{"id":1188,"date":"2008-02-17T20:21:38","date_gmt":"2008-02-18T01:21:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1188"},"modified":"2008-02-17T20:21:38","modified_gmt":"2008-02-18T01:21:38","slug":"nothe-mark-of-the-beast-is-that-bloody-stump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1188","title":{"rendered":"No&#8230;The Mark Of The Beast Is That Bloody Stump&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some days, you really wonder if the pulpit thumpers really think about what they&#8217;re doing to people&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.oregonlive.com\/breakingnews\/2008\/01\/idaho_man_cuts_off_microwaves.html\"><strong>Idaho man saws off, microwaves his hand after he sees &quot;mark of the beast&quot; on it<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A Hayden, Idaho man who believed he bore the &quot;mark of the beast&quot; used a circular saw to amputate one of his hands, cooked it in a microwave and summoned authorities, Kootenai County sheriff&#8217;s deputies say.<\/p>\n<p>The man, in his mid-20s, was calm when deputies arrived at his home in this north Idaho town Saturday afternoon, and neither he nor the severed hand bore any noticeable tattoo or other mark, sheriff&#8217;s Capt. Ben Wolfinger.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;It had been somewhat cooked by the time the deputy arrived,&quot; Wolfinger said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Maybe this is what that poor man was taught to be afraid of&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I have described the hand when it uses a tool as an instrument of discovery&#8230;we see this every time a child learns to couple hand and tool together &#8211; to lace its shoes, to fly a kite or to play a penny whistle.&nbsp; With the practical action there goes another, namely finding pleasure in the action for its own sake &#8211; in the skill that one perfects, and perfects by being pleased with it.&nbsp; This at bottom is responsible for every work of art, and science too; our poetic delight in what human beings do because they can do it.&nbsp; The most exciting thing about this is that the poetic use in the end has the truly profound results.&nbsp; Even in prehistory man already made tools that have an edge finer then they need have.&nbsp; The finer edge in its turn gave the tool a finer use, a practical refinement and extension to processes for which the tool had not been designed.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.&nbsp; Civilization is not a collection of finished artifacts, it is the elaboration of processes.&nbsp; In the end, the march of man is the refinement of the hand in action.<\/p>\n<p>-Jacob Bronowski, <em>The Ascent of Man<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>And in the end, this is exactly what fundamentalism hates most of all:&nbsp; All that is possible to us as human beings, that we discover on our own, by way of the pleasure we take in action and discovery for its own sake.&nbsp; More then any other pleasure, even sex, this is the one we must be denied.&nbsp; So that our spirits cannot soar.&nbsp; So that they will not be left behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some days, you really wonder if the pulpit thumpers really think about what they&#8217;re doing to people&#8230; Idaho man saws off, microwaves his hand after he sees &quot;mark of the beast&quot; on it A Hayden, Idaho man who believed he bore the &quot;mark of the beast&quot; used a circular saw to amputate one of his [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}