Potpourri

Responsibilities at church this week and some other things have affected my postings. I just realized that nothing has gone up since last Saturday. Here are a few items that have been rolling around in my brain.

First, as I was 'channel surfing' this week, I hit a commercial for a group of California Psychics. In the commercial was a guarantee that promised: if this was not the best psychic reading the customer had ever had, we will refund your money.

I was struck by that. How do you rate psychic readings? What constitutes a 'good' psychic reading versus a 'great' psychic reading? Aren't most psychic readings geared toward future events? If so, how long do you have to wait to be able to evaluate? I guess the only thing left for the psychics to promise is that their readings are 100% organic.

Second item. In the City Weekly, SLC's major alternative paper, was a story about Steven Jones, a former professor at BYU. Jones is a leading player in the alternative theories about 9/11. He is convinced that something more than the planes was involved in bringing down the buildings. His outspokenness in criticizing the official US government conclusions was a factor in his early retirement in 2006.

That raises a lot of questions for me. Is there an issue of academic freedom here? How closely do professors have to 'toe' the line - and whose line is it - in order to keep their jobs? What if Jones was denying the majority view on global warming or the Holocaust, would he have been able to stay at BYU or would he have been pushed out even earlier?

Third, there is a push to allow members of the Christian Church to be 'unbaptized.' This service is for folks who now do not believe and want to renounce their previous faith. There is a ceremony and an 'unbaptized' certificate.

I am thinking this is much ado about nothing. If a person no longer believes, then the original baptism should no longer have any significance for him or her. Why go through some ceremony to invalidate it? The 'unbaptism' rite seems to suggest that there is some inherent power in the baptism that must be deactivated.

Do you have any thoughts about any of this?