The Wonder Springs Chronicle

A Redux Independent

11 August 2010

Volume 12, Issue 32

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Things are currently happening in America, that aren’t supposed to happen. At least that is what we have been told for at least a generation. We have been given the story line, if we just do our job, make reasonable expenditures to keep the economy moving, and pay our taxes, tomorrow will be better than today. That reality was said to be true not only for us, but also our children and grandchildren.

That reality has changed, and in our gut, we believe that it will be a long time, if ever, before we will be able to accept again as truth, that desire for security. The question then forms in our minds, “Were we lied to, or were our leaders just stupid?”

For the most part, I think the truth is that most of our leaders were just as ignorant as we were. Probably because they were so immersed in the political culture, they were even more enthusiastic. Sadly they also believed that what they were doing was responsible for our successes and hence, just as we did, never really looked beyond the security of their comfort zones.

Now the tendency is to look to those from the immediate past, blame them for the present, and make some boastful predictions that the future will make us more secure. All we need to do is to have hope that this will become true. However hope and faith are not forces, but realistic beliefs in external factors that will bring about our desires. During this last generation, but always present in the human psyche, we have replaced God as that redemptive ability, with our human governance and our materialism.

Coping with these changes I am in the process of redefining a lot of things in my life, and trying to figure out how I can adapt and provide positive guidance to others. In our sound bite — talking points world, one needs to have a handle that fits. Some concise description that you can defend, both in the sound bite world, but also, if need be, as the depth of your being. The descriptive term I finally have settled on is a Redux Independent.

Over the next few weeks I will spend more time writing about what I have lived through in my adult life, and through those experiences I have been given a truly unique opportunity to share the gifts of God’s grace. As with all things from God, these are not things I wanted to choose in the typical sense, but rather they chose me. Monday we began to meander through some of those experiences in The War Racket. Today we will wander some more and close with some observations on what seems to be one of the current hottest topics, the president and the New York mosque.

For most of my life my political views have pretty much been in line with the vast majority of Americans, essentially slightly on the conservative side of the mean, median, or just average. But if you really think about it in statistical terms that is really the median, and the politics of Americans probably isn’t a standard distribution. That is especially true for the last decade, where you were forcefully told that if you were going to be worth anything, you had to be either a liberal progressive Democrat, or a conservative Republican, hopefully with strong ties to the Religious Right. That of course makes you doubly right and you can’t get enough of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

A long time ago I listened to Rush, but quickly found him hyper — but entertaining. I probably haven’t listen to Rush in over a decade. Sean I have always found grossly simplistic, and if he wasn’t so good looking would probably be doing commentary in Dubuque.

On the other side of the political spectrum NPR is just so warm and fuzzy in such a faux-intellectual way, I have a desire to take a nap for the rest of the day.

What I have found interesting in my writing for the last year or so is there is an increasing Libertarian connection with a lot of it. But as with Monday’s, “The War Racket,” my belief in the value of a conscripted civilian military as an alternative to our professional expeditionary forces, just does not compute with the total freedom of “my personal superior individuality,” which is the theme of most Libertarians.

For a very long time I used the handle when pressed that I was a “Conservative Conservationist.” I still find it very entertaining, when I ask why a Conservative is supposed to be a right-wing Republican and a Conservationist is supposed to be an uber-progressive-liberal Democrat? It doesn’t seem that difficult when the root of the whole statement is “conserve’” to essentially desire to maintain what you have for the benefit of everything. Of course the conservative conservationist had to depart when the only other self branded one I knew of, Mark Sanford, then governor of South Carolina, kissed away a chance to be president, with a lot of soul mate kisses with an Argentine woman.

When I first started these pretty regular writings in 1999, I found one of the most interesting constructs of, especially American English, is the usage of “re” words. Rebuilding, revival, reunion, revolution, reformation, and along list of others have become really terms to describe change in some limited or defined context. I ventured forth again early this year looking for a more generalized re term. Redux, meaning essentially “History leads as the future follows…” is what I came up with and I am sticking with it. So beginning in mid May and continuing through early July there was a series of Redux articles, including a seven part Redux Rendezvous series. Rendezvous being a French term, doesn’t fit the English re model, but focused on essentially redux community development. The Redux Rendezvous website is now under construction, but we do not have the financial resources to seriously begin that development.

Before we get down to a real beginning, to finish off with the external personalities, we have Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck. Bill of course brands himself as a Traditional Independent. He is also a traditional Roman Catholic that makes him, by the progressive description, a knuckle dragger. Like everything else in our world today, the No Spin Zone, tends to focus upon social issues in a way that emphasizes traditional American (religious) values, such as abortion and legal justice in contrast with social justice. The problem is, to fit the entertainment model; the only traditional independent person on the show is Bill himself. Hence argument and dissension are the power sources for the show’s energetics. This creates ratings successes rather than cultural change.

Glenn and his television show are really the fertilizer of the TEA Party and planted the current Redux seeds of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in the United States. Glenn is a Mormon and I have told anyone who asks, and some who haven’t, a more historic Christian could not pull off this mission from God. By that I mean a more orthodox or historic Christian would have to spend so much time defending his positions from that whole Christian spectrum, he could not get anything accomplished. Since Glenn is “a Mormon you know” he has the freedom to develop the program the way God desires. That is truly the religious tolerance that God graced the founders of the United States as they were called to establish this nation in this North American wilderness.

