I had no intentions of crapping on you. I have wondered if this could be done for oer 65 years. I have come to the realization that it would be a waste of time. (at least for me. I can only speak for myself and in no way want to tell someone what to do) I hope for discussion as if you have the power to do what it is you want to do to better the world I would probably be one of your first supporters as this world can surely be made better and we are the only ones who can accomplish the task. If I am a dick then it is so, I however hope this is not the case as I have no interest in doing the stuff one has to do to be that. I do have a dick, it does not work for anything other than making a mess in the bathroom. I am really sorry if I have offended anyone that is not what I am about,

Wow.......that's hilarious. I think I would actually pay an admittance to a church service where it was guaranteed that would happen.

What happened in my local unitarian house is many different strange alternatively practicing people came together (wiccans and Buddhists mostly) and each sub group began using the buidling on different nights as a place of refuge. Only on Sundays would they all come together. even then, they'd do weird rituals. It was like a place where they decided to become as silly as they possibly could.

@Amyreneeferox Interesting. Every group has to have something to coalesce around and at a UU church that's not going to be a common doctrine, by definition. The three UU churches I've poked my head into seem to coalesce around liberal politics, usually of the activist / SJW variety, which is just substituting one ideology for another. I'm fairly liberal myself, politically, but attending any of these churches would be like being trapped in a never-ending Bernie Sanders campaign, and much as I loved Bernie, that is not something I want to do with the rest of my life. They have Buddhists, Atheists, etc., but the common denominator seems to be political.

I can see where it could get weird in the way you mention, too. The two denominations that the UU formed out of around 1960 were themselves fairly diverse, one was more blue-collar, the other more elitist. The in-joke is that one group through god was too good to condemn man, and the other thought man was too good for god to condemn. So the question is, with all this hyper-diversity, what do they actually stand FOR such that there's something to coalesce around? They usually resort to the slogan, "Standing on the side of love" but in practice, at least at one of these churches that I've been on their listserv and attended quite a few of their activities, there's an ugly underbelly of "splitting" behavior where someone who would be the very definition of a conservative's derisive label "snowflake" takes up some sort of offense, blows it out of proportion, and demands to always feel "safe", threatens to leave if they don't get their way, and then everyone comes along to smooth their ruffled feathers.

Not interesting to me.

@Amyreneeferox I've visited that very same UU church you're referring to. I wanted it to be my liberal refuge. I wanted it to be the place I could call home after I left christianity. Unfortunately, I never quite felt like I belonged. I like the idea you proposed. But, like you, I'm the introverted type and could never be a charismatic leader. I could be the behind the scences guy, but definitely not the leader. I like your idea though.

It is for me. I'm debilitatingly nervous

@Amyreneeferox Brazen... That's an interesting word. To be bold and without shame. Frequently used with reference to doing illegal or immoral acts. Enduring embarrassing or difficult situations by behaving with apparent confidence and lack of shame. I think I like brazen.

@MrLink it's extra difficult for me to be social( like at work ) because every damn I thought i have is seen as so deranged by the average sheeple. It makes it difficult for small talk to be possible especially.

@Amyreneeferox Once you stretch a mind, it never returns to its original shape. Sounds like fun.

These stories were given in the Bible to illustrate how distorted their thinking was - just as we have them today. Lot's daughters, being from S&G, picked up some habits living there. Incest was prevalent in those cities. But, how do we REALLY know they raped their father? He had a drinking problem. Maybe he molested them as children, grooming them for sex later, conditioning them to think incest was okay.. And don't forget how mysogenistic the scribes were that wrote these stories, as were religious leaders later for hundreds of years. The scribe could have reversed the truth and made the daughters the attackers.

As for Japeth, he lived in a land where they sacrificed their own children. He wasn't raised a Jew, but converted. The point here was that he thought that since Yahweh permitted burnt offerings, it would be okay to sacrifice his daughter.

Just like there are crazy zealots today handling snakes (what I grew up with), blowing up abortion clinics and the people in them to protest that abortion is murder, they had nutty, dangerous zealots back then.

@Lewellyn3 I am really impressed with your knowledge. It is rare. Yep it's probably made up anyway. I take the bible for what it actually says. If i got a girl so drunk she did not know htat was happening and had sex with her it would rightly be called rape. So that and that alone is my justification for calling it rape. But you are right we don't know that it happened at all so we just can't speculate on fiction.

Japeth is just a horrible story. I think of him as one of the bibles worst idiots. The story also makes god look very bad. For this reason I am glad and hope it is pure fiction.

@DavidLaDeau My point about Lot is that the author of the story could have reversed what really happened, based on how the Jews (and later religious leaders) regarded women as deceitful temptresses ever since Eve. That theme carried on for centuries, to the extent that women weren't given pain medicine during childbirth because they believed that pain was woman's punishment for leading Adam to sin. (I always thought of Adam as weak, spineless, and probably henpecked.) I agree, Jephtha was an idiot. But there were human sacrifices performed where he lived and he must have thought it would be cool with Yaweh, too. Lotsa stupid throughout the ages!

@Lewellyn3 You could not be more perceptive.

@DavidLaDeau thank you!

@Lewellyn3 I am still dying to know how you have come by such depth of understanding. You not only have to have much historical back ground, but also literally in respect to that history in addition to cultural anthropology....

@DavidLaDeau ..I've always had a learning addiction, especially languages, cultures, customs of people. Maybe its the travel, too; I've visited 4 continents, 37 countries. When I was in college, I took a world religion class and realized there were things one must consider when reading religious writings: interprete all writings in the context of that time in which it was written; don't judge the people by the morals of today but of their time and culture; always have a map of the region depicting the time of the story; always have a dictionary or better, a concordance, of the language in which the text is written. Translations are often a scrubbed up version of the original text. I try to always take the translations with a grain of salt! (It was while researching Luke Chapter 7 this way that convinced me that homosexuality is NOT a sin, rather the scribes altered the text! Of course, preachers will NEVER reveal that to their congregations!)