I see the news story about the Lebanese man condemned to death for sorcery in Saudi Arabia.
Here is my opinion.
1. Despite opinions of secularists the death penalty for sorcery-in and of itself-is not surprising or inappropriate in a theocracy. Republics and other forms of government must remember that theocracies are a reality and should be respected if one is truly "open minded" and "liberated." Thus a theocracy is entitled to put to death those convicted of sorcery.
2. However, I am troubled by the lack of evidence that this Lebanese man entered Saudi Arabia and conducted sorcery. If he did not commit sorcery in the boundaries of Saudi Arabia then he cannot be judged guilty under Saudi Arabian religious law.
3. Further, knowing his identity, when he entered SA to attend Muslim religious observance, SA authorities should have used the opportunity to cordially dialogue to determine if perhaps he was having second thoughts about his sorcerous activities in Lebanon. In other words, this was an evangelizing opportunity, perhaps, of someone seeking to return to mainstream Muslim belief.
4. If he seemed to attempt to enter to cause trouble, he should have been turned back. As the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques SA would have the right to turn away a Muslim who wants to spread heresy or other trouble under the guise of Hajj or religious pilgrimage.
5. Thus without evidence that he came to SA in order to conduct sorcery, and was, perhaps, there to examine his own conscience, I recommend commuting the sentence, deporting him, and forbidding him re-entry unless orthodox Muslim authority approves his future intentions.
Allah is both All Knowing and Merciful.
Showing posts with label Legal Justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Legal Justice. Show all posts
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Understanding the Bible: definition of "judge"
A quick point, related to what I've been blogging about (understanding context of the times).
Whenever you read the word "judge" in the Bible, remember there are two totally different meanings, do not assume the first meaning, while is a legal judging, such as a magistrate might do. Yes, it is sometimes used in that context, but just as often it is used to mean:
a hero or military leader who is called by God.
That is why the Book of Judges is called, um, the Book of Judges, as it's about military leaders and heroes who led Israel when Israel did not yet have kings. These were not legal folks who rendered magistrate justice.
So while St Paul is indeed writing about legal matters and the need for justice and righteousness in 1 Cor 6, you have to remember that he, a zealous Jew (so zealous he turned Christians over for death before his conversion) would always have the two definitions of "judge" in this mind, somewhat intertwined. When he mentions "judging angels" he is speaking of the other definition, embedded within his discussion of more legal matters and definition.
He's not wrong to do this, but it is, as all epistles are, a bit of unsupported statement since producing long written documents was tough enough and Paul like others assumed the recipient of their letters understood many of the extenuating meanings and nuances that others would not outside of a previously Jewish context. In other words he was not writing in a way to explain to people who would later (like moderns) think "judge" always and only means magisterial.
Remember that Israel was an entity completely under and of God, not an organized government nor a kingship in its early days. Instead God chose people to lead, starting with Moses. When Josue (Joshua) died the people asked God who they should select as their next military leader. This is because the Israelites were still, through military force, claiming their promised land, so their leader's first and foremost job was to be a military leader, one that God approved and supported. It had nothing to do with being a judge of legal matters, so there were twelve, for lack of a better word, heroes of Israel whose job was to lead the Israelites in times of danger and/or in military matters. They were given the title of "judges," using, obviously, the second definition.
Thus it is very easy for Paul in both his thinking and his writing to slip from one definition of judge into the other. He is building an argument, in 1 Cor 6, that people need to be just in all matters and not be hypocrites, and he uses public litigation as the example that he gives, where he questions and chastises how people can be just if they are so unjust and be litigation crazy (yes they were already suing each other right and left to get money and settle scores in those times). In 1 Cor 6:7 he implies that people should not sue each other and just suffer even obvious wrongs in silence and without counter suit and legal remedies (turn the other cheek, as Jesus taught). He then, having raised the problem of legal fights and injustice, and the related problem of being unworthy to judge even small matters of life, say nothing of the large ones, in 1 Cor 6:1-8 onward, then shifts in 1 Cor 6:9 onward to discussing the unjust, unsanctified and unjustified sinners and their impending judgment from God in general.
So you see what I mean? He is writing about a problem he sees 1) being too litigious and also being unforgiving and unjust, 2) points out the flaws in that mindset, 3) introduces a higher more Christian mindset and 4) concludes with warnings what to avoid and 5) the sacredness of the body in service to Christ. Paul is starting with a specific problem in order to raise the level of thinking, action and sanctity of those he is writing to and 1 Cor 6 progresses accordingly.
So, how to understand 1 Cor 6:3 "Do you not know that we shall judge angels?" Even though that is smack dab in the middle of him speaking of earthly legal matters, he does not mean that humans will judge (as in adjudicate or assess) the actions of angels or the angels themselves. He is hearkening back to the second definition of judges, the heroism and God given leadership, that humans who are truly within Jesus Christ will receive from God. In an effort to get people's heads out of the petty earthly legalities Paul drags angels into his writing in order to uplift people to their correct perspective which is to be genuine leaders authorized by God through Christ, and it is then that yes, people have the right to "judge" as in to "lead into spiritual battle" angels.
That is not so far fetched. Do you not all each have a guardian angel that God gave you to accompany you always while you live? Most times do you even remember that your guardian angels exists? Do you lead your guardian angel in times of danger such as witnessing for Christ? Or do you forget you have a guardian angel?
Your actions on earth in your individual sanctified service to Christ is your training wheels, your practice, in leading ("judging") an angel.
When you are a saint (as in dead and gone to heaven), then you will, God willing, have a role in leading (as in "judging") angels on their home turf, heaven, regarding earthly matters.
It's not too tough to understand that those who did not partner with their guardian angel, with humility, while alive on earth aren't exactly leading the charge of the angel brigade in heaven when it is that time.
1 Cor 6:2 Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world will be judged by you, are you unworthy to judge the smallest matters?
So you see, Paul is basically scolding most severely the people who look forward to being saints and angel partners as being incapable of even keeping themselves out of greedy and vengeful legal lawsuits, and he is warning that they are not even on the first rung of "judging angels."
o Current situation, constant litigation about earthly matters such as money, power and revenge.
o The current situation must be improved by bringing the matters before the saints, which means in other words having a Christian response (such as turning the other cheek). Paul means the saints are (second definition) providing the example, the leadership of behavior. He means that just as the saints did not seek money, power and revenge through the courts, likewise people must turn to the saints for their example to shun that response likewise.
o In the future the saints (most of whom were martyrs) will judge the world because they, in heaven, will bring their petitions of injustice received before God.
Revelation 8:4-5
And with the prayers of the saints there went up before God from the angel's hand the smoke of the incense. And the angel took the censer and filled it with the fire of the altar and threw it down upon the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, and flashes of lightning and an earthquake.
See, Paul wrote Corinthians well before John saw the revelation of the Apocalypse and in fact Paul was martyred decades before John died a natural death (the only one of the Apostles not to be martyred). Paul was dead for decades before John witnessed to Revelation, to the Apocalypse. Yet Paul correctly understood within the spirit of Jesus Christ that the sufferings of the martyrs and saints will accumulate before God's throne, and will in turn be justification for the End of Times. This is why the angel throws the censer with fire from the altar and the prayers of the saints onto earth to smite it.
And so now you can see that through the Holy Spirit the genuine Apostles and disciples of Christ are all reading from the same page, to use an old saying. Paul knew in his heart what John would later see in person, which is the role of the saints in judging (both meanings) the people of the earth. All who learned first hand from Christ understand the inevitability if not the timing of God's judgment of those alive on earth with the saints as witness and examples.
Now, the angels have never been and never will be part of earthly life, since angels abide within God in heaven and are not of time, matter or energy. Thus they of course are not "judged" by humans in a legal or a behavior sense. They are, however, available to be led by genuinely God appointed humans, but only after death. How do we know this? Because Jesus Christ himself never called upon an angel (though one was sent to him in the Garden of Gethsemane and others after the temptation). Jesus pointed out he could have called angels to protect him and destroy the city at any time, but he did not because that was not his purpose. Likewise the Apostles understood that the only angels on earth are the guardian angels, and that the combat will occur only at the End of Times.
So in a few sentences Paul is cramming together the mundane but very dire state of the litigious supposed Christians who are suing each other and pagans for money, power and revenge, the need for a higher thinking, and then, of course, the highest calling which will mostly occur in heaven, when the righteous and justified people are indeed among the angels.
This is a complicated but essential part of my point that one cannot understand the Bible if one does not understand the mental, spiritual and linguistic context of the various authors, all of whom write under the guidance of the Holy Spirit but in the language and meaning of that contemporary time.
I hope that this was helpful!
Whenever you read the word "judge" in the Bible, remember there are two totally different meanings, do not assume the first meaning, while is a legal judging, such as a magistrate might do. Yes, it is sometimes used in that context, but just as often it is used to mean:
a hero or military leader who is called by God.
That is why the Book of Judges is called, um, the Book of Judges, as it's about military leaders and heroes who led Israel when Israel did not yet have kings. These were not legal folks who rendered magistrate justice.
So while St Paul is indeed writing about legal matters and the need for justice and righteousness in 1 Cor 6, you have to remember that he, a zealous Jew (so zealous he turned Christians over for death before his conversion) would always have the two definitions of "judge" in this mind, somewhat intertwined. When he mentions "judging angels" he is speaking of the other definition, embedded within his discussion of more legal matters and definition.
He's not wrong to do this, but it is, as all epistles are, a bit of unsupported statement since producing long written documents was tough enough and Paul like others assumed the recipient of their letters understood many of the extenuating meanings and nuances that others would not outside of a previously Jewish context. In other words he was not writing in a way to explain to people who would later (like moderns) think "judge" always and only means magisterial.
