Stop sending representatives with no sense of the times

Americans keep sending people to Congress who have nothing on their mind but personal power and prestige, and in the grandest tradition of racist supremacy and capitalism, the alliance between fascist causes and religion continues to intensify.  If we thought that representation makes its mark by means of winning partisan conflicts then there is no viable house to defend, the division of people by politics lends itself to shallow morons making themselves the heroes of movements that are divorced from the progress of the last century.

Bondage still stalks the land of the free two centuries after independence

You cannot send people like waffly L. Graham, toothless Quasi-speaker K. McC, seditionist M.T. Greene, J. Kennedy, T. Cruz, Gosar, Hawley to Congress and expect honourable defense of the constitution. These people think the truly wise will use the courts – all the way to the Supreme Court – to make the law not apply to them and whomever they choose to bless. These guys and gals are a curse on patriotism, and with religious guides like Jim Jordan, and whoever else is pushing Jesus into government, Catholicism and Protestantism are in the bed of promiscuous love. The papacy holds the aces and the enslavement of people is still a priority.

For the people is a lost number

America and many other nations are like a child who while learning to count to 10 was told that 7 is a bad luck number. That knowledge acts as a base for never completing the count. “For the people” is not a cute slogan, it actually means the due respect for all of the people’s needs, rights, and aspirations. Two hundred years after independence, let’s face it, some people are not people in America. “For the people” can be a good Gospel song, but the music stars are not catching the gleam. “For the people” is a convenient talking point to get a person elected, but, apparently, the people who matter are one’s siblings and relatives. The current conversations and behaviours are dead-raising horrors.

Misleading giveaways

Trump’s pleading hands and Sarah Sanders Huckabee’s twitching eyes are reliable warnings to the public. I think Trump’s hands look like I’m open which really means he’s closed, and Huckabee’s twitching eyes were indicators of God warning her “please girl, don’t lie again”

These two public displays of deceit rank with the more intimate expressions of a lot of Christians when they tell themselves and anyone willing to listen that they are God’s obedient and perfectly loyal people. I have learned to tune out as soon as the loyalty pitch begins.

SBC catastrophic hardline

Today, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is sitting in soiled diapers on account of its anti-female regulation, or shall we call the move by the SBC’s own terminology, amendment.

Amendment, shmamendment

Amendments have been unsettling in the religious world and in the political realm. Just ask the Americans about their perfect and enlightened constitution.
One: people do not like change.
Two:  the destiny of man has not changed
Three: change to historic operations are necessary (e.g. what was good for journeying through a desert does not work for residence in Canaan)

The most sacred trusts are deposited in the earliest narratives. It is kind of quixotic for the Taliban, the Evangelical fundamentalists, and the Catholics to want to exclude women in God’s name from serving as leaders and stewards of divine mysteries. For Christians it is especially disgraceful to hear men and women talking about excluding women from positions of influence. Would they also deny a woman the right to teach her child what’s right and what’s wrong and to talk about those things from the cradle to the grave? There is a lot of hot air behind the all-male talk. How do I know?

Adam (mankind) is male and female

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Genesis 1:26, NASB

Not only is there no room for gender discrimination in the administration of the mysteries of the Christian faith, stewardship is marked, from the earliest template, as joint. What else are these misogynists going to come up with in the name of decency and justice?

Minneapolis, that metropolis of meanness

When I was growing up I heard “Minneapolis, Minnesota” every day on the radio, sometimes twice a day.  It was Billy Graham’s mailing address.  You have to excuse a guy for thinking that Minneapolis, MN was a kind of Mecca,  Bethel,  Axum, Qom, or Salt Lake City.  Until a vile police officer knelt on the neck and back of a Black man and took his life in plain sight I imagined that Minneapolis was a city full of virtue.  Residents and others familiar with the city have complained, it is reported.  And attorney general Merrick Garland has corroborated that Minnesota’s police force is a rotten cabal from hell.

Anybody, save us from a holy city

  • Mecca, Saudi Arabia
  • Bethel, Israel
  • Axum, Ethiopia
  • Qom, Iran
  • Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America

Minnesota PD, on the healing highway

The findings of the Garland DOJ are sometimes exculpatory,  but there are over a dozen police departments with disturbing records currently under the microscope of the Department of Justice.  It is curious that one never heard the great Evangelist rail against the evil resident in Minneapolis’ guardians of justice and public safety. Do not ask why heads are not rolling. Let us hope that a few bad apples in Minneapolis policing are not the whitewashed conclusion.

