Abortion is pure evil

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? - Romans 6:1-2 (NKJV)

Abortion is the murder of an unborn child. Supporting abortion supports the murder of an unborn child.

There is no way to escape this simple truth. Every attempt to do so requires treating specific sinful behaviors as inevitable and inescapable.

While we cannot escape all sin, that does not mean that our actions do not reduce the frequency and severity of its manifestations.

Our choices matter, and future generations will never even begin to match the anger and rage that God already feels towards those who partake in and support the murder of unborn children.

Such is a topic that defines a hill worth dying on. The sanctity of life, let alone what all these demonic sacrifices are actually supporting, should be sufficient for people to act.

Those that don't have evidenced which God they actually serve.

Babies and their bath water

Conspiracy theorists aren't necessarily wrong about the fact that there are conspiracies, but a trend I've noticed of late is that a lot of folks don't understand maintenance and system interdependence. I am certain that, if these folks really thought about things, this would be a "no duh" realization, but many of the knee-jerk reactions do not reflect a genuine understanding of how little scheming it takes to cause significant problems.

For example, cars are more complicated than they've ever been. There is a lot of effort placed in reducing or eliminating maintenance on cars with superior technology, and there are things we don't have to do today that car owners did 50 years ago, but this comes with a reliance on technological developments and those things are complicated.

Instead of a carburetor, we have fuel injection with electronic pumps that can vary the amount of fuel delivered to the cylinders to get the best air-to-duel ratio given the temperature of incoming air, the position reported by the throttle sensor, the current RPM, and so on. All of this work didn't get invented, it got automated, as prior to the computer controlled systems, these jobs all were still required to run the engine, but they were often mechanical, and mechanical control systems simply wear out faster than electrical ones.

Maintenance of the mechanical control systems required user understanding of the systems, womb to tomb, because failures could happen at any time, and help wasn't easily available in the many decades before cell phones. Electrical systems, because they automate, hide these activities away from the user. They are still happening, but "out of sight, out of mind." Small corrections are made on the fly, diagnostics can be run, and until the "check engine" light, or some other error reporting prompts the user to seek service, drivers are largely ignorant as to what the state of their car is.

Gone are the days of being able to "feel" when a system is not operating as well as it should, because between the user and the device are layers of electronics that can only simulate feedback, they do not transmit it the way that a mechanical system does.

So, how does this apply to conspiracy theories?

It takes a lot less effort to sabotage than people think, and because people don't understand how things are made or operate, fault is assigned to the devices as a whole, instead of properly understanding what the role of the device was in the nefarious scheme.

To continue with cars as an example, let's say there is a conspiracy to murder, and in order to do this, you sabotage someone else's car. They then operate their vehicle as if all is fine, presuming there is nothing wrong with the vehicle, and then expect it to do something it no longer can because of the sabotage, and find out only too late that their car is not functioning correctly, and get in an accident or something like that.

If our hypothetical murderer cut the break lines, then it'd likely be an accident due to the vehicle not slowing down fast enough, and the driver losing control.

In that scenario, what's really at "fault" for the accident? Is it the design of the car? Is it the purpose of a car? Or was it how the car was used?

If you aren't sure how this is confusing, look at the evidence of the connection between vaccines and autism. How frequently is "well they weren't autistic before, and now they are, and the only thing that changed was they got a vaccine" the jist of the data provided? So what actually caused the autism? Is it the design of the vaccine? Is it the purpose of the vaccine? Was it how the vaccine was used, how it was made?

Most folks aren't trying to figure out, because if such a tangible connection existed, it would not be so ethereally difficult to find. We know that 100% of vaccinations don't result in autism, but we can also know that it's not 0% either, because for some reason, after having a vaccine, there are children who develop autism. Ignore how many there are, because it's likely statistically insignificant if you compared to all vaccinations, but what's important is that there are side effects of vaccines, and how they interact with people does vary.