Remember that Israel was an entity completely under and of God, not an organized government nor a kingship in its early days. Instead God chose people to lead, starting with Moses. When Josue (Joshua) died the people asked God who they should select as their next military leader. This is because the Israelites were still, through military force, claiming their promised land, so their leader's first and foremost job was to be a military leader, one that God approved and supported. It had nothing to do with being a judge of legal matters, so there were twelve, for lack of a better word, heroes of Israel whose job was to lead the Israelites in times of danger and/or in military matters. They were given the title of "judges," using, obviously, the second definition.
Thus it is very easy for Paul in both his thinking and his writing to slip from one definition of judge into the other. He is building an argument, in 1 Cor 6, that people need to be just in all matters and not be hypocrites, and he uses public litigation as the example that he gives, where he questions and chastises how people can be just if they are so unjust and be litigation crazy (yes they were already suing each other right and left to get money and settle scores in those times). In 1 Cor 6:7 he implies that people should not sue each other and just suffer even obvious wrongs in silence and without counter suit and legal remedies (turn the other cheek, as Jesus taught). He then, having raised the problem of legal fights and injustice, and the related problem of being unworthy to judge even small matters of life, say nothing of the large ones, in 1 Cor 6:1-8 onward, then shifts in 1 Cor 6:9 onward to discussing the unjust, unsanctified and unjustified sinners and their impending judgment from God in general.
So you see what I mean? He is writing about a problem he sees 1) being too litigious and also being unforgiving and unjust, 2) points out the flaws in that mindset, 3) introduces a higher more Christian mindset and 4) concludes with warnings what to avoid and 5) the sacredness of the body in service to Christ. Paul is starting with a specific problem in order to raise the level of thinking, action and sanctity of those he is writing to and 1 Cor 6 progresses accordingly.
So, how to understand 1 Cor 6:3 "Do you not know that we shall judge angels?" Even though that is smack dab in the middle of him speaking of earthly legal matters, he does not mean that humans will judge (as in adjudicate or assess) the actions of angels or the angels themselves. He is hearkening back to the second definition of judges, the heroism and God given leadership, that humans who are truly within Jesus Christ will receive from God. In an effort to get people's heads out of the petty earthly legalities Paul drags angels into his writing in order to uplift people to their correct perspective which is to be genuine leaders authorized by God through Christ, and it is then that yes, people have the right to "judge" as in to "lead into spiritual battle" angels.
That is not so far fetched. Do you not all each have a guardian angel that God gave you to accompany you always while you live? Most times do you even remember that your guardian angels exists? Do you lead your guardian angel in times of danger such as witnessing for Christ? Or do you forget you have a guardian angel?
Your actions on earth in your individual sanctified service to Christ is your training wheels, your practice, in leading ("judging") an angel.
When you are a saint (as in dead and gone to heaven), then you will, God willing, have a role in leading (as in "judging") angels on their home turf, heaven, regarding earthly matters.
It's not too tough to understand that those who did not partner with their guardian angel, with humility, while alive on earth aren't exactly leading the charge of the angel brigade in heaven when it is that time.
1 Cor 6:2 Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world will be judged by you, are you unworthy to judge the smallest matters?
So you see, Paul is basically scolding most severely the people who look forward to being saints and angel partners as being incapable of even keeping themselves out of greedy and vengeful legal lawsuits, and he is warning that they are not even on the first rung of "judging angels."
o Current situation, constant litigation about earthly matters such as money, power and revenge.
o The current situation must be improved by bringing the matters before the saints, which means in other words having a Christian response (such as turning the other cheek). Paul means the saints are (second definition) providing the example, the leadership of behavior. He means that just as the saints did not seek money, power and revenge through the courts, likewise people must turn to the saints for their example to shun that response likewise.
o In the future the saints (most of whom were martyrs) will judge the world because they, in heaven, will bring their petitions of injustice received before God.
Revelation 8:4-5
And with the prayers of the saints there went up before God from the angel's hand the smoke of the incense. And the angel took the censer and filled it with the fire of the altar and threw it down upon the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, and flashes of lightning and an earthquake.
See, Paul wrote Corinthians well before John saw the revelation of the Apocalypse and in fact Paul was martyred decades before John died a natural death (the only one of the Apostles not to be martyred). Paul was dead for decades before John witnessed to Revelation, to the Apocalypse. Yet Paul correctly understood within the spirit of Jesus Christ that the sufferings of the martyrs and saints will accumulate before God's throne, and will in turn be justification for the End of Times. This is why the angel throws the censer with fire from the altar and the prayers of the saints onto earth to smite it.
And so now you can see that through the Holy Spirit the genuine Apostles and disciples of Christ are all reading from the same page, to use an old saying. Paul knew in his heart what John would later see in person, which is the role of the saints in judging (both meanings) the people of the earth. All who learned first hand from Christ understand the inevitability if not the timing of God's judgment of those alive on earth with the saints as witness and examples.
Now, the angels have never been and never will be part of earthly life, since angels abide within God in heaven and are not of time, matter or energy. Thus they of course are not "judged" by humans in a legal or a behavior sense. They are, however, available to be led by genuinely God appointed humans, but only after death. How do we know this? Because Jesus Christ himself never called upon an angel (though one was sent to him in the Garden of Gethsemane and others after the temptation). Jesus pointed out he could have called angels to protect him and destroy the city at any time, but he did not because that was not his purpose. Likewise the Apostles understood that the only angels on earth are the guardian angels, and that the combat will occur only at the End of Times.
So in a few sentences Paul is cramming together the mundane but very dire state of the litigious supposed Christians who are suing each other and pagans for money, power and revenge, the need for a higher thinking, and then, of course, the highest calling which will mostly occur in heaven, when the righteous and justified people are indeed among the angels.
This is a complicated but essential part of my point that one cannot understand the Bible if one does not understand the mental, spiritual and linguistic context of the various authors, all of whom write under the guidance of the Holy Spirit but in the language and meaning of that contemporary time.
I hope that this was helpful!
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Faith case study: importance of intentions
Hi and especially to young people (!) I have you in mind most particularly and affectionately as I thought of this idea for a blog this morning. I'm going to concentrate on this case study with you because I think it is more important that you understand than my listening on radio, twitter, news to the verbal and mental diarrhea that spews unabated, it seems. *sigh* So I continue to listen but with only one ear (because listening to the crap helps me to understand how urgently I must explain sanitation over and over again, ha).
Here is the case study I want to present to you today. The purpose is to help you try out through faith and logic (reasoning) why two basic truths exist. One is that God knows the intention of a person's heart and soul in everything that person thinks, feels and does, and that intention makes a difference to God. For example, a person can present themselves as the most lovely and spiritual person on the outside, but if they are full of mean crap on the inside, all the "good deeds" and "popularity" and "spirituality" of the person on the outside is pointless because God knows that the person is insincere and even malevolent on the inside, and that person will be judged accordingly. Thus some really "sweet" and "popular" people on the outside do indeed end up in hell, since God knows the motivations of their heart and soul.
The second truth, then, is related to and indeed derivative from the first truth. As a result the Bible clearly states that having an evil heart is sinful (by evil I mean not only flat out evil but also a begrudging, mean, lying, hypocritical and bullying heart, say nothing of being idolatrous) but the Bible also states that all bad thoughts, including ones that are simply foolish, are sins. I blogged about this a while ago, citing the scripture, and commented on it, check and see if you can find those postings under the label "sins," in case you've not read it before, or need to take another look. I'm sticking to doing a logic case study so I'm not going to cite previously cited scripture in this particular post.
So here I am going to give you the case study: Why if, in theory, two people advocate the same action, does it matter if one person is evil (or has evil intention) while the other person is faithful to God and has good intentions? In other words, let's say these two opposite people each agree on some government policy decision... why does it "matter" in the health of their soul, where one will be favored and blessed by God, while the other will not?
As a corollary to this, remember this is a favorite argument of atheists who are "moral" "ethical" and "peaceful." They figure if they advocate the same good things as the believers that they are "the same" in intention and thus in worthiness. Let me tackle this one first as a prelude to the main case study.
Here's the problem with intentions in the atheist example. Bad intentions can hide the truth from you, which affects things in both a specific decision but also one's whole life. Here is the analogy to understand that. Suppose two people, one atheist and one a believer, each rent an apartment from the same landlord. These two people get together on their job (let's say they are peace activists) and they work together on some good project to promote peace. The atheist would argue that because he or she agrees (without the "need for religion") with the believer on a good sound project to promote peace that he or she is as worthy and ethical and moral as the believer work partner. OK, so after work they go back to their own apartments, and the rent bill is due. The believer goes to pay the rent, handing the landlord the cash. The atheist ignores the bill because he or she does not believe the landlord exists. When the atheist is, after repeated bills from the "imaginary" landlord is finally thrown out into the cold, the atheist says, "Hey, how come you aren't throwing out the believer?" The atheist thinks that "equivalent" ethical actions means they are in the same position as the believer, and that of course is not true because the atheist in our analogy thinks that the landlord does not exist and he or she can just ignore bills for their monthly rent. This is an example of how an alliance of actions (the peace project) does not yield equivalent results, because of the intention of each person differs, not only their conscious inner thoughts but of course the entire context of their life and faith philosophy. Interestingly the analogy implies that the atheist renter would continue to not believe in the reality of any landlord, so where would he or she turn to, in our analogy? I guess he or she would find shelter in houses of those who also do not believe in landlords. This is why a person can continue in their whole life without believing in the reality of God, while still doing "equivalent" "good deeds," and only find out there is a landlord indeed when it is too late and he or she had died and is judged unworthy of heaven, and thus ends up in hell. All the "good deeds" and "good intentions" mean naught because the atheist refuses to acknowledge existence of the landlord and pay what is due.
