The Frog and the Scorpion

One day, a scorpion looked around at the mountain where he lived and decided that he wanted a change. So he set out on a journey through the forests and hills. He climbed over rocks and under vines and kept going until he reached a river.
The river was wide and swift, and the scorpion stopped to reconsider the situation. He couldn't see any way across. So he ran upriver and then checked downriver, all the while thinking that he might have to turn back.

Suddenly, he saw a frog sitting in the rushes by the bank of the stream on the other side of the river. He decided to ask the frog for help getting across the stream.

"Hellooo Mr. Frog!" called the scorpion across the water, "Would you be so kind as to give me a ride on your back across the river?"

"Well now, Mr. Scorpion! How do I know that if I try to help you, you wont try to kill me?" asked the frog hesitantly.

"Because," the scorpion replied, "If I try to kill you, then I would die too, for you see I cannot swim!"

Now this seemed to make sense to the frog. But he asked. "What about when I get close to the bank? You could still try to kill me and get back to the shore!"

"This is true," agreed the scorpion, "But then I wouldn't be able to get to the other side of the river!"

"Alright then...how do I know you won't just wait till we get to the other side and THEN kill me?" said the frog.

"Ahh...," crooned the scorpion, "Because you see, once you've taken me to the other side of this river, I will be so grateful for your help, that it would hardly be fair to reward you with death, now would it?!"

So the frog agreed to take the scorpion across the river. He swam over to the bank and settled himself near the mud to pick up his passenger. The scorpion crawled onto the frog's back, his sharp claws prickling into the frog's soft hide, and the frog slid into the river. The muddy water swirled around them, but the frog stayed near the surface so the scorpion would not drown. He kicked strongly through the first half of the stream, his flippers paddling wildly against the current.

Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog's back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs.

"You fool!" croaked the frog, "Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?"

The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drowning frog's back.

"I could not help myself. It is my nature."

Then they both sank into the muddy waters of the swiftly flowing river

How could right thinking individuals come up with the idea that plastering the slogan: "THERE'S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE." is clever. I draw two conclusions. It is meant lightheartedly or it is designed to provoke thought. A third possibility exists, and this is that the campaigners are really smart people who are masters of reverse psychology techniques, and the campaign is in fact designed to push people the other way... to make them rebel against it and say, "who are they to tell me to stop worrying and enjoy my life? I will worry and be miserable if I want to. And who are they to tell me that there's no God?" I'm being light here, but let's say people took the third view. Rather than causing people to embrace atheism they may well cause people to think the other way, and where they took no thought they may then start to ask themselves, "what if there is a God?" I have a strong suspicion that people are already asking themselves that. Granted there are those who will clutch at anything that offers hope of supporting their chosen belief(s)... to the extent of throwing money behind a campaign that in reality offers no support to the unbeliever. I suspect those who added their financial support did so as an act of rebellion against religion (not necessarily against a God they don't consider) and others perhaps gave out of a sense of mischief making (good harmless fun)... but maybe I'm completely wrong? At closer inspection this ad campaign isn't as I first thought, a bad thing. It is an example of how sometimes clever ideas when put into practice can backfire and have the opposite effect on people you hoped to persuade towards believing as you do. Personally, despite the fact that people who choose not to believe in religion/God tend to come to me with arguments that to them are profoundly weighed in their favour, I am always mindful to send them to think and find out for themselves whenever they put forward someone else's argument they watched on Youtube, read or heard... and this despite the fact that I can wipe the floor with the arguments brought to me. When you tell people to essentially, go away, it nullifies them. They expect you to argue with them... a form of attention seeking. So going back to the ad campaign, perhaps they might have been better advised to invite people to question the existence of God, instead of assuming that people who believe in God worry and don't enjoy life. I don't know about other believers, but my experience of God leaves me with nothing to worry about and a full enjoyment of life, regardless of banking meltdowns and social ills.

There I was minding my own business on Wednesday evening after a very long day of filming in a Bollywood movie, when my nephew asks me if I can help to chaperone his class outing on Friday. Putting my own needs aside, I agreed to go. His teacher called yesterday to confirm, and were it not for my committing over the phone, after the events of this morning I wouldn't have bothered. Coming straight to the point, I missed the train because a very slow ticket inspector insisted on preventing me getting a ticket from the machine and issueing one personally moments before the train was due. Now I'm the kind of person who vents freely, and freely I vented. There were up to six inspectors there as I laid into him verbally. Nothing irritates me more than people who don't know me jumping to conclusions. I just told them all to shut up! Shut up! Shut up! And one of them - a woman - invited me to make her shut up. She concluded that I was a bad example to my nephew (aged 11) and that I was scaring and embarrassing him. Now my nephew is something of an attention seeker and he quickly absorbed what this woman said. He walked off and was "crying his little heart out", she said. Please! As if I don't know him. And when his father asked why he had been crying he declared, "because she embarrassed me and was scaring me". Now I know had he not heard her say that when asked why he was crying he would have been unable to answer his father. It is in situations like that that I thank God that I don't have children. This country (UK) is creating incompotent wimpish children who are babied into "adulthood", and God forbid a child of mine would have to taste of this society. There are those who would say I'm being harsh, but I've said it before and I'll say it again: some people treat their children as pets (they pamper them and fail to teach them to fend for themselves) and I have seen them try to undo the work responsible parents do with their children when put in charge of them. The woman who dared to judge me in assuming too that my nephew is my child bears the hallmarks of one who is clueless about how to raise a decent child. My exchange with the ticket inspector was an adult matter and nothing to do with my nephew. His responsibility as a child was to stand back and wait for me to deal with the situation, not to walk off in search of attention. I'm glad this morning happened because I have learned that my nephew is not to be trusted. His attention seeking behaviour is such that heaven forbid the social services should one day come a-looking for me for some misguided adult suggesting something that perhaps is too irresistible for him not to run with. Yes, this might seem harsh, but bear in mind the situation where children not much older than him are killing one another here in London with guns and knives and haven't the wherewithal to consider the consequences, not just to themselves but to others. And will I be accompanying him on any other outings? What do you think?

I slept with the radio on, as I do sometimes, and woke up in the very early hours to a story about the horrors of what is happening in India in the midst of the banking crisis on which the world is so focused right now. Not wishing to take sides or to be seen as biased (something I am not), I'm merely commenting on what I heard, and subsequently read (see link). Suffice to say that Hindus and Christians are in conflict and people are being brutalised and murdered... in the name of their god?

I have to confess my embarrassment as I listened to one very zealous Hindu man justifying the persecution of Christians to the journalist. There is no justification. This conflict serves only to push those who live in hope that there is no God to cling to that hope. This serves only to push people away from religion. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article4834245.ece

When Joshua was made leader over the Israelites, he invited them to worship his God or to do as they pleased if worshipping the gods of the land was what they felt inclined to do. It was not about forcing them to follow. It was about allowing them to choose. And as for Joshua he was going to serve his God no matter what they chose to do (Joshua 24:15).

Mormons (LDS) have thirteen stated beliefs, commonly known as The Articles of Faith, of which number eleven states:

We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.

If religious folks could only learn to focus on what is relevant to them they would not begin to find the time to think about or even have the inclination to go about persecuting those who do not share their beliefs... but come to think of it, even among those who DO share the same beliefs often there exists much conflict.

Do we ever think to ask God's opinion? What must He think of us?