Brutally Honest

Your Will Be Done

Posted by guest blogger, Leslie, on this All Hallow's Eve.

What lies beyond death? Considering what a prominent place this question has held in both myth and literature throughout the ages, it is easily a point of human fascination. Hell, in particular, has literally and figuratively captivated the imagination of human history. The Greeks feared Hades, Dante pondered the circular depths of his Inferno and evil Norsemen expected to wade through venomous rivers of Náströnd. Suffice to say, the concept of Hell is not primarily a Christian one. Civilizations across time have felt the burden of accusation and have crafted into their stories ways of doling out punishment to heap justice on the deserving and vindicate the plight of the victim.

Many of our traditional, western, tent-revival, rattling-chain perceptions of Hell are based on nothing related to the Bible. For instance, Satan is often crowned ruler over Hell and those cast into it. Once rejected by St. Peter, Satan is invited to have his way with you. This is a lie. Jesus let it slip in a story he told, “Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Apparently the Christ of the Christians claims the devil is not only accused, he’s already condemned.

On the other hand, the post-modern, scientific world has enthusiastically denounced the existence of Hell or any form of afterlife for that matter. In an ironic twist of divine comedy, this widespread rejection of the possibility of eternal torment seems to have compelled people to concoct for themselves a living Hell right here on Earth, embracing Chaos and the Trauma that holds its hand. One way or another it seems there is no escape for the accused. Infliction comes. If not from outside sources, then from within. If the heat of the flames does not reach us it is as though we are driven to search in hopes of dangling our toes over the edge that we may partake in that punishment we crave deep down.

How those flames lick at our toes. We torture ourselves with ideals of perfection. The ethereal standard that whispers relentlessly in our ear entices us to work at getting ahead. More professional development courses to climb the ladder of job perfection. More dieting, and a little botox to create visual perfection. More exercise to prove the body invincible. More learning, life-long learning, because knowledge is power and power is the only way a person can be in control of their circumstances well enough to place themselves in a context of perfection.

All of it is a means of ferreting out our inadequacy and casting it to the flames. Who needs the threat of Hell to fear us into submission when we do a masterful job of it on our own?

C.S. Lewis once said, There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' As our relationships suffer at the hands of our advancing worklife, chemicals numb our railing joints after winning the marathon, our minds tire and tanning beds scorch us with skin cancer, we bask in the delicious fulfillment of our goals.

In the midst of it all The Angry God lays his cards on the table and reveals his will: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

How often I choose the flames.

c/p & c/p

‘Don’t Tase me, bro’ student breaks silence

I'm thinking he'd been better off keeping his mouth shut:

TODAYshow.com: A lot of people have weighed in on your arrest and the events surrounding it, but we have heard nothing from you.  Why have you remained silent?

Meyer: On the advice of my attorney, the inimitable Robert Griscti, I went against my instincts and stayed silent. I’m glad that I did. Not only did I have a criminal case pending, but the time away from the spotlight has allowed me to cool off and gain perspective.

TODAYshow.com:  Was your arrest planned?  Did you ask anyone to tape you at the John Kerry event?

Meyer: My arrest was absolutely not planned. You would have to be a fool to intentionally get arrested and incur the cost of cleaning up this mess legally (ask my lawyer, it wasn’t cheap).

I did bring my video camera along. I obviously knew I was going to ask the Senator some tough questions, and I wanted to have it on tape. Before I started asking the Senator my questions, I gave my camera to a woman in line I had never met before who also did not leave when Accent instructed her to, named Clarissa Jessup. Clarissa, I can’t thank you enough for both posting the video you shot and returning my camera to me.

TODAYshow.com:  Your arrest has sparked a lot of questions about free speech and police brutality, but one of the biggest questions remains your motive for attending the John Kerry event.  What was the point you were trying to make?

Meyer: The first question I asked the Senator was about his concession of the 2004 election. Greg Palast, author of "Armed Madhouse," the book I was holding up at the forum, proved that John Kerry won the 2004 election. The ultimate point I was trying to make was to bring up was the heinous way millions of American votes were chucked in the garbage on Election Day. Not only is this a total assault on democracy, but the same tactics used to throw away votes in 2004 will be used again in 2008. Read about the Help America Vote Act and see for yourself. HAVA helps America vote in about the same way the PATRIOT Act patriotically dismantles the Bill of Rights. In other words, it’s completely Un-American.

The second question I asked was why haven’t Kerry and the Democratic Congress made any moves to impeach Bush, considering he has led us into two wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, and wasn’t even legitimately elected (as Kerry knows since, as he told me, he has read "Armed Madhouse.") If Kerry is so concerned about the aggressive posturing the administration is taking towards Iran, why don’t he and the Democrats running Congress do something about it? They have the impeachment power. Millions of Americans believe they should use it.

The third question I asked Kerry, which Tim Russert of NBC’s Meet the Press also asked Kerry (and Bush), is was he a member of Skull and Bones in college. Some people treat this question as a joke, but Kerry and Bush never denied the assertion. Perhaps their involvement in the same secret society (once known as the Brotherhood of Death) has something to do with the answers to my first two questions.

There's much more where that came from but frankly, you might have more fun having a root canal.

It's clear to me that Andrew Meyer has graduated, summa cum laude,  from the Michael Moore/Cindy Sheehan School of Moonbat Lunacy and is apparently headed toward their graduate studies program.

Sheez.

He's obvious proof that electro-shock therapy is ineffective.

 

What Gores around, comes around

This should come as no surprise to thinking people:

The Media Research Center’s Business & Media Institute (formerly the Free Market Project) conducted an extensive analysis of print media’s climate change coverage back to the late 1800s.
            
It found that many publications now claiming the world is on the brink of a global warming disaster said the same about an impending ice age – just 30 years ago. Several major ones, including The New York Times, Time magazine and Newsweek, have reported on three or even four different climate shifts since 1895.

There's more and all of it worthy.

H/T Patrick Mead.

Global warming has it's global skeptics

Yesterday I noticed I'd received a trackback to this post and as I usually do, I followed it to the source.  To my surprise I came to Pindorama, a Terra dos Papagaios � The Mayflower.  You'll note the foreign language.  Here's more:

Hoje li um posto no blog da Miriam Leitão que falava sobre IPCC, o tal painel da ONU que pesquisa as mudanças climáticas. É incrível que paguem a Miriam Leitão para falar tanta besteira.

Um das besteiras principais é o mito que o Internacional Primeiro Comando da Capital é formado por “renomados cientistas”. Juro que procurei no site do IPCC e não achei nada. Nem um currículozinho. O máximo que achei foi esse blog comentando sobre o mesmo assunto. Para esse pessoal de miolo mole, basta um “cientista” diga algo que automaticamente vira verdade absoluta, mesmo que esse “cientista” trabalhe em uma área totalmente distinta do que ele falou.

Eu fico imaginando a quantidade de viagens, festas e bocadas que esses “cientistas renomados” estão dentro.

Blew me away.  So I left a message in broken Spanish (thought initially I had stumbled across a Spanish blog) asking the author if he knew English and wondering what it was he was saying.

This morning, I found the following in e-mail from a Marcus Carvalho:

Rick:

My english is terrible, but it's good enough to thank you for visiting my blog.

Sadly, you coudn't understand anything because it's in portuguese. So I'll try to explain why I put a link to one of your posts.

In this post I talked about how brazilian journalists don't think by themselves, just repeating exactly what comes from abroad.
More specifically about the IPPC and its "renowned" scientists. I searched the internet to find who is in this IPPC, and guess what, I cound not find any list, but I found your post and I found it's worth reading.

The title of the post, "Pindorama - Terra dos Papagaios", is a joke about this.  Pindorama is how Brazil was called by the natives, which means "Land of the Parrots"

Regards,

Marcus

Yo, Mr. Gore, the debate is not over, not here, and apparently, not in Portugal Brazil.

Too cool.

"We don’t see the catastrophic changes that are being promoted all over the place."

You might be surprised to find out that those words came from none other than a scientist who sat on the panel named co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore:

Despite enviro-warriors’ best efforts to suppress dissent from “deniers,” the debate continues: Nagging questions keep arising over the causes of global warming, its long-term effects and whether in fact humans can influence environmental outcomes, no matter how many billions we spend.

Most media genuflect before Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth.” Every shrinking minuscule Pacific atoll, every less-than-roly-poly Polar bear is front page news. But facts that don’t support, or that counter the “sky is falling” scenario tend to be ignored or shuffled off to journalistic Siberia.

An illustrative case in point is a thought-provoking fragment of ephemera tucked away on the back page of the October 25 Wall St Journal (WSJ).

Does the name John Christy ring a bell? It should if you care about the environment, so colour yourself embarrassed if it doesn’t. He’s the real scientist from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who was Al Gore’s co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In their “Notable and Quotable” section, the WSJ excerpted a few telling moments of dialogue from a post-Nobel CNN interview with him.

From it we learn that yes, it is true the ice at the North Pole has been diminished to a record minimum. No surprise there: Who can watch the news for a week without viewing at least one Bermuda-size chunk of Arctic ice shearing off a towering ‘berg and plunging dramatically into the sea?

