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 9/30/2005
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 9/28/2005
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 9/28/2005
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.
Conspiracies or Networking?
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, How Things Work on 9/28/2005
I have real trouble getting my message across to most people because they carry two contradictory ideas around in their heads. The first is that success is a matter of “not WHAT you know but WHO you know.”
The other is that we are ruled by a group of Evil Geniuses who have a superhuman plot going.
So when I trace a major part of our problem down to college professors who think they are geniuses and who are being allowed to get away with what any group of human beings in their position would do, I get ignored.
When people start to reas David Duke’s Jewish Supremacism, the last thing they expect to see is a hundred thousand words of common sense and facts they can easily look up.
From the word go, the biggest burden David and I had to bear was the Conspiracy Nuts.
Yes, there are definitely political reasons David’s books are ignored. But there is a common sense reason, too. People assume Jewish Supremacism will be like The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the discription of a tiny group of master geniuses who direct every move all
the Jews on earth make.
They think of The Bilderberger Conspiracy, where a tiny group of dedicated geniuses already rule the world cloaked by secrecy.
The Conspiracy Nuts have made real revelations based on obvious facts and logic enormously difficult.
If you subscribe to a conspiracy theory you are half beaten already. It makes you feel brave to be taking on the group that runs the whole world. You whole theory is based onthe idea that that tiny group owns and commands the whole world through pure dedication and talent. True, they cheat, but they’re so good at it that they might as well be unbeatable geniuses.
They are great and you are small.
If you believe that, you are, as I say, half way to defeat already.
A giant conspiracy ruled by secret geniuses is not the way the world works.
They are evil, but they are not geniuses and there is nothing secret about them.
A person who gets wealth, power or fame almost always does it with more than just luck. But he has to have luck to get to the top, and lots of it. For every person who makes it to the top in corporations in New York there a dozen people in Minneapolis who are just as talented. They own a huge auto dealership in Minnesota, but the ladder they were climbing had a ceiling.
The man who gets to be head of a national television network doesn’t set out to to do that. He goes into the corporate structure and it becomes part of the group that runs that industry.
Charlie Sheen and Kirk Douglas and Jeff Bridges all produced sons were became major actors. Every one of them had talent, but the obvious fact is that their sons got to show it where other actors were ignored.
They didn’t ride into town on a bus trying to Make It In Hollywood. They knew what was what and who was who from their childhood.
No one will deny that Bill Gates is a genius.
Bill Gates built his fortune on creativeness and savvy, but he used the fact that his mother had enormous contacts in the field that he could use and that his father was already a very wealthy man.
This is a VERY practical matter when it comes to real world politics.
Nobody denies that George Burns had enormous talent. But he pointed out that he got his first break in show business back in the beginning of the twentieth century because the advertisement specified that the Jewish theater owner wanted a Jewish actor.
The great writer Ayn Rand got her big break when she was an extra on the movie lot in the 1930s. Cecil B. DeMille was riding in his chauffeur-driven car and saw her among all the hundreds of actors who would have given anything for a nod from him. He saw an obviously very Jewish girl and stopped and picked her up and talked to her.
Jews are the world’s best “networkers.” They promote each other, which is exactly what the Jewish religion and the Jewish culture has always taught them to do. They are always hungry to find JEWISH talent.
And Jews have a blood grudge against white gentiles which is very openly advocated in every synagogue. In fact, if white gentiles expressed the same “grudge” against Jews that Jews regularly express against gentiles and preach from their pulpits, it would be called “Hate.”
And everybody knows about that Jewish “grudge,” that endless preaching about the persecution of Jews by white gentiles.
Were it not for Political Correctness, this situation would be expressed in plain English:
Jewish culture teaches Jews to hate us. Jewish culture teaches Jews that their overriding goal is to rid the world of white gentiles.
If this is a Secret Jewish Conspiracy then it is the worst-hidden secret in history.
But Conspiracy Nuts have made this common sense look like something out of an insane asylum.
Anti-anti-semites are always frantically denying that liberals or Jews run Hollywood. Ben Stein said, “Of course Jews run Hollywood. You’re just now figuring that out?”
Ben Stein is a Jew and has spent decades as a leading conservative writer. He is NOT a NEO-conservative. He says leftism was wrong from the word go.
Ben Stein attacks the fact that liberals run Hollywood. But, as a Jew, he is proud of the fact that Jews run the place.
Those who write gaint books about giant conspiracies simply don’t understand the basics of how the world works.
Secret Conspiracies are unusual. And they are always very small.
As Ben Franklin said, “Three people can keep a secret, but only if two of them are dead.”
Networking, not secret conspiracy, is how the world works. If you are in any business and you are looking for someone at a high level or for creative work, you don’t put an ad in paper. You call up somebody else who is in your position and say, “I need somebody to run so and so or to do the writing for my new play. Who’s available?”
If this is a secret conpiracy, then the secret has been as poorly kept as that of the Jewish Conspiracy.
Liberals prefer liberals, Jews REALLY prefer Jews. A good American Communist in Hollywood
would not hire anybody BUT another Communist to do his writing or producing or directing for him. Like any other serious group, the Communists demanded that as a duty.
