An Exciting Challenge

I remember the year right before I stopped going to church. It seemed like every month, the bishop would issue a ‘new challenge’ to the congregation.  Ok, so it wasn’t so much a new challenge, as the same challenge over and over again.

“Ok, ward, this year, we’re going to read the Book of Mormon straight through!”

“But I just barely finished it….”

“Don’t care! Read it again!”

So, in the vein of my old bishop, I am going to issue all of you a challenge. Hopefully this will be a little more enlightening, and exciting, than reading the BoM. (Chloroform in print, as Mark Twain put it.) I challenge all of you to read a book this year that you disagree with. All the way through, no skipping the boring parts. If your ideas and beliefs are solid, then you should have no problems with this. If your ideas need some tweaking, that’s okay. You will have learned something.

Personally, I think I will be reading either Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead. I despise Ayn Rand. *ducks to avoid flung tomato*  I don’t care if you guys like her, I don’t, so feel free to tell me what ideas/authors you disagree with.

What are you guys going to read?

A Socratic Dialogue with Leonardo

And now time for some narcissistic self-indulgence.

I notice that Jon posted his Socratic dialog with God (which is hilarious to read). This comes from an Intro to Philosophy course he and I and a bunch of other SHAFT kids took and completely annoyed everyone in with our amoral materialism. While studying Plato’s Dialogs, one of the papers we wrote was a dialog between Socrates and anyone at all. Jon chose The Lord Thy God Yahweh. Because I’m a steampunk nerdy nerd, I chose Leonardo Da Vinci. My full dialog is below the fold.

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