Obama Blue

Well, my candidate won, and so did his party, as shown by the resurgence of blue color symbolizing the Democratic victories in the Senate and the House. The high school students at the small Christian academy where I teach religion and history have been divided over this election race, and, at times, argue with one another. Some students cornered me as I supervised them at lunch, and wouldn’t accept my evasive answers to their persistent questioning: Who did you vote for, Mr. Miles? So I told them; it felt like a casual enough moment, outside the classroom, far from the authoritative “speaking as teacher” mode during which all teachers are loath to bring in their personal political opinions for fear of unduly imprinting their own values on impressionable kids’ minds.

I just finished refereeing another heated discussion in our World History class, in which there are students fervently supporting each of the candidates. The McCain supporters today are disappointed, angry, and some are resigning themselves to the fact that this Obama win means the end of the world just got a little closer to becoming reality. The Obama supporters are rejoicing, proud, and full of hope in their country’s future, one in which they are now eager to play a part.

As they wrangled over campaign talking points which had gotten embedded into their minds over the past months, I stopped everyone for a moment and expressed to them my desire to see them never put party politics over their friendships with each other. I told them that since I had told some of them at lunch who I voted for, that I wanted a chance to say something else about my choice of candidates.

I told them that I wish I could see four parallel Americas going through the next four years; one, with a President Barack Obama leading us; another, with a President John McCain in charge; a third, with President Joseph Biden in the Oval Office; and a fourth with a President Sarah Palin. I told them, and I sincerely mean this, that I have seen things in all four Americans that I would love to see in action in the Executive Branch. I also told them that I believe that any reasonable American citizen could execute the office of the President, given that at this point, the best expert advice in the world is at the fingertips of whoever occupies that position. And so, I believe that any of the four candidates could have been good Presidents. But we don’t get to choose four, just one, and so we choose who we choose, and trust that we made the right choice, no take-backs, no do-overs.

I also said that it is our duty, no matter who is in office, to make known to them our desires and wishes, and never relax our vigilance in holding them to account for what they do while in that office, working for us. And I do not think we should hold up any victorious candidate as our Messiah, the one who will solve our problems, deserving of our worship and adoration. He’s just a man, and not God. He’s part of a system that, while holding great potential for serving the needs of a great many people, is nevertheless imperfect, and subject to the corruptions to which all human governments will always be vulnerable.

Even so, Come Lord Jesus, and Thy Kingdom Come, and set up that perfect government on earth, in which nobody votes, but everybody’s needs are perfectly met by the King and Creator of us all.
Amen.

Palin Scares Me

Sarah Palin, one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency if John McCain somehow wins Tuesday’s election, scares me.

And not just because of what she is unprepared to do, namely, meet the many simultaneous and complex challenges which daily assault our country’s chief executive. A President has the ability to call upon virtually any expert for help and assistance, if they are so inclined. FDR was so inclined, and set up his brain trust. Our current President… not so much. He was the “Decider.” Anyway, it’s not as if a President Sarah Palin would be making all the tough calls without (potentially) some of the greatest advice available to a political leader. She would simply be the one getting all the credit (and blame) for the decisions made in her name.

No, what scares me about Palin is her Christianity, and since I myself am a Christian, that statement probably confuses people who know me. Allow me to explain.

My Christian belief system is heavily influenced by Bible prophecy, especially those prophecies concerned with events at the so-called “end times,” also known as “last day events.” The prophecies in the Biblical books of Daniel and Revelation have much to say about the events surrounding the second advent of Christ, and one line of prophecy predicts that the United States will be pivotal in setting up a worldwide religious movement which ends up restricting the religious liberty of citizens who refuse to line up behind its efforts to enforce a certain kind of worship.

My scoffing fellow Christian citizens may think that religious persecution could never happen on American soil, but I remind you that persecution has a long history on this continent. I thank God that the framers of the Constitution learned the lessons from the Massachusetts Bay and Rhode Island colonies. Although Massachusetts Bay was established with Christian principles in mind by Puritans eager for religious liberty, it was a persecuting power to anyone who dared attempt to worship God differently than their leaders commanded. Roger Williams set up Rhode Island colony to be a haven of religious liberty, creating the freedom of conscience only possible by refusing to set up an official state religion or to allow any church to meddle in the affairs of civil governance. By the time it was necessary to create a nation from those colonies, Americans had rejected the Massachusetts model of church and state connectedness, and, especially in the Bill of Rights, enshrined the Rhode Island model of complete separation of church and state.

