8/31/23 – Our enemies, such as the evil leaders of China, Russia and North Korea, want to destroy us because we pose a threat to their demonic order. Americans, patriots, continue to show them who we really are and what we’re made of. We were called by God to be a city on a hill. Every day, Americans, from small acts of kindness to heroic acts of bravery, place another stone in the city we build together, high on our hill. From the sins of genocide and slavery, discrimination and selfishness, we will redeem and redefine ourselves in the collective by our acts of goodness. We will continue to define ourselves to the world as a resilient people, as a people of faith and repentance, of love, kindness and bravery, and we will be a light of hope for the world. Go forth in this dark time knowing that God walks with us. The NYC firefighters did not abandon the residents in their charge, and the God we love and who loves us, who told us he would not leave us orphaned, did not abandon our beloved firefighters. Do not be afraid.
8/31/23 – The evil, illiterate one, trump, wants to abolish the Department of Education. He and the plutocrats want us to be their slaves.
8/31/23 – The Supreme KKKourt is corrupt. We have the right to defy any judgments it makes that are not in keeping with our Constitution or our laws. They have forfeited their stature. They are nothing.
8/31/23 – We need to start prosecuting the plutocrats to the fullest extent of the law for anything and everything. They have been plotting against the American people, against the laws established by our Founding Fathers and defended by countless American patriots. The plutocrats are parasites and enemies of the state. We need to drive them into the dirt.
8/31/23 – All the perverted plutocrats care about is the endless quest for money and power. The rest of us care about the things that last in the infinite goodness of God. The plutocrats enter the history books in dishonor. Our heroes, men and women, enter them in the greatest of honor. Our heroes become a part of our national conscience and character, the stories we tell ourselves about who we really are as Americans. (Ukrainians, right now, in their suffering, are also defining their national character.) Are we a nation defined by greed and corruption? Or are we a nation defined by the people who pay the ultimate price and those who simply work tirelessly toward the romantic, irrational, divine ideal of love? Is it rational to walk up flights of steps knowing that it’s unlikely you will walk back down? No, and it’s also an expression of pure love. The hard hearts of the plutocrats don’t understand love. They are not really capable of it. They have only their minds, which speak only the language of transactions. We don’t think about them but in disdain. We think about the people who have sacrificed for us long after they are gone. At predetermined times, we honor them as a nation, but also at random, intimate moments, which we often don’t share, our minds drift to their legacy. We weep over the unmerited gifts they have left us and pray that their beautiful souls have peace. They are who we are as Americans.
8/31/23 – “Men (as a group and to a significant extent) are larger, faster, and stronger than women. This cannot be disputed, and it cannot be understood as some irrelevancy, because it comes with an obvious moral question that each man must answer for himself: Will he use his strength to dominate the weak, or to protect them?… The opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity…. [I can’t remember the number of times I have cried, more accurately, sobbed when I have thought about this.] Heroic masculinity is the understanding that someone has to climb the endless staircases in the towers. On 9/11, 343 New York City firefighters died at Ground Zero, and there wasn’t one of them who didn’t know, or at least suspect, that he was climbing to his death. They didn’t do it because of a union contract or an employee handbook. They climbed those towers because they knew that it must be written into the American record that heroes were there that day, and that the desperate people inside those buildings had never—not once—been abandoned.” To those who sacrificed their lives for us and their relatives, know that they live in our hearts, minds and souls. We love them with a genuine, grateful love that’s as eternal as their heroic souls.
In Praise of Heroic Masculinity
8/31/23 – This is beautiful: tradition, practical skills and learning. All kids, not just indigenous kids, boys and girls, should learn how to live off the land. It will help them feel more connected to nature, appreciate the food we eat and the water we drink, develop motor skills and learn practical skills.
An Alaska district aligns its school year with traditional subsistence harvests
8/31/23 – In this case, “the military and Alcoholics Anonymous, are much further toward the dark end than you’d like to believe,” the definition of a cult needs to be made more precise. Setting that flaw aside, the evil one’s followers, MAGA, have been conned, and the more money they give to him, the more conned they become. “As anyone who’s been taken in a game of three-card monte and then played again to win their money back will know, the hardest thing in the world to admit is that you’ve been conned…. ‘The way that cults die without a final, Jonestown-like conflagration is when they can’t recruit the next generation, and we are seeing this in the alt-right. We’re going to see young children of MAGA Republicans voting for the left.’… [T]he members of the cult itself will die out, and there will be no one, eventually, to replace them. In 2020, more than half of Americans over the age of 65 voted for Trump—it was, in fact, the only demographic group he won outright—while 62 percent of voters aged 18–29 went for Joe Biden.”
Outside of his natural death, for which we are praying, the way this cult will end is by the country ending it for MAGA, by putting his evilness behind bars for the rest of his life or by giving him the death penalty. The rest of the country is doing MAGA a public service by saving their money for their progeny who will abhor him. In fact, someone should figure out the average MAGA donation to his evilness and run a simple compound interest calculation. This is the actual amount of which they cheated their children.
The End Will Come for the Cult of MAGA
8/30/23 – To the plutocrats: we are not Russia or China, and we will destroy you. We will make sure your evil greed and treasonous actions cost you everything.
8/30/23 – Let’s look at David Frum’s argument, which we won’t be linking to because it’s idiotic. He wrote, “They might spare the country the ordeal of renominating an insurrectionist president.” So, the evil one, trump, is an insurrectionist. Then, the law applies to him. (It does not to his hand-wringing examples.) Unless one can produce a coherent argument that what we all saw with our own eyes, that spectators in real time observed as insurrection was not actually an insurrection but a…what’s the word, oh fantasy of some variety but not the insurrectionist kind, there is no argument against the use of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Frum and any other unprincipled persons can just shut the f—k up with their political calculations and their illogic. Apply the f—king law as it’s written in our Constitution.
8/30/23 – And what has Biden done to protect our democracy? Nothing. The dotard dawdled his way through the past three years on the most existential crisis in our modern history.
8/29/23 – Our military, our politicians, all naturalized citizens pledge allegiance to our Constitution. Native-born citizens are expected to pledge allegiance to our Constitution. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc. have their respective religious texts. The United States of America has our Constitution. It is our sacred document, and it is clear. The evil one, trump, is unqualified. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment must hold. If the Supreme KKKourt overrules any state, the state should defy their decision.
Also, a message to the fevered plutocrats plotting to destroy our democracy and to make us their slaves: we will have the rule of law, or we will burn the whole thing down to the ground.
Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” V
People Should not be Afraid of their Governments , Governments Should be Afraid of their People
8/28/23 – The GOP would rather cheat than update its policies to win the votes of voters.
8/28/23 – The retrograde party, aka the Republican Party, want you to be stuck in the past, with the industries that their wealthy donors benefit from, and don’t want you to be leaders in the industries of the future. The GOP, once the party of Lincoln, that spoke to the moral conscience of our nation, is now a retrograde party, pandering to racists and bigots to prop up the dying industries of their plutocrats. “‘It’s so frustrating to hear these people ‘poopoo’ solar and renewable energies, and I just don’t see the logic of it. Because it’s just one more feather in our hat to make America more viable for companies to come to, and for Americans to thrive,’ he said.”
Biden’s climate bill brings investments and jobs to many GOP strongholds
8/28/23 – The merchants of short-term profits and long-term poverty, aka the Republican Party, want you to consume your children’s future. “‘[Young Republicans] genuinely want to see some leadership from their party,’ Maibach said. ‘And if the leaders of their party or the people who are asking to become leaders are not taking this seriously … I think young voters are going to become less willing to show up and cast their vote for the Republican candidates and in districts where the margins are thin.’”
Climate change made it in the GOP debate. Some young Republicans say that’s a win
8/28/23 – Exactly! Hold your heads high, compatriots, Americans, and put your heads down and do the work. “Young, the King adviser and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said…his Christian faith tells him to not place limits on what is possible. ‘If there is a place where we can learn to live together as brothers and sisters, rather than perish together as fools, it’s the United States of America,’ he said.”
At March on Washington’s 60th anniversary, leaders seek energy of original movement for civil rights
8/27/23 – Rest and reflect on the many Americans who sacrificed greatly for everything we have, including our freedom and our progress. God bless them, and God bless us. Happy Sunday!
8/26/23 – May he rest in peace.
Martin Luther King | I Have A Dream Speech | August 28, 1963, Full Speech
8/26/23 – Many liberals routinely set themselves apart from the country, seemingly holding it in disdain while holding themselves in high regard. As a Christian, King knew he, like everybody else, was a sinner. King also understood what it means to be a citizen of our great country. Many conservatives want to whitewash our history, erasing elements that they find undermine their own narratives about who they are and who we are. King acknowledged our country’s shortcomings while asking us to grow deeper roots into our adopted land. Aside from the indigenous people, we were all born of foreign soil, but we were all transplanted by choice or by force into this majestic land with the highest of stated ideals. “He talked of the circumstances and sense of urgency but then moved into what he said was a ‘dream deeply rooted in the American dream.’” King’s I Have a Dream speech is thematically oriented around contrasts, which he infuses with Biblical tones. We are contrasts ourselves, good and evil, right and wrong, walking contradictions. Grow roots into our country, into the soil which holds the blood of sins and sacrifices past, and grow branches into our country’s and our world’s collective future, shaping our stated ideals from a dream into a reality.
MLK’s dream for America is one of the stars of the 60th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington
8/26/23 – “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Don’t think yourself to be a saint and your fellow countrymen to be sinners. We are all sinners. Every single one of us, whether we are on the right side or the wrong side of history. Remember it always. Walk humbly with the Lord. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered – that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him. Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’
‘With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.’” May he rest in peace.
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address
8/26/23 – In secular terms, it’s called purpose. In Christian terms, President Abraham Lincoln and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were called by God, and they did what the Lord asked. Like Jesus’s Apostles, they gave their lives. Like the Apostle Peter, they finished the course. We cherish their words and their sacrifice. We also cherish the countless others whose names we do not recognize but who did the same. God knows them by name. He called them by name. When the Lord asks, answer the call and finish the course.
Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address in 1863. King gave his I Have a Dream speech in 1963, one hundred years apart. The speeches are quite different, and they are both rhetorical masterpieces. Where King, as man of God, speaks poetry as prose; Lincoln, a man of the people, speaks prose as poetry. The unifying elements are a call to respect the divine law and order: honor our freedom and our equality. Anyone who dares defy God will face his wrath if not in this life, in the next.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863”
The Gettysburg Address
8/25/23 – Christians: Don’t worry about phases, careers and such. (It’s very confusing.) Do as much good as you can. Goodness. Learn as much as you can. Truth. Glorify God. Beauty. The good, the true, and the beautiful. (It comes from Plato, but we made it our own.) They have to align to find genuine purpose.
8/25/23 – Is it possible that if they are asking these questions as older adults, they had never really answered them earlier. “Who am I? [Nothing to do with one does. If you ended up tying who you are to what you do, you will want to fix that as soon as possible.] What’s my purpose? [This can be a challenging process of discovery. It might change over one’s life.] What do I really want? [We should all ask this of ourselves regularly?] Do I matter? [Yes, always and everyone.]”
Completely agree. “Modern life is oriented around the meritocracy, which implies certain values—that life is best seen as a climb toward the top, that achievement is the essence of a good life, that successful people are to be admired more than less successful people. But this overreliance on our work identities is unhinging us.”
No, see video below that covers this point. “You should find a job that will pay the bills but won’t demand much of your time or passion. Abandon the ordeal of careerism and devote your energies to the daily pleasures of life.”
Exactly. “If you make only a half-assed commitment to your work, you’re settling for mediocrity in an endeavor that will necessarily absorb a large chunk of your life. And if you decide to prioritize pleasure, you’ll spend your days consuming random experiences that you’ll measure on shallow, aesthetic grounds—was today tasty or bland? You’ll accumulate a series of temporary experiences that don’t add up to anything substantial.”
Right. Atheism. “But how on earth did we end up with a society in which 65-year-olds have to take courses to figure out who they are, what they really want, and what they should do next? How did we wind up with a culture in which people’s veins pop out in their neck when they are forced to confront their inner lives?”
The same thing was said in Christian terms below. (It’s not an original concept. It’s been said countless times and places in the Christian context, just phrased differently.) “You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself to find yourself. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself.”
8/25/23 –Adolescence is for sure a phase because your body is changing. However, why would adulthood have phases? This needs to be better explained. Adulthood is individually defined. One gets to flourish under one’s own terms. What defines a phase? Are phases defined by careers? Younger generations often don’t stay in the same career for decades. They might give it a good run, and then move on to something else. If phases are defined by careers, then what if a “phase” is, say, one decade long or so? A decade is not a short amount of time to focus, whether in one’s education or in the workforce, on one area. One can learn a lot over that period of time. Is that a career or a phase as defined in this article? Does one have to do the same thing for three decades for it to be a career or a phase? What if one stagnates and just does the same tasks for thirty years, is that a career, a phase or a job? In any case, that sounds rather boring. Does one need to be performing at increasingly higher levels for it to be a career? Does a phase mean a continuous stretch of working in the same profession, field, position, occupation, which are not necessarily interchangeable terms? What about going to school for a time and then returning to the workforce? Would the phase be broken? Would that be two phases? The definition of phase and its related duration is unclear. Simply: This concept of a phase, defined in this article, more or less as a multi-decade stretch of time working in the same profession is a very perplexing concept, but let’s set this aside.
