Archive for September 30th, 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.

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Reply to Rocko

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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The Trump Card

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.

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