Archive for September, 2005
Begat
You know all those “begats” the New Testament begins with?
You know, “Abraham begat Jacob, Jacob began Isaac…”
Jesus kept talking about “My Father.”
Jesus was the son of God.
So you may wonder why the New Testament begins with all those “begats.”
Well, Matthew was aware that Jesus was the son of God Almighty.
But, bless his heart, he also wanted to prove that Jesus was descended from somebody IMPORTANT.
The Trump Card
Posted by Bob in Bob, How Things Work on 09/30/2005
Shortly after I began to work for Congressman John Ashbrook (NOT ASHCROFT!!!) in the late 1970s, his brother in Ohio was taken out one night by organized crime and strangled to death in a field.
His brother had run up huge, unpayable gambling debts.
Yes, Virginia, these things don’t just happen on the Sopranos.
An adventurous person like John Ashbrook often just loves gambling. On one of the trips to the race track that John took some of us staffers along on he hit his first trisecta, which, as I understand it, is a big payoff when you pick the winning horse in three races.
He took me along when he was in a poker games with enormous stakes. The amount of cash on the table was staggering.
It was a very fun, friendly game all the way through.
But no one at the table was allowed to have a weapon on him. I had no idea where we were going the first time, but as we were ready to go in, John handed me his gun.
There were a couple of his regular older staffers with him from the Ohio office, so I didn’t realize until a few years ago why it was he handed ME the gun.
I was raised with a gun in the pocket of my car. That is called the “glove compartment” by folks whe are not from the South. We didn’t have a lot of use for gloves outside of work, so we ended up calling it the “pocket.” So I sort of assumed that the Ohio guys, being from a largely rural area, would take a gun for granted the way I did.
It was only a few years ago that I finally realized for the first time that John had not given ANYBODY a gun before that. He was kind of proud that he finally had a staffer he could give a gun TO.
The other staffers were civilized people who were not familiar with the practical use of a firearm.
You might say that you could give your pistol to anybody who had been in the armed forces.
That is DEFINITELY untrue. The last thing a person in the armed forces is trained to do is to have a gun on his person with no SPECIFIC rules about how to use it. That is the opposite of what military training is about.
For me being handed a gun in this way was about as shocking as being handed a shovel on a work site. John gave me no instructions.
John knew my background. John Ashbrook was Ranking Republican onthe House Select Intelligence Committee. His access to information on people like me was awesome. A congressman in that position seeking information on a staffer he was hiring was not bound up by the rules that the executive branch must adhere to.
More important, John’s interest in me was PERSONAL. There was nothing routine about the search he did on me. He knew it ALL.
OK, I could handle a gun in an unpredictable situation. So what instructions did he give me?
None.
I was senior staff. I was supposd to know what to do. That’s what he hired me for.
His judgment was confirmed when I changed guns.
The weapon John handed me was a very expensive-looking pistol (“handgun” to you modern folks).
But it was a .32 caliber. FAR too small.
The next time we went to a poker game, I brought my own .45.
I carried a .45 for exactly the reason the .45 was adopted by the army in the first place. In the early 1900s during the fighting in the Phillipines, American soldiers would shoot doped-up guerrilla attackers with their .38’s.
They did kill the attackers with those .38s, but there was a small catch. All too often, by the time the attacker went down, he had killed the American shooting him.
In combat you are usually using your rifle. By the time it gets down to the time you have to reach for your pistol, you are dealing in seconds of precious time.
To put this in the vernacular, when an American soldier in the Phillipines had to reach for his pistol he had lost all interest in adding to the enemy body count. His only obsession was in knocking that sucker DOWN.
Which is why the army adopted the knock-’em-down .45 in the first place.
I did not want a gun that would look good. I wanted one that would protect me and John.
It never occurred to me at the time that I was the first staffer John had ever had who would know little housekeeping hints like that.
Why “Christians” are so Merciless
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 09/28/2005
Mark ( our commenter, not the Book) says:
“Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls; for My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.” Matt. xi. 29, 30.
