Recent content by Shieldmaiden4Christ

Hmm. Yeah, not a big fan of ice pellets, either.

I think Dr. Carson appeals to people who engage primarily in emotional reasoning. That's just my opinion, though. We need less emotional lability and more coherent thought in political discourse.

@gzt -- What are your degrees in (you've said it before but I forgot)? I majored in anthropology, so I've touched on a lot of stuff you'd mentioned in both history and anthropology classes.

I don't think Dr. Carson is a good option, sorry. This is coming from a Libertarian who refused to vote for Ron Paul.

I think what Matt says has merit. I originally fell away from Christianity because I was turned off by praise bands and modern Christian music. I enjoyed the old school Methodist hymns, and it was a turn off to see those disappear in favor of praise bands. I then turned to Catholicism, but the...

One of the things I love about TAW is that there's humor in pretty much any thread.

Although it's not related to Dune, I'm also a huge fan of Ron Moore's reimagined Battlestar Galactica. It gets really "whoa, what the hey...?" crazy in the last season, but there's so much excellence in the writing, story, structure, character building, universe building, macrocosm and...

Gurney, I think that's a really awesome assessment of Dune. There's so much to appreciate in it from the metaphor and the microcosm, to the world building, to the prose. I'm better at analyzing the strength of the prose and the world building than picking apart the symbolic portions of it, but...

For what it's worth, between U.N. and U.S. research and investigation on refugees, it takes over six months to even get refugee status per U.N. qualifications. Then, it takes at least 18 months of research by DHS, FBI and 2-3 other U.S. agencies before someone of Syrian origin granted refugee...

Yeah, basically the conquering elite superimposed their language, culture and religion on the natives of the Anatolian region. A lot of people don't even know that, though, which is why I point that out.

The vast majority of the Turkish population is actually an admixture of Greek and Middle Eastern populations. The only thing Turkic about the Turks is their language.

For a while, sadly. I'm moderately sure that baklava is the official dessert of a lot of Levant countries.

Imagine how long it would be if we brought Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Persians and Armenians in on a discussion over who invented baklava!

@gzt - thanks for that. Mood booster!

In think it might be because it's a large UMC in a small Southern town surrounded by a lot of Evangelical and/or Fundamentalist churches. Maybe it's a competing for the "flocks" of these other churches.