Off road in the VooDoo desert
30/July/2008 11:26 Filed in: Weekly Column
Volume 10, Issue 30
PDF copy
In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Judges 21:25
This is an oft-quoted Bible verse used by all sorts of people to describe and lament the times in which we live. What I have never heard however is the corollary statement that people had to do what was right in their own eyes because they could not get any help with their projects, so they were left alone to their own resources, to make their own way.
Sure you can get help to do something if you are willing and able to pay, but you have to pay not for the value of the service necessarily, but what someone thought or determined what that service was worth. The real world and your world just don’t work together. Again what we are really talking about is a lack of infrastructure to help you with your daily tasks.
One of the first things you will find as you venture off road into God’s creation is that there is a unity in diversity. All things seem to work together. In ecology, that is called simply natural diversity. Why doesn’t it seem to work in human endeavors is, simply stated, we humans think we can come up with a better way, which really isn’t a better way in any way, it just looks right in our own eyes.
Some of those perceived better ways are based on science and valid logical reasoning. Too often however, these ways are based upon some self-righteousness, relying on our own definitions of good and right and center not on reason, but human emotion. When that emotion is divorced from an outside standard of righteousness, it quickly becomes dark and dangerous, essentially a type of voodoo.
As we have done in recent weeks, when looking at the Christian church, you see an organization so intent on saving the world by their methods, they don’t have time to reach the world by God’s methods, or just by being part of the natural community of mankind.
The fundamental statement from a Biblical and creation worldview simply states the reality, “If the church is unwilling or unable to perform her duties to Christianity specifically, and the world in general, we are all in a truly bad state of affairs.”
The information content of natural energetics is an interesting concept. Over time natural diversity will fill the void, in this case the lack of human opportunity and destiny found only in God. Therefore if the church is unable or unwilling to change from within, it will be changed from without.
So using this natural analogy, the church can be changed by external fire, just as a forest fire a few miles down the road a couple of weeks ago cleared out a lot of underbrush and hence killed a lot of trees that really didn’t need to die, if human infrastructure was operating wisely, also a few human homes and a church would not have been destroyed.
This fire was started by wind causing trees to fall on power lines, but once started it was completely operating within natural common laws. This change in the church will follow the same natural fire laws, even though there will be some who will attempt to bottle the flames and become firestorm revivalists, for that is the American way. The real change however must start in the broader community and this takes us off road into the voodoo desert.
America has suddenly discovered that it has a housing crisis, an energy crisis, somewhat brought on by a dollar crisis. But really what has happened is that, just as with the forest fire, someone needed to clear out all the brush 30 years ago and then periodically go back and do it again. Then if the fire would have started, the damage would have minimal effect. Let us start by looking at energy.
There is nothing new on the energy horizon that was not known 30 years ago. The technology may have progressed slightly, but only slightly because of abundant cheap oil there was no market for those diverse energy products.
A couple of weeks ago the “oil markets” were over $140 per barrel and yesterday they were $20 per barrel less. This does not say anything about the cost of producing new energy from any source. Until such time as true market conditions exist, all the drill or no drill voodoo excitements is not going to do anything but work up the crowd, only to be let down when the reality sets in. The reality is that new energy, if it costs an equivalent of say $60 a barrel to produce, it isn’t going to be processed until the producers can make a sustainable profit, let us say $80 per barrel.
The United States of America, should have developed an energy plan 30 years ago, it didn’t. Now the prospects of such a plan seem even more remote than way back then. With such lack of tangible results one might question if the United States of America, remains a civilized nation. With recent approval ratings of the President of less than 30% and the Congress in single digits, there seems to be mounting empirical evidence supporting that conclusion.
Civilization is supposed to establish some sort of infrastructure. You can make judgments about the infrastructure, whether you consider it good or bad, but without infrastructure, you just don’t have a civilized society. Without that infrastructure you have to do what is right in your own eyes, if you are going to do anything. Outside your own autonomy, too often we must enter a world of voodoo and superstition, the voodoo desert.
