“Never lose sight of it.” Losing sight is what makes thinking all of life is a series of carnival rides does. Not merely enjoying something. And then there are Christ’s words about it not profiting to gain the whole world and losing your own soul. Not a good trade off.

— Shari

It’s interesting how profundists like me and AFKAN are more and more taking Shari’s comments as our starting point. As we say down South, That gal is about half BRIGHT.” I read her summation and it gets my brain into action.

As usual, I am not agreeing with or disagreeing with what she says. There’s too much common (What a misnomer!!) sense in what Shari says to leave any room for disagreement. Good comments provide a springboard. The above statement hit me between the eyes because it reminded me of how professional preachers use Christ’s words as a springboard for them to prove their own importance, their own detailed Biblical knowledge, and how little they read what he said and then THINK about what HE meant.

Take the Lord’s Prayer. We are told that the thing to do is to repeat it endlessly, or, as Jesus said, “Many thin they will achieve salvation by much saying.” But if you look at the context, that is exactly what he was NOT advocating.

What Jesus was saying when he recited the Lord’s Prayer was, “It is enough to call a fish a fist.” He was contrasting what one should say to God to what was being done at the Temple, where endless hours were spent praising God and talking, talking, talking.

No wonder they ended up having to crucify him. Nothing could have been as infuriating to the Temple priesthood as Jesus’s reducing all their endless chants to a simple, bare, stark petition to God for what a person needed while he DID good things. We need bread to keep us going, forgive us IF and to the extent that we do the same for others; provide as few temptations to us weak humans as you can.

One minute long. All those endless hours Temple priests made their living on meant very little.

Then there is the rich young man. How many sermons have been devoted to Jesus’s instructing the young man to give all he had to the poor? They build whole social systems and Marxist Liberation Theology on that. But what Jesus said was, “If you would be PERFECT, sell all you have, give it to the poor, and FOLLOW ME.” Listening to the average sermon you would think the last three words were never spoken.

The question Jesus was answering was NOT, “Lord, what is the ideal socioeconomic system?” The question was, “What must I do to be SAVED?” The answer was, “Follow me, and nothing else.” The man’s property was a detail, and earnest of really abandoning all and following Jesus.

Modern “Christians” intensely dislike the idea that Jesus really meant it when he said “My kingdom is not of this world.” One of the perversions that have destroyed the “Christian” right has been their turning him into a fanatical Israeli nationalist. That was precisely what frustrated the Jews of his own time. The rejection of Zionist nationalism is EXACTLY what Jesus was renouncing when he said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

The Modernists were terribly upset with the idea that Jesus was really as obsessed with the Next Life. Now the “Christian” Right is rejecting that same idea. They are deeply upset at the idea that Jesus was betting everything on the Next Life. How can they keep their dues-paying congregation in church if they don’t give them a Guide to Better Living and Political Truth, and just keep talking about some Next Life?

Sorry, gang, that is what Jesus WAS obsessed with. Every word he said to thetrich young man and to everyone else had nothing to do Political Relevance. When he speaks to us, he speaks of what is needed to save our particular souls. It is altogether personal.

Frankly, I have not the slightest need of one more political philosopher. If Jesus was wrong about the eternal future of the soul, he was openly, totally, gloriously wrong. The woods are full of world view philosophers like me. But Jesus, to use Lawrence Brown’s words, “towers above history” precisely because he had a unique message, a total, uncompromising commitment to the idea that he, and he ALONE, knew how to save my personal soul.

Jesus was that absolutely unique phenomenon, a man who was either totally right or totally wrong. And he put EVERYTHING on the line for it. No Buddha, no Confucius, no Aristotle is fit to tie his shoes in terms of pure moral courage.

Besides watching all the documentaries, I also go on e-Bay from time to time and order some old magazines. As I read them, I apply them to today. Things jump out at me that others don’t even notice.

I read the November, 1932 Time Magazine and note the quotes from every expert that a restoration of the Kaiser is an absolute certainty. With the recent election, the NSDAP and the Communists held a majority in the Reichstag, so no government could be formed without including one of them. No way would Hindenburg allow the Stalinists in, so he would look to the extreme right. In 1932 the extreme right was Kaiser Bill, then in exile in the Netherlands.

The 1923 Time Magazine discussion of the failed Munich Putsch described Hitler as a “monarchist.’

This is directly relevant

In 1923 and 1932 World War I totally dominated our world view. Nobody bothered to know anything about Hitler, and everybody knew all about the Kaiser. The result was laughable absurdity. Today all discussion of race is a dominated by our world view which includes World War II and civil rights. The result is laughable absurdity.

Today race is a matter of 1933 torchlight parades. It is a million Germans showing up at the Nuremberg rally of 1936, chronicled in the latest thing, a talk movie by Leni Riefenstahl.

In short, all discussion in 1932 was dominated by 1918. That is how popular NEWS is made, and the magazine that looked to the future instead of the past did not connect with the minds of THEIR own day.

On the one hand there is NEWS and on the other hand there is an accurate view of the FUTURE. The twain never meets, and we must LEARN that. I have lost patience with those who concentrate on NEWS and the past.

From the point of view of the FUTURE, a commenter made the critical point that the most valuable commodities the biological market are the eggs of a white woman. We don’t see that in the media, but not only because it is embarrassing to Political Correctness. More important, no one watching TV news would UINDERSTAND it.

I want to talk to people who DO understand the MEANING of that. In the COMING technology, genes will be a CHOICE. The only discussion of this comes in quoting the alliance of Harvard “ethics” professors and fundamentalists who want it not to happen. I don’t have time or patience to waste my time on one more bunch of people who want the future NOT to happen.

Luddites were big news, but they are a historical aside.

When KDKA broadcast the 1920 presidential election in the first real broadcast it was NEWS. But no one foresaw television and its role in the FUTURE. Now we put down the Internet because it is not TV NEWS.

In short we keep doing the same thing over and over. We do not learn the lesson on the FUTURE. In the future the choice of genes will be NEWS, but the real FUTURE will be an extension of something that is, at most, a minor blip in the NEWS.

Aldous Huxley used to say, “Differences among ‘human beings’ are so great that it is astonishing they breathe the same air.”

Huxley was considered a “lefty”, so go figure how a man who could utter such a statement gets the “lefty” label.

Huxley was an opponent of Wordism and committed to real science. He considered the term “mankind” to be a profound distortion of the truth.

We are all “primates”, yes, and can share language, yes, let us leave it at that.

The differences among us are enormous. They can’t even be measured in terms of light years for there are qualitative differences among “men” that create an unbridgeable separation among them.

That, in fact, is the way the world works. Never lose sight of it.