Ask any Communist and he will tell you he takes that for granted.
In the 1950s it appeared that all the talent was in New York City. That was because the people the guys in power in New York knew were in New York.
This is not rocket science.
It is also not a Secret Plot by Evil Geniuses.
I you try to sell the public a Secret Plot, you will have a good time.
But if you explain how the world works, they will not have to read a lot of books to see you are right.
The Day I Didn’t Get Arrested
Every now and then I go out on my veranda, take out my false teeth and my glass eye, and sit there with my mayonnaise jar full of white lightening.
Pretty soon I begin my senile cackling over incidents in my past.
I want to recite one I may have told you before.
If you’ve heard this one already, try and stop me.
I was doing the press conference for an anti-busing march. I paid all my own expenses, as always, including the trip to the city where the march was being held, which was not next door. As always, I also joined in the march.
Brave policemen started to beat some of the WOMEN on the march. I walked up to one as if I was going to protest, then jumped under his truncheon and knocked him out cold.
They took me to the station and got a call. Somebody told them they were about to arrest the PUBLICITY MAN for the march for cold-cocking one of their cops who was beating up women.
The newspapers would never report one more incident of police violence against a right-wing demonstration. They often don’t mention such protests at all unless there is a press conference.
At the press conferences, you hand out press releases which means most of their writing has already been done for them. A major demonstration doesn’t matter. But a major protest AND a press conference cannot be completely ignored.
But I could have gotten headlines if they had arrested me that time.
The cops hated letting somebody go who had knocked out a cop. But I understand they got a call from the mayor himself, “Don’t you DARE arrest him! I don’t want any record of this!”
I, of course, would have liked nothing better than to be arrested, even though it might have cost me my Federal job. Fighting is on the few offenses a Federal employee can be fired for, much less hitting a cop.
So there I sat. The cops hated me and I kept grinning at them.
They did NOT offer me a ride home.
I Prefer My Human Sacrifices the Old Fashioned Way
Posted by Bob in History, How Things Work on 9/27/2005
In the Middle Ages, parents would routinely obtained the blessings of the Church by bringing a young child in to become a monk or a nun.
If they were truly blessed, their child would spend sixty to eighty years in hunger, exhaustion, self-loathing, physical self-torture, sleep starvation, and humiliation. That was what GOOD monasteries were for.
Usually, in the less perfect convents and monasteries, the child would learn homosexual sex early.
There is one authenticated case, and probably thousands more less well documented, where a boy was delivered to the monastery after his mother died delivering him. In his long life of eighty years he never saw a single female.
That was a GOOD monastery.
In the pagan world they would leave a newborn out in the open to die of exposure in a day or two. For some reason, that was better than actually KILLING the child.
There is an old American country saying, “A man should shoot his own dog.”
In other words, if your dog has to die, you make sure it is done right and painlessly by doing it yourself. To my country mind, if you want to kill a newborn, you should kill it yourself instead of leaving it in hours or days of uncomprehending terror and thirst in the cold and in the sun.
That is the Golden Rule talking. No churchman ever even mentioned that aspect of the matter. The suffering of a newborn doesn’t matter, or we wouldn’t have circumcised hundreds of millions of male babies.
The only thing that mattered to the Church was that the child was exposed and actually killed rather than spending a lifetime suffering. That would been a holy act.
A lot of the sacrifices in pagan days were voluntary. But the Church abhorred that kind of human sacrifice. Human sacrifices in monasteries were usually voluntary, and that makes all the difference.
The difference mystifies me. According to the Golden Rule, you shouldn’t do that to yourself.
The Church disapproved of other forms of suicide.
Political Correctness says that when the Temple Jews convicted Jesus and turned him over to the civil authorities, the Roman, they had no idea he would be executed.
A good conservative can swallow that line, but back on the real earth there were only two alternatives if the Temple Jews convicted a Jew of heresy, stoning by Jews or crucifixion by Romans.
Christianity abandoned the cross when it took over. Instead it used a very slow burning at the stake.
After days or weeks of torture, which the family had to pay for.
When a heretic was burned, the Inquisitors held a celebration feast.
The family paid for that, too.
If they were lucky. Many a person confessed and went to the stake because if they died heretics, everything the family had would be confiscated. They couldn’t pay for anything.
That sort of self-sacrifice was usually futile. The whole family of a heretic was suspected of heresy, so another member was usually arrested later. Eventually the Church would get the whole kaboodle anyway.
My favorite professor made himself a human sacrifice. He and a friend were in a boat when the lake was suddenly flooded and the boat overturned. He was to shore, but his friend couldn’t swim well, so he went back, though exhausted, to try to save him. He drowned trying to save his friend.
He was no Christian, but he died to do something for another person. He died according to the Golden Rule, as Christ did.
That is ONLY reason for human sacrifice, even if the person being sacrificed is you.
A Great Northern Neighbor
Posted by Bob in History, How Things Work on 9/26/2005
I like it when people appreciate my humor. So I’m not COMplaining, I am EXplaining
Some time back I wrote a piece about how I wished America had a Great Northern Neighbor the way Mexico does. All of the commenters thought it was a joke.
