Cracker-barrel 08

This blog is closing.  2022 is almost history and so are my small words. I make no claims about the value of the blog for the writing over the last fourteen years was mostly selfish.  The kiddies use their smart phones to unconsciously touch immortality, the fact that no one can find it really doesn’t matter.  This blog has been therapy in the same manner and any value at all will only be assed should these words be plucked from the trillions of others vying for attention in cyberspace.  No matter the value or the degree of attention, my words, small as they are, will forever be out there. Thank you. Please, have a blessed new year!

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca 

 

Obituary

The final nail in the American coffin has been nailed December 23, 2022.  The giant 1.7 trillion-dollar Omnibus spending bill was passed by both the House and the Senate.  The bill will fund the government for the next year leaving the House incoming Republicans powerless to bring change in time for the next presidential election in 2024.  This is the final nail in the coffin of our grand American experiment in self-government. This bill has made any future opposition to big government impossible.

Government by and for the people is dead!  No longer can we qualify as a Constitutional Republic; we the people, all of us, are now at the mercy of our own government.  They will only take our money to fund governmental priorities while increasing dependency to the government on main street.  The taking will only increase unabated until we are absorbed into the planned one world government with the standard of living of the rest of the world.  Our self-government want-a-be people now have no options anywhere in the world, we only have servitude to the government here at home.

Who is to blame? Shall we blame the greedy traitorous politicians in both parties, the Republican Mc Connell devil in the Senate, the corruption in the federal and state government, the questionable state and federal elections and the mainstream media?  These are easy calls that will not tell our story of the American demise.  We the people, all of us are at fault, we have turned our backs to Washington and let them do their dirt.  Was it apathy, ignorance or willful or all three?  

One more possibility, we the people have been consumed by the new religion of consumerism, leaving no one to watch the henhouse, where the fox has made his kill!

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca

   

Hell

 There is no going back.  Try as we might to minimize consequences, every life choice is a final decision in this world.  Literature and religion have painted for thousands of years grotesque glimpses of hell.  The hell we all live out every day, however, is the realization that this life is hell on earth.  That hell is the result of our being relational animals of the human order, social beings who because we are alive, inevitably become both victims and victimizers.

This is not pleasant news and anyone who dares to speak of it will be vilified so we stay silent.  One often tried solution is to runoff to some cave somewhere to avoid living out our relational nature.  Spirituality is the stomping ground for this kind of escapism but all such attempts have been short lived. Religion offers a new set of clothes that gives the appearance of righteousness or goodness but we are who we are, victims and victimizers. The most egregious response to avoiding our hell on earth is the ever-present blame game of some sort or another. Not me Lord!  It’s the other guy.

If, as has been claimed, the biblical word picture of the Garden of Eden is about eternity and not some corner of our world, then the expulsion of humanity from that garden is the same as the beginning of humanity’s hell on earth.  In this story, the relational consequences were immediate and severe, Cain, the son of the first man Adam, killed his brother Abel.  And so, it goes on and on in hell.

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA

Rather

 Matthew 5:48

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.  TNIV

Christmas is a Jesus celebration.  Two thousand twenty-two years ago a baby was born in a stable manger of Jerusalem as foretold by the Hebrew prophets. This baby, celebrated then and now, was to bring salvation safety to his oppressed people. Jesus was to be the Godly savior for the people in their desperate time of need. This was the expectation of the people then and how his birthing has been largely advertised every year since that first Christmas.

After thirty silent years Jesus begins his mission, not to do the people’s expected political and spiritual bidding but rather to advertise the glories of eternity to, we residents of hell on earth.  He sits down on a Galilean hillside and begins to teach about the constant failure of the Hebrew religion.  The ways of men, as Jesus says, can be relatively moral, right or righteous but no match for the certainty and power of God’s eternity, now and forever. These Jesus words have been named though the centuries, the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, chapters 5,6,7).

This Jesus message was given to upset the spiritual and religious status quo. To the religious crowd who preached ceremony and performance as necessary for a future with God’s approval, Jesus said, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  In nine words, Jesus popped that balloon.  Trust not in your relative performance factor, allow God to be God, perfection awaits all of we humans in eternity united with our Father God.  Celebrate?  You bet!

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bugaboo

 Jesus was all human with a God given mission on earth to advertise the blessings of eternity to all humankind.  Everything else is religion, a mere human construct to advance the powerful.  The church officially became a religion when the doctrine of the supposed God/Man hybrid became its foundational doctrine four centuries after the spirit of Jesus began to work in our world.  Religion has been the bugaboo to this very day. 

