Tagged: love

One Teeny, Tiny Flaw

I remember catching my mom in a bookstore aisle, kind of tucked away once. The book she was reading was self-help for “control freaks”. Understand, then, that she was the control freak in our family, and my sense of the encounter was that she was embarrassed that her son had seen that maybe she didn’t want to be.

I barely need to repeat the following, but for the unfaithful readers, please accept without question that my wife isn’t in love with yours truly anymore.

Books actually play a pivotal role in the drama, albeit in an unpredictable way. One of her main complaints to me, about my way of life, is that all my book reading does not lead to more money.

For my part, one of my main “asks” of her is that she stop reading the latest Christian bestselling “health and wealth” sermon transcripts masquerading as books. And truthfully, I don’t care that she reads them, but I would like her to read, at least some of the time, real books—not “The Secret” part 73. I mean even pulp fiction or Louis L’Amour or whatever is flying off the grocery store shelves these days.

This last time home, I saw an unfamiliar book stacked upon her bible called something like, “How to Live With A Manipulative Husband”.

Do you see the problem, folks? It’s easy to miss, so I understand if you don’t.

As for me, I am seriously considering putting out a best seller for us husbands. What do you say?

The title will be, “How to Smarten Up Your Wife AND Get Her to Stop Buying Crap.” Or maybe, “How to Make Your Wife Understand That She Doesn’t Need Makeup and Wigs Just Because All Other Women Wear Them.”

This might need to be a series, actually.

Another could be, “How to Live with a Woman Who, as It Turns Out, Is an Immature Child Who Lacks the Ability to Reason.”

Then there could be one on, “When Your Wife Married You, But Listens to Every Other Human Being Who Has Ever Uttered Speech Sounds Instead.”

The capstone, and I mean Fifty Shades of Grey success, will, of course, be, “How to Actually Get Your Wife to Stop Complaining and Be Happy.”

Men of the blogosphere, I’ve got you pegged as less than 10% of my readership. But what say you? Would you pay to unlock these secrets?

Poverty Can Be Immoral

As I see it, there are two, maybe three, ways to live in poverty.

Firstly, you can be grateful for what you have. This would be the Biblical and wise posture.

Secondly, you could (though I can’t think of anyone like this) remain neutral or ambivalent towards your condition. Asking for nothing more, expecting nothing more, and receiving nothing more. Again, this doesn’t seem to be a real posture, but I am not willing to rule it out.

Thirdly, you can believe that your impoverished condition is somehow not your fault. The flip side of this posture being that you believe you deserve and are worth more material good than you currently possess. This posture, then, is immoral poverty. It is immoral, not merely because it is unbiblical, but because it is rooted in untruth. Put plainly, you will not find an immorally poor individual who isn’t living a life of wild lies. Lies permeate their life like wetness permeates water. They are soaked in lies.

(Take a breath.)

Faithful Reader: Do not mistake the above for useful information. It is trivial observation based on this morning’s fight with my lying wife. Also indicative that the observation is useless is the following: There is nothing that can be done with these people. Their immorality is complete and airtight. They live within a perfectly logical netherworld. There is no prayer available to us that isn’t already floating to the heavens. There is no god capable of changing their behavior, capable of rescue. There is no help to be found on the mountains for this problem.

How does one live alongside such people? It can only be accomplished through exceedingly particular, nuanced, and ultimately discrete analysis of cause and effect.

That, then, is your wisdom for this Choosday, as Twain’s Jim utters it—which calls to mind another big assist: books.

On “The Lesser Light to Rule the Night” (Artemis II Splashdown around 8pm EST/6pm MST)

In only a few hours, around 8pm EST (6pm MST) the Artemis II astronauts will return to Earth. To be clear, they journeyed around the moon.

Christians in America and the other countries to whom American missionaries have fervently spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ have long associated the moon with Genesis 1:16’s “lesser light to rule the night”. This appears reasonable in the immediate context of, “So God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and also the stars.” But when we expand out to the entire creation account, say, Genesis 1:1–2:3, the moon that Artemis II just traveled to cannot be the “lesser light to rule the night”.

This is not because there is some other “lesser light” which the Genesis writer had in mind or had in view back then. Nor is it because the Genesis writer invented the concept that his god placed two lights in the sky.

The reason we know that the moon that Artemis II traveled to is not the “lesser light” is because the Genesis author demonstrably had no awareness of the moon’s physical reality.