It wasn’t.
Do the math.
Mexico is trying desperately to bring itself into the year 1900. Its Great Northern Neighbor is, technologically, wel over a century ahead of Mexico.
What if we had a Great Northern Neighbor who offered us the tecnolgy of 2100 AD today?
Mexicans seem to HATE that.
I wouldn’t.
If a Mexican can steal his way across the border of Mexico’s Great Northern Neighbor, he can increase his income TEN TIMES.
So if I were an entry-level American worker and I could steal across the porous borders of MY Great Northern Neighbor, my minimum wage would be forty dollars an hour!
If there is a threat, like Communism, my Great Northern Neighbor would protect me from it.
If there is a disaster here, my Great Northern Neighbor would pour in help beyond my wildest dreams.
Consider this: That Great Northern Neighbor would be a century ahead of us in medicine. Think of the diseases the average Mexican contends with today. Think of how it would be if they did not have American and white discoveries in medicine.
Then do the math.
What would OUR health be like if WE had Great Northern Neighbor which lived in the next century in medical advances?
Oh, goodness gracious, but this Great Northern Neighbor, who were Nordic as the snow compared to us, would LOOK DOWN on us!!!
Oh, the pain, the humiliation!
This Great Northern neighbor would EXPLOIT us by sending us industries that paid only five or six times the wages we could normally get.
Oh, the pain, the humiliation!
That’s what the average Mexican thinks about.
I am NOT the average Mexican.
I want a Great Northern neighbor.
I REALLY do.
It Didn’t Go Wrong, It Just Went Ahead
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, History on 9/26/2005
In a recent article National Review talked about how liberals fought for righteous causes until about the middle 1960s. National review was saying that National Review was wrong to fight liberalism for the first ten years of the existence of that publication.
National Review says that National Review should not have been founded in 1955 as an opponent of glorious liberalism. National Review says that the people who founded National Review were on the wrong side.
In the 1950s all of us redneck segregationists were saying that integration, which is now The Holy Grail of conservatism, was wrong and would lead to disaster.
No respectable conservative today would dare even hint a suggestion that integration, the final solution to the race problem, which means the final solution to the white problem, is anything less than holy.
When a white country becomes dedicated to the proposition that the white race must go, it is a very sick society.
Everything we predicted for integration came true. But nobody who wants to be on the national media could even allow that fact to cross his mind if he wants to keep his job.
So everybody in the spokeman business agrees that integration was glorious, progressive, inarguable and holy.
How do they explain that every single disaster that us rednecks and most of the founders of National review predicted is now a fact of life?
They say the only thing they CAN say:
“All that progressivism was right and wonderful and us old reactionaries were just evil. We right until about 1970 Then all of a sudden, something went WRONG with liberalism.”
That is the doctrine of neoconservatism. Neoconservatives say were right when they were liberals and they are right now. National Review agrees.
I say liberalism did not GO wrong. It is obnvious to me that all those “progrssive ideas” went on to their natural conclusion.
Which is the natural conclusion I was predicting as a teenager.
Once the Holy Grail of Integration and the other ideas liberalism fought for were estalished by 1968, we were headed for the disasters we are experiencing right now.
Nothing suddenly “went wrong.” Progressive policy just went on to its natural conclusions, the ones we predicted, with uncanny accuracy, fifty years ago.
This realization is critical. This is the sine qua non (without which nothing) of a sane society.
If we are to recover, we must reject the insanity entirely and go back to basics. We must get “simplistic.”
If you are totally involved in today’s latest revelation about Iraq or Bush’s foot odor, you can miss this overriding, critical historic fact.
A lot of people are wrapped up in the realization that the official spokesmen for neoconservatives, the people National Review worships, are Jews.
That is true, and that is important in the present war for Israel we are fighting in Iraq. But in the long run, that is not the essense, the real meaning, of the neoconservatism today’s entire conservative establishment adheres to and worships.
I just wanted to remind of you of what, in the sweep of history, neoconservatism really means.
You may now return to frantically e-mailing each other about Iraq.
Doctrinal Infallibility
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, How Things Work on 9/26/2005
Our established religion of Political Correctess has a docrtine of infallible that makes Papal Infallible look like minor league stuff.
Liberals have stopped talking about many of their silliest declarations, but they NEVER admit that thoss doctrines were dead wrong. They just don’t discuss them any more, and any conservative who wants to be on national media never reminds them of their nuttsiest statements.
A conservative who remembers what liberals once required people to believe to get a college profesaorship. Liberal dogma that could not be denied on campus has been quietly forgotten.
If liberals were reminded of their track record they would laughed off the public airways.
So any conservative who reminds liberals of their track record loses his respectability and his livelihood.
A professor who does that loses his livelihood. The token conservatives on campus are as carefully respectable as media conservative spokemen.
One example of PS Doctrinal Infallibilty appears inteh New York Times and then in all the local newspapers belonging to national syndicates regularly. It goes like this:
“Crime has dropped dramatically, BUT the prison population keeps rising.”
This shows that the idea that punishment is a cure for crime is wrong.
