Narrow Path

Dietrick Bonhoeffer was on the right path, while in prison, he gave to us religionless Christianity.  What if he had survived Hitler justice, would religionless Christianity have been enough?  Would the narrow path that he was led to walk have blossomed into a religionless spirituality?  Not the fluffy pseudo modern escapist spirituality but the courageous variety. The kind of spirituality that has no fear of the lion’s den, religious persecution or the Hitlers of this world. The narrow path that gives no quarter to the certainty of our own demise because, live or die, the narrow path is eternity bound.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA 

Useful Idiots

The question to be decided sometime before November 5 is the following.  Are there enough useful idiots* in America voting on November 5 to give America continued Democratic control? Does America want more of the same? 

Frankly folks, we still don’t know who will be at the top of the Democrat Party ticket, as if that really matters.  I am still betting on Michelle Obama. Kamala Harris has been given a few weeks, prior to the Democratic Convention August 15, to prove she can beat Donald Trump, otherwise, the Kingmaker will also dump Kamala and install Michelle as the new old face of the party.  Michelle has recently appeared in public alongside her husband and despite all of her denials about seeking the job, that is the plan.

Bring it on Barack!  How can any thinking adult say that this plan is nothing but a dictatorship in the making? Like every other issue, you forecast what you are thinking by accusing Mr. Trump of doing what you are planning. Democracy, forget it.

Barack and Michelle will be back in the White House for good. They will stack the Supreme Court, give voting rights to illegals and force most of America on the government dole.  Barack and Michelle will ignore the Constitution with mandatory term limits.  The dollar will no longer be the international currency, business innovation will cease without a motive and inflation will skyrocket due to crazy spending while the country runs out of other people’s money. The government will be forced to tax the life out of everyone, rich and poor, unless you are a government elite and among the powerful.

There will be no recourse, on any issue beyond the government, including whether you and yours live or die. Sounds like a dictatorship, doers it not?  Only useful idiots would vote for this Obama planned version of America. We shall see.

*  Thank you for this clarification, Prime Minister of Israel, Mr. Netanyahu.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

 

Cosmic Flip

The message that Jesus preached was primarily as a reformer of the Hebrew religion in sync with the prophets of old.  All religion was and is a dead end.  Above religion, Jesus's message was that eternity can be tasted now as a cosmic flip of the priorities of our world. The coming flip will include, the losers becoming winners and winners losers, the pious will be exposed as sinners and the sinners will experience the respect of God, the rich will become poor and the poor rich and the masters will become servants and the servants masters.

Jesus says, believe and taste the God ordained coming cosmic flip.  2000 years later, with hindsight, we can identify the beginnings of our coming of age but most of the cosmic flip awaits us all, at our own deaths as individuals and the earthbound final fulfillment to be experienced by an unknown generation in the future.  No one has ever, can now or will ever avoid the coming cosmic flip.

Before we get all confused with traditional end times preaching, allow me to say a word about the Bible. No thinking adult can defend the understanding that all the red-letter words in the Bible were the actual words spoken by Jesus or understandings given by Jesus.  These recorded words in the Bible are the best recollections of a variety of Jesus listeners multiplied, who knows how many times, all of which were mixed with a variety of human understandings about the supposed reality of God. 

The Bible, therefore, can be thought of as an egg.  The pure words and message of Jesus are the egg yolk, given to us surrounded by layers of human listening fallibility or ineptitude. This is the albumen or egg whites.  In the Bible it is called religion.  The trick is to separate the whites from the yolk, not an easy trick. Some biblical thinkers just throw out their brains and take the written words of the Bible “as is”, in Zillow talk.  The Bible then becomes so complicated that the yolk is given no value or hidden, even taken as a joke, in our complicated world.

Much of the Bible is not history, a history that can extend us in some way into eternity beyond our own demise. Eternity is not to be thought of as heaven, a storybook dumped on the Bible.  Jesus called and expected our world to be ruled as the kingdom of God with God's eternal values endorsed and lived out by believers. Thanks to the Jesus Seminar and the Westar Institute, the Bible is being separated, fact from fiction.  Now, the question needs to be asked, what's next?  When will the next appear?

This blog is just humble enough not to make a guess as to what God is up too. For now, the kingdom of God appears to shine among us when we, as believers, order our lives to reflect eternity values. The number one value being, the inherent value of every living being that crosses our path. We shall try to make our world eternity friendly, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding but our eternal future in God is assured for all of us.      

What a great day that will be! The flip is among us and will be the order of the day in eternity. Of course, you will not hear this from the pulpit because the institution of religion drowns out those eternal values of the kingdom. 

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

Blinders

Our delicate sensibilities would like to believe that the assassination attempt on former President Trump was merely a case of woke Secret Service incompetence and faulty decision making.  The Butler Pennsylvania scenario, however, follows a very familiar pattern lived out in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother, a candidate running for president, Robert Kennedy and the attempt to kill President Ronald Regan.   

In each tragedy, an obscure gunman does the deed through an obvious and unexplained hole in Secret Service protection.  That security hole, in each case, has never been fully explained and our politicians were quick to accept a leadership shuffling as an explanation. Our government is again, in 2024, hiding the truth and expecting we useful idiots to accept another leadership change deflection.

Take off the blinders, America, some power in our government has killed and will kill political threats to its invisible control. That is the simple truth. The identity of these folk cannot be quickly labelled Democrat or Republican, something bigger is going on.  Our politicians of whatever flavor, have been and are running scared and justifiably so.  This conspiracy theory is real life.

I wonder if the shooter was told that he would be allowed to get a few shots off but then he would be silenced?  Probably not.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca

Chase

We modern Americans are spoiled brats. We give no respect to the welfare of any other human being, let alone those of us who also call ourselves Americans.  Entirely self-absorbed, that is what we are, wrapped up and manipulated by any ideology that seems, for the moment, to further our own self-interest.  Yes, we are proving ourselves to be the pitiful people, the ugly Americans, content to crazily chase that illusive pot of gold just over the next hill.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.   

Weird

I’m kinda weird.  I am a believing theist, that is, I believe there is a creator God who is the source of our reality, to include all that we experience in all places and at all times.  Our reality, however, is not the only reality. Ours is not the God reality.  We exist as if in a dark cave (Plato's cave), God is the only light source in our cave but that source or God is behind us, over our shoulder.  We can only see or experience the reflections and shadows of that God reality.

Reflections and shadows are lousy bed partners, we as humans desire certainty.  Through the ages we have invented meaningful stories that give us a feeling of certainty about God but the stories are also mere shadows of that God reality. The lived-out temptation for us is to value the stories instead of or more than the God reality. In my limited understanding, there is no need to defend the stories of Hebrew, Christian or Greek traditions.

This much is fairly simple. For sure there are more heady thinkers out there but I prefer my simple minded stuff.  The more difficult question is, what in God’s name, is this God reality up too? Are we being toyed with?   Later.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca      

Sixty One Years

The more things change, the more they stay the same. gg

“But that Christianity should be equated in the public mind, inside as well as outside the Church, with ‘organized religion’ merely shows how far we have departed from the New Testament.  For the last thing the Church exists to be is an organization for the religious.  Its charter is to be the servant of the world.”   John A. T. Robinson, “Honest to God”, (1963, 2002), p.134.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.