The Joke

Prince Charles was being shown around a Scottish hospital.

At the end of his visit, he is shown into a ward with a number of patients who show no obvious signs of injury. He goes to examine the first man he sees, and the man proclaims:

Fair fa' yer honest, sonsie face,Great chieftain e' the puddin' race!Aboon them
a' ye tak your place, painch tripe or thairm:Weel are ye wordy o' a
grace as lang's my arm.

The Englishman, somewhat taken aback, goes to the next patient, and immediately the patient launches into:

Some hae meat, and canna eat,And some wad eat that want it,But we hae meat and
we can eat,And sae the Lord be thankit.

This continues with the next patient:

Wee sleekit cow'rin tim'rous beastie,O what a panic's in thy breastie!Thou need
na start awa sae hasty, wi' bickering brattle.I wad be laith to run
and chase thee, wi' murdering prattle!"

"Well," Prince Charles mutters to the scottish physician, "I see you saved the psychiatric ward for the last."

"Nay, nay," the Scottish doctor corrected him, "this is the Serious Burns unit."

 

Scintilate

I have outlived
my youthfullness
so the quiet life for me

where once
iused to
scintilate

now I sin till ten
past three.

Roger McGough

Ben and the art of auto-motive theology

The answer According to Ben in our Townsville Branch.

Question:
Does anyone have a fish decal (for a Christian car) with a cross in it for a CSO. The customer bought one and it just wouldn't stick. Which leads to an interesting theological question? Do you think it was the sins of the car, or the owners sins that caused this?

Answer:

Dear Tim
What a fascinating question. Perhaps we can answer that question by looking at a similar situation in the Bible. John 9:1-7.

1As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. 2And his disciples asked him,
"Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
3Jesus
answered, "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works
of God might be displayed in him. 4We must work the works of him who sent me
while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. 5As long as I am in the
world, I am the light of the world."
6Having said these things; he spat on
the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man's eyes with
the mud 7and said to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent).
So he went and washed and came back seeing. (John 9:1-7, ESV)

Notice the disciples' question: "Whose sin was it that this caused this man to be born blind? Was it his or his parents'?"
Or in our context: "Whose sin was it that caused this decal not to adhere to the car? Was it the car or its owner?"
How can anyone sin before he or she is born?

Now, this gets fascinating. Just from the context of the passage, one can infer that some people (the disciples among them) believed God would punish the sins of parents by causing problems with the children. We can also infer that people believed God would punish a person's sins directly. In both cases, such punishment could extend to causing physical disability. Another inference-perhaps the most unusual one to us-is that one could be born into a condition of punishment for his own sins. Which leads us to consider, maybe it is not the owner of the car at fault but perhaps it was the 'parents' of the car who did not adhere to the laws of Scripture and therefore causing the car to be punished by not allowing a 'Christian' decal to adhere to it?
The text also refutes an idea or two. One false idea, sadly believed by many who claim to follow the Bible today, was that all illness or disability is caused by God as punishment for sin, or, alternatively, by the oppression of Satan. Sometimes on a cold morning I would debate a similar dilemma on why my car would not start. "Why me Lord? I'm already late as it is! What have I done to deserve this? Jesus clearly refutes the former case in his answer to the disciples.
What else can we directly infer from this passage alone? Not much.
How could someone who is not yet born sin? Did he commit some sin in utero?
Or perhaps during the car's manufacturing process it popped down to the pub or a ciggie and a few beers hoping no-one would notice.

What light does Scripture shed on these beliefs? The Old Testament talks about divine retribution, even such being passed on to the children of those God is punishing. So, we can see in Scripture the concept of the man being punished for his parents' sins. (I merely mention the existence of this topic; much further elaboration would be required to address its applicability to a case such as this.) However, nowhere in Scripture do we see the idea of someone being punished for personal sins committed before birth. Was God being pre-emptive, punishing the man with blindness for something the man would later do?

Ultimately, Scripture does not answer the question about how someone could be born into a condition of punishment for his own wrongdoings. Here we must look to the historical context of the passage.

Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible, in this case apparently referencing the work of J.B. Lightfoot, summarizes the historical context of the disciples' questions quite nicely:

It was a universal opinion among the Jews that calamities of all kinds were the effects of sin. CF Luke 13:1-4. The case, however, of this man was that of one that was blind from his birth, and it was a question which the disciples could not determine whether it was his fault or that of his parents. Many of the Jews, as it appears from their writings (see Lightfoot), believed in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls; or that the soul of a man, in consequence of sin, might be compelled to pass into other bodies, and be punished there. They also believed that an infant might sin before it was born (see Lightfoot), and that consequently this blindness might have come upon the child as a consequence of that. It was also a doctrine with many that the crime of the parent might be the cause of deformity in the child, particularly the violation of the command in Leviticus 20:18.
We could then extend that to include the transmigration of souls into machinery, which could then explain why some cars, truck and tractors seem to have a personality of their own. A document discovered in the archives of General Motors in Detroit confirms this theory and goes on to explain how many hours of research went into stopping this transmigration of human souls into the vehicles during the manufacturing process, although some still do get through and into the vehicles

So, from the larger body of Scripture, the local context of this passage, and some educated guesses, one might derive a number of correct conclusions about what relatively common beliefs were for the subject at hand; but, without examining other historical writings, one could never derive all the possibilities of what was believed-especially the possibility of the transmigration of souls, which is not at all referenced in Scripture.
So getting back to Tim's question: Do you think it was the sins of the car,
or the owner's sins that caused this? I would have to say it was both.
Most likely the car (or the transmigrated soul within the car) had sinned in a former life and is now paying for those sins by 1) being a cheap and nasty car and 2) by having an owner who is too stupid to realise that if you stick a magnetic decal to a plastic bumper it will most definitely fall off.

Anaesthetists Hymn.....enjoy

An African Tale

In 1986, Mkele Mbembe was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University .
On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Mbembe approached it very carefully.
He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant's foot and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it.
As carefully and as gently as he could, Mbembe worked the wood out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot.
The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments.
Mbembe stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away.
Mbembe never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.
Twenty years later, Mbembe was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenaged son.
As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Mbembe and his son Tapu were standing.
The large bull elephant stared at Mbembe, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.
Remembering the encounter in 1986, Mbembe couldn't help wondering if this was the same elephant.
Mbembe summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Mbembe' s legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.
Probably wasn't the same elephant.

Ireland's worst air disaster occurred early this morning when asmall two-seater Cessna plane crashed into a cemetery. Irish searchand rescue workers have recovered 1826 bodies so far and expect that number to climb as digging continues into the night.

Apparently, 1 in 5 people in the world are Chinese. There are 5people in my family, so it must be one of them. It's either my mum or myDad,or my older Brother Colin, or my younger Brother Ho-Cha-Chu?
But I think its Colin.

For those of you who are fans of the Dav Vinci code, or the Spice Girls for that matter, here is what art restorers found underneath the original painting of the last Supper or La Cene.

Have a blessed Australia Day everyone

Believe it or not, but we have Rob to thank for the following contribution:

An American decided to write a book about famous churches around the world.

So he bought a plane ticket and took a trip to Orlando, thinking that he would start by working his way across the USA from South to North. On his first day he was inside a church taking photographs when he noticed
a golden telephone mounted on the wall with a sign that read "$10,000 per call".

The American, being intrigued, asked a priest who was strolling by what the telephone was used for. The priest replied that it was a direct line to heaven and that for $10,000 you could talk to God.
The American thanked the priest and went along his way.
Next stop was in Atlanta. There, at a very large cathedral, he saw the same golden telephone with the same sign under it.
He wondered if this was the same kind of telephone he saw in Orlando and he asked a nearby nun what its purpose was. She told him that it was a direct line to heaven and that for $10,000 he> could talk to God.

"O.K., thank you," said the American. He then travelled to Indianapolis, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Boston and New York. In every church he saw the same golden telephone with the same "$10,000 per call" sign under it.

The American, upon leaving Vermont decided to travel to AUSTRALIA to see if Australians had the same phone. He arrived in Australia, and again, in the first church he entered, there was the same golden telephone, but this time the sign under it read "40 cents per call." The American was surprised so he asked the priest about the sign.

"Father, I've travelled all over America and I've seen this same golden telephone in many churches. I'm told that it is a direct line to Heaven, but in the US the price was $10,000 per call. Why is it so cheap here?"

The priest smiled and answered, "You're in Australia now, son - it's a local call".