Better than Nixon saying (as Vice President) “you won’t have Dick Nixon around anymore” Of course he lied. Later he said “I am not a crook!” Again, he perjured.
Trump was very succinct. To the point. “I’m fucked” … actually, he’s sodomized with a shovel, sideways so it would hurt more.
on a pretense of “animal rights”. So, do the non-kosher methods of killing an animal measure up? Raising the animals in factory/warehouse type “farms”?
See, the Wreligious Wrong in Amerikkka ought to be on alert for that.
AIPAC among them. “Oh, no, Jonah, you’re wrong, they would never round me and my family up for a “Camp” out, for we are Baptist/Pentecostal/Catholic/Jewish what the hell ever… and the Homeland Security measures are only being used against Muslims”.
Some of the AIPACkers are probably going to be upset about this next statement, the first groups the Gestapo rounded up, first Anarchists, then Gypsies, then Communists, then mentally ill people, then homosexuals and THEN they started eyeing the blacks and Jews.
Remember, as Goebels and Hitler said “Germany is and always will be a Christian Nation!”… but only if you happen to be the “Right Kind” of Christian.
Those who have been riding along in the same posse with the Falwell Klan, a few years ago would have been the right time to hit the panic button and bail out. NOW they’ve got your address, phone number, the names of everybody in your households, where your kids go to school… How much money you make, Who your closest friends are.
What, you thought those pastoral letters from the 700 Klub were just them being nice to you?
Get a freakin’ grip already. When the Pilgrims came to Amerikkka they were seeking religious freedom, sure… FOR THEMSELVES. The same with the Puritans. Before they burned witchcraft suspects in Massachusetts, they burned Bibles and banned the budding Evangelical movement.
Funny thing about that, not funny ha-ha because it just AIN’T gonna make anybody laugh, but you know that War on Christmas bullshit they bitch about every year? And keep popping off with the names of Pilgrim and Puritan elders? They’re not interchangeable, even though they lived roughly as contemporaries, both had a predilection for really stupid looking hats, didn’t bathe and had a real talent for pissing off their neighbors and the government wherever they went. And they didn’t celebrate Christmas. This is the kind of religious warfare that sparked the notion of Separation of Church and State.
To have a Church State you’d have to set up a State Church and guess what? Chicken butt… no really guess what? It AIN’T GONNA BE YOUR CHURCH, BUBBA. Your pastor probably deluded himself while he was deluding you but Your Church Ain’t Going To Be Top Dog and that’s so close to a slam dunk bet that I won’t have to ever change the statement.
You’re going to give people the impression that you’re dumb and, chances are, they’ll be correct.
That “bridge between church and state” is a no-win game so it’s no surprise that it attracted dumbasses like Bush.
For Bruce McCluggage
Had some words with my friend Bruce yesterday–OK, lots of words. In fact, the Spirit moved me, so I was blasting words all over the place like that guy from the X Men, only with a gag instead of a visor. All the way toward the end of much conversatin’–and yes, Bruce held his end respectably in the face of my torrent–we came to a summation.
The idea is already on the pages here, so it’s important, and needing some flesh, but it’s also very simple. We all know we can’t prove a negative. Any third grade philosopher know this as an unshakable verity, right? So who will step up to prove that? No one, that’s who–we can’t do it, and mind you, I don’t hearsee that term coming from myself often. I’ll beat my kids senseless if I hear them using it. (Hi kids! Molto amore!). Hell the notion is generational. My totally outstanding 95 year old Granddad banned the word from his brood’s vocabulary, and he started his family during the Great Depression. But we can’t, and we know we can’t.
We can’t even prove that we can’t prove that we can’t prove a negative. We can add layers to our investigation to Eternity, and never can we prove a negative. And yet we know that we know that we know (&c.) that we can’t do it. What the Heellll!!? This is why: Reason breaks down at a point between proving and knowing right here for us to examine like a fascinating diamond, cut in some diabolically ingenious fashion to as to hide its facets from us like a tesseract or something. There’s math that explains this pretty succinctly. Look up Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, (here’s a good start http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/). Godel, whose name I’ll be disrespecting til I figure out how to add an umlaut on this thing, wrote a bunch of High Math, way beyond my capacity, that shows us in terms even I can grok, that any closed system can never possibly contain all the tools necessary to fully describe itself. With me so far?
