Friday, June 24, 2011

Healthcare expectations

June 24, 2011

G.Goslaw
7983 SVL Box
Victorville, Ca. 92395

James Krider, MD
Formula Medical Group
18182 HWY 18, Suite 105
Apple Valley, CA 92307

Dear James Krider,

Thank you for your registered letter of June 20, 2011. Dr. Krider, you are absolutely correct, we do have a difference of expectations. You expect your patients, at least this patient, to remind your referral person to generate the needed correspondence to gain an appointment with a specialist physician. Really, are your patients an extension of your office staff?

You are also correct, I raised my voice in protest at loosing a specialist appointment one hour before it was scheduled, an appointment that had already had a thirty day wait. It was cancelled because of Linda’s incompetence with the paperwork,repeated again and again over the last five months,probably at your direction.

Your leadership makes our doctor patient relationship impossible so I shall move on. However, the fault is yours. In the past few months, this patient has learned that life is so short and one never knows what awaits around the corner. Accordingly, another truism states that “what goes around always comes around”, at least life has provided me with ample educational experience to validate this additional fact.

We all are learning, you have my kindest regards into the future.

Your former patient,
G.Goslaw
Victorville, Ca.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

The Truth

Letter to the Editor
Daily Press
Victorville, Ca. 92392

Most Christian churchmen are Biblically ignorant and ignorantly bigoted. In truth the church social order is the priority of these folk. They choose to emulate the perceived social order as if it were God. They look to the Bible to validate this social order and fail to consider individual verses in their greater context,
including the character of the God they purport to worship. The thinkers of the church parrot this ignorance and/or are to cowardly to confront the ignorance for career and monetary concerns. It is a Donald Trump cop out, since he and they both love the truth but worship more the goodies of this world.

G.Goslaw
Victorville, Ca.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

The Few

Pensees’ # 179 There are few true Christians, I mean even as regards faith. There are plenty who believe, but out of superstition. There are plenty who do not believe, but because they are libertines, there are few in between. I do not include those who lead a really devout life, nor all those who believe by intuition of the heart.
Blaise Pascal, Pensees’, Penguin Books, 1995, p. 55.

Soren Kierkegaard (1850) must have read Blaise Pascal (1650), for they appear to be kindred spirits. They are both thinkers of the first order. What they are not is clergymen who owed their worldly existence to the church. Isn’t it strange how it seems to work that way? Thankfully, there have been men such as these in church history but sadly they have been the few.

As Pascal notes, Christian superstition has been and is a large segment of the faithful. In Kierkegaard’s time the superstitious believers were the Christian majority that just went along with the expected Lutheran faith of their fathers and the state run church. Though Pascal was always loyal to his Roman Catholic Church, he surely had in mind the superstitious rule of the church during the middle ages to include his time. Who are the superstitious believer's of our time? Who are the true Christians of our time? Any creditable clergyman will tell you that his office does not make him or her devout. It is the faithful, plain, quiet, devout widow lady in the second pew, right front. These folk have to live a religion of the heart. gg

Matthew 7:13&14 "Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide, and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it. For the gate is small, and the way is narrow that leads to life, and few are those who find it.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Terror

Pensees# 172 The way of God, who disposes all things with gentleness, is to instil religion into our minds with reasoned arguments and into our hearts with grace, but attempting to instil it into hearts and minds with force and threats is to instil not religion but terror.
Blaise Pascal, Pensees’, Penguin Books, 1995, p. 54.

Pascal the prophet is speaking. He comments on the church of his time (1650) and by extension to the church of our time. Could not the revivalist methodologies of the last two hundred years be an appropriate example? Threats of hell and eternal damnation have been and are used to manipulate seekers after truth. Terror is the supposed power of the pulpit. These tactics have accomplished some good but are they God's way? The church and it's pulpits fail to consider the damage done to the thinking but unbelieving adults to whom Pascal spoke. Let us define evangelism as did Pascal, as reasoned arguments and grace from God. gg