The real crisis in America is not among the media obsessed topics. The real crisis is not guns or climate change or lack of socialized medical care or who said what and when. The real crisis is fatherlessness. And government and new laws are not the answer to this crisis. Fidelity and faithfulness and father-fulness appear to be.
“All over the world where there are divorces, divorces tend to lead to a lack of father involvement,” he warned. “Where there’s a lack of father involvement, boys are in what I would call the ‘boy crisis’ mode.”
“…boys with significant father involvement are not doing these shootings. Without dads as role models, boys’ testosterone is not well channeled. The boy experiences a sense of purposelessness, a lack of boundary enforcement, rudderlessness, and often withdraws into video games and video porn. At worst, when boys’ testosterone is not well-channeled by an involved dad, boys become among the world’s most destructive forces. When boys’ testosterone is well channeled by an involved dad, boys become among the world’s most constructive forces.”
-Dr. Warren Farrell, author of the new book The Boy Crisis
From the perspective of having worked with a para-church group that has ministered to free people from the cycle of homosexuality, I would like to address a concern of mine…
Recently I saw a huge sign outside a mega-church that offered a “Biblical” approach to gender. The wording was directed at teenagers. Though seemingly innocuous this is a type of inferred legalism.
When a Church or seminar group puts the word “Biblical” in front of its messaging it is clearly inferring that this is the domain of Christians, that this is what a Christian in this subset must do or be.
But desired male and female “characteristics” or conformism should never be taught as gilded pages of Scripture lifted out and fashioned into tablets of “Biblical” mandates. One may say that these approaches are just “guidelines” but the word “Biblical” in front of something conveys the idea of de facto Sola Scriptura truth.
As mentioned, in the past I have been around and served in a para-church ministry based on what was termed “gender symbolism issues” (a cautious reference to Carl Jung). The speaker’s main thrust was to employ an admixture of psychology terms, quotes of the Inklings and of Scripture with the application of soul-healing prayer. It all sounded good to me at the time.
Within this context seminar leaders and counselors urged attendees to pray and ask God for the “True Masculine” and the “True Feminine.” But, these prayers, of course, will not be answered because there is no such thing. The best a man or woman can ever become is being Spirit-filled. It was out this time that I came to realize how insidious this kind of psycho-spirituality was.
It is not hard to understand the Christian Church trying to stabilize the culture surrounding it. But, in this case, it is doing so by adding unnecessary “traditions” onto the message of the Gospel. By placing added strictures and burdens regarding the masculine and the feminine, the Christian Church removes itself from the Gospel and becomes, in a sense, the fashion police.
Recall the early Christian Churches of Jerusalem and Galatia which demanded that new Christians follow the strict tradition “soaked” Law along with the teachings of Jesus? Today’s church in similar manner, as I see it, is seeking to propagate men and women of the “Biblically” masculine or feminine tradition. It would appear that the Christian church is in the process of “canonizing” romantic notions of what they consider to be masculine and feminine qualities.
As a former student of Moody Bible Institute and over the course of a lifetime having read through the Bible several times I have yet to find any description of “Biblical” manhood or womanhood.
What is written are what characteristics a man likes about a woman (see Song of Solomon and Proverbs 31) and what characteristics a woman likes about a man (see Song of Solomon). None of these “characteristics” – physical and pragmatic – carry the moral weight of the Ten Commandments. These “characteristics” should never be used to propagate more sons and daughters of the “Biblically” masculine and feminine.
I believe that the Church with regard to its “genderfication” of males and females has become a stumbling block for the weak.
There are those in the church who are perfectly comfortable conveying the macho role that men play in on TV. And there are some in the church who base gender roles on the corn-fed lyrics of country music. There are women’s conferences about “Biblical” womanhood based on Proverbs 31. And there are many more instances of role play.
I have no problem with role play. Role play is a given in relationships. But I have a problem with a rite of conventionality outside of conforming to the image of Christ. This statement may be too much for some people in the church, I understand.
Yet, the weak, the searching, may easily stumble when such stereotyping is placed askance to their faith.
One could say that Proverbs 31 was written by patrician authors who imagined the qualities of an ideal woman to be in relationship with or for King Solomon’s court. Proverbs 31 definitely speaks of a pragmatic woman and not of a physical woman, as does Song of Solomon. (Platonic men would later consider woman’s physical beauty a type of entrapment and something to avoid.)
But in this day and age Christian men also enact Proverbs 31, do they not? Should we delineate gender based on Proverbs 31? My answer is “No.”
