Carlene

If you cite only the New Testament, you won't find the Ten Commandments either. They are part of the Old Testament. The New Testament begins with the gospel of Matthew - long after the days of Moses and the Ten Commandments. I'm not trying to complicate anything. I'm just pointing out that you can't have it both ways. If you throw out the Old Testament, the Ten Commandments get thrown out with it. Many fundamentalists (and I'm not suggesting that you are one of them) like to pick phrases out of the Bible willy nilly, and quote them to reinforce their own particular brand of Christianity. A little from the Old Testament, a bit from the new....kind of like a scripture buffet. I think that's totally unfair...and illogical. Of course I would like to see a world without cheating, lying, abuse, etc. Unfortunately, that world does not exist this side of heaven. Nor could it, by God's own design. We all missed the boat on paradise (damn that Eve!). So now we have to content ourselves with doing the best we can, and that means taking personal responsibility not to cheat, lie, steal, etc. And praying for others, including those who fall short of God's grace. May the peace and love and fellowship of Christ be with you all.

Thanks...that was really helpful.

First marriage for him, second for her. My DH says Mrs P is the only woman he (Mr P) has ever known intimately. He married her because he loved her deeply and felt that he would never be happy without her. He was far from a millionaire when he married her. He was an A&P (airline) mechanic for many years. His parents died several years ago and left him lots of money, property, tax-free bonds, stock, etc. They were very frugal people who had worked and saved all their lives. Then he contracted Hepatitis C from a surgical center who had employed a druggie nurse with previous offenses. (What ever happened to background checks?) The nurse was injecting himself with pain killers, then using the needle to refill the bottle with saline. The lawsuit was settled out of court for over a million. Mr P, by the way, is fortunate to have responded well to treatment for the Hep C. He has never developed symptoms and has "cleared" the virus, even though it is still detectable via blood tests.

Oh, if only it were so!!!!!!!!!!!!

This isn't "TOM's version", per say. It may be TOM's collection of commandments, but they all came from the Bible. I think his point was, are they less important because they weren't given to us as a matched set, carved (literally) in stone? Jews recognized a long time ago that placing undo importance on the Ten Commandments, as opposed to other commandments issued by God, was not a good idea, and they no longer refer to them as such. By the way, TOM, I really like your pick for number 10... Malachi 2:1-4: And now, O ye priests, this commandment is for you. If you will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart to give glory to my name, ... behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces. I have seen some priests (and TV evangelists) that I would like to see with dung spread upon their faces. Who knows...it might have been a lot better for Tammy Fay's skin than all that makeup!

Trust me, he hasn't gone anywhere. You just aren't reading the right threads.

Parkinson’s is a disease of the central nervous system. PD affects movement, both voluntary and involuntary. Other symptoms may include: Depression Mood disturbances Apathy Impulse control Dementia Memory loss sleep disturbance Impaired vision Dizziness Pain Oily skin Urinary incontinence Constipation Sexual dysfunction

I've wondered the same thing, but my gut feeling is "no". Not unless she (the caregiver) initiated it. Mr P really is a wonderful husband. My DH says that Mrs P is the only woman he has ever been with. He was about 20 years old when they met. It's a real love story. He grew up in NY and joined the Air Force right out of high school (mid 60's and he didn't want to be drafted). He was stationed in AZ. She was a divorcee in her mid 30's. He was smitten from the very first. He spent every minute he could with her, then his enlistment was up. He went back to NY, just as he had promised his parents. He was an only child and they expected him to come work for the family business. But he was miserable. He got on a plane and flew back to AZ. She had no idea he was coming. He took a cab from the airport, straight to her house. She said, "What are you doing here?" He said, "I came to marry you." And he did.

Diane...you are so nice. I'm not always right, but I try to be accurate.

I was trying to be objective. I don't know if it's just me or not. The caregiver has gone from living hand to mouth to having a shot at being a millionaire's girlfriend, so I don't know. Is that motive, or just good fortune?

