This Little PIggy said,"Wee, Wee, Wee", all the way to the ER

Rushing madly through outside school hallways--which are open to the torrential, afternoon, Florida rain--a toddler darted out in front of me and caught my naked pinky toe, unprotected by my flip-flops, with his apparently steel-toed tennis shoes.

After limping around the elementary school, and then the middle school for two hours, while holding back tears towards the end, I realized that my toe was probably broken instead of only badly stubbed.

One trip to the ER, and a few X-rays later, I am the proud owner of shiny metal crutches.

My husband thinks I have become a self-inflicating injury hypochondriac looking for extra attention.  I told him not to say things like that to a woman who has two new, long, metal clubs with which to strike him.

He's lucky that I can't chase after him! ;-)

Pale Blue Dot

Last weekend the boys and I went to a planetarium and attended several of the shows offered. One of the presentations, Extreme Planets, explored the possible environments of planets that have already been discovered outside of our solar system.



This and the Live Star Talk by the Planetarium's astronomer were pretty spectacular.

The Rationalist said afterwards,"Watching those shows made me realize how small Earth is and how easily it could be destroyed."

I concurred. Imagining the immensity of space, the vastness of our galaxy and the prospect of billions of other galaxies, it does make a person seem pretty insignificant.  It also makes me think that somewhere out there there has to be at least one other planet with life.

Functionally, it doesn't really matter.  Even if there are thousands of planets with life, they are so far from us that they may as well not exist.  Theoretically, though, how amazing would that be?

Why Belief?

Why do humans believe things? Why do we venture into thought worlds that can only exist through exerting a high level of belief that can't be substantiated by materialistic, visible processes?

Because we evolved that way.

Part of what makes humans successful is the ability to teach and receive information and ideas without having personally experienced the knowledge firsthand. We learn from each other, not just through observing another person's actions, but through the other person recounting a lesson, or a bit of knowledge, or a new way of doing things.

We store up all this information in our relatively large brains and it gives us an advantage we wouldn't have otherwise.  We survive because we are good at information storage, retrieval, and analysis.

A large portion of that information we must accept on faith. There's no way we could personally check every fact or idea for veracity.  There must be a level of trust present in our learning; trust from our teachers, from our fellow humans, and in the process of learning itself.

This trust is self-reinforcing.  When we receive a new bit of information, or advice about something, and we follow it and it turns out to be true and right, then we have strengthened the level of trust we have for secondhand knowledge.

Multiply this by a million instances and it's easy to see how trust and belief become natural human tendencies. Because we are social animals living in complex social hierarchies, it is a necessity that we trust each other and build upon a base of knowledge that is shared across our social group regardless of our ability to prove that the conglomeration of ideas that guides our lives is true in every detail.

Belief, then, is just a normal outgrowth of our development and survival as a species.

Of course, that's the positive side of belief and trust, but belief and trust can go horribly awry. It's possible to believe things which are false. It's possible to be manipulated and have belief and trust misused and abused by a devious person. It's possible for belief to become our main way of viewing the world to the exclusion of the reality around us.

In turn, it seems to me that belief--the acceptance of ideas that we haven't personally verified--is directly tied to our social groupings and loyalties. And, when our beliefs are challenged, the ramifications are enormous for us because of what it does to our sense of unity and trust in the larger system in which we exist.

Logically, it would seem silly to be so critically affected by an overturned belief.  After all, everyday we have to adjust to new circumstances and learn from our failures. If I think the best way to get across town is route A and I've been going that way all my life, and everyone I know swears by that route,  I don't get upset or feel ashamed if I learn that route B is actually faster and more convenient.  I simply start using route B and wind up happy that I learned something new.

Yet this doesn't happen when we experience it in our religious or personal beliefs. Changing or losing belief in these areas is monumental because of what it says about our trust and attachment to a particular group of people, people we feel close to and love and interact with every day. People who we used to listen to uncritically and trust implicitly.

