http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


--
dadl-ot mailing list
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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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)

http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


--
dadl-ot mailing list
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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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)


>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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)

>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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)


>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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)

>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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)


>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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)


>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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)

>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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)
And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
http://www.in-one-ear.com
_______________________________________
"I want a song to learn and sing, of a life requited."-Echo & the Bunnymen

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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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)


>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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--
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http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot
)
>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
http://www.in-one-ear.com
_______________________________________
"I want a song to learn and sing, of a life requited."-Echo & the Bunnymen

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)
I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: "" <>
To: dadl-
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:46:10 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
http://www.in-one-ear.com
_______________________________________
"I want a song to learn and sing, of a life requited."-Echo & the Bunnymen

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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

--
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http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot
)


>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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)

>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
--
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)
On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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)
And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

--
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http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot
--
dadl-ot mailing list
http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot
)
>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
http://www.in-one-ear.com
_______________________________________
"I want a song to learn and sing, of a life requited."-Echo & the Bunnymen

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)
I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: "" <>
To: dadl-
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:46:10 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
http://www.in-one-ear.com
_______________________________________
"I want a song to learn and sing, of a life requited."-Echo & the Bunnymen

--
dadl-ot mailing list
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:46 AM, <> wrote:
> Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?

Certainly.

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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
http://www.in-one-ear.com
_______________________________________
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I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: "" <>
To: dadl-
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:46:10 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
http://www.in-one-ear.com
_______________________________________
"I want a song to learn and sing, of a life requited."-Echo & the Bunnymen

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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:46 AM, <> wrote:
> Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?

Certainly.

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On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
http://www.in-one-ear.com
_______________________________________
"I want a song to learn and sing, of a life requited."-Echo & the Bunnymen

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I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: "" <>
To: dadl-
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:46:10 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
http://www.in-one-ear.com
_______________________________________
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:46 AM, <> wrote:
> Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?

Certainly.

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On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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Have any of those others mocked their parents?

And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know anything
about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
figures.


Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps), but
writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Lance McLain <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
http://www.in-one-ear.com
_______________________________________
"I want a song to learn and sing, of a life requited."-Echo & the Bunnymen

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I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: "" <>
To: dadl-
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:46:10 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
http://www.in-one-ear.com
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:46 AM, <> wrote:
> Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?

Certainly.

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On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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Have any of those others mocked their parents?

And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know anything
about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
figures.


Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps), but
writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Lance McLain <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, �Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?

I don't particularly like these guys' mocking tone either.

> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? �I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think part of my problem with Schaeffer is its so personal. He's not
just mocking ideas, he's mocking his family.

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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: "" <>
To: dadl-
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:46:10 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:46 AM, <> wrote:
> Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?

Certainly.

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On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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Have any of those others mocked their parents?

And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know anything
about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
figures.


Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps), but
writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Lance McLain <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, �Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?

I don't particularly like these guys' mocking tone either.

> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? �I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think part of my problem with Schaeffer is its so personal. He's not
just mocking ideas, he's mocking his family.

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On Tue, 24 May 2011, Lance McLain wrote:
> On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> > I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
>
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
> Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
> mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think the skepticism around Schaeffer derives from the fact that he's
mocking *his own friends and family*, rather than sacred cows.

And his dismissive comments about The-God-of-the-Bible are... interesting.
I wonder if he's still Christian. (He converted to Greek Orthodoxy back
in the '90s, I think, but does he still consider himself Orthodox?)

Anyway. Even there, I'd say it's not so much "sacred cows" that concern
some of us, as a sort of baby-vs.-bathwater thing.

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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
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I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: "" <>
To: dadl-
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:46:10 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:46 AM, <> wrote:
> Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?

Certainly.

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On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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Have any of those others mocked their parents?

And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know anything
about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
figures.


Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps), but
writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Lance McLain <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, �Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?

I don't particularly like these guys' mocking tone either.

> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? �I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think part of my problem with Schaeffer is its so personal. He's not
just mocking ideas, he's mocking his family.

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On Tue, 24 May 2011, Lance McLain wrote:
> On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> > I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
>
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
> Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
> mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think the skepticism around Schaeffer derives from the fact that he's
mocking *his own friends and family*, rather than sacred cows.

And his dismissive comments about The-God-of-the-Bible are... interesting.
I wonder if he's still Christian. (He converted to Greek Orthodoxy back
in the '90s, I think, but does he still consider himself Orthodox?)

Anyway. Even there, I'd say it's not so much "sacred cows" that concern
some of us, as a sort of baby-vs.-bathwater thing.

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>Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt, Stewart, >Limbaugh or any other?

