Sunday, September 11, 2011
Why is it people are so quick to judge?
Dear Brother Sam,
(Numbers applied by Editor) (1) Why is it people are so quick to judge? (2) Why do people make hate on human kind weather it be racism, discrimination, and just plain nastyism? (3) Don't people understand that we are all on this giant rock of shit together? That we all need each other to survive on said giant rock of shit! (4) Are we all just to plain dumb to figure this out? (5) Or are we all just going to keep repeating history until we are all dead? I've pondered on these questions for quiet some time and haven't came up with a good answer. (6) Does this make me just as moronic as the rest of human kind?
Love,
Sister Cassandra Grimm
Dear Sister Casandra,
1. Fuck if I know.
2. Fuck if I know.
3. Fuck if I know.
4. No.
5. Yes.
6. Yes.
Love,
Brother Sam
Friday, September 9, 2011
The Bridge Case: Redux
Dear Brother Sam,
You’re standing on a bridge over a train track. Next to you to stands the very large pastor of a mega-church. A quarter-mile down the track you see a van get caught in a chain-reaction collision with several other vehicles and stuck on the track with all fifteen of its passengers trapped inside. A quarter-mile up the track a runaway train is speeding toward the van and will have to pass under the bridge before reaching it. Your choice is whether to watch as the train hits the van and kills the fifteen passengers, or push the pastor onto the track in front of the train, in the expectation that his immense bulk will stop it. You yourself are clearly not massive enough to even slow, let alone stop the train. So jumping is out of the question.
Do you (A) do nothing, and see fifteen people get killed, (B) Push the pastor, who, aside from his heft, is healthy and in the prime of his life, onto the track in order to stop the train, or (C) call your cousin Ray who has never see a train wreck?
Love,
Sister Dinah Moe Humm
Dear Sister Dinah,
Ah. A variation on the old “Bridge Case,” familiar to anybody who’s taken a college ethics class or done much reading on the subject. Most folks find it hard to choose. But that’s where the additional information about the large fellow next to me comes in handy. Knowing him to be a pastor, I take a hundred dollar bill from my pocket and toss it into the air. Naturally, the pastor cannot keep from lunging for it. He falls to the track, done in, not by me, but by his own godliness. The train smears to a stop well in advance of the van. The fifteen people get loose and drive over and take my hundred bucks before I can get down to it. And that’s what comes from trying to be moral. I’m out a hundred bucks.
Love,
Brother Sam
You’re standing on a bridge over a train track. Next to you to stands the very large pastor of a mega-church. A quarter-mile down the track you see a van get caught in a chain-reaction collision with several other vehicles and stuck on the track with all fifteen of its passengers trapped inside. A quarter-mile up the track a runaway train is speeding toward the van and will have to pass under the bridge before reaching it. Your choice is whether to watch as the train hits the van and kills the fifteen passengers, or push the pastor onto the track in front of the train, in the expectation that his immense bulk will stop it. You yourself are clearly not massive enough to even slow, let alone stop the train. So jumping is out of the question.
Do you (A) do nothing, and see fifteen people get killed, (B) Push the pastor, who, aside from his heft, is healthy and in the prime of his life, onto the track in order to stop the train, or (C) call your cousin Ray who has never see a train wreck?
Love,
Sister Dinah Moe Humm
Dear Sister Dinah,
Ah. A variation on the old “Bridge Case,” familiar to anybody who’s taken a college ethics class or done much reading on the subject. Most folks find it hard to choose. But that’s where the additional information about the large fellow next to me comes in handy. Knowing him to be a pastor, I take a hundred dollar bill from my pocket and toss it into the air. Naturally, the pastor cannot keep from lunging for it. He falls to the track, done in, not by me, but by his own godliness. The train smears to a stop well in advance of the van. The fifteen people get loose and drive over and take my hundred bucks before I can get down to it. And that’s what comes from trying to be moral. I’m out a hundred bucks.
Love,
Brother Sam
Friday, September 2, 2011
A sports question
Dear Brother Sam,
If religions were subject to similar recruiting standards for adherents as the major educational institutions in the United States face for student athletes, would Christianity be more like Ohio State or Southern Methodist in the early 1980s? Obviously the University of Miami, by way of hosting elaborate sex parties full of 72 virgins for their players, belongs to the Muslims.
Love,
Brother T. Scott Brown
Dear Brother T.,
Brother Sam does not follow college golf, so I cannot speak with authority to the historical references you offer. But I will note that religions are subject to recruiting standards; but those standards are of a markedly different, lower, order than even those flauted by the collegiate sports industry to which the idea of liberal education is anathema. As Brother Sam has noted before, religion, like spectator sports, provides something of no material consequence about which people may disagree, and an impetus to conflict when conditions otherwise favor harmony. The standard, and there’s only the one, for getting into a religion, any religion, all religions, is a willingness to value yourself over all others. Salvation, a higher plane, nirvana, bliss, paradise, heaven: call it what you will, it’s for yourself alone. Can’t be transferred. Can’t be shared. As to whether that standard is worse, equal to, or better than another, say the NCAA’s, I’ll leave for another time. But that’s the standard. One other way religion is like sports: both are hard on your knees.
Love,
Brother Sam
If religions were subject to similar recruiting standards for adherents as the major educational institutions in the United States face for student athletes, would Christianity be more like Ohio State or Southern Methodist in the early 1980s? Obviously the University of Miami, by way of hosting elaborate sex parties full of 72 virgins for their players, belongs to the Muslims.
Love,
Brother T. Scott Brown
Dear Brother T.,
Brother Sam does not follow college golf, so I cannot speak with authority to the historical references you offer. But I will note that religions are subject to recruiting standards; but those standards are of a markedly different, lower, order than even those flauted by the collegiate sports industry to which the idea of liberal education is anathema. As Brother Sam has noted before, religion, like spectator sports, provides something of no material consequence about which people may disagree, and an impetus to conflict when conditions otherwise favor harmony. The standard, and there’s only the one, for getting into a religion, any religion, all religions, is a willingness to value yourself over all others. Salvation, a higher plane, nirvana, bliss, paradise, heaven: call it what you will, it’s for yourself alone. Can’t be transferred. Can’t be shared. As to whether that standard is worse, equal to, or better than another, say the NCAA’s, I’ll leave for another time. But that’s the standard. One other way religion is like sports: both are hard on your knees.
Love,
Brother Sam
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