Right after the Golden Rule, the most laudable guideline in the world is “different strokes for different folks.”

Sometimes, Religious Freedom Really Is Under Attack.

Part of the problem, the study concludes, is the human brain itself, which lies in wait for its unsuspecting host to remove itself from all distractions — other people, entertainment, conversation, visual stimulation — before striking. Lying very still and quiet in a dark room is in fact the worst thing a person can do, as it gives the brain an unparalleled opportunity to flood the body with invisible horrors and anxious, waking nightmares.

“It turns out that lying down by yourself in total darkness is the least restful thing a person can do,” Taccone added. “It’s a recipe for setting your brain on fire.”

Via Falling Asleep Actually Impossible, Scientists Discover

Great contrast image here of a living, flowing stream and the stinky drying detritus left to dry on the bank.

The biblical case for full gender equality in the church is clear, potent and overwhelming. It flows with the trajectory of all the major currents of the mighty stream of scripture. It is an inescapable consequence, means and mechanism of the overriding, over-arching biblical mandate of love and justice and love, love, love.

And yet there are some verses, a bunch of them, that can be plucked out of that great stream and divorced from the context of that biblical current. And if you set those verses off to the side and allow them to dry off so as to no longer be tainted by all the other verses and arguments and principles to which they were formerly attached, they can be read in such a way that they seem to forbid gender equality in the church.

This process of selecting verses to extract from the rest, elevating them above the rest, and thereby interpreting them to contradict the rest, is what I call the clobber-text hermeneutic. This approach to the Bible is pandemic in America, where it was perfected and popularized because it provided the only excuse that white Christians could come up with for reconciling their defense of slavery with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

via Why young-Earth creationism needs to be killed with fire part 2.