The First Amendment is the genius of American rule of law. And because of this wealth of religious autonomy enjoyed by Americans, my spiritual forefathers (the founders of the Advent movement and the Seventh-day Adventist Church) were able to freely teach the Bible prophecies which predict that, contrary to our beloved Law of the Land, someday this country would sacrifice religious liberty for the sake of some future crisis. This country has never lacked for crisis, and one only has to consult the stock market these days for fresh sources of panic.

The book of Daniel predicted the rise and fall of many empires which are now long gone, but also a religious power which would rise from the ashes of the Roman Empire and has indeed become the most visible and politically powerful segment of modern Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church and its leadership, the Papacy, were a bloodthirsty persecuting power during the Dark Ages. The book of Revelation teaches that someday the now dormant and docile persecuting Church will take up the sword again, bolstered by the religious and political authority of the gem of the New World, the United States.

Since the religion most commonly practiced within the United States has always been Christianity, it has always seemed to me that the prophecy in Revelation 12, 13, and 14 foresees a time when this country’s leadership will be taken over by Christian politicians who share a fundamentalist worldview with the many voters who sweep them into office and then somewhat mindlessly allow them to erode away the religious and civil liberties which made this country a uniquely free society. Sarah Palin, of all the four candidates (Presidential and VP), is the most likely to be that fundamentalist leader.

Most Presidents of this country have been church-going Christians. But very few have dared to make their religious faith a prominent part of their political agenda; this is wise, since the First Amendment so forcefully warns us away from institutionalizing any religion, and a President embodies in their person the very institution of the Executive Branch of our government. Lately, though, more Christian voters have willingly taken on the political agendas of their religious leaders, and of organizations like Focus on the Family, the Heritage Foundation, the Discovery Institute, and the Republican Party itself, which more and more looks and behaves much like a Christian institution. The twin issues, abortion and homosexuality, are the deciding factors for many Christians when it comes to deciding which political organizations to support or be influenced by.

And so the Republican candidates this election include Sarah Palin, a born-again believer from the Pentecostal and charismatic end of the Christian spectrum. She has strong ties to the popular and explosively growing Third Wave and dominionist movements in fundamentalist Christianity. These movements promote a very politicized set of beliefs and fervently pray, and work, and vote, for the Christian politicians they bless and send into campaigns in order to transform nations and other political entities all over the world into Christian “dominions.” They practice a complex form of spiritual warfare, battling demons at many levels which they perceive to be the barriers preventing Catholics, Jews, atheists, other Protestants, etc., from joining their particular movement.

The scary part of all this is what the media has not been bothering to find out regarding how much Palin is likely to be influenced by this extremely motivated, and fiercely political group of power-hungry Christians. One website dedicated to documenting these very questions is called Talk To Action. I recommend to all that you spend time studying their findings before you vote.

Barack Obama is a Christian, (not a Muslim, as the Republican rumor-mill has successfully gotten many of their flock to believe), and thus shares in this potentiality whereby he could be influenced by Christians in this country to do similarly damaging things to religious liberty. He just doesn’t seem to be as openly and obviously beholden to his spiritual mentors as is Palin; he seems more interested in political solutions than religious ones. And that makes good sense to me, in light of the wall of separation between church and state that we should preserve and defend to the end.

As an academic and an intellectual person (as most teachers, I suppose, are), I am drawn to Obama’s thoughtful, intelligent approach to tough issues. When others were complaining about his hesitation to make bold campaign pronouncements, I was respecting his sense of reserve, knowing that all the campaign rhetoric that gets you elected amounts to little more than access to a seat at that table where many, many others are also empowered to wrangle with you over the pressing problems of the moment. I would much rather have someone at that table who has the skills to unite, to compromise, to imagine solutions to problems from the perspective of one who has advocated for the neediest in the community (which is what his years as a community organizer gave him), than one who has only been a chief executive (mayor, governor) and who has mainly dealt with the needs of the least needy in the community (oil companies doing business in Palin’s Alaska).

Ultimately, I really don’t care who wins on Tuesday. Part of me wants my Lord to hasten His coming and take us home to heaven, and knowing that the prophetic events which Palin is very likely to set in motion makes me a little excited at the prospect of the end coming that much sooner, rather than later. But another part of me always wishes for the best for my home and country, for the sake of my family and the work God gave my church that remains so very unfinished, and thus I also hope for a little more time, more time to pray and work and watch my daughters grow up in a country they haven’t yet seen the best of.

Benevolent Dictator

If the dictator is perfectly benevolent and infinitely wise, then dictatorship is to be preferred over democracy.

If the dictator rules in a laissez-faire fashion regarding his subjects’ free moral agency, no one would rebel against him; there would be no motive for revolutionary regime change.

If the dictator had omnipotent power, but only ever chose to use it to empower his subjects to pursue their own passions, loves, and happiness, guiding and guarding them from all dangers without and within, then democracy would be a ridiculous suggestion.

This type of dictatorship describes the political reality described in the biblical pre-fall and post-millennium universe. Here in the present, inside this brief window of time, within the sin vaccination probationary era, there exist a few God-friendly governments. This writer would identify them as democratic republics with strong socialist sympathies. Examples would include the post WWII, pre-Reagan United States of America, and many of the current members of the European Union, notably Norway, France, and Sweden. These nations are God-friendly because they have made the sincere attempt to maintain for their society the values of religious liberty and social justice.
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Infragard

There are prophecies in the Bible which indicate that a time is coming in which powerful religio-political forces will persecute a non-conformist minority, attempting to intimidate them into submission, and eventually using deadly force against them. I agree with my Seventh-day Adventist Church in its application of one such prophecy to the United States government. The prophecy has been studied in this respect for over 100 years, comparing the machinations of the Federal Government with the words of the Bible. The Book of Revelation contains one such prophecy:

Revelation 13:15-17, “He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark.

This prophecy connects the power of commerce “buy or sell” with the power to exert deadly force. The introduction of digital banking, check-cards, and identification numbers was a first step toward the ability to bar access to commerce to hand-picked members of the population. To my mind, however, the deadly force aspect was vague; I couldn’t see yet how a large number of American citizens could be militarized and authorized to use lethal force against their fellow Americans. Then the following story was told on my local Pacifica radio station, and I sat there stunned as I listened to it, the implications of it creating a sick feeling in my stomach.

The FBI is partnering with businesses ostensibly to help guard our nation’s economic infrastructure from terrorist threats, but in so doing is granting business leaders the right to the prosecution-free use of deadly force when martial law is declared.
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Republicans Christianizing History

House Republicans are trying to pass a bill that establishes the United States as a Christian nation. Their tactic is to rewrite the early history of our nation to look like it was a band of Christian pilgrims carving out a new empire of Christendom in the New World. Or something.

The Nation article has all the goods:

Here is an event I have no intention of honoring: American Religious History Week. OK, it’s not official yet. But it is spelled out as Resolution 888 in the bowels of a House committee, sponsored by Republican Congressman Randy Forbes and backed by thirty-one other Representatives. This is an insidious attempt by the radical Christian right to rewrite American history, to turn the founding fathers from deists into Christian fundamentalists, to proclaim us officially to be a Christian nation. If you want to know why Mike Huckabee is dangerous, why his brand of right-wing Christian populism is so frightening, you should read this resolution.Sent to me by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the resolution has passages like this: “Whereas political scientists have documented that the most frequently-cited source in the political period known as The Founding Era was the Bible” and “Whereas the United States Supreme Court has declared throughout the course of our Nation’s history that the United States is ‘a Christian country’, ‘a Christian nation’, ‘a Christian people’, ‘a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being’ and that ‘we cannot read into the Bill of Rights a philosophy of hostility to religion….’”

The resolution is staggering for its sheer volume of falsehoods about our history, our system of government and our democracy. It asserts that Thomas Jefferson “urged local governments to make land available specifically for Christian purposes, provided Federal funding for missionary work among Indian tribes, and declared that religious schools would receive ‘the patronage of the government.’” There are seventy-six preambular clauses like these, leading up to four resolution clauses, the third of which states that the House “rejects, in the strongest possible terms, any effort to remove, obscure, or purposely omit such history from our Nation’s public buildings and educational resources.”