Why create extra yokes called the “Biblical Masculine and Feminine” to be placed on people’s necks? Isn’t a “Biblical” manhood and womanhood referenced only at the conjunction of men and women? And, isn’t marriage of man and wife the nexus that is the positive anti-thesis to same-sex anomalies.
Now it is common knowledge that people do not like ambiguity. We demand black and white. We demand inerrancy. And, we demand “Biblically masculine and feminine” males and females. Our minds are wired to alert us to any differences to a norm. When a perceived threat to a norm occurs we seek to reconcile things as quickly as possible.
Any ambiguity comes off as a potential threat to our understanding of how life should be. As related to gender we tend to overemphasize male and female “roles” in order to reduce our anxiety over ambiguity. Here it is, I believe, that some of the fear of non-conformity has grown out the Christian Fundamentalist movement that was raised up in the early twentieth century against the threat of Liberal theologian’s textual infractions. The Conservative Christian world sought to tighten its reins on what is and isn’t “Biblical.” And in so doing it is also now putting a noose around each gender.
Yet, there is no gender typecasting or stereotyping in Scripture, only sacrosanct relationships established and reinforced. And, more importantly, the message of the Gospel offers everyone freedom from fear. This includes freedom from the fear of the ambiguous and the unknown, whether the fear is of material nature or of the fear of gender “status.”
We should not live with the fear of the not being able to follow the letter of the Law and especially as conjoined with the added impedance of “Biblical” gender.
The current falderal about “Biblical” manhood and womanhood are gooey sentimental and romantic notions mandated under the banner of the “Biblically” acceptable. Let’s not go there. Let’s not make the freedom and fun of romantic role play into religious rule pretense. Let’s be free to be men and women without the yoke of the man-made gender laws placed on our necks. And then, perhaps, homosexuals will then feel free to come home and find new hope under the roof of Christ-like relationships.
In my estimation the best how-to books to lead a Spirit-filled life are the Bible and My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers. Forget the OTC self-help books and seminars on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. You would be wasting your time and money. Worse, you would most likely seek to adapt to someone else’s notion of what it is to be a man or a woman. Run from this nonsense. GIGO.
~~~
“Jewish Wedding” by Jozef Israels (Dutch, 1824-1911)
The closest we come to “Biblical” manhood and “Biblical” womanhood in the Bible, as I read it, is within the Apostle Paul’s circular letter to the churches at and around Ephesus (Ephesians chapter 5). It is there that he instructs Christians as to how men and women should relate to each other and he does so with equanimity and, more importantly, in the context Christ and His Bride, the Church.
Paul’s circular letter should be read in the context of Ephesus being the protectorate of the Temple of Artemis aka Diana. “There was no other Greco-Roman metropolis in the Empire whose ‘body, soul and spirit’ could so belong to a particular deity as did Ephesus to her patron goddess Artemis.” (Oster 1990:1728) Many in the Greco-Roman world came to Ephesus take part in the seductive sexuality of Diana’s worship, worship which included prostitution. Adored as life givers women were given inordinate prominence. As such, they were placed above men.
Sadly, so many sermons and books and seminars parse out “wives submit to your husbands” and “husbands love your wives”. As I see it, Paul wrote to these churches – churches situated in the context of the worship of the female deity Diana, and specifically this passage to promote a Kingdom view of women as opposed to the Artemis view. In the Spirit’s way, Paul let it be known that women were not to be placed on a pedestal as an idol or to be used– not as a Madonna or as a whore.
Paul writes to the Ephesian church outlining a Kingdom of God view of relationships. Husbands are to love their wives and not submit to prostitutes. Wives are to submit to their husbands and not to those who would put them on a pedestal to worship or in a bed as a prostitute. Paul advances the true characteristics of Kingdom of God people: concomitant respect and love of husband and wife.
More than any pretense of “Biblical” gender teaching, the Scriptures order our relationships as it orders our loves: Love God with all your heart, mind, body and soul and love your neighbor as yourself.
Husbands who love their wives love their closest neighbor and are in fact submitting to the Lord within her.
Wives who submit to their husbands submit to their closest neighbor and do so out of love for the Lord within him.
This gamboling of submission and love resembles, I imagine, the relationships of the Trinity and Their dancing embrace.
Please! No more tattoos. Cover up your butterfly, your Mayan symbol of fertility, your undulating butt cheeks covered with spider webs. Cover up your magic marker body. I do not want to see it.