So that is the first part of the case study. Here is the secular part of the case study. I am thinking of this secular case study (as I write it here) so that everyone, regardless of the condition of your faith (or lack of it) or religion/spirituality can understand the practical "bread and butter" secular life reasons that intentions DO matter even in "equivalent" ethics and deeds. To keep this easy to understand I'm going to choose a commodity that is not controversial, such as alcohol, and instead use an imaginary candy, a sweet, a dessert, as the analogy.
Suppose there is a very successful candy, a wrapped single serving sweet, that is found to contain an incredibly high amount of sugar, fat, and thus a HUGE amount of calories with each bite. Let's say that one of these candies had 3000 calories in it, more than most people should have in all their food in a day. So a whole bunch of people with various intentions get together and advocate that this candy be banned. On the surface it seems that everyone is in agreement with a "good cause" to "protect the public" from an "unhealthy" food. They pass a law banning this candy in whatever country or state that they have this influence. Now, let's think about why differing intentions can lead to vastly different results (and worthiness, both in practical life and in spiritual matters) by making a list of people and their intention frameworks and their implications. I'm just going to do a few here to show you how it is done, and you can think of some of your own! :-)
1. A woman is a nutritionist and really, really, really believes that this candy would destroy the health of many people, so she favors the ban.
Here intention is good, but one sided. If it tasted so wonderful and was such a popular sweet, could she not have used her nutrition expertise to help the manufacturer develop a sweet that tastes the same but has less calories? Or suggest to them a way that a person could once in a while have the sweet, but on high activity (like sports or exercise) days? By having a scolding and forbidding orientation, even though there is "good intention" (to preserve some ideal of diet and nutrition), it would never occur to her to have both, by using her expertise to modify the product and avoid a ban of such an innocent and fun sweet.
2. A man is an "expert" in consumer safety, and feels the sweet is just one of a list of things where the public must be protected from "unintended dangerous consequences."
Ahhh.... interesting. The "professional" "consumer safety" guy. Here is it nothing personal, because he's not against the candy and only the candy. He is against anything that the public is "ignorant" of possible "dangerous consequences." Again, many people would think that is a worthy calling. But is it? It sure is when there is a clear and present danger, such as toys that could choke a young child. His "intention is good," most particularly when he is indeed protecting the public from a built in hazard in a toy or product that could harm a child, for example. But he has two blind spots due to his intentions. One is that he stops thinking about each item and rather view them as a continual conveyor belt of "danger" that a continual conveyor belt of "ignorant" public might be harmed by, and thus he is in the taboo business, of looking continually for things to ban. So he has the error of thinking that all items he considers are dangerous deserve the same banning remedy AND he assumes a continual level of public ignorance (none of them are ever smart enough to pick their "dangerous" product). So his intention while certainly "good" on a certain level (dangerous toys for young children, for example) but is very slippery because it has made a factory of demonizing both products and the intelligence of the public.
3. A woman pretends to be a "concerned mother" and "homemaker." She secretly holds stock in a competing candy and sweet company.
Need I say more? That is obvious where the hidden intention is to hurt the successful competitor of a company whereby she holds a hidden financial stake. But let's examine this because my not so hidden intention is to tell people that they are harming themselves when they do not come clean with their own intentions. This woman would justify, I suspect, her advocacy of banning the sweet under consideration because she would say, if confronted, word for word, the following: "Well, even IF I didn't hold stock in the competitor company, as a mother and a homemaker I'd be against that unhealthy and dangerous candy!" Oh my. "Even if." Really? Only God knows how people would have behaved under alternative future scenarios. She is kidding herself, perhaps even honestly fooling herself, actually thinking that she'd be hoisting the banner and flag of advocacy against that product if she didn't have a dog in the fight. Odds are that if she did not have stock in the competitor product that the whole dangerous sweet controversy would have, in that "alternate future," just been a news story that she sees on TV or in the newspaper and like dozens of other stories, leave it to other people to sort out and act upon, as she'd have other interests and concerns. Having the competitive stock makes her more sensitized for both sinister (hurt the competitor company) and innocent (she's paying attention to products of competitors and news about them) reasons. There is no "even if" because humans are not single line entities where everything in their life goes the "same" "even if" "just one thing" were "different."
4. A wealthy woman really believes the product is dangerous and puts her money into the cause of having it banned.
So she is sincere in believing it is dangerous..... and she has the money (and thus influence) to do something about it. Hmm. Sounds good so far, right? A celebrity or an industrialist or media figure "putting good money to the cause!" Maybe so. But here are the different forks in the road of different intentions. 1) She has lots of money and thus bans it for everyone else, but stockpiles the candy for herself, figuring that it's a "dangerous" treat that "she can handle." 2) She really does believe it is dangerous and doesn't want the candy, but her success in this power play goes to her head. She looks for other "causes" that she can provide the money as "fuel" to muscle through people's agendas, both "good" and maybe "bad" ones. She gets hooked on being a power maker. The problem is that she becomes hooked on the power she has rather than the genuine worthiness of the cause, because of her intention to "make a difference." How many times do we hear those words: "I have the money to 'make a difference.'" Automatically that attracts such a person to causes that are able to be purchased, and in all innocence may not see causes that just need a pair of hands and a willing and open heart. Her "good deeds" become skewed and ultimately blinded and invalid because the motivation, the intention, is to use money and power as a lever.
Can you think of others? I could but I'm bummed out enough at always having to point out the faulty spiritual and secular reasoning that so very many people follow, without thinking of even more for you here, ha.
So think of other ones. Here's a hint (think about people who are killjoys because they were deprived in some way in their childhood or whatever....they can and do kid themselves that they are protecting others, while just begrudging what they did not have themselves).
After you've added one or two other examples to my list, now imagine the wrap-up. All these people agreed to a single "good deed" of "consumer protection from a dangerous product."
A. All people engaged in the same activity and got the law passed, banning the sweet.
B. Each person had a totally different motivation and hidden intention.
C. If they were honest about their intentions, many of them would have changed their minds about the law in the first place.
D. Better alternatives than the flat out ban are never even considered.
E. Alternative better actions are totally missed, so there is a high "missed opportunity" cost.
F. When one is not honest about one's inner motivations and intentions, one becomes the willing or unwilling slave to those intentions, continuing to act in that intentions mindless "service."
G. Serving those intentions results in missing other sets of priorities as one seeks out repeated gratification of those intentions in all things.
H. Hypocritical and coveting temptations have a greater and greater hold.
So now by expanding this analogy into faith, it is not at all difficult to see how God at the time of their personal judgment will place in front of each of these people, who agreed on one action (the banning of the sweet), how worthy or not their lives actually were, and how widely divergent all of these people will be. Same action but different intentions yield not just later but in the immediate wildly different results.
Ha ha, I can't resist, so here's another example, if you've not thought of it already.
5. A lawmaker is the author of the law banning the candy. He thinks it is unhealthy and dangerous.
OK, sounds like a responsible consumer advocate legislator, right? Yeah, but what if he knows that it will get voted down? He is trying to look good for the voters by banning the "unhealthy candy" but he knows it is "win-win" because if it passes, sure, that "bad candy" got banned, but if he is voted down, "well, he tried to do the right thing" and that ends up in his campaign ads. So at heart he cares neither if the candy really is dangerous (or he'd try hard to get all the votes lined up in favor of his banning law) or if the dangerous candy ban loses, and people keep legally eating it.... he's "won" either way as he looks like either the victorious, or losing, "hero."
Now, think of those intentions in the faith context. Some of the people above are flat out lying, sinful, coveting hypocrites. How will God judge them? It will be quite obvious that they will be harshly judged.
So this case study shows you how 1) even if you omit God from the situation under discussion that the same action can and does result in wildly different outcomes depending on the totally individual conscious or unconscious intentions and 2) since God IS in this and every situation, God knows not only the worthiness of the intentions (their genuine or not benevolence) but God also knows all the subsequent life directions and implications of letting those intentions rule.
I hope that you have found this helpful!
Here is the case study I want to present to you today. The purpose is to help you try out through faith and logic (reasoning) why two basic truths exist. One is that God knows the intention of a person's heart and soul in everything that person thinks, feels and does, and that intention makes a difference to God. For example, a person can present themselves as the most lovely and spiritual person on the outside, but if they are full of mean crap on the inside, all the "good deeds" and "popularity" and "spirituality" of the person on the outside is pointless because God knows that the person is insincere and even malevolent on the inside, and that person will be judged accordingly. Thus some really "sweet" and "popular" people on the outside do indeed end up in hell, since God knows the motivations of their heart and soul.
The second truth, then, is related to and indeed derivative from the first truth. As a result the Bible clearly states that having an evil heart is sinful (by evil I mean not only flat out evil but also a begrudging, mean, lying, hypocritical and bullying heart, say nothing of being idolatrous) but the Bible also states that all bad thoughts, including ones that are simply foolish, are sins. I blogged about this a while ago, citing the scripture, and commented on it, check and see if you can find those postings under the label "sins," in case you've not read it before, or need to take another look. I'm sticking to doing a logic case study so I'm not going to cite previously cited scripture in this particular post.
So here I am going to give you the case study: Why if, in theory, two people advocate the same action, does it matter if one person is evil (or has evil intention) while the other person is faithful to God and has good intentions? In other words, let's say these two opposite people each agree on some government policy decision... why does it "matter" in the health of their soul, where one will be favored and blessed by God, while the other will not?
