Thursday, December 30, 2010

Ultimate Power

The Apostle Paul continues to chastise the Church at Corinth in Chapter 6. Verses one through eleven focuses on a specific immorality within the ranks. Members of the body of Christ were taking their petty disputes to a secular judge to be resolved. Verse six, “But instead, one brother goes to law against another -- and this in front of unbelievers!” Insulted by their selfishness, Paul exclaims as if to say, don’t you know, don’t you understand who you are? How can you think this way?

In verse seven Paul ridicules their misbehavior making clear that all the offenders amongst them were “completely defeated already” (TNIV & LB). The NASB translates Paul’s accusation to the Corinthian church by saying that the lawsuits are “already a defeat for you”. The KJV says, “Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you”. The NEB translates verse seven as “Indeed, you already fall below your standard in going to law with one another at all”. The Weymouth Bible translates that the lawsuits are a “token of your defeat”.

All moral failure is to act in contradiction to the divine love that is the guiding principle of the church. Supposed love for the Christ in them and the resulting love for others, especially the brethren should be the one overt rule of the Church. What degree of lovelessness will God tolerate in His Church? The Corinthian brethren lived or were tempted by a long ugly list of moral defeats. St. Paul confronted them with their defeatist behavior, scolds them but does not call them names and cast them out. In fact, Paul only has praise for the Corinthian membership in his greeting to them in the first nine verses of the book.

Paul asks the bigger question in verse nine. “Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the Kingdom of God?” The Church is a “now” question but this question is also eschatological. This is an impressive theological word that pertains to God’s final judgments or plans for this world. At that time when the church is dissolved into the will of God, there will be no wrongdoing. Please allow me to paraphrase the thought of St. Paul. Moral defeats are now the regrettable norm but they are incompatible with the Kingdom ethic and upon the consummation of the fully revealed Kingdom moral defeats will be no more.

The purpose of the Corinthian letter is to warn, awaken or correct the church members to their Kingdom calling. As believers, according to St. Paul, we are not to be selfish slaves to our immediate earthly temporary circumstances. Instead, as believers in the Christ, as slaves to Him, we are human centers for the expression God’s love. The difficulty for the Corinthian Church was the draw or the influence of the immediate selfish culture, the only culture they had known since birth. An abrupt radical departure required by the Kingdom ethic of love was and is humanly impossible. That love ethic is our only hope or power.

In a culture whose God’s would operate whore houses for the propagation of religion, the Christ way seemed so inconsequential. Where is the power of divine love? The people of the church had divided loyalties. Today’s Church of Jesus Christ is no different so that an impartial observer may ask of us the same question, where is the power of divine love? Does the Church really honor marriage when the divorce rate is equal to that within our secular communities? Is love for others the norm when we believers separate themselves according to skin color, societal norms, income capabilities, education, worship styles, ethical rules and doctrinal statements? Where is the divine love?

As the laity of the Church of Jesus Christ, we are not thinking about who we are two thousand years after the Church at Corinth. We too are slaves to our circumstances. When we model the selfish world, we model defeat. In contrast, Paul reminds us all about the significance of the rite of baptism. “When you are baptized you are washed; you are cleansed; you are sanctified; you are buried in the water and by this burial you get a share in Christ’s death and resurrection; you are adopted and you become sons of God; you are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, that is, you are made members of God’s people; in short, you are included in the kingdom.”* Surely St. Paul would further admonish each of us ……. trust the ultimate power and now act like it!

*J. Jeremias, “Jesus and the Message of the New Testament”, Fortress Press, 2002, p. 90. (from 1965).

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Best of Friends

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.

But lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise. They have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of the mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for the trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive any thing more destructive to morality than this?

Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, p. 352 and 353. “Common Sense, Rights of Man, and other essential Writings of Thomas Paine”, Signet Classics Series, paperback, 2003. First written in 1776, Common Sense greatly influenced the American Revolution. The Rights of Man written in 1791 influenced the French Revolution. The Age of Reason was written in 1794.

