Monday, November 9, 2020

No bacon and eggs for breakfast?

I am trying to wrap my head around the idea of not eating bacon and eggs for breakfast. I have gotten to the point where I have two breakfasts that I've been going to, but both involve either eggs or pork. The first is huevos a la mexicana. I make it with no meat on the side, only three corn tortillas. The second breakfast is two frozen waffles and turkey sausage. Oh wait, that isn't pork! So I guess I've progressed a little. But it's a pork substitute. I mean, I still want pork.

I've been looking at the DASH diet stuff on and off ever since the dietitian at MacDill told me about it last year. But today before I went to the store I decided to just think through how I do breakfast without eggs and bacon. There are so many alternatives for lunch and dinner, but I just didn't have a whole lot of ways of thinking about breakfast. Now I have a few. For one, I don't have to have what I've considered a meal. I've always had this idea that a meal had to be balanced, as in it had to be three things. I'm letting go of that idea. I can eat one thing. So I can eat porridge for breakfast like in days of old. And by porridge, I mean grits. But I can also eat beans. I can see beans going up in rank. DASH says red meat is a no-no. Of course, I'm still going to eat it, but probably not as much. Although I don't think I eat it all the time now. The big thing is cutting down meat in general, and upping the beans is a good way to do that. 

What else? Yogurt. Yes I'm lactose intolerant, but it doesn't matter during COVID. And it's pretty hit or miss anyway. I guess I can keep some of those pills on hand. Put them on the list. And fruit. And fish has always been in the back of my mind. And eomuk. So I definitely have more options. Let's do this.

Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Anything Goes

I was reading Allison Cook's article in the Houston Chronicle about beer and dessert pairing, and I quote:

I am neither a dedicated beer person nor a die-hard dessert person, but in this topsy-turvy season, anything goes.

She's certainly right.

That last phrase took me off on a tangent--which is pretty common with me--and made me thing about the opening of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. That movie doesn't seem to be held in high regard, but it was the first Indiana Jones movie that I saw in theaters. We didn't go to the movies often, and I was not yet thirteen when the film was released. I do not know if I can describe the type of cinematic impact that film had on me. Anything goes indeed. 


Sunday, October 18, 2020

Chili redux

 So I made chili again. I followed the same recipe as last time, except I did modify the salt. Instead of a full teaspoon, I went for 3/4 teaspoons. Also, the original recipe called for some filler, specifically masa harina, which seems to be pretty standard. However, my favorite canned chili, Wolf Brand chili, uses oatmeal as filler, so I decided to try that. I only put in two teaspoons, so it didn't have much of an impact. But really, neither did the masa harina when I tried it the first time. It certain didn't ruin the recipe. It turned out good.

Thursday, October 15, 2020

God is not a being

 I went to Facebook today and saw a post by Pete Enns that kind of blew me away. The Facebook post was a link to his blog post, but some of the quotes and discussion on the Facebook post were just as thought provoking as the blog.

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Pete Holmes and Stuff

 I was re-watching the YouTube clip of Pete Holmes and Whitney Cummings, and for some reason I decided to Google Pete Holmes himself. As usual, I gravitated towards his Wikipedia entry first, and was surprised to find we had a lot in common. And by a lot I mean that he started out as a Christian, but his Christianity 'devolved.' I'm reading a CNN article about him now.

The interviewer asked him if he felt like he had to defend the Bible before, and he said yes. He said because of that he had to turn a blind eye to other things. Like how Jesus said "the system is a lie." My first thought was that isn't exactly true. My second is that it's overstatement. I would say that Jesus believes in the system, much in the same way progressives do. The fact that he critiqued it didn't mean he didn't believe it. In fact, he critiqued it because he believed in it. He wanted it to be better.

Which brings me to the thought that made me want to blog in the first place. We are getting to the point where some of us are very tolerant of others faults. There are still areas that promote a zero-tolerance culture, but not everyone. But we tend to have higher standards when it comes to systems. Systems can fail the same way people do. In fact, the whole thing about failure is that successful people do it all the time. How many TED talks have I heard about that? That was the main takeaway I was supposed to get from West Point. I'm going to fail, so I need to learn how to handle it. But what about systems, that are composed of fallible human beings? They are going to fail too, so where do we draw the line? And there is a line. Too much failing means that the system is in fact a failure, but where do you draw the line?

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Oh, and somewhere there was mention of Rob Bell. I think on Wikipedia. I need to watch that documentary.

Sunday, October 11, 2020

Kant and the justification of believing in god

 So I'm writing a paper about hermeneutics, and Schleiermacher is becoming a big part of it. I'm trying to start the paper off, and I'd read something (I think) about how Kant changed the way people thought about the Bible as an unquestionable source of truth. Rather than try to find that source again, I started reading Kant's Wikipedia page. I found more than I bargained for.

Kant provided a justification for believing in God, even though his existence cannot be proven. He basically says if you can't prove or disprove a thing, the question becomes whether it's in your best interest to believe it. What caught my attention is that he says it's no longer a question of whether we are deceiving ourselves or not if we take the position. I'm not trying to understand it completely right now, but what I'm getting is that he saw morality as a system but not happiness. He saw happiness as dependent upon morality. And apparently he saw morality as being intertwined with the presupposition of God, the soul, and freedom. Since God can't be proven or disproven, he's not saying that these beliefs have to be exclusive. God to Europe was the Christian God, but there could be other concepts of God that would be acceptable under this criteria, though not all.

...

But that brings me back to the idea that believing in God doesn't necessarily equate to believing in the Christian God or the Bible. You can hold to a belief that the universe was created by a supernatural being and that there are higher moral laws without holding to the Apostles' Creed.