As a corollary to this, remember this is a favorite argument of atheists who are "moral" "ethical" and "peaceful." They figure if they advocate the same good things as the believers that they are "the same" in intention and thus in worthiness. Let me tackle this one first as a prelude to the main case study.
Here's the problem with intentions in the atheist example. Bad intentions can hide the truth from you, which affects things in both a specific decision but also one's whole life. Here is the analogy to understand that. Suppose two people, one atheist and one a believer, each rent an apartment from the same landlord. These two people get together on their job (let's say they are peace activists) and they work together on some good project to promote peace. The atheist would argue that because he or she agrees (without the "need for religion") with the believer on a good sound project to promote peace that he or she is as worthy and ethical and moral as the believer work partner. OK, so after work they go back to their own apartments, and the rent bill is due. The believer goes to pay the rent, handing the landlord the cash. The atheist ignores the bill because he or she does not believe the landlord exists. When the atheist is, after repeated bills from the "imaginary" landlord is finally thrown out into the cold, the atheist says, "Hey, how come you aren't throwing out the believer?" The atheist thinks that "equivalent" ethical actions means they are in the same position as the believer, and that of course is not true because the atheist in our analogy thinks that the landlord does not exist and he or she can just ignore bills for their monthly rent. This is an example of how an alliance of actions (the peace project) does not yield equivalent results, because of the intention of each person differs, not only their conscious inner thoughts but of course the entire context of their life and faith philosophy. Interestingly the analogy implies that the atheist renter would continue to not believe in the reality of any landlord, so where would he or she turn to, in our analogy? I guess he or she would find shelter in houses of those who also do not believe in landlords. This is why a person can continue in their whole life without believing in the reality of God, while still doing "equivalent" "good deeds," and only find out there is a landlord indeed when it is too late and he or she had died and is judged unworthy of heaven, and thus ends up in hell. All the "good deeds" and "good intentions" mean naught because the atheist refuses to acknowledge existence of the landlord and pay what is due.
So that is the first part of the case study. Here is the secular part of the case study. I am thinking of this secular case study (as I write it here) so that everyone, regardless of the condition of your faith (or lack of it) or religion/spirituality can understand the practical "bread and butter" secular life reasons that intentions DO matter even in "equivalent" ethics and deeds. To keep this easy to understand I'm going to choose a commodity that is not controversial, such as alcohol, and instead use an imaginary candy, a sweet, a dessert, as the analogy.
Suppose there is a very successful candy, a wrapped single serving sweet, that is found to contain an incredibly high amount of sugar, fat, and thus a HUGE amount of calories with each bite. Let's say that one of these candies had 3000 calories in it, more than most people should have in all their food in a day. So a whole bunch of people with various intentions get together and advocate that this candy be banned. On the surface it seems that everyone is in agreement with a "good cause" to "protect the public" from an "unhealthy" food. They pass a law banning this candy in whatever country or state that they have this influence. Now, let's think about why differing intentions can lead to vastly different results (and worthiness, both in practical life and in spiritual matters) by making a list of people and their intention frameworks and their implications. I'm just going to do a few here to show you how it is done, and you can think of some of your own! :-)
1. A woman is a nutritionist and really, really, really believes that this candy would destroy the health of many people, so she favors the ban.
Here intention is good, but one sided. If it tasted so wonderful and was such a popular sweet, could she not have used her nutrition expertise to help the manufacturer develop a sweet that tastes the same but has less calories? Or suggest to them a way that a person could once in a while have the sweet, but on high activity (like sports or exercise) days? By having a scolding and forbidding orientation, even though there is "good intention" (to preserve some ideal of diet and nutrition), it would never occur to her to have both, by using her expertise to modify the product and avoid a ban of such an innocent and fun sweet.
2. A man is an "expert" in consumer safety, and feels the sweet is just one of a list of things where the public must be protected from "unintended dangerous consequences."
Ahhh.... interesting. The "professional" "consumer safety" guy. Here is it nothing personal, because he's not against the candy and only the candy. He is against anything that the public is "ignorant" of possible "dangerous consequences." Again, many people would think that is a worthy calling. But is it? It sure is when there is a clear and present danger, such as toys that could choke a young child. His "intention is good," most particularly when he is indeed protecting the public from a built in hazard in a toy or product that could harm a child, for example. But he has two blind spots due to his intentions. One is that he stops thinking about each item and rather view them as a continual conveyor belt of "danger" that a continual conveyor belt of "ignorant" public might be harmed by, and thus he is in the taboo business, of looking continually for things to ban. So he has the error of thinking that all items he considers are dangerous deserve the same banning remedy AND he assumes a continual level of public ignorance (none of them are ever smart enough to pick their "dangerous" product). So his intention while certainly "good" on a certain level (dangerous toys for young children, for example) but is very slippery because it has made a factory of demonizing both products and the intelligence of the public.
3. A woman pretends to be a "concerned mother" and "homemaker." She secretly holds stock in a competing candy and sweet company.
Need I say more? That is obvious where the hidden intention is to hurt the successful competitor of a company whereby she holds a hidden financial stake. But let's examine this because my not so hidden intention is to tell people that they are harming themselves when they do not come clean with their own intentions. This woman would justify, I suspect, her advocacy of banning the sweet under consideration because she would say, if confronted, word for word, the following: "Well, even IF I didn't hold stock in the competitor company, as a mother and a homemaker I'd be against that unhealthy and dangerous candy!" Oh my. "Even if." Really? Only God knows how people would have behaved under alternative future scenarios. She is kidding herself, perhaps even honestly fooling herself, actually thinking that she'd be hoisting the banner and flag of advocacy against that product if she didn't have a dog in the fight. Odds are that if she did not have stock in the competitor product that the whole dangerous sweet controversy would have, in that "alternate future," just been a news story that she sees on TV or in the newspaper and like dozens of other stories, leave it to other people to sort out and act upon, as she'd have other interests and concerns. Having the competitive stock makes her more sensitized for both sinister (hurt the competitor company) and innocent (she's paying attention to products of competitors and news about them) reasons. There is no "even if" because humans are not single line entities where everything in their life goes the "same" "even if" "just one thing" were "different."
4. A wealthy woman really believes the product is dangerous and puts her money into the cause of having it banned.
So she is sincere in believing it is dangerous..... and she has the money (and thus influence) to do something about it. Hmm. Sounds good so far, right? A celebrity or an industrialist or media figure "putting good money to the cause!" Maybe so. But here are the different forks in the road of different intentions. 1) She has lots of money and thus bans it for everyone else, but stockpiles the candy for herself, figuring that it's a "dangerous" treat that "she can handle." 2) She really does believe it is dangerous and doesn't want the candy, but her success in this power play goes to her head. She looks for other "causes" that she can provide the money as "fuel" to muscle through people's agendas, both "good" and maybe "bad" ones. She gets hooked on being a power maker. The problem is that she becomes hooked on the power she has rather than the genuine worthiness of the cause, because of her intention to "make a difference." How many times do we hear those words: "I have the money to 'make a difference.'" Automatically that attracts such a person to causes that are able to be purchased, and in all innocence may not see causes that just need a pair of hands and a willing and open heart. Her "good deeds" become skewed and ultimately blinded and invalid because the motivation, the intention, is to use money and power as a lever.
Can you think of others? I could but I'm bummed out enough at always having to point out the faulty spiritual and secular reasoning that so very many people follow, without thinking of even more for you here, ha.
So think of other ones. Here's a hint (think about people who are killjoys because they were deprived in some way in their childhood or whatever....they can and do kid themselves that they are protecting others, while just begrudging what they did not have themselves).
After you've added one or two other examples to my list, now imagine the wrap-up. All these people agreed to a single "good deed" of "consumer protection from a dangerous product."
A. All people engaged in the same activity and got the law passed, banning the sweet.
B. Each person had a totally different motivation and hidden intention.
C. If they were honest about their intentions, many of them would have changed their minds about the law in the first place.
D. Better alternatives than the flat out ban are never even considered.
E. Alternative better actions are totally missed, so there is a high "missed opportunity" cost.
F. When one is not honest about one's inner motivations and intentions, one becomes the willing or unwilling slave to those intentions, continuing to act in that intentions mindless "service."
G. Serving those intentions results in missing other sets of priorities as one seeks out repeated gratification of those intentions in all things.
H. Hypocritical and coveting temptations have a greater and greater hold.
So now by expanding this analogy into faith, it is not at all difficult to see how God at the time of their personal judgment will place in front of each of these people, who agreed on one action (the banning of the sweet), how worthy or not their lives actually were, and how widely divergent all of these people will be. Same action but different intentions yield not just later but in the immediate wildly different results.
Ha ha, I can't resist, so here's another example, if you've not thought of it already.
5. A lawmaker is the author of the law banning the candy. He thinks it is unhealthy and dangerous.
OK, sounds like a responsible consumer advocate legislator, right? Yeah, but what if he knows that it will get voted down? He is trying to look good for the voters by banning the "unhealthy candy" but he knows it is "win-win" because if it passes, sure, that "bad candy" got banned, but if he is voted down, "well, he tried to do the right thing" and that ends up in his campaign ads. So at heart he cares neither if the candy really is dangerous (or he'd try hard to get all the votes lined up in favor of his banning law) or if the dangerous candy ban loses, and people keep legally eating it.... he's "won" either way as he looks like either the victorious, or losing, "hero."
Now, think of those intentions in the faith context. Some of the people above are flat out lying, sinful, coveting hypocrites. How will God judge them? It will be quite obvious that they will be harshly judged.
So this case study shows you how 1) even if you omit God from the situation under discussion that the same action can and does result in wildly different outcomes depending on the totally individual conscious or unconscious intentions and 2) since God IS in this and every situation, God knows not only the worthiness of the intentions (their genuine or not benevolence) but God also knows all the subsequent life directions and implications of letting those intentions rule.
