Category Archives: Blessings

Blessings, Children, Christian, Entertainment, parenting

Hello Kitty is satanic and bad for Christians (>^_^<) KIDDING!

February 15, 2013 Vicki 7 Comments

For a newer and much more detailed discussion about the Hello Kitty controversy, please see Hello Kitty is Popular, but is she Evil? [added September 7, 2014]

The Real Story Behind Hello Kitty!

So I’d love to write a Hello Kitty blog myself, but as I need to do more research, I’ll leave you with the above story (click on link). I don’t actually know how accurate the referenced post is since no sources are provided, but I’m going to trust that it has some legitimate information in it. [Please see Anita’s comment below for more information on the sources used and on the controversy itself.]

When starting my research into why I keep getting people to my blog that are searching for Christian dis-ease with Hello Kitty, I DID come across a page that tried to make Hello Kitty into some kind-of underhanded conduit to pagan deity worship. Seriously? When I was a kid, I had dolls and stuffed animals. They could ALL be linked to the same sort of thing if anyone wanted to make an argument for it, and actually believe it. All around the internet there are young anti-theists who see this kind of “reasoning,” and it only gives them more ammunition for blasting away at the intellectual integrity of Christians.

Hello Kitty only gets picked on because the character is popular. If she were a Disney doll (as an example, but go ahead and substitute any brand that is more familiar or less “foreign”), a stuffed animal, that little kids hugged, lugged around, and invited to their tea parties, you wouldn’t be reading about her, coming up with concerns about some kind of demonic worship coming out of Japan.

What bothers me the most is that Christians can be so worried about such nothing things when so many people in the world, and in our own country, are homeless, dying from lack of medical care, being forced to lose everything and live in their cars because they get laid off and no one will hire them . . . and we hear how conservatives and libertarians just live on their ideal that there is this golden world where jobs magically appear for anyone who tries and that everyone can get the health care that they need . . . if only their family would sacrifice all (I guess . . . but that doesn’t seem to work for the sickest with cancer and other intense-care diseases). If anything, money is idolized here, along with those who are “assertive” enough to maintain a line of part-time, minimum wage earners so that stock holders can continually have money funneled into their accounts. How is a material item like a Hello Kitty doll evil? Aren’t people’s hearts evil when they put greed and self above a human that is made in God’s image?

Sorry, it just makes me crazy to think there are so many real people that Christians should be concerned about, but instead these fluffy issues surface. God has said, over and over, how He is concerned for the disadvantaged and that the rich shouldn’t lord over them, cheat, steal, etc., and that the rich will have the hardest time getting into heaven (why is that? I’m not being rhetorical).

As with anything in life, if you or your children are being tempted to sin or idolize something, then get rid of that thing. Otherwise, let a flower be a flower, a doll a doll, an item that makes people happy an item that lifts the heart and provides a smile in a dark and difficult world. All good things are from God.

If you want a business summary and a bit of cultural analysis on Hello Kitty, you may find this article of interest: What is this Thing Called Hello Kitty? [added 4/23/14]

[Edited a bit on September 6, 2014]

Blessings, Christianity, Christmas, Faith, Holidays, Jesus, Love, Religion, Spirituality

Christmas “Tree”

December 25, 2012 Vicki 1 Comment

I love this image and wanted to share! It’s from a Tumblr, “Our July in the Rain” (Tess).

Blessings, Christian, Christianity, church, commentary, Faith, Jesus, Religion, Science, Spirituality, Theology

Thoughts on Singing and Evolution

November 22, 2012 Vicki Leave a comment

61l9v-DMUGL._SS400_ — Cover from the “Voice of the Blood” cd, Hildegard of Bingen (from Amazon.com).

In church last weekend the thought came to me that the beauty of human singing is an example of a God given gift or virtue. How can singing, beautiful singing, be considered a trait that evolved? Our voices are so varied to begin with that it’s hard to think that somehow that variety evolved, but then there is also singing. Can you imagine a chimp or ape singing? The thought is laughable.

The theory of evolution is based on the survival of the fittest. Surely that works at a basic level in any environment with any species. But there are many problems with the time frame for species to actually diverge and develop (despite what basic level text books say . . . they make it sound like all is fact when it is not); and it can easily be shown that there has not been enough time for humans to have developed to their present state from their nearest assumed ancestor (for more on this, see “Science and Human Origins” Informational Review).

So besides all the other differences between us and the very small and very ape-like ancestor of ours, singing had to develop somehow, right? As already mentioned, environment plays a factor in who lives and who does not. But a biggy that evolutionists use is sexual selection. I’m not writing a scientific discourse here, but am going by my past studies (I have a degree in anthropology with an emphasis on human evolution and archaeology).

Here’s an example. Why are human female breasts so big (usually, and compared to other primates)? Well, you can imagine the answer: males had more sex with females with bigger breasts, producing more big-breasted females. And you might reflect on how that answer just doesn’t seem valid based on human sexuality, that while many men find large breasts attractive, most men wouldn’t care about that when it came to the chance for sex. And if you imagine it from a purely scientific, non-Christian viewpoint, “evolving” men probably cared even less and raped more. At any rate, scientists may try to argue that human singing is a result of not survival of the fittest in the environment, but survival of the most reproduced based on attraction, just like the breast example.

Do you think that could be so, really? A good singer (or any other charismatic person, for that matter), may have more sex partners – which in the past would result in more offspring. But, considering how beautiful good singing is, wouldn’t we all be great singers by now? Or, wouldn’t some populations have a very high per cent of great singers by now, and some have mostly lousy singers? And, of course, this type of argument can’t account for the amazing nuances/differences of the human voice itself.

No, we were created with these traits. Singing is often, if not always, associated with the spiritual. I don’t mean that singing is always spiritual, but that is has always been used in spiritual contexts as far as I’m aware. Singing is emotional, it’s often spiritual, it can induce or promote thoughts of love. We as humans think musically and mathematically, with thoughts of the music of the spheres and the singing of angels. This all coming from the survival of the fittest? I don’t think so. When we see human aggression and greed, the survival of the fittest makes sense, but when it comes to beauty like human singing, it does not.

[Edited on December 23, 2014]

Blessings, Christianity, God is good, Poems

Christian Poems V: Levertov, Halpern

August 18, 2012 Vicki Leave a comment

INTRUSION

By Denise Levertov

After I had cut off my hands
and grown new ones

something my former hands had longed for
came and asked to be rocked.

After my plucked out eyes
had withered, and new ones grown

something my former eyes had wept for
came asking to be pitied.

In The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, JD McClatchy ed. (Vintage Books 1990), 191.

___________

1291969_92785652 Two Hands 1 sxc.hu — By Doc at Stock.xchang (http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1291969)

HER BODY (parts 1 & 4)

By Daniel Halpern

1. The Fingers

They are small enough to find and care for a tiny stone.
To lift it with wobbly concentration from the ground,
from the family of stones, up past the pursed mouth—

for this we are thankful—to a place level with her eyes
to take a close look, a look into the nature of stone.
Like everything, it is for the first time: first stone,

chilly cube of ice, soft rise of warm flesh, hard
surface of table leg, first and lasting scent of grass
rubbed between the tiny pincer fingers. And there is

the smallest finger poking the air, pointing toward the first heat
of the single sun, pointing toward the friendly angels
who sent her, letting them know contact’s made.

4. The Soul

Who knows how they get here,
beyond the obvious.
Who packaged the code

that provided the slate for her eyes,
and what about the workmanship
that went into the fingers

allowing such intricate movement
just months from the other side?—
Who placed with such exactness

the minute nails on each
of the ten unpainted toes?
And what remains

beyond eye and ear, the thing
most deeply rooted in her body—
the thing that endlessly blossoms

but doesn’t age, in time
shows greater vitality? The thing
unlike the body that so quickly

reaches its highest moment only
to begin, with little hesitation,
the long roll back, slowing all the way

until movement is administered by
devices other than those devised
by divine design? The ageless thing

we call soul, like air, both resident
and owner of the body’s estate.
But her soul, only partially

unpackaged, sings
through the slate that guards it,
contacts those of us waiting here

with a splay of its soft,
scrutinizing fingers.
Her soul is a sapling thing,