Scary stuff. Except that it isn’t, because according to Christy, the extent of Antarctic ice — which accounts for a full 90% of the earth’s ice ( i.e. the Arctic contains a mere 10%) — has just reached its all-time maximum. Thickening ice may not be an ambitious journalist’s money shot, but it’s still — or should be — environmental news the public deserves to know about.

And speaking of ice, from his frosty tone, I think it’s fair to say that Christy’s a bit miffed at sharing the Nobel with Al Gore (“I always thought that — I may sound like the Grinch that stole Christmas here — prizes were given for performance, and not for promotional activities”), not to mention discomfited at being linked with the hyperbole of An Inconvenient Truth: “I don’t see very much effect in trying to scare people into not using energy when it is the very basis of how we can live in our society….Mother Nature is so complex, and so the uncertainties are great, and then to hear someone speak with such certainty and such confidence about what the climate is going to do is…annoying to me.”

Christy confirms that of course carbon dioxide levels are going up, and indeed temperatures are rising. But he categorically refutes Al Gore’s conclusions: “I’m one of the few people in the world that actually builds these climate data sets – [and] we don’t see the catastrophic changes that are being promoted all over the place.”

Score a point for the “deniers” — that’s to say, those of us who think climate change has been business as usual on this here planet since time immemorial and is not to be feared so much as adapted to, even though we should live as cleanly and greenly as possible.

As John Stossel has said, the debate is not over.

COAPS: Historically inactive Tropical Season

Oops, seems there's a little hiccup in the doom and gloom forecast according to the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies:

Unless a dramatic and perhaps historical flurry of activity occurs in the next 9 weeks, 2007 will rank as a historically inactive TC year for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole.  During the past 30 years, only 1977, 1981, and 1983 have had less activity to date (January-TODAY, Accumulated Cyclone Energy). However, the year is not over...

No, the year is not over... and things could change but in reality, it won't matter. 

No matter how the data comes in, someone from the Gore-bal Warming crowd will find a way to spin it into fore-telling more death and destruction, all to be blamed on mankind (to include women, especially conservative women).

Wait and see folks.

Ya gotta be kiddin'

H/T Boots and Sabers.

How to avoid becoming a moonbat...

... or a snootier member of the Religious Left. Just be sure not to take Morgan's 7 steps to insanity:

1. The first step to insanity is to confuse the subjective with the objective. This is necessary. You can’t go insane without this, but it’s much easier to do than you might think. All you have to do is think of value judgments, inferences, and other cognitions of yours as measurable when they’re not, and vice-versa; lose track of, and any interest in, what another capable mind might conclude when looking at the same thing. Simply put, you insist on debating things that aren’t really debatable, and settle on the realization that anyone who thinks differently than you do must be a flaming idiot or must have something wrong with them. Stop believing in perspective. Things are the way you think they are…unless you don’t like whatever that is, and then there must be “shades of gray” involved.

2. The second step is closely intertwined with the first step; it usually follows it, but this isn’t always the case because this might actually be a precursor. The second step is to start feeling your way around challenges rather than thinking your way through them. This makes perfect sense to many people — the purpose to life is to be happy, right? So the only way to check any decision you make, is to evaluate whether it makes you happy. Start finding ways to deviate from the path through the First Triad; reach opinions and inferences without considering the facts that are supposed to justify them. Pronouncing Things To Do as correct or incorrect without internally understanding what consequence looms if the wrong course of action is chosen, or what reward is supposed to be forthcoming if the right one is chosen. Just make all your decisions, about what you know and what you do, by feeling, feeling, feeling. Easy as falling off the proverbial log.

3. The third step has to do with financial and social issues on a personal level, and how to think of yourself, and those around you, when suffering is going on. This is a big step, and it’s actually divided into three parts:

3a. Place more importance on the prospect that an individual’s problems be solved, than that the individual owning the problems be the solver of them;

3b. Place more importance on the prospect that a group of people get together to try to solve the individual’s problem, than that the problem be solved. At this point, you have this sequence of importance: collaboration; solution; accountability. Solution of the probem is subordinate to working together as a group — so the group-work appears to be a prerequisite to helping someone, but it really isn’t because it has ancillary importance that goes beyond solving the problem. We work together and fail to solve the problem — that’s good. We solve the problem without working together — that’s not as good. And, accountability for creating the problem in the first place, is less important than anything else.

3c. Nurture an acrimonous attitude toward the idea that somewhere, there might be an individual solving his own problems. It isn’t supposed to happen.

4 more to go, all worthy. 