What if New York Times in 1950 said, “Deaths from infectious diseases have dropped dramatically, BUT the use of pennicilin keep rising.”
Even a lot of the brain-dead reader/worshippers of the New York Times would have laughed at that.
No respectable conservative would have, of course.
Obviously the growing rate of incarceration is the REASON crime is dropping.
Years ago some of us noticed that most crimes were committed by career criminals. When a store was robbed or a child murdered, the news story would recite the violent acts the perpetrator had commited previously.
So we said, “Lock the career criminals up and throw away the key.”
Liberals denounced locing them away and throwing away the key as “simplistic.” They said that the only way to reduce crime was “to get at the root causes of crime.” They said that the cure for crime was the same one Political Correctness has for ALL social problems” more expensive programs planned by professors.
Professors recommended this so the New York Times accepted it without question. “Getting to the root causes of crime” was the doctrine, and any professor who disagreed put his job in danger.
But there is on consistent theme here. Political Correctness, as backed solidly by professors, ALWAYS demands that the policy adopted be the produce of professors and give power to the professors.
So the New York Times and all its little mental satelites insist that if you “get to the root causes of crime,” both crime and the number of prisoners will decrease. The fact that you dealing with crime by punishment obviously WORKS means nothing to them
As the Pope said about Galileo, heretics CANNOT be right, no matter what the facts are.
This is exactly like an
Yes!
When I asked if you are reading this, five commenters charged forth and said they did.
You better believe I appreciate it!
I feel GOOD!
Is Anbody Reading This?
The service provider has changed he address of this blog, and I have not ogtten a single comment since?
Is anybody reading this?
Answer to Elizabeth
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 9/21/2005
Elizabeth says,
If you’re female, sometimes discussing something, even in prayer, with a man/male
presence, can be intimidating.
In real life, sometimes the best way to get through to a male VIP is to go
through his secretary, his wife — or Mama. (This may be an alien concept
to those of you not fortunate enough to be Southerners!)
One things I’ve noticed since my first visit to a Catholic church is that
not having a female presence (Mary) tends to result in a feminized Jesus.
Any orthodox (doctrinally-correct) Catholic church has at least one image
of the Holy Family, which could be considered an earthly Trinity. After all,
Jesus was part of a FAMILY, while He was present in flesh on Earth.
XXXXXXXXXXXX
MY REPLY:
Elizabeth, since I was forunate enough to be raised a Southerner, I used the hell out of it on Capitol Hill.
I would often be put on hold while trying to reach a congressman. Since I was big deal on the Hill, the woman putting me on hold would explain why the congressman could not talk to me. That gave me a chance to ask who SHE was.
“She” was often the office manager for the congressman. All my fellow staffers informed me that “office manager” was just a word invented to make a secretary feel good. If you took a look at her salary you would be disabused of that myth right quick.
Nobody looked at their salary but me.
It is public record, but I was he only person I knew who could look it up.
That “glorifed secretary,” I discovered, was theone I really wanted to talk to.
If I had talked to the congressman, and if I were successful, he would go to his office manager and tell her to remind him of the commitment he had made to me.
IF I was lucky. We had a list of the congressmen who were too drunk to keep commitments after lunch, so my confidence in speaking to The Great One Himself was somewhat limited.
So while other staffers fumed at being forced to talk to “the secretary” I would more often than not get my business done directly with her. I did not need to talk to His Majesty Himself.
The office managers thought I was great.
This is the big leagues, gang, and nobody got to be an office manager on Capitol Hill unless she really enjoyed taking the responsibility herself.
She would get to the congressman in a way I could never do.
And she LIKED it.
After some years on Capitol Hill I discovered that my genius in dealing with “secretaries” was just part of a plot of concocted by the Evil Genius Whitaker.
One day we were dividing up calls to be made and someone said, “Have Whitaker get in touch with her. he’s been cultivating secretaries for years.”
So do you think I said, “No way. What I did was common sense.”
If they thought I was a genius, who was Ole Bob to disagree?
Legion
With my background I am impressed by watching American soldiers who are thoroughly trained.
You have to give a real pro credit.
American troops move into position at neither a run nor a walk.
I would hate to be on the other side.
Those troops are like the Roman legions, a whole new phenomenon in their time. They constitute a single unit moving inexorably forward. Each soldier’s firepower is staggering but he is never overconfident about it.
Each man is an arsenal by any earlier standards of warfare, but each arsenal moves in a dance, always in the direction of their goal.
Nobody seems to notice the artistry of it.
If you are someone like me, who has been the objective of firepower, it gives you a cold chill.
Repeat: I would hate to be on the other side.
There used to be a saying, “One barbarian can beat one regular soldier. But a million barbarians cannot beat a legion.”
If you want to beat American soldiers you must wear a woman’s clothes and carry a bomb.
In World War II American soldiers were a joke. If it were not for the Italians, Americans trying to be soldiers would have been the laughing stock of the war.
Today nobody can come close to American soldiers.
I never say anything to flatter anybody. I despise everything those soldiers are doing for Israel.
But Lord Almighty, they are GOOD at what they do!