Please! No more women talking endlessly on cell phones while driving an SUV or a mini-van. They are multi-tasking my patience.
Please, no more skinny jeans. If I wanted to look at a blue toothpick then I will go puncture a Smurf.
Please, no more make-your-skin-crawl women: Rachel Maddcow, Ellen, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi.
Please, no more city mayors telling us we can’t drink a biggie size drink or carry a gun or have a Chic-fil-A restaurant in our district.
And please. No more government!
When you voted for Obama you voted to make your life harder. I know I know. You thought life would be better but you were deceived by the “social justice” propaganda.
Voting for tax and spend Democrats (Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi) means that you spend less time with your family and more time working to pay your bills. Sure Barrack and Michelle will continue to get Hawaiian vacations and Barrack will continue to play hundreds of hours of golf but your family will have to put off vacations because of … 1) rising Federal and State taxes, 2) because of government regulations affecting your workplace which affects your pay and 3) because of rising consumer prices due to corporation taxes. And, tax rate increases for the wealthy do not occur in a vacuum. Increasing the tax rates for the wealthy affects everyone negatively.
With Democrats you are placed in what I call a Moronic Squeeze: government through taxation (including the newly tax-mandated Obamacare) demands more of your money. So now you will have to work more hours in order to take care of your family. Then because you are both working so much you can’t spend time with your kids, time the kids desperately need. Instead, a public school takes over your children. Then the public school system demands more money to teach your children and then government will come back for more tax money from you. Phew! You and your children are put in an ever tightening vise by government.
More devastating, government creates fiscal and moral poverty; “social justice” is the scam that is used to take money from your pocket and put it where it best serves a politician and his reelection needs.
When both parents are working who’s with the kids? Are you letting the public school inculcate its “diversity” values into your children because you don’t have the time to spend with them, because you work so many hours to pay government for the first five months of the year?
Social justice, better simply, “justice”, is learned at home. Invest your money there and not in government: spend time with your children, teach them what is good. The returns will be great. Government gives you pennies on the dollar return on your tax payments.
When you keep more of your own money you have more options and more time to spend with family.Voting for more government – more Democrats – does not give you more time with your precious family. Instead you must work all the harder to meet government’s demands. Obamacare is only one of the huge financial demands now placed on the middle class.
2014 & 2016: Think about your family before you vote for more government (and less take home pay) in the form of a Democrat candidate.
Any exhaustive research into my childhood would reveal several close encounters with aliens.
You would learn that these encounters occurred primarily on Sunday afternoons but also sometimes on Saturday nights. You would read that the aliens would slowly pull up in front of my parent’s home and then park right smack in the center of our view, a view framed by our front room picture window. (I wanted to say “frontroom” because it’s the Chicago way.)
For our family Sunday mornings meant going to church – the hell-fire-and-brimstone-preaching-shouted-from-revved up lungs-quivering jowls-and-leaps and-bounds-of-a-Baptist-minister-kind of church. Such a fire-breathing monster would let us know in no uncertain terms that redemption came only by turning from our sins and by walking down the aisle or raising our hand. I did wonder why he didn’t sell exercise videos out in the foyer – “Pilate Your Way Out of Purgatory: Fit and Fundamental Workouts.”
Now my mom and dad are God-fearing people who have always been very hospitable. Often, after a Sunday morning service or an evening service, my folks would invite friends, speakers, missionaries or relatives over for a meal. As I said, this happened a lot.
There were also a few Sundays when my parents decided to have an afternoon home alone with the kids. On those days we would come home from church to the salivating smell of pot roast. The roast would cook while we sat in church pondering our short comings and our eternities. The record will show that I had aromatic visions of pot roast as I turned from sin, walked down the aisle and raised my hand.
Back at home my mother would take the pot roast out of the oven and cover it with aluminum foil. Apparently the fat needed to rejoin the roast in a final cattle roundup. Mom and dad would then prepare the sides – all kid friendly: corn, mashed potatoes and gravy, rolls. And, upon occasion my mother would make butterscotch pudding for dessert. As a devotee of such fine cuisine I sat in the basement far out-of-the-way of the chefs. Down there I watched Warner Oland play Charlie Chan on our B & W TV: “So sorry.”
Besides being wafted to Kid Heaven by the smells I knew that my parents were not just making a scrumptious Sunday meal. They were not going to take any chances with me going far from the straight and narrow. They knew that the way to tether a kid’s soul and keep him close to home was with pot roast and butterscotch pudding.
