Periodic Penny Poise

At the trash bank everyone just leaves their money on the lawn

In for a penny, in for a Duckstack

Art: Redmer Hoekstra

Imagine if you’re carving a pumpkin and when you go to pull the guts out its a Duckstack. This is par for the course, of course. You would expect this. You are a reasonable person, after all. But then, what if you went to carve another pumpkin, and again inside it drew forth yet another Duckstack? How do you feel at that point? Perhaps you feel you could dismiss this also. “Another Duckstack for me, I guess,” you would say. And you would be right. It would be another Duckstack for you.

But out of curiosity, you go and dig out a pumpkin fresh, unearthed from your pumpkin graveyard in your garden. This one is straight from the ground, freshly unburied, but when you go to carve it, you find that it is even more Duckstack than the previous two. a sense of growing horror comes over you. You rush to your neighbors house, they have some pumpkins out for the autumn season. You stab it open, much to your neighbors horror. A Duckstack email peers up at you from inside. “What is going on!” You and your neighbor shout. For different reasons. You waive the Duckstack email under his nose. “What’s the matter, never seen a Duckstack before?” He will ask, because this is all very familiar to him.

In a stupor, you stammer out an apology for carving his pumpkin, and he frankly forgives you, not because he is happy with you doing this to him, but because he does it to his neighbors all the time, and he remembers the parable Christ gave about the unrighteous debtor¹ and doesn’t want to be charged with hypocrisy at judgement day.

But this still leaves you in the precarious predicament which you had found yourself in previously. Do you run around the neighborhood, slaying pumpkins, descending steadily into madness? Do you return to your house, filled with gloomy acceptance of this new facet of reality?

These are deep questions of the soul, so you can be forgiven for being a little bit confused. Nevertheless, this is a real thing you need to grapple with, in case it ever happens to you one day.

Sermon: Petty Forgiveness and Cheap Grace

Forgiveness out of spite, malice forgiveness, grudge forgiveness, that’s what being “Christlike” means, y’know? Credit to Bennett's Demilich for sparking some of these thoughts two years ago in a tweet he probably doesn’t even remember.

One of the things we have got a lot of today is junk food². I have heard people complain to varying degrees of accuracy³ that eating unhealthy is actually cheaper than eating healthy, that trash is easy to get and good stuff is, for some, nearly unattainable. However, I believe that this was preceded spiritually, by spiritual junk food. Shrines cause wickedness, not the other way around. And I don't mean this saying in a superstitious way- In very practical terms, it is simply easier to follow roads⁴.

This Halloween some Utah kids were caught wearing blackface in walmart as part of their costumes, which if you can believe it sparked a lot of outrage. The People seem very mad, and if the posts are to be believed are intent on making it so these 15 year olds can never go to college or hold a job ever now. Which is awfully nice of them, I guess, since both those things suck, but it is somewhat concerning to see the way some of my countrymen are couch fainting over it. Absolutely tripping over themselves to denounce these kids loud enough for the liberal media to hear them⁵, hoping to be congratulated on how racist they aren't⁶. Though this isn't the part that bothers me.

The part that bothers me is that they explicitly do so under the banner of their Christianity- that joining a virtual lynch mob is “protecting the vulnerable and downtrodden” is somewhat dubious to me; No, Jesus did not tell you to become the accuser of your brethren. It is not humble and Christlike to seek out people who aren’t being Christian enough and denounce them to the world, and to the extent blackface is a “sin” rather than simply a joke in poor taste⁷, we are commanded to be merciful to sinners, especially ones that sin out of weakness⁸. I don't know if these kids are even members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints- But it happened in Utah, so we have to make a whole affair out of it, I guess. Wouldn't want people to think we let sinners be in our church! That’s being generous though. To listen to these people talk, including people so prestigious as the child governor of Utah himself, these bad Halloween costumes are on par with Hate Crimes⁹. But if you are going to use that sort of rhetoric you should own up to it, and sentence these 15 year olds to life in prison.

They won’t do that of course, because the outrage caused by kids wearing racist costumes on Halloween is fluff with no substance- junk food.