Because what we have learned in life has always come down to us through our closely knit social groups, there is no way to overturn a deeply held, core idea without it appearing treasonous to the group, without seeming to undermine the authority of the very group which produced us.

more on this later.....

Comparison as Consolation

My *extended family member's mother passed away this past weekend after suffering with Huntington's disease for years. She had spent the last 3 years in a nursing home, unable to talk, eat, walk, or communicate in any way by herself. See had been pretty badly off for some time before that.

I called to express my condolences and talked with my extended family member--a very gentle, sweet person--for a few minutes.

In the middle of that conversation I realized, once again, that people say all kinds of things without really thinking about them. In order to express her consolation that she and her brother and her father were all present when her mother passed, along with their families, she referred to my father's death, making a comparison about the comfort of one death over another.  She went further bringing up the comfort that her mother was in Heaven while we didn't have that comfort about my father. We were left with "uncertainty".

My father died alone from what the medical examiner thinks was a massive heart attack, with the phone still in his hand.  He never made the call that he was probably trying to make to 911.  That's how instantaneous his death happened...not enough time to even press three numbers on a phone. It wasn't discovered that he had died until at least a week or two later.

He also died an atheist.

I didn't respond to my extended family member's comments.  I know that she is hurting and has no intention to offend . I know that she is just expressing ideas that my own brother still struggles with.  I know exactly what she meant by her comments, because I might have made those same comments a few years earlier.

So, this post isn't about ranting and outrage over my extended family member's comments. Instead, I wanted to merely mark down the idea that so much of our comfort comes from having a concrete example to compare things to.  It seems as if we can only feel good about ourselves and our circumstances when we have other people and disasters to view as horrible examples.

It's as if goodness and happiness joy can't exist if it doesn't have an evil by which to define itself.  We are "good" people because we are not like those "bad" people. Our choices are good choices because they are different than those bad choices...etc.

My extended family member found comfort that God had brought them all together to be present at her mother's death, as if it were some grand design that coincidentally happened when really, it was due to the nurses calling and telling them that her mother didn't have much time left and everybody should come if they wanted to say goodbye to her.

But we take comfort where we can find it and dress up the ugliness behind how we get that comfort. Most of the time we don't even see the ugliness because it isn't important to us.  It's just a vehicle we use to move us along to a better emotional place.

The ugliness behind my extended family member's comment is the idea of my father being eternally in hell. From such a thing she stole a moment of consolation that her mother wasn't suffering the same fate.

It would be an easy thing to be upset about....except for the truth that we all function in this way at times.

* I edited this to remove some identifying information.

Stewart on Ron Paul

Saw this somewhere and thought it was funny.

The Daily Show - Indecision 2012 - Corn Polled Edition - Ron Paul & the Top Tier
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

This is one of several videos lately in which Stewart spends most of his time aiming at the media instead of the actual politicians. Interesting change in targets.

Outrage All Around Us

The Rationalist reacted strongly upon seeing a father with his two year old on the end of a leash:

(this is just an image pulled from the interwebs)


"I understand why that kid's on a leash....but that's just not right!"










His outrage has also been ignited by the idea of dog breeding.  After watching a Dogs 101 DVD that talks about different dog breeds and crossing breeds, he exclaimed,"That's just wrong!  Dogs shouldn't be forced to mate with other dogs...with total strangers!! How would those dog breeders like it if they had to mate with a total stranger!?"

I tried to convince him that animals frequently do such things in the wild, meeting up for brief periods with a heretofore unknown animal and then moving on.

He didn't seem convinced by my argument.  ;-)

His main outrage has to do with the concept of "force" and animals or people being made to do things against their own will or inclinations.

Before I know it, he may become a member of PETA or decide to go vegan and I'll have to change what I feed and clothe him with.

I do admire his passionate conviction at times.

