Help me with my learnings!

[ishyface]

Questions for... well, everyone, I guess:

1) How big is the gap between Asperger's Syndrome and high-functioning autism? (From what I understand the two overlap a lot. Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

2) What is the Baptist Church's official stance re:stigmata? (Any info about the Baptist Church would be useful, actually- I know very little about it.)

3) What does it feel like to have a nosebleed? (I've never had one.)

4) How do you know when "coffee" is not just coffee but coffee? (Because I just made plans to go for coffee with a friend, but I think said friend may be under the impression that these plans are for coffee instead of coffee. And, um, that could be problematic!)

5) How much does Thomas Hobbes suck? (Like, a lot, right?)

This list brought to you by the Gerald Doesn't Wanna Finish Hir Philosophy Paper Wildlife Fund.

ETA: From the essay I am currently writing on Hobbes' theory of the state of nature:

"Hobbes would have us believe that people tend not to murder their children because of the power of law and the state, but this is nonsense: anyone who has ever been in the same room with a fussy baby for more than ten minutes is sure to wonder why its parents do not simply drop it into the nearest lake and tell the authorities that dingoes ate it."

I don't even care if I am grossly misrepresenting Hobbes here,* I am not cutting that sentence.

* I am, but only because I don't like him.

Comments

[elorie.livejournal.com]

Well, to begin with, there is no "Baptist Church" in the same sense that there is a Catholic Church with a hierarchy and an organization. Baptist churches (small "c", as in individual churches) form associations or fellowships with other churches, but are historically pretty independent theologically.

There's the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. There are other Baptist associations, but those are the two I know the most about. The latter is what happened after the Fundamentalists took over the SBC in the early 1980s and there was a ten-year fight after which all the moderates took their congregations and went home.

Then there are Primitive or Independent Baptists, which means they are too weird even for the other Baptists and are often the foot-washin', snake-handlin', shoutin' kind of Baptist.

None of these folks to my knowledge have any official stance on stigmata, though the SBC would probably think it sounded too Catholic for them. With Primitive/Independent Baptists, they might take it as a sign of holiness, but only if you could also pick up a snake and not get bit. Cooperative Baptists are a buncha hippies who would probably think it was interesting and would have a long conversation with you about it. You would wind up with an earful of theology, but everyone would have a different opinion on it.

[elorie.livejournal.com]

I should say, the churches are independent theologically *and* organizationally. They are members of an organization, not branches of it, if you follow that.

[ishyface.livejournal.com]

Interesting! As an ex-Catholic that kind of independent organization is pretty alien to me, but intriguing.

I've always been a little mystified by the snake-handling thing, though as I understand it picking up snakes without being bitten to prove your holiness is a fairly common religious motif. It just seems a little weird to make such a big thing about it. But again, it's a Catholic thing- we don't even approve of loud singing in our churches, let alone foot-washin', snake-handlin', and shoutin'. (We don't approve of dropping g's, either, unless we are Irish.)