{"id":5035,"date":"2010-12-01T22:01:40","date_gmt":"2010-12-02T06:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/?p=5035"},"modified":"2010-12-01T22:02:14","modified_gmt":"2010-12-02T06:02:14","slug":"whatever-you-do-dont-prop-up-your-arm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/?p=5035","title":{"rendered":"Whatever you do, don&#8217;t prop up your arm"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We were talking about Noah&#8217;s Ark tonight, which reminded me of those Illustrated Bible Stories books that were an inevitable find at any doctor&#8217;s or dentist&#8217;s office when we were kids. I ate those stories up like Milk Duds. &#8220;Remember the Flood, Karen?&#8221; She didn&#8217;t remember that one. &#8220;The Flood was Jesus&#8217; tears.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Then I reminded her of the one about the kid in the hospital &#8212;<\/p>\n<p>Didn&#8217;t take any more than that. We both put up our right hands and burst out laughing. Jake thought we were crazy.<\/p>\n<p>I tried to find it online just now, and could only find a discussion of it over on James Randi&#8217;s forums. <a href=\"http:\/\/forums.randi.org\/showthread.php?p=2040576\" target=\"_blank\">I&#8217;ll let &#8220;Lisa Simpson&#8221; explain the story in her own words:<br \/>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>My &#8220;favorite&#8221; story was one of a boy, in the hospital for a tonsillectomy or something similarly minor, who was placed in the same hospital room as a boy who had been in a car accident and critically injured. Car accident boy is dying and scared. Tonsillectomy boy tells car accident boy that if he raises his hand, Jesus will know he&#8217;s ready to go to heaven and Jesus will take him. But car accident boy is too injured to raise his hand by himself, so tonsillectomy boy uses a pillow to prop up car accident boy&#8217;s arm. In the morning, when tonsillectomy boy wakes up, car accident boy is dead, dead, dead.<\/p>\n<p>I spent many a night sleeping with my arms clenched to my sides, afraid that Grim Reaper Jesus would kill me in the night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>My favorite response downthread:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>So tonsillectomy boy killed him and got away with it? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And further downthread, commentor joobz explains that there are, in fact, some New Testament stories he likes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Like the story of Jesus with some dude and a whore.<br \/>\nwhore comes in, some dude says, &#8220;begone whore!&#8221;. And Jesus is all like, &#8220;No, come back here whore, it&#8217;s ok&#8230; That guy is being a D**hebag&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As a kid, religion baffled and titillated me. I fantasized wrestling matches between God and Satan, refereed by Jesus or Moses (depending on who had ref duty that day, I suppose). I was bright enough to recognize the various internal inconsistencies but not a natural cynic enough (like my son) to reject it all out of hand. Christianity in particular fascinated me; I remember reading stories of the Crucifixion that read like torture porn, and I wondered, and still wonder, how God could be kind and good and <em>also be okay<\/em> with damnation being mankind&#8217;s default state.<\/p>\n<p>What amazes me is that so many people DO get their heads around these ideas, and become quite agitated if someone challenges their rationality.<\/p>\n<p>D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We were talking about Noah&#8217;s Ark tonight, which reminded me of those Illustrated Bible Stories books that were an inevitable find at any doctor&#8217;s or dentist&#8217;s office when we were kids. I ate those stories up like Milk Duds. &#8220;Remember the Flood, Karen?&#8221; She didn&#8217;t remember that one. &#8220;The Flood was Jesus&#8217; tears.&#8221; Then I&hellip; <a class=\"continue\" href=\"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/?p=5035\">Continue Reading Whatever you do, don&#8217;t prop up your arm<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opium-for-the-masses","radius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5035"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5037,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5035\/revisions\/5037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}