Alrighty. Yes, I'm actually still alive, and have been so for the entire weekend. Some of you are very disappointed, but I'll let that slide this time.
First off, I want to say that whoever thought that 1A running around yelling at some ungodly hour of the morning would be a good extended orientation activity should be shot, drawn and quartered, and hung up as an example for the rest of campus. I do *not* appreciate being woken up before dawn on a Sunday morning.
After catching a few more hours of sleep, I managed to drag myself out of bed and go to church with various and sundry friends. What's even more amazing is that I stayed awake through the entire sermon. Which may or may not be a good thing, as I now feel stupider for having done it.
I have vague recollections of visiting the church we went to a couple of times very early in my freshman year. I didn't go back; now, I like to chalk it up to feelings that something was fundamentally wrong with the preaching. This may or may not be true. I was a little bit naive back in the day.
Anyway, the pastor proceeded to take as his text Revelation 18. Of course, in reading it before the actual sermon he stated something to the effect that it was quite self-explanatory and could stand on its own. Then he spent an hour explaining it to us. For those of you who don't particularly feel like looking it up yourselves, it's the passage where Babylon the Great falls and the vast majority of the world is mourning over it. The summary of the sermon reads thus:
Babylon the Great = materialistic economic empire which will rise up in the last half of the Tribulation
Materialism & money = bad
Bad things get destroyed -> bad people are sad
Bad things get destroyed -> good people are happy
Etc., etc. Which wouldn't be so bad, except for some of the weird cross-references he pulled in. For instance, in Rev. 18:2 it states that Babylon the Great "has become a dwelling place of demons and a prison of every unclean spirit, and a prison of every unclean and hateful bird." As some sort of backup, he referred to the parable of the Mustard Seed, and interpreted it to mean not the church as a whole, but organized religion, and especially the one-world church which he says will rise up in the end times. This is apparently because of Matt. 13:31-32, in which the mustard seed grows into a tree, and birds rest in its branches. And since birds are obviously demons and incarnations of evil, the parable of the mustard seed cannot refer to anything good. Contrary to popular opinion, and the belief of nearly every other church in the nation. But anyway, enough of that.
I finally got my install of Win2K patched, after IT so kindly informed me that I was vulnerable to the Blaster worm. And then I installed Mozilla *and* Opera, and everything is fairly happy again.
Posted by Ardith at August 31, 2003 05:10 PM