Doing OK

I've been doing well the last few weeks and feel totally normal.  I don't know if that's because of the low-sodium diet or mere coincidence.  This whole Meniere's disease thing seems vague and mysterious enough that you could probably report any kind of regimen as successful at certain periods.

The placebo effect shall always be with us.

The major thing that has transpired is that I tearfully quite my job.  The anxiety over whether I would have an episode of vertigo while driving around town every day, or in the middle of a presentation at a school was causing me too much turmoil.

It hurt to willingly quit a job in an economy that's so terrible, but I felt as if I had to.

Now. it's time to move on to something else.

August 2nd, The Government Hopes for The Rapture as Solution to Debt Crisis

Not Really.

But that would be one way out, wouldn't it?

I watched the presidential address this week and Boehner's response to it.  They both were nauseating, for completely different reasons.

Obama's portrayal of "fairness" and wealthy Americans paying their "fair share" falls flat for me.  Wealthy Americans already pay most of the taxes in this country at a rate of 35% in comparison to the 15% that represents "average" household incomes.

Those percentages are on taxable incomes which are usually much lower than actual incomes by the time that most people take even standard deductions.

The whole "fair share" argument is a non-starter.  Wealthy Americans already pay their fair share.

On the other hand, tax rates need to rise.  It's simply unavoidable.  We are too far into this mess to not suck it up and face facts.  Cutting spending sounds great when you think it's all wasteful, but last time I checked we drive on federally funded roads, learn at federally funded schools, and our older population depends on federally funded health care.

We can make cuts in those areas, but we need to be conscious of the fact that when we say "cuts" we are also meaning that individuals will have to pick up the tab for these things on their own, which in certain areas will be nearly impossible, especially in a down economy with so many people out of work.

We need tax rates to rise in all brackets, even if it is only by 1% for each bracket. Working Class, Middle Class and Lower Class people need to contribute to maintaining all of the services that a federal government provides. We all use those services everyday and we all should have a hand in maintaining those public spaces and services.

This requires speaking the truth and explaining to all of us Less Than Wealthy Americans how little we contribute to the Budget compared to all those Wealthy Americans and Bad Corporations.

Boehner came across as an angry, defiant man in his rebuttal. I shook my head and thought, "Nothing good can come from this."

So far his plan is a drop in the bucket of what needs to be done, offering 1 trillion in deficit reduction instead of the 3-4 trillion previously offered.

I keep hoping to read the news and hear that both sides have compromised and finally settled on a plan, but so far it seems like we're watching a game of Chicken in which no one wants to blink.

Shrinking Life

The summer's kind of been a bummer for me.

I got some of the painting done that I had planned, but not nearly as much as I had hoped by this point.  The living room has multiple color splotches painted on the walls, like some sort of abstract color-blocking. Instead of painting the living room red, I opted to paint the front hallway red, deciding that a red living room would be more red than I could handle.

I haven't gotten as much done as I hoped because I have been battling episodes of vertigo and nausea. This is something that began very subtly about six months ago.  My ears became congested and were causing me some faint dizziness.  I chalked it up to a head cold that had moved into my ears and figured I would wait it out.

It went away after a week or so.  Until it came back a few weeks later.  Same thing.  Congested ears. Reduced hearing because they were congested. Occasional moments of dizziness.

These annoying but minor symptoms seemed to come and go with no rhyme or reason.  I wondered if I was developing allergies or had a lingering ear infection that my body couldn't quite kick.

Mid-April, while driving to see my father-in-law who was in hospice, I turned my head to check for traffic before changing lanes and the whole world went swirly. Luckily, I was almost at my destination.  By carefully keeping my head straight, and driving extra cautiously, I was able to safely get where I was going.

I stepped out of the car and had a hard time walking a straight line without feeling like I was going to fall. I made my way inside and sat very still for about an hour until the vertigo passed.....and then I was fine.

It was very strange.  Once again, I blew off the episode because it was isolated, seemed to magically resolve itself after a couple of hours, and seemed to be tied to my ears becoming congested.