Perfection is a Contemptible Goal
Posted by Bob in How Things Work on 9/21/2005
I was taking high school Latin and we had a substitute teacher. One girl in the class had gotten a series of A pluses on her tests because she had gotten all the answers right.
The new teacher said to her, in class, “I can’t give you A pluses like your earlier teacher did. A plus means perfection and perfectionis like..”
And she pointed upward dramatically,
“God.”
I was about fifteen years, but I added her comment to my already very long list entitled, “Incredibly Dumb Things People Say When They’re Trying to be Wise.”
Her concept of God Almighty was somebody who made a perfect score on a high school Latin test.
And she was dead serious.
I have heard a number of sermons on The Rich Young Man. Jesus said to him, “If you would be PERFECT, sell all you have and give it to the poor and FOLLOW ME.”
Not one word of any of those sermons even mentioned the fact that the Rich Young Man was being asked to become an Apostle of Jesus Christ. All that ever matters about the Rich Young Man was that he was rich.
Which was exactly the attitude Jesus was criticizing him for.
Jesus was asking him to BEGIN by renoucing his fortune. Jesus was saying he needed to do that to become PERFECT. Heaven is not limited to Perfect People.
AFTER the young man followed Jesus, he would GROW to be something much more than wealthy.
Perfection can be achieved by a worm. He can be a perfect worm. But will it matter?
Would God surrender his throne to a person who scored perfect on a Latin test? Even a COLLEGE Latin test?
One thing you will notice about people or business or people who make a difference in the world is that a lot of confusion and a lot of bad mistakes go with their success. They are growing.
By definition, growth is not perfection.
Intelligent Conversation Cannot Use All the Qualifiers
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, How Things Work on 9/21/2005
Two people cannot communicate if all the qualifiers are put in.
If I say “To appeal to Southern white voters you have to be conservative” I could spend all day qualifying that statement.
What is “conservative” to one person is not “conservative” to another. There are hundreds or thousands of whole books dedicated to that question.
Many of the tens of millions of voters I am referring to are liberals. There are hundreds of whole books devoted to that subject.
What exactly is “white?” People get paid to write whole books quibbling over that.
But if you are in real politics, you had better understand that rule, not the quibbles.
What is a duck?
“If it quacks like a duck I call it a duck.” That’s a standard piece of common sense. But a toy can quack without being a duck.
Are you actually going to say, “I saw a quacking toy that is not a duck.”
You may think you have made a big point. But all that tells real people is that you have a lot of time and absolutely nothing to do with it.
This is a matter of seeing the trees but not the forest.
But you could argue, “The forest cannot exist without trees. He who seeth not the trees cannot understand a forest.”
Boy, that sounds wise! And I just made it up.
You can spend all day sounding wise.
There is one minor problem with spending all day with Deep Wisdom like that: You miss everything the person who said “They are not seeing the forest for the trees” is trying to tell you.
But you get to feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Lately I was talking about the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. I used the names Jacob and Esau, I think. There are so many name-pairs in the Old Testament.
What I was criticizing was a Methodist bishop about 1955 who said that if Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac for God, we should be willing to sacrifice the white race for God. By “God” he meant integration. I pointed out that all of us in the Bible Belt knew that God refused to accept that kind of sacrifice.
But if I mixed up Abraham and Isaac with Jacob and Esau, wasn’t my criticism absurd? I got my facts wrong just like the bishop did. Isn’t that the same thing?
Not at all. I was making a very critical point. The bishop was declaring, as a doctrine of his faith, that we had to be willing to sacrifice the white race for integration.
I was also making the point that we all knew back in 1955 that integration was aimed at the extinction of the white race.
The point I made was infinitely more important than getting the names right.
One of my commenters corrected me. I appreciated that. I would not have appreciated that if he had obsessed over it.
But if he were dumb enough to obsess over it, he wouldn’t be commenting here.
Back about 1955 a man who prided himself on his Wordly Practicality would say, “If the Greatest Thinker on earth gave a lecture with his pants unzipped, all people would remember about him would be that his pants were unzipped.”
I was just fourteen, and everybody else was impressed. But I was thinking that he hadn’t told me anything about the Greatest Thinker on earth, but he had told me a lot about himself and the people who took him seriously.
If all you notice about the Greatest Thinker on Earth ishtat he is buck naked, you have the IQ of a mushroom.
One of these days I may go back and change Jacob and Esau to Abraham and Isaac. But the fact is that I have not the slightest respect for anybody who obsesses on crap like that.
So I probably won’t bother.
Suffering is Cheap
It is no accident that theologians, including Communist theologians, talk almost exclusively about how the people need to make sacrifices.
Jesus preached one single commandment when it came to the question of how you should treat all human beings, including yourself:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
So early Christianity responded by tens of thousands of people going out into the desert and whipping themselves and starving themselves and imprisoning themselves and humiliating themselves.
What exactly does all this self-immolation have to do with the golden rule?
How about the other of the two commandments? If you torture yourself, does it show you love God?
You are showing you love by taking one of his children and torturing him.
If that makes sense to you, you need a long rest.
So why do all religions, including Marxism, love sacrifice and suffering so much?
The reason is obvious. Any retard knows how to torture somebody. Torturing yourself is even less of an intellectual feat.