If we sorted out what that connection really was, then before we gave anyone a vaccine, we could ensure that the vaccine would do only what it was designed to do. Or, to return to the car example, if we know that leaking fluid under a car is a sign of trouble, then we'd know to dig further and determine the true state of the car before we drove it. A smaller example of this might be checking the air pressure in the tires, seeing if any "check engine" lights come on, etc.

GMOs are another example of a technological creation that has ominous connotations, and the "evil" is often prescribed holistically, ignoring the details of what is really happening, and throwing out the entire technology because of how it was used by someone to do something "evil". What folks are doing, perhaps unintentionally, is assigning inherent "good" or "bad" vales, ignoring that "good" or " bad" requires context to remain coherent.

If someone was murdered via their car being sabotaged, does that mean we should ban cars? That nobody should ride or drive in a car?

Are cars inherently "evil" because someone can use them to manifest "bad" consequences?

It's the same thing with guns and gun control. Is it the gun, or how guns are used, that people really have a problem with?

It's easy to be blinded by cognitive bias on topics which are emotionally charged, but if we can't remain intellectually consistent, then we can be manipulated and controlled by folks who simply figure out our buttons faster than we can figure out theirs.

Modern technologies rely on, as I have said in other posts, layers of automation, and users are not aware of all these layers, let alone how they interact. These complications increase the opportunities for problems to arise, because each layer is dependent on each one below it, and so the whole system must be working well.

Now, not only are there opportunities to interfere at each level, but if components that serve each level are manufactured to the same "depends on everything else working" mentality, then product quality could be terrible and you wouldn't know until you started to run into systemic failures, and that presumes people even report them.

How reliable are modern electronic devices? To what degree do we expect them to work all the time?

If we live in a society where things break or malfunction regularly, where quality is a memory, and folks rarely grasp the way these systems all really interact, then to manifest a plot, you'd only need to know a single weak link in the whole system, and then apply a very small amount of pressure to it, and then rely on the automated systems getting people beyond what they can deal with to do the rest.

Where once you may have had to hide your trails, fate can be blamed when low quality goods produced lazily by the lowest bidder result in disaster. Don't need fancy secretive technology to make that happen, though it wouldn't hurt. Even better, nobody would immediately suspect malevolence because everything can be explained simply and rationally from the data at hand.

It's fun to think that there is fancy cutting-edge stuff, to imagine the James Bond style workings behind the scenes, but the reality is probably a lot simpler, a lot more boring, and a lot more simplistic in nature, and we'll miss it if we're expecting something more. We'll not actually root out the real problems because we're convinced it has to be something more complex, more convoluted, more arranged. Don't be tempted to go down that path.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth

"Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless." - George Orwell 1984

This was fiction, written back in 1949.

Do you notice what portions of this are no longer fiction?

Actions matter more than words

Peter denied Jesus three times, but was later executed for his faith in Jesus Christ.

Failures are a reminder of fallibility, a gift for sustaining humility.

There's a good reason why folks who make claims of perfection generate an immediate suspicion.

If you point to Jesus Christ instead of yourself, your failures become a non-sequitur, a distraction.

Point to yourself and your failures will be all that anyone wants to talk about.

What we want doesn't matter

Christmas : Christianity :: Civic Nationalism : The United States

If you fight for the byproducts of an identity, but won't fight for the identity itself, you will lose your fight.

I know a lot of folks who want to "Make Christmas Christian again", but don't want to call out heretics like Beth Moore, Joel Osteen, or Rick Warren.

If you won't defend Christianity, it won't matter what people celebrate on December 25th, and not just because there is no suggestion from God to do so.

The Old Testament includes explicit detail on how the temple was to be built, down to the specific precious stones and the order they were to be placed in on the clothing the priests wore. God knows how to request something specific when it matters.

When God doesn't request something specific, we aren't ever commanded to try and fill the gap, because the truth is that in pursuing God, worshiping with all our hearts, our minds, and our strength, that would already fill a lifetime without any new ceremonies or rituals. Our different priorities are going to drive different behavior, and defending that is work in and of itself, a work which has been ignored or deemed unnecessary for over a century.