I have held for years the real cause of this mess, in which we now find ourselves, is not the progressives or any other group we might desire to make the scapegoat. The problem with America is that the Christian church, in the broadest ecumenical sense and down to the individual Christian, has gradually decided that we really don’t need a scapegoat, we will save ourselves, and the grace of God allows us to be like Jesus and teach morality like we feel comfortably self-righteous in doing.

In that light, a great plurality of evangelicals are really theologically Mormons, without the book of Mormon, and without the Mormon piety for the blessings of God within a hostile world. From high school through the service and in my most active entrepreneurial days, I probably dealt with more Mormons than I did more traditional Christians. Over that time, I have found that the Mormons have treated me better than they treat there own, and much better than I have been treated within the leadership of traditional Christianity.

Furthermore I once saw a poll that asked the respondent if they believed in the Biblical Creation. Over 50% of Mormons agreed with that reality, less than 30% of Protestants did, and less than 20% of Roman Catholics did. I might add that Orthodox Jews would tell you that today is Elul 8, 5770. Furthermore to the best of my knowledge, contemporary Bible scholars, who allow the Bible to stand on the sufficiency of the Biblical text itself, without the infusion of human enlightenment and evolutionary dogma, plainly state, if you lose Biblical Creation, you also lose the atonement, fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is true because Jesus tied his ministry and teaching to the creation account, the flood of Noah, and other presently described enlightened myths of the Old Testament.

What all that means is that our way out of this mess is not going to come through the Republicans taking back the House and the Senate. Neither is it going to come from president Obama continuing to enact his progressive agenda. It also is not going to come by a structured Cloward and Piven driven anarchy and rebuilding of some communist or fascist state.

The changes that are occurring in these times of stupendous change all find their roots in the grace of God. We will not understand most of them. Considering our current solely materialistic worldviews, we are fining a lot of those changes sorely frightening or worse. A few of the changes may be what we consider a miracle, especially on the individual personal level. Most changes however are taking place within the construct of what is theologically defined as common grace. In the secular, the changes are instituted by natural law.

All of these changes will be surrounded by the “Fog of Sufficient Grace,” as part of our Business Ecology Outline, which is found illustrated on the “Grace Spiritual Life Curve” near the bottom of the Phylogenesis Tab on The Creation Leadership Center website.

As we move forward, a Redux Independent will attempt to explain the natural laws that will again exert their reality into our lives. From those natural laws we will attempt to show imperative solutions for becoming more successful in the terms that we each walk some sort of Spiritual Life line, whether we recognize our Godly image creation or not. Then we will also provide cogent commentary on current events such as Monday’s “The War Racket,” as well as some more brief thoughts about what is happening in the news that you may not find within the pundit expressions.

From prepared remarks, at a Ramadan dinner, president Obama decided to comment on the potential mosque to be build near the “hallowed ground” 9-11 site in New York City. Those remarks made it clear that they cleric and his backers had that constitutional right. That is one of Obama’s “negative liberties” found in the Constitution that doesn’t describe what the government can or should do. We now know that over 60 percent of New Yorkers and Americans agree with that reality.

In regard to the prepared statement, I question whether Obama wrote and gave those remarks himself, or who did, and who passed them as being acceptable? If I paid someone and they allowed me to create a fiasco like this, by now this team would be wondering if they could find good jobs before their 99 weeks of unemployment insurance ran out.

As my immediate email correspondence reflected, these remarks were two weeks late (at least) and virtually unnecessary. Then to limit the unnecessary to the irrelevant does not show leadership, but some other malady. From Saturday and further attempts to walk the unnecessary back towards relevance, confirms the diagnosis.

Views on building the mosque vary, as does the polarization of the American people. Mayor Bloomberg of New York City being so politically correct that they make Obama’s remarks look downright cogent. Probably the best analysis came prior to Obama’s affliction on August 9 from Bill O’Reilly interviewing Canadian Muslim Raheel Raza on the Factor Followup Segment. The most interesting counter point to Obama, came from my email with a video called, “Of Mosques and Men: Reflections on the Ground Zero Mosque” issued by Answering Muslims, which has over 2.5 million views. Both videos represent the views of 64 percent of Americans that do not think the mosque-cultural center should be located at the proposed location. There seems to be a small basement mosque four blocks from ground zero named Masjid Manhattan, definitely close but in no way comparable to the proposed center.

So what causes the president many times to suffer from a Deep Woods description of Foot In Mouth Disease?

There is no doubt that the president believes strongly in his oratory skills and that he can be a healer of the nation’s political divide. This unsatisfactory excursion into the unnecessary-irrelevant to make a very elementary (like in education) constitutional statement is both naïve and condescending to the American people.

When I was reviewing the life of Barack Obama before the election, there were a number of articles that described his childhood and his parents. One I remember stated that many his formative years were living with his anthropologist mother in Indonesia. The conclusion of the writer stated that anthropologists make it a point not to infect the studied population with their personal cultural views. As a result of that training, the article’s writer wondered if our soon to be president really had any strong cultural views of his own.

We have subsequently learned, he chose cultural views in college and beyond that seem to align as close as possible in the United States with those of his father, a communist that didn’t fit in with Kenya’s ruling African socialist government.

So I guess the pondering question is does president Obama share any cultural values with anything similar to America’s center right population? Furthermore is there anything within his worldview that will allow him to adapt to that, to him, a very foreign culture? The next couple of years should define the answers to those questions.