Let’s celebrate!  I’m going to knock off early and play some League of Legends for a bit.  Then tonight from 9pm EDT to 1am EDT I’ll be streaming more league of legends showing people who to carry out of the jungle like a frackin’ pro. 

Watch live video from jteberhard on www.twitch.tv

No blogging tomorrow. Patheos is doing some kind of update so I’m forbidden from logging in. I guess it will be a day of relaxation and video games.

Darn. Hope you all join me!

It’s funny to me that people who subscribe to a religion that seems to augment divorce rates will then act like they are the exclusive owners of the word “family”.  You don’t need religion for a healthy family, you only need love.

Congrats mom and dad!  Enjoy the day of fishing.  You earned it.

And today I found an orchestral remix that is just lovely.  Enjoy!

My reader who has been suffering from profound depression has a treatment option open to her, but will need resources to do it, particularly childcare every day for three weeks from 8 to 5.  FWIW, I’ve suggested she start a Kickstarter page or some other fundraising thing.  If she does, I will give youse guys the link because you are awesome and generous and have ridden to the rescue of Christ’s beloved in the past.

Take a moment to let the irony of praying to the architect of depression to cure depression sink in.  It’s like people beseeching Osama Bin Laden to put a stop to terrorism.

What’s more, if prayer works, you don’t need the Kickstarter page.  However, if human being are the solution to every problem facing, like the people donating to the Kickstarter page and the psychological experts who have dedicated their lives to understanding the operation of the human mind, then the Kickstarter page makes perfect sense.  People like Shea say they believe in a god who answers prayers, but then act like it’s all bullshit.

And if the depressed person is Christ’s beloved, why would Christ afflict them with depression?  And why are the efforts of people who are not all-powerful required?

Another reader writes to ask for prayer as he struggles with a deep crisis of faith.

Father, hear our prayer that your son will find his footing on the Rock who is Jesus Christ and place his complete trust in you.  Mother Mary and St. Thomas the Doubter, pray for him.

Send them to me.  I can help them.

Being recovered also means weight gain.  That’s like getting a shot as a kid: it sucks to deal with, but you know it produces better health so you roll with it.  But lately I’ve gotten a little heavier than I care for and wanted to lose weight.  The very first day I began monitoring my caloric intake I could immediately feel the all-too-familiar wave of resentment toward food wash over me.  Sure, my mind said, if you ate the way you planned you could lose one pound per week, but you can trim back more and lose even more weight!  Food quickly began to feel like the enemy again, and this was no more pronounced than when I stepped on the scale.

Boy, did that ever produce the kind of nostalgia one generally tries to avoid.  I recall my obsession with the scale, of being owned by it.  I treated the scale like smokers treat their habit, by taking breaks from my work ten or more times a day to go get my fix on the scale.

Solution: control my environment.  Instead of focusing on the number on the scale, I focused on the numbers of what I was putting into my body.  How many cups of milk, how many ounces of chicken, etc.  Spread sheets galore!    It’s all about losing weight healthily without giving up, but also without letting the demon in the back of my skull pull me back in.  It’s a strained, and slightly frightening balancing act, but one that’s working.  It’s the same strategy as always: know what you’re facing, plan around it, and stick to the plan.

Today I stepped back on the scale for the first time in two weeks.  I lost three pounds, which is a healthy rate of weight loss (if you’re losing more than two pounds per week, that’s bad).  Rock on!  See you in another two weeks, scale.

This paragraph says it all very well:

I take issue with the fact that my peers and I were forced to attend a preferential religious sermon by a public school administration. The government, and Northwest is indeed a government for all intents and purposes, has no place in dictating the religion of the governed. May I remind the public of the first right listed in our Bill of Rights, established in order to protect the people from overbearing regimes: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Good for her.

Someone asked her for advice on how to forgive her cheating husband.  Here’s comes the failure bomb:

You see, if you’d have just kept the house nicer, he wouldn’t have cheated.  You have nobody to blame but yourself.

The irony?  She’ll probably be thankful for that advice.

She said she knew Jesus endorsed her because of three signs which she said she wouldn’t discuss publicly.

Well, I just read one of them:

Pierre had told the Miami Herald Jesus came to her in a dream:

I had a revelation when I was going to give up on this race. I had a dream, I know what I saw. A figure I can’t explain told me, ‘Don’t be afraid, I am your friend. I am walking with you side by side. You are not alone.’ I felt it was from heaven. It was an endorsement by Jesus.

Because, as everybody knows, your dreams always correlate 1:1 with reality.

Seriously, how can you dream one night that you’re flying and think “Oh, you can dream about anything, no matter how unrealistic” and then dream of a random figure saying you’re not alone and believe that it was Jesus, who could just swing by your house when you were awake, really visiting you and communicating with you to the best of his omniscient capability?  Seems to me Jesus doing that is no more realistic than you flying.

Ironically, the candidate hauling in the most votes was Kevin Burns, who is openly gay.  Jesus appears to be behind Burns…if you get me.