I hope that you have found this helpful!
Monday, January 4, 2010
Urgent case study: rights definitions
I'm signed on and writing this before doing anything else because I just heard something on a talk show that helped me to realize a huge confusion that I can clear up right here and now. Hi young people, because this is especially for you, you'll see why in a moment. The previous two generations have become so mentally illiterate and sloppy that they no longer understand the definitions of the words they use in everyday speech but, most alarmingly, in politics and the search for social justice. It is no wonder that people are arguing over the correct way to solve huge problems because not only are they not discussing the same thing, defined the same way, they don't even understand what they are arguing for, on behalf of.
The first word I want to clarify, since that is what the talk show mentioned, is "rights." The talk show hosts played a sound byte from a politician where the politician claimed that they (politicians) "create" or "give" rights to people. No, that is incorrect, and the talk show hosts were quick to point this out. Yet I know that many of you would think that rights are created. They are not created; rights are in existence, continual existence. It is the depriving of rights that is the problem in society, so that is the first part of what I want to explain.
Every human being, just by virtue of existing, has certain absolute rights. They are not "rights" conferred by other human beings. To calm those social justice people (and believe me, I am on your side, I am coaching you though in a grave error) let me start with an obvious example. When you are born, no one had to give you a piece of paper saying you had the right to breathe the air. I mean, duh. If someone smothers you, though, they have deprived you of your rights. Do you understand that? When a human being is born they have rights already in existence, the complete set of rights all humans need and are born into, not given to them. Now you can understand the wording of the Founding Fathers better, where they recognize these inherent pre-existing eternal rights, not confer them. Believers understand that these rights are given by God when humans were created in the first place. Ethical non-believers understand that even if they deny a God, those rights are already in place, and don't have to be spelled out by a set of human beings, because it it "natural law" (believers use that term too), or "the right thing to do," or the "ethics of human rights" or other God-neutral but ethic phrases and philosophies. Both believers and non-believers who are ethical understand that genuine rights are eternal, inborn, and already in existence.
That is the first part of what the past two generations have warped and misunderstood. They have taken the eternal and inborn existence of rights and forgotten what that really means. When did this happen? Pretty much in the 1960's when people started saying "I want my rights." Yes, they were correct to perceive that those who suffered injustice were being deprived of rights. But "rights" became shorthand for remedies. Rights are not remedies. Rights cannot be created. They are already in existence. Rights exist and every thinking human, whether a believer or not, needs to protect the language in order to maintain clarity that all people have certainty of the rights that are inborn of being human.
So whether you believe in God or not you must understand that in the USA the Founding Fathers recognized that certain rights are in pre-existence. Go back to the example of the baby being born having the right to breathe air, even though no one wrote a piece of paper saying that that this baby has a license or permit under the law to breathe air upon birth. Anyone who is not insane or an idiot understands that. Thus it is really easy to understand that the right to be alive (including being able to breathe) is automatic upon coming alive (being born), duh. If someone takes a pillow and smothers the baby on birth, two things have happened. The baby's right to life was violated and so the baby was, to use the correct language "deprived of his or her rights." So you have "rights" and their opposite, which is not the "lack of rights" but the "deprivation of rights." And here is where it had become naturally confusing: not only was the smothered baby deprived of his or her rights (to life), but a civil crime was committed, assault, battery and murder. This is where the thinking became blurry during the 1960's and got worse and worse until now when it seems no one understands simple basic concepts and definitions anymore.
Just a pause, this is not going to turn into an abortion argument, so put that aside and let us work together for clarity about human rights. I am using the baby, full term, born in a wanted situation (presumably) for its universal ease in understanding, not for agenda. Keep that in mind when I start to also discuss in this case study civil (racial) deprivation of rights.
The Founding Fathers recognized every human being already has three basic "rights:" life (the right to be alive and not to have life truncated, such as in the smothering), liberty (the right to be free and not in bondage to another human being) and the pursuit of happiness (the right to lead one's life in search of sustaining and satisfaction). If you think about this, this is such a profound insight. In a pithy way the Founding Fathers summarized, using three simple words and phrases, these universal God given (or natural law/ethics) rights and pre-exist.
So you say, well, why was slavery and so forth legal when one has the right to liberty? Now you are getting it. Notice to ask me that question you said slavery was "legal?" It was not, correctly speaking, a right; many laws and social customs are violation of and deprivation of inherent rights. The civil rights movement started out using the verbiage correctly, but society started eroding their understanding of the fact that it happens every day throughout human society, this problem:
1. All humans have inherent rights not created by humans but eternal and already in place.
2. Some humans deprive other human beings of those rights.
3. Some deprivation of rights are actually legal under human made laws, but they are always wrong as they are deprivation of rights.
4. Human rights must always trump laws that deprive of human rights, but in reality we see that often the opposite takes place.
5. Rights cannot be created; rights already exist. What humans can do is restore those who have been deprived of their rights to no longer be deprived.
So now let me tackle the second core area of confusion about rights and the law. We now understand that rights already exist, totally without human creation or control. We also recognize that the problem is humans who deprive other humans of their rights. Thus slavery, while legal, was not "a right," (even if in the lingo people used that word) but slavery was, instead, a legal but unrighteous deprivation of human rights. Remember there is worldwide slavery still going on, both of servitude and sexual, and thus we must urgently understand that there is no "right," either legal or for "free market" reasons, for slavery in any form at all. Period. When slaves are freed they have not "gained" a right; their inherent rights have been restored.
So the second area of confusion exists around the terms "entitlement" and "reparation." Let's roll up sleeves and clear that up so we can actually get something done in this world before it is too late.
Remember that no one has a right to tax; taxing is a law, a mechanism, not a right. An entitlement is an expenditure of money gained by taxes, but it is a specific form of expenditure as a group is designated by "title" to receive funds. Thus that group is "entitled" because the name of the group segregates them from others so they receive special tax money. Let's use an obvious example.
The baby has been born and was not smothered, and so mother and father now have a person with a new title in their family "a child." Under USA tax law anyone who has the title "child" is entitled to being a tax deduction on the government tax forms. The baby was born with rights, but not with an entitlement. Entitlements are political, social, monarch or other human based decisions to confer or not, and has nothing to do with "rights." Too many people, both conservatives and liberals, think that they have a "right" to "entitlements." They may have a legal right, but we are speaking of human rights here. Human rights have become blurred by those who most advocate them by mixing them up with the concept of legal remedies and legal rights such as entitlements. Humans pass and enact entitlements for their own perceived fairness or merit agendas; humans do not create "rights" because human rights already exist.
So one must maintain clarity of thought and language, when one is debating or problem solving the giving of human laws/legal entitlements versus the problem of restoring deprived human rights. Too many well meaning people have ferocious arguments that are bull crap because they are not even speaking about either rights or entitlements/remedies/deprivation of rights (three different things). Do not "look" to law for "your rights," unless you mean "legal rights". In other words, no law states that a baby has the obvious human right to breathe the air. A law does say you can't smother a baby. If you look to human law for God given (natural, ethical) rights, you are lost from the very beginning, as human rights are in pre-existence, not conferred by law.
Human rights are like gold in a mine that is as yet undiscovered. The gold is already there and it's not there because some human "created gold" and then "injected it into a mountain," duh. Yet people can pass laws about who can own or explore the land. Those laws have nothing to do with the fact that the gold already exists, without the will or workings of mere human hands. Human rights exist and are eternal, no matter what a human being says or does. The problem is that many people deprive others of their human rights. It would be as if people told each other, "Well, the unmined gold in that mountain only exists if you have brown eyes, while if you have blue eyes that gold does not exist." We are not even speaking of the legality of pursuing the mining, we are speaking of a lack of reality of people who deprive others of their human rights, saying those human rights do not exist when they do, obviously, just as the gold exists whether you have brown eyes or blue.
This, young people, is one reason why faith in God gives, not takes away, strength, logic and clarity to human actions. Those who believe in God have a better comprehension of God given human rights. This is not because they necessarily "do better" or "behave better" or are "more moral" or "more ethical" than a well meaning atheist, for example. I'm not saying that at all. Rather, what I am saying is that non-believing human rights advocates live entirely within the framework of human created laws, and often they are caught and limited by the snares of human nature and laws. They say "you don't need to believe in God to be good," and that is true, but if they do not believe in God, then they believe only in the goodness of man, and that can only be understood, as a consequence, via deeds and laws. They inadvertently take their eyes off of the inherent truth of eternal inborn human rights (since they don't believe it is God given and inborn) and thus they think of rights as good behavior and laws. They put their own well meaning aim too low and too limited.
Like abortion, I am not making this about black/white slavery (notice I am speaking much of modern slavery, which is commercial/sexual and labor servitude) so do not try to discern agenda: I'm on everyone's side here. But I will now deliberately discuss the black/white slavery legacy in order to build upon the clarity of definitions by now tackling "remedy" and "reparations." I'm not using USA Native Americans in the case study because I need to keep this a global example.
First, to recap:
1. Human rights are inborn and pre-exist.
2. Human rights can be deprived, and often are, but are not created by humans.
3. Deprived human rights must be addressed and restored. In other words the depriving of rights must cease.
4. Entitlements are a special legal monetary consideration given to a designated group, which reflects the priorities of society.
5. Remedies are the means by which an injustice is corrected and rights restored, not "given."
Let's start with an easy example. Someone breaks into your house and steals your television. The police catch the person and give you back your television. The police "restore" your goods, your television, they do not need to write a law "giving you a right to own a television." You already had the right to the television.