We don't need to create new rituals and practices to fulfill what God commands of us. Even worse, creating them may cause new problems, because then the focus becomes those rituals and practices instead of the God they are supposed to be about.

If everyone was aligned in their worship of the same God, nobody would be concerned with what or how people celebrated on December 25th, because by default we'd have unity where it really mattered, and freedom to act within the framework of a genuine understanding of the difference between righteousness and sin.

But, because we have sinned with idol worship, the list of things which are "permissible but not beneficial" will be different for us than a nation which is not drowning in hedonistic materialism. The things they do will be different from us, and neither is "right" or "wrong" in that difference.

Because we have lost our identity, and have been consumed by pride, our path back to God will look different than other nations.

We will need to get back to the basics, to the heart of Christianity, learn to defend that effectively, and then slowly build up and out from there.

Defending holidays and such, under the current circumstances, is entirely pointless if we're not in agreement with which God that is supposed to be at the center of that holiday. If we're not following God's explicit commands when God has provided them, if we can't even get that right, then we've certainly got no place trying to come up with anything on our own.

We are a nation fixated on pleasure and celebration, and so we'll need to abstain from those until we can understand how to do them correctly. We have to stop sinning, no matter how convenient it is to keep going, to just go with the crowd.

Like an alcoholic, it's possible that we could enjoy an alcoholic beverage responsibly, but if we can't, then our only option is prohibition. If we can't help but create a false god, better that we do without such temptations at all than to try and bed evil and sustain an entirely false pretense of righteousness.

It doesn't matter what everyone else is doing. It doesn't matter how your behavior is going to be restricted compared to what everyone else may be doing.

The purpose of our lives is to glorify God, and God is not glorified when we deny the unrepentant sin that we have enabled or participated in.

We must repent, cut back all that has led us astray, all the distractions, and only rebuild from a position of truth and understanding.

If we end up back where we were before, so be it to the glory of God. If we don't, so be it to the glory of God.

Either way, our goal should not be a maximization of our pleasure and entertainment, but the glory of God, whatever that may require us to give up in doing so.

The sacrifice is worth it, and refusing to sacrifice something so arbitrary and temporal would demonstrate where one's faith is truly placed.

You can't share what you don't have, teach what you don't understand.

Today I finally canceled all of my sponsorships of children through Compassion International.

I say finally because I had come to the decision to do so many months earlier, but being a coward and lazy, I allowed other life circumstances to crowd out taking the rather small amount of time required to do this. I don't know what made today different. Perhaps it is just that I am tired of inaction in my own life, tired of the cowardice fueling inaction, and I wanted to take a small step towards changing that downward spiral.

Regardless of the reason why I finally did it, I did.

The short version of "why" is that I don't care what is done "in Jesus' name."

If you read Matthew 7, you'll find that doing something "in Jesus' name" doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. This is because applying a label, or slapping "in Jesus' name" onto something, doesn't take a lot of effort.

"We're eating this food, in Jesus' name!"
"We're building a new church, in Jesus' name!"
"We're reinstating temple prostitutes, in Jesus' name!"
"We're toppling governments and creating world unity, in Jesus' name!"

It doesn't matter what you do "in Jesus' name" unless Jesus wants you to do it in the first place.

Similar to how there is no scriptural support for "The Crusades", people still try to pretend that because they were done "in Jesus' name", that they had anything to do with Christianity, instead of the political reality that Christian nations were fighting back against the Muslims that had been busy conquering large portions of Europe until that point in time.

So, when did Jesus ever command Christians to be material saviors of the world?

When did Jesus say that it was the responsibility of Christians to run around the world and alleviate the consequences of sin?

