Jesus
Why Me? The American Miracle
03/March/2010 09:35 Filed in: Weekly
Column
There is a historical interest article beginning to
make its rounds this week delineating a comparison
between the ship survivors on the Titanic and the
Lusitania. Probably the most interesting in the
free literature is the
Discovery article, but for those with ten
dollars to spare you can get the original from the
National Academy of Sciences.
So far, we might conclude the ships of nation states around the world are economically in a potentially perilous position of sinking. From our leadership we hear that such a catastrophe is impossible. So too were the passengers on the Titanic until that pesky natural iceberg forever altered their reality. Then just three years later, no one on the Lusitania believed that a man caused disaster, the small German u-boat torpedo, could sink the ship in just 18 minutes.
The problem with political leadership is that they have a vested interest in projecting the past into a rosy future. If our ship had a hole in it, we have now by our own ingenuity and skills fixed the problem and we are again full speed ahead. Of course if some might ask the question, “Where are we going?” they are met with scorn and ridicule for being a conspiracy theorist, or a primitive common human, not highly evolved to understand the pleasures of a fantastic ocean voyage.
At Wonder Springs we speak a lot about the world being afloat on an ocean of non-energetic debt money. Just as in the “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” there is money, money everywhere, but none of it can you drink. Of course we are told that if we just have hope, someday a few drops of good money will trickle down to us, but just as with seawater, it is undrinkable and the salinity is such that it can’t be used to grow anything, or abstractly create wealth.
Read More...
So far, we might conclude the ships of nation states around the world are economically in a potentially perilous position of sinking. From our leadership we hear that such a catastrophe is impossible. So too were the passengers on the Titanic until that pesky natural iceberg forever altered their reality. Then just three years later, no one on the Lusitania believed that a man caused disaster, the small German u-boat torpedo, could sink the ship in just 18 minutes.
The problem with political leadership is that they have a vested interest in projecting the past into a rosy future. If our ship had a hole in it, we have now by our own ingenuity and skills fixed the problem and we are again full speed ahead. Of course if some might ask the question, “Where are we going?” they are met with scorn and ridicule for being a conspiracy theorist, or a primitive common human, not highly evolved to understand the pleasures of a fantastic ocean voyage.
At Wonder Springs we speak a lot about the world being afloat on an ocean of non-energetic debt money. Just as in the “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” there is money, money everywhere, but none of it can you drink. Of course we are told that if we just have hope, someday a few drops of good money will trickle down to us, but just as with seawater, it is undrinkable and the salinity is such that it can’t be used to grow anything, or abstractly create wealth.
Read More...
Why Me? Stupendous Change
17/February/2010 08:34 Filed in: Weekly
Column
Barack Obama ran for President of the United States
promoting a vision of “Change We Can Believe In.”
Much to the chagrin of many of the people who voted
for him, the true meaning of that catchy phrase
was, “Change He Can Believe In.” What Obama was
able to tap into during his campaign, is that all
humans seek change that they can believe in as one
of the prime goals in their lives. The underlying
paradigm of this change however, relies on the
ability of me to understand what is happening and
to control, or at least find the outcome
sympathetic to my desires for happiness. For me to
see anything to be really positive change of the
first degree, it needs to be achieved without risk,
pain, suffering, or just about anything I could
define as negative or undesirable.
So many Americans, especially those who worked hard to find their security in traditional American values, are grossly disappointed in the reality that when the candidate Obama said change, he really meant that unsettling word, “CHANGE!”
Oh, the audacity of that strange change fellow! We asked for warm feely change, and would you believe it, he really wanted to deliver change that was bordering on what most people would consider stupendous change. This angst is especially true because they elected George W. Bush twice, and he could not deliver on those warm fuzzy desires either. In fact Bush tried so hard by the end of his second term he had basically crashed all of our retirement security, in the names of freedom and unsustainable spending.
“Oh Jesus, what are we to do?”
Of course to bring the words of Jesus into the lyrics of a somewhat contemporary country song: “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden!”
Read More...
So many Americans, especially those who worked hard to find their security in traditional American values, are grossly disappointed in the reality that when the candidate Obama said change, he really meant that unsettling word, “CHANGE!”