Human rights are the same thing. The rights already exist, but some humans deprive others. Those humans need to be stopped from depriving others. When someone is stopped from depriving a person of their rights, all is automatically good again. The rights were always there, but someone blocked you from them. Now the rights are restored when the person stops depriving you of them.
But hold on, you say, damage is done when rights were deprived. I agree. But you must be clear in your mind what you are working on in a given moment: 1) restoring access to deprived rights and/or 2) compensating for the damage.
Let's say the thief smashed a window to get into your house to take the TV. If, in our silly but usefully clear example, TV represents a human right you already had, when the police remove the deprivation of your right as a problem (someone else had your TV) that concludes their role in this matter. Part of society must focus on ensuring that no one's rights are deprived. That is not the same as the part of society that now helps you to inventory the damage and get you back on your feet. The police do not fix your window, or give you money to have it fixed. They also do not take a window out of the thief's house and give it to you. Human rights campaigners must focus, like the TV recovering police, on removing obstacles to other people's access to their pre-existing human rights. Human rights should not at all complicate their essential first priority with issues of remedy and reparations, since those require human created processes, rules, law, procedures and logic. For example the homeowner may have an insurance policy and pursues remedy based not on human rights but the commercial agreement he or she has in place for insurance reimbursement.
Now, here's where we need to clear up the whole "slavery reparations" language. You might, being an attentive reader, now put two and two together and say, "Well, suppose the culture gives an entitlement that all people who had TV's stolen from them gets a $100 tax credit or payment to remedy that their rights were violated." Now you are talking! See? Now you are getting somewhere. You have separated the restoration of deprived human rights from the "picking up the mess left behind" process. That would be a logical use of the entitlement human made process, not right to address lingering damage from a now corrected deprivation of human rights. An entitlement is the creating of a group of people based on their title (titles such as senior citizens, social security recipients, children, people who had their TV's stolen) who now receive goods, services or usually monatary special consideration. Remember, a human baby has the pre-existing universal inborn right to be born and to breathe the air, a crime is committed (and that right was deprived) if the baby is smothered, but the decision to give a tax deduction to the successfully born baby is an entitlement based on the title "child."
Suppose someone tried to smother the baby in the hospital and while they did not succeed they did some real damage to the baby. This is now the area of remedy and it is entirely dealt with by human laws and processes. This is where morality must be one's compass and this is what the Bible means about being "righteous" and "just." Here's what I mean.
Righteousness and justice must be immediate and focused on the actual people involved in the problem. You go after the guy who stole the TV for remedy and damages, not anyone who ever stole a TV. You go after whoever tried to smother your baby (and perhaps the bad procedures of where this crime took place), but you don't sue every hospital and every person who ever wronged a child. In other words, remedy is targeted and immediate. Too many in society have drifted away from that understanding in their attempts to "recover" what is they are "entitled to." See? That's wrong language. No one is "entitled" to "remedy" unless an entitlement law exists that all people who had stolen TV sets (title) receive $100. Remedy is the attempt to provide justice and righteousness after a wrong has been committed, and there is a wide range of possible valid avenues for remedy, all based on human law, process and free will regarding goodness, charity and virtue.
Two people each had a TV stolen via smashed windows. One gets reimbursement from their insurance company. The other does not have insurance, but has a friend who owns a window business and the friend, through charity, rebuilds and replaces the window for free.
The term "reparations" is best understood as the financial punishment levied onto the combatant who is defeated in a war. So now, build on the foundation I have given to you about entitlements and remedy. If one country is attacked unjustly by another, yet defeats the aggressor at great cost, the aggrieved victorious country may well indeed impose reparations onto the aggressor losing nation. The most obvious example of that is World War I when huge, back breaking reparations were placed upon Germany, the aggressor and loser of the war. (And put aside all the nuance around who did what to whom and stick to the basic facts). In reparations you clobber the entire country because they are the unit by which the injustice occurred. So even the peace movement in the aggressor country would get clobbered by reparations, as no distinction is made. That's not entirely bad because we all understand enablers, whether willing or against their will. It's the theory that a country could not war if people such as farmers did not keep growing food and thus enable the war machine, even if the farmers themselves were against the war in the first place.
That is the slippery slope of reparations. They are strictly speaking logical but in reality there is a huge problem. The first problem is that it must be immediate. In other words, the second generation should not pay for the war of the first generation. The second problem is, as I stated, reparations are the largest and broadest of all entitlements. The title thus becomes "an entire country."
Those are the problems in logic and justice that even well meaning black/white slave reparations face, which is why it is a waste of time to discuss it, really. I am not at all marganizing what has been done, but I am trying to be your friend and your coach and teach you how to be alive and have your rights today. So bear with me as we use this sensitive subject in this case study.
You no doubt agree with me that reparations must be 1) immediate and 2) appropriately targeted. I bet you think I'm going to say it's "too late" for reparations, since legal slavery ended over one hundred years ago. Nope, I'm not going to say that. I'm going to help you get reparations. Here is what you need to do. You need to determine who took your TV or, rather, your ancestors' TV, and you have suffered as a result. Thus you need to research in Africa which tribes first captured your ancestors and name them as the first liable group for reparations. In general many Africans were captured and sold into slavery by rival African tribes. So you need to identify which ones were involved and proportion responsibility. Then you need to identify the European countries/monarchies that funded the slave capturing and transport. Your rights were first deprived by those who captured your ancestors, those who stole your TV, and by those who provided the capturing and transportation facilities. Your rights were then secondly in time sequence deprived by the slave owners who purchased and kept the slaves. Thus you must outline the shape of your "war reparations country" in order to appropriately target them. But in your case it is a virtual country, to use the computer term, who owe you reparations. Not to be political I will make up names, except for the USA.
Virtual reparations country: 30% the African tribes X, Y, Z who captured and sold slaves, 30% the European countries O, P, Q who seized slaves, provided men and ships to transport them, 40% the actual white people in the USA who sold, owned and profited from slaves.
You see the problem? Genuine reparations have one of two possiblities: 1) designate a country as being "guilty" such as was done in WWI or 2) identify those who actually conducted the wrong and apportion blame according to their actual participation.
So without taking sides, dear friends, I am simply teaching you the difference between genuine reparations and entitlements. A society could take the stance that every person who had an almost smothered child, or a stolen TV (and I'm not trivializing, but using the case study materials) gets an entitlement based on that title as a remedy. A society could try to designate that those who descended from an almost smothered child also receives an entitlement. The problem is that entitlement comes from your own participatory tax dollars, by definition. Reparations comes from "the other guy" the one who "actually did it." In order to do just reparations you have to research and apportion (wow, would that keep lawyers busy!) guilt and blame and then trace the descendants and apportion the cost of the reparations aka entitlement to them. You know that makes very little sense because the rule of reparations is that if done against a group you are indeed charging those who were innocent and against the war in the first place, and also their subsequent generations.
I don't want to get too far into transforming this into a slavery reparations case study since this is a case study about rights, and how rights are inborn and eternal, compared to human devices such as deprivation of rights, entitlements, remedy, crime and reparations.
But you see that many in public office, and privately, have their definitions all backwards and blurry and ultimately ineffective. As a result humans are farther from understanding their inherent God (or natural/ethical) given rights, rather than closer. So when I listen to political or legal debate I really find it so pointless because people are not even sure what they are arguing about factually and clearly, in truth. This is a problem of rights, entitlement and remedy policy in all parts of life in all societies and governments, where people have lost actual understanding of the ultimate motivation which is inborn rights of all humans and the removal of the means of depriving rights in the here and now. Without that first everything else is futile and even counterproductive fail. What good will it be if two hundred years from now people are arguing how to remedy the legacy of child sexual slavery and abuse, for example, if they allowed it to happen in the here and now? People, it's only one lived human life apiece, and one earth, and the consequences (and thus remedies) must happen in the here and now, based on universal recognition of authentic inborn human rights and removal of real deprivations of those human rights.
I hope that you have understood this and find it helpful.
The first word I want to clarify, since that is what the talk show mentioned, is "rights." The talk show hosts played a sound byte from a politician where the politician claimed that they (politicians) "create" or "give" rights to people. No, that is incorrect, and the talk show hosts were quick to point this out. Yet I know that many of you would think that rights are created. They are not created; rights are in existence, continual existence. It is the depriving of rights that is the problem in society, so that is the first part of what I want to explain.
Every human being, just by virtue of existing, has certain absolute rights. They are not "rights" conferred by other human beings. To calm those social justice people (and believe me, I am on your side, I am coaching you though in a grave error) let me start with an obvious example. When you are born, no one had to give you a piece of paper saying you had the right to breathe the air. I mean, duh. If someone smothers you, though, they have deprived you of your rights. Do you understand that? When a human being is born they have rights already in existence, the complete set of rights all humans need and are born into, not given to them. Now you can understand the wording of the Founding Fathers better, where they recognize these inherent pre-existing eternal rights, not confer them. Believers understand that these rights are given by God when humans were created in the first place. Ethical non-believers understand that even if they deny a God, those rights are already in place, and don't have to be spelled out by a set of human beings, because it it "natural law" (believers use that term too), or "the right thing to do," or the "ethics of human rights" or other God-neutral but ethic phrases and philosophies. Both believers and non-believers who are ethical understand that genuine rights are eternal, inborn, and already in existence.
That is the first part of what the past two generations have warped and misunderstood. They have taken the eternal and inborn existence of rights and forgotten what that really means. When did this happen? Pretty much in the 1960's when people started saying "I want my rights." Yes, they were correct to perceive that those who suffered injustice were being deprived of rights. But "rights" became shorthand for remedies. Rights are not remedies. Rights cannot be created. They are already in existence. Rights exist and every thinking human, whether a believer or not, needs to protect the language in order to maintain clarity that all people have certainty of the rights that are inborn of being human.