It’s easy to hurt yourself.
On the hand hand, the golden rule is far more challenging. It takes talent to put a smile on someone else’s face.
Like the Communist “intellectual” the theologian has absolutely nothing to offer anybody. So he prescribes suffering. He tells you you should suffer gladly.
Neither the theologian nor the “intellectual” has anything to sell.
So they sell you pain and sacrifice, the easiest and cheapest commodities there are.
Can God be a Man?
Posted by Bob in Musings about Life on 9/20/2005
In our last exciting episode below I discussed the controversy that convulsed the early church, “Can the man Jesus, who was clearly a man, also be God?”
In the end the Middle East never accepted the idea that the G-d of Israel could be man and that is a major reason it is now Islamic. There is one God, and he is God.
North of the Middle East the doctrine that Jesus was both God and man was accepted.
North of the Middle east the debate completely reversed itself.
Instead of asking whether the man Jesus was God, the debate became whether the God Jesus could have been man.
Let’s bring this right up to date. There is not a single church today which would not be offended by the idea that Jesus the man ever wanted to have sex with any woman.
THINK about it before you react to this statement. Can you imagine telling any conservative Christian that Jesus wanted to go to bed with any female?
Jesus was God. He had no lust.
Can a man with no lust be a man?
This concept of Jesus had very practical consequences. In the centuries following the Council of Nicea Jesus became more and more God. The people who had looked upon Jesus as the mediator between themselves and God began to see Jesus as being as forbidding and as unreachable as Jehovah.
That is where Mariology came from.
People began more and more to pray to Mary, the Holy Mother, as the person who could understand us lowly humans. Jesus was as far away as Jehovah.
For over a thousand years theologians denounced the “Cult of Mary.” Augustine fought it. St. Thomas Aquinas fought it.
But Western people wanted someone human they could pray to, like the old gods.
Finally Mary was accepted as the human mediator with God, as the human being who could understand both God and men.
Once the idea that Mary had a direct link to God was accepted, Mary began to become a part of God in the eyes of theologians.
So once again, the theologians asked, “If Mary is a part of God, can she be fully human?”
One thing all of the church fathers agreed on was that any human being conceived by sex was conceived in sin. Jesus was conceived to the Virgin Mary, so he was the only exception.
But what about the Virgin Mary herself? Was SHE conceived in sin? Finally in 1854 the pope declared The Immaculate Conception of Mary to be dogma, and anyone who denied it was a heretic.
Mary was not conceived in sex. She was part of God.
Mary was a part of God, and therefore she could not be fully human.
As I keep repeating, Buddhist theologians have been proving for decades that the Buddha could not have come from the “dirty” womb of a female. And Christian doctrine now holds that Mary could not have come from the “dirty” sex act and that Jesus could have had any thought of the “dirty” sex act.
In the world of Islam, a man cannot be God.
In the Christian world, God cannot be a man.
Both are heresies.
And as Screwtape said, Satan doesn’t care how you got Down There. He just wants you There.
An obsession with sex is great way to get somebody Down There.
It doesn’t matter if the obsession is with having sex or with not having sex.
As long as your obsession keeps you from seeing Christ as both man and God, it can be used to get you straight to what Screwtape referred to as “Our Father Below.”
This illustrates that people always get so obsessed with their own cultural concepts that they forget the basics. That is an excellent lesson, even if you have no religion at all.
Can a Man be God?
Posted by Bob in Musings about Life on 9/20/2005
I keep pointing out that church history is a fascinating guide to how the human mind works.
Gautama Buddha made it very clear that he was enlightened, but very much a man. But Buddhist theologians have developed complex theories to show how their Buddha did not come out of gthe “dirty” womb of a woman.
The gigantic community of Hellenized Jews who became the Christian Church still had trouble with the idea that Jesus, who was very much a man, could also be God. A majority of bishops believed that Jesus was above the angels, but below God.
Jesus the man had come back to earth and shown the Apostles that he was a man by eating a piece of fish and allowing the Apostle Thomas, the original Doubting Thomas, to put his hand into the wound in Christ’s side.
Jesus had sat and EATEN with the sinners, the tax-gatherers and usurers.
Every “Christian” loves to say, “We are all sinners” but he never BELIEVES it. The average self-styled Christian today would have led the mob to stone Jesus.
So when the Hellenized Jews accepted Christ they did not doubt he was a man, but the traditional faith of Hellenized Jews held to the idea that G-d was invisible. So Jesus was the savior and above the angels, but he was not God.
The Council of Nicea decided that Christ was both God and man. The idea that Jesus was above the angels but not God became the Arian Heresy.
There was an exact geographical split. The Hellenized world finally accepted the idea that Christ was both God and man, but in the Middle East, which had enough trouble accepting this savior in the first place, the idea that a man was also God was repeatedly challenged. The Arian Heresy caused constant rebellion against the church and kept it permanently weak.
In the end, a non-Christian faith took over the Middle East with astonishing ease. That faith said that Jesus was above the angels but below God, who stands alone.
That faith is called Islam.
If you a Christian, a Moslem or an athiest, this is a terrific lesson in human nature.