This shows us another Eternal Verity: Truth transcends Proof; and further–our ability to know does the same. Now, Bruce is a philosopher, and kind of a Christian, so this sort of shit doesn’t bother him like it may the Scientific Determinists that may read this. What we are gazing upon, through the lens of our little diamond, is an example of our ability to “jump out of the system”, and view it from outside, in some manner as indescribable as how we can know there’s no proving a negative. (Apologies to Doug Hofstadter for abusing an idea I came across in Godel, Escher, Bach. I’m about to depart from his comfort zone, I think. He did, give him mucho credit, respectably describe the idea within the closed system of those pages). This is an ability we share with God. This, I think, is why some tidbit of western scripture says, “Ye are gods,” (Psalm 82, for you skeptics; read it all and get some context before attempting to argue, please).
This whole line of thought is closely associated with the Ontological Argument as proof of God, if not fully dependent upon it, (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/). For the uninitiated, this is a supremely brilliant bit of philosophical tomfoolery that attemtps to prove the existence of God by reason alone, in an orderly procession of thought utterly divorced from empirical evidence. If anyone would care to take it on, I’d love–no LOVE–to see a genuine debunking. It’s very slippery indeed, and feels for all the world like a stage magician pulling infinite decks of cards from his sleeves. But it’s irrefutable, in my stupid little mind. It jumps the system.
I’ll readdress the crap we’ve mulled over here, but this is good. Put simply–arithmetically, one might say–We can’t prove a negative>We know this>Truth is superior to proof>We are therefore superior to the closed system of All-There-Is>Only god is thus>We are gods. (Yes, I took a leap there at step 6. I only have so much attention span. Roll wit’ it for now, OK? It’s in the Ontological Argument if you feel like getting ahead of me). This is arithmetical, yes, and handily sums up my points from yesterday, Bruce and friends. But, as you’ve seen by now I guess, that doesn’t mean one can’t do a bit of Algebra, Trig, or (Meta)Physics with it.
***
Jeez, I hope you all enjoyed that. Please don’t burn me at the stake yet. There’s more. It’ll take a while to work around the mess of toroidal thinking here. See Bruce–I didn’t forget that part. I’m only human, even if we are all gods. Bear in mind all, that Nothing here is any more valuable than the opinion of one idiot house painter. And any of you who have read the stuff before this will know already: It’s all a bunch of bullshit.
(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)
It’s difficult to inject logic into either politics or faith without being the subject of a lynching, but here goes.
There was a statue, 62 feet tall, of Jesus on the side of a highway in Ohio. People would actually pull over and pray to it. So last year about this time it was struck by lightning, caught fire and burned down. Or burned up. Means the same thing. Now, there’s long been a controversy in Christianity and Judaism and Islam over the making of graven images and with special notice given to a statue, picture or whatever of God.
Much Christian blood has been spilt by other Christians with Iconoclasm being one of the issues.
The Hundred Years War for instance. Somebody who was crawling up out of the Medieval Tradition and had learned to read, and noticed that there was a discrepancy of sorts between “Thou shalt not make any graven image” and the Church tradition of making lots and lots of graven images. So, that left no choice but to wage bloody, expensive and generally tragic War for a hundred years, hence the name. There were other issues, mostly having to do with which Christian king got to own which land and the people therein.
So, now, there’s almost completed, another Touchdown Jesus statue being made by the same corporation which makes the fiberglass Big Boy hamburger franchise statues. With the notation of “it’s lightning-proof”.
Here’s where logic should be employed…
If as the Bible says, God controls the storm, Jesus specifically, then it’s pretty likely that God has decisively said “NO!” to the statue of His Incarnation Jesus, and building another one right in the same spot and DARING God to strike that one with lightning might not be all that good an idea.