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First, that human beings , all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in. p. 21

Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got to is a Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong. I think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. P.34

But to be complete I ought to mention the in between view called Life-Force philosophy, or Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution. The wittiest expositions of it come in the works of Bernard Shaw, but the most profound ones in the works of Bergson. People who hold this view say that the small variations by which life on this planet “evolved” from the lowest forms to Man were not due to chance but to the “purposiveness” of a Life-Force. When people say this we must ask them whether by Life-Force they mean something with a mind or not. If they do, then “a mind bringing life into existence and leading it to perfection” is really a God, and their view is thus identical with the Religious. P.35

It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behavior, and yet quite definitely real- a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us. P. 30

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. P. 58

In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble-because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him, all the time enabling him to repeat(in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out. P. 64

When they speak of being “in Christ” or of Christ being “in them”, this is not simply saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts-that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body. And perhaps that explains one or two things. It explains why this new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion. It is not merely the spreading; it is more like evolution- a biological or supernatural-biological fact. There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it. P.65

But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know him can be saved through Him. But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. P. 65


C.S.Lewis, Mere Christianity, Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1943, paperback edition 1979.

No Pain, No Gain

We Americans are caught in a buzz saw. The future can only be financial collapse or at least a slide to bare third world status. The selfish few and their co-conspirators have devastated our economic prospects along with the prospects of most of our friends and neighbors. However, there really are no innocent parties left standing for we have all tried to work the system to our own advantage. There are those who bear the brunt of responsibility but having understood our journey, how do we Americans proceed? Are we doomed to dire future economic circumstances or is there any hope?

Surely our politicians have proved hopeless. Despite the “jobs” rhetoric and decisions based on an expected economic rebound, they will continue habitual destructive spending that is a slow painful suicide for the people. We must look to ourselves. Possibly the best course of action would be to admit our inability to effect meaningful change. Are we there yet? Please allow these small words to those of us who believe politics is not the answer and that we must look to some greater authority for hope.

Easy, this is not a spiritual exercise. Biblical scriptures will not to be thrown at our problems with a call to prayer, this is not Sunday morning. There may be some help for us, however, if we consider the possibility that this is a moral as well as a physical universe. To address the human condition from merely a physical perspective does not answer the question of why? C.S. Lewis argues in “Mere Christianity” that there is a moral law in our world just as there is a law of gravity. He believes that human kind is starving for the moral law for we are incomplete without it and we make a heavy investment attempting to manage this universal need in all the wrong ways.

A variety of religions of many forms have arisen in every society to better order their lives around this moral law. The point being, if there is this universal need for a moral awareness, there could also be a corresponding universal presence or originator who has so influenced humanity. This linkage is not a “proof” that God exists but His possible existence can be argued from a rational, thinking perspective. For the sake of argument let’s assume that this thinking God exists and that he has so designed His world that is also our world, to be in balance, a balance of the physical and the moral.

Two thousand years ago an obscure wandering prophet in the countryside of Palestine, announced that such a life balance was possible, even a necessity. He named this place “the Kingdom of God” and invited all to live therein. Rejecting the religious dogma of their times, Jesus and C. S. Lewis would both agree that the moral law is not about an ethical standard. That was the long derailment of the ancestors of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That was the wrong popularized priority of the Pharisees who harassed Jesus. That is the wrong priority of the fundamentalist Christian aberration of the last one hundred years.

Lewis spoke of self sacrifice as a moral principle and Jesus spoke of love. Are they not one in the same and so rare? It is normal for every religion to lift up a seemingly attainable standard ethic and avoid a morality as God defines it. This argument may have progressed to the point where you would allow me a Scriptural reference (Luke 9:51). Having become a popular country preacher, “Jesus resolutely set his face to go to Jerusalem”. It is hard to catch the magnitude of that “resolute” decision. He knew he would be walking into the hornets nest of religious orthodoxy and survival was doubtful. The decision was to leave the comfort of the countryside for the way of pain. In Roman Catholic terms Jesus was offering himself up for the possibility of good spiritual change for others.

