Tuesday, January 28, 2014

10 "Shocking Facts" - Really?

If this isn't the saddest bunch of left-wing/anarchist drivel.  This "share me" deal that is circulating on Facebook is an inverse manifesto for vegan progressive socialist anarchism. Look hard at what the "logical" response to all of these points are. While some of them are good things, notably the ones that represent conditions in heaven and the New Earth with sin well and truly gone, some lead toward an acceptance of some sinister principles.  Let me take them point by point:

(We prioritize money over......)  This is a broad statement and demonstrable untrue. Money for most of us is a tool whereby we obtain food, clean water, and a healthy place to raise our families. Without a viable way to exchange our labor for things we need, we regress to a hunter gather society, every man for himself, short miserably lifespans and violence at the hands of those not clever enough to grow/gather their own food, build shelter or figure out how to keep their homes clean and disease free. It's worded to make us feel guilty for the sins of the thugs and bullies of the world who do exploit people except nowadays they use money instead of simply murdering us with swords and clubs and taking our goods away.  At least we have lawyers these days to look out for us. I'd hate to see it go back to the club thing.

(Economic trading system that facilitates death...)  Please!  Yes, there are wars, and there are those who profit by keeping those wars going.  That's by no means "we".  And if they weren't providing guns and rockets, the same folk would be going at each other with clubs and spears.  The nations supported by that evil economic trading system also do intervene to try and stop the genocide on occasion (admittedly not often enough). What this writer doesn't point out is that the reason the US doesn't intervene in places like Rwanda, Chad and the Sudan where genocide is taking place is because people like this writer would raise blue bloody hell if they did so we only wind up going to war in places where someone else has provided them with enough money to get a lot of weapons that threaten us. We are forced by the peacenik faction to hunt only lions and to leave off protecting the sheep from the foxes.  Do away with the "trading system" and adopt, say, the socialist/communist system and all economic decisions are put in the hands of a handful of elite "leaders". Historically, doing away with capitalism has only resulted in a loss of motivation NOT to murder your customers en masse.

(We divide the land)  This is a thinly disguised appeal for the state-owns-everything (communist) model.  You work for the state, where the state wants you to, making what the state thinks is fair while enjoying substandard food, clothing, shelter, entertainment and healthcare in a polluted cesspool of an environment (ask the former Soviets what happened to the Aral Sea (hint - it went missing). If we have no land that is ours, then we have no security. We can be thrown off our land and out of our homes anytime someone more powerful (like the state) wants to. What a lovely model for a society of all homeless citizens.

(We call some people soldiers...)
Fine, let's fire all the soldiers, stand down the military and that will make everything good....right up until the roving bands of thugs wipe out your town and indulge in a little freelance pillage, rape and murder.

(Animals)  We all become Vegans.  And all those, now useless animals out there consuming food that we have no use for?  Turn them loose to graze in people's yards and farmers' fields? Slaughter them all now that they are useless?  Universal veganism would throw the economy and the eco-system into a death spiral. You may not like it, but there are more cows and chickens in this country than there are people and what do you do with all those corpses?

(We send children to school)  What's she saying?  That we should stop teaching our kids.  Hey, the German school system is an idea introduced in the early 1900s by progressives who wished to use it to fill kids heads with socialist propaganda. They weren't successful at first, but the school system has become more "progressive" with each generation. I'd love to see that changed.

(We impose financial pressures on parents)
  That, my dear, is a direct result of, not financial pressure, but social pressure applied by the rising feminist/progressive movement. We lower Dad's salary so women make equal pay which forces women to join the workforce to keep up.  It's social pressure that pushed women into the workplace, brought upon women by and large by people who vote to the left, support liberal causes and demand that you keep up with the latest fashions, and by feminists who made housewives and mothers feel ashamed because they don't have a career! So we've reshaped the economy where it takes two incomes to survive and virtually eliminated the wife and mother career track altogether.

