, of course.) This kind of idiocy does raise, however, the issue of whether or not animals go into heaven. The problem is that the Bible is silent on the subject, as far as actually outright stating whether or not they do.

This seems like a fun group, a church dedicated to getting animals into heaven:

'...Our Mission Is To Prove Without A Shadow Of A Doubt That When God Made Animals He Made Them With Spirits And Souls and intended that they have a place in Heaven...'

I found them doing a Google search on 'will my pet go to heaven.' I could write for months on those search results, but many of them say the same thing, focusing on the book of Ecclesiastes as the scriptural source offering proof that in fact they do. Of course one can also offer countering scripture that hints that in fact animals don't go to heaven. If you're interested, just follow the link.

But what I found funny is the volume of search results - over 2.3 million hits. If you use quotes around the phrase, requiring an exact match, you get 721 hits. So I decided to compare that result to others:

"Will my husband go to heaven." - 2 hits

"Will my wife go to heaven." - 0 hits (Give it a week or so, and the google spider will hit this website, creating one hit - this blog entry)

"Will my spouse go to heaven." - 0 hits..

"Will my parents go to heaven." - 0 hits

"Will my mother go to heaven." - 0 hits

"Will my father go to heaven." - 1 hit

"Will my brother go to heaven." - 4 hits

"Will my sister go to heaven." - 1 hit

"Will my child go to heaven." - 5 hits

"Will my son go to heaven." - 1 hit

"Will my daughter go to heaven." - 0 hits

"Will my neighbor go to heaven." - 0 hits

"Will my enemy go to heaven." - 0 hits.

"Will my friend go to heaven." - 4 Hits

Again, "will my pet go to heaven" gets 721 hits. As a comparison I used "Is my ... going to heaven" and got very similar results. So there is a lot of angst out there about our pets getting into heaven. And not much about people close to us getting there. So we simply don't give a shit, either because we are convinced we are, convinced we aren't, or don't care about anyone other than ourselves:

"Will I go to heaven." - 805 hits.

Cowboy

This is classic:

'...President Bush may like to be seen as a swaggering tough guy with a penchant for manly outdoor pursuits, but in a new book one of his closest allies has said he is afraid of horses.

Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, derided his political friend as a "windshield cowboy" – a cowboy who prefers to drive – and "the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life". ...'

To be fair, most other preppies from Connecticut are also afraid of horses. H/T TPM.

Music Lessons

How To Record Music:

How to Play Music:

Class Dismissed

'Everybody likes Ganesh'

It looks like a certain Hindu deity is becoming very trendy:

'...Patel and her family will be one of many to visit a temple to honor Ganesh. Representatives from two of the U.S. temples where Ganesh is the presiding or primary deity say the numbers attending the celebrations are rising.

At the Sri Ganesha Hindu Temple in South Jordan, Utah, 50 people attended the first Ganesh Chaturthi celebration in 1995; about 500 are expected this year. At the Hindu Temple Society of North America in Queens, N.Y., which was built in 1977, the festival has grown from three days to nine to accommodate all the worshipers.

The numbers are not surprising, said Deepak Sarma, an associate professor of religious studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

"There are lots of different sects in Hinduism," he said. "Ganesh overlaps with all of them. Everybody likes Ganesh."...'

Ganesh Chaturthi (Ganesh's birthday celebration) is this Saturday, September 15th. Another good anniversary to celebrate.

9/11

Gary Kamiya has an excellent article in today's Salon. Some choice quotes:

'...Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by "extremists," demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.

Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation's defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Many more Americans have now died in a needless war in Iraq than were killed in the terror attacks, and tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Billions of dollars have been wasted. America's moral authority, more precious than gold, has been tarnished by torture and lies and the erosion of our liberties. The world despises us to an unprecedented degree. An entire country has been wrecked. The Middle East is ready to explode. And the threat of terrorism, which the war was intended to remove, is much greater than it was.

All of this flowed from our response to 9/11. And so, six years later, we need to do more than mourn the dead. We need to acknowledge the blindness and bigotry that drove our response. Until we do, not only will the stalemate over Iraq persist, but our entire Middle Eastern policy will continue down the road to ruin...'

This September 11th is the sixth anniversary of the attacks. But it is also the 101st anniversary of the beginning of Mahatma Gandhi's campaign against non-violence. It would be great if we could start commemorating that event. Because as several have been pointing out, we have no need to be made to remember what happened on this day six years ago - we keep having it pounded into our heads every damn day by this administration.

The Back Forty

This summer we've turned the front stoop into the back forty. We're growing four cherry tomato plants, a fajita bell pepper plant and a Serrano pepper plant. The results have been a good success, especially the tomatoes - they're sweet and tasty. The peppers have been a bit more problematic. The output from a bell pepper plant is not huge, so when one ripens, Kathy will chop it up and put it into something. The Serranos have mostly spiced up guacamole.

This 'growing things locally' is quite a trend, though I have my doubts of this project's scalability. Each cherry tomato has about five calories, and the average production of a plant is 50 or so tomatoes. So that's a total of one thousand calories for my entire farm. Or about enough to sustain me for a little more than half a day. It's not going to be cutting down my trips to the grocery store.