Dec 15th 2007
Warning: Do not download and read the following if you doubt your conservative beliefs; reading this presentation puts you in serious danger of changing your outlook on politics into a decidedly progress one.
Dec 14th 2007
I am heartbroken over the plight of the hurricane-homeless of New Orleans. With each new injury to the residents committed since those levees were first allowed to degenerate into an inadequate safeguard (see this previous post; see the Senate’s findings), the story of the betrayal of the American citizens of Louisiana gets uglier. I feel the need to refer to them overtly as “American citizens,” because our governments’ treatment of them makes it seem as though we need to be reminded of that fact.
It’s hard to be proud of my country when it leaves its own out in the cold like we did those thousands on their rooftops.
It takes more patriotism than I can muster to cheer for the good ole U.S. of A. while we tear down the neighborhoods of our own most vulnerable citizens. This is not how an enlightened modern government ought to behave. This smacks of the very types of humanitarian abuse charges that we so commonly hurl at all kinds of so called “third world” countries.
Before Christmas this year, the federal government wants to have finished their latest insult-to-injury project in New Orleans: tear down perfectly livable public housing (the only kind affordable to the poorest in their community), and replace it with fewer units of more expensive housing.
Before Christmas? Have we no sense of shame?!
To learn more, and find ways to help, watch the video, and visit the following websites:
http://defendneworleanspublichousing.org/
Dec 13th 2007
Congratulations, Kimmy, my beautiful wife! (she’s the one on the left, cheek to cheek with her best buddy and fellow nursing school student, Lisa).
My wife has just completed an ordeal that vaguely resembles a college degree, but more accurately could be described as an insanely cruel and unusual punishment meted out on unsuspecting moms-with-kids going back to school to get a better income.
Anyway, Kimberly, I’m so proud of you, that I had to put you front and center on my blog today!
I love you!
Dec 13th 2007
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower
For the less Biblically literate of jimblog readers, that whacko peacenik pinko hippie Eisenhower is referencing Jesus’ own words in Matthew 25:42-43. We need the old Republican party back! (The one that produced an ex-general President who could say the above).
Dec 11th 2007
I sent this link to everyone on my email list with whom I’ve talked about interesting inventions, or whom I think would have insights into this invention’s implications. I’ll post the replies (with their permissions) here, because so far they have been really interesting.
http://www.hytechapps.com/company/press
Could this fuel be the next big thing?
Have you heard of it?
Why is 2006 the last anyone broadcast anything about it?Surf to the site’s press release page and watch the video’s, all taken from mainstream news broadcasts. Maybe we should invest in this company??
Let me know what you think, please, after watching the press release videos, and tell me if you think this whole thing is either a hoax, or in fact The Next Big Thing.
go to Youtube to see this video
thanks to brasschecktv.com for the video
Dec 9th 2007
UPDATE DECEMBER 16, 2007:
Two websites to help you analyze the Republican Party’s love affair with the Christian fundamentalist electorate:
And the online edition of Liberty Magazine, the news journal of the Religious Liberty department of my own Seventh-day Adventist denomination:
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UPDATE DECEMBER 15, 2007:
This is the feeling of more and more in the Republican Party: Christianity is better than other religions.
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In his recent speech clarifying his religious views, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said two things to which this teacher of religion and government must take exception:
- “Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom.”
- “But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning.”
First of all, it’s just simply foolish to assert that freedom requires religion, when you take into consideration even the most elementary reading of the history of Massachusetts, the state which Romney governs, and its most influential expatriate Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island colony, who famously coined the term “wall of separation” and stands to this day as the bravest defender of that principle enshrined in our U. S. Constitution. Romney refers to Williams later in his speech, without any hint of irony!
Secondly, that second statement shows that Romney is indeed pandering to the Christian right in this country who have been clamoring for years for an ever-closer blending of Christianity with our society, even if it takes legislation to get it. They re-write history in their sermons and speeches, and the brain-dead mainstream media just nod and yawn.