The wife is 76 and the husband is 62. She is not dying, per say. She has Parkinson's Disease and has broken both hips in the last year, but has just about recovered from those. Her short term memory is often out to lunch. Mr P found his cell phone in the refrigerator one day. And Mrs P once mistook the cedar chest for the toilet, raised the lid and peed on the winter blankets. Other than that, she's fine (LOL). Mr P is a millionaire, but none of it is community property. There is something about the caregiver that sets my antenna off, but maybe it's just me. Mr P loaned her money ($2000) to buy a computer and a digital camera. Six months later they were "stolen", so he gave her money for another. He loaned her the price of a brand new car (her credit is crap). A good bit of money ($400) came up missing from her wallet and she said Mrs P must have taken it, so Mr P replaced the funds. The thing with the cedar chest happened when Mr P was not at home. The caregiver told him about it. She was washing the last of the blankets when he came home. The cell phone went missing, they looked all over for it, then suddenly it appeared in the fridge and it was assumed that Mrs P had put it there. It sounds like the plot of a bad movie, I know. But I can't help wondering....could this be a set up?

If you want to examine the OLDEST form of the Bible (including the New Testament), then yes. I don't want to start a debate with anyone over whose Bible is the "correct" version. I have nothing against non-Catholics. All Christians are our offspring. And as in secular families, they may not want to claim us, but that doesn't change the face of history. In the infancy of Christianity, there were no Baptists, Methodists, Church of Christ, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, etc. All those came much, much later. "Christian" - as in feed-them-to-the-lions - meant the Catholic church...the "one holy and apostolic church". (Notice the quotation marks...that means it's a quote, not a statement.) The Orthodox church is the second oldest Christian denomination, although it has since split into numerous factions. The word "orthodox" means traditional. The word "catholic" means universal. Many protestant denominations (Lutheran, Methodist....I'm not sure who else) still recite the Apostles Creed, which says, in part, "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church", only they don't capitalize the "c" in Catholic. I think religious history is fascinating. And, of course, I think Catholic history is particularly so. I am aware of all the dark moments in the Church's history. (The Spanish Inquisition was not our finest hour.) Regretably, mortals have stained the pages of Catholic history, but that doesn't make the church less holy. It makes those men less holy, but not the church.

I'd change gastros. Mine is sooooo great. I was his first LB patient, too. In fact, I forgot to mention the band and when he encountered my port in the midst of the exam, he jumped about 4 feet. I was supposed to have a scope and said I didn't want to be unfilled for it, so my GI guy said he would use a pedi tube. How great is that?

How awful for everyone. However, having been widowed myself (twice), I think I'm entitled to say that cheating with your best friend's husband is gutless and beneath contempt. If you have endured great pain yourself, why on earth would you deliberately visit it upon someone you supposedly care about? The "friend" is getting a faithless husband....just exactly what she deserves.

Well...that's just it. I sort of have been in his shoes. Before I was married to DH, I was married to a man who developed non-alcoholic liver disease. I took care of him until the day he died. In fact, he died in my arms, on our 25th wedding anniversary. The last 8 years of our marriage was sexless, due to the liver disease. I was in my early 40's, so this was not exactly what I had signed on for. But I did sign the contract (the marriage license), and I lived up to it 100%. I did not use LDH's (Late Dear Husband's) poor health as an excuse to commit adultery. Nor do I think anyone else should. I'm sorry. I think it's wrong. So don't ask me. Which brings us to the next problem. Mr P is truly a nice man, and I do want to be his friend. But I am terrified, because he IS such a nice man, that at some point he will ask us, "Do you think what I'm doing is a terrible thing?" My DH would KILL me if I said "yes". My conscience would kill me if I said "no".

NO....the word "apocrypha" simply means questionable, or some would say not divinely inspired, in the context of religious works. The King James version of the Bible is an example of so-called apocrypha being deleted from the Bible. The KJV was first published in 1611. The version most widely used today was adopted in the mid 1880's. The Catholic Bible has 80 books, as did the Protestant Bible at one time. There is widely held misconception that Catholics do not read the Bible and do not revere it as the word of God. Not so. The Catholic Church is well aware that the Bible is not one book, delivered to us by God, all nicely bound in leather. It is a collection of writings, recollections, stories, observances and songs from many sources - handed down in many languages and pieced together over quite a long time. The Catholic Church holds the four gospels to be absolutely sacred. We believe that the remainder of the Bible is scripturally sound, but we also recognize that something may have been lost in the translation.

