God and Cosmo

We got some great weather today, dark, stormy, and windy. My favorite kind of atmosphere! It caused me to abandon some of my after-noon plans and make chicken stock instead. There’s nothing like making a huge witch-brew of chicken stock during a thunderstorm…it’s an otherworldly experience. Plus, it will help with dinner tonight, which is going to be experimental. What happens if you were to make a chicken pot-pie but instead of a crust top it with mashed potatoes like a shepherd’s pie? I think it could be really good...we shall see.
I got the new Cosmo at Borders today…that magazine is one of my guilty pleasures in life. “Inside the Mysterious Male Mind”—who knew that our fellow species-members are so difference and complex? Did you know that men fall in love faster than women? Or that they have 12% fewer brain cells in the language region of their brain? I actually could have guessed on both of those, but still… “8 Sex Truths You Don’t Know About Yourself”—how didn’t I know? It turns out that women who’ve gone to college are more apt to give and receive oral sex than those who haven’t. (Sure, it’s where they teach all that stuff. I knew I went for a reason.) Plus, “The Cosmo Beauty Awards”! For products, not people.
On a different note, God’s been on my mind today, partly because I think she was messing with me earlier. I was walking back home with Alice and it was really hot and sticky out, and I was wearing jeans…so I was just thinking about how nice a shower would be when it started raining. I don’t mean like 20 minutes later or something, but right that minute, just as I had the thought. Nice one. It got me thinking about the Hurricane Katrina disaster and how 3,000 years ago it would probably have been attributed to God’s wrath similar to Sodom and Gomorrah or the Great Flood. Too many Mardi Gras beads or something. It made me wonder how religion and history would have been different if the ancients (Jews in this case) had had our access to knowledge about weather, climate, etc. If S & D were just two cities built in the wrong place at the wrong time, or if Moses’ miracle had been viewed as just a conveniently low tide, instead of everything being credited to Divine anger or aid; the constant threat of an unpredictable and vengeful deity has shaped the course of human history until perhaps the last few centuries. It seems that the more we learn (or teach ourselves) about science, the more our cultural image of God changes, until Noah’s Flood goes from being a terrible tragedy and lesson to a cute wall-paper border for a nursery, with little smiling animals. Never mind that all the people died….
The righteously angry Old Testament God, full of plagues, disasters, and sacrifices, gets replaced by the New Testament God, who seems to be much more touchy-feely, loving-kindness. (Although I’ve never read the New Testament, so I don’t know the details.) Example: angels in the OT were scary creatures: the Elect, just as likely sent down to slay you as otherwise (see Dogma for details); now they are cute little things on bumper-stickers and embroidery patterns.