Fighting, bad, worse and the worst

You may not be a believer – a faithful or graced person – if you keep clinging to the conclusion that humans are all intrinsically good people or all deserve to be celebrated.  The malignant things some people in positions of trust repeat in word and deed are a flashing warning that toxic potions, fabricated narratives, and absurd religious-political constructs are not worthy of our time.  War to end war has made the journey from bad to worst and the idea is a crooked attempt to imitate the life from death realities that define God.

Who’s gonna stop the misery?

None of the political platforms are sufficiently informed or enthused about all of mankind. The power hungry nerds of our times will not rise to the occasion to defend the human race, because they are all interested in exploiting us. All the leaders pretending to have received top notch insight and instruction are like foolish little children in the marketplace dancing and piping and applauding each other’s performances.

31) To what then shall I compare the men of this generation, and what are they like? 32) They are like children who sit in the market place and call to one another, and they say, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.’

Luke 7:31-32 New American Standard Bible

On becoming and other privileged lanes

We Christians have clearly marked rights of passage in the spiritual journey.  Conversion and baptism are the primary pair; they transform a person’s identity.  Baptism is the action we take to declare to the believing community that we have experienced a change and to state our commitment to the new status.  Jewish people have a bar mitzvah rite. When does a person become a Muslim?  Do we really know how deadly organized religion has been, or are we willing to ignore the evidence of Judaism’s follies, Christianity’s tango with worldly powers, or Islam’s quest to dominate by extremism?

Question of the millennia

What is the difference between a religious person and a religious country?  All kinds of holiness mantras and regulations will break up our reverie about governments allied with religion and answer the question with “Too much”. That “too much” rises like smoke from a fire to choke us with discrimination, miscarriages of justice, and cleverly devised fables. Christian individuals are entirely different entities from the so-called Christian nation. Muslim individuals are entirely different entities from the so-called Islamic nation. Religious Jews are entirely different entities from the so-called elect kingdoms of Israel and Judah. So let them smoke their pipes and croak in their silos of bigotry and darkness.

Locked in on a fantasy

Passion is both dying and living

What are you passionate about?

My home , my hope, and my heritage define me.  Were I not all in for them I would be a coward and a likely deceiver.   Recently I heard a commentator on television ridiculing people who combine their employment with passion. His view was that work cannot be passion. I suppose that helps explain why robots replacing us in so many places is just the kind of robotic thing we do for money.  Working without passion, to me, sounds like prostitution. The turmoil in societies all over the globe are like our appointment with death.  Passion for flags, tribe and religion are going to define individuals and communities for a while yet. 

I am all in for the earth and the community in which I live.  I am all in for the people who shaped my thinking.  Our consumer society lives on stupid slogans like “drill, baby, drill” without a thought about the finite resources of the planet. Beguiling people with the possibility that amazing technological advancements will contribute to humanity’s flight to a new planet home is one of our doomed fantasies that is driven by unprecedented financing and passion. Maybe we will just repeat among the stars the colonial and imperial expansions we have seen by European powers. I think we can see that passion for native land, tribal and political tradition and religious dogma as destructive and they have always  powered the decline of the human race.

The Passover stands out as my season fav

What is your favorite season of year? Why?

New and full moon, liberation, peace and joy guarantees

Easter Monday is a statutory holiday when the beaches are packed with people in love with life and beauty.  Life hardly gets better than all day fun at the beach. Easter Sunday is the reminder that people have access to liberation,  Easter Sunday also brings a sobering reminder that all people need to be freed from fear and meaningless lives   The full moon aspect of Passover comforts me with the facts of the ebb and flow of life.  In this sense Passover comes every month as the moon waxes to full and wanes to new.  I like the exceptionalism of Good Friday with its unique action undertaken by someone other than me as the foundation of my sense of value and destiny.  It stands apart from the usual confessions about a great hero and/or God, because I get to simply rely on and celebrate a truly incredible act of love.

Passover is originally a day to commemorate exit from the clutches of bondage.  It is a Jewish festival and it has, through practice in both Judaism and Christianity, gotten rolled into a multiple day remembrance.   When a Jew talks about Passover he means the 8 day period that runs from Passover Day to the last (or the seventh) day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread.  Easter for me and many Christians includes Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and Easter Monday.