I was going to point that out. Pretty much all satirists are paid to mock. It seems to me people only find mockery distasteful when the target is their own group. It's okay to mock Republicans, not democrats, it's okay to make fun of liberals, not conservatives.



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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: "" <>
To: dadl-
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:46:10 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:46 AM, <> wrote:
> Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?

Certainly.

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On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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Have any of those others mocked their parents?

And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know anything
about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
figures.


Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps), but
writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Lance McLain <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, �Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?

I don't particularly like these guys' mocking tone either.

> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? �I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think part of my problem with Schaeffer is its so personal. He's not
just mocking ideas, he's mocking his family.

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On Tue, 24 May 2011, Lance McLain wrote:
> On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> > I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
>
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
> Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
> mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think the skepticism around Schaeffer derives from the fact that he's
mocking *his own friends and family*, rather than sacred cows.

And his dismissive comments about The-God-of-the-Bible are... interesting.
I wonder if he's still Christian. (He converted to Greek Orthodoxy back
in the '90s, I think, but does he still consider himself Orthodox?)

Anyway. Even there, I'd say it's not so much "sacred cows" that concern
some of us, as a sort of baby-vs.-bathwater thing.

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>Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt, Stewart, >Limbaugh or any other?

I was going to point that out. Pretty much all satirists are paid to mock. It seems to me people only find mockery distasteful when the target is their own group. It's okay to mock Republicans, not democrats, it's okay to make fun of liberals, not conservatives.



Thom
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http://www.in-one-ear.com
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On May 24, 2011, at 10:14 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> Have any of those others mocked their parents?
>
> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking
> Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would
> know anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were
> public
> figures.

Some of the lunacy that evangelical right at large have come to
believe has been a result of his parents. Seeing their son dispute
that with vigor is encouraging to many ex-evangelicals (like me) who's
beliefs are a direct result of generations of similar ancestors. We
who were raised in ignorance of the fullness of what Christianity
really is, historically, universally. In some cases (like mine) this
can be chalked up to ignorance, generations of minimally educated but
sincere people trying to find God navigating revivalists fads and
fearmongering preachers. It is truly a miracle they didn't cast off
God altogether (although many did). But in the case of educated
leaders, there is no excuse. And they deserve none, for leading
American Christians about as far away from authentic Christianity as
Christendom has ever seen.

-L



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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: "" <>
To: dadl-
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:46:10 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:46 AM, <> wrote:
> Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?

Certainly.

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On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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Have any of those others mocked their parents?

And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know anything
about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
figures.


Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps), but
writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Lance McLain <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, �Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?

I don't particularly like these guys' mocking tone either.

> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? �I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think part of my problem with Schaeffer is its so personal. He's not
just mocking ideas, he's mocking his family.

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On Tue, 24 May 2011, Lance McLain wrote:
> On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> > I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
>
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
> Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
> mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think the skepticism around Schaeffer derives from the fact that he's
mocking *his own friends and family*, rather than sacred cows.

And his dismissive comments about The-God-of-the-Bible are... interesting.
I wonder if he's still Christian. (He converted to Greek Orthodoxy back
in the '90s, I think, but does he still consider himself Orthodox?)

Anyway. Even there, I'd say it's not so much "sacred cows" that concern
some of us, as a sort of baby-vs.-bathwater thing.

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>Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt, Stewart, >Limbaugh or any other?

I was going to point that out. Pretty much all satirists are paid to mock. It seems to me people only find mockery distasteful when the target is their own group. It's okay to mock Republicans, not democrats, it's okay to make fun of liberals, not conservatives.



Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
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_______________________________________
"I want a song to learn and sing, of a life requited."-Echo & the Bunnymen




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On May 24, 2011, at 10:14 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> Have any of those others mocked their parents?
>
> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking
> Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would
> know anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were
> public
> figures.

Some of the lunacy that evangelical right at large have come to
believe has been a result of his parents. Seeing their son dispute
that with vigor is encouraging to many ex-evangelicals (like me) who's
beliefs are a direct result of generations of similar ancestors. We
who were raised in ignorance of the fullness of what Christianity
really is, historically, universally. In some cases (like mine) this
can be chalked up to ignorance, generations of minimally educated but
sincere people trying to find God navigating revivalists fads and
fearmongering preachers. It is truly a miracle they didn't cast off
God altogether (although many did). But in the case of educated
leaders, there is no excuse. And they deserve none, for leading
American Christians about as far away from authentic Christianity as
Christendom has ever seen.

-L



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Agreed.

Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |*
*


On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Mike Findlay <>wrote:

> Have any of those others mocked their parents?
>
> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know
> anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
> figures.
>
>
> Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps),
> but
> writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.
>
> Mike F.
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Lance McLain <>
> To: DADL (off topic)
> Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
> Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies
>
> On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:
>
> > I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> > Mike F.
>
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.
>
> regards,
> -Lance
>
>
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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: "" <>
To: dadl-
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:46:10 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:46 AM, <> wrote:
> Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?

Certainly.

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On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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Have any of those others mocked their parents?

And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know anything
about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
figures.


Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps), but
writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Lance McLain <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, �Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?

I don't particularly like these guys' mocking tone either.

> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? �I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think part of my problem with Schaeffer is its so personal. He's not
just mocking ideas, he's mocking his family.

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On Tue, 24 May 2011, Lance McLain wrote:
> On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> > I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
>
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
> Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
> mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think the skepticism around Schaeffer derives from the fact that he's
mocking *his own friends and family*, rather than sacred cows.

And his dismissive comments about The-God-of-the-Bible are... interesting.
I wonder if he's still Christian. (He converted to Greek Orthodoxy back
in the '90s, I think, but does he still consider himself Orthodox?)

Anyway. Even there, I'd say it's not so much "sacred cows" that concern
some of us, as a sort of baby-vs.-bathwater thing.

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>Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt, Stewart, >Limbaugh or any other?

I was going to point that out. Pretty much all satirists are paid to mock. It seems to me people only find mockery distasteful when the target is their own group. It's okay to mock Republicans, not democrats, it's okay to make fun of liberals, not conservatives.



Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/Thomwade
http://www.in-one-ear.com
_______________________________________
"I want a song to learn and sing, of a life requited."-Echo & the Bunnymen




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On May 24, 2011, at 10:14 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> Have any of those others mocked their parents?
>
> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking
> Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would
> know anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were
> public
> figures.

Some of the lunacy that evangelical right at large have come to
believe has been a result of his parents. Seeing their son dispute
that with vigor is encouraging to many ex-evangelicals (like me) who's
beliefs are a direct result of generations of similar ancestors. We
who were raised in ignorance of the fullness of what Christianity
really is, historically, universally. In some cases (like mine) this
can be chalked up to ignorance, generations of minimally educated but
sincere people trying to find God navigating revivalists fads and
fearmongering preachers. It is truly a miracle they didn't cast off
God altogether (although many did). But in the case of educated
leaders, there is no excuse. And they deserve none, for leading
American Christians about as far away from authentic Christianity as
Christendom has ever seen.

-L



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Agreed.

Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |*
*


On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Mike Findlay <>wrote:

> Have any of those others mocked their parents?
>
> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know
> anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
> figures.
>
>
> Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps),
> but
> writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.
>
> Mike F.
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Lance McLain <>
> To: DADL (off topic)
> Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
> Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies
>
> On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:
>
> > I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> > Mike F.
>
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.
>
> regards,
> -Lance
>
>
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On Tue, 24 May 2011, wrote:

> > Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
> > Hewitt, Stewart, >Limbaugh or any other?
>
> I was going to point that out. Pretty much all satirists are paid to
> mock. It seems to me people only find mockery distasteful when the
> target is their own group. It's okay to mock Republicans, not
> democrats, it's okay to make fun of liberals, not conservatives.

To reiterate: The problem here is not that Schaeffer mocks *our* own
group, but that he mocks *his own family*.

Steyn, Stewart and the others all take aim at public targets, and they all
have to prove that they are just as up-to-speed on these public targets as
all the other satirists. They compete, as it were, on even turf.

Schaeffer, on the other hand, is a pure product of nepotism: someone who
claims special insider knowledge that no one else can have, and who claims
that his mockery is somehow "better" or more privileged than the mockery
of others, because nobody else has the insider knowledge that he has.

Frank Schaeffer, in other words, is basically just the evil twin of
someone like Franklin Graham. Graham is a former problem child who ended
up becoming a complete toe-the-liner -- albeit one who seems to be
inclined to toe the Religious Right's line more than his own father's.
Schaeffer, on the other hand, is a former problem child who apparently
decided to turn *against* a lot of what his father stood for. But
Schaeffer is pandering to his own constituency just as much as Graham is.
And both of them are claiming a special right to define their fathers'
legacies, simply by virtue of that family connection.

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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: "" <>
To: dadl-
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:46:10 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:46 AM, <> wrote:
> Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?

Certainly.

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On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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Have any of those others mocked their parents?

And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know anything
about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
figures.


Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps), but
writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Lance McLain <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, �Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?

I don't particularly like these guys' mocking tone either.

> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? �I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think part of my problem with Schaeffer is its so personal. He's not
just mocking ideas, he's mocking his family.

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On Tue, 24 May 2011, Lance McLain wrote:
> On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> > I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
>
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
> Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
> mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think the skepticism around Schaeffer derives from the fact that he's
mocking *his own friends and family*, rather than sacred cows.

And his dismissive comments about The-God-of-the-Bible are... interesting.
I wonder if he's still Christian. (He converted to Greek Orthodoxy back
in the '90s, I think, but does he still consider himself Orthodox?)

Anyway. Even there, I'd say it's not so much "sacred cows" that concern
some of us, as a sort of baby-vs.-bathwater thing.

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>Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt, Stewart, >Limbaugh or any other?

I was going to point that out. Pretty much all satirists are paid to mock. It seems to me people only find mockery distasteful when the target is their own group. It's okay to mock Republicans, not democrats, it's okay to make fun of liberals, not conservatives.



Thom
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_______________________________________
"I want a song to learn and sing, of a life requited."-Echo & the Bunnymen




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On May 24, 2011, at 10:14 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> Have any of those others mocked their parents?
>
> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking
> Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would
> know anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were
> public
> figures.

Some of the lunacy that evangelical right at large have come to
believe has been a result of his parents. Seeing their son dispute
that with vigor is encouraging to many ex-evangelicals (like me) who's
beliefs are a direct result of generations of similar ancestors. We
who were raised in ignorance of the fullness of what Christianity
really is, historically, universally. In some cases (like mine) this
can be chalked up to ignorance, generations of minimally educated but
sincere people trying to find God navigating revivalists fads and
fearmongering preachers. It is truly a miracle they didn't cast off
God altogether (although many did). But in the case of educated
leaders, there is no excuse. And they deserve none, for leading
American Christians about as far away from authentic Christianity as
Christendom has ever seen.

-L



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Agreed.

Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |*
*


On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Mike Findlay <>wrote:

> Have any of those others mocked their parents?
>
> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know
> anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
> figures.
>
>
> Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps),
> but
> writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.
>
> Mike F.
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Lance McLain <>
> To: DADL (off topic)
> Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
> Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies
>
> On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:
>
> > I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> > Mike F.
>
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.
>
> regards,
> -Lance
>
>
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On Tue, 24 May 2011, wrote:

> > Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
> > Hewitt, Stewart, >Limbaugh or any other?
>
> I was going to point that out. Pretty much all satirists are paid to
> mock. It seems to me people only find mockery distasteful when the
> target is their own group. It's okay to mock Republicans, not
> democrats, it's okay to make fun of liberals, not conservatives.

To reiterate: The problem here is not that Schaeffer mocks *our* own
group, but that he mocks *his own family*.

Steyn, Stewart and the others all take aim at public targets, and they all
have to prove that they are just as up-to-speed on these public targets as
all the other satirists. They compete, as it were, on even turf.

Schaeffer, on the other hand, is a pure product of nepotism: someone who
claims special insider knowledge that no one else can have, and who claims
that his mockery is somehow "better" or more privileged than the mockery
of others, because nobody else has the insider knowledge that he has.

Frank Schaeffer, in other words, is basically just the evil twin of
someone like Franklin Graham. Graham is a former problem child who ended
up becoming a complete toe-the-liner -- albeit one who seems to be
inclined to toe the Religious Right's line more than his own father's.
Schaeffer, on the other hand, is a former problem child who apparently
decided to turn *against* a lot of what his father stood for. But
Schaeffer is pandering to his own constituency just as much as Graham is.
And both of them are claiming a special right to define their fathers'
legacies, simply by virtue of that family connection.

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> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
> figures.

been a result of his parents. Seeing their son dispute that with vigor is
encouraging to many ex-evangelicals (like me) who's beliefs are a direct result
of generations of similar ancestors. We who were raised in ignorance of the
fullness of what Christianity really is, historically, universally. In some
cases (like mine) this can be chalked up to ignorance, generations of minimally
educated but sincere people trying to find God navigating revivalists fads and
fearmongering preachers. It is truly a miracle they didn't cast off God
altogether (although many did). But in the case of educated leaders, there is
no excuse. And they deserve none, for leading American Christians about as far
away from authentic Christianity as Christendom has ever seen.<

Some of lunacy of the evangelical right, (a loaded term and one I am using only
for the sake of argument), is in spite of his parents. Name me one current
lunacy that can be attributed to Francis/Edith Schaeffer - heck he even maligns
his mother regarding menstrual blood without any evidence that she did anything
but read the bible to him. I admit to seeing a fair amount of ignorance about
the history of Christianity but to be fair my interest in it and evolving
knowledge of it can be attributed to reading Francis Shaeffer's works.


