Christian MEN Wearing Skirts

[Big and Bashful]

I am impressed at how this thread has progressed and at how Carl & co have let it proceed. My views are very different to the main posters here but I welcome the chance to see other points of view without any nastiness creeping in. Very interesting, very interesting indeed! Also much easier than getting into a debate with my sister!

[Tor]

It's often remarkable just how similar religions can be to each other. True, differences amass, but similarities I think are stronger than people often think or perhaps would even like. I took a world religions course during my studies at BYU in UT and I was fascinated by the similarities between the LDS religion and the other major world religions. They had us observe different meetings of different religions. It was a fantastic course and I enjoyed learning of the other world religions and seeing so many similarities!

Part of what I find interesting here, though also to be expected if the theories (I'm close to calling them facts, but with less time spent testing them than I would like and being the only person I know (semi-)actively testing them I reserve some uncertainty) are indeed true. Though a judgement made with actually reading the Bible (still on my list to read), secondary sources led me to the conclusion that there were good principles buried in it, amidst quite a bit of unreliability. Then, to, there is this idea I keep: "Religion has a lot to answer for in this world." That should of course not be taken to mean that religion is wrong, but the world would surely be a happier place if it were taken to heart and considered before people of one religion attacked someone else on (nominally) religious grounds. Back to the beginnings of the world, I pretty much accepted evolution as being most likely, but a view I hadn't tested, having come across nothing compelling to induce me to test it.

Now, however, I'm having to look at at least the creation myths that hold so much similarity as preserving like a fly in amber the remnants of knowledge handed down to mankind at the dawn of, as I'm inclined to call it, the Age of Men. As for what turned me in this direction, consider the probability of landmass size, shape, and location and related celestial body locations that have no discernable need to be as they are to life generally as we know it developing. How many nines may one write to achieve a probability of design that rounds to less than one before you cede the possibility of design or the certainty thereof? 10? 20? 50? I find myself staring at the latter, for a start. I'm not even sure I can justify even as a thought experiment adjusting the probabilities of the original forms down even enough to halve that number of nines - and there are other pieces to consider to achieve a true final number. This doesn't even touch the additional satisfaction in having an explanation for the similarity of myths around the world, why they developed, and why they were so important to so many peoples for millenia.

Even if we may not have had a hand in the initial reshaping of the Earth, we certainly have a hand in where it is now. Maybe we will one day be the gods of other worlds, hopefully creating kinder worlds than the one we were left. As a side note for those who believe in undirected evolution, the only thing that really must be disproven by this is the first two letters of that pair of words. Well, I suppose it also means that SETI has been scooped, and we just haven't pointed our telescopes at any radio communications or blinkenlights in our 50-100 year band through the universe.

Sinned, I have read The Holographic Universe, but I'm afraid so long ago that I cannot converse on its ideas apart from what has seeped into my general model of the world, source forgotten. I remember it being worthwhile reading, and am quite sure it's around here somewhere. Perhaps I ought to dig it up and add it to my pile of books to read far too tall for my time available.

As interesting as I might find a systematic study of world religions, for now I'll have to settle for picking up bits and pieces along the way, such as right here in this thread.

B and B, we do have perhaps a little more incentive to stay polite than your sister, but i too am pleased that civility can be upheld amongst diverse views. I for one hope it stays that way, as I too am enjoying glimpses into areas that interest me but that I regrettably haven't time to tackle the sources, perhaps for a long time yet.

[dillon]

I actually find the proxy baptisms that are done in LDS churches here in the US at least, to be really cool in that someone cares enough about the eternal destiny of a friend or colleague enough to want to do that for someone. It is beyond the limits of my own beliefs, but still touching to consider, IMO.

[Sinned]

dlln, You have to appreciate that in doing the proxy baptisms we are not forcing them all to join our Church we are performing an ordinance that Jesus went through and He has said is a requirement in the Grand Scheme of Things. By doing the ordinance we are removing a barrier but they still have the free will to accept or reject the ordinance and I suspect that there will be many that won't accept for whatever reason. There is no compulsion here. And yes we do care about each and every member of our families, alive or dead. Through family history research I have found "tinges" ( best word I can come up with ) of their characters and what their lives were that were not available through just the words on the pages of the sources I was going through. Not easy to explain this because there's no way that I can justify such feelings - it's as if I am tapping into a consciousness that's outside our physical environment or receiving some aspect of communication on an unconscious level. And I have been doing this research for over 43 years now.

[Darryl]

I submit the following document for the perusal of those interested: https://itmacguyver-my.sharepoint.com/p ... be0c0f1b09

I donated some commentary, but was primarily pulling together a lot of stuff I found interesting and related in some way to "Can Men Wear Skirted Garments? Like Women Wear Pants?"

Interestingly, this last Saturday while shopping the Goodwill store for bargains I was following along and squeezing past and back-and-forth a couple of older white-haired ladies. We went from one end of the store to the other, about 20+ minutes in fairly close proximity. Finally, as I was squeezing past to go back down the aisle and leave the one lady looks at me and asks "What's that you're wearing? A skirt?"