Oh, the audacity of that strange change fellow! We asked for warm feely change, and would you believe it, he really wanted to deliver change that was bordering on what most people would consider stupendous change. This angst is especially true because they elected George W. Bush twice, and he could not deliver on those warm fuzzy desires either. In fact Bush tried so hard by the end of his second term he had basically crashed all of our retirement security, in the names of freedom and unsustainable spending.
“Oh Jesus, what are we to do?”
Of course to bring the words of Jesus into the lyrics of a somewhat contemporary country song: “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden!”
Read More...
Why Me? Pardise Lost : Part 2
03/February/2010 07:22 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.
Our human world builds its society based upon myths. Of course we have now redefined many of them in terms of the myth of science, for the most part to justify our philosophy or religion, many times both. Some of our myths are as old as human language; some are quite modern. To become a myth means that there is something believable about the story. The power of that appeal to truth, greatly contributes to the longevity of the myth.
Old myths in someway touch the deeper soul of humanity; their appeal is many times based upon an unspoken or unknown truth, perhaps even an absolute truth that transcends humanity and life itself. New myths do not stand that test of time as well, and if they lose their basic tenants through corruption and exaggeration, they cease to be myths, or even wise fairy tales.
The creation account in the Bible’s book of Genesis fits our definition of myth. The written record is attributed to Moses, but the oral tradition basically goes back to the creation of it all, and specifically through the development of a human society on earth from a couple we call Adam and Eve, created by God, in his image.
A modern myth is the demise of the earth and everything upon it via the mechanism of global warming caused by man induced greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, but not limited just to that form of hot air. Recent emails that report that the basic assumptions of the myth were manufactured to support a religious bias, have hurt the myth’s plausibility by many who were and are skeptical not only of the underlying truth of the myth, but also the integrity of the proponents.
Read More...
Our human world builds its society based upon myths. Of course we have now redefined many of them in terms of the myth of science, for the most part to justify our philosophy or religion, many times both. Some of our myths are as old as human language; some are quite modern. To become a myth means that there is something believable about the story. The power of that appeal to truth, greatly contributes to the longevity of the myth.
Old myths in someway touch the deeper soul of humanity; their appeal is many times based upon an unspoken or unknown truth, perhaps even an absolute truth that transcends humanity and life itself. New myths do not stand that test of time as well, and if they lose their basic tenants through corruption and exaggeration, they cease to be myths, or even wise fairy tales.
The creation account in the Bible’s book of Genesis fits our definition of myth. The written record is attributed to Moses, but the oral tradition basically goes back to the creation of it all, and specifically through the development of a human society on earth from a couple we call Adam and Eve, created by God, in his image.
A modern myth is the demise of the earth and everything upon it via the mechanism of global warming caused by man induced greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, but not limited just to that form of hot air. Recent emails that report that the basic assumptions of the myth were manufactured to support a religious bias, have hurt the myth’s plausibility by many who were and are skeptical not only of the underlying truth of the myth, but also the integrity of the proponents.
Read More...
Why Me? Paradise Lost: Part 1
27/January/2010 11:37 Filed in: Weekly
Column
At the close of my philosophy class at the end of
my undergraduate college education, Mr. Gibbons
stated essentially that your success in any
philosophical argument that you may choose to
pursue, really wasn’t due to the strengths or logic
of your arguments, but rather the weakness of the
position of others. This came as I spent the
quarter discussing in written response to Mr.
Gibbons questions, the role of language in our
interpretation of reality, and a term paper on
Philosophy and Science,
with a conclusion that stated: Science is
what my father uses to convince me to eat my
peas and philosophy is what I use to state why
I think (eating peas) is a bad idea, and “and”
is the word that holds the whole thing
together.
Of course none of these discussions dealt with the epistemology of sophisticated language itself and how it developed only in humans. To say that somehow it evolved from the grunts, howls, cries, and similar communications of less evolved animals, truly lacks any intellectual acumen. Furthermore that discussion would quickly require the reality of supernatural intelligence that never has been a prerequisite for what we call the modern university, which doesn’t deal with the real universe at all, and especially in the arts and humanities, mostly uncontested, ad hominem, personal bias about the universe.
We touched on those profound truths last week in our exegesis of the Genesis creation account. This week we continue along those lines looking at how sin entered the perfection of God’s creation and what that means to us today, a day and age when we think we have evolved to such a point that evil and sin no longer exist. That construction, again based not so much on the strength of the evolution argument, but rather a lack of anything looking like an argument from the other side in common life, or as Augustine defined the term, “City of God.”
In a worldview that holds that the beginning really isn’t that long ago, like thousands of years, rather than millions and billions of years, what we see demonstrated in creation, is not a revelation of the deity of creation itself, but rather the omnipotence of God. Furthermore when you look at human history, especially its violence and a sacrificial system of appeasement to nature’s supernatural gods, many times including human sacrifice, you see evil depravity at the opposite extreme of the continuum of good and evil, where our definition of good is some warm fuzzy feeling of my desire to withdraw from the reality of actual life.
Read More...
Of course none of these discussions dealt with the epistemology of sophisticated language itself and how it developed only in humans. To say that somehow it evolved from the grunts, howls, cries, and similar communications of less evolved animals, truly lacks any intellectual acumen. Furthermore that discussion would quickly require the reality of supernatural intelligence that never has been a prerequisite for what we call the modern university, which doesn’t deal with the real universe at all, and especially in the arts and humanities, mostly uncontested, ad hominem, personal bias about the universe.
We touched on those profound truths last week in our exegesis of the Genesis creation account. This week we continue along those lines looking at how sin entered the perfection of God’s creation and what that means to us today, a day and age when we think we have evolved to such a point that evil and sin no longer exist. That construction, again based not so much on the strength of the evolution argument, but rather a lack of anything looking like an argument from the other side in common life, or as Augustine defined the term, “City of God.”
In a worldview that holds that the beginning really isn’t that long ago, like thousands of years, rather than millions and billions of years, what we see demonstrated in creation, is not a revelation of the deity of creation itself, but rather the omnipotence of God. Furthermore when you look at human history, especially its violence and a sacrificial system of appeasement to nature’s supernatural gods, many times including human sacrifice, you see evil depravity at the opposite extreme of the continuum of good and evil, where our definition of good is some warm fuzzy feeling of my desire to withdraw from the reality of actual life.
Read More...
Mary, did you know?
23/December/2009 07:08 Filed in: Weekly
Column
Mary, did you know?
A couple of weeks ago in the post, “God if you are real?” we dealt with how God answers our doubts about His existence by bringing people and situations into our lives to answer that question. This week we will take on that testimony that is later offered by these God questioners to the people who contributed so much to establishing God’s present reality. This begins, “Did you know the situation I was in?”
In that illumination, as with Genevon’s return to our group Christmas party, it was a good thing that I was sitting in a big overstuffed supporting chair, because I had no idea that there was anything wrong with her, when our church group called on her that long past Monday night as she was seriously planning on taking her own life.
As we continue to understand the realness to trust God for our provisions, those life or death situations no longer just begin, but become part of a much broader narrative in which we understand the faithfulness of God, not only as he provides for our needs, but also adds to that an abundance of blessings and gifts that mean more to us than we can at this time fully understand or articulate. Many times that blessing comes from someone we will probably never meet in this life, or if that happening does occur, one of the first questions we will ask is, “Did you know?”
We know the words to the hymn Amazing Grace. The last verse begins, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years,” I believe that much of that time will be spent, meeting those who have blessed our lives and asking them, “Did you know?” Once they learn about our knowing, we will meet some of their “Did you know friends, and so on, and so on.” Truly a gift that keeps on giving, because the wonder of the gift of God’s grace, can only be truly received if we attempt to continually give it away.
The Bible puts this in context in Ephesians 3:20,21: Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.
Read More...
Special Report: A Christmas Hunt
Today the United Nations Climate Change
Conference Copenhagen focuses upon “Earth
Journalism Awards” among other interesting topics.
In efforts to provide a little “fresh insight” into
this unique conference in human history the Wonder
Springs Chronicle would like to post this little
contribution. We don’t claim that it is journalism,
nor even a good story, probably more of a simple
fairy tale, concocted not by climate change
skeptics, but true believers, in this continuing
universal principle. It however, probably doesn’t
spin this reality in a way that would find a wide
audience among our Copenhagen friends.
We live in troubling times, and readers of knuckle dragging blogs such as the Wonder Springs Chronicle and other publications and programs are being told they are unenlightened, stupid, naysayers, who only believe in some fictional deity, guns, and real money. Therefore for our loyal readers please understand that this really is a tale of real fiction, which you might fully not understand. It attempts mythically to bring together for a hunting trip in the backwoods two of the most enlightened progressives of all time, namely Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt and Albert (Al) Gore. It must be pointed out that these two men lived a century apart, we therefore need some license with reality to make this fictional trip happen, so we have creatively decided to have this trip begin today, December 14, 2009, but to focus upon the technology of a century ago, that would be December 14, 1909.
Our story is set in a hunting camp in Northwestern Montana, at one of President Roosevelt’s favorite hunting spots. He has been camping at the location a couple of days before Vice President Gore arrives, by horseback, sometime in the evening before our story begins.
Teddy: Good morning Al, Merry Christmas. How did you sleep?
Al: Happy Holidays Teddy. Dang, I almost froze to death, I mean the ten wool blankets you gave me to keep warm just didn’t seem to do the job. And did you realize the fire in the tent stove went out about midnight. Why didn’t you get up and feed the fire, that canvas tent was as cold as that eternal hotspot, if you catch my drift?
Teddy: Well Al, you see it is this way, I was President of these here United States and you were just a Vice President. I think that means you work for me, not the other way around. More to the point if you had not spent the whole night whining about being cold and gotten up and stoked the fire yourself, you might have gotten your blood circulating and not have been so cold. More to the point, the canvas tent, the wool blankets, and the wood stove are about as carbon neutral as you can get. I thought you believed in that sort of thing.
Al: You’re right Ted, I’m just not acclimatized to this rapid cold change from staying in five star hotels, traveling on my private jet, and my home back in Tennessee. Also you know methane flatulence is produced by the sheep that was the source of the wool, why didn’t you have some modern petroleum based sleeping bags, I’m sure I would have slept very toasty in a nice synthetic bag?
Read More...
We live in troubling times, and readers of knuckle dragging blogs such as the Wonder Springs Chronicle and other publications and programs are being told they are unenlightened, stupid, naysayers, who only believe in some fictional deity, guns, and real money. Therefore for our loyal readers please understand that this really is a tale of real fiction, which you might fully not understand. It attempts mythically to bring together for a hunting trip in the backwoods two of the most enlightened progressives of all time, namely Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt and Albert (Al) Gore. It must be pointed out that these two men lived a century apart, we therefore need some license with reality to make this fictional trip happen, so we have creatively decided to have this trip begin today, December 14, 2009, but to focus upon the technology of a century ago, that would be December 14, 1909.
Our story is set in a hunting camp in Northwestern Montana, at one of President Roosevelt’s favorite hunting spots. He has been camping at the location a couple of days before Vice President Gore arrives, by horseback, sometime in the evening before our story begins.
Teddy: Good morning Al, Merry Christmas. How did you sleep?
Al: Happy Holidays Teddy. Dang, I almost froze to death, I mean the ten wool blankets you gave me to keep warm just didn’t seem to do the job. And did you realize the fire in the tent stove went out about midnight. Why didn’t you get up and feed the fire, that canvas tent was as cold as that eternal hotspot, if you catch my drift?
Teddy: Well Al, you see it is this way, I was President of these here United States and you were just a Vice President. I think that means you work for me, not the other way around. More to the point if you had not spent the whole night whining about being cold and gotten up and stoked the fire yourself, you might have gotten your blood circulating and not have been so cold. More to the point, the canvas tent, the wool blankets, and the wood stove are about as carbon neutral as you can get. I thought you believed in that sort of thing.
Al: You’re right Ted, I’m just not acclimatized to this rapid cold change from staying in five star hotels, traveling on my private jet, and my home back in Tennessee. Also you know methane flatulence is produced by the sheep that was the source of the wool, why didn’t you have some modern petroleum based sleeping bags, I’m sure I would have slept very toasty in a nice synthetic bag?
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...