In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit

And not, as some in the mainline are fond of saying, “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier”. God is not an abstract amalgam of roles, no matter what the Sabellianists and Modalists say. God does act in those roles, but He has not invited us to know him only by narrow functional titles; we are made to meet face-to-face, not face-to-nametag.

But, of course, “Father” and “Son” hit us too close to home; we cannot hold someone called “Father” or “Son” at arms length without doing violence to our own humanity. We can love or we can hate, but the one thing we are incapable of doing is not caring. A “Creator”, however, can safely be observed from afar, or (more likely) simply ignored.

And, lest there be any confusion: That’s the God and Father or Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

But I will give them this: at least it’s linguistically artful, which is more than can be said for ecclesiastical abominations against our noble tongue like “God Godself”.

More Seattle Cognitive Dissonance

A few months ago Seattle had a series of severe winter storms. By “severe” I mean, of course, that enough snow fell to not melt instantly when it hit the ground. Anyway, those of you fortunate enough to have visited Seattle when such events occur will know that the city is absolutely crippled by them. We have a lot of arterial roads that run up and down very steep grades, and our four snowplows and two road graders just can’t keep up.

Well, those of us from cities that actually know how to handle winter weather invariably chirp up and complain that Seattle DoT needs to get its act together. To which a predictable cadre always reply “Why should Seattle make that huge capital outlay for an event that happens once a decade?”

Now, there are ways to have substantial snow-handling capabilities with minimal capital outlay by the city, but let’s set that point aside for the sake of argument.

The interesting part comes a few months later when a debate about Anthropogenic Climate Change comes up, and this same predictable cadre of people shout from the rooftops that we should expect more dramatic seasons (hotter/dryer summers, colder/snowier winters) because of it.

So, stick this in your pipe and smoke it: If these fine folks (with their very high estimations of their own intelligence) actually believe that the current theories of anthropogenic climate change are “good science”, that means that those theories give rise to highly reliable predictions of things which have not yet happened. One of those predictions, and it is the “consensus” of the current majority opinion-holders, is that (statistically, of course) we’ll be getting a lot more snow a lot more frequently in places like Seattle. So it would seem to follow logically that these same people would be clamoring for us to build a massive snowplow fleet before the coming anthropogenic uberwinters devastate our fair city.