I don't think Carole and Kinky's supporters have yet come to terms with the fact that neither is likely to win. Everyone loves an underdog. Texas is a two party state. That's a fact, no matter how much anyone might love to see Grandma or Goofy in the governor's mansion.

Priests who molest little boys are just men who have sinned. It has nothing to do with religion, other than the fact that they abused their position as a cleric.

Okay, here's the story. My DH has been friends with a certain Mr. P for over 40 years. Mr. P married a woman 14 years older than himself and they have been wed for 35+ years. He is a wonderful husband. Several years ago, Mrs. P developed Parkinson's Disease, which gets progressively worse as time goes on and ravages not only the body, but the mind, as well. Mrs. P cannot be left alone, so for the last couple of years, Mr P has engaged the services of a caretaker on a daily basis. The caretaker is a nice lady - long since divorced and reasonably attractive. Mr P feels that the time is very near when he must consider putting his wife in a nursing home. He gets little rest at night, due to her erratic sleep patterns and basically has no life of his own, other than getting out during the day when the caretaker is on duty. The doctors and the nursing home Mr P is considering have told him that Mrs P is "no longer his wife". I have a problem with that. To further muddy the waters, Mr P made the remark to my DH recently that he and the caretaker would probably "end up together", whatever that means. Here is my dilemma. I told my DH this morning that when Mr P puts his wife away, we should invite him out to dinner, etc so that he does not get mired down in grief and guilt. Unless, I said, it includes L (the caretaker). I would never judge Mr P, but I am not prepared to socialize with him and his "girlfriend", knowing he has a wife in a nursing home. My DH is very upset with my stance. He said that Mr P has been too good a friend for too long and he cannot refuse to go out to dinner with him, just because he wants to bring L along. I believe in "until death do us part". I believe, as much as I like Mr P, that a sexual relationship with L would be adultery. I would never "preach" at him or against him for making that choice, but I am not comfortable with endorsing it. My DH could go out with them alone, but eventually he would have to explain my continued absence. He doesn't want to have to do that. He wants me to go along "for him" and be pleasant and keep my mouth shut. What do ya'll think?

People who cast their vote based on a candidate's name or "cute" quotient should be caned and then rendered incapable of reproducing. (Everyone, check the title of my post before you get out the flame thrower.)