The New Old Age
8/25/23 – America is back. We don’t know for how long, but we do know that nobody can take the mugshot away from us. It was as good or even better than we expected. God bless America.
8/25/23 – The thing to understand about the liberal, atheistic media is that they are a business, and it’s about making money. Like most atheists, they are about themselves. They don’t care about your mental health. In fact, the more addicted you are to the news, the more money they make. Stay informed, but don’t give it more time than it deserves.
8/24/23 – The long-awaited mugshot of the murderous mobster is finally here, and the evil one, trump, looks like the crazy person he is. He can try to spin this and fleece the MAGA cult, but it’s obvious he’s not happy. Are the American people happy? Justice is working, but the evil one should be disqualified from running, so obviously, the rule of law only applies to a certain degree. He needs to be disqualified, and he deserves the death penalty, or at least, life in prison. Then, justice will be served. We’re waiting for that day.
8/24/23 – “Here’s the question we all need to ask ourselves:… what do I love when I long for achievement?… What do I want when I want accomplishment? What am I looking for in this aspiration?” Recently, we discussed suffering in the context of Job’s life. (See below.) Here, we discuss success in the context of Augustine’s life. One can suffer not just from deprivation, pain, loss, or other negative experiences, but we can also suffer in the midst of our success. Are we going to blame God for this too? What aren’t we going to blame God for? A well-ordered, well-directed love provides protection from the brutal onslaught of the world and the whims of fortune and provides protection from our own egos. The one we’re made for is the one who made us, and it’s only by directing our ambition to glorifying and pleasing him that we can find rest. “Be our glory, let it be for your sake that we are loved.”
PS The audio isn’t the best.
Reforming our Ambition: James K.A Smith
8/24/23 – Labor, leisure, and love. Remember: God made us, and God loves us. We belong to him.
8/24/23 – Tim Keller recently passed away. May his faithful soul rest in peace. He was the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church and the Center for Faith and Work. What is workism, as termed by The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson? It’s the atheist’s calling. It’s centering one’s identity and purpose around work. What is faith and work? It’s the religious person’s calling. According to the Center for Faith and Work’s website, it “exists to explore and investigate the gospel’s unique power to renew hearts, communities, and the world, in and through our day-to-day work.” Martin Luther started this conversation about how laypeople can use their work to connect with God and each other. The monastic communities do this too, but obviously, they have an overt religious dimension and spend considerable time on their spiritual lives. How does a layperson do this? The difference is mostly in who you’re ultimately serving. By serving each other, we’re ultimately serving God. However, in the atheist’s calling, work is intended to serve oneself. After all, the present atheistic culture is about individualism, independence and achievement. In the religious calling, it’s about the beloved community and giving glory to God. This orientation outside of oneself helps give genuine purpose to the work. It is actually a big difference.
Faith & Work Integration | Q&A with Paul Sohn, New Director of the Center for Faith & Work
8/24/23 – Connection in all forms is very important. It’s not just one’s family, which, let’s face it, can sometimes (maybe almost all of the time) be quite annoying. It’s friendships, long and short. If a friendship doesn’t work out or fades with time, so what. At least, you tried, and at least you enjoyed it for a time. It’s having causal conversations with strangers, or even to just smile, wave or raise one’s hand in a gesture of peace with anyone you encounter is to recognize their humanity. If you need to practice casual conversation, start with Trader Joe’s. Seriously. They may be encouraged to chat with you, but it comes across as quite genuine. Let’s just assume it is. Then, to go to the next level, you initiate. Something that’s so great: give casual compliments to people you pass by. “Your outfit is beautiful.” “I really like that shade of lipstick.” You could be making that person’s day. It’s like giving a free gift. Especially if you’re of the same sex, it’s unlikely to come across as creepy, and for women, in particular, it’s a small but meaningful way to show solidarity. Relationships in faith communities are special though. At least in some churches, likely in other faith traditions also, we have activities that we do that go deep into who we are. It’s trust and love, and often times, it’s with strangers. It’s the most beautiful thing. This doesn’t really happen anywhere else.
Why a stranger’s hello can do more than just brighten your day
8/24/23 – For those who think atheists, nones, and whatever are in the majority, let’s break up the parties, and see what happens. The country needs a religious moderate party. If one thinks it’ll be in the minority, it’s not a threat to either of the existing parties, right?
8/23/23 – Climate change is real. Any religious, moderate candidate must take this position because it’s the reality. The person must also be hopeful. We need our politicians to make us feel stronger, not weaker, especially as we face down existential threats. The apocalypse is nigh, but we must always be a people of hope. This is not contradictory. They are coexisting truths.
8/23/23 – Like all political candidates, both Nikki Haley and Tim Scott have their flaws, but either would make a much better candidate than the evil one, trump, who should be disqualified. (The evil one is not just a terrible candidate, but he’s a clear and present danger to the republic.) Tim Scott is particularly appealing, but Haley, who was once Sikh, defends religious minorities, which is very important in every country, even ours where our religious liberties are constitutionally protected. Protecting freedom of religious expression for all people of faith is nonnegotiable.
Any religious, moderate candidate must be religious. Haley and Scott are religious people, which reflects most of this diverse country, full of immigrants not just white coastal elites, and the world. Note that candidates don’t have to be specifically Christian, just people of any faith or spiritual tradition that thinks of people as more than just matter. We have souls, and any other conception of a human being is a nonstarter. This is also nonnegotiable.
On this issue of a “colorblind society,” it all depends on the context and how this is understood. The legacy of slavery and past wrongs do need to be recognized and, importantly, righted, but do we really want to be a country where we think of each other based on the color of our skin? In many Asian countries, they are obsessed with skin color. It’s quite ridiculous. However, what does a colorblind society mean exactly?
Ideally, we end up in a place where people just don’t even think about race or skin color. (Dark skin is beautiful and more protective, by the way. Don’t change it.) In one of the episodes of Jewish History Lab (so good!), Dr. Abramson said that back in Moses’s time, who is said to have an Ethiopian wife, people just didn’t think about race that much. (On the other hand, gender was a much bigger deal.) Whether or not this is true about race in ancient times, we won’t know for sure, but the ideal is that race is simply a nonissue.
The ideal is that we focus on character. At present, America is still structurally racist to a certain degree, but it has gotten better, and it’s definitely not irredeemably racist. We have to honor all of the white people who have fought for freedom and equality of nonwhites, and we have to be a people of hope. We are Americans. It’s who we are.
Can South Carolina’s Haley and Scott woo the GOP’s white evangelical base away from Trump?
8/22/23 – The liberal elites are full of nepo babies, i.e. talentless hacks, such Catherine Rampell, the person who wants the Fed to keep raising rates. There are many others. This is the party that claims to be about diversity, equity and inclusion. They are complete hypocrites.
8/22/23 – The most common feeling in the country right now is being stuck in the middle of two extremes. This is undemocratic, and we need to fix it.
8/22/23 – Democratic religious moderates are tarnishing themselves by continuing this involuntary marriage due to a lack of party and candidate choice. We don’t agree with the evolved ones on foundations concepts, such as what a human being is. Therefore, we will inevitably disagree with them on many other issues as well. Pretending these profound differences don’t exist is unhelpful. More generally, the evolved ones are an embarrassment to the country and the world. They are like 10% of the world’s population (correcting for countries that don’t allow religious expression), and they alienate almost everybody else. They come across as unhinged and extreme because they are. Why should we associate ourselves with this? We shouldn’t. It’s embarrassing, and it doesn’t reflect our values and beliefs.
8/22/23 – Atheists, the soulless ones, who are really smart and cool, aka the evolved ones (including some nones) are on the same intellectual level as MAGA. They’re both anti-intellectual and detached from reality. MAGA belong to the cult of the evil one, trump. The evolved ones belong to the cult of scientism. Wherever the evolved ones and MAGA are is where we shouldn’t be as a country or as voters. Since, at present, this means both parties, it means both parties. They have both destroyed our country, just in different ways. Simply put: dumb + crazy = dangerous. See the evil one, trump. See MAGA. See the evolved ones.
8/22/23 – If religious moderates got our own party, it’s likely to be the biggest and the most normal. Policies would be somewhere in the middle, and the country would be spared all the unnecessary drama of the extreme right and left. We could have reasonable and well-reasoned debates about questions that concern the intersection of morality and policy, meaning all of our laws and policies.
The entire country is exhausted not just by the evil one, trump, but also by these wacky, incessant narcissists. The what has God done for me lately, church without the religion, I’m so rational, smart and cool crowd, and the God is a white nationalist, church is an arm of the government, and I’m a proud degenerate crowd. Hopefully, they would both finally just shut the f—k up.
8/22/23 – Being a boring “normie” is glorious. Please God, bless us some more to be exceptionally boring. We go to our jobs, which we do as well as we can; we go to our religious activities, which we do as well as we can; we help each other as much as and as well as we can, and the rest of the time, we engage in fun, wholesome activities. It’s simple living. It’s the best.
8/22/23 – If you’re wondering if the loony left has completely lost it, yes, you’re not imagining it; they have. It’s just the latest in all sorts of fun political developments. Insanity is definitely not confined to the right.
8/22/23 – There are no bounds for the atheists’, nones’, etc. narcissism, but just know that it’s guaranteed whatever deep insights or questions they have about religion or spirituality, it has been covered in the texts generated in the past, oh at least 6,000 years. They aren’t special or smart compared to the people who’ve come before them. In fact, those people were way smarter than they are. These people are a sad excuse for intellectuals. After these people read their works and actually understand at least some of the key points, they can get back to us.
8/22/23 – According to an article in the Atlantic, which has some of the best and some of the worst writers, love is magic caused by hormones. That’s the title. We didn’t get beyond the title since well…why? Let’s find some similar titles: love is sex; love is the body; love is the brain and the body; love is the brain and the body, and a magical mix of hormones. Maybe we should measure it? Should we plot it? Should we put love in a decanter? Science.
8/22/23 – Around 2010 at the latest, many economists and others were forecasting the demise of the dollar. Unsurprisingly, they were wrong. “Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela — have expressed interest in joining BRICS.” They should not be allowed to join BRICS. This is a good idea, “[he]e’s urged African leaders to join a fledgling pan-African payments system that uses local currencies in a push to encourage more trade.” What they should not do is a currency union.
Obviously, the management of the US dollar is customized to the US economy, but it is stable and trusted. If there is an inadequate supply of US dollars in these countries, one option would be to create a sort of contracts form of bartering using blockchain or even a simple app. Instead of just exchanging one good for another, the contract could be customized to have elements of this exchange (and a financial component, perhaps as a hedge,) which allows for a time dimension. In other words, the contract would act as a sort of store of value. The key would be to keep it simple enough for people to understand, but complex enough to offer some value-added to run-of-the-mill bartering.
Emerging economies are pushing to end the dollar’s dominance. But what’s the alternative?
8/21/23 – The world needs to switch to less water intensive grains.
Global food security is at a crossroads as rice shortages and surging prices hit the most vulnerable
8/21/23 – Religious moderates need their own party. The chasm between us and the atheists, nones and whatever is just growing wider and wider. It’s not bridgeable. We also really don’t want to be stuck with these odd people anymore. They make no sense. It’s just not tenable.
8/21/23 – People on the right already think the left is loony. If they say, people need more church without the religion, they’re just confirming the right’s conclusion that the left is crazy.
8/21/23 – People want to take personal credit for their achievements, in this achievement-based, atheistic society, and blame God for their suffering. That’s conveniently flattering and protective of the ego, isn’t it? God created the universe and everything in it. Does he owe you something? Who are you? Suffering is a part of life. Are you blaming God for giving you life? Is God supposed to save you and everybody else from themselves and each other every time they experience suffering? Why even bother to give us free will then?
What is obvious is that people want and need reconciliation with God. They just can’t get there or figure out how to get there for a variety of reasons. It’s easy to blame others, the broader society, politics, religious institutions themselves, etc. What is actually preventing this reconciliation is the person themselves? If one wants to grow spiritually, they have to be extremely honest with themselves on the deepest of levels, or it’s unlikely to happen. Interventions such as with the Apostle Paul, for whom God had a special mission, are few and far between. Stop asking questions of God, as Job did, and start asking questions of yourself.
8/21/23 – A chaplain who’s an atheist, OK. No offense to this person, who seems kind and, frankly, still traumatized by the Holocaust, but this is an oxymoron. To help others with their spiritual life, one does have to have a healthy spiritual life of one’s own. Therapy is not spirituality, and this confusion is indicative of the spiritual decay within our society. This is therapy. “Most of the community members who I work with and serve are ex-evangelical and ex-Mormon who have somehow been really hurt by traditional religion. And to offer a safe space where that’s not going to happen again feels important to me.”