Now most of us are familiar with the term Voodoo Economics. The term was used by George H. W. Bush to describe the “supply side” economic policies of Ronald Reagan. This same economic theory is also the basis for our current Bush administration. What we are beginning to find out is that the fiscal deficits caused by this theory are never made up by increased economic growth.
We are not going to even go into whether “letting you keep your own money” works or does not work in reality. What we are going to point out however is that fiscal deficits do decrease civil infrastructure. We are not just talking about highways, bridges, and an energy plan, we are talking about the infrastructure to regulate human abuses.
On the political right, pundits are saying that a future Obama presidency will bring big government social programs and higher taxes. However, the real weakness of these type of government dictated programs in the United States, is that we have absolutely no infrastructure to carry out the applications, or more importantly to regulate the growth of that bureaucracy.
On the political left, pundits are saying that a McCain presidency will continue the market abuses of the current Bush administration. However what they fail to understand is their solutions will basically eliminate all capital markets. They fail to recognize there is no way to regulate corporate greed without some sort of developed infrastructure that can allow markets and competition to function for the good of all humanity, not just for the padding of the corporate bottom line and the monetary enrichment of upper management.
What neither group seems to understand is without the breadth of natural diversity the whole context of civilization breaks down. That anarchist reality is much closer than either group seems to comprehend. As we have seen in the last year, the first symptoms of that voodoo desert are beginning to be seen in all aspects of society.
The church doesn’t work like it was designed to do. The government doesn’t work as it was designed to do. Your life doesn’t work like you would like to design it to function. The old adage, that form follows function seems to be limiting your ability to exist. What it really says however is that without the infrastructure to create a functioning form of civilization your life will not function in a civil fashion. That is true in the urban center or in a nowhere forest cabin. The voodoo desert is expanding all around.
Now thankfully we have those who will assert that this voodoo desert is real and it is the result of global warming. If we all think green thoughts, buy carbon credits in a whole lot of renewable energy projects, the world will turn green, the deserts will become oasis and we will live happily ever after. The reality is after all is said and done the real desert will still be there, the forest will still be there, and your material well being will have been shifted to some global warming voodoo enterprise.
The beginning step to surviving in the voodoo desert, wherever you may find it, is simply, use your head. It really doesn’t matter whether you think your head has evolved from some billion year old swamp or created by God a few thousand years ago. However you have obtained your brain, you still have at least a limited ability to think and to reason.
Follow that up with beginning to create your own unity in diversity community. That community must have two aspects, a natural nature aspect and the human component. Both are naturally designed communities, and are the real basis for human civilization and the development of positive and required infrastructure.
Next try to weed out the emotional voodoo in your human community. It wastes much time and valuable resources and ultimately leads to nowhere positive. Finally, deepen and enrich your soil. Stimulate your thought processes and keep personal entertainment within a balance. That soil enrichment must include people beyond your pier group. That is true whether you are young or old, rich or poor. Other-people-based-wisdom is the foundation of common sense. Your common sense.
The Protestant Reformation began not with a theological structure, but more as an attempt to begin a community to promote the discussion of theological issues. Martin Luther’s preamble to the 95 Theses nailed to the church door at Wittenberg follows:
Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg, under the presidency of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and of Sacred Theology, and Lecturer in Ordinary on the same at that place. Wherefore he requests that those who are unable to be present and debate orally with us, may do so by letter.
None of us are Martin Luther, but we are in strong measure accountable, to be who we were created or desire to be. What better way to begin than with the concept for the love of truth and the desire to bring it to light. That proposition assumes that truth does exist, but the voodoo desert will tell you truth is an illusion. Don’t let it drag you down, for without natural truth the world could not exist, if you didn’t exist, you would not be reading this article.
Therefore basic as you desire to go, or as advanced as your reasoning can take you, there is the ability to provide context to your life and the lives of others. Off road in the voodoo desert means that it is a trail that hasn’t been surveyed yet, and it is a road only you can build. You may be hesitant to start, but the reality is that the voodoo desert doesn’t need your permission to exist or to grow. It will do that and it takes a community to change that wasteland and make it productive, perhaps again, perhaps for the first time.