The Florida teenager who was arrested two weeks ago for causing a small explosion on the campus of her high school will not be charged with a crime. Kiera Wilmot, 16, was arrested by police in Bartow, Florida, after conducting an unauthorized science experiment which lightly damaged an eight ounce plastic water bottle.

At the time, Wilmot faced possible charges for “possessing or discharging weapons or firearms at a school sponsored event or on school property.” If she had been convicted, she could have faced up to five years in prison.

Wilmot’s arrest became a national story, as members of the press and the scientific community insisted that Wilmot was the victim of a massive overreaction from law enforcement. A crowdfunded legal defense fund netted over $8,000 to cover Wilmot’s potential legal fees, and a Change.org petition to get the charges dropped received nearly 200,000 signatures.

Kiera is back, but attending another school.  I’m just glad she didn’t have her future ruined over poor judgment when indulging her curiosity.  Kids make mistakes.  But Keria’s was academic, not malicious.  You’d think we’d reward something like that, but I guess we’ll settle for her still having a bright future.

Thanks to everybody who wrote in!

Vatican announcement: Disgraced Cardinal O’Brien leaving Scotland for “penance and prayer”…

Memo for those of you saying, “Oh yeah?  Why doesn’t the Vatican *jail* him?”

See. there’s this thing called “civil law”. We laity do the jailing thing. And we chose not to. That’s not Rome’s job, particularly with foreigners.  And the Church’s job is to emphasize the “mercy for sinners” thing.  Those who who would like the Church to be transformed into the Instrument of God’s Avenging Rage on Sinful Man should really reconsider what they hope to have happen to them the next time they enter a confessional.  This is one of the reasons I am mortally grateful that the Church, for all her  faults, is not run by polling combox Catholics on who needs to be kicked out, punished, and put to death this week.

It’s not that sane moral people expect the Catholic Church to exercise power they thankfully don’t have (like throwing someone in jail – we recall when the Catholic Church did have such power and it wasn’t pretty).  It’s that we expect the Church to be honest about certain things.

You see, Mark, the Catholic Church did act with regards to the O’Brien scandal: it attempted to keep his victims nice and quiet for fear of damage to the Church’s reputation.  When the Church attempted to silence those who complained about being violated by such a high ranking employee of the Church in attempt to preserve the Church’s integrity, we ask you, and other Catholics, to admit that the Church that you claim to be a moral beacon has a very backwards idea of integrity.  Despite supposedly getting its moral cues directly from god, the Catholic Church apparently still needs to learn lessons from mere mortals who have figured out that integrity means solidifying your reputation by looking out for the victims of those in your employ, not binding their victims to help protect the man who violated them by staying silent.  This was a lesson we were repeatedly told the Church had learned after it covered up and enabled several child rapists.  It is a lesson the Church has apparently not learned, and we expect Catholics to be fair-minded in their morality and, rather than citing the Church’s inaction and claiming how awesome they are, to withhold a great deal of respect until the Church manages to do better.

It has nothing to do with jailing the criminals in your employ.  Shea is right when he says that’s up to civil law.  However, that doesn’t mean the Catholic Church should do nothing, or that it should be absolved of what it did do.

And it also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t very much think less of those who continue to hand the organization money and to rationalize that such a transparently wicked organization is actually the brightest moral light on this planet, as if almost every other human being were incapable of realizing that shushing the victims of a guilty sexual predator was the wrong thing to do.  If you spend more resources protecting a rapist than his victims, it’s not just that you had a slip in moral judgment, but that the group claiming to be the moral guide for all of humanity cannot even manage the equivalent of moral arithmetic.

If the Church wants to take cues about integrity, it should listen to the complainants they attempted to intimidate into silence:

He said the four complainants had been asked to sign sworn statements to Archbishop Mennini.

But he said they had been warned that if their allegations were made public they would cause “immense further damage to the Church”.

“For me, this is about integrity,” he told the newspaper.

“There have been two sensations for me this week. One is feeling the hot breath of the media on the back of my neck and the other is sensing the cold disapproval of the church hierarchy for daring to break ranks. I feel like if they could crush me, they would.”

He said: “I thought it was best to let the men and women who put their hard-earned cash in the plate every Sunday know what has been happening. If you pay into something you have a right, but also a duty, to know what you are paying for.”

He added: “This isn’t about trying to own the moral high ground. I feel compassion for O’Brien, more compassion than the Church is showing me, but the truth has to be available – even when that truth is hard to swallow.”

The church should be glad that this young priest defied them.  He did the right thing.

We don’t ask that the Church jails O’Brien – we just ask you to give this lone priest more of your respect than the hierarchy that attempted to shut him up.  And, if you can’t do that, if you praise the organization that villainized the real hero in this story (who stood up to the actual villain even when the Church was trying to keep his misdeeds a secret), then it’s time to stop acting like you care more about morality than the maintenance of power for the Catholic Church.