The Way Plotnikkies See God.

Two notes from friends got Plottie thinking this morning. His friend Corrie is getting ready to take his wife to Central Europe. His wife is a Jew, who is looking for her roots in Slovakia and Hungary, and Corrie is a black man whose father is a minister in North Carolina.

His friend Leah is kind enough to say she likes the religious and politial maelstrom that is The Great Plotnik's brain.

But what is Plotnik's view about God? After all, he is the Religious Pastor of a Cyber Flock composed of maybe six people, none of whom turn to him for advice about anything. Perhaps this is because The Great Plotnik has never been able to solve this conundrum:

When holocaust survivors were interviewed after they were released from the death camps, they were asked how they saw God now.

Half said God had abandoned them.

Half said God had saved them.

Go figure.

So perhaps Plotnik should distill the way that Plotikkies might think about the Almighty.

(But Plotnik doesn't think anyone should tell anyone else how to think about the Almighty.)

The other day The Great Ducknik entertained two lovely Latina women at the front door in a Spanish conversation about The Watchtower Magazine. She was practicing her Spanish -- perhaps they thought they had finally found someone in this neighborhood who would buy their magazine.

Ducknik and the Jehovah's Witnesses ladies were kind to each other. This is the way Plotnikkies should look at religion: as an opportunity to listen to other people, all of whom think exactly the same way you do about the important stuff, and none of whom has the slightest idea what the truth is, no matter what they say or what you could find in their magazine.

About the Almighty: it sounds like Almaty, which was the old capital of Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan is where the Cossacks came from, the ancient tormentors and occasional executioners of Jews in Central Russia. Read Mikhail Sholokhov's "And Quiet Flows the Don" for luminous examples. If you'd have thought about it, you could have asked Plotnik's grandma about it. She would have spit and screamed: "Kazakhski!" and spat again.

Jews in Central Russia who weren't eliminated by Cossacks probably left earlier, for the USA, France and, later, Israel.

Israel has plenty of problems, few of which Plotnik agrees with.

If you don't believe in Israel, 1 million per cent of the time, this makes you either an Anti-semite, a self-loathing Jew or a terrorist.

If you're a terrorist everyone is afraid of what you have in your underwear.

(Nobody is afraid of what Plotnik has in his underwear. They used to be, but this is bordering on T.M.I.)

So it seems to come down to underwear, or shampoo in large bottles, or that liter of Crystal Springs you forgot to drink before you got to the idiots with the badges at the airport.

Put that liter of water in your underwear if you want to see them jump.

Thus endeth today's sermon.

Plotnik is glad he has had the chance to explain. He is happy to entertain your theological questions. Go forth, my children, and multiply. Or add. Don't divide, for God's sake. You're not paramecia.