Bake's Sake
Put your oven in another oven. Cook your cooking.
Like water off a duckstacks back
Substack tells me today’s letter is too large for email servers to handle. Click the title to read on Substack’s website.
Race: Human1
Class: Duckstacker
Level: 1
Hit Points: 6
Duckstack Ecology: Fish
Welcome to Duckstack aquarium, we got water and even the stuff in it
The Noble Clownfish: Look at his goofy shoes
The Spangled Starfish: Possibly the most patriotic fish of all time
The Angelic Anglerfish: what a perfect halo
The Merry Moray: An eel with a 0 second memory, every second a surprise
Jake From Accounting: A hole in his oxygen tank ensures he’ll be back to work soon2
Trade Goods: Hot As Ice
The masculine and feminine clash violently in a winter wonderland
The ICE raids in Minnesota are an extremely politicized topic and probably nobody wants to hear “opinion” on them, but I will be brief. I think it is probably wrong to act like protestors are innocent. You might believe they are just, that you think the federal government is wrong here (on this topic, the Church’s council when this all started was that members should seek to uphold the law), but my perspective is when a protestor gets hurt they kind of signed up for it. If you’re on a crusade against the government then you’re at war, you’re a combatant, and you really don’t have any claim on not getting injured at that point. As a parent I don’t have any tolerance for “I’m not touching you” provocation games- if someone is trying to agitate while maintaining plausible deniability that’s worse than aggression, not better.
My friend Bones has much more insightful commentary than myself. She’s writing a boddice ripper smut novel featuring an ICE agent. Nice.
Scripture Readings: Natural Law
I don’t know what natural law means, but I would classify unnatural law as things like, speed limits
11 And he said unto them, What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?
12 How much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the sabbath days.
-Mathew 12
This is extremely interesting reasoning. Its an appeal to hypocrisy, first off. Do things become ok just because someone else would do it? Obviously the Savior looked very poorly upon hypocrisy (self serving hypocrisy, anyway), but I believe there is more to this. This argument also happens to confirm all my unique biases about religion. Lucky me!
The context of the chapter is the pharisees finding Christ to be irreligious. Or “heretical” as we might say to day. Christ rebutted them with scripture, not to demonstrate that he was in compliance with scripture, but showing that scripture was not some absolute metaphysical yardstick- it had exceptions. That was when he referenced David and the shewbread, but he wasn’t citing a scripture here.
I have said for a long time that religion should be 1) useful and 2) describe basic reality. I get lynched for this daily3. Letting your important stuff die just to fulfill minor orthodoxy is indeed impractical, and indeed there’s a note about good intentions here, all of which culminate in the explanation that “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” I wouldn’t say all of God’s laws are fungible based on whether they’re getting in the way at the moment or not4, but the amount that they are fungible in such a way is not zero and is probably more than we are comfortable with. Which makes sense if you believe God’s purpose is to make you a master, not a servant.
There’s some saying about measures becoming targets5, which was a huge part of the pharisees “whole thing”. The other part being self aggrandizement and power lust. Nobody’s perfect. But you can see with most of the times the Savior rebuffs them, it was this sort of thing- religion as a matter of compliance, rather than a tool, a schoolmaster, to bring you to God.
This doesn’t mean schoolmasters and law are bad. I’ve heard my fair share of pastors rail against “legalism” and they’re wrong. You actually do need that stuff to learn faith. The law of Moses wasn’t some mistake on God’s part. But there was no living religion behind it. At this point the pharisees hadn’t heard from a real prophet who God had authorized in something like 400 years, and there was nobody but John the Baptist to point them to Christ6. There was no living God to them, only dead scriptures, which they could interpret to their liking7. Whenever you get a dynamic like that, you’ll move quickly away from principle, and religion stops becoming a guide for better life, and becomes a tool to gain status, or worse, a security blanket, to assuage one’s own guilt.
Of course, guilt itself can be a security blanket. People love to performatively flagellate themselves- “if I punish myself, then God (/nature/karma) can’t justify punishing me once I have to confront him (her/it) later”. The jots of the law are used to avoid the whole8. You wallow in guilt to avoid having to rely on Christ’s grace. Probably a normal impulse, every child wants to be independent. “I can do it myself!” I doubt God objects to this! But the immediate question is whether you are truly repenting, which is measured by change of heart, not attempting to pay a debt. Is your conscience becoming more educated, more sensitive? Or are you covering it?
The point of shame or guilt or whatever is to get you to repent. To do soul searching. Most people don’t have time for that. But you gotta. If you don’t set time for it then you waste religion- the opportunity to become elevated.
DUCKSTACK COOKING: Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies
My lovely wife made cookies this week, and in preparation for this article, I didn’t ask her for the recipe. Instead, enjoy this recipe that I wholly fabricated using ChatGPT AI “in the style of the duckstack”. Let me know if it actually makes anything
History
Our history shipments have been slow lately because the history pipes are clogged
“are you killing my flowers?” she freezes. She puts the leaves back and shakes her head no, solemnly
Our toddler and her brother have very different personalities, which was again confirmed to us through ice cream this week9. The toddler cried when the ice cream melted onto her fingers, and the cone had to be gently wrapped in napkin to protect her. Her brother ate the cone first.
The kids love ramen. Toddler eats it with her fingers. Quite the spectacle. Not much to say about this but its a good memory so I’m writing it so I’ll remember it later.
Ducksnax
George
Ostensibly
Jake takes 2 damage
In my mind
As one example from my life, LDS missionaries have a rule about not taking rides from people who aren’t members of the church. This avoids all sorts of liability issues
“When you put a measuring tape to a target, you can figure out the rings diameter”. I’m sure that was it
That’s why they got all the miracles- “woe to you Jerusalem, for had the same miracles been given in Sodom, they would have repented in sackcloth!” -Mathew 11ish I don’t remember and I’m not looking it up
They weren’t the undisputed interpreters of scripture, they enjoyed arguing over it with people. It was safe! Scripture can’t condemn you. You don’t have to examine your sins through it if you don’t want to.
God appeared to me in a dream once just to scold me over this specifically
just like every week
“2 cups flour, harvested from a field you apologized to”
I guffawed
Sharp riff on law as tool versus orthodoxy as performance. The Merry Moray bit is clever too, zero-second memory eel might be the best metaphor for internet discourse I've seen this month. I grew up around very legalistic thinkin and watched it eat relationships for breakfast. The sheep-in-pit argument from Matthew cuts right throgh that. Good reminder that principles outrank procedures.