The religiously inclined citizens of this country really ought to shudder when they hear statements like the above from Romney. Even cursory readings of the history of Western Civilization lead any comprehending reader to the conclusion that persecution of a minority is always the result of a state taking to itself an “official” religion. There is likely an intoxicating attraction to the political power gained by a state’s government when it takes up religion as its hand maiden. O, the masses which will swoon as their leaders look to their gods for help in leading them! But the iron maiden is not far behind the first embrace of that hand maiden by the unsuspecting state.
Statements like Romney’s, whether meaning to or not, will always play to both sides of that dangerous scenario: the religious masses of the governed, who long to hear a leader agree with them that their god is great and leads them all, and the powerful classes who govern, who long to have that iron-fisted grasp which always results from the union of church and state.
Those in the ruling classes, the ideological descendants of Roger Williams, and those of us in the masses, who still acknowledge the power of our own consent, must wake up and take notice when candidates look askance at our first amendment like Romney does in his speech. We must refuse to give our consent to govern to any candidate who does not hold up as sacred to our country’s future that Wall of Separation so many today are longing to pull down.
We hope that former Baptist minister Mike Huckabee, GOP candidate from Arkansas, will hold close to the “Wall of Separation” idea that the founder of the first Baptist church in America, Roger Williams, held dear. We hope that all the candidates, left, right, and centrist, religious or non, will take firm stands on religious liberty. And we hope that American voters, whether religious or non, will take the same care with how they exercise their hard-won right to vote.
From an excellent article online about Roger Williams’ intellectual exchanges with the Indigenous Americans of his day and his observations about Indians’ religious liberty, which he found so in step with the progress his colony of Rhode Island made toward true separation of church and state:
Williams died … March 15, 1683 in Providence, with the pain of the world bowing his creaking shoulders, likely realizing just how out of step he was with the temper of his time. He was a peacemaker in time of war, a tolerant man in a world full of ideologues; a democrat in a time of ecclesiastical and secular sovereigns, a dissenter wherever self-interest masqueraded as divinity. Williams had planted seeds in American soil which would not fully flower for more than another century. He would have relished the company of Thomas Jefferson, for example, at a time when his ideas were the common currency of revolution.
Williams also would have enjoyed meeting two Creek sachems who visited England in 1791, “where, as usual, they attracted great attention, and many flocked around them, as well to learn their ideas of certain things as to behold `the savages.’” Asked their opinion of European religion, one said that the Creeks had no priests, or established religion, and that people were not expected all to agree on mere matters of opinion. “It is best that everyone should paddle his own canoe in his own way,” the two Creeks told the assembled English.
Dec 1st 2007
Isaiah 52:14, The Message:
He didn’t even look human– a ruined face, disfigured past recognition
…Makes me think of Mel Gibson’s Christ (beautifully acted by James Cavaziel) in the post-flog Passion scenes.
Soldiers did this.
Military might smashed in the face of my Jesus.
The superpower, torturing an insurgent ring-leader in order to put on display an example of what results from trying to do things His own way.
Simon the zealot-terrorist and the other ten had been led around, gathering sympathy from the bitter masses, resentful of their occupiers, and got all twelve of the disciples and their Leader on the Watch List.
Operation Jewish Freedom had brought peace, safety, roads, and “civilization” to this dusty Middle Eastern colony. And this was the thanks Rome gets! Not exactly flowers and chocolates, eh?
I’m sure there was tortured rationalization all up and down the chain of command, from Pilate who pretended he could wash his hands of the dirty work to the grunts on the ground down there, really giving that Jesus guy the deluxe thrashing.
But rationalizing it didn’t work. It never does. The torturers always are tortured and shocked by their own inhumanity to their fellow man. The torture works both ways, scarring both the perpetrator and the victim.
But it’s worse for the Victim.
How many Iraqi fathers and brothers and sons end up hating (secretly, i.e. safely) soldiers for what soldiers always destroy: harmony, health, safety, peace . . . even as we salute them, honor them, sculpt images to them, anthem, moment-of-silence them? Because they smashed our best friend, our Brother, our Father, our Son, our Jesus, our Jesús, our José, our Jimmy, Johnny, GI Joe?