If you are not obsessed with labels, you discover that the thinking of the Middle East remained the same. If you are to understand the Moslem Shiites, you must understand that Iranian thinking is still in the Zoroastrian tradition.
Don’t get this backwards the way a theologian would. I am NOT saying that Middle Easterners were influenced by Arianism, I am saying that Arianism appealed to Middle Eastern thinking. Islam did not win out there because of unreconstructed Arians. Islam won because it appealed tot he same ingrained thinking that made Arianism so strong in the Middle East.
Middle Easterners want a G-d who is invisible, all powerful, and who regards men not as fellow men but as less than his slaves. There is only one God and he is God. There is no room for a God who is just another man.
Shiites do not exist because of a lingering memory of Zoroastrian wisdom. They are Shiites because of a mindset that their own Zoroastrianism appealed to.
It was not the theology of Islam that appealed to the Middle East, it was their natural mindset. This is a complete mystery to the theologian. He believes that mindsets come entirely from theologians. He believes in quotes, not in cultures.
Truck
Posted by Bob in Bob, Musings about Life on 9/19/2005
I was dragged out of bed at five in the morning in a third world country because the army needed somebody to drive a truck.
This was not in my job description and they apologized for it. You don’t bring somebody thousands of miles to do KP or drive vehicles.
It was one hell of a truck.
Now it happens that I was raised on a brick plant so I COULD drive the thing. But what was interesting was that they just assumed I could drive it because I was an American. They think Americans can drive anything.
The reason I could drive it was because there is a subtle difference between the weight-to-value ratio of brick as compared to, say, Ming Dynasty vases. When you truck brick, that booger is HEAVY.
I have been repeatedly assured since then that heavy trucks had less than the one hundred and fifteen forward gears I remembered, every one of which required double-clutching. I still remember each of the 115 vividly.
On a two-lane highway, which was all we had, when you got up behind a slow driver you had to go back through the series again. I conceived a personal hatred for slow drivers that I retain today for those who cruise in the passing lane.
Well, I drove the truck, though I doubt it ever got over what I did to its transmission. I was told later that when it heard somebody with an American accent it would run away.
Recently, decades later, I finally realized why they assumed that any American could drive any truck. I was passing a pickup on an Interstate highway and it suddenly occurred to me that in many American movies they saw showed us driving pickups as easily as cars.
Obviously we saw no difference between cars and trucks.
I don’t blame them for making that mistake.
But I don’t think that poor truck ever forgave them.
To My Friend Traeger Smith
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 9/19/2005
It is taking me a long time to come up with a reply to Traeger.
Normally I would feel guilty about this, but the fact is it takes me a while to think of what I want to say to something important.
And this is even more important: I no longer work on a schedule. I no longer work on obligation.
Since I threw it all up, my blood pressure has dropped twenty points. People want their names remembered. People want diplomacy. People want prompt replies.
I no longer provide any of those things. And my blood pressure is down.
Too much of what I say sounds like a quip when it is deadly serious. For decades when someone asked me, “Is he friend of yours?” I have replied, “I don’t know know. I am a friend of HIS.”
This is not a quip. This is many years of hard experience talking.
Traeger never required any of those things from me for him to remain a friend of mine.
I have always known this about practically everybody else except Traeger: the person who says he’s my friend is always one sentence away from despising me. What is called friendship by most people is a very slippery thing.
I no longer worry about this. Common courtesy comes to me from my upbringing, but pretending to admire nonsense or respecting standards that mean nothing to me is like constantly smiling for the camera. If you are a sociopath, it is easy. If you are an honest man, it wears on you.
If you are a monomaniacally, obsessively honest man like me, it is a burden you must eventually lay down.
Whitakeronline had the world’s deadest list. Through the years I begged readers to put my ideas into newsgroups. A vanishingly small handful sometimes did that. Their time was devoted to Clinton’s immorality, to Iraq, to the front pages. They kept e-mailing me comments from great leaders who were saying again what other writers had said repeately my entire lifetime.
I cannot list the number of Great Crises like Clinton and Iraq that I have had to listen to people obsess about through the weary decades. No one who was obsessed with them a decade ago can even remember them now. But what I was trying to tell them, upstream against the torrent of Latest Things, is still as current as tomorrow’s history book.
And nobody noticed.
I am not talking about how hard this was on me. I am talking about how this led me into TWO nervous breakdowns and was heading me into another.
When I announced my retirement I asked people to read my archives and THINK about what I said and how THEY could USE it.
I could count the number of people who are doing that on one mutilated hand.
All I ever asked was an outlet for my ideas. I’ve got that now.
I do the blog because it is a two-way street.
For now.
I have already said far more than can be swallowed by people who put me tenth in a list of priorities which consists of eight items. No one but me understands what I am doing. That is why it is so effective.
I work hard to boil concepts down as far as it can be done. Then I sometimes get replies that say, “I agree with you.”
Big deal. Then I get e-mails quoting other writers they agree with.
If other writers are doing the job, why should I knock myself out?
I now have my blog and Stormfront and may be some easy internet radio shows I am STILL trying to get set up for.
I need very little little help with this, but I am still tenth priority in a list of right, so it is all frustration.