(Thousands of religions...) This is presented by a bad thing - the old BS about how religion causes all our troubles.  They keep saying this hoping we'll believe it.  The problem is history. The societies which were officially religion-free over the past century committed all the genocide, killing hundreds of millions without any excuse of religion for it - their only excuse being that it was done for "the greater good".  One of the hazards of casting aside religious morality.

(Love and compassion are mocked?)  By whom. We honor those who protect our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness which provide the setting for us to show love and compassion to our fellow humans. If the we is the U.S. we show more compassion toward our fellow man than any country on the planet. Our government gives billions to struggling nations. Our people (mostly Christians) give even more than the government does of our own free will and out of our own pockets.

(Anyone with a really useful invention)  She wants to get rid of patents. In other words, you may work for years and years to create a new and useful thing. On the day someone sees it, they may take your idea from you and if they have more money to promote it and sell it, you are flat out of luck. This person who wants to bring down the economic system apparently wants to return it to a feudal system where the guy with the most bucks and the biggest set of swords can take the fruits of your labor and not pay you a dime for it.

This manifesto is a ludicrous mess - the ravings of someone who believes in magical unicorns and the perfectibility of man.  It would no more give us a "free" world than resurrecting Atilla the Hun would give us a peaceful Eastern Europe.

I believe man is corrupt, held in check only by good people who band together to protect the rights and freedoms of all, by a self-governing economic system that protects the right to individual property, both physical and intellectual as well as to the fruits of their own labor. Evil must be held in check by strong, brave people who stand on the walls to protect us all from the savages that live in our world and would destroy us to take from us what they are too lazy or ignorant to make for themselves.

All that the author of this blather wants will be available when Christ removes the good folk and leaves the bad behind. After they destroy the world and themselves with it, we'll be the ones to clean it up and replant and rebuild.  THEN, we'll get peace and love and compassion. Soldiers will be gone. No more taxes, no more power hungry madmen, no more hate, fear or misery.  The laws and social systems we create are to protect us, not from "WE" who might actually feel a little guilt for doing all the things in this manifesto, but from those who feel no guilt for lying, stealing, greed, murder, exploitation and bullying.

No application of guilt of the sort the Free World Manifesto above represents will in any way be effective at changing the behavior of someone who has chosen to do evil. They will blow you off as a joke. But hey, at least you FEEL like you've done your bit for saving the world.

Just sayin'

Tom

Monday, January 6, 2014

Why Does God Only Answer Some Prayers

USA Today photo of  'Nearly Homeless Nick'.
This USA Today story garnered the usual complaints that God can't be real because he only saved the one homeless guy and not the others. This young man's family spotted him in the photograph and hurried to his side, got him to a hospital and is trying to get him some help. When the family called it a "miracle and answer to prayer", however, the usual crowd of angry atheists swarmed the comment section of the article.

"God cures one person of cancer and then kills thousands of others," as one wag put it. "It's not fair for God to rescue one homeless guy and leave the others in the gutter. It's a familiar argument used by both the devil and progressive socialists to argue for a more structured solution to the problem of evil. Both solutions give us a utopian workers paradise that is neither a paradise nor a utopia.

It always amazes me how people who want nothing to do with God will complain that He doesn't solve their and everyone else's problems for them. Rather like the disrespectful child who wants nothing to do with his parents and then is surprised when they stop paying his car note and ask him to move out of the basement.

God placed us here and gave us a tremendous gift - free will. Without it we'd be simple animals running on instinct or, perhaps, some kind of obedient robots. God knew it could all go wrong when He gave it to us. He knew the risk from the beginning, but, apparently, God felt that we were worth the risk and the eventual cost of His son to save us. People who want nothing to do with God often argue that He cannot exist simply because He doesn't fix their personal problems for them or end war and sickness for everyone. Nick's story in the USA Today article differed from that of some of the other homeless guys in one key way that explains the rather different outcome to the story. He had a family praying hard for him.

