Whoopi

Whoopi Goldberg, you are so very sexy when you get your dander up. I like. This blog, however, never usually agrees with the stuff you put out on the View. This time you have done it.  We agree on one point, to hell with this shared blame stuff for hate speech. The problem is that you got that much right but the wrong offender. You and your Democrats in bondage do all (100%) of the hate speech which incites the crazies to kill to protect their delusions. You wrongly try to avoid blame by redefining what is hate speech.  All criticism or verbal exposes of the negative policy results from Democrat control is now hate speech, in your world.

Whoopi, your world is not the real world. You are an actor and a good one. But please, keep the dander flying.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.  

Credentials

Is it not likely (99 44/100 %) that the words of Jesus which may have been, “this is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6)”, later became interpreted to be an “I am” saying by the succeeding believing communities? Did Jesus mean to say that the billions of people worldwide must all believe in this, “I am” God, the Jesus God in the flesh, as the only hope for finding the only true spiritual reality and an eternal future?  Is Christianity, as faith in the Christ God, the only truly authorizes spiritual reality?  I wonder if we will have to check our credentials at the Pearly Gates? 

Some of us should just get over it!

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.   

Psychosis

Psychosis is a set of symptoms that can cause a person to lose touch with reality, and have difficulty distinguishing what is real and what is not. This is a medical/ dictionary definition. For one who is suffering from a psychosis facts are unreal and truth is only defined by their own delusions or hallucinations.  Our world has had the ground breaking thought of Sigmund Freud to thank for outlining the dangers and better understanding psychosis.

Dr. Freuds studies were with individuals during the rise of Hitler and Naziism in his homeland of Germany.  Being of Jewish descent, Freud was at a loss as to why the people of Germany willfully embraced such Nazi hatred.  In his book, “Moses and Monotheism”, he advanced the theory that not only are individuals vulnerable to psychosis, there is also such a condition in groups of peoples.  Germany was collectively suffering with an episode of group psychosis. Nothing else fits and we all know how that played out.

America is now in the same boat. To a large group of our people, the facts of reality do not matter, all that matters is their supposed truth, their delusions and grandiose hallucinations. The deluded will lie, defame, jail, destroy and kill all conflicting facts or persons that paint a different story.  Our people are, indeed, suffering from a group psychosis. This sickness is being played out in our politics as it did in Germany almost 100 years ago.

Who are the crazies?  Following the presidential election loss of Donald Trump in 2020, this blog made the prediction that going forward the crazies are now our rulers.  Have not the past four years proven that reality, America has seemingly gone crazy.  Before your feathers get ruffled there is a way to make a self-diagnosis in the privacy of your own head. If candidate and former President Trump were to be killed by a lunatic fringe left winger, would you still be a Democrat? Would you still vote the party line?  If the answer is yes, call the psychiatrist!

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

Life

Life is like a game of solitaire. There is only one way to navigate the ups and downs of this world. The only rule for this game is, “where there is a will there is a way".  We fanatic solitaire players can best appreciate this rule. 

As long as one has the breath of life, God has a plan for our next breath, God has not called us home yet.  The new plan may not be to our liking, it may even be humiliating but he has blessings awaiting us and for all others who are sent to assist. If we choose to will God’s new plan, we shall all reap life spiritual bonuses, regardless of the circumstances.  Together we are one.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

Quote

If one cannot say in a few sentences what needs to be said, what is said will find few ears. (gg)

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Pain

There is no spiritual freedom without consequence. Evil is the necessary consequence that forces us to search for our spiritual God given inheritance. If there were only pleasure and no pain, we would not search. Because this world was created by God for soul-making, evil is a necessary ingredient to be experienced.

The eternity of God is absolute freedom. Our mission in this world is to experience the lack or scarcity of freedom (bondage) so that eternity, when presented to us, will be affirmed in our soul or centeredness. It matters little how much of eternity we taste in this world as long as we taste the pain, be it physical, emotional, mental or spiritual. All of whom will never be a blind alley.  Should we not pray, therefore, Lord God, bring it on!

(My take on the thought of: John Hick, "Evil and the God of Love", Revised Edition, 1978.)

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Prophecy

The traditional Democrat and Republican American politics is dead, haven’t you heard?  This election is now about the Obama, Biden, Harris fundamental change, yah or nay. No longer is the welfare of American people controlling the political agenda of this new federal government. The controlling agenda is now the Obama, Biden, Harris governmental control over all of our lives. Those of us who disagree go directly to jail.

It is so simple, why are the minds of so many thinking Americans, according to the polls, taking this election so casually?  Are you afraid or protecting your nest?  How are you dealing with the dramatic rise in the cost of everything?  Why are there no longer unfilled job opportunities awaiting the American unemployed?  Why is there a shortage of affordable housing?  Why is the real-world economy tanking?  If you are at all awake, the answer is obvious.  All is crumbling because of the Obama, Biden, Harris fundamental change that is out to destroy the middle class.

If you the voter want to green light the Obama, Biden, Harris fundamental change, vote accordingly. Be advised, however, should the gutter politics of Obama, Biden, Harris win the election in November, the double down Democrats will make the last four years seem like a Sunday School picnic. Should the double down democrats win the White House, and a majority in the House and Senate, they will do as they did after sweeping the 2020 federal election, double down with more of the same. 

Big spending will cause double digit inflation. They will double the number of justices on the supreme court freeing the federal government from any Constitutional checks and every federal election will become meaningless. The deed will be done forever, the old America will be no more. The new America will not be either Democrat or Republican, it will be the Obama, Biden, Harris fundamentally changed federal government. This is not just election talk, it is fundamental prophecy, are you awake?

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.  

       

  

 

Evil

Why are we here?  Why do bad things happen to good people? Why is evil just around the corner?  Historic Old Testament God thinking says that evil in our world is our doing, evil reigns upon and within us as the deserved fruit of our sin. This understanding is rooted in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve and the first bit into that dammed apple. Evil is a daily occurrence among us and it is our fault, as humans we have earned our sad evil state.

The story is, however, Plato language and may not be the whole story. If the presence of evil in our world is a God judgement, this sinful miserable sinner of a hominoid would have been dead long ago. Another Old Testament God thinker, Job, also disagreed. In his story, Job experienced the loss of everything in this world except his next breath while maintaining his innocence before God. He demanded of God to know why he was experiencing such crushing evil? No answer.

While reading on this subject, I was again driven to the google search bar by the fancy word, theodicy.  A theodicy is our God thinking about the presence of evil in our world. The understanding that God could not or would not get His hands dirty creating a world with even the possibility of evil is ancient storytelling. Why was there even a tree of good and evil in the Genesis story at all?  Could it be that evil is a necessary part of God's plan for us. Maybe, God put together this world to accomplish His goal for His creation and not our petty goals. 

Maybe, God did not birth His creation in a puff of magic; maybe God is a bottom-up construction engineer. Why should we then complain?

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

 

 

Life

“Is the future open or closed? Does the freedom God has granted us include the freedom to affect how things will turn out, or is the end point set and our only problem, how to get there?  Is life a journey or a dance?”

Taylor, Barbara Brown, “The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion”, Cowley, 2000, p.72.

Why not both, a journey and a dance? gg

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Conversation

“While science disputes religion’s certainty that purpose is built into creation, religion challenges science’s certainty that such purpose is impossible.”

Taylor, Barbara Brown, “The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion”, Cowley, 2000, p.73,74.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca. 

 

Bound II

My parents didn’t talk or share about family history. It was as if all appeared in a puff of smoke, the only significant history was their now.  One of my father’s brothers spent 30 to 40 years in prison for armed robbery and I found out about it only through extended family scuttlebutt when I was close to retirement age.  My mother had a brother, a Navy Corsair fighter pilot in WWII and Korea. He died near El Centro when his plane didn’t pull out of a diving run. I learned of this from scuttlebutt when I was in my forties. What else was going on that seemed not to be important enough to share with the kids?

Was the fault of silence their inheritance or was the fault mine?  Maybe I was in a fog myself? The family history began in a small town in northwest Poland named Goslaw. Our name first appeared in Canada when immigrants from Poland must have changed their name to the town of their origin to better fit in with their new world.  Then our name popped up in upstate New York. All of this history I dug up with searches on the internet, not from a shared primary family history.

My father was a young preacher boy who deferred from WWII to attend college to prepare for an evangelical ministry.  This must have been a heavy and honorable decision but the humanness of such a decision was never shared with his children, why not?   Would we not have been better equipped to make such significant decisions in our own lives if we had a better understanding of the severity of decision making? How does one make such large decisions?  There is a consequence to every decision.

If my parents were still living, I now have many questions to ask. Would I have the courage to ask, maybe?  Simple stuff, mom and dad, how did you meet?  What attracted you to each other, physical, mental or spiritual?  I am guessing but my mother was a gifted musician and soloist who complemented the soon to be ministry of my father.  Was this the basis of their relationship?  While reorganizing the personal effects of my parents, I found a small box with school books and papers from a female personage of long ago. There must have been a very personal story in that box, why was it saved for sixty years? Mom when asked, would not answer.  I trashed it without inspecting.

The most difficult question would be, what were my early years like?  My memories are few with significant gaps. How do you remember those preschool years?  Can you make sense of my snapshots?  

                            - to be continued -

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca. 

 

 

 

 

Death Divide

From my extra-orthodox reading, eternity will be a homecoming (unity) for all we humans or a blank dark space for all we humans, to await the homecoming (unity). Sin as defined by how we fail to contribute to the well-being of others is of this world but will be an embarrassment to be carried with us into eternity.

Either/or: it is good and not our choice.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Silence

Those of us who find it necessary to deny a life circumstance are themselves in an emotional state of denial. Maybe, silence is golden or said another way, of God. Jesus was accused of all manner of craziness yet he remained silent to the point of death, guilt or innocence was and is not the important issue, the bigger issue is our personal trust in the beyond of God.  (gg)

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Going Home

In the long term of eternity (gg) …….

“What I have argued thus far, then, is that since man has been created by God for God, and is basically oriented towards him, there is no final opposition between God’s saving will and our human nature acting in freedom; and that accordingly the universalist argument is not at all undermined by the fact of human freedom.”

John Hick, “Death and Eternal life”, Westminster/ Jon Knox Press, 1994. P. 254.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Fraud Alert

“It seems like an oddly futile enterprise to forgive humans for what they can’t help doing and will continue doing. Until you consider how it gives the church enormous power. The doctrine of original sin created the ultimate spiritual franchise, diagnosing the human race with a disease that only the church could cure.”

Robin E. Meyers, “Saving God from Religion”, Convergent Books, 2020, p. 80.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca    

Bound

1990 Gibralter Road has been God’s way of teaching me about life, my life. In a fundamental way this place has been my salvation. At sixty-seven years, my life was still bound as it always had been, by what, I did not know or understand. My father had gone, my older brother had gone, my faithful courageous wife had gone and my mother had just been admitted to hospice care and soon to be also among the dead.

My life was a trainwreck, every opportunity given to me in life was sabotaged by me, no one else. I was bewildered and befuddled at the value of even being alive, all seemed to be lost as sinking into a bottomless quagmire. Maybe it was desperation or possibly insanity but for some unknown reason, I decided try to buy a house.  This was an almost insane decision, from whence this hope came to me, I knew not at the time.

This loser and the greater family had lived for over thirty years in a community that had grown to be unaffordable so with my meager resources I began to search the outer regions of civilization. In 2012, the first place I looked was down the road but still in the high desert of California. I had recalled trucking down the 247 in 1992 following the earthquake when we were detoured around a section of the road that had dropped three or four feet. I'll check it out.

Following the Landers sign east from the 247, I quickly found that Landers is a Post Office, a Community Center and a Moose Lodge, that's it, perfect. The search for a house was another story, frustrated and disappointed, I called a real estate agent. When we talked and I shared my meager resources,  I shall ever wonder why Herbert did not laugh, maybe he and our unseen force had a plan.

Amazingly we set a day to begin a search, a two-bedroom abode for one and of practically any condition with enough land to be semi-private.  Minimal is the word that would best define our search.  After viewing a few properties that had potential but would never qualify for financing, we drove two miles down a very ever bumpy dirt road in Landers, California.

                                -to be continued- 

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca. 

Stalemate

I can not prove I’m right and you can’t prove I’m wrong.  I guess we’ll just have to keep the conversation going.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca

Blank

Bad cosmology does not necessarily mean no cosmology. Just because some or most of the saints have been wrong for three or four thousand years does not mean that God, however that reality may be defined, is not up to something other. If not heaven and hell, what pray tell? 

Some of us say that the total extent of what God is up to is only my present, my personal earthly search for spiritual authenticity.  With their limited cosmology, the only goal afforded us can be measured with word salads like the process of becoming fully human, expanded consciousness and autonomy.  The God of Christianity is dead but we can find happiness, they say, as solo souls of this redefined community of believers.   

In an attempt to be fair and inclusive, there is an element of truth to this search but these folk seem to assume that if enough of us apply this ballooned personal spirituality to our lives it will unloose a truly loving world-wide, religion-less community of all we human God believers.  As they say in Missouri, show me.

By touting the personal spiritual priority these folk seem to deny or at least ignore any form or activity of their God beyond their solo supposed salvation, however that may be defined. Was the God of Ecclesiastes right, all is vanity? Speaking personally, this one seeker needs a God bigger than just me. I am the ass end of all believers but need a hope or a way of contributing toward a righteous cosmology beyond this person.  

Maybe death is a blank space, maybe the place of darkness as envisioned by early Hebrew believers is most accurate.  Maybe the extending of faith only in our time is enough. But maybe their vision as ours and many others, are and have been at times shortsighted. The God of historical Christian orthodoxy is dead but the mystery of God remains, now and forever.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

Heretics

 "The church is a museum, and museums are not in the business of pioneering. Thus any attempt to reconnect Christianity with the leading edge of spiritual development must appear naïve, incongruous and ridiculous. It is likely to be mocked inside the church as outside it, for the faithful love the museum and most theologians love being scholarly museum curators. There are only a few dissidents."

"The dissidents or heretics are people who, in spite of all that has happened, still hope it is possible to reconnect religion with modernity."

Don Cupitt, “Taking Leave of God”, Crossroads, 1980, page 155.

 

Soup

If you are one of the ingredients in the condensed soup of all life, past, present and future, existing on this planet, what would your first question be toward the God of eternity?  Only one question is of any consequence.  God, if you be God, why go to all this trouble? gg

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca