Westboro Baptist Church at Boston University

Readers are likely familiar with the Westboro Baptist Church as the strange cult run by Fred Phelps which is devoted to telling the world that God hates them. A lot. They are most known for the slogans "God Hates America" and "God Hates Fags." Pretty much there is no group they don't hate. They even have a song about called God Hates the World, to the tune of "We Are the World." They have a fascinating eschatology in which in the end time God will ask them what should be done with the rest of humanity and they'll gleefully tell God to send humanity to hell. Some people who don't know much about the Church have speculated that the Church exists really just to make the right-wing look bad.

Why am I thinking of the Westboro Baptist Church? Today they came to Boston University to protest. I think this time they were nominally protesting Jews. Or something like that. Apparently they had signs attacking a lot of different groups.

Unfortunately, I had office hours when they were protesting. This isn't fun. When Ray Comfort was distributing his version of Origin of Species to a hundred universities across the nation, he neglected to include Boston University and I was unable to get to Harvard or MIT where there was distribution.

I've concluded that there is a God. God is taunting me by dangling interesting groups just close enough that I'm aware of them but not so close as to actually get to talk to them. God probably sees me as sort of like a cat and sees the various crazies as akin to a laser pointer.

Just my luck, Neturei Karta will probably come to campus and I'll miss them also.

The MBTA and Icehouse

Icehouse pieces are small colored plastic pyramids used in a variety of games.



(this image is in the public domain)

I recently had the pleasure of introducing one such game, Zendo, to the Boston University Hillel. Zendo is a game in which one player, the Master, makes a rule for which configurations of Icehouse pieces are valid and which are not. For example, a very simple rule might be "A valid configuration must contain a red piece." Other players then take turns presenting configurations of Icehouse pieces and find out if those configurations are valid or not. The goal of the game is to figure out the rule. When this game is generally played, the game terminology uses terms from Zen Buddhism. Thus, configurations are called "koans" which are described as having Buddha-nature or not. At the BU Hillel, this quickly mutated into whether or not configurations were kosher or treif.

Readers may be wondering what this has to do with the MBTA. A few days ago, I decided to purchase more Icehouse pieces since Zendo is hard to play with only a few pieces. After buying a new set of pieces I got onto the subway heading back to Kenmore Square. Icehouse pieces come in small, rectangular boxes of transparent plastic with pieces of different colors stacked up on top of each. The boxes are about 6 inches long with a 1 by 1 inch base (in metric that's around 15 cm long with a 2.5 by 2.5 cm base). One of the MBTA personnel stopped me and asked what I was carrying. I explained that they were plastic pieces for a game. The MBTA official said "Oh. Ok. You should put that in a bag. Someone might think that it's a weapon." I must confess that I was speechless. Considering the idiocy about such issues that Boston is known for, I should be happy I'm not in jail right now.