I’ve wondered how the church could justify their lust for self sacrifice in light of this scripture.
*************************
Mark, the trick is so obvious you miss it.
Fifty or a hundfred thousand years ago some caveman shaman made a wonderful discovery. Instead of speaking for himself, he said he spoke for God. He found that people who would not listen to him would listen to God.
And he discovered that, if you are God’s spokesman, it is just as good as BEING God.
Better. If you are obviously wrong, you can just say you misinterpreted God’s Words. But nobody can get you for that, because you are the only one who can talk to God at all.
When a prince owed them money, a pope would routinely put the prince’s hundred thousand subjects under the interdict. Terrified old people were denied the last sacraments, the sacraments essential to salvation. How could a man who called himself a Christian do this over money?
Very simply. It was not money owed to HIM, it was money the prince owed to GOD.
How many times have you heard a “Christian” pronounce some variant of the following words:
“You can insult me all you want to, but I will not allow you to insult GOD.”
With that simple and age-old dodge, a person can justify ANYTHING. So the parents gave their children up to a life of suffering in a strict monastery or convent for the Sake of God. They give themselves up to misery for the Sake of God.
“…and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
That’s pretty clear. But there is an easy way around it. “Christians” say that Jesus did NOT say, “and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who offend our idea of God.”
So today’s self-styled Christians almost invariably are totally unforgiving, but only inthe name of God and for the Sake of God.
The Temple priests who caused Jesus to be crucified followed that version of Christianity to the letter.
The Temple priests never said they wanted Jesus tortured to death because he had offended THEM. They said exactly what “Christians” have said ever since: They wanted Jesus crucified because he had offended GOD. Jesus was a trouble-maker. Jesus was a danger to the True Religion and would lead others into the Pit of Sheol.
A person who takes responsibilty for his own actions, as Jesus demanded that we do, has definite limits on what he can do to another human being. A person speaking in the Name of God has no such limitations. The crueler he is the more it proves his dedicaton to True Religion.
We have an exact duplication of that thinking among today’s whites who consider it a virtue to hate the white race. What could be more moral, more Christian, than sacrificing one’s own race for the sake of others, for the sake of God?
I quoted a Methodist bishop who said exactly that last sentence in in 1955 as part of his demand for integration. Everybody understood integration meant the end of hte white race, and he said it was a sacrifice we had to be willing to make For The Sake of God.
What could be more holy than to give up every natural feeling of loyalty to your own people for God’s sake?
So if that bishop was right. what could be more holy than violating every other natural feeling?
Look at that last sentence. It comes directly from the thinking behind handing one’s newborn baby over to a monastery in the Middle Ages. What could more holy than to give up every natural feeling and subject your own child to a lifetime of exhaustion, starvation and self-hatred in a monastery FOR GOD’S SAKE?
Look at that last paragraph. What could be more holy than to subject YOURSELF to a lifetime of hunger and exhaustion and deprivation FOR GOD’S SAKE?
All you have to do is put that little twist to The Lord’s Prayer.
Which was exactly the thing that Jesus kept telling people NOT to do.
Which is why people exactly like today’s Old Testament Christians put Jesus on the cross.
The Napolean Watch
Posted by Bob in History, How Things Work on 09/28/2005
There is a very true saying that, “The nearest thing we have to eternal life on earth is a temporary government agency.”
When I was in England back in the 1970s they had a great example of that. A person was still being paid to patrol the coast watching out for an invasion by Napolean’s armed forces.
Actually, I can see why that job was still open. The salary for it was fixed at ten pounds a year. Back in 1814 when Napolean was finally defeated at Waterloo, a young man who volunteered to fight in the war and who was crippled for life received a pension of only one shilling a day for for life.
A poor man could actually live on that back then.
If some hobbling wounded veteran got an extra ten pounts a year by being given the Napolean Watch, it increased his income by over fifty percent. I wouldn’t have had the heart to abolish the job either.