So whether you believe in God or not you must understand that in the USA the Founding Fathers recognized that certain rights are in pre-existence. Go back to the example of the baby being born having the right to breathe air, even though no one wrote a piece of paper saying that that this baby has a license or permit under the law to breathe air upon birth. Anyone who is not insane or an idiot understands that. Thus it is really easy to understand that the right to be alive (including being able to breathe) is automatic upon coming alive (being born), duh. If someone takes a pillow and smothers the baby on birth, two things have happened. The baby's right to life was violated and so the baby was, to use the correct language "deprived of his or her rights." So you have "rights" and their opposite, which is not the "lack of rights" but the "deprivation of rights." And here is where it had become naturally confusing: not only was the smothered baby deprived of his or her rights (to life), but a civil crime was committed, assault, battery and murder. This is where the thinking became blurry during the 1960's and got worse and worse until now when it seems no one understands simple basic concepts and definitions anymore.
Just a pause, this is not going to turn into an abortion argument, so put that aside and let us work together for clarity about human rights. I am using the baby, full term, born in a wanted situation (presumably) for its universal ease in understanding, not for agenda. Keep that in mind when I start to also discuss in this case study civil (racial) deprivation of rights.
The Founding Fathers recognized every human being already has three basic "rights:" life (the right to be alive and not to have life truncated, such as in the smothering), liberty (the right to be free and not in bondage to another human being) and the pursuit of happiness (the right to lead one's life in search of sustaining and satisfaction). If you think about this, this is such a profound insight. In a pithy way the Founding Fathers summarized, using three simple words and phrases, these universal God given (or natural law/ethics) rights and pre-exist.
So you say, well, why was slavery and so forth legal when one has the right to liberty? Now you are getting it. Notice to ask me that question you said slavery was "legal?" It was not, correctly speaking, a right; many laws and social customs are violation of and deprivation of inherent rights. The civil rights movement started out using the verbiage correctly, but society started eroding their understanding of the fact that it happens every day throughout human society, this problem:
1. All humans have inherent rights not created by humans but eternal and already in place.
2. Some humans deprive other human beings of those rights.
3. Some deprivation of rights are actually legal under human made laws, but they are always wrong as they are deprivation of rights.
4. Human rights must always trump laws that deprive of human rights, but in reality we see that often the opposite takes place.
5. Rights cannot be created; rights already exist. What humans can do is restore those who have been deprived of their rights to no longer be deprived.
So now let me tackle the second core area of confusion about rights and the law. We now understand that rights already exist, totally without human creation or control. We also recognize that the problem is humans who deprive other humans of their rights. Thus slavery, while legal, was not "a right," (even if in the lingo people used that word) but slavery was, instead, a legal but unrighteous deprivation of human rights. Remember there is worldwide slavery still going on, both of servitude and sexual, and thus we must urgently understand that there is no "right," either legal or for "free market" reasons, for slavery in any form at all. Period. When slaves are freed they have not "gained" a right; their inherent rights have been restored.
So the second area of confusion exists around the terms "entitlement" and "reparation." Let's roll up sleeves and clear that up so we can actually get something done in this world before it is too late.
Remember that no one has a right to tax; taxing is a law, a mechanism, not a right. An entitlement is an expenditure of money gained by taxes, but it is a specific form of expenditure as a group is designated by "title" to receive funds. Thus that group is "entitled" because the name of the group segregates them from others so they receive special tax money. Let's use an obvious example.
The baby has been born and was not smothered, and so mother and father now have a person with a new title in their family "a child." Under USA tax law anyone who has the title "child" is entitled to being a tax deduction on the government tax forms. The baby was born with rights, but not with an entitlement. Entitlements are political, social, monarch or other human based decisions to confer or not, and has nothing to do with "rights." Too many people, both conservatives and liberals, think that they have a "right" to "entitlements." They may have a legal right, but we are speaking of human rights here. Human rights have become blurred by those who most advocate them by mixing them up with the concept of legal remedies and legal rights such as entitlements. Humans pass and enact entitlements for their own perceived fairness or merit agendas; humans do not create "rights" because human rights already exist.
So one must maintain clarity of thought and language, when one is debating or problem solving the giving of human laws/legal entitlements versus the problem of restoring deprived human rights. Too many well meaning people have ferocious arguments that are bull crap because they are not even speaking about either rights or entitlements/remedies/deprivation of rights (three different things). Do not "look" to law for "your rights," unless you mean "legal rights". In other words, no law states that a baby has the obvious human right to breathe the air. A law does say you can't smother a baby. If you look to human law for God given (natural, ethical) rights, you are lost from the very beginning, as human rights are in pre-existence, not conferred by law.
Human rights are like gold in a mine that is as yet undiscovered. The gold is already there and it's not there because some human "created gold" and then "injected it into a mountain," duh. Yet people can pass laws about who can own or explore the land. Those laws have nothing to do with the fact that the gold already exists, without the will or workings of mere human hands. Human rights exist and are eternal, no matter what a human being says or does. The problem is that many people deprive others of their human rights. It would be as if people told each other, "Well, the unmined gold in that mountain only exists if you have brown eyes, while if you have blue eyes that gold does not exist." We are not even speaking of the legality of pursuing the mining, we are speaking of a lack of reality of people who deprive others of their human rights, saying those human rights do not exist when they do, obviously, just as the gold exists whether you have brown eyes or blue.
This, young people, is one reason why faith in God gives, not takes away, strength, logic and clarity to human actions. Those who believe in God have a better comprehension of God given human rights. This is not because they necessarily "do better" or "behave better" or are "more moral" or "more ethical" than a well meaning atheist, for example. I'm not saying that at all. Rather, what I am saying is that non-believing human rights advocates live entirely within the framework of human created laws, and often they are caught and limited by the snares of human nature and laws. They say "you don't need to believe in God to be good," and that is true, but if they do not believe in God, then they believe only in the goodness of man, and that can only be understood, as a consequence, via deeds and laws. They inadvertently take their eyes off of the inherent truth of eternal inborn human rights (since they don't believe it is God given and inborn) and thus they think of rights as good behavior and laws. They put their own well meaning aim too low and too limited.
Like abortion, I am not making this about black/white slavery (notice I am speaking much of modern slavery, which is commercial/sexual and labor servitude) so do not try to discern agenda: I'm on everyone's side here. But I will now deliberately discuss the black/white slavery legacy in order to build upon the clarity of definitions by now tackling "remedy" and "reparations." I'm not using USA Native Americans in the case study because I need to keep this a global example.
First, to recap:
1. Human rights are inborn and pre-exist.
2. Human rights can be deprived, and often are, but are not created by humans.
3. Deprived human rights must be addressed and restored. In other words the depriving of rights must cease.
4. Entitlements are a special legal monetary consideration given to a designated group, which reflects the priorities of society.
5. Remedies are the means by which an injustice is corrected and rights restored, not "given."
Let's start with an easy example. Someone breaks into your house and steals your television. The police catch the person and give you back your television. The police "restore" your goods, your television, they do not need to write a law "giving you a right to own a television." You already had the right to the television.
Human rights are the same thing. The rights already exist, but some humans deprive others. Those humans need to be stopped from depriving others. When someone is stopped from depriving a person of their rights, all is automatically good again. The rights were always there, but someone blocked you from them. Now the rights are restored when the person stops depriving you of them.
But hold on, you say, damage is done when rights were deprived. I agree. But you must be clear in your mind what you are working on in a given moment: 1) restoring access to deprived rights and/or 2) compensating for the damage.
Let's say the thief smashed a window to get into your house to take the TV. If, in our silly but usefully clear example, TV represents a human right you already had, when the police remove the deprivation of your right as a problem (someone else had your TV) that concludes their role in this matter. Part of society must focus on ensuring that no one's rights are deprived. That is not the same as the part of society that now helps you to inventory the damage and get you back on your feet. The police do not fix your window, or give you money to have it fixed. They also do not take a window out of the thief's house and give it to you. Human rights campaigners must focus, like the TV recovering police, on removing obstacles to other people's access to their pre-existing human rights. Human rights should not at all complicate their essential first priority with issues of remedy and reparations, since those require human created processes, rules, law, procedures and logic. For example the homeowner may have an insurance policy and pursues remedy based not on human rights but the commercial agreement he or she has in place for insurance reimbursement.
Now, here's where we need to clear up the whole "slavery reparations" language. You might, being an attentive reader, now put two and two together and say, "Well, suppose the culture gives an entitlement that all people who had TV's stolen from them gets a $100 tax credit or payment to remedy that their rights were violated." Now you are talking! See? Now you are getting somewhere. You have separated the restoration of deprived human rights from the "picking up the mess left behind" process. That would be a logical use of the entitlement human made process, not right to address lingering damage from a now corrected deprivation of human rights. An entitlement is the creating of a group of people based on their title (titles such as senior citizens, social security recipients, children, people who had their TV's stolen) who now receive goods, services or usually monatary special consideration. Remember, a human baby has the pre-existing universal inborn right to be born and to breathe the air, a crime is committed (and that right was deprived) if the baby is smothered, but the decision to give a tax deduction to the successfully born baby is an entitlement based on the title "child."
Suppose someone tried to smother the baby in the hospital and while they did not succeed they did some real damage to the baby. This is now the area of remedy and it is entirely dealt with by human laws and processes. This is where morality must be one's compass and this is what the Bible means about being "righteous" and "just." Here's what I mean.