I nodded and said "Yes, its quite comfortable."

She nodded and said "Well, why not? Women wear pants."

[Sinned]

Thanks Drryl, that's quite a document. It will take some time to read it but I have read the bits on pages 71-72 on the objections of wives. Not sure that it helps though. MOH's objections are emotional not logical and therefore just about impossible to counter. No matter how many times I say that I am not a transvestite/homosexual-in-waiting/wanting-to-look-like-a-woman/etc it just doesn't seem to make any difference.

[Big and Bashful]

I can't open the document, the browser looks like it is opening the document, then just returns to the thread.

[Big and Bashful]

Got it, switched browsers and, oh, just checked, the document had downloaded after all, I have a new download manager and hadn't spotted that it had downloaded the document. Soz!

[wsherman]

Thankyou Darrel for the link to your paper. I am having a bit of trouble with my screen reader and Adobe Acrobat which makes page navigation interesting but it will read one page at a time. If I remember correctly M S Word plays nice but I currently do not have it installed due to not having a current key for this machine and my old version doesn't work with Win. 7. Oh well it'll keep!

Slainte'
Bill & Sir Brinkley the Exubrant

[crfriend]

I submit the following document for the perusal of those interested: https://itmacguyver-my.sharepoint.com/p ... be0c0f1b09

I donated some commentary, but was primarily pulling together a lot of stuff I found interesting and related in some way to "Can Men Wear Skirted Garments? Like Women Wear Pants?"

I kind of hate to be a stickler here, but it's usually considered good form to credit someone if you're quoting more than just a snippet of their work. I refer specifically to a four paragraph portion of page 19 ("Risk Management") and offer this as collateral, but there are more than a few others.

I'm flattered in a way, but my wife takes a very dim view of such things, and when I pointed up a several paragraph plagiarism of my computer-history site to her done by a student in Singapore she contacted the university with a scathing letter and the student's thesis was promptly pulled down and the student likely very heavily reprimanded.

[Darryl]

True, I was simply pulling stuff down that was interesting, in some cases I mentioned the site, but that was likely after I'd started into the paper aspect of it and by that time I would have simply held it since finding everything I'd found in the 'heat of the moment' appeared to be a daunting task. Which is why I mention at the top that its compiled from various sources. Perhaps not as plainly or clearly as I could have. But this was intended to sit inside my computer collecting bit rot.

If anyone wishes I can pull the entire document, give credit to whatever sections someone claims or snip them as the case may be. I did mention the Braveheart Manifesto, and figure anyone would Google that if interested.

[crfriend]

If anyone wishes I can pull the entire document, give credit to whatever sections someone claims or snip them as the case may be. I did mention the Braveheart Manifesto, and figure anyone would Google that if interested.

I'll take this as meaning that it's a "work in progress" and not make any more of a stink about it. "Googling" for The Braveheart Manifesto is trivial, but original authors do take some pride in their work and some of those authors' style tends to stand out a bit.

Personally, when I bother to write something, I endeavour to do so carefully and with consideration. This, in the modern idiom, means that it tends to "speak wrong" but that's down to the written word being very different from the spoken word; the two are related, but really only tangentially. When I write, I write; I think in the written language and deploy that to its fullest. When I speak, I use the spoken idiom, although it tends to be a bit more "flowery" than many might use. It's a personal thing.

The astute will notice my preference for UK English in my writing, even though I am a denizen of the US. This is a device I use to keep the written and spoken languages discrete. There are several folks in this community whom I have had the pleasure of meeting (and I hope to meet more), and in person I am reasonably unremarkable save for my penchant for wearing skirts; it seems I save my real passion for the written word. This is partially grounded in reason; the spoken word dissipates into the atmosphere as quickly as it is uttered -- the written word may persist for centuries.

To crib a line from George MacDonald Fraser's exquisite screenplay for Richard Lester's wonderful The Three Musketeers of 1973: "One must be careful of what one writes -- and to whom one gives it."

[Darryl]

My last writing was done in high school, in 1970. For a few years afterward my writing was more like this:
.loop:
00000035 41 inc ecx ; Add 1 to the loop counter
00000036 803C0800 cmp byte [eax + ecx], 0 ; Compare the value at the string's

Then this for a bit:
RD sales-report
PAGE LIMITS 60 LINES
FIRST DETAIL 3
CONTROLS seller-name.

01 TYPE PAGE HEADING.
03 COL 1 VALUE "Sales Report".
03 COL 74 VALUE "Page".
03 COL 79 PIC Z9 SOURCE PAGE-COUNTER.

And lately:
using System;

class Program
{
static void Main()
{
Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!");
}
}

Probably be more comfortable working and talking with 'Andromeda Ascendant' - officially designated as Shining Path to Truth and Knowledge AI model GRA 112, serial number XMC-10-182 than most people.

[skirted_in_SF]

Good heavens, is that COBOL? I had a brief exposure to it around 1973.

[Darryl]

Good heavens, is that COBOL? I had a brief exposure to it around 1973.

Yup. 1970 graduated high school and started learning IBM 1401 SPS, IBM S/360 Macro Assembler, COBOL and RPG.