BTW who gets to judge what is "authentic Christianity"? Franky, you, Pat
Robertson....?

Mike F.
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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
http://thomwade.wordpress.com/
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I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: "" <>
To: dadl-
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:46:10 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:46 AM, <> wrote:
> Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?

Certainly.

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On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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Have any of those others mocked their parents?

And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know anything
about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
figures.


Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps), but
writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Lance McLain <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, �Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?

I don't particularly like these guys' mocking tone either.

> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? �I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think part of my problem with Schaeffer is its so personal. He's not
just mocking ideas, he's mocking his family.

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On Tue, 24 May 2011, Lance McLain wrote:
> On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> > I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
>
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
> Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
> mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think the skepticism around Schaeffer derives from the fact that he's
mocking *his own friends and family*, rather than sacred cows.

And his dismissive comments about The-God-of-the-Bible are... interesting.
I wonder if he's still Christian. (He converted to Greek Orthodoxy back
in the '90s, I think, but does he still consider himself Orthodox?)

Anyway. Even there, I'd say it's not so much "sacred cows" that concern
some of us, as a sort of baby-vs.-bathwater thing.

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>Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt, Stewart, >Limbaugh or any other?

I was going to point that out. Pretty much all satirists are paid to mock. It seems to me people only find mockery distasteful when the target is their own group. It's okay to mock Republicans, not democrats, it's okay to make fun of liberals, not conservatives.



Thom
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On May 24, 2011, at 10:14 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> Have any of those others mocked their parents?
>
> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking
> Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would
> know anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were
> public
> figures.

Some of the lunacy that evangelical right at large have come to
believe has been a result of his parents. Seeing their son dispute
that with vigor is encouraging to many ex-evangelicals (like me) who's
beliefs are a direct result of generations of similar ancestors. We
who were raised in ignorance of the fullness of what Christianity
really is, historically, universally. In some cases (like mine) this
can be chalked up to ignorance, generations of minimally educated but
sincere people trying to find God navigating revivalists fads and
fearmongering preachers. It is truly a miracle they didn't cast off
God altogether (although many did). But in the case of educated
leaders, there is no excuse. And they deserve none, for leading
American Christians about as far away from authentic Christianity as
Christendom has ever seen.

-L



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Agreed.

Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |*
*


On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Mike Findlay <>wrote:

> Have any of those others mocked their parents?
>
> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know
> anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
> figures.
>
>
> Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps),
> but
> writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.
>
> Mike F.
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Lance McLain <>
> To: DADL (off topic)
> Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
> Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies
>
> On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:
>
> > I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> > Mike F.
>
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.
>
> regards,
> -Lance
>
>
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On Tue, 24 May 2011, wrote:

> > Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
> > Hewitt, Stewart, >Limbaugh or any other?
>
> I was going to point that out. Pretty much all satirists are paid to
> mock. It seems to me people only find mockery distasteful when the
> target is their own group. It's okay to mock Republicans, not
> democrats, it's okay to make fun of liberals, not conservatives.

To reiterate: The problem here is not that Schaeffer mocks *our* own
group, but that he mocks *his own family*.

Steyn, Stewart and the others all take aim at public targets, and they all
have to prove that they are just as up-to-speed on these public targets as
all the other satirists. They compete, as it were, on even turf.

Schaeffer, on the other hand, is a pure product of nepotism: someone who
claims special insider knowledge that no one else can have, and who claims
that his mockery is somehow "better" or more privileged than the mockery
of others, because nobody else has the insider knowledge that he has.

Frank Schaeffer, in other words, is basically just the evil twin of
someone like Franklin Graham. Graham is a former problem child who ended
up becoming a complete toe-the-liner -- albeit one who seems to be
inclined to toe the Religious Right's line more than his own father's.
Schaeffer, on the other hand, is a former problem child who apparently
decided to turn *against* a lot of what his father stood for. But
Schaeffer is pandering to his own constituency just as much as Graham is.
And both of them are claiming a special right to define their fathers'
legacies, simply by virtue of that family connection.