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca  

 

Confrontation

 Republican leadership is gone to hell.  They are stuck in the playing nice mode of our political history and will not confront the crazies among us.  They call for investigation after investigation when our enemy, big government, just gets bigger and bigger.  At the end of every investigation, the GOP and the people will only be told to just suck it up, this country as a representative democracy is dead forever.  

America is there now and with the flood of new Americans from around the world, blanket poverty is unavoidable and recovery seemingly impossible.  Get ready people, imagine trying to support your current lifestyle on half your yearly present income.  That reality is a few short years away.  The only people making an adequate living will be those of us who have auctioned off America and joined up to work for the government.

The Democrats are daring the Republicans to defund the government by not co-operating with their money grab before the new House Republicans take the power of the purse in January.  The Obamacrats will not agree to a short term CR but will insist on a long term money grab.  The GOP must call their bluff.  McConnel and McCarthy, quite being crybabies.  Quite being pushed around by Obama who is an accomplished politician who plays political chess while you play checkers.  Obama hides behind his blackness to do his dirt and squelches all opposition as racist when he is the the racist in chief.  There are no greater cowards in American society than this brand of blackness.    

Confrontation is the only hope for the working people of America.  It will not be popular but as someone used to say, what do we have to lose!  GOP leadership, take to the offense, say no to the money grab for big government, tell the people why and stand your ground.  We the people can whether a month of government shutdown now to preserve our Constitutional heritage.  You are the our last hope, stand for America, make the next few weeks a story we can tell to our grandchildren.  

Decide whether America will die slowly in the prison of economic socialism or die on the cross to confront big government.  Neither can be popular nor pleasant but chose to confront anyway, for all of our sakes. 

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca    

 

 

Sleezebags

Never underestimate the gullibility of the uniformed American electorate!  Good job Democrats, stifling the flow of information.  At least now we have proof of your partnership in crime with the media moguls and the Twitters.  Stifle information as you will and you may win some battles but the war is not yet won. 

Donald Trump is not the criminal, you, all of you belong in jail.

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca

  

 

Rap

Matthew 5, v 20 

“For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”  TNIV

Does Matthew Chapter 5 bother you as much as it bothers me?  Maybe it should.  Our modern culture is awash with unfounded expectations about eternity.  Just maybe, the search for eternity only begins through the Law of Moses, passed on to us as a beginning point and not a performance standard.  Jesus tells us this beginning point, a kind of filter, will never go away nor can it be replaced by religious ceremony and standards. 

The radical morality that Jesus espouses is much more than the letter of the religious law.  It is the spiritual law that is eternity bound, the spark of which is in every heart and this spiritual law has no limits on either side of death.  If we settle for a mere human standard, Jesus says, we certainly will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

The religious crowd whom Jesus targeted with this closed-door policy must have been shocked. They had structured their lives around being good enough.  Now this upstart peasant, uneducated, so-called prophet was telling them that God was not pleased with their effort.  No wonder they were angry and wanted to kill him.

The question needs to be asked, was the threat Jesus dumped on the religious crowd only meant to shock or was Jesus eternally serious?  That answer is above my paygrade but it should be noted that in the previous verse those who teach that the Law has been set aside will be in the kingdom of God.  Go figure.  Eternity seems to have levels or grades of blessing because these folk will be counted in eternity but carry the stigma of being the least in the kingdom.

Are we living to just beat the rap? 

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca   

 

 

Question?

 Is it not possible to take the same raw facts of biblical scripture and reach a somewhat different conclusion than that demanded by the idol of tradition?

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA

Playbook

Socrates and many others through history have told us how we play the game.  If we humans can’t make a viable argument, we attack the messenger. 

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca

                      

Worldview

Accept the reality of the chaos but then trust the reality of eternity.

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca

Gamesmanship

This blog is about gamesmanship.  As humans, we all play games to minimize the chaos that confront us each day here on earth.  The game of politics and the game of religion are the primary drivers that are supposed to make sense of the chaos but neither of these seems to have a solution for our dilemma. When I was young, I was willing to accept the premise that there actually was a solution.  At this point in my life, I have concluded that this search has no plausible ending on earth because the games just go on, waxing and waning like the moon.

One morning two Dobermans appeared at my back gate.  Mama and Baron, as I named them, became adopted family members and friends.  Even these dogs play games.  They get regular chewy dog bones when they go outside and the games begin.  Sometimes the bones are devoured immediately but some are buried in the sand for future rewards.  The game they play is about digging and finding the bones that one or the other has secured in the sand. 

Are we much different?  Could it be that our simplistic world view of how things work is at fault?  Is there a more plausible explanation for the chaos?  Do the games we play have another worldly or other worldly purpose?

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA