Christianity
Why Me? Outside the Box
10/March/2010 11:45 Filed in: Weekly
Column
The United States and the world today are facing
“Outside the Box” stresses. It has been a long time
since the stupendous changes of economics and
politics have not only forced people to look
outside their comforts and securities for
solutions, but also to examine the basic paradigms
on which their perceived security is based.
In previous articles we have stated that in western culture about every five hundred years a major reboot of the way we do things occurs. This turmoil creates the fertile soil for new developments that redefine our individuality and communities in ways that were unknown before the plowing or tilling began.
Beginning with the absolute understanding that humanity is a creation of God, and was indeed a creation in the image of God, it logically follows that this five hundred year upheaval, forces us again to look beyond the temporal world and refocus upon the transcendent nature of common life. That understanding then brings about the incorporation of that transcendence into the religions of mankind.
While all religions including evolutionary materialism are exclusive in their worldviews, stresses develop that quickly become fault lines between the reformers and the establishments they are attempting to reform. Within Christianity the last time this occurred was in the Protestant Reformation.
That Reformation led to an era known as the Enlightenment where those new religious views received a more common application. At the time when the human development and religious fervor were properly understood within the broader culture, time was right for the miracle that became the American Revolution and the founding of the United States of America as a constitutional republic.
Notice all the “re” words that accompanied the changes from subjugation by divine right of kings into a worldview that valued individual liberty above all else. It then attempted to formulate a minimal governmental structure in which all humans would have the opportunity to pursue happiness, without class distinction.
Read More...
In previous articles we have stated that in western culture about every five hundred years a major reboot of the way we do things occurs. This turmoil creates the fertile soil for new developments that redefine our individuality and communities in ways that were unknown before the plowing or tilling began.
Beginning with the absolute understanding that humanity is a creation of God, and was indeed a creation in the image of God, it logically follows that this five hundred year upheaval, forces us again to look beyond the temporal world and refocus upon the transcendent nature of common life. That understanding then brings about the incorporation of that transcendence into the religions of mankind.
While all religions including evolutionary materialism are exclusive in their worldviews, stresses develop that quickly become fault lines between the reformers and the establishments they are attempting to reform. Within Christianity the last time this occurred was in the Protestant Reformation.
That Reformation led to an era known as the Enlightenment where those new religious views received a more common application. At the time when the human development and religious fervor were properly understood within the broader culture, time was right for the miracle that became the American Revolution and the founding of the United States of America as a constitutional republic.
Notice all the “re” words that accompanied the changes from subjugation by divine right of kings into a worldview that valued individual liberty above all else. It then attempted to formulate a minimal governmental structure in which all humans would have the opportunity to pursue happiness, without class distinction.
Read More...
The Babel Constant
10/February/2010 12:01 Filed in: Weekly
Column
Myth: a traditional story, especially one
concerning the early history of a people or
explaining some natural or social phenomenon,
typically involving supernatural beings or events.
Following along different myth paths from either the creation of all life from God’s will or the evolution of some human out of the trees of Africa a few billion years ago, things are getting more interesting. Since time is of the essence however, we will let our readers do their own evolutionary trip but only make a comment.
Does it seem only a coincidence that these most ancient human ancestors are found in Africa, which today we still consider the most primitive place on earth, when it comes to just about anything. Actually it seems as the most logical place to look, considering that there are more monkeys in Africa than anyplace else. But that still doesn’t answer the fundamental question of the leap of faith in intelligence and that little thing such as language. That was just a minor evolutionary leap of faith from squeaks and screams to the iPad. No wonder we need a lot of time. Of course only in the twenty-first century would all this evolving technology seem like a true advancement rather than a waste of precious time.
So when we last left Adam and Eve, they were sinners in the Garden of Eden. The short synopsis of the events thereafter is that the Creator made clothing for the couple, therein creating a covenant of God’s grace, today, in its true essence, the most rare substance on earth.
Then God kicked the couple out of the Garden so that they would not become immortal. They had kids and more kids, and just like today their kids were more self-centered than their parents. Since we know little of those days we must assume that it had little to do with their music their lack of a work ethic. Those things after all take a long time to evolve, or just plain develop. Perhaps a rebel without a cause really is just an unconscious effort to become something new and unique from our parent’s influence?
These kids got so bad that the mean God decided to start over, so he had the dude named Noah to build an arc out of wood, with the help of his reluctant offspring. They got on the ship with two of each kind of animals and it started to rain. During that episode of a little over a month, the vapor canopy that made the earth an Eden, collapsed, waters also came out of the depths of the earth. That was some climate change you could believe in, except for the reality that unless you were on that little life raft, along with all other terrestrial life on earth, you became today’s motor fuel.
Read More...
Following along different myth paths from either the creation of all life from God’s will or the evolution of some human out of the trees of Africa a few billion years ago, things are getting more interesting. Since time is of the essence however, we will let our readers do their own evolutionary trip but only make a comment.
Does it seem only a coincidence that these most ancient human ancestors are found in Africa, which today we still consider the most primitive place on earth, when it comes to just about anything. Actually it seems as the most logical place to look, considering that there are more monkeys in Africa than anyplace else. But that still doesn’t answer the fundamental question of the leap of faith in intelligence and that little thing such as language. That was just a minor evolutionary leap of faith from squeaks and screams to the iPad. No wonder we need a lot of time. Of course only in the twenty-first century would all this evolving technology seem like a true advancement rather than a waste of precious time.
So when we last left Adam and Eve, they were sinners in the Garden of Eden. The short synopsis of the events thereafter is that the Creator made clothing for the couple, therein creating a covenant of God’s grace, today, in its true essence, the most rare substance on earth.
Then God kicked the couple out of the Garden so that they would not become immortal. They had kids and more kids, and just like today their kids were more self-centered than their parents. Since we know little of those days we must assume that it had little to do with their music their lack of a work ethic. Those things after all take a long time to evolve, or just plain develop. Perhaps a rebel without a cause really is just an unconscious effort to become something new and unique from our parent’s influence?
These kids got so bad that the mean God decided to start over, so he had the dude named Noah to build an arc out of wood, with the help of his reluctant offspring. They got on the ship with two of each kind of animals and it started to rain. During that episode of a little over a month, the vapor canopy that made the earth an Eden, collapsed, waters also came out of the depths of the earth. That was some climate change you could believe in, except for the reality that unless you were on that little life raft, along with all other terrestrial life on earth, you became today’s motor fuel.
Read More...
Why Me? In the beginning
20/January/2010 10:18 Filed in: Weekly
Column
Psalm 8
O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth,
Who have set Your glory above the heavens!
Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen—
Even the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth!
I shall assume that I am not alone when I consider the transcendence revealed in these words impossible to reconcile with the fact that so many say that this nature, this creation, all happened as the result of a freakish random event called the Big Bang some fourteen billion years ago. I don’t really see that calling it the Great Singularity really makes any change in that reality!
Of course, perhaps the result of my eccentric audacity, I also find it almost as difficult to believe that God began creating the heavens and the earth, as in the biblical creation account, on October 23, 4004 B. C., based on the Julian Calendar. This creation date was proposed by James Ussher in “The Annals of the Old Testament” published in 1650. The Protestant Ussher was Bishop of the Church of Ireland at this time and was hopeful that his chronology would help Irish Roman Catholics convert to the Protestant faith.
Furthermore I assume that both of these theories of creation stem from a basic but ignored truth. The sixteenth-century reformers, especially Martin Luther and John Calvin assumed that the minds of men were basically idol factories. This is verified first of all by empirical observation, but also in the Bible illumination of Jeremiah 17:9, The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?
Calvin went so far as to compile a little pamphlet called the “Inventory of Relics” that listed all the divine antiquities of the established church. Whether that included just those of the Roman Catholic persuasion, or included also those of the Eastern Orthodox, I do not know. In any event, I would imagine the list was rather long and quite boring reading for twenty-first century tastes, but snippets are available on the Internet to get the general idea.
If God thought that the actual date of creation was a requirement for his plan of redemption of humanity, that date surely would have been codified within scripture. The same is true for the actual date of birth of Jesus, but that is a different story, and only listed here to show mankind’s idol making enthusiasms.
Read More...
O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth,
Who have set Your glory above the heavens!
Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen—
Even the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth!
I shall assume that I am not alone when I consider the transcendence revealed in these words impossible to reconcile with the fact that so many say that this nature, this creation, all happened as the result of a freakish random event called the Big Bang some fourteen billion years ago. I don’t really see that calling it the Great Singularity really makes any change in that reality!
Of course, perhaps the result of my eccentric audacity, I also find it almost as difficult to believe that God began creating the heavens and the earth, as in the biblical creation account, on October 23, 4004 B. C., based on the Julian Calendar. This creation date was proposed by James Ussher in “The Annals of the Old Testament” published in 1650. The Protestant Ussher was Bishop of the Church of Ireland at this time and was hopeful that his chronology would help Irish Roman Catholics convert to the Protestant faith.
Furthermore I assume that both of these theories of creation stem from a basic but ignored truth. The sixteenth-century reformers, especially Martin Luther and John Calvin assumed that the minds of men were basically idol factories. This is verified first of all by empirical observation, but also in the Bible illumination of Jeremiah 17:9, The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?
Calvin went so far as to compile a little pamphlet called the “Inventory of Relics” that listed all the divine antiquities of the established church. Whether that included just those of the Roman Catholic persuasion, or included also those of the Eastern Orthodox, I do not know. In any event, I would imagine the list was rather long and quite boring reading for twenty-first century tastes, but snippets are available on the Internet to get the general idea.
If God thought that the actual date of creation was a requirement for his plan of redemption of humanity, that date surely would have been codified within scripture. The same is true for the actual date of birth of Jesus, but that is a different story, and only listed here to show mankind’s idol making enthusiasms.
Read More...
Why Me? The novel - novel
13/January/2010 10:48 Filed in: Weekly
Column
The novel – novel
Novel:
1. noun: a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism
2. adjective: new or unusual in an interesting way
Well if you reverse the position of novel two with novel one, you have the context of this current “Why Me?” undertaking. So this why me excursion will develop into a new, hopefully interesting way to describe a fictitious narrative, with some degree of realism, eventually the story line will relate to where we currently are, how we got here, and where we may be headed. Over these courses of course we will begin with the beginning, the beginning of it all, and move rapidly forward. Because of the genre, which herein is developed, we will do this in a linear fashion, which we will learn early on, may be in itself fictitious, in the grand scheme of the cosmos.
The idea for this exposé came from a book I purchased many years ago in the theological section of a used bookstore in Seattle. The story was written by a Lutheran pastor someplace in the eastern United States during the middle of the twentieth century. The scenario revolved around the historic figure of Martin Luther, given the heavenly assignment to return from eternity to check out what had happened to the church that bore his name, in the almost five hundred years since the Reformation. He was then to report back to God his findings and any recommendations to change the course of history. As I remember, the essence of that report, Luther found that Lutherans were basically majoring on things of minor importance, with a very minor emphasis on the specific historical truths of both the Reformation and Christianity.
In our current world where everything is all about me, all the time, in every circumstance, no matter the outcome, it logically follows; that in the good, we take credit as independent results of are ascending abilities. Anything that does not achieve the greatness that we hope, must be the fault of someone or something else. This failure also deserves greater distinction if we can blame it on other people as individuals.
Because of the historical context of this novel it makes no sense to blame this failure on our parents. In similar light for conservatives to say it is or will be caused by Barack Obama and the Progressives, definitely stretches credulity. In the same aspect for liberal Progressives to blame the current mess on George W. Bush and greedy capitalists really is a leap of blind faith into a world not of reality, but the cosmos of wishful thinking.
Read More...
Novel:
1. noun: a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism
2. adjective: new or unusual in an interesting way
Well if you reverse the position of novel two with novel one, you have the context of this current “Why Me?” undertaking. So this why me excursion will develop into a new, hopefully interesting way to describe a fictitious narrative, with some degree of realism, eventually the story line will relate to where we currently are, how we got here, and where we may be headed. Over these courses of course we will begin with the beginning, the beginning of it all, and move rapidly forward. Because of the genre, which herein is developed, we will do this in a linear fashion, which we will learn early on, may be in itself fictitious, in the grand scheme of the cosmos.
The idea for this exposé came from a book I purchased many years ago in the theological section of a used bookstore in Seattle. The story was written by a Lutheran pastor someplace in the eastern United States during the middle of the twentieth century. The scenario revolved around the historic figure of Martin Luther, given the heavenly assignment to return from eternity to check out what had happened to the church that bore his name, in the almost five hundred years since the Reformation. He was then to report back to God his findings and any recommendations to change the course of history. As I remember, the essence of that report, Luther found that Lutherans were basically majoring on things of minor importance, with a very minor emphasis on the specific historical truths of both the Reformation and Christianity.
In our current world where everything is all about me, all the time, in every circumstance, no matter the outcome, it logically follows; that in the good, we take credit as independent results of are ascending abilities. Anything that does not achieve the greatness that we hope, must be the fault of someone or something else. This failure also deserves greater distinction if we can blame it on other people as individuals.
Because of the historical context of this novel it makes no sense to blame this failure on our parents. In similar light for conservatives to say it is or will be caused by Barack Obama and the Progressives, definitely stretches credulity. In the same aspect for liberal Progressives to blame the current mess on George W. Bush and greedy capitalists really is a leap of blind faith into a world not of reality, but the cosmos of wishful thinking.
Read More...
Traditional Historic American Values - Part 7: Leadership
21/October/2009 11:54 Filed in: Weekly
Column
As we begin wrapping up this series on Traditional
Historic American Values, we come to the zenith on
why the United States has come to the banana
republic crossroads. I suppose zenith is probably
not really what we are trying to explain, but terms
like nadir, canyon, rock-bottom, pits - really do
not do justice to the current situation either.
America’s true crisis is really a crisis of leadership. In that respect, void, black hole, and vacuum seem much better descriptions. Republicans point to President Obama as the power taking us to the banana republic standard. The Democrats point to George W. Bush as the creator of the path. The problem is that all the name-calling is really just that and it is decisively counter productive to doing anything but letting the forces of gravity do its thing.
Gravity is a Natural Law and it is the major force behind the current situation. The failure of leadership is that they truly fail to understand the gravity of the situation. The prosperity of the United States has been understood as a universal law for so long that those who are the self described leaders think a little application of warm fuzzies to the problem will make everyone feel better and therefore everything will soon be better.
In the bygone days warm fuzzies were created out of material and understood as such. Today warm fuzzies are created out of deficit spending and the spin goes, “Don’t worry, be happy.” Of course that is a 1988 song from Bobby McFerrin quoting Indian mystic Meher Baba.
That concept seems to be especially true for the current stock market. The financial powers of the United States have created so much funny money and pumped it into too big to fail financial institutions that they really have no need to worry, they can be happy. As long as things continue to go up they get paid, and if things go down they get paid also. If they really screw up again they will get another bailout. In other words the funny money goes round and round and in the process, the process becomes the perpetual money making machine. How cool is that?
Since Wall Street is really a machine, all that is needed is a little routine maintenance, a little grease to the wheels, and it will run forever. Well at least until it runs out of gas. Running out of gas, thereby allows gravity and friction to again bring Natural Law into play.
“Don’t worry, be happy” has become a four word philosophy that means that we are all to live beyond our means. The cool thing is there is so much stuff available to make it all happen. It seems a little moronic to think that if excessive debt got us individually and corporately into this mess, that continuing to inoculate the economy with more and more debt will somehow save the system. That surely isn’t a Natural Law, because it defies all logic.
Of course if the stuff doesn’t sell then the economy will collapse and we will all starve to death, or be killed or saved by global warming, or die in the swine flu pandemic.
Read More...
America’s true crisis is really a crisis of leadership. In that respect, void, black hole, and vacuum seem much better descriptions. Republicans point to President Obama as the power taking us to the banana republic standard. The Democrats point to George W. Bush as the creator of the path. The problem is that all the name-calling is really just that and it is decisively counter productive to doing anything but letting the forces of gravity do its thing.
Gravity is a Natural Law and it is the major force behind the current situation. The failure of leadership is that they truly fail to understand the gravity of the situation. The prosperity of the United States has been understood as a universal law for so long that those who are the self described leaders think a little application of warm fuzzies to the problem will make everyone feel better and therefore everything will soon be better.
In the bygone days warm fuzzies were created out of material and understood as such. Today warm fuzzies are created out of deficit spending and the spin goes, “Don’t worry, be happy.” Of course that is a 1988 song from Bobby McFerrin quoting Indian mystic Meher Baba.
That concept seems to be especially true for the current stock market. The financial powers of the United States have created so much funny money and pumped it into too big to fail financial institutions that they really have no need to worry, they can be happy. As long as things continue to go up they get paid, and if things go down they get paid also. If they really screw up again they will get another bailout. In other words the funny money goes round and round and in the process, the process becomes the perpetual money making machine. How cool is that?
Since Wall Street is really a machine, all that is needed is a little routine maintenance, a little grease to the wheels, and it will run forever. Well at least until it runs out of gas. Running out of gas, thereby allows gravity and friction to again bring Natural Law into play.
“Don’t worry, be happy” has become a four word philosophy that means that we are all to live beyond our means. The cool thing is there is so much stuff available to make it all happen. It seems a little moronic to think that if excessive debt got us individually and corporately into this mess, that continuing to inoculate the economy with more and more debt will somehow save the system. That surely isn’t a Natural Law, because it defies all logic.
Of course if the stuff doesn’t sell then the economy will collapse and we will all starve to death, or be killed or saved by global warming, or die in the swine flu pandemic.
Read More...