People don't work that way! We bite the hands that feed us, and should a hand be stroking us and then stop it's not so much that, cat-like, we will nip that hand or scratch it to express our displeasure at the breaking of the stroking social contract as that we will track that hand back to its house, load a bunch of…

Or, you know, provoked a secondary immediately apocalyptic conflict.

Depends, Mordor always struck me as having a polka to Linkin Park spectrum for radio. Can we rock out to that which does not rock?

I always suspected there was some nuclear escalation style logic in the Eagles forbearance. That they were afraid if they got in to soon Sauron would get desperate enough to really go off and then the big guns would have to get involved in destructive ways.

Aw, shucks, I'm glad to be in such good company, there have been some nice threads in here.

It's impossible that Tequilla is scared. He reserves his fear for romance.

Yeah, the Presbyterian's I knew had giant portraits of Calvin all over their house.

My favorite resistant immigrant splinter culture story is of a town in Texas populated entirely by post-1848 exiles.

I have to say, as a non-Episcopalian with a lot of Episcopalian friends, you guys take a lot of shit.

Methodists can be pretty amazing. The church that sponsored the Boy Scout troop I belonged to as a kid has just gotten more and more hoss in terms of its charity and local justice commitments, right down to sponsoring security details for PFLAG meetings.

There's a significant difference in terms of how binding statements are declared and the relative importance of general interpretation, but there are functional similarities.

Nope, think more Lone Star. Though I did host people from UST from time to time. I understand the local raidable citrus groves are a pretty phenomenal feature for the cocktail set.

Well, diving inspiration is widespread - particularly among Baptists where the act of individual interpretation itself is sometimes given the weight of divine authority (Texas Baptists, in particular, are like a herd of hermeneutically confident theologically inclined hyper feral cats, sometimes with a hint of…

Not even figure anymore, just authority.

Also true in Academia.

I think about it all the time. WTH, GOP, WTH.

Not to mention the burning popes in tubes.

Nope, I may have actually gone to your school - or one very similar - and the OP is correct.

That's not really how predestination works, but it is one of the ways it starts to make sense.

I had exactly that happen. Atheist who said she respected true Christians and then descended into a wild anti-Catholic rant. Fortunately, this happened in a bar in the south and she was wearing short shorts so it was fairly to tap some broseph in to replace me in the conversation.