The way forward is to give it up and rejoice in the face of suffering. This blogger is a minimalist who prefers to claim as truth only the obvious. The second moral principle of this world is that painful suffering in this world will breed positive change. There are eight million, four hundred and seventy thousand hits on Google when “no pain, no gain” is searched. Of the first two hundred, only two have a spiritual context. We need not share the same religion but the no pain no gain principle seems to be widely accepted as factual.

The Message translation of the Scriptures translate this verse, “Jesus gathered up His courage and steeled himself for the journey to Jerusalem”. Jesus accepted that the road ahead was pain but traveled none the less. The American economic road we have journeyed is painful and will be more so. We really don’t have a choice and we must accept our fate as Jesus accepted His. At present we are in pain avoidance mode, in an attempt to dump the most pain possible on the other guy and the next generations. Does that sound like a Christian mode? Does that sound like courage mixed with the determination for the journey?

Wouldn’t America be the most true to it’s history and it’s beliefs if we as a people were to seek shared pain instead of another economic bubble? The task ahead is to be a part of the solution. After all, is it not Christmas?

G.Goslaw
Victorville,CA

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

2011 NRSC Issues Survey

Part 2.
Government is grossly to big and is all talk. Show us that you can be serious about spending cuts and we may be with you. I am a Common Sense Republican who believes government to be in the way of the Republic. There should be a 25% cut in the public sector, ineffective departments shut down and regulations on business severely cut back. The pork is stinking up the country and I don't believe you have the guts to change. Wall street and the stock market own you and the Democratic party and neither of you are about the integrity of the American worker or the viability of the middle class. Balance the budget and stop the Federal reserve with it's Qe's. The war is evil and National Security as constituted is a farce. John Beaner's 5% House tax cut is laughable if not so paltry and mere lip service. You Good ol' boys are ignoring the Tea party priorities as if you the establishment Republican Party won the election. You were an unintended consequence to be dealt with in 2012. Donald Trump for President.
Part 5.
Cut spending, balance the budget, tax credits for hiring American labor, tax lazy wealth including capital gains, tax and Tariff imports,shut down overseas wars,play hardball with companies who ship out jobs, defund NAFTA and put the army on border to stop drugs and illegals. No Pain, No Gain!

Thank you for asking for my opinion but you deserve not a dime.
G.Goslaw

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Good ol' boys

Not to long ago the Good ol’ boys fought for justice in the countrified TV setting of the “Dukes of Hazard”. The General Lee, their 69 Dodge Charger, hustled Luke and Bo to one adventure after the other. Their crusade was against the status quo and not surprisingly the inept Man. In the best Robin Hood style they weekly and humorously connived for the reform of their unjust governmental figures.

In our real life world, the Good ol' boys are a network of players in politics whose motivation is to take from the powerless and give to the powerful. They are the status quo, their own cause and their own political party disguised with some self righteous label like Republican, Democrat, liberal or conservative. The dollar sign is their weapon of choice and every political ideology is but a cover for their selfish shenanigans. The trick is to know who they are and today it is very difficult to identify the really good guys.

There has always been this political status quo in the American experience. The powerful rightfully brag,“the government works through us”. They are not so transparent as to admit to taking a percentage off the top in the form of money, power or influence in the private or public sectors. The campaign dollars will flow into their coughers as their constituency is paid back. Washington is all about getting into the pockets of taxpayers, even the pockets of the unborn taxpayer. Money and the status quo politicians are in control as never before. How can we survive as a country?

Call any political office and quickly the conversation will be what your elected official can do for you, the voter. Political leadership is about compiling a wish list of every need imaginable to prove his or her essential worthiness for your vote. Do you have a sob story? Do you need a government contract? Do you need citizenship? Do you need a tax break? Do you need a governmental job? Gather your voter friends and pay money to the politician and it may happen. This is not leadership.

Political leadership should first decide what is the greater good for our country. The Good ol’ boys don’t think. Our undereducated citizenry wants more and more from our government but no one wants to pay the bill. We are a disaster close to happening and it may already be to late. Is this an aberrant opinion that can be easily dismissed? Take ten minutes and look around on the internet. Reject any semblance of credulity but can all the warnings be wrong?