Things went along smoothly except for minor moments of congestion/slight dizziness. Fourth of July weekend found me lying in my niece's room by myself, in the middle of a huge party, because I was experiencing so much vertigo and nausea that I simply couldn't interact with anyone.  That was the first life-altering episode.  It passed after an hour or two and I got up, feeling perfectly fine, and joined the party. Everybody around me was a little freaked out and worried about me.....but I truly felt OK once the vertigo stopped, so I tried to reassure everyone that I was fine.

Fast forward to one week later...I'm lying on the floor in the bathroom, unable to make my way back to the bed I had been hiding in for two hours, trying to make the world stop spinning around me.  I was shaking, and on the verge of throwing up, and feeling so sick that I started thinking the emergency room was in my future. The only reason I didn't ask my husband to take me was because I didn't think I could stand up and walk to the car, let alone endure the ten minute drive without dying......that's how sick I felt.

The level of "unwellness" and the helplessness that I felt and the fear of what the heck was happening took me back to my days of chemo and emotionally crushed me. I hadn't felt this terrible and out of control of what was happening to me since then.  And, the finger of fear, about whether this might be a recurrence or a metastasized brain tumor, poked around in my head.

It was frightening.

And yet....a couple of hours later.....I was mostly fine, though exhausted form the ordeal and worried about what it meant for me.

A trip to an urgent care later in the evening supplied me with a course of antibiotics and Antivert, although the doctor didn't see any signs of an ear infection or any inflammation, or any physical reason for my ear congestion and episodic vertigo.  Still, I thought that maybe this would solve things.  Maybe I had an infection in my inner ear that wasn't visible.

A week later, the antibiotics proved useless. Another episode of vertigo, and the loss of my entire day to laying still in a dark room waiting to feel normal again, motivated me to see an ENT specialist.

In the meantime, I scoured the internet for clues as to what might be wrong with me. My symptoms didn't seem brain-tumorish, but these events were so bizarre that I needed some kind of explanation.

Unfortunately, what I found wasn't encouraging. I happened across the term Meniere's Disease and when I investigated it found this.

The symptoms of Ménière's are variable; not all sufferers experience the same symptoms. However, so-called "classic Ménière's" is considered to have the following four symptoms: 

1. Periodic episodes of rotary vertigo or dizziness.
2. Fluctuating, progressive, unilateral (in one ear) or bilateral (in both ears) hearing loss, usually in lower frequencies.
3. Unilateral or bilateral tinnitus.
4. A sensation of fullness or pressure in one or both ears.

Ménière's often begins with one symptom, and gradually progresses. However, not all symptoms must be present for a doctor to make a diagnosis of the disease. Several symptoms at once is more conclusive than different symptoms at separate times. Attacks of rotational vertigo can be severe, incapacitating, and unpredictable and can last anywhere from minutes to hours, but generally no longer than 24 hours.

Crap.  That sounded exactly like what I was experiencing.  And the good news?  No cure.  No understanding of what causes it, or why it happens.  Once it starts, it doesn't stop....unless you are one of the few who might have spontaneous remission after many years.

I promised my husband that I wouldn't mention all of my internet research to the doctor in order not to influence his train of thought.  I would just go, describe what had been happening, let him examine me and see what he came up with.

This was one of those moments when I wanted to be proved wrong.  I wanted him to look in my ears study the results of the ear and hearing tests that he gave me and say, "Aha! I know what's wrong and it is easily solved!  You have a giant ball of wax in your ear!"

Or maybe,"Yes...it's an earwig living in your ear!"

Or maybe,"Yes...it is an infection.  You just need a different antibiotic than the one that you had!"

Alas, he merely looked at me and said, "You have a disorder called Menieres Disease."

Great. Tell me something I don't know.

At this point, the only thing that seems to help people with this disorder, sometimes, is a low-sodium diet. The idea is that the inner ear is overproducing fluid which cause a membrane in the inner ear to break, leak fluid into all the wrong places, and cause vertigo, aural fullness, tinnitus...yada, yada, yada. Keeping your body from retaining too much fluid by drastically reducing your sodium intake is supposed to help

Have you ever tried to eat a low-sodium diet?  It's extremely hard. No pre-packaged foods, sauces, soups, restaurant food, soy sauce, ketchup, most salad dressings, definitely no shaking of salt over anything. It doesn't make for an easy adjustment.

Yet, I'm doing it. And...I resent it.

I feel like I'm a 75 year old person, accumulating sicknesses and conditions like some kind of weird collection.  The list of things I have to do, and take, and watch out for is growing larger.

The list of situations in which I must be extremely cautious is growing.  I have to evaluate before I get in the car how my ears are feeling.  Do I think I might have an episode?  Will one happen to me in the middle of the store? What would I do if it did?

To make matters worse, I'm really worried about whether I will be able to work.  My job, which follows the school calendar, requires me to drive to and from locations every day.  It requires me to be on my feet, twisting and turning and bending and rising up and down as I perform in front of hundreds of people.  If an attack hit me in the middle of a show, I would be incapacitated. I wouldn't be able to finish and no one could fill in for me. I would have to lay down on the floor while making a spectacle of myself and my "condition".

Not Good.

And yet...I need this job.  I need to work.  The condition is wholly unpredictable. I might be perfectly fine for months on end and then get hit with an episode.  Which would be OK as long as the episode happened in the afternoon or evening.

It's possible to work around it.....but I resent even having to.

I feel as if my life keeps shrinking. The circle containing future possibilities keeps tightening around me.

I guess I am mostly feeling sorry for myself and wishing that things would be easier, that there wasn't always some new obstacle on the horizon.

It's not even the obstacles, in and of themselves, that are frustrating.  It's the feeling that my own body keeps letting me down...that the obstacles are intrinsic to my physical being, not some external problem that I could try and conquer.

Sigh.

Summer's Under Way

Almost a whole month since I've updated!

It's been a busy month.  The Rationalist finished fifth grade with a 2 hour long awards ceremony. Even though it dragged on, it was actually quite touching to see him and all of his classmates over the years, grown up, dressed up and being recognized for all of their achievements. Almost everyone received some sort of award and it was great to hear the PE, Music and Art teachers introduce the talented students they had worked with.

Afterwards, we all went to The Cheesecake Factory for a celebratory dinner, otherwise known as "the fanciest restaurant I've ever been to" according to The Rationalist. That tells you how frequently we eat out at a "real" restaurant!

I had decided that this summer was going to be the Summer of Home Repair and Maintenance.  I spent the first week of the summer break painting our bedroom and trying to find a paint color that my husband didn't reflexively hate.  That's not easy.

Eventually, I finished the bedroom and am now moving on to the rest of the house.  I'm considering painting the living room a deep red...mainly because my natural inclination is to pick out something boring, neutral and bland. If it turns out like a French bordello I may have to repaint.

Last week, we spent the entire week at Anna Maria Island, one of my favorite places to visit the beach on the Gulf side of Florida. It's quieter, more family oriented and not totally bogged down with traffic, crowds of roaming teenagers, tourist shops or high rise condos. Plus, It's incredibly beautiful; fine, white, sandy beaches, blue-green water and gorgeous sunsets.

The boys had a great time swimming, trying to body surf on the tiny waves that the gulf usually provides. Outside of really bad weather, the Gulf tends to be very calm, which makes it great for paddle-boarding, or kayaking, or fishing....but not so cooperative for boys wanting crashing waves that propel them forward with powerful surges.

I've got a few things simmering in my head that I might blog about....but it's hard to promise anything during the Summer of Home Repair and Maintenance.