Unless you know the story of the other homeless guys that some commentators complained weren't rescued, you can't tell whether God was being "fair" or not. If someone chooses to live on the street, then God is not like some oppressive government. He doesn't round them up and load them in a paddy wagon and take them someplace "safe" (usually someplace with bars on the windows) for their own good. God doesn't force you to do His will by rescuing you against your own will. If you tell God you want no part of Him, then it's not terribly fair to complain that He does so once you've discovered he has left you on your own resources.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'" 

And yes, I know God doesn't always answer prayers the way we think he ought to - even prayers of those who serve him devotedly. There's a story in scripture that speaks to that. God told King Hezekiah he should get his affairs in order because his death was coming soon. Hezekiah prayed and prayed for his life to be extended and God finally relented and gave him 15 more years. During that time he had a son who would succeed him and become the most evil king Israel ever had. Had Hezekiah gone ahead and died that young man would never have been born. Thus, not every death is a bad thing, even your own. A follower of God lives for what he shall be in eternity, not for what he can wrest out of this world. Here we are preparing for that life that is to follow.  

Faith is all about trusting that God really does know what he is doing.  Within that framework, God's miraculous intervention or even his nonintervention makes perfect sense. That we might not understand the reason for it, is simply the limitation of our human understanding. After all, we cannot see all the consequences of any action. Our job is to choose to do what is right based on the knowledge we have and to stand for the right though the heavens fall around us.

We followers of God thank Him for when He gives us good things and even things that seem not so good. We thank Him even when things appear to be bad because we know that with God all things work together for good to them who follow Him even though we may not understand how those things can possibly be good while they are happening to us.

It's all about choice in the end and choices have consequences. Whether you think that's "fair" or not, is immaterial to the cold hard universe (or God). Who or whatever is responsible for your existence has seen fit to give you a nice warm, wet, food laden and oxygenated planet to live on against all the odds against it that such a perfect place would even exist in the first place. Given your situation, you have quite an abundance of blessings to start out with and you've been given the ability to choose which you wish to accept and which to reject.


But remember this. Along with the right to choose, comes the responsibility for your choices.

Just sayin'

(c) 2013 by Tom King

Friday, January 3, 2014

There You Go Again.....The Paulestinians Stretch Another Conspiracy Theory to Ludicrous Lengths

The rumors of Judge Napolitano's banishment from
FOX News have been greatly exaggerated.

The Paulestinians are at it again. Apparently, Judge Napolitan's show on Fox Business will be cancelled, although the judge will remain a Fox contributor. A recent bit of political conspiracy spam has popped up saying a specific speech more than 8 months earlier was the reason he was fired.

This is because someone found a Napolitano piece that mentioned Ron Paul favorably and tried to connect it to the cancellation of his show.  Never mind that Napolitano did this piece two years ago. Never mind that Fox was already planning a program shuffle before Napolitano did this report. Never mind that the Judge did a major piece on Fox News just last week. Never let a little thing like the truth get in the way of a good conspiracy theory.

The Paulestinian, conspiracy junkies, every ready to stretch a suspicion to ludicrous lengths, call an unrelated Freedom Watch segment the so-called "speech that got him fired" and run it as a breaking news story.  Since Napolitano was "fired", the Judge has been on Fox as a commentator and reporter so often most people didn't realize his regular show was gone.  It really seems unlikely that Fox would keep giving him feature stories for almost two years after they "fired" him for mentioning the almighty Ron Paul with suitable (for Libertarians anyway) reverence. And he's done some even more controversial pieces since then.

It looks like the Paulistas would get tired of this nonsense after a while. They really are starting to make conservatives look bad. Let me say this one more time and since the forces de' Paul seem to prefer to write in all caps let me as one of the Bible's minor prophets put it, "Write it with large letters so that he who runs may read it":

LYING DOES NOT HELP THE CAUSE. IT ONLY MAKES US LOOK LIKE..........LIARS!

Stop it, please.

Just sayin'

Tom King © 2013