Keep that thought in mind as you consider the following. However, all that said, she describes common lines of questioning and conclusions. “I asked my dad once about God and he said, ‘If there’s a God, he hates us.’ And by ‘us’ he meant the Jewish people. My dad’s historical understanding of Jews is that every generation there’s an attempt at total eradication.” This is covered in the Book of Job, which is a masterpiece of psychology and spirituality. It answers key theological questions, including this one.
There are three main responses in terms of faith to suffering: strengthening the faith, weakening the faith, no response. Weakening is nothing new. Being angry with God is nothing new. The thing with God is that, ultimately, you either reconcile yourself to him or you don’t. In the end, no one can really help you with that process. Like most other things, you have to do the work. Read the book, and ask yourself: what did you learn? What are you actually seeking in a having a relationship with God? Is it transactional, or something beyond that? What are your expectations, and why do you have them of God?
There is nothing in atheism that encourages this moral behavior. That’s a fallacy, which people need to stop promoting. In fact, as climate changes worsens, and people get more desperate, the survival instinct will kick in and fewer people will take care of each other. “But I think that the absence of God can be really beautiful. It means it’s our responsibility to take care of each other on this earth. And everything courageous and beautiful that we do is on us.”
This is a biased conclusion. Many people would argue that the afterlife keeps people on their better behavior. What many people hate about Christianity is the notion of an afterlife, specifically hell, mainly because they don’t want any restrictions or to feel guilt about their behavior in this life. This is a very common complaint. “It’s really easy to say to someone, ‘It’s great that you’re suffering in this life because you’ll get your just rewards in the next life.’”
This was self-flattering. It’s a “humblebrag,” another oxymoron. “I’m results oriented, Rachel. I’m data-driven in my religion. I want us to be solving these problems on this planet.” She exists in her mind. The spiritual life doesn’t exist in the mind alone.
Now, we see the hallmarks of atheism: “I want to marvel at the fact that lions exist and despair at the fact that they’re dying from being overheated because we’ve ruined this planet and not leave myself the option to put a silver lining on it. [Spiritually, this translates to hopelessness. Are Christians who believe in hope and using it to motivate action or simply to stay sane putting a silver lining on our own exploitation of the planet? What does marveling at this fact and despair mean exactly? Does it mean acceptance of this avoidable tragic reality as it is? A central tenet of Christianity is to be a people of hope. This doesn’t mean we’re naïve or that we’re putting a silver lining on anything. If we don’t have hope, we have no reason to even wake up in the morning.] I’m not saying that religious people have only cheap grace. [Cheap grace, it says so much. Hope is not cheap grace. The Jewish people aren’t a people of persecution. They are a people of hope. It’s one of the greatest gifts they gave the world. It has sustained countless other people in their own trials and tribulations.]
I want to just confront the realities of the suffering. And I don’t think enough people take that position. And I was raised to take that position. I don’t think everybody should. So, I feel like this is a muscle that I have and I don’t know why, but I think it’s a gift that I have to offer, my atheism. [Without being a therapist, that “muscle” is learned values and behavior from her father. She adopted his pessimism and internalized his own anger at God. How does she confront the realities of suffering? Where is that guidance in this piece? It’s not there. Simply stating the suffering or the data, as she bragged, is not confronting the realities of it. See, this is one of the main confusion of atheists. They confuse awareness of a problem as taking action to solve the problem. What is going to motivate people to take action, viewing the problem as hopeless or maintaining hope even while acknowledging the tremendous challenges in front of them?]” Let’s thank her for helping strengthen our own faith and not wanting to ever become an atheist.
Why this chaplain sees her atheism as a gift
8/21/23 – When is the United States going to dump Saudi Arabia? It is morally abhorrent.
8/21/23 – To the naysayers, we don’t care what you think. One way or another, Ukraine, all of it, including Crimea, will be free. Slava Ukraini!
8/21/23 – We the people make this country, not any one man or woman, not any party, not the media or the press, not any institution, not any corporation, not any industry, not any one entity of any kind, but we the people. Nobody should forget that. The country, the government and the culture, all of it belongs to us – all of our people, not just coastal elites or the rich and powerful. It’s ours, and it will reflect the majority, even if we have to burn every entity in this country to the ground to eliminate or to remake them.
8/21/23 – A piece of advice: if you’re proposing anything to a Christian audience, which is never any newspaper’s target audience, know our tenets and ask yourself: is this actually new or better than the framework we already have? It is quite unlikely to be. We’ve had 2,000 years to sort out these questions and develop a comprehensive moral framework. The atheist moral framework doesn’t even exist. It simply appropriated evolutionary theory, which has no moral component.
The work truly practicing Christians do can be quite exhausting. It’s often a lot of giving and not a lot of getting in a tangible sense, and it can lead to burnout. A nurtured spiritual life is what offsets this natural fatigue, which is often accompanied by a decrease in compassion. It’s a regular recalibration of the soul to reorient to love, our love for God and for each other, and away from the world and the work itself, which is inherently taxing. The proposal below, although definitely better than nothing or the prevailing culture, is a mutual exchange, and it’s not holistic.
8/21/23 – A certain newspaper has a well-meaning article about encouraging interdependence instead of independence in children. At least it recognizes that the atheistic culture (not referred to as such in the article), which has been the prevailing one for the past approximately half century, is based on individualism, independence and achievement. Perhaps these aren’t the best values for individuals or for a society as a whole after all. All atheism has given people is a false sense of identity and of accomplishment. If people adopt atheism, they think they will be considered smart and cool.
The “interdependence” the article argues for is less comprehensive than what Christian communities have been encouraging and practicing, with more or less success (recently less thanks to the atheists and to the failures of the church itself), for two thousand years, but sure, let’s pretend what’s extremely old is new again. Wasn’t there somebody else who did something similar recently? Ah yes, this guy, the huckster, “For a moment at least, Ramaswamy had pulled the elemental trick of both a politician and a huckster: making a banal idea seem forgotten, and new.” (See link below.)
Is “e pluribus unum” banal? Is what Christians call “beloved community,” a more expansive and holistic concept than “interdependence,” banal? No, actually, they’re not. They are short phrases, aphorisms, simple truths that remind us of their respective usually hard-to-practice and deeper concepts or ideals.
The reason many correctly practicing Christians have little or nothing to learn from atheists is that they pushed western civilization into the moral and metaphysical dark ages or perhaps even the abyss, one into which we didn’t enter. Why would we adopt “interdependence,” which, by the way, works contrary to evolutionary theory, when we have “beloved community”? Why would we avoid morality and the wholeness of a person to fixate on an intellectual and presumably logical argument?
Let’s check the assumptions of this presumably logical argument. What are they? Ask yourself, as one example, why should someone who does not suffer from a disability help someone who does? More generally, why should someone who is “superior,” as evolutionary theory would define, smarter, stronger, more beautiful, richer, more talented, help someone who is dumber, weaker, uglier, poorer, and less talented? What could the “superior person” possibly get out of this exchange, this “interdependence”?
An unstated assumption is that “interdependence” as described in the article is between relative equals. The church believes that the more marginalized and vulnerable the people, the more we need to help. In other words, the less help we get in return, the more we’ll get out of building those relationships and the work we do. We give freely of our time, talent and treasure because it’s morally correct. We do it because we’re doing what Jesus did, reversing the power structure, not because we get anything tangible out of it. We get a lot of intangible, irrational love though, love from our God, and love from each other, which is more valuable than anything else. The interdependence framework has no room for love because it exists only in the mind and tenuously at best.
8/21/23 – We have an originalist Supreme Court, don’t we? We are either a nation under the rule of law, or we’re not. Apply the law without fear or favor. “Section 3 is ‘self-executing.’… one who fails to satisfy the Constitution’s qualifications does not have a constitutional ‘right’ or ‘entitlement’ to serve in a public office…. The bottom line is that [the evil one,] Donald Trump both ‘engaged in’ ‘insurrection or rebellion’ and gave ‘aid or comfort’ to others engaging in such conduct, within the original meaning of those terms as employed in Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close. He is no longer eligible to the office of Presidency, or any other state or federal office covered by the Constitution.” Many people described it as an insurrection in real time. It was obvious. “The only intellectually honest way to disagree is not to deny that the event is what the Constitution refers to as ‘insurrection’ or ‘rebellion,’ but to deny that the insurrection or rebellion matters.” It matters more than almost anything else, except betraying us to our enemies, which he might have also done. The evil one deserves the death penalty.
The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again
8/20/23 – Our bodies are sacred. Our minds are sacred. Our souls are sacred. We are all sacred beings loved by God. We are not slaves. We are made free. Rest is resistance.
8/20/23 – The church isn’t a social club. It’s a beloved community. “Arquero says bearing each other’s burdens in this way — caring for neighbors — is the work of the church. ‘That is what we are called for to. That we care for people. In fact the mission of our church is we love God and we love people.’”
A Filipino congregation took in its own members after their Lahaina homes burned
8/19/23 – MAGA are an abomination to mankind. The evolved ones are also an abomination to mankind. We are stuck in the middle with them.
8/19/23 – Remember for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It applies to societies also, not just to physics. If you’re wondering why the far-right is getting more extreme, it’s because the far-left is getting more extreme.
8/19/23 – All public schools should have spaces where employees and students of any and all faith traditions can pray. Many Muslim students also pray during the school day. Schools should be places where the whole person is honored and nurtured. Intellectual development is only one part of a person’s development.
8/19/23 – There is a misconception that all Gen Z or Gen Alpha are not religious. This is untrue. The loony liberals, the liberal elites and the media haven’t indoctrinated all of them with their atheism. They need to work harder to spread their scientism and ruin more people’s spiritual lives. “While the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits school-sponsored prayer in public schools, the court also has made clear that individual students have a right to pray in public settings. And, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of teens ages 13 to 17, a sizable share of students in public school are availing themselves of this right. About a quarter of teens who identify with a religion and attend public school (26%) say they regularly pray before eating lunch at school…. Prayer in a school setting doesn’t just take place before lunch and, in fact, teens in public school are more likely to see students praying before sporting events (39%) than before lunch, according to the survey.”
About a quarter of religiously affiliated teens in U.S. public schools say they pray before lunch
8/18/23 – The idea that the rest of us are all going to “evolve” into the superior white atheists’ ultra-liberal positions, which is a form of white supremacy, is pure fiction. They are in the minority. They just don’t realize it because we are not provided with adequate choices. The Hispanic vote is decreasing, and even *liberal, white women* are complaining, at least privately. If Democrats lose the black vote, it’s over. If the loony left keeps this up, Democrats will alienate key constituents within its coalition, and it will lose them, possibly for generations. It’s a foolish strategy, and it’s morally wrong. This is a democracy. The politics and the culture should both reflect the majority. That’s clearly not what we have now. Neither reflect the majority.
8/18/23 – The Washington Post and The New York Times are local newspapers. Their reporting is totally disconnected from and does not reflect the majority of Americans, and much of their readership is like them, soulless evolved brains. We need national newspapers that can actually cover this complex, diverse country fairly and dispassionately.
8/18/23 – One of the super big, genius brains commented, “A deficient article that doesn’t mention the misbehavior of Catholic priests that shocks the conscience, and the subsequent coverups by the chrurch [sic].” What about the priests! What does that have to do with these parents?
8/18/23 – This article was published in The Washington Post as an opinion piece because their liberal atheist reporters, many of whom have no journalistic integrity and who do not represent even the country leave alone the world, would never publish something like this as news: a heterosexual couple is not allowed to foster children because of their entirely “normie” religious beliefs, you know the ones that at least 90% of the world views as totally normal. They will however run pieces as news that promote highly controversial practices that at least 90% of the world views as abnormal. The loony left has lost it, and this situation tells you everything you really need to know about how f—ked up the media is. Reverse discrimination is not always true (we don’t need people crying wolf), but it’s also not always untrue. Kudos to them for suing! They will win. It’s blatant discrimination.
A new puritanism is turning Catholics into Salem’s witches
8/18/23 – Both conservative and liberal elites want different constitutional amendments, obviously, ones that favor them. What the American people actually need, which European countries have, is more choice (parties and candidates) and ranked choice voting. It’s a much simpler and more direct fix for many of our political problems.
8/18/23 – The political polarization belies the reality, which is that the vast majority of voters are somewhere in the middle. The two-party system obfuscates it. The phenomenon of MAGA notwithstanding, these are fragile coalitions. Most people are voting either against something or because they have no better alternative. Both parties have exploited this lack of choice. The liberals have exploited it for cultural imperialism. The conservatives have exploited for political power.
8/18/23 – If the Democratic Party loses the black vote, many of whom are rather culturally conservative, it’s toast. It’s already lost many Hispanics because it’s gone off the cultural deep end. Voters, right or left, should never be taken for granted.
8/18/23 – It might be tempting to discount Ramaswamy as a huckster, but aren’t all politicians hucksters? None of them tell the truth all the time. All of us have lied at some point in our lives, if only about minor matters or white lies. Thus, lying is something to which everybody can relate. The seriousness and the frequency are what matter, but this is not a black and white area. It’s a gray area, and this is what regular liars abuse.
He’s also doing what any good politician intuitively knows how to do: validate voters’ feelings. In other words, make them feel good. However, ethical politicians do this in a way that doesn’t do damage, such as promote hate or conspiracy theories.
His political positions are infantile. He has no understanding of politics, and it shows. However, the Republican electorate has shown us that it doesn’t care about that. On the cultural issues, many of his positions, such as God is real, are taking on the extremes of liberalism. “Faith, patriotism, and family have disappeared as pillars, he said on the stump, replaced by ‘depression, anxiety, fentanyl, suicide.’” This is true. Whereas the politics is conservative minority rule. The cultural is liberal minority rule. The liberals own this decay, and on this point, the liberal extremes are the problem, not the pushback against it.
In Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republicans Have Something New
8/17/23 – Religious savages are being punished by the evolved ones who dominate the media and who can’t be bothered to give any thought to weighty questions because they’re too busy preening in front of their cellphones. Idol worship. Cultural hegemony.
8/17/23 – Among religious people in the US, black people have some of the strongest relationships with God. “For African Americans, the Bible’s Exodus narrative is a cultural touchstone. Since before the Civil War, the story of the Israelites’ [Hebrews’] slavery and deliverance has spurred comparisons to black people’s experiences in the United States. Scripture’s importance to the black population in the U.S. is reflected in Pew Research Center survey data showing that black people are more likely than most other Americans to read scripture regularly and to view it as the word of God.” They’re just not evolved enough to figure out it’s all lies, fairytales and such. Maybe the evolved white atheists, with their superior brains, can educate them? White supremacy can take many forms, and it’s not just on the right. The evolved ones must be sure to destroy their spiritual lives, as they have much of the rest of the country’s.
Blacks more likely than others in U.S. to read the Bible regularly, see it as God’s word
8/17/23 – Many loony liberals say the same thing. Who needs enemies when you have them? “Vice Foreign Minister Kim Son Gyong called the United States a ‘declining’ power and said if the council dealt with any country’s human rights, the U.S. should be the first ‘as it is the anti-people empire of evils, totally depraved due to all sorts of social evils.’” The perspective of the godless is that there is no God, so there is no God to love them and no God to love. Why would they love country or anything else larger than themselves? It’s all about them and their evolved brains.
UN: North Korea is increasing repression as people are reportedly starving in parts of the country
8/16/23 – Hey liberal media, MAGA, and loony liberals, the s—t has been real. We need to focus on solving our problems, not creating unnecessary ones. If you’re bored, you’re sleep-walking. Roll up your sleeves and do the work!
8/16/23 – This might not be of much interest to the godless atheists and therefore to the liberal media, but it’s of great interest to us, religious savages. Restorative justice holds a lot of promise. It comes out of indigenous practices and is also an application of the Judeo-Christian value of forgiveness. For almost everyone, forgiveness is one of the hardest virtues to practice. Instead of relying strictly on the criminal justice system, restorative justice can be used instead of it, in cases where the crime was an accident or relatively minor, or in addition to it, where the crime was intentional and more serious. The statistics show that it can greatly reduce recidivism, and it also helps promote compassion, which promotes more compassion, in other words, a virtuous cycle.
Jewish people and black people have historically been some of the most wronged people in history, and they have also been some of the most forgiving people in history. This is not a weakness. It is a testament to their strength. The Jewish people and black people have both experienced bondage, persecution and liberation on a massive scale, such as the Holocaust and chattel slavery, respectively. Liberation from these wrongs is more than just physical. It is also a psychological and spiritual process. In general, restorative justice has the potential to make our criminal justice system less punitive and more healing, both for the perpetrator and the victim of these crimes, no matter how heinous they are.
8/16/23 – The media is our frontline to protect our democracy, but it’s done terrible damage to our culture. The work they do on the former is being defeated by the damage they do on the latter. When you send the message that anything is permissible, the message received is anything is permissible. Their job is to protect our democracy, not to engage in cultural hegemony or imperialism and to manipulate people into their mindset. The liberal media needs to fix the mess that it created.
8/15/23 – Professions that involve serving people are bleeding staff because serving people has become highly unpleasant. The problem is atheism. We gave up something important and got this s—t culture in return.
8/15/23 – “By the nineteen-sixties, Rothbard had fallen out with William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s National Review, for its support for the Cold War buildup, and for its frivolous inclination to abandon the real ideological fight against the state in an effort to preserve, as Rothbard put it, ‘tradition, order, Christianity and good manners.’” And the abolitionist John Brown was a devout Christian. His faith motivated his zeal to end slavery, a cause for which he sacrificed his own life. “This approach can sometimes come off as a land grab; my eyebrows went up when they claimed the abolitionist John Brown as a libertarian hero.” Right.
The Long Afterlife of Libertarianism
John Brown (abolitionist)
8/15/23 – Clearly, our society is falling apart. Not only have children lost it, but so have the adults. However, most people, children and adults, can’t see it. This is a big part of the problem. If you don’t even recognize you have a problem, you can’t actually fix it. Why can’t they see it? Because they’re following the prevailing culture’s values and norms, and based on it, they’re not doing anything wrong. So, of course, they don’t see it.
Also, MAGA are convinced that their problems will disappear or be greatly reduced if the evil one, trump, is reelected, and if they own the loony libs. The loony libs are convinced that their problems will disappear or be greatly reduced if they defeat the evil one, trump, and own MAGA. From their perspectives, the problem and therefore the solution hinge on power and politics.
Many thoughtful, smart people have offered several theories about why our society is falling apart and recommendations on how to fix it. David Brooks proposes in this piece that it’s a lack of moral formation. Derek Thompson has proposed that is workism, making work the center of one’s identity and life. Among some of the other reasonable theories, some people have proposed that it’s due to political polarization or the weakening of communities.
All of this is true, but the source of the problem is broader and more foundational than this. We have to start with what a human being is. We don’t even agree on this most fundamental of concepts, so really, there is nowhere to go from this lack of consensus but to misery. Also, on the pretense of being a secular culture, we’ve actually become an atheistic culture based on might makes right.
Atheism says there is no god. The universe just started. Evolution determines the formation of life. When you, as an intelligent animal, die, meaning when your body and brain die, that’s the end. What is the inevitable result of a shallow, simplistic conception of a human being and of the world such as the atheistic one? Exactly what you’re looking at.
David Brooks said that “Statecraft is soulcraft. The laws we pass shape the kinds of people we become.” The causality is reversed. Soulcraft is statecraft. The laws we have now are based on Judeo-Christian values. Also, from the atheists’ perspective, human beings don’t have a soul. Therefore, statecraft would follow the laws of evolution, survival of the fittest. Might makes right. There is no moral code. How could there be one based on this theory? The culture, however, has developed based on this theory. No soulcraft is cultural immorality and decay.
Brooks writes, “For decades, researchers have asked incoming college students about their goals in life. In 1967, about 85 percent said they were strongly motivated to develop ‘a meaningful philosophy of life’; by 2000, only 42 percent said that. Being financially well off became the leading life goal; by 2015, 82 percent of students said wealth was their aim.” Is anybody surprised by this? “A meaningful philosophy of life,” what good could that possibly do for anyone when we have no soul? Everybody is avoiding the elephant in the room: the atheism problem.
How America Got Mean
8/15/23 – We have three main existential problems right now: the threat to our democracy (the most immediate), climate change (the most far-reaching), and the disintegration of our society (the most poorly understood).
8/15/23 – Let’s take a journey. Let’s start in our present space. We can look at our own bodies and at the space around us, smell the air, feel what we’re sitting or standing on, hear the noises around us, taste some water or food. We can engage all our senses and know to some degree but not entirely what we’re experiencing.
Now, let’s pull out a little. We can ask ourselves questions about our feelings and thoughts. How do I feel about these sensory experiences? What do I think about their relative importance? Do I prefer one experience over another? We still know, but the knowing becomes more abstracted, more fluid. Perhaps you preferred one thing now, but will prefer something else later. This means that time has a role. Are your emotions, thoughts and states conditional on time or circumstance?
Let’s keep pulling out. What do we know about current domestic affairs? More. What do we know about current international affairs? What do we know about world history? More. What do we know about all human knowledge? What do we know about our solar system? What about our galaxy? More, and more and more. What do we know about our universe?
Imagine yourself sitting there one little speck of knowledge that even when you’re experiencing the most immediate, the most concrete of your experiences, you still know it only to a certain degree, and as you pull out, you remain more or less that little speck, and the unknown keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. What you know is the numerator, and what you don’t know is the denominator. As you keep pulling out, the unknown keeps getting bigger and bigger until the fraction goes to zero. Now, imagine that there is a God, and he knows everything. This fraction is one.
You are at zero, and God is at one. No matter how much knowledge you gain, relative to God, you’ll still be at zero, and he’ll still be at one. This can be distressing, or it can be liberating. Someone once said to me, “I don’t trust God.” In this case, it will likely be distressing. But imagine if you did trust God. Imagine if you trusted him so much that you fully surrendered to him. What do you really need to know now: the unknown or God who knows all? One of the reasons people yearn to know God is because if they know him, they know everything they really need to know. Is God unknowable? Who is God? In the Abrahamic context, God’s answer is: I am.
8/15/23 – Scientific experiments need to be made much more ethical. The natural world, including the incredible animals we share our beautiful planet with, also belongs to God.
8/15/23 – “We [all human beings] have been created to know the unknowable.” Lovely phrasing of a universal truth. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You,” as Augustine said. (Augustine was African, not European, by the way. If you’re going to claim to be a Christian, learn the faith and the history.) The need and desire for reconciliation with the divine will continue to exist, whether a person recognizes it or not. Rainn Wilson had been raised in the Baháʼí faith, so even though he fell away from his religion, as so many of us do, he was able to more easily recover it. In fact, this process of loss and recovery can actually help people have a stronger connection to God. (Also, see the Hebrews to Israelites story of loss and recovery below.) To all the atheist parents and nonobservant religious parents, not only have you set your children up to be weaker and less resilient, you’ve also set up them to have no spiritual recovery process. They will have to start from the very beginning, to construct their belief in God from scratch. God works in mysterious ways, but, in general, this is likely to be a harder process.
Why ‘the guy’ from ‘The Office’ wants a spiritual revolution
8/15/23 – A question for the liberal atheists: Unless they’re lying to themselves, which is entirely possible (although being great thinkers, they don’t think of themselves as sinners because they don’t think of sin and, of course, they’re very good people, perhaps even perfect), evolution and natural selection has no moral component. It is simply survival of the fittest. If the only thing that matters about a species or any individual within a species is their relative intelligence, then what should we do with people who have intellectual or other mental disabilities? If you reduce someone to the brain: rational, intelligent, logical, etc., what should happen to the people who aren’t at a high level on these measures? Let’s add the body. If they have physical disabilities, what should we do? (They have no souls, right? So, that’s all to consider.) Should we treat them like the Nazis did? Should we treat them as some “scientists” at the Smithsonian treated blacks and indigenous people? Should we assist them in suicide, my body, my choice? (See David Brooks’s article below.) Should we let them change their brains, allowing them to experiment on themselves, like we experiment with guinea pigs? Science. Progress. Right? Just curious.
8/14/23 – When it comes to bodily autonomy, what’s the difference between the liberal atheists and the libertarians? Is there one? Note that many libertarians are also godless.
8/14/23 – Let’s all remember that not that long ago, the Democratic Party was the racist party, and the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln, the party that freed the slaves. Do people actually think that these racists might not change parties again. (If you do, you’re a special brand of naïve.) It is true that some people who claimed to be Christians incorrectly used the Bible to justify slavery. Any written or oral message, such as our own Constitution, can be incorrectly used to justify anything. That’s the nature of communication of any kind. We have a justice system to help manage this inherent problem. Do you know which part of the Bible they often used? The Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, the same Bible that contains Exodus, the greatest story of liberation from slavery ever told. It gave comfort and courage to black slaves for generations in their own story to freedom. Remember in the painting below: the Semites and the Nubians toil together in bondage. In a sense, the Hebrews helped liberate their counterpart, another group of people who had been stripped of their identity, to be free at last and recover their God-given human dignity.
Christianity is distinguished from Judaism by the New Testament, and Jesus went out of his way to break down barriers: from the Samaritan woman at the well, to the Good Samaritan, to the Romans, such as the Centurion, etc. His ministry is characterized by a reversal of the power structure, see the Sermon on the Mount and his own crucifixion and resurrection. So, tell us, what are the implications of more godless white racists becoming Democrats given the complete lack of a moral code, not just potential ambiguities within the text to be exploited for evil ends, but completely nonexistent text in the theory of evolution? Where there is an absence of communication, there is no potential for misuse, right? Is that right? You don’t need to imagine actually: you can just look at communists and fascists. Where is the corrective mechanism coming from, for example, regarding the Uighurs in China? It’s coming from the Abrahamic religions, both Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions, outside of China because in China, might makes right.
