The Blaisdell Blog

This Sunday, the church was a sea of red.  This is my favorite secular day of the Lutheran church year.  In honor of this day, I am reprinting an article I wrote for the Mensa Bulletin several years ago.  This issue was the first time Mensa had allowed articles about religion.  They solicited several regular contributors to write on any religious theme they wanted.  When I was contacted I said yes, but that I would have to write about basic, vanilla flavored, Lutheran church based Christianity.  It was the only thing I knew!  I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.   Martin Luther is often depicted as a brooding, personally troubled man.   The pictures of him show a square-jawed German with a grim mouth and a furrowed brow.   Growing up in a Lutheran home, I was sure he had been a brave but angry man, nailing his 95 Thesis on the door of the church in Wittenburg and starting a religious revolution.   Even his decision to enter the priesthood, a vow t

The Sami are the reindeer herders of Northern Scandinavia.   They are native to Norway, Sweden, Finland and the adjacent areas of Russia.   They total only about 80,000 people and almost half of them live in Norway.   Early pictures of them show a people with gently Asian features, though modern Sami tend to resemble their fellow Scandinavians more rather than less. Their language is a part of the Uralic linguistic group (think Hungarian and Finnish) but has no relationship to Norwegian.   They speak in dialects, rather than one, unified language.             In many ways the Sami mirror the Native Americans of the New World.   They prefer their traditional lives (hard as they are).   Their clothing is colorful, multi-layered and reminiscent of the Inuit.   Traditional homes are small, primitive and functional.   Tents are not unknown.   Their artistic forms are primarily expressed in the decoration of clothes and useful objects.     Musical expression is in the form of chants wh

There is a member of the nut squad who is declaring, with some urgency, that there is a problem with  witches performing incantations against Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh.   This mental lightweight is using this as an example of the ire of the left against Justice Kavanaugh.   It is telling that the right did not invoke self-described witches when Obama appointed the liberal Sotomayor and Kagan, they just ran a candidate that could win.  But more on this in a moment. Let me point out that Americans do have a legitimate reason to worry about Antifa and other violent anarchists.   These mindless, spoiled brats are being encouraged, financed (I doubt any of these spoiled brats have had to earn a dime in their cossetted lives) and goaded on by the leftists in the media and the Democratic party.   Between Holder and Clinton they are getting all the pretended moral justification they need to commit acts of violence.   But with those legitimate worries, why are we interviewing id