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> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
> figures.

been a result of his parents. Seeing their son dispute that with vigor is
encouraging to many ex-evangelicals (like me) who's beliefs are a direct result
of generations of similar ancestors. We who were raised in ignorance of the
fullness of what Christianity really is, historically, universally. In some
cases (like mine) this can be chalked up to ignorance, generations of minimally
educated but sincere people trying to find God navigating revivalists fads and
fearmongering preachers. It is truly a miracle they didn't cast off God
altogether (although many did). But in the case of educated leaders, there is
no excuse. And they deserve none, for leading American Christians about as far
away from authentic Christianity as Christendom has ever seen.<

Some of lunacy of the evangelical right, (a loaded term and one I am using only
for the sake of argument), is in spite of his parents. Name me one current
lunacy that can be attributed to Francis/Edith Schaeffer - heck he even maligns
his mother regarding menstrual blood without any evidence that she did anything
but read the bible to him. I admit to seeing a fair amount of ignorance about
the history of Christianity but to be fair my interest in it and evolving
knowledge of it can be attributed to reading Francis Shaeffer's works.


BTW who gets to judge what is "authentic Christianity"? Franky, you, Pat
Robertson....?

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>Schaeffer, on the other hand, is a pure product of nepotism: someone who claims
>special insider knowledge that no one else can have, and who claims that his
>mockery is somehow "better" or more privileged than the mockery of others,
>because nobody else has the insider knowledge that he has.

Frank Schaeffer, in other words, is basically just the evil twin of someone like
Franklin Graham. Graham is a former problem child who ended up becoming a
complete toe-the-liner -- albeit one who seems to be inclined to toe the
Religious Right's line more than his own father's. Schaeffer, on the other hand,
is a former problem child who apparently decided to turn *against* a lot of what
his father stood for. But Schaeffer is pandering to his own constituency just
as much as Graham is. And both of them are claiming a special right to define
their fathers' legacies, simply by virtue of that family connection.<


Well said.

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http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/kamasutra/magic-menstrual-mummies/

A boy discovers that there are right and wrong kinds of blood.

by Frank Schaeffer

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball sized, tightly-wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

Let me explain why I’ve capitalized those words. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader—not merely the power behind her man, though she was also that. My parents raised me in L’Abri Fellowship, a sort of fundamentalist hippie commune before there were hippies, really not much more than a big old Swiss chalet where we lived, along with everyone who visited for “spiritual help” and/or to “find Jesus.” Mom divided everything into Very Important Things—say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness—and everything else—those things that barely registered on my mother’s to-do list, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in here. I’m not doing this as a theological statement so much as as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing, about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read from Leviticus 15 in a Bible study:

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited as an example the fact that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if this theory of menstrual synchrony will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the women who stayed with us, from the helpers—cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help for years at a time—to the students—who might stay for six to ten months or so.

These nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: women.

*

The-God-of-the-Bible—not to be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there—is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.” It seems The-God-of-the-Bible created his first female human as something of an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story in Genesis.

That said, when The-God-of-the-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-of-the-Bible’s Mind. Women brimming with bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-of-the-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-of-the-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-of-the-Bible issued countless factory recalls—for instance, miscarriages—and complex owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Managing Rules.

The-God-of-the-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-of-the-Bible hates wetness! Certain kinds, at least.

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad. If a woman finds a stain after, say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood isn’t from her womb. Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-of-the-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet. The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

The Bible is full of vengeful bloodshed. As the Psalmist says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” Such “triumphal” blood runs in God-of-the-Bible-pleasing crimson rivers throughout the Scriptures—from the Slaughter of Midian right up through the Book of Revelation.

*

About thirty years after peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, quivering with curiosity, my grown-up and terrified self was crouching next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging. I’d already watched our three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—the eldest—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world.

Now, on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So—illogically—I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, imagining that a face might stare back at me.

Waiting to be examined by a gynecologist, Genie was waxy pale. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand.

Next to me was a clear plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied the bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s **** hair to snag any **** hairs from her ****. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the ****, in case she put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

The night-duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a bleary-eyed gynecologist. He was a stranger to us, since Genie’s doctor was several towns away, and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room. He smelled faintly of liquor. We waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. My wife was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence. I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, one more example for me of the intimate reality in the universe that binds man and wife. If I were asked to choose between any religion—let alone the woman-hating, rape-sanctioning Bible—and my love for the women in my life, by that night the choice was clear. A God that doesn’t side with women isn’t worth following, let alone worshipping.

Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, published this month by Da Capo Press.


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> Adapted from ****, Mom, and God: How the Bible�s Strange Take on **** Led to Crazy Politics�and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)

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>Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)<

It sure comes across that way, (mocking people in his past). What could have
been so bad that he is so bitter? And when is he going to grow up and get past
it? I understand having baggage; I don't understand the desire to make a living
off of said baggage. It certainly can't be healthy.

Mike F.




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>
> Here's hoping Frankie has Found What He's Looking For. It's
> unfortunate that he can't help but mock people in his past, people he
> presumably loved. (Perhaps that's a bad assumption.)
>
That's a really difficult thing to do, especially when you feel betrayed by them, that they should have known better.

Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

Regards,
-Lance
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> �Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the veneer of their pride. �But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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And who of us would escape mocking?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:05:00 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> Part of me thinks mockery should be the appropriate response for smart
> people who do/believe dumb things. It may be the only way to break through the
>veneer of their pride. But then again, that may be my own pride talking there.

That's my concern. It's too easy to mock and I'm not sure we can do so
with the right motives.

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>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?

Mike F.




________________________________
From: "" <>
To: dadl-
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 9:46:10 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

>And who of us would escape mocking?



Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?


Thom
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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:46 AM, <> wrote:
> Which begs the question of who among us has never mocked?

Certainly.

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On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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Have any of those others mocked their parents?

And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know anything
about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
figures.


Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps), but
writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.

Mike F.




________________________________
From: Lance McLain <>
To: DADL (off topic)
Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies

On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> Mike F.

I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.

Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
Much of what he writes needs to be said.

regards,
-Lance


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On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Lance McLain <> wrote:
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, �Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?

I don't particularly like these guys' mocking tone either.

> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? �I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think part of my problem with Schaeffer is its so personal. He's not
just mocking ideas, he's mocking his family.

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On Tue, 24 May 2011, Lance McLain wrote:
> On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> > I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
>
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
> Hewitt, Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him
> mock. Much of what he writes needs to be said.

I think the skepticism around Schaeffer derives from the fact that he's
mocking *his own friends and family*, rather than sacred cows.

And his dismissive comments about The-God-of-the-Bible are... interesting.
I wonder if he's still Christian. (He converted to Greek Orthodoxy back
in the '90s, I think, but does he still consider himself Orthodox?)

Anyway. Even there, I'd say it's not so much "sacred cows" that concern
some of us, as a sort of baby-vs.-bathwater thing.

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>Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt, Stewart, >Limbaugh or any other?

I was going to point that out. Pretty much all satirists are paid to mock. It seems to me people only find mockery distasteful when the target is their own group. It's okay to mock Republicans, not democrats, it's okay to make fun of liberals, not conservatives.



Thom
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http://www.in-one-ear.com
_______________________________________
"I want a song to learn and sing, of a life requited."-Echo & the Bunnymen




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On May 24, 2011, at 10:14 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:

> Have any of those others mocked their parents?
>
> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking
> Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would
> know anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were
> public
> figures.

Some of the lunacy that evangelical right at large have come to
believe has been a result of his parents. Seeing their son dispute
that with vigor is encouraging to many ex-evangelicals (like me) who's
beliefs are a direct result of generations of similar ancestors. We
who were raised in ignorance of the fullness of what Christianity
really is, historically, universally. In some cases (like mine) this
can be chalked up to ignorance, generations of minimally educated but
sincere people trying to find God navigating revivalists fads and
fearmongering preachers. It is truly a miracle they didn't cast off
God altogether (although many did). But in the case of educated
leaders, there is no excuse. And they deserve none, for leading
American Christians about as far away from authentic Christianity as
Christendom has ever seen.

-L



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Agreed.

Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |*
*


On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Mike Findlay <>wrote:

> Have any of those others mocked their parents?
>
> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know
> anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
> figures.
>
>
> Maybe he needs to say what he is saying to someone, (a therapist perhaps),
> but
> writing about it and making a buck off it is in poor taste.
>
> Mike F.
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Lance McLain <>
> To: DADL (off topic)
> Sent: Tue, May 24, 2011 10:03:22 AM
> Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Magic Menstrual Mummies
>
> On May 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Mike Findlay wrote:
>
> > I'm sure we all have, but how many of us have made a living doing it?
> > Mike F.
>
> I can think of a lot of writers who's work have been posted here.
>
> Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn, Hewitt,
> Stewart, Limbaugh or any other?
> Is it because he's mocking our particular sacred cows? I say let him mock.
> Much of what he writes needs to be said.
>
> regards,
> -Lance
>
>
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On Tue, 24 May 2011, wrote:

> > Why should Schaeffer get any more derision for mocking than Steyn,
> > Hewitt, Stewart, >Limbaugh or any other?
>
> I was going to point that out. Pretty much all satirists are paid to
> mock. It seems to me people only find mockery distasteful when the
> target is their own group. It's okay to mock Republicans, not
> democrats, it's okay to make fun of liberals, not conservatives.

To reiterate: The problem here is not that Schaeffer mocks *our* own
group, but that he mocks *his own family*.

Steyn, Stewart and the others all take aim at public targets, and they all
have to prove that they are just as up-to-speed on these public targets as
all the other satirists. They compete, as it were, on even turf.