8/14/23 – Speaking of slavery, Exodus is one of the greatest stories in the Bible, and it obviously has a special meaning for the Jewish people. It is the foundation for their identity. You can see this as Dr. Henry Abramson describes watching the movie, The Ten Commandments, as a young immigrant in Ontario, Canada and experiencing it as only Jewish people can. As an immigrant, a foreigner in a foreign land, this must have been particularly poignant. Jewish identity has a specific beginning, and they find it after the Egyptians had tried to erase their humanity. In the painting, he explains that the Hebrews are depicted as Semites working alongside the Nubians, without specifically being identified as Hebrews. He draws the analogy to black slaves in the US whose unique African identities were erased by their white enslavers. Don’t take your identity for granted. It’s an important part of who you are. Figure out who you are. And remember: you are nobody’s slave. God made you free.
There is a special treat at the end, a providential resemblance. Wow! Tell us, which endures: worldly power or otherworldly power? Enjoy this great episode!
5 Exodus in Historical Perspective (Jewish History Lab)
8/14/23 – Nobody will make us into slaves, not the liberals, not the conservatives, not the loony left or the MAGA right, not the Democrats or the Republicans, not any of our friends or our enemies in the world, not any corporation. Nobody. God made us free, and we belong to him.
8/13/23 – God loves us all.
8/13/23 – Many people describe Jesus as pacifist. Some might describe him as somewhat introverted, especially compared with the Apostle Paul or some of Jesus’s disciples. Even more than his observant Jewish disciples, Jesus routinely withdraws, leaving his disciples and others, into silence and solitude for prayer.
The liberal elites, media and atheists have forced their idea of a human being upon the rest of us whether or not we realize it. We are walking brains held in bodies that can be modified as we wish. We are a product of cells, simple matter, so we can be engineered in any which way we want. From their perspective, we could modify our bodies to extend the shelf-life of the brain or its productivity. We could modify our brains and bodies such that the brain and the body don’t need a good night’s rest, usually quantified as 8 hours. This would be progress, scientific achievement, evolution. (Note: If you go without sleep for a long enough period of time, you can literally die. Do not attempt this.)
It used to be the case that much of the country would honor the Sabbath. This observance holds for all three Abrahamic religions, but the day varies. On at least one day, we would rest and reconnect with our spiritual lives. The liberals have destroyed this day for the rest of us, who are the majority in the world. On this day, our minds are now an endless checklist. Our bodies are just a vessel for pleasure. It’s not a day dedicated to our spiritual lives. From their perspective, we don’t have souls, so what possible value could this have. It’s a day to complete unfinished tasks and entertain ourselves with some soma, whatever form that might take for us.
However, we do have souls, and we need time to focus on them. Take time out of your day, like Jesus did, for silence, solitude and prayer. Respect the integrity of your person and nurture your whole being, body, mind and soul. The checklist, the vapid entertainment, it can all wait until tomorrow.
8/12/23 – If they can’t even hang onto Democrats, leave alone attracting Republicans, they’re failing at their jobs. After more news organizations fail, maybe we can finally get ones that reflect the composition of the country and the world in every respect instead of what we have now. These organizations are dominated by liberal elites who are ambivalent if not antagonistic towards religion. It’s cultural imperialism.
8/12/23 – Does The New York Times still exist?
8/12/23 – The Washington Post’s idea of covering Christianity is to mock it.
8/12/23 – Some Christians dislike or even hate Muslims, yet Islam has nothing but praise for Jesus. Dr. Shabir Ally provides a helpful summary of what Muslims believe and don’t believe about Jesus. From a Christian perspective, Jesus acts like John the Baptist for the Prophet Muhammad, not exactly an insignificant role. Jesus prophesied his coming. Jesus never made a villain out of people. He reached out to everybody. Be like Jesus. Salaam, Shalom, Peace to our Muslim sisters and brothers.
Muslims Believe in Jesus too | Dr. Shabir Ally
8/12/23 – Liberals are some of the most vapid people on the planet. Flaking is not a negative. It could be positive. It’s embracing chaos. This argument is supposedly article worthy.
8/12/23 – Between the liberals, the evolved ones, MAGA, proudly degenerates, and the evil one, trump, it’s going to be a long, hard road.
8/12/23 – If the white nationalist MAGA, the self-described Christians do not actually become real Christians, they need to stop calling themselves Christians because they’re not. They have done incalculable damage to the church.
8/12/23 – “He [Jesus] belongs to the world.” Billy Graham, may his soul rest in peace. We miss him. The geographical trinity image is lovely.
What Did Jesus Look Like? How Would A Jewish Man Possibly Look 2000 Years Ago?
The Land of Israel in the Ancient World (Jewish History Lab)
8/12/23 – The reason communist states, such as China, fascist states, such as Nazi Germany, or communist/fascist states, such as Russia, which are/were all dictatorships, want godlessness is because they don’t want human beings to have inherent dignity and worth. They want human beings to be slaves. Godlessness and authoritarianism appeal to liberals and conservatives, respectively, and it’s up to balanced, sensible people to prevent either of these outcomes.
8/12/23 – For those who think this is a dystopia future, is it in the future, or has it already begun? Let’s consider our problems: the detachment from reality and the increase in violence, both greatly exacerbated by social media and technology; the explosion of pornography, including child pornography; the myriad sexual depravities that have also exploded, both again facilitated by social media and technology; the drug addiction crisis and the associated deaths of despair; the breakdown of the family; the breakdown of gender; the breakdown of identity; the decline of communities; the decline of religious life, and the corresponding increase in isolation, anxiety and loneliness; the mental health crisis also resulting from the decline of community and religion; the new concept of people as simply matter for whom death is nothing but the end of the body and the mind; the disconnection from the natural world; the treatment of classics and classical themes as outdated even ignorant; the desire to transform free people into dependents of the state, such as already exists in Europe. All of this is the liberal elites’ and liberal atheists’ fault. They have destroyed our society. Conservatives are guilty of creating many other serious problems, but you cannot blame these serious problems on them. Hey genius liberals, fix it!
8/12/23 – We, backward idiots, savage religious people, who you, super evolved, genius, irreverent experimenters, who you liberal atheists say believe in the flying spaghetti monster, traditional families, and who want to be more than babies and brains in decanters, and want to, what’s the word, is it science, no, no, it’s not, it’s love, the most irrational of all the irrationals, and not just love, but the highest of loves, with our body, mind and soul (you might be unfamiliar with some of these terms, but they were once considered to make up a whole human being), this unevolved, funny, silly, stupid thing called God, yes, your brave new world, that’s right, we reject it. We don’t find it evolved at all, and we don’t want science in our lives to that degree. Atheists have already told us that we have no souls, deleting our divinity. We don’t want our entire humanity deleted by science. We claim the right to be fully human as designed by our creator. We don’t put our faith in science. We put our faith in God. We believe in a natural and a divine order, and we believe that we are loved by our maker, our God. We understand that you find these ideas antiquated, but we find them eternal.
8/11/23 – This is what the liberal atheists, the evolved ones, want for the rest of us. Science. Evolution.
Brave New World – Narrated by Aldous Huxley
8/11/23 – It should be noted that of the 1.2 billion with no religious affiliation, more than one half of them (58%) are Chinese. It’s not a choice. The Chinese government does not allow them to be religious, nor does the North Korean government. “In 2015, 1.2 billion people in the world, or 16%, said they have no religious affiliation at all…. The region also hosts 76% of the world’s religiously unaffiliated people, 700m of whom are Chinese.” See link below.
8/11/23 – My body, my choice has always been a lie. Individual autonomy has always had limits, from the beginning of a person’s life to the end of a person’s life. Let’s look at why. “About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.” As a society, we don’t want people or allow people to take their own lives. The moral expectation is that we will intervene to prevent it where possible, even if it means physically restraining the person, in other words, overriding their autonomy.
When we are born, we don’t have individual autonomy. Our parents have almost complete control over us, which diminishes over time as we become more independent of them. Until we are 18-years-old, they are held legally responsible for us. However, this doesn’t mean that during these first 18 years of life, our parents can do anything they want to us. They cannot abuse or neglect us. Why are there these limits? Whether or not we recognize it, we are God’s property. We belong to him. We don’t even belong to ourselves. This is the main reason why you cannot do whatever you want to your own body.
Another reason we can’t do whatever we want to our own body is out of a sense of collective obligation, of our interconnection. During Covid, this terribly simplistic slogan was flipped from liberal usage to conservative usage to defy following Covid restrictions. Just like we are interconnected with the natural world, we are interconnected with each other. Even a single individual’s actions, depending on the action, can have a dramatic impact on all of mankind. Therefore, we have expectations that we will restrict ourselves, in other words, sacrifice individual autonomy for the greater good, especially in certain circumstances.
PS This article is also a good example of liberal bias. Is the problem really access to guns? That might be a contributing factor, but it’s definitely not the underlying cause.
US suicides hit an all-time high last year
8/11/23 – Another key truth: no identity. Neither side, conservatives or liberals, have any idea how to construct a real identity. They both pull words from their respective word clouds, slap them on their persons and convince themselves that they’ve actually done the work of figuring out who they really are.
8/11/23 – Another key truth: superiority. Many white conservatives think they’re superior because of their white skin and Europeans’ supposed dominance. Many liberal atheists think they’re superior because they’re not religious.
8/11/23 – One key truth is this: hypocrisy. Some conservative Christians, not all since many of them know almost nothing about the religion, might remember that Jesus used this word numerous times. Some liberal atheists might think this word doesn’t apply to them since the only word that they think applies to them is science and not some word the flying spaghetti monster said, but it does. They both stink to high heaven of hypocrisy.
8/11/23 – F—k the liberals, and f—k the conservatives. We’re done with the duality. There’s a better way. It’s not through the middle. It’s through the truth.
8/11/23 – Let’s go through this list as a comparative exercise. Let’s see what we find, shall we.
“You or I have no shortage of illusions in our parts of the political spectrum?” Applies to both liberals and MAGA. We all have illusions, not just MAGA, although theirs – at present – are worse.
“Though Trump may be a person of low character, to many of his supporters, he seems like the sort of fighter that is needed—someone who does not follow the rules because the rules are believed to be the problem.” The system is rigged, which it is, applies to both liberals and MAGA.
“When you’ve committed to something at a great cost, it is hard to admit that your commitment was all for nothing.” Universal truth.
“No one wants to be confronted by a horde of their neighbors at church or accused of supporting degeneracy at the grocery store. Peer pressure is probably keeping a lot of people in line.” Another universal truth.
“[W]hat really matters is whether a candidate gives a voter an identity.” True on both sides. Look at Bernie supporters, for example. People don’t know how to construct real identities, so they are vulnerable to creating superficial identities. See criticism below that applies to liberal atheists.
“Trump supporters believe that the economic and cultural game is rigged…. Trump supporters see Trump as challenging the cultural and economic system that excludes them and their views.” Both sides think the system is rigged on every level, and everybody wants a candidate that will unrig it.
“They defend him out of reaction: It’s ‘unpopular,’ and they are raging against the machine.” This is America, and all Americans love flipping the bird to the man. We are naturally rebellious.
“[T]hey don’t want government interfering in their freedom…. And beyond them, I’ve observed that there are people with a seemingly ‘genetic’ trait who simply enjoy seeing a person ‘stick it’ to others.” See previous comment, and add, Americans love freedom.
“But I do think that we tend to support someone when we see ourselves in them. Identity politics play in both parties.” Ditto.
“It’s cultural imperialism.” Both sides are vying for cultural imperialism, which is a great term, and when MAGA says that the cultural system is rigged, they’re right. On the political side, the conservatives have minority rule. On the cultural/media side, the liberals have minority rule. This liberal minority rule pushes atheistic values and calls it neutral by pretending it’s secular. It’s not neutral. It’s a cultural position that favors the minority.
“Part of being a human being is wanting to belong. One way we do that is to identify with someone or something.” Absolutely true. On the political side, some liberals identify with, some might argue, have a cultist attachment, to AOC, Warren, Bernie, for example.
“Give someone a reason to feel good about their anger and resentment and you can gain their loyalty.” Liberals are not at all immune to this.
This comment was brutal and so true. “After all, how would we feel if confronted by a way of life that mocks our religion, siphons up our brightest young people and convinces them we’re hopelessly ignorant, sells us out to the global economy, promotes behavior that’s been taboo for thousands of years, and cancels us if we disagree? It fits with the experience of Indigenous cultures that were overrun by modern industrial society during the past 250 years.” This is what liberals and liberal elites are doing. So, take a cold, hard look at yourselves, and ask yourselves, why do you think you’re so much better than the other side? Liberals are so smart and science and such, do some self-reflection and self-criticism.
13 Readers on What Trump Voters Want
8/10/23 – “84% of the world’s population identifies with a religious group.” Of which over half (55.3%), belong to two Abrahamic religions: Christianity and Islam, which for obvious reasons share considerable theological overlap with Judaism. “According to 2015 figures, Christians form the biggest religious group by some margin, with 2.3 billion adherents or 31.2% of the total world population of 7.3 billion. Next come Muslims (1.8 billion, or 24.1%).” In other words, over one half of the world’s population, to some degree, share the same religious beliefs, with some of them being about as important as they can be, such as the nature of a human being.
Yet the shallow, simplistic atheistic values and worldviews are shoved down our throats by the liberal media, every single day. The liberal atheists claim to have these evolved, highly developed brains; they are so smart, scientific and rational; they are enlightened; they are humanists. Simply put: they are superior. Did you know that?