Our society is full of junk food. Because society decided, at some point, that having correct opinions was an acceptable substitute for making the correct choices, so decades later society decided corn was an acceptable substitute for sugar. Its all related, all things are created spiritually before they are created physically¹⁰. Its kind of like "by harassing these kids, I am doing public relations for being a Good Person. I'm promoting the idea that I think being a Good Person is Good. Who does this help? This isn't morality. "Lord, is it Him?"

Everyone wants to feel moral, and if you plate feed them a “cause” then its really easy to massage that morality itch without having to put in the work, which was literally Satan’s plan in the pre-existence. Labor saving devices, except for morality.

-bobdaduck¹¹

When Jesus died on the cross, he fulfilled the law of Moses. This means you can’t just export all your sins onto a proxy and kill it to ritually cleanse yourself. That’s what it means to live the “higher law”. God doesn’t accept cheap sacrifices anymore. You have to actually break your own heart and contrite your own spirit.

HOW SICKNESS WORKS

this is medical advice I have 16 PhDs

I have been a bit sick this week, just like everyone else, so I thought it would be good to talk a little bit about how sickness works, so that everyone can know what’s going on. You see, your body has thousands of tiny jails inside it, called “cells”. These jails are usually empty, but sometimes some foreign and malicious actors show up, called germs, uninvited and unannounced, and start trashing the place, since they know they don’t need to clean up after themselves its just a rental¹². So your body rounds them all up and puts these germs in what are called "White blood cells". The white stands for purity, the blood stands for all the lives lost in the war on illness. Once all the germs are in these cells, they thrash and scream and basically, "let it all out", which is pretty disruptive to everyone else, which is why you feel under the weather when you get sick. But once these germs have gone through this therapeutic system they’ve really processed their emotions, and they come out more mature, upstanding, and conscientious than ever before. They become fine citizens, contributors to your body’s economy, working hard as tour guides and taxi drivers and public speakers, helping other antagonists to reform.

The system isn’t perfect, and everyone has their agency. Some germs don’t make it through the reformation process, so they get killed, but for the most part we’re pretty humane about this. If you’ve got complaints take it to management, I just work here.

History

Today’s history is brought to you by: America

I Killed my first chicken this week. It is interesting. Very sacred and solemn, until its done. When the chicken is dead, the atmosphere abruptly shifts to all business. And admittedly it was kind of awful; like this was our chicken, and we killed it. It didn’t deserve that. That’s not easy to do. But its like, this is the alternative to factory farming. If we eat store bought chicken we’re getting something that was put through a grinder and never knew love. The injunction on Adam to dress the garden and keep it, to have stewardship over it, really hits home today. That’s not a light duty God put on him and us. That’s a duty of blood. Of doing horrible things, because if you don’t, someone else will, and they will do it far worse.

In kid news, he’s taken this week to responding to every request with “I can’t”, which is somewhat inconvenient. “get up out of the bath” “I can’t” why?” “because I’m too heavy.” just sucked up all that bathwater like a sponge I guess

The kid also has taken to occasionally just saying “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” uhh no

Herded a bunch of deer in our yard, flowing like water through the trees and out, a very casual thing. Though really I would like to be violently ruining their lives for trespassing.¹³

Also, the asphalt fertilizer from last week is working great, we are growing so much asphalt now

1. Matthew 18:21-35

2. you can only blame some of this on Halloween

3. slightly lower sympathy for the people buying $30 organic bread

4. smashing into trees, and rocks, tumbling down a mountain as my car is gradually trash compacted into a small sporty-colored cube: I took the road less traveled by

5. little do they know the liberal media is not a person and does not have ears

6. To be fair, they are very aren’t racist

7. Notice this category doesn’t exist anymore for regular people. Its all apocalyptic and nazis no matter what nowadays

8. idk maybe teenagers stopped being doofuses at some point after I got out of high school

9. You can’t talk about blackface with the same language you use to talk about 9/11, come on

10. Moses 3:5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew. For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth. For I, the Lord God, had not caused it to rain upon the face of the earth. And I, the Lord God, had created all the children of men; and not yet a man to till the ground; for in heaven created I them; and there was not yet flesh upon the earth, neither in the water, neither in the air;

11. that’s me!

12. There is no high ranking politician in all of Europe who has children.

13. And then arrested, and then executed before the magistrate