Schaeffer, on the other hand, is a pure product of nepotism: someone who
claims special insider knowledge that no one else can have, and who claims
that his mockery is somehow "better" or more privileged than the mockery
of others, because nobody else has the insider knowledge that he has.

Frank Schaeffer, in other words, is basically just the evil twin of
someone like Franklin Graham. Graham is a former problem child who ended
up becoming a complete toe-the-liner -- albeit one who seems to be
inclined to toe the Religious Right's line more than his own father's.
Schaeffer, on the other hand, is a former problem child who apparently
decided to turn *against* a lot of what his father stood for. But
Schaeffer is pandering to his own constituency just as much as Graham is.
And both of them are claiming a special right to define their fathers'
legacies, simply by virtue of that family connection.

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> And he's not mocking my sacred cows, the fact that he's mocking Francis and
> Edith Schaeffer means far more to him than it does me; who would know anything
> about who or what he was mocking if he didn't have parents who were public
> figures.

been a result of his parents. Seeing their son dispute that with vigor is
encouraging to many ex-evangelicals (like me) who's beliefs are a direct result
of generations of similar ancestors. We who were raised in ignorance of the
fullness of what Christianity really is, historically, universally. In some
cases (like mine) this can be chalked up to ignorance, generations of minimally
educated but sincere people trying to find God navigating revivalists fads and
fearmongering preachers. It is truly a miracle they didn't cast off God
altogether (although many did). But in the case of educated leaders, there is
no excuse. And they deserve none, for leading American Christians about as far
away from authentic Christianity as Christendom has ever seen.<

Some of lunacy of the evangelical right, (a loaded term and one I am using only
for the sake of argument), is in spite of his parents. Name me one current
lunacy that can be attributed to Francis/Edith Schaeffer - heck he even maligns
his mother regarding menstrual blood without any evidence that she did anything
but read the bible to him. I admit to seeing a fair amount of ignorance about
the history of Christianity but to be fair my interest in it and evolving
knowledge of it can be attributed to reading Francis Shaeffer's works.


BTW who gets to judge what is "authentic Christianity"? Franky, you, Pat
Robertson....?

Mike F.
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>Schaeffer, on the other hand, is a pure product of nepotism: someone who claims
>special insider knowledge that no one else can have, and who claims that his
>mockery is somehow "better" or more privileged than the mockery of others,
>because nobody else has the insider knowledge that he has.

Frank Schaeffer, in other words, is basically just the evil twin of someone like
Franklin Graham. Graham is a former problem child who ended up becoming a
complete toe-the-liner -- albeit one who seems to be inclined to toe the
Religious Right's line more than his own father's. Schaeffer, on the other hand,
is a former problem child who apparently decided to turn *against* a lot of what
his father stood for. But Schaeffer is pandering to his own constituency just
as much as Graham is. And both of them are claiming a special right to define
their fathers' legacies, simply by virtue of that family connection.<


Well said.

Mike F.
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On Tue, 24 May 2011, Lance McLain wrote:
> It is truly a miracle they didn't cast off God altogether (although many
> did). But in the case of educated leaders, there is no excuse. And
> they deserve none, for leading American Christians about as far away
> from authentic Christianity as Christendom has ever seen.

I'm still waiting to hear whether Frank "The-God-of-the-Bible [is] not to
be mistaken for whatever actual deity might be out there" subscribes to
authentic Orthodoxy as he once claimed to do.

I mean, it's funny, but I know people who claim to have met Greek Orthodox
monks (on Mount Athos, even) who, on discovering that these people were
evangelical, said, "Oh, you must read Frank Schaeffer, then!" These monks
were apparently unaware of the fact that Schaeffer's reputation within
evangelicalism was a pretty controversial one to begin with, so there was
no reason to assume his arguments for Orthodoxy would have impressed
anyone -- and now I wonder if they're even aware of what he's been saying,
and whether they'd even want to claim him as one of their own, now.

For a time, at least, certain Orthodox types were inclined to claim Frank
Schaeffer as a trophy of sorts: "Look! a former evangelical heavyweight --
well, okay, the *son* of a former evangelical heavyweight -- is one of us
now, and telling evangelicals to become Orthodox!" But now it's the
religious "progressives" -- the Huffington Post people, the Killing the
Buddha people -- who want to claim him as a trophy of sorts: "Look! a
former evangelical heavyweight -- well, okay, the *son* of a former
evangelical heavyweight -- is one of us now, and telling evangelicals to
become pro-choice, pro-gay, and all the rest of it!"

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