At this point in human history, knowledge on agriculture is not exactly hard to find. We know that if you put plants in good soil, provide a source of water and sunshine, then the plants will grow. Some plants, in growing, produce things we can eat. If we focus on growing those things, we can have sources of food.

This isn't complicated, and yet "world hunger" is still an issue? How is that even possible?

Because for the same reason that people would deny God's gift of salvation through the death of Jesus Christ, people will reject truths that would lift them out of the depths of squalor and poverty. It is arrogance, pure and simple.

People don't want to admit that they are wrong, that they could do things differently in a way which would be better, and so they'll keep doing the wrong thing and boast loudly about how much better their way is.

It is not "bad luck" that condemns one to poverty, but arrogance and pride.

And this arrogance and pride I am no longer interested in subsidizing.

The Compassion International charity claims to provide for material needs of children, to "lift them out of poverty", and then throws in that because they work through churches, the children also get a chance to hear about Jesus.

That is not the correct priority. Offering material salvation first and then eternal salvation afterwards does not make acceptance of the Gospel more probable, and this is seen most clearly in the type of "Christianity" that exists in some of these places, where there is little more than a "Christianese" coat of paint over animism, shamanism, occultism, and every other demonic practice under the sun.

The reason that this is what happens is because these charities cannot offer a salvation they themselves do not possess. One cannot spread the Gospel if one has not heard and accepted it themselves, as those who genuinely do find the material struggles of this life to be insignificant in comparison, let alone necessary as part of the sanctification process.

When we make bad choices in life, bad consequences follow. When someone comes along and offers to absorb the cost of bad consequences, we'll take it rather than correct our own behavior. This unfortunate reality about human nature was captured in the prayers by Jesus Christ in the garden before his death, and indeed was what necessitated his sacrifice on our behalf:

Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to the disciples, “Sit here while I go and pray over there.” And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and He began to be sorrowful and deeply distressed. Then He said to them, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Stay here and watch with Me.”

He went a little farther and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”

Then He came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, “What! Could you not watch with Me one hour? Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

Again, a second time, He went away and prayed, saying, “O My Father, if this cup cannot pass away from Me unless I drink it, Your will be done.” And He came and found them asleep again, for their eyes were heavy.

So He left them, went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words. Then He came to His disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting? Behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is being betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us be going. See, My betrayer is at hand.”

The people who had seen the miracles, had the parables explained to them, who witnessed the ministry of Jesus Christ firsthand, couldn't even obey a simple command from Jesus Christ, that he made three times in a row right to their faces.

If they couldn't do that, realize that what Jesus Christ was asking is if there was any other way to reconcile man to God. Is there any other way, other than doing all the work, is there any middle ground whereupon humanity would realize its own folly and repent?

God's answer? NOPE.

This isn't about intelligence, or the lack thereof. This isn't about education, or the lack thereof. This isn't about opportunity, equality, fairness, or the lack thereof.

Humans are arrogant and prideful creatures who will not "get it" unless their own horrible nature and the consequences it naturally brings about are shoved in their faces, and even so some would rather die in that arrogance and pride than admit that anybody, let alone God, has any place to tell them to do anything differently.

Just like how Israel, despite their favor and intimate connection with God, frequently turned away and rebelled, humanity lacks the ability to be obedient to God on our own. We can't do anything on our own strength, it took God doing all the work and leaving us with just a choice.

God doesn't make that choice for us, and "steps back" when we make the wrong choices and lets us experience the consequences. Unfortunately for humanity, this dynamic isn't just temporal, but eternal as well. God will not "override" the choices of those who have rejected Jesus Christ, who have died unrepentant, who till their last breath cursed God for being God instead of them being God.

So how does filling someone else's stomach accurately reflect this dynamic?

How does free education accurately reflect this dynamic?

How does using the wealth and technology developed or accrued by those who were obedient to God to alleviate the consequences of sin "spreading the Gospel"?

How does "saving" someone from the consequences of their own decisions, without them choosing anything, going to "prime" them for understanding that the choice to follow Jesus may cost them everything in this life?