Nov 26th 2007
Isaiah 53:3-6 in The Message:
“We’ve all gone our own way, done our own thing…”
That phrasing…
Stark individualism is not good for a person. It is devastating for a community, for a society. The man, or nation, embracing it, forgets how connected all men are designed to be. Alone, divided off from each other (in- divid- uals), we wither and break. United into community (comm- unit- y), we flourish and grow.
God plunged Himself into human community, dove into the gene pool, and took on all human guilt, pain, and punishment. Take on Jesus, by letting Him have your guilt. He frees you from punishment, and immediately you begin to heal from all kinds of pains: emotional, intellectual, philosophical, relational, physical, and spiritual wounds. I know this. This is my story!
In that healing process, God uses community. Every religion exists as a conduit through which their community can receive blessings from faith in their higher power. When a person moves from “non-believer” to “believer” attitude, they soon become conscious that they have “joined” something. Community has been the basis for human society since day one, and that truth is held in common between believers and evolutionists and agnostics alike. Whether you study ape communities for insights into your origins, or the book of Genesis, both sources of information present you as a member of a human community.
God uses churches and synagogues and mosques and temples to pull people together. Religion is the great commons of human history. Almost without exception, every human being is either currently a member of, or recently estranged from, a religious community. This reference point of membership has existed as long as humans have walked this earth. I don’t know if evolutionists will ever try to purge the historical record of the universality of religious community, but they really must if they are ever to obtain any sort of a majority standing in the world. Right now, they are seriously outnumbered, and that’s even if you count those cognitively dissonant few who are members of religious communities and believers in the tenets of evolutionism.
E Pluribus Unum, the motto of the United States, may teach that out of many diverse communities Americans have made a country of united citizens, but We The People have at times allowed a dangerous tendency toward individualism to overtake our priorities. The “Me Society” looks out for Number One and says, “Do your own thing,” even as it erodes away the ties that bind us to the source of our sovereignty– community action! When your wealth allows you to gate yourself away from the unpleasant reality of diversity and community, you place yourself in a position of self-delusion. It’s the individualist’s air-conditioned micro climate of the SUV rampaging through the dangerous streets of poverty, war, and sickness that allows so many of the owners of our community’s wealth to avoid dealing with the question of whether or not they should, in fact, accumulate so much of our community’s wealth.
Whether solutions to this divisive power-plays are forthcoming or not, one thing I believe: God Himself will someday intervene in such a way as to reclaim His sovereignty over the human community, and physically redistribute the wealth and land in a fair and equitable fashion.
I doubt that without Divine intervention, but I’m convinced that soon, with it, human society will one day return to its roots: a community of individuals united by the idea that together we are more than the sum of our parts. And all will worship the only King worthy of that title, God Himself.
Nov 25th 2007
Why Can’t These Pale Pilgrims Learn The Language?
Colin McEnroe - The Hartford Courant
We’ve been having quite a debate about immigration lately. I was chatting with some guys right after a Wampanoag medicine circle last week, and I was surprised at how many people favor immediate deportation of everybody who has come here without proper authorization from our government - which is pretty much everybody who has come here.
“How are we going to do that?” I asked a guy named Tinsin. “We don’t ever know how many of them there are. They’re impossible to keep track of. How are we going to round them all up and send them back to England or Holland or wherever?”
“They’re easy to find,” a guy named Masshantamaine chimed in. “They smell bad. And they never do anything or go anywhere. They’re very lazy. And they drink that alcohol stuff all the time.”
“And they bring diseases,” said Tinsin. “They’re dirty and sneaky. And they refuse to learn the language.”
They had a point. I’m pretty liberal on the immigration question, but I do think they should learn the language. Half the time they’re babbling away in English, like we’re supposed to understand them. We’ve set up Wampanoag as a Second Language evening classes down at the community wetu, but hardly any of them show up.
So I say to the pale immigrants, “How do you think you are going to make it here in this country, in this Shining Land of the First Light, if you don’t speak the language?”
I learned enough English to say this to them, but that only encourages them. They want us - just for example - to do our signs in Wampanoag and English. How practical is that?
Nov 18th 2007
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