To start, and this is softball or elementary level knowledge, the moon isn’t a light anymore than a mirror is a light. The moon and mirror are reflections of the light emanating from a proper light source.

Secondly, the moon (even from what Moses and peers could see) was present in what we call phases, to include “new moon” (or no visible moon at night) and full moons during the day.

Any child can be shown these two facts on any day and demonstrate that they understand, no different than they can name and meaningfully distinguish trees from driveways. (To be sure, a child can understand the moon is a mirror—has a dark side—and that the moon is visible when it is not night and not visible when it is night.)

Assuming that you, faithful reader, understand these two facts about the moon, the one that Artemis II just traveled to, then you now have a sure foundation from which to understand, as early generations of Jews/Israelites did, the creation account recorded in Genesis and referenced elsewhere in the library that we call the Bible.

This is not about creationists vs evolutionists or any iteration of that debate. It isn’t about 6-day creation or intelligent design.

I am sharing a simple, incontrovertible set of facts from which any Artemis II watching American can undergird their interpretation of scripture.

Moses didn’t understand what we call physics. It is untenable, baseless, and rigid stubbornness to suggest Yahweh inspired him to write words which would so easily prove laughably inaccurate. Instead, the divinely inspired words of Moses recorded in Genesis (and elsewhere) infallibly inform us who (the real) god is and what he is like.

The answer to any question your mind develops is “read more”, not “become inflexible”.


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The Astronaut is just as Wrong as the Politician

Deuteronomy 6:5 says “You shall love Yahweh (the LORD) your god…”

In Mark 12:30 after Jesus is asked a question, he says, “You shall love the lord your god…”

Talerico and Glover, to the undulating praise of their respective bases, both drop the specificity of the commands. Why? Do they not know their bible?

Obviously Talerico is out for destruction and will misuse and abuse any words from any writer as he goes about accomplishing his quest. Despite his claims to the contrary, the Bible books and their authors are not sacred or special to Talerico.

Glover is a different story.

For my part, I imagine that he feels some sense of “people are actually listening to me!” and for some reason, this translates to “…so I better not push them away!” (as it does to so many pastors who have 15-min of fame).

But (according to the library that we call “the Bible”) the blood of Jesus matters, which means the time he spent on earth matters, which means the other people alive with him mattered, which means the previous people who lived matter, which means that Moses’ words matter in their totality.

Moses was preaching Yahweh, not god. It would have been confusing (it still is confusing) if Moses told a bunch of prone-to-idolatry people, “Love god”. The response to this exhortation, back then and today, should always be, “Which god?”

For his part, Jesus was talking to a scribe, which we can reasonably presume means literate man, and Jesus includes the full phrase from Moses, “the lord your god.”

It is not Biblical Christianity to read scripture and assume that because of the new and singular demonstration of Yahweh’s all-powerful status in the resurrection of his son Jesus the competition for “who is god” is over in the lives of us mortals.

Does Grover not know this? I don’t know. What I do know is it is obviously distasteful to push people away. And yet, the core and empowering belief and living hope of Christianity is the resurrected Christ Jesus (son of Yahweh). However, the fact that there is a specific and easily namable hope and belief of a religion does not prevent their from being many, many anti-Christ’s who disagree and don’t care about the belief.

The question for you is, “If you don’t quote scripture accurately, what are you even quoting?”

Quote it accurately, I say. Because, in a world of confusion and sin, using accurate quotations indirectly (indirect because you’re honoring the precise words of another instead of thinking their words don’t matter—as if all we care about is some ethereal, abstract concept) it indirectly conveys to the audience that you matter. And if you matter, they matter.

Life isn’t a simulation. Life isn’t a game. And more life is the goal. And as Paul wrote, “…if you confess with your mouth Jesus as lord (Yahweh/trinity talk) and believe in your heart that god (Yahweh) raised him from the dead you will be saved (Romans 10:9),” is the only way to get eternal life.

The Word (And Idea) “Incompatible” Is Impotent. Please Stop Using It.

The single most important political issue of our day is removing Islam from the USA and the West in general (if not removing it from the face of the earth, vis-a-vis all the gods and religions that currently make up the “myth” section of libraries and bookstores, Zeus, Ares etc).