God's love is unconditional, but God's wrath is not, and in preaching only about God's love, we have diluted the reason why God's love matters in the first place. In acting only in love, we have reduced God to a cosmic vending machine of blessings, happy to reward others who do not hoard what God has granted them.

In preaching salvation, and yet acting as material saviors, we have ignored what we need to be saved from in the first place.

And a people who don't need saving can't be saved. So instead of preaching eternal salvation and sharing the Gospel, "Christians" provide for the material needs of others and invite them to join a social club, as if the acceptance or rejection of the invitation was only of incidental consequence, because the "Christians" will still be providing salvation regardless of what the individuals choose in the end.

Many are guilty of believing that they can be even more patient than God. That they will find a way to save people that Jesus Christ did not already afford, did not already make available. That somehow it's people's understanding or awareness which is the hindrance to their choosing God instead of themselves.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of why people ultimately reject God. People do not reject God out of a lack of understanding, but because they understand all to well that the Gospel brings news of is that they are not God, and they simply cannot bear to live with the ramifications of that.

Spread the Gospel, not comfort. Spread the Gospel, not health and wealth.

And that is why I will no longer support charities whose primary purpose and behavior does not center around spreading the Gospel. The rest is, quite literally, just a distraction from the most important role we can play in this material life.

I am not God, and neither are you, but God wants to have a relationship with us, and the price of reconciliation was already paid by Jesus Christ on the cross.

What will you choose?

When war has been declared, act like it.

Last week there were fake bombs used in a false flag to drum up support for Democrats just prior to the mid-term elections.

These devices were identified as fake rather quickly because they were illogically constructed, folks took pictures for social media before calling in the bomb squads, and these devices could not actually harmed the "intended targets" because those people never actually open their own mail. This is the equivalent of a gun whose only function is to extend a flag with the word "boom" on it. Even so, the event was touted as further evidence that the current President needs to do things differently.

So what happens when the scare isn't fake?

Most false flags aren't fakes at all.

Here's a list of 42 known false flag operations.


Look at the list. People died. Governments, both "good" and "bad" guys in the historical narratives, are present and accounted for.

In almost every case, the acts were done to provide a "moral high ground" for an aggressor to have their subsequent actions justified. If you've just been attacked by someone, then who is going to interfere with your actions to defend yourself? They'd be allying themselves with those who just attacked you!

Look at how frequently a simplistic mindset shows up in the justifications. Look at how frequently personal reasons are used as the cover for political ones.

"We did something we knew was wrong and then were going to blame someone else for it because we couldn't otherwise justify doing what we wanted to in the first place."

Even scripture has a fairly well known story about this, when Joseph accused his brothers of stealing and imprisoned the youngest, who was found with "stolen goods", when Joseph had actually planted the "stolen" goods.

The reason these types of manipulation work is because we are not primarily rational creatures, so when an offense has occurred, our instinct is not to investigate and discern what needs to be done, but to react. Our instinct is to right the wrongs and settle things, and the "false flag" hopes to evoke such an emotional response that nobody takes a closer look at the circumstance to determine what the correct course of action should be.

The name itself is a literal one, from the time when ships on the sea would run the wrong flags to confuse and disorient other ships.

After the fake bomb scare, someone shot up a Jewish synagogue, and there are 8 dead and more injured.

Now, why am I framing that shooting alongside false flags?

Look at one of the responses to the shooting.

“Our Jewish community is not the only group you have targeted,” the group wrote. “You have also deliberately undermined the safety of people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. Yesterday’s massacre is not the first act of terror you incited against a minority group in our country.”

Trump was fiercely criticized after he failed to condemn white supremacy and asserted that there is “blame on both sides” after last year’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

The group said Trump is not welcome in the city until he also stops targeting minorities, immigrants and refugees.

Does this sound personally motivated or politically motivated? Put differently, were they specifically targeted, or were political groups they belong to, or are aligned with, targeted?