Death by Internet Searching

The hot flashes I experienced from chemo a few years ago, and continued anti-hormonal therapy, caused me to develop rosacea. It may have eventually erupted on its own, but I primarily fault my cancer treatment for bringing it on.

I am probably predisposed to the condition.....it tends to hit fair-skinned women in their 30's with Celtic ancestry.  That's me.

There is no cure for rosacea; it's a chronic condition that is managed, sometimes going into "remission" and then flaring up.

One of the treatments for rosacea consists of taking Doxycycline, an antibiotic, for about a month or two depending on how quickly symptoms subside.  Doctors aren't quite sure why the antibiotic works for rosacea, because rosacea isn't exactly an infection.

Anyway, now that I've bored everyone with my medical conditions, the point is that I had some Doxycycline in my medicine cabinet from the previous time I had taken it a couple of years ago. My rosacea was acting up and I decided to just take it because I didn't have time to get to the dermatologist and just figured they were going to tell me to take Doxycycline anyway.

I noticed it was expired, but then recalled a pharmacologist I once knew saying that most medicines are still effective way past the expiration date. I figured the worst thing that could happen would be that I would take it and it wouldn't work in which case I would have to go to the doctor anyway.

***********

A curious mind is an infernal thing.  It never knows when to stop.  It's always asking "Why?".  It's always wondering how things work.  It's like a five-year-old child pestering their parent with a thousand questions a day, unsatisfied, always wanting more, more, more.  More answers.  More explanations.  More understanding of generally obscure, not-very-useful facts.

Unfortunately, I have one of those question-generating-machines in my skull driving me to look things up. Curious about why medicines expire, or what could happen from taking expired medicines I used some free time to look it up.

This is what I found:

Store doxycycline at room temperature away from moisture and heat. Throw away any unused medicine after the expiration date on the label has passed. Using expired doxycycline can cause damage to your kidneys.

What??? Kidney Damage???

In a panic, I tried to find more information.

Everywhere I looked on general, medical, non-obscure sites I found this dire warning about doxycycline and the words "renal failure" used in conjunction with expired doxycycline and tetracycline antibiotics.

OK.  I had taken 3 days worth.   How much trouble was I really in?  Should I let my husband know so that he could start planning my funeral?  How quickly was I going to die?  What symptoms should I look for?

So off I went through the inter-webs trying to find out more information, more details, more understanding of why this stuff is so bad for kidneys.

And what did I find?

Nothing really.

The first clue came from the wiki article on doxycycline.

In the case of doxycycline, the absence of an hydroxyl group in C-6 prevents the formation of the nephrotoxic compound.

Oh. OK.  So maybe I wasn't going to die after all.

Now I was very curious.  Which was it...Deadly Toxin, or Meh?

Eventually I came across the topic in this forum which seems to be associated with Rutgers University.

The forum administrator, while trying to answer a poster with the same question I had:

I tried to find the data behind the statement that "expired doxycycline can cause a dangerous syndrome resulting in damage to the kidneys" (Source (http://www.drugs.com/doxycycline.html)). I was unable to find a published study on the subject although there are many outrageous warnings of the dangers of expired tetracycline or doxycycline all over internet. Let me continue looking but this is making me very suspicious.


I followed the thread which I won't entirely repost.  He listed some information and basically said that there have been no studies about expired doxycycline and the information he was able to find was based on some case studies over 40 years old.

He finished the conversation with:

I was quite surprised to find all these strong warnings all over internet, including statements that taking expired tetracycline and doxycycline can kill people. That is one of the problems with internet. All these people are posting and reposting information without critically evaluating it. Even reputable sites are reposting the information. 

It turns out that tetracylines can degrade into a toxic substance, but so far there haven't been any concrete, documented examples of expired-doxycycline-caused renal failure. 

Aacck.

I hate when I mentally bump up against this. It always shakes me up a little when I come across these situations.....situations in which normally reputable people and organizations turn out to not know what the hell they are talking about.