After that, I doubt anybody even thought about abolishing the job.
By the 1970s that ten pounds amounted to exactly two bucks a month. I wonder if the person holding that position even bothered to collect it. But I am sure some elderly Englishman thoroughly enjoyed ambling out to the coast a few times a year and still being the Official Napolean Watch.
In the twentieth century there were a couple of reports by the Napolean Watch of seeing the French invading fleet, but they were discounted because they always happened right after the pubs closed.
They still had a legal closing time for all pubs inthe 1970s (Last orders, please!) So the reports that came in right after that time were discounted.
I think that was too hasty a conclusion. I believe that, being a military genius, Napolean would have attacked exactly at the moment that the maximum number of Englishmen were in no condition to resist.
By now I imagine that the Napolean Watch has either been abolished or allowed to lapse.
So now if the Grand Army pours into England, muzzle-loaders and all, the English will be caught completely off guard.
As a former bureaucrat, all I can say I can is that it serves them right for abolishing a temporary government agency.
-
You are currently browsing the archives for September, 2005
Bob’s Books
Bob's first book - 1976
A Plague On Both Your HousesBob's second book - 1982
THE NEW RIGHT PAPERSBob's deadliest book - 2004
Why Johnny Can't Think:
America's Professor-PriesthoodWhy Johnny Can't Think ebook zip
pwrd: Phu=9Ad5
Reply to Rocko
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 09/30/2005
Rocko’s statement is at the end, but I think you will get a sense of what he said from my reply.
MY REPLY:
Rocko, you are being very unfair to me, but I survived it.
I never said anything remotely approaching the concept that hypocrites calling themselves “Christians” invalidates Christianity. Please, NEVER accuse me of that!
I never even hinted anything of the sort.
Try to understand that I deeply resent “Christians” precisely because I am, or try to be, a Christian. So being told that I am being anti-Christian is not what I want to hear.
As I have said over and over and over and over and over and over, Jesus was not an Old Testament savior any more than Aramic is the holy language. He spoke Aramaic because the people around him would not have understood Hindi or Swedish. He spoke in Old Testament terms because nobody where he was preaching had read the Zoroastrian Avesta (?) or the Eddas.
What language would you EXPECT him to speak? What scriptures would you EXPECT him to cite?
But in the end, he said that the Old Testament was as worthless as pagan myths. He, not Moses, was the way, the truth and the light. The ONLY way. He left not a micro of room for the Old Testament or anything else.
People listened a moment and then went right back to what they always did.
Which is what humans always do.
Jesus didn’t die on the cross because we were WORTH it.
ROCKO SAID:
I think Bob and joe rorke have missed a crucial point here, and have adopted a sort of “magical” view of Christianity, that somehow the fact that people have been hypocrites in every era and civilized society somehow shows that Christianity is false. That is very poor reasoning.
The Sermon on the Mount is a sermon against hypocrisy. Jesus constantly condemned the leaders of his day as hypocrites. His most important (at least recorded) sermon is focused on that. As Bob has often said, when he figures something out that makes real sense, he realizes Jesus said it better already.
Jesus said “By their fruit ye shall know them”. It is fine to moan about how bad so many “Christians” are, and condemn the whole thing, if you just ignore the plain teaching that Jesus himself pointed out. Why do you think he kept repeating the point? Obviously He knew it would be a big problem.
joe rorke is right, that the warmonger attitude is not a result of what Jesus taught. How does that invalidate Him? Just because Bob’s spelling is poor, that doesn’t invalidate the English language. It is Bob that is at fault, not the language.
Bob uses a phrase, “Old Testament Christians” to say what Jesus said more simply, that is “hypocrites”. Almost everything Jesus said came straight out of the Old Testament, so does that make him an “Old Testament Savior”?
“He is my brother and my sister who does the will of my Father”, said Christ. There it is again. If they don’t do the will of His Father, then what does that mean? It isn’t complicated.
3 Comments