Dog in Flight

Autumn is here with enough coolness and breeze that the very best thing about the season is manifest- no mosquitoes!  So I could sit outside again without feeling that I was volunteering for a blood drive. I tied Honeybun to a tree, remembering the time when I had tied her to the porch column and she had ripped it off the porch going after a squirrel. Lucky was loose with his electronic collar, and the three of us were soaking up the warm sun on a crisp day. I was researching helicopters. It was peaceful and quiet.

There were many confusing graphs and equations teaching me about flight, but one really surprised me.
As lift increases so does drag, but the lift increases at a faster rate, which is why airplanes fly.... until a certain point. If the lift is too fast, the drag rises and suddenly the lift line shoots back down. This is called the "stall point." I believe this only applies to lift/drag on an airplane wing, because I know (or think) rockets don't stall. There is of course a rather disturbingly large probability that I am completely misunderstanding what I am reading.

Suddenly there was an exlosion of barking and a whirl of fur and the telltale signs of a little white tail bounding across the lawn. Lucky screeched to a stop when the bunny crossed the electric collar warning zone. Honeybun however, leaped through the air, and conformed her body into the perfect airfoil shape, a tear drop. But then just as her paws almost encircled the little bunny, she reached the end of her rope, and experienced drag of the first degree.

Those opposing forces will get you every time. There is no lift without drag, yin without yang, love without hate, faith without disbelief, etceteras without finite lists....Yet just like Honeybun, we are always surprised when the opposing force slams into us.

When we were reading the Bible story in Mark of the crazy man possessed by demons, we were surprised to see that instead of sending the demons away when Jesus cast them from the poor man, He acquiesced to their request to remain in the area. He let them go into the nearby herd of pigs, who then leaped over a cliff into a lake and drowned.  I don't know about you, but that story makes me scratch my head. There are more than a few weird things in that story. 1.How could Jesus, God Himself, want to talk to demons? 2. How could he accede to the demons request? 3. Why would he let the demons stay in the area instead of casting them far away as was His original intent (Mark tells us that)? 4. Why did they drown the pigs? And this one is the most confusing....5. Since the demons requested where Jesus cast them, He clearly had the power to cast them anywhere. Therefore, He chose to have them remain, ruin the pig farmer's livelihood, and presumably leave the dead pigs in search of new people to torment. Why would He choose to let them stay?

 While I play one on my Blog, I am not a Bible scholar. I love the Bible, I read it daily and I ponder what it means regularly. But this passage disturbs me, I believe, in the same way drag disturbs lift, or that logarithms must have antilogarithms to be useful to the math student. If there is not an opposing force, then there is no free will, there is no choice, there cannot be faith. There has to be a Satan for us to choose God. I despise that this seems to be the case, but I can come to no other conclusion.

Honeybun shook herself off, tried to look dignified, and watched the bushes intently where the bunny had disappeared. Meanwhile, I was studying what aeronautic engineers do to decrease the effects of drag in the stall zone.


Luke 8: 32-39
 ³²A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into them, and he gave them permission. ³³When the demons came out of the man, they went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.
 ³⁴When those tending the pigs saw what had happened, they ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, ³⁵and the people went out to see what had happened. When they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting at Jesus' feet, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. ³⁶Those who had seen it told the people how the demon-possessed man had been cured. ³⁷Then all the people of the region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, because they were overcome with fear. So he got into the boat and left.
 ³⁸The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, ³⁹"Return home and tell how much God has done for you."