Received wisdom from a perceived, authoritative source can become so powerful that no one questions it.  When we have a source that we have previously experienced as being smart, knowledgeable and useful, it is easy to assume that it will always be so.

It's uncomfortable when we realize it's not.

Anyway....turns out that I probably won't die... at least not from expired doxycycline.....but at the same time I don't think that I will take any more of it.

You know...just in case.

;-)

Who Said It?

"A despairing man should have the devotion of his friends even though he forsakes the fear of the Almighty."

Over 1,000 Posts

I realized that I have actually published over 1,000 posts on this blog. It's hard to imagine that I let that many mostly complete thoughts escape my keyboard and wind their way through cyberspace....or, perhaps more honestly, stagnate in this little corner of it.

hmmm.

How many "wasted" hours does that represent?

I don't want to know because for every post I have published there are several others that never made it that far.

Gandhi and Hitler BFFs?

I was tracking down Gandhi's letter to Hitler, hoping to find someplace that had the actual text available after following some links to a site that was dropping the bomb that Gandhi called Hitler "my friend". The reference was so brief and interspersed with other personal failings of Gandhi that I was curious about how exactly Gandhi used the term.

I found the text at Letters of Note; Correspondence deserving of a wider audience.

Here's the post dealing with Gandhi's letter. It turns out Gandhi didn't really know Hitler and was trying to butter him up and ask him, oh-so-politely, not to start a war. Well...that didn't work out....although the post makes mention of the fact that Hitler never actually received the letter. Still, I doubt Hitler would have cared about Gandhi's opinion. The letter was written before the start of WWII as tensions were ratcheting up in Europe but before the scope of what Hitler was eventually planning on doing was fully understood.

So....it is factually true that Gandhi called Hitler "my friend" but not thematically true that Gandhi viewed Hitler as one of his best buds.

Just an interesting tidbit I ran across.

Camping Not Giving Up the Ghost

Harold Camping just can't surrender the idea that he's right, even when the evidence that he is completely wrong is all around him in the presence of non-raptured human beings and in the earthquake-less, destruction-less world around him.

While I definitely have a certain mocking tone about the whole thing in my head, I do actually feel some pity for the man and especially for the followers who fervently gave all they had to support him. Discovering that your certainties are all wrong, and being able to actually admit it, is a spirit-breaking event.

If you learn that the way you thought about something was based on false presuppositions through and through it upends your whole world and sense of yourself.

You gotta love this quote from Camping, though:

"I don't have any responsibility. I'm only teaching the Bible. I'm telling ... this is what the Bible says. I don't have spiritual rule over anybody ... except my wife as the head of the household."

Yippee for her! What a lucky woman! I send her my condolences.

On a serious note, I do wonder how he can so easily make himself blameless in his own eyes. No responsibility? While he certainly didn't make anyone do anything drastic by physically forcing them to give up savings, cars, houses, and jobs, he didn't seem to have any problem accepting the proceeds from people. He didn't hesitate to hasten the drumbeat of doomsday in his followers' ears, encouraging them to sacrifice for his message.

And now....well if they have nothing left, that's their problem. Maybe it's true, but it's awfully heartless.

Anyway, what does he care? The world's going to end again, for like REAL....I mean really, really, REAL in 5 months. So, his followers just have to squeak by for 5 months before they truly won't need jobs, houses, cars, etc.

So why does it all matter? AVI thinks it's not such a big deal, and I would agree on a very basic level that he may be right. No one was physically harmed. No violent protests took place. No one died as a result of this end-of-days fiasco.

I would argue, however, that the harm done by Mr. Camping was/is psychological, spiritual, and relational. Families have been separated. People have been brought up short by the failing of their leader to instruct them. The world of those followers who now recognize Camping is and has always been completely wrong is in shambles.

It matters because these people will not simply have to square the fact that Camping, as a human being, was wrong, but that what they think about God, who He is, how He works, and what He thinks of them is all up for grabs.