“House Resolution 888 is perhaps the most disgraceful, shocking and tragic example yet of the pernicious and pervasive pattern and practice of the unconstitutional rape of our bedrock American citizens’ religious freedoms by the fundamentalist Christian right,” says Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and a former White House counsel for President Reagan.

The resolution may never work its way out of committee, and even if it does, it may never be passed. But it is important because it expresses an increasingly influential ideology. It underlies the ideological appeal of the Huckabee campaign, however adroitly the Republican candidate dodges these issues when speaking to the general public. “I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ,” Huckabee told a Baptist convention in 1998. He assured the crowd that he had not entered politics “because I thought government had a better answer. I got into

politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.” And this ideology, as illustrated by Mitt Romney’s coded appeal to Christian fundamentalists when giving his recent Texas speech on faith, or even John McCain’s humbling trip to Liberty University, has a powerful pull on Republican candidates.

I saw a persistent rewriting of history in numerous Christian history textbooks, used by hundreds of thousands of children, when I wrote American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. The revisionists take a minor historical event–in the case of the missionaries, drawing from very rare decisions to provide funds for mission schools or the building of a church on Indian lands–and use it to create a false portrait of a Christian nation. The resolution asserts that the Fourth of July was designed as a Christian holiday, and that in 1977 Congress authorized that Bibles be “printed under their care” and imported for dissemination to the American public. Congress never imported Bibles. But facts matter little.

It is a mistake, despite the seeming implosion of the Republican Party, to count these people out. The Christian radicals have, as the Huckabee candidacy illustrates, broken free from the fetters of their corporate and neocon handlers. They have unleashed a frightening populism that, in the event of an economic meltdown or period of instability, could see the movement ride the wave of a massive right-wing backlash. So when you get tired of the cute sound bites that constitute most coverage of these campaigns, pull out this resolution to remind yourself that we are playing with dynamite, that unless we begin to re-enfranchise tens of millions of Americans–and this means economically–back into the mainstream, unless we again give our workers the chance to earn a living wage, we will fail to blunt this movement and could well fall victim to it.

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/hedges
Christianizing US History

by CHRIS HEDGES

[from the January 28, 2008 issue]

War is Theft

“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).

Mitt Romney on Religion

UPDATE DECEMBER 16, 2007:
Two websites to help you analyze the Republican Party’s love affair with the Christian fundamentalist electorate:

1. theocracywatch.org
2. onlinejournal.com

And the online edition of Liberty Magazine, the news journal of the Religious Liberty department of my own Seventh-day Adventist denomination:

libertymagazine.org

_________________________________________
UPDATE DECEMBER 15, 2007:

This is the feeling of more and more in the Republican Party: Christianity is better than other religions.

_________________________________________
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:

1. “Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom.”
2. “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.

Communities United vs Individuals Divided

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.

Indigenous People’s Day

It’s indigenous people’s day.

Private property is an unknown, unused doctrine in the cultures of indigenous peoples. Common land, available and accessible to all, for all survival and spiritual needs, extended virtually to the door flap of a family’s tent.

Everyone “owned” all the land and its resources, and no one owned any subdivision of it.

The land is sacred.

U. C. Berkeley taking ownership of the physical remains of ancient Indian ancestors is typical of the clash of cultures that began when the first capitalist/ownership society entered their newest market– the homeland of Native Americans. That invasion and occupation blew into this continent without so much as a nod toward the sacredness of the land.

Five hundred years later, the invaders are waking up to the globally-changing power of the pollution their disregard for the land’s sacredness has unleashed, and soon we will hear from all of their descendants a collective, “Oops!”

But it will be too late by then to do anything about it, except regret that the original invasion force and the colonies behind them did not listen to the Native sons and daughters of this continent.

If God had a plan in bringing greed-driven people (allowing that not all of them were greed-driven, although they did universally scorn the native philosophies and lifestyles) to this American continent, I am guessing that it was something like this:

1. By the 1400s AD He saw that capitalist greed was getting powerful enough to lead to the human global self-destruction we face today.
2. So He puts the wanderlust into the explorers.
3. Soon white capitalists are face to face with brown americans.
4. The plan may have been: the indigenous people had (have!) critical lessons to teach capitalists about life in a resource-rich land.