I freely confess that it is difficult to tell how things are going. Once the algorithm knows what you’re interested in, the entire world seems to revolve around that content. But I have been paying close attention to Islam’s spread since 2015ish and recently even the major players have been echoing the above position of mine.

The trending strategy, which I believe is totally uncoordinated, seems to be, “We use the word ‘incompatible’ because it is neutral.”

That is a powerless strategy. Don’t get me wrong, any strategy that works is fine by me. But there is something to be said for truly stating the case.

The case against Islam: Islam is stupid.

Many other religions, not all, are likewise stupid. But the obvious difference in their adherent’s twin categories of (1) assimilation and (2) non-calls for jihad make these other religions relatively harmless.

Just the same, the problem is not that Islam is incompatible with the West or the USA. The problem is, at face value, Islam is stupid. The god of the Bible, not Yahweh, not Jesus, not the Holy Spirit, did not show up to anyone in a cave and issue a new law that canceled the current law.

How do I know? Because it’s a stupid idea!

Did the Israelite god have a grand plan to send his son as a man-god to die? And if so, is that good news? Yes and yes.

How do I know? Because it is a brilliant idea!

Do you see how you feel right now? Even when I write it, I find this description of “Christianity is brilliant” to be repulsive. For some reason, to admit that something we want to believe (I can have eternal life in the best sense of the word “life”) is something brilliant just doesn’t land. As if there is something inherently stupid about “life” and something inherently bad about “brilliant” ideas.

And yet, to be clear: to admit biblical Christianity (originalist/orthodox/not-Talirico-progressive-style) is brilliant does not mean it was invented. Brilliant just means brilliant. And stupid means stupid.

And Islam is stupid. America, on the other hand, is on the leading edge of the most brilliant civilization mankind has developed to date. And brilliant civilizations do not welcome stupid ideas, especially one as stupid as Islam.

On the Ignorant’s Religion

I’m going to keep this short for today. But I need to jot down some thoughts for future reference.

For a long time now the question, “What precisely does the general claim, ‘religion is accepted and believed more readily by ignorant people’ mean?” has plagued me. My approach to answering the question has been to study the history, chronologically and conceptually, of math with an eye for what are the non-math-ers (“I’m not good at math” adherents) actually doing with their mind throughout life. Simultaneously, I have also been digging deep into what the more ignorant “Christians” believe.

Two conclusions:

Firstly, I now define math as the unbounded study of absolute obedience.

Secondly, the ignorant “believers” can hardly be called such. Part of the very definition of “ignorance”, I am convinced, is an absolute freedom of word use. For the ignorant, there is no truth. There is no consistency. There is no coherence. There is no alignment, no integrity. The ignorant cannot possibly be labeled as religious or even holding a worldview at all. The ignorant are quite literally sheep, being led astray by who knows what, for who knows how long, before another thoughtless route is taken.

In short, the problem of religion is not that it somehow exists as some inherent trait or behavior of the ignorant. The problem of religion is ignorance. Put inversely, if you find yourself to be religious, your main task is education. And, similar to math, education requires consistency, coherence, and obedience. Most of all, education requires truth.

Everyone Is Christian

Did you know? I had no idea.

But, apparently, it took the enforcement arm of the Law’s killing only two people for the entire world to assert Jesus Christ as all-powerful being and ruler of the time-space universe.

I’m also not sure if I should welcome them or they should welcome me.

“Let him take your garment also.”

A tip for the communists: your favorite verse for the current scene in Minnesota is “And if anyone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your garment also.”

That’s much more difficult teaching for the White Christian Nationalists to deal with than the temple cleansing incident.

You’re welcome.

What Fascism Looks Like When Carried Out By Mankind

Faithful readers and new readers alike: The point of sharing lists of how many deportations past presidents and administrations carried out is not the illustration that both political parties have done what Trump is doing. Neither are the lists particularly indicative of the character of past politicians. In other words, it isn’t news that politicians change their policies or blatantly lie at times.

The point of the lists is to definitively give absolutely conclusive and damning evidence that Trump and his administration are not behaving like fascists while they enforce the nation’s—every nation’s—established Laws.

For a glimpse of fascism, read this blurb from back in October of 1938. Pay careful attention to the twin facts regarding there being (a) a new agreement and (b) no protection.

To be sure: Trump et al are not enforcing some new law. And there is no law (being enforced or left unenforced) in which protection is withheld or unconsidered.

Current events across the land are not evidence of fascism. Not even close.