You will find many creditable voices sounding the alarm to warn of a near disaster. Jo Cromerford, Executive Director of the National Priorities Project, says that the current tweeking of the budget, as painful as that may be, is merely a temporary fix pushing the impending disaster down the road. Senator Tom Coburn today was interviewed on Fox and compared we Americans to the passengers on the Titanic, partying as the ship is sinking.

Please check out an article on Militant Libertarian.org. Russell D. Longcure details the seeming hopelessness of our circumstance. After detailing the systemic causes of the impending disaster he recommends cession for the more fiscally responsible of our states. Our only option is to pull the plug on Washington. In so doing we would pull the plug on the Good ol’ boys. One may ask, are there no Good ol’ boys at the state level?

Our only hope for the union of American states is to address our systemic problems. They are not hiding from us but our Good ol’ boys would rather go down with the ship than to deal with them. There are only three.
1. Good ol’ boy impossible spending with only a short term accounting using unreal numbers.
2. Good ol’ boy big government mentality that is a tax payer funded elitist job program.
3. Good ol’ boy preoccupation to identify with one world priorities. They promote and govern for free trade and illegal immigration, both of which are job killers for Americans.

The only positive force on the horizon is the Tea Party Movement. Some of us have seen the near future and want to try to make a difference for the sake of our children and grandchildren. We are paddling upstream but if the Good ol’ boys in Washington will give up control there is a chance for all of us. We will not be distracted or vilified for in 2012 we Tea Party citizens will speak again.

G.Goslaw
Victorville, Ca

Monday, December 6, 2010

Gays in Military

Letter to the Editor
Daily Press
P.O.Box 1389
Victorville, CA 92393

RE: Think it through, William Cash, Sunday , December 5, 2010.

We could understand your opinion on “gays” in the military if their were no gays in the military. Sorry, but there are. Those Americans serving with them know. Only the homosexual is demoted to closed mouth subhuman status. All men and women serving have exhibited the “gifts and graces” for service so let them serve. Let them serve as the responsible adults who daily protect us. If they fail to be responsible, then kick them out.

G.Goslaw
Victorville, CA

Tax Cuts

The current, as we speak, hubbub in Washington is about Tax cuts, you know those Bush era Tax cuts that were deemed good for all of us, rich and poor. The cuts that some opposed because they were seen to disproportionately benefit the rich. The cuts that would prove the wisdom of the Laffer economic curve. This curve promised that if you lower tax rates there would be a corresponding increase in tax revenue. This curve is what some called voodoo economics, no spiritual disrespect intended.

The old political gamesmanship is back in the context of the most destructive economic downturn in American history after the Great Depression. C.S. Lewis in his book, Mere Christianity, insisted that the best way forward was to first go back. The wisdom of this is beyond it’s theological context, it is daily life. Let’s test out the hypothesis, did the Bush era tax cuts work as advertised? For that answer we must go back through the last ten years of insanely higher spending and lower taxes.

Most of us can remember the wisdom on the streets in the beginning of George Bush’s presidency was to buy, buy and buy houses. Owning a house or houses was like gold in the bank, a sure quick return on the investment dollar as real estate values skyrocketed. Bernie Madoff was the resident investment guru of Wall Street. George Bush lowered the prime interest rate to further stimulate home investment while beginning in 2001 he gave minimal tax breaks to most Americans. The higher incomes would reap a bigger return on a percentage drop in the tax structure. The 2003 cuts in dividends and capital gains greatly exacerbated the Bush bubble.

As we all know, the Bush economic bubble popped. Our government in Washington chose to bail out the investment community comprised of predominately higher income taxpayers, at the expense of the rest of we powerless average American taxpayers. Based on the tax paying performance of our politicians, one could question to the extent that the higher incomes now pay there fair share. The politically powerful already have an unfair advantage. Our humongous tax code is bulging with tax breaks for the wealthy. In this new American culture it is O.K. for the rich to be a tax cheats. Those of us with automatic deductions from our paychecks are left to finance the country.

We average taxpaying loyal Americans have suffered disproportionately. Those wealthy folk who instigated the false economy in the first place in order to chase after the almighty dollar have been bailed out and gotten off scot free. Now they have hunkered down with their ill gotten gain to weather the economic downturn. The truth is that investing for job growth will not happen regardless of the tax structure. The truth is that the Republican party is heavily invested in the investor folk and it is payback time, even if we middle class Americans get in the way.

