Annual Pirate's Prayer Post

For INTERNATIONAL TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY:

Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
with the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wilder seas
Where storms will show Your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.

We ask you to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push back the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.

This we ask in the name of our Captain,
Who is Jesus Christ.

Francis Drake,an adventurer and essentially a legal pirate (What else is a second son supposed to do to make a living?), wrote this prayer as he departed Portsmouth on the Golden Hind to raid Spanish gold on the west coast of South America. He ventured at least as far north as the non-Spanish parts of California, claiming it as "New Albion" - New England- and returned to his Queen (the long way - via circumnavigation) with loot worth over a half million pounds sterling, and received his Knighthood for it.

An Occasional Post- Meaning & Ethics

Saw this meme with a picture of the cosmos saying "No Life Matters" on an atheist page. The funny thing was the comments, where people stretch to try to still justify being moral. They were not impressive attempts. Look, if life doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. Emotions are judgments of VALUE. In a valueless universe, they mean nothing. Reason is SUPPOSED to keep us from acting crazy. To say on the one hand that persons are no more valuable than rocks and yet we should treat them as if they are of inestimable value is hypocrisy and counseling schizophrenia. You can't have it both ways. A consistent reason in a meaningless universe includes a practical reason based on meaninglessness. Anything else is cowardice and contradiction.