Day: September 16, 2022

MLMM Friday Faithfuls — Prompt Me

Fandango15 Comments

For the Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Friday Faithfuls challenge this week, Jim Adams would like to know our thoughts on blogging challenges. I’m going to take his questions one at a time.

Which ones do you participate in and why you decided to participate in them.

I participate in prompts that tickle my imagination, be they word prompts, photo prompts, Q&A prompts, or whatever.

If you are a host of any blogging challenge, talk about your challenge.

Do I host any blogging challenges? Well let’s just say that, all modesty aside, I consider myself to be somewhat of a master prompter. In addition to my daily FOWC with Fandango One Word Challenge, which I started back in June 2018 when WordPress abandoned its daily prompt, I have a number of weekly prompts that I host:

  • Sunday: Who Won the Week?
  • Mondays: Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge (a photo prompt)
  • Tuesdays: Fandango’s Story Starter
  • Wednesdays: Fandango’s Provocative Question
  • Fridays: Fandango’s Flashback Friday

I often participate in six daily prompts from other bloggers: Word of the Day Challenge, The Daily Spur, Ragtag Daily Prompt, Your Daily Word Prompt, My Vivid Blog, and E.M’s Random Word Prompt.

And I regularly participate in these weekly prompts: Song Lyric Sunday, Cellpic Sunday, What Do You See, Share Your World, Blogging Insights, The Monday Peeve, Truthful Tuesday, One-Liner Wednesday, Throwback Thursday, Thursday Inspiration, Fibbing Friday, Stream of Consciousness Saturday, and Weekend Writing Prompt.

There some monthly prompts, like Last on the Card and One-To-Three Photo Challenge, that I enjoy. And other prompts I may join in on as time and inspiration permits are some of the Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie prompts, Three Things Challenge, One Minute Fiction Challenge, Writephoto, Flash Fiction for the Purposeful Practitioner, TGIF, and Friday Fictioneers.

Do you feel that the host of a blogging challenge has any responsibility to the participants.

I try to read every response to my prompts and, time permitting, to comment on them. As to other bloggers who host prompts, it’s up to them how much they interact with those who participate in their prompts.

Talk about Mr. Linky or the Blue Frog.

I’m not a fan and don’t typically use them.

How do you feel when the host is not automatically approving your comments or pingbacks?

I personally made the choice not to moderate comments on my blog. But I think it’s up to the host of the blog to decide how to handle comments and ping

Fibbing Friday — Alter Egos

Fandango9 Comments

Di (aka Pensitivity101) and Melanie (Sparks From a Combustible Mind) alternate as hosts for Fibbing Friday, a silly little exercise where we are to write a post with our answers to the ten questions below. But as the title suggests, truth is not an option. The idea is to fib a little, a lot, tell whoppers, be inventive, silly, or even outrageous, in our responses. Since Melanie is still temporarily out of commission, Di is back and she is asking us to come up with alter egos for the individuals on her list.

1. Boris Johnson: Donald Trump

2. Madonna: The Virgin Mary
3. Victoria Beckham: Twiggy

4. Roger Federer: Roger Rabbit
5. James Bond: Maxwell Smart

6. Ebenezer Scrooge: Scrooge McDuck
7. H.G. Wells: Doctor Who
8. Agatha Christie: Angela Lansbury
9. Liberace: Billy Joel
10. Winston Churchill: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — September 16th

Fandango19 Comments

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 16th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on September 16, 2017.

Faith Versus Reason

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My blogging buddy, Jim, wrote a fascinating post today entitled “Why is it So Hard to Believe in God.” In addition to being a provocative post, he managed to get in the WordPress one-word prompt, “recreate,” when he wrote, “We cannot recreate the Big Bang, so we may never understand all of this, but we can believe that we do exist.” Well done, Jim.

In response to one of the comments on his post, Jim wrote, “I believe in logic and God makes sense to me….” I found that notion to be particularly interesting. I believe in logic, reason, and rationality, and it’s because of embracing those things that God makes no sense to me.

For purposes of this post, I’m going to consider “logic” and “reason” to be synonymous, although technically they aren’t. Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying logic, establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information.

That said, logic (or reason) is the antithesis of faith. It takes tremendous faith to believe that an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, supernatural being created everything that exists.

So the question I have for Jim, or for anyone who cares to weigh in is this. When it comes to belief in God, can logic and reason support that belief, or must one suspend logical and rational thought in favor of pure faith to believe in the existence of God as the creator of all things?

Please feel free to share your thoughts (or beliefs).

FOWC with Fandango — Deadpan

Fandango19 Comments
FOWC

It’s September 16, 2022. Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “deadpan.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.