And I am out of the frustration business.
Did I mention that my blood pressure has dropped?
No Professional Study of the Future Has Anything to do with the Future
Posted by Bob in How Things Work on 9/17/2005
This is a followup to the piece below, “Highly Qualified People Predict the Future.”
There is a group of professionals who call themselves Futurologists. A professional, by definition, is someone who gets PAID for his work. You can only be a Futurologist if someome PAYS you to be. So in order to be a professional futurologist you must produce a future which someone will pay you to produce.
By definition a PROFESSIONAL Futurologist says that things to come will be what those with money today consider plausible and desirable.
A professional predictor does not get a dime for being correct. It makes not the slightest difference whetheranything he foresses happens or not. All that matters is that his idea of the future is approved by the right people NOW.
So Futurology has absolutely nothing to do with the future.
Futurology, like every other professional field, has a sign on the door that says, “Heretics not welcome.”
And there is one thing about things to come that one can say with absolute certainty:
The future is ALWAYS heresy.
Busy People
Pope John Paul II was a very fine man, but he never had time to talk to me.
I never expected him to.
So my relation with the Pontiff was entirely impersonal.
What gets me is people who act like the Supreme Pontiff but who also expect me to have some sort of personal obligation to them.
To me, a “busy” person is, to the extent he is busy, a non-person to me in exactly the same way I am a non-person to him, as I am a non-person to the Pope.
I wish him well. He wishes me well. That’s all very well. Isn’t that, well, just very well?
Now that I am retired this is easy. If someone is preoccupied, that’s just fine. But don’t expect me to act like you are an emergency when you suddenly need Ole Bob.
I am out of the emergency business. Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Black Rythm and White Brains
For untold eons black people had an incredible sense of rythm and nothing but a drum to use it on.
And it was a lousy drum.
When the black man’s rythm and the white man’s musical instruments met there was an explosion. Blacks found what they had been missing all those tens of thousands of years.
For all the inventions of Great Black Cultures, the fact is that if you wanted to take to take those thoroughly white musical instruments away from blacks, you would have to pry them from their cold, dead hands.
Orientals have a natural ability to be organizedby a ruler.
For that reason, when we think of Orientals we always think in terms of the paddy culture based on rice.
Rice as we know it is aquatic rice. It has roots sometimes thirty feet long and it is like hydroponic farming, the yield per acre is enormous, but you have to keep the workers in a routine that only Orientals are really suited for.
From the dry lands wild rice to the aquatic rice is a long road. Orientals did not build that road. Aquatic rice was developed in India when it was still a very white country. The Chinese got aquatic rice from white India and then built the entire paddy culture that we think of as the special characteristic of the Far East on that white invention.
In the Orient of our day, the Japanese got lucky and the Chinese were dealt a cruel hand.
Japan was occupied by Americans. The soldiers who occupied Japan were young men of the World War II generation, the ones who call themselves The Greatest Generation. But those who took charge of Japan, those in command, were better men.
Douglas MacArtur went into Tokyo as governor without any guard. At the end of brutal war, this was an enornmous compliment to the Japanese, and they took it that way. It was the sort of thing an Old American would do.
As they used to say of the Texas Rangers, “One crisis, one ranger.”
Japan was taught economics by the generation that was mature in 1945, not the one that calls itelf The Greatest. They learned American methods, and American know-how while the Greatest Generation learned to demand government handouts.
Japanese, with their natural discipline, thrived.
By contrast China got something even worse than the Greatest Generation. China learned economics from the Middle East in the form of Karl Marx.
Two thousand years ago Tacitus praised the Germanic tribes and said the Middle East was where all perversion came from. He was dead right.
Marxism is the bastard child of Middle Eastern Christianity, not of Western Christianity. Religious leaders always preferred the Old Testament version, where the priests ruled and the people obeyed, to the teachings of Jesus which gav them no power in this world.
There were constant rebellions in the West against this papal and Calvinist form of Christianity. But it was perfect for China. The professor-priesthood, the “intellectuals,” ruled and the peasants obeyed. China was heaven for Marxists.
And hell for the Chinese.
The same people who are inventing Great Black Civilizations are also getting paid good money to dig up inventions in China.
But like Great Black Civilizations and Great Native American Civilizations, Chinese inventions don’t MATTER. You can learn every detail of Aztec Civilization , down to a recent study of how they managed to cut out so many human hearts so fast, and in the end it is useless.
The whole point of Great Black Civilizations and Chinese inventions is to show that non-whites could do what whites did. But Chinese inventions never mattered in the history of China. Printing never made any difference there. Gunpowder never made any difference there. The mechanical clock that was invented in China disappeared completely.
Now China is learning white economics, not the Middle Eastern perversion called Marxism. Japanese have long been living at a level which makes the existence of the average Chinese peasant look bestial by comparison. Today’s Japanese have completely forgotten that starvation was considered a routine phenomenon in Asia within their own living memory.
China hasn’t.
Non-whites fulfill their own destinies by white innovations.
But if the white man disappears, they will soon be back in the horror they came from.
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Reply to Rocko
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 9/30/2005
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.
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