Why are you still here?

 

Sunday morning thoughfulness

From Parchment and Pen's C. Michael Patton:

I am an Evangelical . . . a “Historic Evangelical.” Meaningless, I know. But let me respond to many of you by taking the next step in putting some flesh on this proposed new name for an old tradition.

Reason for the Change:

1. Evangelicalism has lost its meaning in most circles today. “Evangelicalism” means both everything and nothing at the same time. It is fast becoming identified as a movement of political agendas, entertainment, health-wealth theology, radical separatists, and white Americans. While there are a great many Evangelicals who should not be identified with these characteristics holding the fort, remodeling is happening from the outside and no one asked for permission. These things happen.

2. The Emerging Church showed some potential and promise, but has, as of late, began to define itself as a movement holding hands with compromise. I understand that there are emergers such as Scot McKnight and Dan Kimball who are not compromising, but, while I admire and respect their continued battle in the emerging church, I don’t think that they can rescue it from irrelevance and heresy.

3. Evangelicalism ironically seems to have lost the ability to reform. It is ironic because Evangelicalism has traditionally found its identification in the roots of the Great Reformation who’s principled admonition to the future church was semper reformanda (always reforming). Often to be deep in the theology of Evangelicalism means being deep in an unqualified sixteenth century anti-Catholic (Roman) polemic. This needs to be rethought based upon the current state-of-affairs and a humble recognition that while the Reformation was necessary we should not find all our roots in its soil.

More where that came from and it'll make you think... I think.

The question of the ages

I've been trying to make a point or two over at Mike's place (Waving or Drowning?) related to last night's post dealing with Brian McLaren's perspective on United States diplomatic pressures being applied on Iran.

  What I'm looking for are examples of Brian McLaren praising any of the good that American policy might be bringing about abroad.  While doing that, Sonja has raised a challenge:

Hmmm, Rick, I wonder if any of that makes the US a global police force? You are correct in pointing out that all of that is horrible, violent and awful. But meeting it with more horror, violence and awfulness is not the path of peace. As Christians (Jesus-followers) we are to bring light and salt to world. We must look like something that is different and not of this world. If we also kill in response to killing and hate in response to hating ... how is that different? What light are we shining?

What light are we shining indeed and it brings me to the point of this post I hope.  But first, allow me to post here my response to Sonja:

Is that all America is doing?  Is there no good, whatsoever, that has been done by America in the world? 

Can someone explain to me how a McLaren or a Wallis, quick to talk about how we should deal with the evil in our own hearts before we deal with the evil in someone else's, are quicker to then talk about the evil being committed by this Administration?

Might someone explain to me where the integrity is in denying or ignoring any, and I do mean any, of the good being done abroad by Americans, especially by America's military?

I can tell you that it is beyond disappointing to find out that Brian McLaren has turned out to be nothing more than yet another Sojourner political hack, pushing their narrow view of what is or isn't Christian, while talking much about the need to be loving, accepting and open.

Please sonja, before we start asking about what light is shining by the direct confrontation of evil in the world, let's in the least have the integrity to admit that indeed there is light shining and that there are those in America's military and America's leadership who are doing their level best to promote good over evil. To focus on the exceptions in that policy and furthermore to promote the idea that the exception is instead the rule is to practice one of two things. Willful deceit or ignorance, neither of which have much to do with integrity.

Again, I ask for someone to send me links to McLaren or Wallis speaking of the evil that is being confronted by this administration or the good that is being accomplished by the same. Either one. I'll be more than glad to promote it at my place as an example of my being wrong and their being something other than the hypocrites and narrow minded religious zealots I see them to be.

I believe that two of Christ's commandments have come to a point in history where one is colliding against the other.  What do we do when we are faced with the choice of either loving our neighbor or loving our enemies?  The answer seems clear to me.  When an enemy is threatening the well being of loved ones, including those we'd globally see as neighbors, do we eschew loving our neighbor to love our enemy?

Hell. No.

This administration is pursuing diplomatic means to prevent Iran from threatening her neighbors.  Whether they are doing it perfectly we ought to debate and we ought to do so with vigor.  But to paint the attempt in the manner that McLaren and others are doing, the same ones who think we've not attempted diplomacy in the past, is dishonest.  And dishonesty doesn't look so good on those who trumpet how Christian they are and how un-Christian others are.

I'd like to see two things come out of the Sojourner types.  Just two.

An acknowledgment that good is being produced at some level by our actions in the war against terror (to include Iraq) and a wrestling with the question of the ages.

What do we about the love your enemies command when those enemies are actively threatening the neighbors we're to love as well?

Looking forward to some answers.