PDF copy
In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Judges 21:25
This is an oft-quoted Bible verse used by all sorts of people to describe and lament the times in which we live. What I have never heard however is the corollary statement that people had to do what was right in their own eyes because they could not get any help with their projects, so they were left alone to their own resources, to make their own way.
Sure you can get help to do something if you are willing and able to pay, but you have to pay not for the value of the service necessarily, but what someone thought or determined what that service was worth. The real world and your world just don’t work together. Again what we are really talking about is a lack of infrastructure to help you with your daily tasks.
One of the first things you will find as you venture off road into God’s creation is that there is a unity in diversity. All things seem to work together. In ecology, that is called simply natural diversity. Why doesn’t it seem to work in human endeavors is, simply stated, we humans think we can come up with a better way, which really isn’t a better way in any way, it just looks right in our own eyes.
Some of those perceived better ways are based on science and valid logical reasoning. Too often however, these ways are based upon some self-righteousness, relying on our own definitions of good and right and center not on reason, but human emotion. When that emotion is divorced from an outside standard of righteousness, it quickly becomes dark and dangerous, essentially a type of voodoo.
As we have done in recent weeks, when looking at the Christian church, you see an organization so intent on saving the world by their methods, they don’t have time to reach the world by God’s methods, or just by being part of the natural community of mankind.
The fundamental statement from a Biblical and creation worldview simply states the reality, “If the church is unwilling or unable to perform her duties to Christianity specifically, and the world in general, we are all in a truly bad state of affairs.”
The information content of natural energetics is an interesting concept. Over time natural diversity will fill the void, in this case the lack of human opportunity and destiny found only in God. Therefore if the church is unable or unwilling to change from within, it will be changed from without.
So using this natural analogy, the church can be changed by external fire, just as a forest fire a few miles down the road a couple of weeks ago cleared out a lot of underbrush and hence killed a lot of trees that really didn’t need to die, if human infrastructure was operating wisely, also a few human homes and a church would not have been destroyed.
This fire was started by wind causing trees to fall on power lines, but once started it was completely operating within natural common laws. This change in the church will follow the same natural fire laws, even though there will be some who will attempt to bottle the flames and become firestorm revivalists, for that is the American way. The real change however must start in the broader community and this takes us off road into the voodoo desert.
America has suddenly discovered that it has a housing crisis, an energy crisis, somewhat brought on by a dollar crisis. But really what has happened is that, just as with the forest fire, someone needed to clear out all the brush 30 years ago and then periodically go back and do it again. Then if the fire would have started, the damage would have minimal effect. Let us start by looking at energy.
There is nothing new on the energy horizon that was not known 30 years ago. The technology may have progressed slightly, but only slightly because of abundant cheap oil there was no market for those diverse energy products.
A couple of weeks ago the “oil markets” were over $140 per barrel and yesterday they were $20 per barrel less. This does not say anything about the cost of producing new energy from any source. Until such time as true market conditions exist, all the drill or no drill voodoo excitements is not going to do anything but work up the crowd, only to be let down when the reality sets in. The reality is that new energy, if it costs an equivalent of say $60 a barrel to produce, it isn’t going to be processed until the producers can make a sustainable profit, let us say $80 per barrel.
The United States of America, should have developed an energy plan 30 years ago, it didn’t. Now the prospects of such a plan seem even more remote than way back then. With such lack of tangible results one might question if the United States of America, remains a civilized nation. With recent approval ratings of the President of less than 30% and the Congress in single digits, there seems to be mounting empirical evidence supporting that conclusion.
Civilization is supposed to establish some sort of infrastructure. You can make judgments about the infrastructure, whether you consider it good or bad, but without infrastructure, you just don’t have a civilized society. Without that infrastructure you have to do what is right in your own eyes, if you are going to do anything. Outside your own autonomy, too often we must enter a world of voodoo and superstition, the voodoo desert.