In fact, it might be considered downright foolish. And expensive, the last one cost $600,000 and the notion of fiscal conservativism is a big issue with Christians nowadays.
Not that the ones who sing the loudest praises of conservativism actually conserve anything but that’s a longstanding pet peeve of mine and y’all probably already noticed that it’s my pet peeve.
I was thinking of getting a dog and naming it Peeve so I could go around saying “that’s my pet, Peeve” but the humor would wear off after about, o, I dunno, the second time I told the joke. Dogs sometimes live to be twenty years old and I don’t think the joke would last quite that long.
But back to the theme, spending more than a half million to replace a statue that God already rejected, kind of violently and to the point, one could say “in a shocking display” is, I don’t know, maybe “squandering” as opposed to “saving”.
Mind you, it’s not my money. I do, however, wish and pray that people would stop doing things to make Christians look stupid.
In a related theme, a preacher named Pat Robertson has often tried to make White Southern Christians look stupid by telling the entire world that White Southern Christians all agree on his Hate Speech talking points, and that they’re not Hate but Love.
It’s incredibly insulting. I’m not any more than half white and I’m insulted. Maybe Brother Pat can go stand near that statue.
First, it should be noted that Doctors, Psychiatrists and Chaplains are, like everybody else in the services, Combatants under the Geneva Conventions. Their orders are to keep the soldiers physically and mentally and “morally” able to follow their orders, which are to Kill Other Human Beings. That’s the whole purpose of a Military Organization. Although sometimes, if the Other Human Beings grovel enough to them (like Karzhai and al Maliki do) they’ll be allowed to live, just as slaves. So when a “Mountain Post” Chaplain, Baptist Minister, got blown away in VietRaqiStan early last month, and the local news kept up the steady patter about how he volunteered for “duty” after the 9/11 Bush-ordered Mass Murder, to spread the word of Jesus. Only, Jesus never told anybody to Kill anybody. So Chaplains have to make shit up in order to justify what they’re ordered to do, keep the Soldiers and Airmen and Marines and Sailors from feelings of guilt and remorse over Killing Other Human Beings.
Preachers, religious leaders, and other propagandists for the Enemy-du-Jour are frequently targeted under legal codes naming them as accomplices. Under the Bush Doctrine, which Obama never repealed, anybody who “gives aid and comfort” even by failing to enthusiastically support Killing Other Human Beings could be determined by a Homeland Security or Military or even Mercenary Contractor Assassination Squad to be an Enemy Combatant.
Without, of course, trial, charges, any kind of Rule of Law stuff.
These are the same kinds of War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity for which first Nazis convicted at Nurnberg and many Iraqi officials were executed.
But because the U.S. Chaplains are Americans and for the most part Christian (there are also Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Native American Church, Wiccan etc Chaplains, so it’s almost an equal opportunity to sell the souls of your congregation deal), well, you do the math.
But, really, what exactly differentiates a Christian Chaplain from any other propagandist?
In Christian, Judaic and Muslim laws one of God’s Top Ten List is “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”. I don’t know the details on Sikh or Hindu or Buddhist or whoever else, completely out of range of my experience. I’m pretty sure they’ve got laws against blasphemy and killing as well.
Fact is, the Chaplain in question wasn’t, under the definitions he was hired and commanded to propagate and reinforce, “murdered”. But that’s a technicality. He might have embraced it, in fact there’s no way to be a Military (or Paramilitary, like the Police) Chaplain and say anything at all contrary to what you’re ordered to say.
Not ordered by God to say it, but by the Empire.
That brings up another issue. The Chaplains are also commanded (and could conceivably get the death penalty under a charge of Mutiny) to tell their Congregants that GOD, Himself, tells them they must obey every order of the Emperor.
The good Chaplain might have accepted these precepts, and sold them wholesale to his flock, (Pastor means Shepherd, every pastor is a preacher but, especially in Baptist churches, not every preacher is a pastor), that Murder by an Army is different from Murder by an individual.
If he was a willing accomplice in his own murder, then, hey, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin to do”
Religion isn’t as simple as it seems from the outside.