Righteousness and justice must be immediate and focused on the actual people involved in the problem. You go after the guy who stole the TV for remedy and damages, not anyone who ever stole a TV. You go after whoever tried to smother your baby (and perhaps the bad procedures of where this crime took place), but you don't sue every hospital and every person who ever wronged a child. In other words, remedy is targeted and immediate. Too many in society have drifted away from that understanding in their attempts to "recover" what is they are "entitled to." See? That's wrong language. No one is "entitled" to "remedy" unless an entitlement law exists that all people who had stolen TV sets (title) receive $100. Remedy is the attempt to provide justice and righteousness after a wrong has been committed, and there is a wide range of possible valid avenues for remedy, all based on human law, process and free will regarding goodness, charity and virtue.
Two people each had a TV stolen via smashed windows. One gets reimbursement from their insurance company. The other does not have insurance, but has a friend who owns a window business and the friend, through charity, rebuilds and replaces the window for free.
The term "reparations" is best understood as the financial punishment levied onto the combatant who is defeated in a war. So now, build on the foundation I have given to you about entitlements and remedy. If one country is attacked unjustly by another, yet defeats the aggressor at great cost, the aggrieved victorious country may well indeed impose reparations onto the aggressor losing nation. The most obvious example of that is World War I when huge, back breaking reparations were placed upon Germany, the aggressor and loser of the war. (And put aside all the nuance around who did what to whom and stick to the basic facts). In reparations you clobber the entire country because they are the unit by which the injustice occurred. So even the peace movement in the aggressor country would get clobbered by reparations, as no distinction is made. That's not entirely bad because we all understand enablers, whether willing or against their will. It's the theory that a country could not war if people such as farmers did not keep growing food and thus enable the war machine, even if the farmers themselves were against the war in the first place.
That is the slippery slope of reparations. They are strictly speaking logical but in reality there is a huge problem. The first problem is that it must be immediate. In other words, the second generation should not pay for the war of the first generation. The second problem is, as I stated, reparations are the largest and broadest of all entitlements. The title thus becomes "an entire country."
Those are the problems in logic and justice that even well meaning black/white slave reparations face, which is why it is a waste of time to discuss it, really. I am not at all marganizing what has been done, but I am trying to be your friend and your coach and teach you how to be alive and have your rights today. So bear with me as we use this sensitive subject in this case study.
You no doubt agree with me that reparations must be 1) immediate and 2) appropriately targeted. I bet you think I'm going to say it's "too late" for reparations, since legal slavery ended over one hundred years ago. Nope, I'm not going to say that. I'm going to help you get reparations. Here is what you need to do. You need to determine who took your TV or, rather, your ancestors' TV, and you have suffered as a result. Thus you need to research in Africa which tribes first captured your ancestors and name them as the first liable group for reparations. In general many Africans were captured and sold into slavery by rival African tribes. So you need to identify which ones were involved and proportion responsibility. Then you need to identify the European countries/monarchies that funded the slave capturing and transport. Your rights were first deprived by those who captured your ancestors, those who stole your TV, and by those who provided the capturing and transportation facilities. Your rights were then secondly in time sequence deprived by the slave owners who purchased and kept the slaves. Thus you must outline the shape of your "war reparations country" in order to appropriately target them. But in your case it is a virtual country, to use the computer term, who owe you reparations. Not to be political I will make up names, except for the USA.
Virtual reparations country: 30% the African tribes X, Y, Z who captured and sold slaves, 30% the European countries O, P, Q who seized slaves, provided men and ships to transport them, 40% the actual white people in the USA who sold, owned and profited from slaves.
You see the problem? Genuine reparations have one of two possiblities: 1) designate a country as being "guilty" such as was done in WWI or 2) identify those who actually conducted the wrong and apportion blame according to their actual participation.
So without taking sides, dear friends, I am simply teaching you the difference between genuine reparations and entitlements. A society could take the stance that every person who had an almost smothered child, or a stolen TV (and I'm not trivializing, but using the case study materials) gets an entitlement based on that title as a remedy. A society could try to designate that those who descended from an almost smothered child also receives an entitlement. The problem is that entitlement comes from your own participatory tax dollars, by definition. Reparations comes from "the other guy" the one who "actually did it." In order to do just reparations you have to research and apportion (wow, would that keep lawyers busy!) guilt and blame and then trace the descendants and apportion the cost of the reparations aka entitlement to them. You know that makes very little sense because the rule of reparations is that if done against a group you are indeed charging those who were innocent and against the war in the first place, and also their subsequent generations.
I don't want to get too far into transforming this into a slavery reparations case study since this is a case study about rights, and how rights are inborn and eternal, compared to human devices such as deprivation of rights, entitlements, remedy, crime and reparations.
But you see that many in public office, and privately, have their definitions all backwards and blurry and ultimately ineffective. As a result humans are farther from understanding their inherent God (or natural/ethical) given rights, rather than closer. So when I listen to political or legal debate I really find it so pointless because people are not even sure what they are arguing about factually and clearly, in truth. This is a problem of rights, entitlement and remedy policy in all parts of life in all societies and governments, where people have lost actual understanding of the ultimate motivation which is inborn rights of all humans and the removal of the means of depriving rights in the here and now. Without that first everything else is futile and even counterproductive fail. What good will it be if two hundred years from now people are arguing how to remedy the legacy of child sexual slavery and abuse, for example, if they allowed it to happen in the here and now? People, it's only one lived human life apiece, and one earth, and the consequences (and thus remedies) must happen in the here and now, based on universal recognition of authentic inborn human rights and removal of real deprivations of those human rights.
I hope that you have understood this and find it helpful.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Cross honoring WWI dead under attack
Some guy filed suit that it was "unfair" that a plain wooden cross placed on national parks land seventy years ago to honor the dead of WWI because it allegedly promotes one religion on federal land. What? How dumb is that. It's now being argued at the US Supreme Court.
There are two errors in "logic," such as it is, by this clown and his supporters, who filed the original suit in 1999. Here they are:
1. The first error is that a "specific" religious symbol refers only to that religion's followers (as in only the Christian WWI war dead are being honored). I can easily prove the error in that. Suppose that a bunch of Buddhists got together and created a memorial, with one of their symbols, that honored all women who died in childbirth. I would find that touching and would never assume that they only meant all Buddhist women. I mean, DUH! Likewise a Jewish monument honoring all lost in the Holocaust, I figure that they are sending "good vibes" to all who died, and not only the Jews. If Muslims had calligraphy somewhere honoring all grey haired middle aged women who grew up in poverty, I'd be flattered, and not assume that they mean only Muslim grey haired women. Only a moron would reckon that a cross honoring all WWI dead is somehow selective and an insult or omission, rather than an honor to everyone. Sheesh.
2. The second error is that having a "Christian" symbol, a historic one, not a new one, on federal land is somehow enticing or coercing people to recognize Christianity as a "state" religion. This is totally bogus and I can prove it. Yep, I can prove it. How? OK. Attention all hikers in federal lands and national park systems. If you come across an ancient carving of American Indian cultures that depict any part of their religion, since it's on federal land it's wrong to put it there, so I guess it's OK for you to remove the carvings. Either deface them or chip them out and sell them in the antiquities market (maybe help to balance the budget). Why not? Would not the presence of an American Indian religious symbol carved into a rock on federal land be endorsement of the "state" religion? Better get ready to remove any and all American Indian religious carvings anywhere on federal land. In fact, I think I might even insist on it, if the cross is so bad... gosh, think how we've been living under the insult and coercion of American Indian pagan faith symbols being protected and treasured on Federal lands. Hmmmm.....
There, now that was not so difficult, was it now?
;-)
There are two errors in "logic," such as it is, by this clown and his supporters, who filed the original suit in 1999. Here they are:
1. The first error is that a "specific" religious symbol refers only to that religion's followers (as in only the Christian WWI war dead are being honored). I can easily prove the error in that. Suppose that a bunch of Buddhists got together and created a memorial, with one of their symbols, that honored all women who died in childbirth. I would find that touching and would never assume that they only meant all Buddhist women. I mean, DUH! Likewise a Jewish monument honoring all lost in the Holocaust, I figure that they are sending "good vibes" to all who died, and not only the Jews. If Muslims had calligraphy somewhere honoring all grey haired middle aged women who grew up in poverty, I'd be flattered, and not assume that they mean only Muslim grey haired women. Only a moron would reckon that a cross honoring all WWI dead is somehow selective and an insult or omission, rather than an honor to everyone. Sheesh.
2. The second error is that having a "Christian" symbol, a historic one, not a new one, on federal land is somehow enticing or coercing people to recognize Christianity as a "state" religion. This is totally bogus and I can prove it. Yep, I can prove it. How? OK. Attention all hikers in federal lands and national park systems. If you come across an ancient carving of American Indian cultures that depict any part of their religion, since it's on federal land it's wrong to put it there, so I guess it's OK for you to remove the carvings. Either deface them or chip them out and sell them in the antiquities market (maybe help to balance the budget). Why not? Would not the presence of an American Indian religious symbol carved into a rock on federal land be endorsement of the "state" religion? Better get ready to remove any and all American Indian religious carvings anywhere on federal land. In fact, I think I might even insist on it, if the cross is so bad... gosh, think how we've been living under the insult and coercion of American Indian pagan faith symbols being protected and treasured on Federal lands. Hmmmm.....
There, now that was not so difficult, was it now?
;-)
Friday, December 5, 2008
Comment about OJ Simpson sentencing
The only thing I am surprised about is that "OJ" did not, during his pre-sentencing plea for mercy, state that he should receive little or no prison time so that he can, you know, "Continue to pursue who really killed Ron and Nicole." But oh wait, he never spent a moment doing so, and we know why.
Enjoy "stir."
Enjoy "stir."
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