Now most of us are familiar with the term Voodoo Economics. The term was used by George H. W. Bush to describe the “supply side” economic policies of Ronald Reagan. This same economic theory is also the basis for our current Bush administration. What we are beginning to find out is that the fiscal deficits caused by this theory are never made up by increased economic growth.
We are not going to even go into whether “letting you keep your own money” works or does not work in reality. What we are going to point out however is that fiscal deficits do decrease civil infrastructure. We are not just talking about highways, bridges, and an energy plan, we are talking about the infrastructure to regulate human abuses.
On the political right, pundits are saying that a future Obama presidency will bring big government social programs and higher taxes. However, the real weakness of these type of government dictated programs in the United States, is that we have absolutely no infrastructure to carry out the applications, or more importantly to regulate the growth of that bureaucracy.
On the political left, pundits are saying that a McCain presidency will continue the market abuses of the current Bush administration. However what they fail to understand is their solutions will basically eliminate all capital markets. They fail to recognize there is no way to regulate corporate greed without some sort of developed infrastructure that can allow markets and competition to function for the good of all humanity, not just for the padding of the corporate bottom line and the monetary enrichment of upper management.
What neither group seems to understand is without the breadth of natural diversity the whole context of civilization breaks down. That anarchist reality is much closer than either group seems to comprehend. As we have seen in the last year, the first symptoms of that voodoo desert are beginning to be seen in all aspects of society.
The church doesn’t work like it was designed to do. The government doesn’t work as it was designed to do. Your life doesn’t work like you would like to design it to function. The old adage, that form follows function seems to be limiting your ability to exist. What it really says however is that without the infrastructure to create a functioning form of civilization your life will not function in a civil fashion. That is true in the urban center or in a nowhere forest cabin. The voodoo desert is expanding all around.
Now thankfully we have those who will assert that this voodoo desert is real and it is the result of global warming. If we all think green thoughts, buy carbon credits in a whole lot of renewable energy projects, the world will turn green, the deserts will become oasis and we will live happily ever after. The reality is after all is said and done the real desert will still be there, the forest will still be there, and your material well being will have been shifted to some global warming voodoo enterprise.
The beginning step to surviving in the voodoo desert, wherever you may find it, is simply, use your head. It really doesn’t matter whether you think your head has evolved from some billion year old swamp or created by God a few thousand years ago. However you have obtained your brain, you still have at least a limited ability to think and to reason.
Follow that up with beginning to create your own unity in diversity community. That community must have two aspects, a natural nature aspect and the human component. Both are naturally designed communities, and are the real basis for human civilization and the development of positive and required infrastructure.
Next try to weed out the emotional voodoo in your human community. It wastes much time and valuable resources and ultimately leads to nowhere positive. Finally, deepen and enrich your soil. Stimulate your thought processes and keep personal entertainment within a balance. That soil enrichment must include people beyond your pier group. That is true whether you are young or old, rich or poor. Other-people-based-wisdom is the foundation of common sense. Your common sense.
The Protestant Reformation began not with a theological structure, but more as an attempt to begin a community to promote the discussion of theological issues. Martin Luther’s preamble to the 95 Theses nailed to the church door at Wittenberg follows:
Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg, under the presidency of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and of Sacred Theology, and Lecturer in Ordinary on the same at that place. Wherefore he requests that those who are unable to be present and debate orally with us, may do so by letter.
None of us are Martin Luther, but we are in strong measure accountable, to be who we were created or desire to be. What better way to begin than with the concept for the love of truth and the desire to bring it to light. That proposition assumes that truth does exist, but the voodoo desert will tell you truth is an illusion. Don’t let it drag you down, for without natural truth the world could not exist, if you didn’t exist, you would not be reading this article.
Therefore basic as you desire to go, or as advanced as your reasoning can take you, there is the ability to provide context to your life and the lives of others. Off road in the voodoo desert means that it is a trail that hasn’t been surveyed yet, and it is a road only you can build. You may be hesitant to start, but the reality is that the voodoo desert doesn’t need your permission to exist or to grow. It will do that and it takes a community to change that wasteland and make it productive, perhaps again, perhaps for the first time.