Well, on one of those blissful Sundays when my tummy was ballooned to its fullest pot roast-iest extent I lay on the floor rolling and reading the funny papers. Nancy and Sluggo. Dick Tracy and Flattop. Brenda Starr and…my brother.
Daryl ever the antagonist always wanted to read the same few square inches of the comics that I was reading. I swear. He would daily invent ways to aggravate me. That day his pointed elbow to my side almost burst me. In retaliation I poked him back and then he poked back harder. This went on for ten minutes until my father said, “You two cut it out or no butterscotch pudding for you.” That settled things for the next five minutes. The thought of Butterscotch pudding had a calming effect on me. An added dollop of whipped cream would also keep me in check – for at least a half-hour.
It was within the cautious serenity of those five minutes that I saw my father suddenly leap up out of his swivel rocker. The Chicago Tribune fell to the floor splayed open. My dad turned to my mother who was sitting on the couch half asleep. With a look of petrified horror he said, “The Gephardts are here!” That was the day I would have my first sighting of aliens in our own front yard.
Absolutely beside himself, my dad thought for a moment: perhaps we could make it look like we weren’t at home. But then he saw the visitors looking at him through the picture window. The alien father on the front lawn was yelling “Hi Bob.” My dad then looked down at his two young children, children who just came home from re-dedicating their lives to Jesus and to pot roast looking up at him. Instantly changing his mind my dad scrambled in two directions at once. In the same step he first bolted toward the kitchen but then turned and flew to the back of the house. Things were put away, hidden from view. Rooms were “straightened.” Food stowed deep in the refrigerator. Our Schnauzer Bobbie took the cue and hid under my bed whimpering. My brother and I hid all of our toys. The quiet afternoon had morphed into the afternoon of the living Gephardts.
Now the Gephardts were good people my folks said, “They’re just a little different.” Yeah, as different as earth and mars I would soon find out.
After greeting the family of five, my dad said he had to get “some things” at the grocery store. An hour later my mother looked concerned, abandoned concerned, angry concerned. As the time crept, my mother sat patiently listening to Mrs. G. wonder out loud if her little “Ronnie was really over the chicken pox.” (I kid, (scratch, scratch) you not.)
My brother and I stood across from the three alien kids, two boys and a girl, and wondered what to do. Mom suggested that we go to a nearby field and play baseball until the FBI had located our father. So off we went.
I can not recall whether it was my brother or whether it was me who was hit in the head with a baseball bat by a Gephardt boy. It must have been me who received the carom because great a swath of my memory has been forever displaced. The oldest kid swung right though an imaginary fast ball which was in fact my head. Let the record show that silly remained intact though. (I have had three concussions in my life: one from a right-handed batter on sugar, one from a concrete wall that halted my fifty yard dash at 55 yards and one as an adult when a humongous lead pipe-carrying truck used my car as a brake – my head bounced around like a pin ball in a Dukes of Hazzard pinball game. Three concussions may explain my David Lynch-like persona, my dream-state reality and my stuttering posts.)
At some point my dad came back from the store with a pie, a cherry pie and a can of whipped cream. He offered to heat it, slice it and even remake it -anything so as to not have to talk to Mr. G who I now know was dead ringer for Randy Quaid. Mr. G sat in our front room – greasy tee shirt, flys buzzing and all. The three G kids all could have walked off a page of the Addam’s Family comic strip. It’s all a blur. On purpose.
Mr. G was a junk collector by trade. He collected “fine” items no longer of use to their owners. He resold his JIT inventory on Maxwell Street. Did we have anything that we didn’t want any more? I imagined that my father wanted to say “Yes, you here.” But my dad, a generous and good man, kept to his busy ways and went looking for a ‘fine item” that would spur Mr. G into immediate sales activity. My dad “sacrificially” retreated to the basement where after a half hour of searching everywhere including a Walter Cronkite newscast he found a lamp on its last light bulb and handed it to Mr. G. who was pleased with his salable good but continued to eye my mom’s china cabinet. My mother seeing Mr. G’s honed gaze locked onto the china cabinet stood up between Mr. G and the cabinet as she continued to talk to Mrs. G. The “over-my-dead-body” look must have told Mr. G all he needed to know. He backed down.
After some warmed cherry pie and coffee and a shake down of each the kids to see if they had taken anything from our rooms we said goodbye to the G’s and to the afternoon. It was now evening. Exhausted we all fell back into the couch to watch a “really big shew.” We had seen the Outer Limits.
