Wonderful Matters

"...But will He find faith on the planet?" (From the 18th chapter of Luke) A rhetorical question Jesus asks after speaking about people with such a deep abiding faith in Him that they'd pray for good, righteous things -- all the time. The problem is, when He actually comes back to find out how people have been blessed by the wonderful things He gives them, it is very possible there will be far too few who get it. It is actually, a quite sorrowful lament. But I do get it. I do look around and see the World ---- and its devotees. Very often they appear very smart, very kind, very savvy, very concerned about things being decent everywhere... and yet... They are such fools. Like Jeremiah observed, "Everyone is stupid and without knowledge." (From the tenth chapter) And without God, without an insightful conviction of fear of the Lord (there in the sixth verse of that chapter), people will just be fully confused. It is just not hard to see that confusion just getting...

This morning I had my devotional time on the patio, as I usually do, and right as I got to the middle of the Parable of the Sower in the eighth chapter of Luke, I looked up at a spectacular cloud formation illuminated by the just-rising sun. It was as if God had woven the most beautiful golden wool fleece in the sky. There was also a hummingbird fluttering frequently against this backdrop -- just an amazing testament to God's masterful creative work He shares with us. I just felt like sharing that, it was quite the experience while spending time in His word and in prayer, but I also share it because right when it all lit up like that, I was reading that middle part of the parable, between Jesus' sharing it and His explaining it. Do you know what that transition part is? It is His reminding His listeners of the Old Testament passage in the sixth chapter of Isaiah, when Isaiah was commissioned and asked God what he was supposed to tell his listeners. God told him to tell them the...

The second half of the month of June we were on a nice vacation back east, seeing sites with very good friends and family who live there. It was wonderful.  One of the places along the touring route was Gettysburg, and we had to stop in. We enjoyed all the museum and visitor center things, but because of time constraints and pretty good rainfall we didn't see much of the battlefield areas. On our drive back out we did, however, stop for a look-see at the Gettysburg cemetery and the exact location where Lincoln gave the famous address. I took a snapshot of a memorial to that event, not exactly where he stood but close to it. Sure enough engraved there is the entire speech, along with a nice bust and... and... Fasces. Huh. Arguably the greatest speech about the merits of the thing DEMOCRACY and how much it must be defended with honor and sacrifice and all the rest of it -- the thing is here memorialized with the most meaningfully profound display of authoritarian hegemonic power ever...

Everyone seems to be breathing a little slower now that the 250 TH ANNIVERSARY OF FREEDOM WITH LOTS OF EAR-SPLITTING EYE-BLINDING MIND-BLASTING EXPLOSIVES is over. Whew. Quite exciting for sure, yet throughout it all still observing the obsessive fealty to the Great Americanist Americanism, I do feel sorrow. Anyone with any Scriptural insight sees that devotion to whatever is in the mythology is just the worship of another god.  I do feel that sorrow. This post is actually a quite personal one, because while I do understand, and know that God does miraculous things in the lives of those who genuinely seek Him, repent, and find the rapturous beauty and -- ahem, yes, wonderful liberation  -- in The Kingdom... While I do get all that, I do weep at times when I see all the stuff happening everywhere in the Catholicist Nation. That's just me. Some can take it, I think it just hits me harder for some reason. How much do I endure people spouting about how much lying there is out the...

The other day was an election day, when World Devotees may officially register their preference for the bully they think will make things good. I was at a polling location and I won't detail the circumstances but one of the poll volunteers at the front table discovered in that setting that I was a follower of Christ with some authoritative function (totally unrelated to the polling activity there, by the way). I didn't know her but we got to talking, and she shared quite a bit. From the heart. In my latest home page piece I'd introduced you to a very nice gentleman and shared a transcript of the conversation we had. Well, sure enough, I got to enjoy another such conversation with this very nice lady. I'm not going to transcribe it as such, just tell you about it, and about how revealing it was regarding the extraordinarily typical mentality that reigns in the hearts and minds of so many. She was in her 70s, and said she attended the very nice old Methodist church in th...

I felt like posting about another article from Brownstone , this one based on the ideas shared in the classic American novel The Grapes of Wrath. I have not read the book and all I know about the film is it stars Henry Fonda as an exasperated Tom Joad, a farmer afflicted with the unyielding vicissitudes of farm life, including that of powerful financial exploiters. He mentions one part that is quite instructive about the reality of The Monolith, that millennia-old entity that does the proper work of prosecuting the standard evildoing of a World System devoted populace. The bank is poised to take his farm, and he fervently exhibits a righteously justified resistance, speaking to the bulldozer driver about to raze his place. The author of the piece does make mention about having enough courage to just get out there and labor really hard to make change happen with the very best rhetorical convincing with the help of a lot of others who feel really really bad about how exploitive The Monol...

Finishing up some web reading I thought I'd direct your attention to David Bell's article over at Brownstone . It is really how the principle of Universal Basic Income is really just a form of murder. Read it, you'll see. On my social media a post reminded me of John Calhoun's work with mice. I don't know the details of this work, might be apocryphal, I don't know. But he put a community of mice in an environment where they had everything they wanted. Food, shelter, comfort, companionship, all the very nice mouse things. After a while they started dying off. The alpha male mice got very ferocious and belligerent and the beta male mice got very docile and withdrawn. The female mice didn't want any of it and stopped having baby mice. I think I got that right. The analogy to human behavior and interaction has been obvious to most perceptive people who know about this.  It is pretty much happening everywhere, now, a lot. Right now people are screaming about hav...

Today out on my long walking loop in a very nice part of a town next to mine, I crisscrossed a very nice park and happened to stroll past three teenager-young-adult gentlemen. Each was wearing a white tank-top t-shirt, baggy shorts or khakis, had belts and maybe a chain or two on their hip if I remember. The one in the fedora was telling the other two, "My underwear is designer, my [some other clothing item I don't quite remember] is designer, my t-shirt is designer. Everything is designer, bro." I didn't pay any attention to anything else because I was walking pretty briskly, and I wasn't interested in prying. I thought about this and first felt this a great take on the truth that we are indeed all like that gentleman. We are all exhibitionist of some measure and it's nice to be seen as sporting the most fashionable something-or-another so we can be, well, considered . But then I thought about something else I can also put in my remarks here in this blog post...

I was listening to a Greg Koukl podcast interview with fellow apologist Tim Barnett and it was all about the "AI." Very good stuff, there is always something new to discover not just about what should be called SPIT (Superfast Processing Information Technology) but how people are thinking about it and more importantly being captivated by what the Romanist mandarins are doing with it. Tim brought up something about it that relates to the seriously entrenched echo chambers the whole chatbot obsession is creating -- perfectly what the Jesuits want to happen!  -- everyone just living comfortably in their own "cognitive universes," as another pundit called them.  One of the examples Tim shared was how some detractors will incessantly post the notion that Christianity was the most oppressive, imperialist, just-plain-rotten thing that ever happened, you know the trope. Tim added in his own web efforts Red Pen Logic  he has had to set the record straight with all the great ...