Why this urge to justify?
An unrighteous thread in a tapestry of rebellion
what is it in me
that cries out for a verdict
that my fibers are not as soiled
as the surrounding warp and weft?
The only outside eye can see
more clearly than I
and if I call for a premature
appearance of the Judge of all the earth
who can endure the day of his coming?
Who can stand when he appears?
For he will be like a refiner's fire!
But I will call out for cleansing of
what is unclean in me
and let him be to me not a judge of others,
but for me, a launderer's soap.

DOG POOP, OR CHICKEN BONES?

I don't agree with the Dog poop brownies theory. It states that watching/hearing/seeing something that contains sin is the same as eating brownies laced with dog poop. A good rendering of the story can be read here. If this was true, then we wouldn't eat pretty much anything due to the trace amounts of whatnot in it (Have you checked out what's allowed in our food recently?), and we wouldn't go outside for fear of seeing sin, and we wouldn't go to work for fear that our employer might be involved in something sinful, and if we got really picky we probably wouldn't read our bibles for fear that some transcription or translation error would shipwreck our faith.

I think the main thing the Dog Poop model of mental ingestion disregards is the faculty of discernment. So I would like to propose an alternate model, the "Chicken Bone" model of mental ingestion. most people, especially mature people, are capable of eating meat with bones out of it, and realizing that the bones wouldn't be too healthy to swallow, they learn to separate the meat from the bones and spit those naughty bones out. Some foods are so bony and bereft of meat that they aren't worth eating. Some people, for example children, are unable to safely remove the bones, and so we don't try to feed little kids, say, a bony fish. Anytime we eat something with bones, it requires a degree of care and alertness to make sure we don't choke on a bone. But as we do it it eventually becomes second nature. So, I would say, with the faculty of discernment as regards entertainment and art. Some of it's to full of "bones" to be worth the trouble, some of it wouldn't be safe for immature ingestion, and all of it requires something more than thoughtless absorption.

I was just forced to shoot a squirrel with a blowgun in self defense.
Even though I hate squirrels, I wouldn't normally think to plug a dart in one, but this squirrel was threatening my wife and children.
At first it was trying to get to the bird feeder that's directly outside of the sliding glass door, which is when Brandy started making shooing motions at it. It moved in closer. Then Brandy opened the door & threw some pebbles at it, and it moved away just far enough to dodge the rocks, then came back and kept lunging at her through the glass.
So I pulled down the dart gun, opened the sliding door, and the squirrel charged. It was about three feet from my face when I hit it in the arm. It ran off into the wild where it belongs shaking it's arm with the four inch dart hanging out of it.
And I don't feel guilty, not one bit.
Take that, nut rat.

So.
I spent the better half of yesterday "fixing" our deck.
For the past month, dog feces, dog urine, cigarette butts, ashes, and a mysterious white slime have been dripping on our deck from the people upstairs. After I asked, they scraped the actual piles of crap off their deck, but enough fecal matter and urine were still crusted in the cracks for swarms of flies to want to make OUR deck their home. We've not been able to go out on our deck for the past month because of this, and I've talked to the management 3 times about it. The first time they sent someone out to power wash it, the second time they said they were going to power wash the upstairs neighbor's deck as well but didn't, and we were still left with a stank-nasty unuseable deck. Brandy convinced me to buy a kiddie pool to put out there after she said she cleaned it off and it hadn't rained for a couple days. The kids played in it, came in smelling like dog piss, and in the morning there were ashes floating in the pool. So for the third time I went to the management and asked them to provide a permanent solution, or let me put up some sort of barrier and reimburse me. They said OK to option #2, so I went to Lowe's and went to town. A very kind brother in the lord let me borrow his truck for the day while I worked on the project, and when the day was done, we had a very decent looking second roof made of corrugated polycarbonate sheeting. All for the low low price of 250.00. I wrapped the receipt up in a letter detailing what I expected them to reimburse me and options for reimbursement. Brandy delivered it this morning (she said the woman at the desk didn't look very happy at the figure, apparently she thought I was just going to drape a tarp over our deck to loosely funnel the excess piss towards the edge of the deck. I have a missed call from her on my cell, but aside from the cordless drill that I bought to finish the project, I'm committed to making them pay for it all. They agreed to it beforehand, they haven't done anything effective despite my repeated requests, since they haven't done anything, my kids have been exposed to animal waste, and the deck smells like it, so does the area of the carpet directly in front of the deck door, and really, I could have charged them for labor! It took me half a day to finish! That's not my favorite way of spending my day off.
So, if you could spend five minutes and pray that they would see reason and reimburse me for the whole thing without any trouble, that would be great.