Over time the Gs would show up again and again unannounced. Somehow we were ever on their radar though my parents only slightly knew them as neighbors at a previous address in Chicago. But finally these afternoon aliens did stop showing up.
I suspect they stopped coming when our house looked eerily uninhabited: with all the curtains pulled my dad started taking long Sunday afternoon naps on the couch in the dark, cool basement of our house. My mom who loved our dad took us three (by now) perturbing kids for a long drive in the country – all of us far from afternoon aliens.
(Any truth in this account, real or perceived, is totally up to you.)
Did you know that Intelligently Designed quantum physics provides matchmaking services? You didn’t? Well, recently, I read…
”…that in reality two electrons can really fit into the same energy level because they can have opposite spins. This means that they can both fit into the lowest (symmetric) energy level and, crucially, this level decreases in energy as the atoms get closer together. This means that it is energetically favorable for two distant atoms to move closer. And this is what happens in nature.”
And God saw that it was not good for atom to be alone.
(Two electrons, opposite spins? The atoms get closer together? Yin and Yang, Matter and anti-matter. Grace and nature. Male and female. This fundamental symmetry makes sense at the atomic level and also at the nuclear family level. Hence the mating song “I’ve Got You Under My Spectrascope.”)
“…This preference for two atoms to stick together as a result of sharing their electrons between them is known as a covalent bond.”…
And the preference for two humans (Mr. Spin up and Ms. Spin down) to stick together as a result of sharing their lives in the molecule of marriage is known as intimate bonding.
“…covalent bonding is the reason that you are not a bunch of atoms sloshing around in a featureless blob.”
This explains a lot about my love life! I’ve got your atomic number, buddy.
In a previous post linked above I pointed out that family life in America is producing children who could easily become guests on the Jerry Springer Show later in life.
Here is a video of Theodore Dalrymple giving us more anecdotal evidence of this:
Last night I found myself in a van, my ex driving us to a familiar campground in the next state. We wanted to get there as fast as we could. We urgently wanted to get to our seven year-old son.
We drove through the darkness panting and leaning forward in our seats. Just before sunrise we entered the campground. We drove over to the campsite where we had camped many times before. There in the middle of a grassy opening surrounded by oak trees was a lone pup tent.
I jumped out of the van and ran over to the tent. Down on my knees I lifted the tent flap and looked into the dimly lit tent. My son was sitting in the middle of the otherwise empty tent. He was facing the other way.
There was nothing in front of him. He sat dead still.
I crawled over to him. As I did so he turned his head to look at me. He then got up, jumped into my arms and hugged me tightly.
After a while we released our hug and I put him down. He returned to sit in the same place in the tent. He sat down facing away from me.
I went out of the tent. My ex had been yelling from the car that we had to leave.
I called back to my son and told him that we were going, that he must come along. There was no reply.
****
I opened my eyes and winced them shut again. The pit of my stomach felt as if it had been carved out of me while I slept. When the silent sobbing began I tried to cover the wound.
The other day I was shopping at a Barnes and Noble Bookstore. Over in the Music/DVD section I was purchasing the Howard’s End DVD. As the sale rang up I could hear the high-pitched sound of a young girl’s voice singing behind me. I turned and saw a pre-teen sitting at a music display. She was wearing headphones and singing quite loudly, oblivious to the people around her.
My first thought was “I remember doing that. How neat.” But my quickly heart sank when I realized that she was singing the words to Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream:
“Let’s go all the way tonight,
No regrets, just love,
We can dance until we die,
You and I we’ll be young forever.”…
‘We drove to Cali and got drunk on the beach
Got a motel and made a fort out of sheets
I finally found you, my missing puzzle piece
I’m complete…
I’ma get your heart racing in my skin tight jeans
Be your teenage dream tonight
Let you put your hands on me in my skin tight jeans
Be your teenage dream tonight..
You make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream
The way you turn me on, I can’t sleep…
How does this situation make you feel? Are you outraged or would you just laugh it off?
Have you seen the music video? Do you realize that young children are watching Glee and hearing these words?
I won’t display the Katy Perry music video. Here is Darren Criss (Blaine) along with “The Dalton Academy Warblers” singing all of “Teenage Dream” in Season 2, Episode 6 of Glee titled “Never Been Kissed”.
The TV program Glee is a type of peer pressure inviting our kids to emulate what is presented each week is it not? Children want to be in sync with their peers. It is very troubling to see the gift of human sexuality being talked about so cavalierly. I see it portrayed as an extension of the Disney ‘fluff fantasy” characterization of childhood and not as a sacred endowment from a holy God.
Kids have enough to deal with without the constant barrage of sexual promiscuity and depravity that is promoted by the media. Letting your child come in contact with this type of overreaching influence is comparable to sexual abuse of a minor.
Where are this girl’s parents? Maybe they are in the café drinking coffee, hoping to stave off the night of the teenage dream.
Dad,
Masquerading man –
Provider, Decider, Chronicler,
Motivator and Love’s unlikely dance Partner,
A mischievous Mirth-er who’s my mother’s lover
(Confused by Eve but not alone),
A baseball phenom:
Always at bat for me;
Always fielding my bloopers;
Always never keeping score,
A figurine in flannel wearing
Camouflaged feelings in the blind
Savior of children’s happiness with
Strength born of recycled weakness –
Dad,
A Giver given.
“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton
*****
“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
*****
“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
*****
“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
*****
To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
*****
“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
*****
Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
*****
If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
*****
“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
*****
“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
*****
Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
*****
“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
*****
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
*****
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
*****
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
*****
“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
*****
God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
*****
From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
*****
“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
*****
One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
*****
“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
*****
God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
*****
“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
**
“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
*****
“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
*****
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
*****
“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
*****
This is what the LORD says:
“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
*****
“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
*****
Cindy Wity 
Quoth the Paradise: Nevermore!
December 30, 2012 2 Comments
Quoth the Paradise: Nevermore!
Please! No more tattoos. Cover up your butterfly, your Mayan symbol of fertility, your undulating butt cheeks covered with spider webs. Cover up your magic marker body. I do not want to see it.
Please! No more women talking endlessly on cell phones while driving an SUV or a mini-van. They are multi-tasking my patience.
Please, no more skinny jeans. If I wanted to look at a blue toothpick then I will go puncture a Smurf.
Please, no more make-your-skin-crawl women: Rachel Maddcow, Ellen, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi.
Please, no more city mayors telling us we can’t drink a biggie size drink or carry a gun or have a Chic-fil-A restaurant in our district.
And please. No more government!
When you voted for Obama you voted to make your life harder. I know I know. You thought life would be better but you were deceived by the “social justice” propaganda.
Voting for tax and spend Democrats (Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi) means that you spend less time with your family and more time working to pay your bills. Sure Barrack and Michelle will continue to get Hawaiian vacations and Barrack will continue to play hundreds of hours of golf but your family will have to put off vacations because of … 1) rising Federal and State taxes, 2) because of government regulations affecting your workplace which affects your pay and 3) because of rising consumer prices due to corporation taxes. And, tax rate increases for the wealthy do not occur in a vacuum. Increasing the tax rates for the wealthy affects everyone negatively.
With Democrats you are placed in what I call a Moronic Squeeze: government through taxation (including the newly tax-mandated Obamacare) demands more of your money. So now you will have to work more hours in order to take care of your family. Then because you are both working so much you can’t spend time with your kids, time the kids desperately need. Instead, a public school takes over your children. Then the public school system demands more money to teach your children and then government will come back for more tax money from you. Phew! You and your children are put in an ever tightening vise by government.
More devastating, government creates fiscal and moral poverty; “social justice” is the scam that is used to take money from your pocket and put it where it best serves a politician and his reelection needs.
When both parents are working who’s with the kids? Are you letting the public school inculcate its “diversity” values into your children because you don’t have the time to spend with them, because you work so many hours to pay government for the first five months of the year?
Social justice, better simply, “justice”, is learned at home. Invest your money there and not in government: spend time with your children, teach them what is good. The returns will be great. Government gives you pennies on the dollar return on your tax payments.
When you keep more of your own money you have more options and more time to spend with family. Voting for more government – more Democrats – does not give you more time with your precious family. Instead you must work all the harder to meet government’s demands. Obamacare is only one of the huge financial demands now placed on the middle class.
2014 & 2016: Think about your family before you vote for more government (and less take home pay) in the form of a Democrat candidate.
Added Dec 31st, 2012: The Best Bumper Stickers of 2012 – the Legal Insurrection edition. Here’s one example:
I have to ask:
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Filed under 2014 election, commentary, Economics, family, Political Commentary, Politics Tagged with bnig government, city mayors, debbie wasserman schultz, Economics, family, government, politics, progressives, progressivism, public schools, socialism, take home pay, taxes, unions