Actually, the rest of us didn’t know that. These liberal atheists are actually anti-intellectuals, and their entire identity is composed of a word cloud from which they all pull the same words to form a caricature of an identity: humanist, science, rational, science, evolution, science, autonomy, science. Did you know that they believe in science? Perhaps if they repeat the word some more, the backward, religious idiots of the world, such as we are, would get it.
What the liberal atheists actually believe in is their own superiority, and they should just say this. They are more evolved than the rest of us. Are the rest of us supposed to be impressed by this? What exactly are the rest of us supposed to get from them and this? By the way, did you know that they’re cool, really cool, and smart, really smart. That’s what we’re supposed to get. It’s pure narcissism, and it has no value whatsoever to society.
Religion: why faith is becoming more and more popular
8/10/23 – Let us put the liberal atheists’ understanding of human beings in simple terms: we are a more evolved animal due to natural selection, and we think, therefore we are, meaning our body is just a physical vessel to hold our exceptional brains. (The usage here is not referring to Descartes’s original.)
Firstly, many religions do not think of human beings as more evolved animals. The Abrahamic religions definitely don’t. We are made in the image of God, which for all Abrahamic religions is a spiritual image not necessarily a physical one. This is arguably the biggest difference in the way atheists see things and the way we see things. Although God created everything, human beings are distinct on an important level from the animals he created. As an extension of this belief, for us, we, all humans, are created equal.
The logic of evolutionary theory, however, is that we are all unequal. That’s the logical foundation of natural selection. The humans who go extinct either naturally (diseases or genetic susceptibility) or through violence (genocide and war) are just less evolved. Survival of the fittest. Might makes right. One cannot overemphasize how important this difference in our understanding of a human being is. Its implications affect everything.
Secondly, for many religious people, humans aren’t just exceptionally intelligent. We are not just a mind, but a body and a soul as well. We are three parts in one beautiful whole, and all three parts are divine. This difference in understanding also carries with it a myriad of implications.
Liberals feel no compunctions about experimenting with their bodies, either with drugs and alcohol, plastic surgery, gender changes and so on. Nothing is out of bounds because they don’t actually have any regard for the body, except to extend its longevity through any means possible, including ones that religious people would find objectionable. In addition, in their framework, emotions originate in the brain and can be controlled with the right thinking. They also don’t think humans have a soul. It’s ultimately all about the brain for them.
When you reduce human beings to just a brain, all of the other dimensions, the body and the soul, that are actually still there and need nurturing end up being neglected. Do you want to see the result of this one-dimensional understanding of a human being? It’s what you’re looking at right now. A breakdown of people and of the broader society. See, the “Enlightenment” was not actually all that enlightened. It was actually retrograde.
You cannot reduce complex human beings, our cognitive processes and psychology, into I think therefore I am. That’s simply not how humans are actually wired or work. They have needs, desires, and motivations that are of a mystical nature, that transcend both rational and irrational, and they often think and act on a subconscious level. Also, whether something is rational or irrational depends on the perspective.
Let’s consider: Is the desire for humans to connect with their maker rational or irrational? For religious people, it would be entirely rational. Of course, we do because we believe God exists. For atheists, it would be entirely irrational because God doesn’t exist. The existing assumptions determine the rationality or irrationality of the conclusion.
For Christians, God is. God is not because he thinks, but he simply is. We also think that humans are more than just thinkers. We aren’t just because we think. We are body, mind and soul made in God’s image. It is a sensitive, multi-dimensional understanding of human beings that does justice to our complexity and our divinity.
8/10/23 – The power of Christianity is not in militancy or any kind of aggression or dominance. It’s in peace. Jesus is the Prince of Peace. It’s not in belittling or disrespecting other religions or people who are different from you. It’s in love. People love Jesus because he knows how to love. Jesus loves you. It’s not worldly power. It’s otherworldly power.
8/10/23 – This applies to all people and religions, but to address conservative Christians who are feeling threatened by the perception of a decline in the faith: this is a great time for all religions, including for Christianity. It used to be the case that people were born into a faith, and many of them practiced it almost mindlessly. They practiced it because that was the tradition into which they were born. How well did they understand their faith? Did they go to their place of worship because they really wanted to connect with God or for some other reason? When disputes arose between religions or religious factions, they often didn’t settle them peacefully but violently, which, for Christians, is antithetical to Jesus’s teachings.
For perhaps the first time in world history, many people (but sadly not all, in some parts of the world, they aren’t allowed to choose freely, which is a violation of their God-given right) have the freedom and the access to learn about and consider a variety of religions. This is great news! Obviously, they might not approach the process efficiently. They might meander meaninglessly or the variety might end up being more confusing than clarifying. But the people who do find their way, who find their spiritual home and clarity, are much more likely to understand the faith well and have more zeal because they actually went through a discernment process.
The thing to understand about people is that there are certain fundamental truths about their being that don’t change with time. One of these truths is that they all want to be reconciled with God. Even when they don’t recognize this need, it’s still there. So, no matter how the world changes, they will want to fulfill this need.
God willingly, all people on earth will be presented with Christianity among other options, the more options, the better, so that they can be more fully informed, and the Spirit will move them. To conservative Christians, pray for this divinely inspired conversion and be the hands and feet of Christ, so that they can see how powerful our faith is. In your life, bear witness to Jesus Christ and the faith by being the embodiment of goodness. Not only will you be stronger in your own faith, but you will make Christianity much more appealing to others, which will address your fears of its decline in a healthy, positive way.
In the American church, there are a lot of people who treat church as a social club, which is not what church is, and don’t actually understand the faith, which is a real problem. We want people to understand and practice the faith correctly because it is truly a beautiful thing. Also, Christianity has suffered from corruption, power and money almost from the beginning. Remember the Protestant Reformation. This is a great opportunity to clean the Lord’s house and to realize what Luther and other reformers hadn’t fully realized: a Christianity that’s actually faithful to Christ’s teachings.
8/10/23 – Christianity and religion, more generally, are not in decline. It’s a false perception.
8/9/23 – “Jesus represents a whole body of religion, not just one way.” Oprah means well, so let’s show her some grace, but this is very imprecise language and frankly wrong. And Rohr who is thought-provoking and has many good insights is also guilty of this sometimes. He’s a good person and could be a healing force in these polarized times, but frankly, his theological interpretations can be pretty loose.
Even more than to Christians, Oprah’s statement would actually be quite offensive to practitioners of other religions. In that statement, their sophisticated and differentiated belief structures are being subsumed under Jesus. When these sort of “universalists” (don’t really know what to call them) make these kinds of statements, they mean to be inclusive. They mean well. They are trying not to exclude. What they don’t understand is that it’s actually quite offensive to almost all practitioners of various religions. This is a good example of how to do inclusivity incorrectly.
Just like human beings and all of God’s creation around us, religious and spiritual traditions are diverse. They are all sophisticated. These are the hardest questions we grapple with as human beings. A lot of (metaphysical) thought, debate and decision-making has gone into them. Almost all of them overlap to some degree, and they are all also different. (See Joseph Campbell.) Therefore, when you try to erase their distinguishing characteristics, this is naturally offensive because you’re treating these elements as if they are not integral to the religion, as if they are optional. You’re treating the religion like it’s an à la carte religion from which you can pick and choose, or mix and match how you want. You’re disrespecting the integrity of the religion.
This is one of the reasons why you have to choose. (See below.) Imagine that you’re choosing a spouse. You can’t mix and match. You can’t take aspects of one girlfriend or boyfriend and mix it with aspects of another girlfriend or boyfriend. Not only is it usually infeasible, but you would be violating the integrity of the person. If you try to change the person, especially on a substantive level, into the other person, it’s likely not going to go well. This is disrespectful to the person. You’re not accepting the person as is.
Choosing a religion is like choosing a spouse. You’re “marrying” that belief system. You can always try to “spin off” a new one that uses elements of the original and perhaps elements from other system(s) or something new. See Christianity from Judaism or Buddhism from Hinduism. But you can’t mix and match between existing religions because it’s disrespectful to the religious and spiritual traditions. In one’s personal life, of course, you’re free to do what you want, but just know that these kinds of ideas and statements will likely not go over well with a lot of people, especially in traditional cultures.
Inclusion done correctly is founded on love and respect for the differences. Human beings have come up with so many different understandings of God, which in and of itself is a testament to the divine. There is a natural desire to understand the divine and for this divine connection. To do inclusion right, you simply recognize the differences between faith systems. You can appreciate or admire aspects of other faith traditions. You can try to learn the other systems to help inform your own practice and spirituality. You can even try to understand their theological foundations. However, you also have your own reasons why you chose what you chose. That doesn’t mean that other religions or belief systems are less than yours. They just didn’t correspond as well to your understanding or conception of God. Remember: none of us know. We believe. So, humility is always in order, but picking and choosing, mixing and matching is not respectful. It’s actually disrespectful, even if well-intentioned.
Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations Father Richard Rohr The Universal Christ
8/9/23 – It is now clear to me why I was dreading dealing with love. It is the most abused word and concept in the world. It is a tortured word cloud holding the most banal and the most sophisticated of emotions and states. Tip: Whenever you’re confused about metaphysical matters, refer to the Gospel. High likelihood it’s covered there. God is love. We want to be reconciled with God. Love in this highest of expressions resides in the heart (body), mind, and soul. In other words, this kind of love requires your entire being. “Jesus replied, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. Love God above all else. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” The second part, “love your neighbor as yourself,” is less demanding but still hard to do. In practice, we love in different ways, and in most (if not all other) expressions of love, it’s not going to reside in our entire being but parts (one or more) of it, or rather oddly, just a banal utterance (not really love) that doesn’t really reside anywhere but in a word cloud. What are the implications of this? For you to be truly transformed, your entire being (body, mind and soul) needs to be in a state of love of God.
8/9/23 – Faith, soul. Hope, soul. It would have to be love, the most irrational of the irrationals. Even time is easier to deal with because you can just say it started with the Big Bang (the beginning of the universe, of all creation, and God exists outside all of it) and call it a day. (You’ll notice that this means that time is not infinite.) But love is frankly a pain in the a— metaphysically, arguably the worst. It would be so much easier to ignore it, but that no longer seems tenable. So, where does love fit best? Body (unlikely, even though we associate it with the heart, which is just an organ), mind (unlikely, love is way too irrational), soul (promising but complicated), a separate entity (but how exactly)? Let’s work from the premise that love resides in the soul. Let’s list a few things people love: nature, books and other human creations, pets, other humans, and God. Now, let’s make some statements. I love nature. I love my blue coat. I love my dog. I love my child. I love God. Are all of these expressions of love going to originate in the soul? Are we just sloppy and use the same word, “love,” to express very different emotions or states? Given how hard people fight for money and material possessions, it seems to be (some sort of) love though? Maybe it’s just an addiction? Some (sadly, likely many) people (seem to) love their money and stuff more than anything else, including other humans? How could this love reside in the soul? Is the love for one’s parents or children the same as one’s love for God? Is there a hierarchy to love? Perhaps different types of love reside in different places. This would, however, undermine the integrity of the concept. Love as a single concept would cease to exist. Or perhaps love is only love if it resides in the soul, and everything else is just called “love,” but it’s really not love. From this perspective, the residence (the soul) of the expression (love), defines the expression. Is this tautological?
8/9/23 – Don’t feel at all compelled to dig into this. It’s pretty metaphysical stuff. This is a Jewish explication, and this line stuck out to me, “Without the body, the soul would be unable to do the holy, redemptive work of following the commandments.” It’s as if the soul needs the body to redeem the soul, which I find rather fascinating from a Christian perspective, especially in terms of communion, since Jesus gave his body to redeem our souls.
Body and Soul: Indispensable partners for doing life’s sacred work
8/9/23 – Jesus was a brown Jew (brown Jew, meaning not white) born in the Middle East. This was the specific human form Jesus, the Son of God, took. One’s preferences and opinions on this matter are irrelevant.
8/9/23 – The process below will work for discernment for any religion, no religion, or no one religion. For Christianity specifically, many people don’t need this or any intellectual process at all. Their hearts know. Their hearts run to Jesus like a child to its parent. They understand Jesus’s love, and that’s all they need. They are truly blessed. The rest of us need our minds to explicitly make that journey with us.
8/9/23 – Some words of advice to people trying to understand Christianity or discern if they believe in it: if you let it, the process and Christianity can be overwhelming. The Trinity can be particularly hard to understand, and some people argue that Christianity isn’t a monotheist religion because of it. Note: monotheist does not equal superior. It’s best to not get too wrapped up in theological debates or definitions. It will more than likely frustrate or confuse you and will not help you at all in your spiritual journey. You can just ask yourself a couple basic questions and your answers to them should be enough.
The first question to ask yourself is: Do you believe in God? If you believe in God, then God can take on whatever form or no form. God takes on different forms in different religions. Therefore, the second part is to decide which form is true. Note: “Believing” in all religions might be an appealing copout from actually making a decision, but it’s also pretty meaningless. This does not mean that you can’t strengthen your faith or spirituality by learning from other religions.