• Lesson One: Don’t Pollute It! Ever! Or it will come back to bite you!
• Lesson Two: Don’t ever forget Lesson One!
• Lesson Three: Don’t be so greedy.

Well, we see how well that plan went, no thanks to the blindness and stupidity of greed.

And now we celebrate “Columbus Day.”

Columbus Day is such an offensive concept. This kind of celebration or memorial is like Germany creating a national holiday called Hitler Day. The extermination of indigenous peoples in America affected millions more families than did the Nazi Holocaust, which well deserves to be remembered without celebration but rather sober reflection on the lessons humanity stubbornly refuses to learn. But the fact that the European Holocaust of Indigenous People even happened, never mind that it was more tragic even than Hitler’s, is a non-fact. That means that we cannot know it. We cannot allow ourselves to know it, to teach it, to admit it.

To admit the wrongs of Western Civilization perpetrated upon indigenous peoples here, or anywhere else, would force the kind of introspection and reparations which would permanently change that Civilization. I would argue that the change would be a welcome improvement, making us in fact more civilized, and allowing the kind of progress and growth that the world desperately craves. Conservatives, capitalists, and corporatists (those who control the flow of facts to the masses, who determine what is and is not allowed on the table for discussion, who own the media and pull the strings of political power) cannot allow that change, and will not ever peacefully consent to it.

Restitution to indigenous peoples would involve a very expensive re-alignment of land ownership. The cost would be that gap between the owner class and all other classes would disappear overnight. And though, as I contend, that change would result in the long-term survival of our American culture, our ability to continue as a player on the world stage, and to continue to enjoy generations of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, nevertheless it remains a change too revolutionary to even enter the imagination of most Americans.

Can you talk about it without feeling threatened?

Jesus Is All About Free Will

My conclusions about Christ, based on writings about him that I’ve been reading for the last 20-odd years, are that He created the human race with free will built right in. He did that in order that the love he wanted to share with us would be genuine and not forced (force being evidently incompatible with love). He seems to be the type of person who is all about love, learning, relationships, growth, and creativity, and not so interested in force, violence, death, destruction, or “power trips.” Oddly enough, though, very many who look into what he is all about don’t “get” him.

It seems that the human race was not the only creation of his; in fact a previously created species, which also had free will, has apparently fallen prey to the weakness that free will itself contains, namely power-addiction. A free moral agent can by the nature of free will obviously choose to do whatever it wants at any time; given that possibility, it was a statistical inevitability that a created agent would at some point make a self-destructive choice.

I’m sure he knew about the risks and weaknesses of free will before he let creatures loose in the universe who were vulnerable to the abuse of choice; at any rate, he seems to have had a contingency plan all along for healing those whose addiction to self-aggrandizement is not too far gone as to be beyond help. Incredibly, he has never forced anyone of his creatures human or animal to do anything against their will. He has chosen instead to give humans a very powerful set of sensory tools, a very high-order computational organic super-computer brain, and a recorded history of events to compare their current on-going experiences against.

Unfortunately, the first owners of human DNA totally screwed up the strains available to us by making early on some very self-destructive choices. And so here and now so many generations down the pipeline, our senses and brains have all they can manage to not be distracted by the constant chaos of our environment, which through unfortunate choices we ourselves are seriously damaging. It’s hard to think! Let alone make any kind of meaningful sense out of the crazy stuff that a world full of free moral agents all power-addicted and self-destructive and creative, and silly, and capable of the most beautiful profound statements about life, the universe, and everything!

He has entered into the human reality, the human home planet, even the human skin. He has had it all recorded with a pretty high degree of accuracy. And he has carefully availed himself of key opportunities to personally speak to various writers he hand-picked for their ability to relate to their readers. I think he was careful about that because he is so not about using force, and yet when he shows up the impact upon their senses he makes really blows them away. It must be mind-blowing to hear a word from God, especially when he utters some profound truth about yourself.

Given all of that, what are you going to do with Jesus?