And which version would that be? If you are Protestant, your version of the Bible dates from the mid-1880's. If you are Jewish, it's called the Torah and it is almost 3500 years old. If you are Catholic, the earliest written copy of your Bible is preserved in the British Museum Library in London. It was written around 300 AD. You can argue religion all day long, but you can't argue with history. The first recorded instance of God’s Word being written down, was when the Lord Himself wrote it down in the form of ten commandments on the stone tablets delivered to Moses at the top of Mount Sinai. Biblical scholars believe this occurred between 1,400 BC and 1,500 BC… almost 3,500 years ago. The language used was almost certainly an ancient form of Hebrew, the language of Old Covenant believers. The earliest scripture is generally considered to be the “Pentateuch”, the first five books of the Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, & Deuteronomy… though there is some scholarly evidence to indicate that the Old Testament Book of Job may actually be the oldest book in the Bible. The Old Testament scriptures were written in ancient Hebrew, a language substantially different than the Hebrew of today. These writings were passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years on scrolls made of animal skin, usually sheep, but sometimes deer or cow. Animals considered “unclean” by the Jews, such as pigs, were of course, never used to make scrolls. When the entire Pentateuch is present on a scroll, it is called a “Torah”. An entire Torah Scroll, if completely unraveled, is over 150 feet long! As most sheep are only about two to three feet long, it took an entire flock of sheep to make just one Torah scroll. The Jewish scribes who painstakingly produced each scroll were perfectionists. If they made even the slightest mistake in copying, such as allowing two letters of a word to touch, they destroyed that entire panel (the last three or four columns of text), and the panel before it, because it had touched the panel with a mistake! While most Christians today would consider this behavior fanatical and even idolatrous (worshiping the scripture, rather than the One who gave it to us), it nevertheless demonstrates the level of faithfulness to accuracy applied to the preservation of God’s Word throughout the first couple of thousand years of Biblical transmission. Hebrew has one thing in common with English: they are both “picture languages”. Their words form a clear picture in your mind. As evidence of this; the first man to ever print the scriptures in English, William Tyndale, once commented that Hebrew was ten times easier to translate into English than any other language. Tyndale would certainly be qualified to make such a statement, as he was so fluent in eight languages, that it was said you would have thought any one of them to be his native tongue. By approximately 500 BC, the 39 Books that make up the Old Testament were completed, and continued to be preserved in Hebrew on scrolls. As we approach the last few centuries before Christ, the Jewish historical books known as the “Apocrypha” were completed, yet they were recorded in Greek rather than Hebrew. By the end of the First Century AD, the New Testament had been completed. It was preserved in Greek on Papyrus, a thin paper-like material made from crushed and flattened stalks of a reed-like plant. The word “Bible” comes from the same Greek root word as “papyrus”. The papyrus sheets were bound, or tied together in a configuration much more similar to modern books than to an elongated scroll. These groupings of papyrus were called a “codex” (plural: “codices”). The oldest copies of the New Testament known to exist today are: The Codex Alexandrius and the Codex Sinaiticus in the British Museum Library in London, and the Codex Vaticanus in the Vatican. They date back to approximately the 300’s AD. In 315 AD, Athenasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, identified the 27 Books which we recognize today as the canon of New Testament scripture. In 382 AD, the early church father Jerome translated the New Testament from its original Greek into Latin. This translation became known as the “Latin Vulgate”, (“Vulgate” meaning “vulgar” or “common”). He put a note next to the Apocrypha Books, stating that he did not know whether or not they were inspired scripture, or just Jewish historical writings which accompanied the Old Testament. The Apocrypha was kept as part of virtually every Bible scribed or printed from these early days until just 120 years ago, in the mid-1880’s, when it was removed from Protestant Bibles. Up until the 1880’s, however, every Christian… Protestant or otherwise… embraced the Apocrypha as part of the Bible, though debate continued as to whether or not the Apocrypha was inspired. There is no truth to the popular myth that there is something “Roman Catholic” about the Apocrypha, which stemmed from the fact that the Roman Catholics kept 12 of the 14 Apocrypha Books in their Bible, as the Protestants removed all of them. No real justification was ever given for the removal of these ancient Jewish writings from before the time of Christ, which had remained untouched and part of every Bible for nearly two thousand years.

In that case, it missed by a long shot. The state of Utah was blackmailed into disavowing polygamy as a condition of granting it statehood.

There are two kinds of marriage - civil and religious. The government controls both, however, since they require people to take out a marriage license and in the case of a same sex couple, no license will be issued. And a marriage performed without a license is not legal. I have a problem with this. My church will never perform or recognize same sex marriage, and that's okay. They are a church, not the state. If you want to belong to my church and you are a gay couple, that's just too bad. Go find one that accepts your lifestyle. The government, on the other hand, does not get to interpret the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, or the How To Be A Buddhist Handbook. Neither the state of Texas nor the US government can require that I wear a veil over my face in public, although traditional Muslims may think I should. They can't make me keep a Kosher kitchen, even though conservative Jews might feel that would be a good thing. Before you vote to make religious beliefs into law, remember that yours isn't the only religion around. And the fact that you think yours is the only "right" one is immaterial. Everyone else believes theirs is, too.

We have early voting here, as I assumed most states do. Maybe not? Anyway, early voting started this week.

I am absolutely not against a Democratic governor. I am voting against Rick Perry - whatever that takes. I will vote for whoever leads the polls and isn't Rick Perry - simple as that. My greatest fear is that Strayhorn and Friedman will split the Democratic vote and allow Perry to get re-elected. And that will be a shame...all those votes wasted.