In Christianity, God takes the form of the Trinity. The Trinity is basically the Father (no physical form), Jesus (human form), and the Holy Spirit (no physical form) that are connected as one whole. I understand the Holy Spirit as Jesus explained it. When he left this world and his disciples, he sent the spirit to guide and help them and us. He didn’t want his disciples, in particular, who had gotten used to his presence and whom he had sent on hard missions to feel orphaned.
To me, the remarkable aspect of the Trinity is for God to explicitly take human form, Jesus. This is an important point: You do have to believe that Jesus is the Son of God to be a Christian. In the Christian faith, he’s not just a nice man who did and said some nice things, or a prophet, as he is in the Islamic religion. Why would God actually choose to take human form and then choose to die on the cross for us? That’s a mystery. Only God can know his own motivations, and one just needs to accept it as such. But if you need (even more) proof of God’s incredible love for us, there it is. So, the second question to ask yourself is: Do you believe the testimony in the Gospel? That’s pretty much all there is. It’s best to not over-think. Reduce the logic to its essence and answer key questions.
8/8/23 – What church leaders and others need to admit is that they watered down Christianity to make it more palatable for the general public. Let’s face it. Many people can’t even understand the Gospel, let alone live it. This “mass marketing,” if you will, comes at a cost to the faith itself, and arguably, to the broader society that would otherwise greatly benefit from a better understanding and practice of it. The reform that needs to happen is to bring Christianity back to its roots. Don’t pretend it’s a religion that doesn’t ask much. It asks everything. But if we can do it, we get everything in return. It’s better for the church to be smaller and truer than whatever it is now.
8/8/23 – Correction: The verbatim part below isn’t correct. It was actually his son, jr. However, the general message is the same, for example, here.
8/8/23 – Personally, it’s mind-blowing to me to spend all this time on something, and not understand it at all. What’s the point in that? Sleep-walking through one’s life. Wake up, people. Think more. Think harder.
8/8/23 – When hasn’t the church been in crisis? It’s been in perpetual crisis. In the west, in the beginning, it was persecuted within the Roman Empire, which is a crisis of its own. Then, it became adopted by the Roman Empire as its religion, which is a crisis of a different kind, arguably worse than the persecution. And on and on and on. The question I have for all true Christians in the west (because where Christianity is a minority religion, they should know better) is: why do you expect a subversive religion, which is what Christianity is, to not be in crisis?
Jesus told us what to expect, and it isn’t pretty. Yet your expectations aren’t actually matching what he told us to expect. In other words, if Christianity is practiced correctly, you’re going to be persecuted; you’re going to be marginalized; you’re going to be distrusted, and so on. Yet, the expectation is that you’re going to be an extension of the powers that be, of the status quo: dominant, powerful, wealthy, etc. What is this? When this has been the case, the church became corrupt, meaning it stopped being the church in its original intention, and therefore, in crisis. The church is the purest when it is the truest to the teachings of Jesus Christ, typically when it’s a smaller group of people who come together to worship together or to live and worship together, casting off all worldly trappings. You see this throughout the history of the persecuted church, throughout the world, people who are willing to give up everything for Jesus.
I had the Bible read to me in church since I was born, and I used to think that all people had to do was to read the Gospel for themselves, and they would be converted (born again), which was my personal experience. I later realized this is not the case. As you can see below, people can react in the strangest ways to the Gospel. If Jesus, the Son of God, is weak, then how do you define powerful? Jesus chose of his own volition (this is why we call it a sacrifice and not a crime), to die on the cross for us, for our salvation. He didn’t have to do any of the things he did. He chose to do the things he did, including to die, for us. Does God need us, or do we need God? These people below don’t actually understand even the basics of the faith they claim to practice, and there are millions of them. It would be shocking if it weren’t so common.
”It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — ‘turn the other cheek’ — [and] to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’ And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would not be, ‘I apologize.’ The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.’ And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.” And do you know where they got this particular misunderstanding? They got this from the evil one, trump. It’s practically a verbatim quote. The devil has entered the Lord’s house, but let’s not pretend this is the first time nor will it be the last.
To dissect this particular observation: “And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.” Is this, “subversive to us,” how we define crisis? The reality is that Christianity is subversive, and in many ways, it’s actually intended to be “subversive” to us. We should be clear-eyed and honest with ourselves about what our religion says and what it is asking us to do. It’s asking us to go against every natural instinct we have as human beings: self-preservation, narcissism, power, money, lust, and on and on. When you think lower-level thinking or instinct, we’re being asked to not do it. What should we call that? We are choosing to subvert a lower-level person for a higher-level person because that’s what it takes to be closer to God. That is what Jesus asked of us. That is what he modeled. When you understand it that way, “turn the other cheek” is not weakness. It’s power. The reason it is not understood this way by Christians and non-Christians is because there has been a complete misunderstanding of what the Gospel’s message really is, and this misunderstanding is perpetuated by, at least, American, if not western, churches themselves.
He was a top church official who criticized Trump. He says Christianity is in crisis
8/8/23 – Paul said that the greatest of these: faith, hope, love is love. You would think that for Paul, the person who was blind but then could see, it was faith, but it wasn’t. It was love. I wasn’t actually convinced. They seemed equally important. Other things also seemed equally important. What about justice? What about equality? Etc. I’m absolutely convinced he was right now. Love is the greatest of all. It is also the greatest commandment. How I got to this conclusion is long, convoluted and a bit mystical. In other words, I’m not sure I can explain it myself, but he was right. Probably subconsciously, I didn’t want it to be true because I knew it would be really hard for me. I don’t think of myself as a mystic or a naturally loving person at all. I think of myself as a rational person who’s rather bad with all emotions, especially love. So, talking about the highest of emotions, love, is about foreign as it could possibly be for me, but here I am. The person that wants to tell people to just go f—k themselves will still be here though, just to manage expectations.
8/8/23 – Being really good at virtue signaling and really bad at showing love in the real world doesn’t work. You have to change yourself. You have to the work. Don’t worry about controlling or changing others. The reason you want to control or change others is because you’re trying to get out of doing the hard work of changing yourself. It’s a similar psychological place to procrastination, but it gives you a scapegoat. If only they’d change…. No, you need to change. I need to change. We all need to change ourselves.
8/8/23 – His comments about elders particularly and painfully resonates. The older people in my personal life are simply older. They definitely are not elders. In fact, the reason why very few older people in general are regarded that way is because they didn’t develop themselves to be elders. So, it’s hard to find people with wisdom who live contemporaneously with us. There is the wisdom elders left in books, which is much appreciated and helpful, but it’s not the same as being in their company. There might be more middle-aged people who are on their way to being elders. (Middle-age is generally a good time to start because one has enough experience to reflect on and hopefully enough maturity to do this work.) So, it seems something, maybe a narcissistic arrested development, happened, particularly in the baby boom generation.
8/8/23 – If anybody is wondering why Richard Rohr keeps being shared, it’s because the situation has gotten so dire, we need to bring in the cavalry. He’s probably our best shot right now to get us out of this quagmire we’ve created. At a minimum, he’s capable of self-reflection and self-criticism. (He’s obviously capable of much more than that.) If you can’t do self-reflection and self-criticism, and MAGA and the loony libs seem incapable of this, then you really can’t help anything or anyone move forward. You have to be able to do at least this one thing.
Father Richard Rohr “Falling Upward”
8/8/23 – Remote work is better for the environment, and if they relocate to rural areas, better for communities. But on an individual basis, given our loneliness epidemic, it’s probably not healthy for people. There should be some balance that each employee can work out with their employer based on their life situation.
8/8/23 – People love Jesus because he knows how to love. God loves us all with a deep and abiding love. Yes, this includes MAGA with their lovers of demagoguing false gods and democracy killers, and yes, the loony libs with their militant atheists and irreverent experimenters. In fact, Jesus seems to specialize in loving hard to love people. It’s one of the great mysteries. A section should be added to praying the rosary: the love mysteries. Jesus chose Paul, the persecutor, and Matthew, the tax collector. The others couldn’t figure out why, but there they were with the Apostles. Writing away. Love mystery. Jesus even loved the people who condemned him, an innocent man, to death. Love mystery.
8/8/23 – A word to the wise (and to the Democratic Party), psychology is more important than economics or any other policy matter. It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the person, stupid. Any party or politician worth anything would do one thing well – make voters feel good. That’s really all one needs to do. It is critical to understand and acknowledge their fears. The world has changed faster than most people, even well-educated ones, can process. Even the tech “geniuses” can’t keep up with their tech “genius” inventions. How can anybody else? Say that. Speak truths that narrow the distance between us and them to make it we. Speak truths about the state of affairs that shows empathy with voters, which is what people and politicians should do anyway, empathize. Then, provide an antidote to what is naturally an unpleasant state of the mind (and the soul). If your opponent is someone who peddles hate, provide love. If he incites fear, instill hope. If he spews lies, speak truth. And so on. On a fundamental level, everybody, whether they realize it or not, wants to be reconciled with God, with love. You don’t actually need to convince anybody of anything. You just need to get their state of mind (and soul) into a positive place where their fears, whether real or perceived, have been acknowledged and allayed, and provide a positive alternative. You will not only increase your chances of winning, but you’ll help our country heal, which is even more important.
8/8/23 – “George Will said it first, but it bears repeating: The modern GOP is the first American party that fears its own voters.” It might sound counter-intuitive, a party fearing its own voters, but this phenomenon is not unique to the United States. In China, for example, the people can get worked up into such a nationalistic fervor that it can be hard for the Communist Party (or now the dictator Xi Jinping) to rein them in, especially on issues of a nationalistic variety (us versus some foreign threat, real or perceived, a qualification one needs to add because it’s usually perceived), for example, the South China Sea. The leadership isn’t necessarily afraid of the people in these authoritarian regimes, but they can be cowed into taking actions they wouldn’t otherwise take to appease the angry, nationalistic mob.
These are fear-based regimes and politicians. They prey on the fears of the people. Unlike Jesus, who kept repeating, “do not be afraid,” they want the people to be afraid. Fear is a primal emotion, and Jesus was asking us to rise above it. (This is not easy. Look at what difficulties his own disciples had.) Once it’s triggered, the survival instinct (a fight or flight response) kicks in, which can run longer and stronger than intended. The GOP’s MAGA base has become a fear-based electorate. We know that they are also grievance-based. Rohr explains that every preference is a grievance waiting to happen. If one’s preferences carry (perceived) existential weight, the resulting grievances become fears that become battles for survival whether real or perceived. Remember: it was really not Pontius Pilate or the Jewish high priests who condemned Jesus to death. It was the angry mob that the Jewish religious leaders had worked up into an irrational rage. It’s an ancient strategy that will often work and will continue to be exploited by evil people. Unless, of course, we can become a people who rise above fear to a higher state of consciousness, one defined by love.
Mike Pence’s 11th Commandment
8/7/23 – God bless the persecuted church. Pray for our sisters and brothers in Christ. Pray that the hearts of the Hindu persecutors are softened in Manipur and throughout India where they have terrorized other religious minorities, such as Muslims. Pray for peace in India and throughout the world.
8/7/23 – This is the person who the unprincipled panderer, also known as Biden, as well as other weak world leaders, such as Macron, who hasn’t met a dictator whose a— he wouldn’t kiss, courted and showered with unearned praise. Like the evil one, trump, did here, the murderous, dictator(-wannabee) modi (and his demagoguing BJP) foments this hatred and then silence. Not a spiritual silence. A satanic silence. Under the BJP, it will never be Gandhi’s India. “For three months, the strongman leader has been absent on arguably the worst ethnic violence ever seen in the remote state, where Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party is in power. Modi’s role, or lack thereof, has sparked a no-confidence motion against him in Parliament, where his government holds the majority.”
India’s Modi faces a no-confidence vote over silence on ethnic violence tearing at remote Manipur
Violence & Assault in Manipur: Christians Persecuted in India
8/7/23 – It is incumbent upon all – meaning all – of us to help each other. We have a mental health crisis, an addiction crisis, which is also related to a deaths of despair crisis, a homelessness crisis, a poverty crisis, etc. We have a lot of crises. One of our responsibilities as human beings is to help restore each other’s dignity in our daily lives. When you cross paths with someone/anyone, smile, and if possible, greet the person, or raise your hand in a gesture of peace. If possible, talk to each other. Where you can, help each other. Basically, recognize the person’s humanity and divinity. It is a simple gesture that makes a big difference. It also helps build community.
Other people are not just other animals that share your space. They are God’s people, and they belong to him. Treat his creation, human and other, with the grace and love he and they deserve. There are a lot of broken people in the world, and they need love. They need to be reminded that they are loved by God and by others. If all you’re doing is spewing hate: religion is bad, God is bad, science is bad, x political party is bad, everything but what you think is right is bad, you’re not fulfilling your responsibilities as a human being to your fellow human beings. You’re not being restorative. You’re being destructive no matter how well-intentioned you might be.
