What Rug Thinks

I would like to preface this post with a little bit of my history and my personal choices in this matter. With my ex-wife I have been through three miscarriages. Which I would not wish upon my worst enemy. They were terribly heartbreaking and a very difficult time in my life. I have never considered for a second aborting any of the pregnancies I was involved in. Unless approached by the mother I would never consider abortion as an option, and even then I doubt I would be in favor.  To make sure I am talking about the same thing everyone thinks I'm talking about. Here is the dictionary definition of abortion as provided by google.com. "The deliberate termination of a human pregnancy, most often performed during the first 28 weeks of pregnancy."  I would also like to point out that google also list synonyms as termination or miscarriage. Termination in this case makes perfect sense, but why is miscarriage listed? Here is what google gives as the definition for mi...

Browsing through my newsfeeds, I came across something that had me almost doing a spit take. A picture saying "Put God Back In The Schools" Similar to this one. My first thought to this post was. WTF? I mean according to most christians beliefs God is omnipresent. Therefore, he is everywhere. So how exactly did anyone remove him from schools? Then I realised that was nothing more than a facetious response to a nonsense statement. I don't want to argue a strawman argument after all. With a little digging I was able to get to the bottom of what this really meant. In my research I found this petition that has a rather simple description of what is meant by this statement. However, that seem to have the facts completely wrong to start with. "This Country was founded on the principles of the bible..." This is completely incorrect, and you only have to read the constitution to figure this out. Not to mention there are other writings by the founding fathers...

In recent headlines from end of 2015 Planned Parenthood has been mentioned a lot. First there was a lot of hoopla over a video that didn't show they were doing anything wrong. Then of course the was the terrible tragedy of a nutcase shooting one facility up. There has been talks in the government about defunding Planned Parenthood, and many nasty thing being said about them all over the news. I would like to take a few minutes here and give my recollection of my experience with them. I was 15 years old living in a small town most people would call the middle of nowhere. This was a predominantly white, middle class, rural town.  The schools had a decent sex education program where they taught about contraceptives, gave rather accurate failure rates of contraceptives, STD's (nowadays called STI's), and showed the only 100% safe sex was no sex. It taught us about our bodies, and the bodies of the opposite sex. To this day I still cannot find any logical or factual faults wit...

I've read the bible many times and recently I've been thinking a lot about some of the things found in the bible, what religious people find deplorable, and how many of the things they hate are in the bible. Here are a few examples based solely on word definitions and characters and their actions in the bible. Bastard - a person born of parents not married to each other. Is it just me or does this describe Jesus? Adultery - voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and a person who is not his or her spouse. This may or may not describe God and Mary. While the bible never says if God and Mary had sex, she did get pregnant by God and I only know of one way that is possible. There is also the conflicting passages saying she was married to Joseph and wasn't married yet in a different book of the new testament. Sinner - a person who transgresses against divine law by committing an immoral act or acts. I find this one to be the oddest. One of God's laws is...

Every year we have to hear about how it's so wrong to say Happy Holidays and we should all be saying Merry Christmas instead. I have news for you Christmas people. The holidays is not just Christmas. Here is a short list of some common holidays that are celebrated around the same time of year. New Year - Celebrated December 31st on into the early hours of January 1st. Hogmanay - Same as new year in the Scottish tradition. Berchtoldstag - Same as new year in the  Switzerland and Liechtenstein traditions. Malanka - The Russian new year celebrated January 13th. Hanukkah - While it varies a bit, it falls somewhere from late November to late December. Kwanzaa - Celebrated December 26th to January 1st. Chalica - Starts the first Monday in December and lasts seven days according to Unitarian Universalists. Winter Solstice - Celebrated whenever the winter solstice takes place. This year it happens to be on December 22nd. Dydd Santes Dwynwen - The Welsh equivalent to ...

There comes a time in some people's lives when they are faced with something that seems impossible to get through. No matter what the something is you are left with two choices, give up or keep going. The choice is yours and yours alone. You can consider all the pros and cons of each option. You can debate about it until you are blue in the face, but you still have to choose if you are going to quit or persevere. There is a song by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones called Tragedy that has some interesting things to think about these types of situations. While the entire song is really relevant to this discussion, the line that really gets me is this one. "Have you ever felt the odds stacked up so high, you need a strength most don't possess? Or has it come down to do or die? You've got to rise above the rest." One of our former presidents has this to say. "Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles van...

Words have meaning. I know that comes as a shock to some people, but it is true. Words don't have intrinsic meaning, but they do have meanings we have come to agree upon to enable communication. I have been told on a number of occasions that the dictionary is not the arbiter of definitions. While I do agree with this there seems to be something that a lot of people are forgetting. Dictionaries get updated. I know it's a bit shocking, but dictionaries get updated with definitions for words as they are used in modern languages. Sure, you can use words in new ways that may change the meaning. However, when you start using different definitions for words you can't expect people to understand what you meant to say. Here is an example. If I said, "The nuptials the cops used were titillating." Everyone would have a different understanding than if I said, "The handcuffs the cops used where painful." Even if the second is what I meant by the first statement, I ...