"I teach the Bible"

So what? I know English teachers who teach English and don't know grammar. That you teach something is no recommendation. You have a Bible and you teach it to people. I'm not impressed. I have been in a number of churches wherein the minister had no clue what he was teaching, or he was teaching heresy. Like the Supreme Court Justice who thinks the Constitution is a "living document" and is thus ours to re-write at will, there are tons of "Biblical Scholars" who have made up little stories for themselves to believe about what the Bible really meant to say and are now in the process of teaching their narcissistic garbage to a parish full of suckers who will believe whatever they're taught, because they don't know any more about the Bible than your average schoolchild knows about Spelling or American History.

You're welcome to teach it all day if you want, but please don't use the fact that you teach it as proof that you know it or understand it.

The afterlife

Prager, we're pretty sure the afterlife is spent in an immaterial place. See "String Theory".

I happen to think it's another dimension in this universe, but that's just my opinion.

At any rate, the existence of an immaterial dimension or dimensions outside our three-dimension (three and a half, actually, since time really is a dimension but we're stuck in it, unable to move around at will) world means that there is no such thing as a heaven with pearly gates and no such thing as fire, since fire and pearl are both material things that do not exist in an immaterial dimension.

I wish you would mention how the ancient poetry we find in the Bible isn't meant to give lovely graphics about what you see, the road you walk down, the lion and the gazelle lying down together. It expresses moods, sensations, "What it's like to feel this way." Thus, the Beloved's breasts are like a clump of grapes, but no, they're not all lumpy and squishy and ready to be pressed into wine; instead the Lover's joy at burying his face between her breasts is as satisfying as admiring a fine clump of grapes. There's a huge difference.

So then is "heaven has streets of gold" is going to be an immaterial place as rich and lush as if we were walking through a marble shrine with the ground paved with gold. The eternal separation from God that some people have asked for is going to be as harsh and painful as if there were a fire burning inside, thus the image of a fiery hell.

"When people get something for nothing..."

"...it generally worsens their character."

Yah, I can testify to that. That's a good way for our government to keep people down: give them a pittance and tell them they're well off.

"Those who act unhappily all the time"

Prager, are you joking?

Okay, you're probably not. "Unhappily" is an adverb and describes how they're acting, right?

Wrong.

"To act" in this case is a copulative verb. Or, since the word "copulate" is a naughty one, you may have learned the term as "linking verb", which means that the subject and its predicate nominative are connected in a way that links them, so that you have a noun or pronoun before the verb and an adjective or adjectival noun after the copulative verb.

Thus, John acts smart. John is modified by the word smart, and we don't use an adverb "smartly" to modify the verb "acts". "John acts smartly" is just evil.

Don't get it yet? Consider this one: You seem intelligent. "Intelligent" modifies "you". Would you prefer, "You seem intelligently" ? Go to the rear of the class.

On a side note: When I was in school, a very boneheaded English Grammar text tried to tell us that "I feel well" was correct, rather than "I feel good." The committee of English teachers who wrote this book were wrong. Thanks to fifty years of not teaching grammar in "grammar school", they didn't understand that sentence well enough to parse the connecting verb and realize that "well" was totally inappropriate. They tried to slither around the issue by claiming that "in this instance, 'well' functions as an adjective," this admitting that an adjective was the appropriate choice. I feel sick, I feel happy, I feel inappropriate. Not I feel happily or inappropriately, those would describe what your hands were doing. (Shame on you!)

I remember there was a time when Prager used to say, "Boys and girls are born differently." The grossness of this error should be immediatlly obvious. You can be born in a certain way, but once you are born you have certain characteristics and don't confuse those characteristics with the manner in which you were born. Obviously someone told Prager how wrong this was, but I can't for the life of me figure out why he didn't retain the lesson and generalize it to other copulative verbs.

Prager question: "Did the advent of a child affect the quality of your marriage (your sex life)?"

"Love is not necessarily a feeling; it's a decision, too."

Amen. I've been trying to educate people on this for two decades. People don't listen.

Prager on vacation

I hate it when he's on vacation, because I tend to take the days off and not post anything, when I intended to keep listening and posting.

Oh, well, we'll see.

Zoos

Prager: After you've seen animals out in the wild, you'll never want to see them caged in a zoo again.

Well, that's nice, and I'm sure you're right, but sadly not all of us can afford to go see them in the wild. Many refuse to afford to go see them in the wild. Kids with such parents will never see them at all unless their schools drag them off on an annual zoo trip. I don't like the schools and I think they have plenty of money and they're not teaching what they ought to but I'm definitely in favor of expanding kids' horizons with a trip to the zoo.

Besides, if they never see them in the zoo, their only recourse is to see one of the charming "animal eats animal" shows on Animal Planet of NatGeo, and I say shows like those are basically garbage. Chase a wildebeest, pull the wildebeest to the ground, rip up the wildebeest. And we don't worry about teaching cruelty to animals this way? Why not?