Everybody wants to know that they are loved. It is a fundamental need, and we each have to communicate this truth to each other in gestures, words and deeds, or unnecessary pain will continue. A person who is well-connected with God exudes love. Most of us aren’t there, but this is the goal. Let’s drive out each other’s fear with love. It’s not easy to do, especially consistently, but we have to keep trying for ourselves, for others and for God. Fail again. Fail better.
8/7/23 – Don’t be motivated by fear. Be motivated by love. Love is fearless. God loves all of us. What do we have to fear? Nothing. Not even death itself. “Do not be afraid.”
8/7/23 – In terms of secular law, one person’s right to practice their religion openly and in peace trumps another person’s right to protest this practice if it prevents them from exercising their right. In other words, some exercises of freedom of expression get more protection than others. They are not all equal.
8/7/23 – Most of the video below is a critique of the church and Christian practice, but the critique Rohr makes at the beginning of science is fair. In fact, if one is wondering why economics, for example, doesn’t seem to change, aside from the influences of power and money, it’s his explanation of dualistic thinking. Also, the Big Bang theory he referenced was discovered by a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître. Science has never been Christians’ enemy. If anything, it supports the faith if only we could understand it this way. Like many institutions, people and things in the secular world and in other religions, the church is its own worst enemy.
8/7/23 – Did you know that a lot of MAGA, Make God Great Again, are pagans or don’t even practice Christianity? They want to control who comes into the churches they don’t attend and who practices the faith they don’t practice. They want to call themselves Christians even though they worship false gods, evil men.
8/7/23 – “[I]t’s not your place to pick and choose…. The Gospel was meant to be a socio-political economic revolution. How else is Jesus going to be the savior of the world if we keep him at this tribal level? Keep him just our little Jesus, our little Christ, who just cares about white, middle-class Americans who vote correctly, you know?… For some reason, we’re in love with the good old days when God was God. Give me that old-time religion when God was God. Do you see the atheism in that? Do you see the agnosticism in that?…. [I]t isn’t up to you to decide what human beings are sacred or whether the earth is sacred. It really is an all or nothing proposition. Either this whole thing came forth from God or it didn’t. Either God created all things or God created nothing…. It’s not a moral matter. It’s a mystical matter.” Amen. Amen.
An Evening with Richard Rohr
8/7/23 – People do no spiritual work during their lifetimes. Then, they get to the end of their lives and are woefully unprepared to reckon with their own mortality. Like anything else, one needs to put time and effort into a spiritual life in order to grow. It is an important part, arguably the most important part, of a life well-lived. Don’t neglect it.
8/7/23 – Medicine is a glorified trade, and there is no real reason for “doctors,” which is originally and still now an academic title not a medical one (it should remain that way), should make as much as they do. They are over-paid and over-respected. They often don’t care about helping people. They just care about the money and prestige. They also shouldn’t be trusted. Any time they make a recommendation, which is all it is, not an order, do your research and think about your own bodies. They are not always ethical, and they will prescribe medications that are unnecessarily and lifelong. Not that long ago, many of them were often quacks and charlatans. More recently, the profession intentionally made itself too exclusive, and that’s in part what drove up their salaries. It suppressed the supply of doctors. AI will soon be doing much of their work better and cheaper. We should all hope that medical costs fall considerably as a result.
8/7/23 – Once a news organization undermines its credibility, it’s pretty much impossible to recover from it. They aren’t paid to push an agenda. They’re paid to objectively report the f—king news.
8/6/23 – Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. It is when his divinity is revealed to his disciples: Peter, James and John. The Lord chose these disciples as is his prerogative. May we be transformed by his sacrifice and by grace into instruments of his peace and love.
8/6/23 – God created everything, including all human kind. We belong to him. We are his property, and therefore, we cannot be anybody else’s property. To own another human being in any way, shape or form is an act against God. When we, as a free people, chose to build a church, it becomes the Lord’s house. It belongs to him. It is not anybody’s place to choose who can be part of the body of Christ.
There are over 8 billion people in the world, and about one-eight of them are Catholic. It is simply not possible for us to always agree. We are not robots or clones of each other. We are children of God, and by his design, we are unique. We are entitled to our own feelings, opinions and thoughts.
What we are not entitled to do is to play God. No Christian gets to decide who is welcome in the Lord’s house into which we all, including the priests, walk as sinners. God has already decided that. Jesus decided that when he extended his ministry from the Jews to the Gentiles. God chooses his followers. As a Christian, you are free to disagree with how others live their lives or the decisions they make, but they also have the divine right to make those decisions for themselves.
Just as no human being will be the gatekeeper beyond this life, you are not free to be gatekeepers to his house on earth, the church. It is, at a minimum, discrimination and could even be persecution to try to prevent LGBTQ+ or anybody else from practicing their Christian faith. They have a divine and civil right to practice their faith openly and in peace.
It should go without saying that all – meaning all, meaning catholic – are welcome to all churches. After all, they don’t actually belong to us. They belong to our Lord and our God. If you feel called to him, go to him where we will pray for your transformation and for our own.
Pope presides over solemn Way of the Cross prayer as Portugal government weighs in on LGBTQ+ protest
8/6/23 – Below are two videos that provide much food for thought. They touch on several topics relevant to our present problems, which are many and serious. Also, take time for silence and contemplation. It’s important for your soul.
Trappist | Full Movie | Thomas Moore | Kathleen Norris | Herbert Bronson MD
Festival of Faiths: Fr. Richard Rohr: Finding God in the Depths of Silence
8/6/23 – The truth is that American universities have a lot of problems. Many of which are caused by rich elites, but also simple demographics, such as the baby boom. There are many good articles from academics and others that outline them. Presenting these universities as innocent institutions of moral and intellectual purity is not accurate.
8/6/23 – There is a decline of the west. That’s indisputable. The original west, Europe, is dying. Some of the decline has been due to the excesses of the “Enlightenment,” a poor understanding of and irrational belief in science. Some of it has been due to the excesses of liberal culture that is hedonistic and godless. However, the right’s dystopian authoritarian vision would only accelerate the west’s decline. The result of this vision, as it has been shown in Russia, is cultural death, enslavement and kleptocracy. Russia has no culture. It has only theft. It has no free people. It has only slaves. It has no democracy. It has only autocracy. This result isn’t the restoration of western values: democracy, freedom and human rights. It’s a restoration of might makes right, of pre-Christian values.
The driving psychological force in the appeal of this vision is that social changes are happening much faster than many people’s ability to adapt to them or even to absorb them. The average person is not adaptable and not smart. Although some people (liberals) want to continue the change, even at a faster pace, many people want to stop the change, and some people (such as MAGA) even want to reverse the change. This would give them a false sense of control over these changes. Why is it a false sense? Because the motivations of those who peddle this vision have nothing to do with the restoration of western values. They just want to consolidate power and money for their own personal benefit.
To restore western values, more precisely, to build societies that truly reflect western values as listed above, would require the transformation that Jesus prescribed: a death of the glorification of the self and the birth of the glorification of God. This is contrary to both the right’s and the left’s prescriptions. It is countercultural to the entirety of our present culture. It doesn’t fit into any side of the “culture wars” because it is on the side of Jesus, on the side of truth. It also can’t be imposed on people. They have to choose it of their own volition, of their free will. If they choose it, they will be truly free.
Why the Populist Right Hates Universities
8/6/23 – Almost all rich people have a sickness of the soul. Money is addictive and corrupting. It erodes souls. Don’t envy them. Don’t admire them. Don’t model them. Instead, follow Jesus. Be like him. If you commit to him, you commit to everything good, true and holy, and you will be transformed.
8/6/23 – Science. “The protective benefit of personal spirituality, meaning someone who says their personal spirituality is very important, is 80% against addiction. They have 80% decreased relative risk for the DSM diagnosis of addiction to drugs or alcohol…. In other words, three cheers for the skeptic. Here is published, peer reviewed science for skeptical audiences to begin to explore, to be curious about our spiritual nature. You know, at the inner table of human knowing we all have an empiricist, a logician, an intuitive, a mystic, and a skeptic. And the skeptic is very welcome, but the skeptic is not the bouncer at the door.” But don’t do it for the science. Do it for your soul.
This Ivy League researcher says spirituality is good for our mental health
8/5/23 – Christianity started as a small Jewish sect that worships a man, Jesus, who was crucified on the cross. It was countercultural. It’s still countercultural when practiced correctly. Despite everything, the scandals, the corruption, the reformation, 2,000 years, the Pope is still the most powerful person in the world. It’s pretty mind-blowing.
8/5/23 – An older article (2015) whose relevance has only grown. Many of the world’s religious faithful and scientists are in agreement on this issue. The only people pushing an alternative narrative as they push alternative facts are the merchants of short-term profits and long-term poverty. “In ‘Laudato Si,’ Francis addressed ‘every living person on this planet,’ urging them to hear ‘both the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor’ about the damage from ‘compulsive consumerism,’ waste and a single-minded pursuit of profit.’… Scientists who for more than 50 years have been talking about the dangers of global warming say the encyclical could break the inertia that has characterized climate negotiations. With their data and computer models, scientists appealed to logic; the pope sought to engage the soul.”
Pope challenges world to clean up its filth
8/5/23 – What is a life well-lived? Status, money, prestige? Or is it living a humble life of service, caring for our planet, lifting up others and giving glory to God? “‘An academic degree should not be seen merely as a license to pursue personal well-being, but as a mandate to work for a more just and inclusive — that is, truly progressive — society,’ he said. Francis encouraged the students to use the privilege of their educations to protect the environment, care about poor and marginalized people, and to ‘redefine what we mean by progress and development.’”
Pope gets an electrifying World Youth Day welcome and urges fighting for economic justice, climate
8/4/23 – Get some f—king perspective. “Such eruptions occur when officials let their irritations suppress their empathy. At the moment of peak whine, they forget what it means to have a fifth of your country occupied, or to know that a far bigger country is attempting, every night, to smash your power plants, blockade your ports, and destroy your crops. They are not holding in the forefront of their minds obliterated towns and mass graves. They do not know what it is to welcome back exchanged prisoners of war who have been castrated. Or to mourn old men and women murdered, or younger men and women tortured and raped. Or to worry frantically about thousands of children kidnapped. They forget that while a Western official’s sleep may be interrupted by a phone call or an alarm clock, a Ukrainian official’s sleep is more likely (and more often) interrupted by a siren or the crash of a missile slamming into an apartment block.” Eliot Cohen, thank you! Slava Ukraini!
Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine
8/4/23 – See the plague mentioned below. “The MAGA base doesn’t support Mr. Trump in spite of his flaws. It supports him because it doesn’t seem to believe he has flaws.” He doesn’t believe he has flaws, so it must be so. Forget: “I think, therefore I am.” I think I am perfect, therefore I am perfect. Right, libs? Right, MAGA? Right, everyone?
More generally, “The former President continues to attract millions of supporters who have such antipathy for Biden, for the Democrats, for the ‘corporate media,’ for academia, for all the institutions they see as woke and hostile to their interests, that they interpret Trump’s deviance as defiance, his lies as truthtelling, his fury as their fury.” Thus, more precisely, they aren’t attracted to the evil one, necessarily, as much as they are repelled by the alternative. Why is that? Is it because the alternative refuses to do any kind of self-reflection and self-criticism? Also, it’s not just hostile to their interests. It’s also hostile to them and things they hold dear, such as their religion. The left helped create this situation, and they refuse to accept any responsibility for their role in it. The reckoning is coming for all of us.
The New Trump Indictment and the Reckoning Ahead
8/3/23 – To reprise some of the points in this Atlantic article below, there is a difference between “workism” as we currently experience it and intense productivity. This is an important distinction because it can be argued that nobody has been as productive as deeply faithful Christians. The Benedictine monks, for example, did nothing but ora et labora, pray and work. They were so productive, they became wealthy, which sometimes led to corruption, and, of course, they also saved western civilization with their transcription. It isn’t just that we’re working a lot. It’s that there is no counterbalance: a nurturing of the soul, a communal structure and a deep love of and commitment to God. The other half of this equation is important, and we have lost it. Work can’t give you these other things: “but for the college-educated elite, it [work] would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community.” Religion gives you those things, and when you lose religion, you lose the counterbalance to work. Then, you are just a slave to the world instead a slave to God, which is not being a slave at all, but being totally and completely free.
What Did Medieval Monks Do All Day?
Why So Many Americans Have Stopped Going to Church
8/3/23 – Love yourself as you are means as you actually are, not as you want others to perceive you to be. If you want others to think you’re rich, you can buy a bunch of expensive clothes, and they might think you’re rich, but you’re not actually rich. If you change aspects of your physical appearance, your DNA doesn’t change with it. There is a plague upon our world, and it’s this idea that you can just pretend to be a certain kind of person and that makes it so. It doesn’t. Also, it’s just a matter of time before the loony liberals, the irreverent experimenters who don’t understand the limits of their intelligence or abilities and who have no respect for God, destroy mankind by screwing with human DNA. It’s hard to say which will come first, the destruction of the planet, which has been caused by both the right and the left, or the destruction of human kind by irresponsible and unethical experimentation, which will most likely be caused by the crazy libs. In either case, the apocalypse is nigh.
8/2/23 – The evil one, trump, deserves the death penalty.