The Republican squealing is at least disingenuous, even deceitful. If the concern of the party was jobs, an investment tax credit for jobs would be a reasonable alternative. This is not proposed because the investment class knows that there is no fertile soil for jobs in this country, no jobs no tax credits for the bottom line. We are in for a long term essentially jobless recovery. The truth of the Laffer curve is that the downside of that curve is very unpleasant. The upside works to the good for a short period of time and in certain historical contexts but it is not an automatic cure for our economic ills. In fact, the curve is now irrelevant.

Going back as recommended is indeed unpleasant. To revisit the error of our ways requires courage that does not reside in Washington. Courage has been and will be the great strength of we average Americans who foot the bills for the dollar players. We must rebel and not buy into the political gamesmanship in Washington. The truth is that we Americans are in a fix and we must muster the courage to find a way forward despite the shared responsibilities of our mistakes.

Drastic times require drastic measures. Are we ready America?

G.Goslaw
Victorville, CA

Thursday, December 2, 2010

"Henish"

There are those of us who are thinkers and those of us who are feelers, most of us operate between these two poles. We are male and female, a community of persons not defined by a variance of body parts but by a predisposition toward a particular life methodology. These past blogs have struggled to define our “henish” culture or the “henish” church and never quite succeeded despite the obvious causal relationship.

This blogger stumbled on a quote by the humanistic philosopher Bertrand Russell circa 1930. Negatives aside, this atheist thinker had a very perceptive eye toward understanding how we function together as a culture or a community of persons. What he is saying in his book, “The Conquest of Happiness” is that our morality should not be thought of as God driven but should be derived from a rational understanding of our humanness. The quote from page 84 is as follows.

“Our nominal morality has been formulated by priests and mentally enslaved women. It is time that men who have to take a normal part in the normal life of the world learned to rebel against this sickly nonsense.”

In 1930 Bertrand Russell, was right and he was wrong. He was wrong by entertaining the thought that morality was about being happy and that we can think our way to happiness. However, he was correct to direct all of us toward a rebellion that would reject a growing affinity for femininity. Real men, male or female, make truly moral decisions based upon our human thought processes and not the feelings of priests and enslaved women. To enslaved women the immediate feelings resulting from the consequences of any decision are the primary preferred moral value.

That which is good and moral is that which feathers the nest, our immediate personal space. However, the female priority is meant to be balanced by the God given male priority for rational thought. In the male morality, “thinking” is the dominate ingredient for any valid understanding of right and wrong. Men are at their best when they frequently consider the broad implication of their actions that hopefully touches on the greater good.

The “sickly nonsense” of priests and mentally enslaved women results in a false morality, a superficial sentimentality that seeks to avoid the harsh realities of life. Long ago there was a secular prophet who so warned America about growing up female. He said, beware of the hypocrisy of a feminized understanding of right and wrong. What did he mean? America, look around eighty years later, we are Petticoat Junction. We have allowed our culture, economy, politics and religion to become dominantly touchy-feely.

The priests of Bertrand Russel's day responded to his challenge by accusing his crowd of situational ethics. They said the spiritual person has no need of using his mind because the Bible plainly states what is right and wrong. This was and is a decidedly female response. There are a multitude of moralities in the Bible, all of which have a historical context that we have to use our minds to understand. In brief, all moralities are situational. Most priests lazily dump their personal bias's on the Biblical record.

Our American culture has never rebelled against this sticky nonsense. Christianity has remained in lock down mode prescribed to us by the nest minding clergy and the church has remained female. Our politicians have waged a war to dumb down the American voter and thinking in the Church is even less desirable. Most thinking persons in the Church have sadly chosen the way of Bertrand Russell and written off the demands and blessings of a God inspired thinking morality.

We are long overdue for a male morality that is more significant than the current in name only morality. Men and women, let us revolt against this nonsense and be whom God created us to be.

G.Goslaw
Victorville, Ca