As before, how often did known false flags have predominantly political implications?

Is their goal to get justice for a specific incident, or to affect a more sweeping change that goes beyond the incident?

Let's divert the train of thought for a bit. I've shared this video before. If you have not watched this video, you need to before you can understand what is going on in this country. You need to understand all the possibilities before you can be sure and take any action, because if you think that how a person behaves in their day-to-day describes the entirety of their capacity, you are woefully ignorant.

Also, in case you didn't read it, Israel showed up on that list.

Israel was at war with Egypt when it hatched a plan in 1954 to ruin its rapprochement with the United States and Britain by firebombing sites frequented by foreigners in Cairo and Alexandria.

But Israeli hopes the attacks, which caused no casualties, would be blamed on local insurgents collapsed when the young Zionist bombers were caught and confessed at public trials. Two were hanged. The rest served jail terms and emigrated to Israel.

 So, let's do some simple math.

In a population of an estimated 325.98 million, or 325,980,000 let's presume that, based on Derren Brown's experiment, only a very small portion of a percentage of the population is susceptible to such programming, but those that are will do nearly anything you've programmed them to do, including kill people when your "normal" personality is quite the antithesis of violent or aggressive.

If it's .0001% of the population, that still puts us at about 325 people, 6 per state, if you spread them out. If it's .001% of the population, that is 3250 people, 60 per state, and so on and so forth.

Even seemingly tiny odds amidst a big enough population exposes that we are living in a rather volatile time where peace and civility are more of a coincidence than a result of any intentional effort.

So, how many people are usually involved in a "mass shooting" in the USA? Is it more or less than 6? More or less than 60? Are there enough people that an entire "movement" could be faked to support their own narratives?

When the fake bomb scare apparently failed to move the needle, in that even within 24 hours it was apparent that the reaction desired did not occur, what do you think would happen next if folks believe that the political changes they desire are so important to start running false flags? To try to go beyond merely making new policies available to choose and moving to the extent of trying to persuade and manipulate the mob in order to achieve their goals?

They would escalate. Just look at what happened with women's suffrage in the UK over a hundred years ago:

In 1913 some Suffragettes began to resort to the tactic of small bombs. In February 1913 Lloyd George's week-end cottage which was in the process of being built, was target of a small explosion, and in June 1914 a bomb was placed beside the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey. It exploded causing slight damage to the chair and the 'Stone of Destiny' below it. Several other bombs planted including one in St Paul's Cathedral, and near the Bank of England.

When any political group ever desires more power, they will follow a very specific path of escalation when they don't get what they want, until the cost of continuing is beyond what they can afford to pay. This is why parents will often start taking away existing toys of a child throwing a tantrum because they can't get a new one, because they are increasing the cost of continuing behavior on the child to then change the motivations of the child.

Does anyone still wonder why positive reinforcement alone fails to raise children into mature adults?

As Clausewitz said "War is a mere continuation of policy by other means."

Realize that if it's important enough to escalate at all, and they can "afford it", then they will, and they have hundreds, if not thousands, of people around the country on tap who could commit terrible acts that are completely outside their normal character, and that presumes the need for those folks in the first place because they cannot draw from within their own political groups to achieve a goal.

Folks will presume that their victory will surely be just around the next corner. And then the next. And then the next. They just need to try a little bit harder and then everything will fall into place, and just as their efforts grow, so will the animosity for those who, even by appearance alone, stand against them. They've put in so much work so far, it's not that much more. They've put in so much work so far, it would be such a tragedy to see it all go to waste!

A false flag is a means to try and justify further actions being taken which would otherwise be completely inappropriate without the context of "responding to a hostile aggressor". It's for when folks want to take action but don't want the optics of it to be against them.

It's something people do when they've already contemplated doing more but cannot yet justify it.

Yet.

So immediately following the fake bomb scare, a Jewish synagogue gets shot up, and various political groups immediately start making political demands of the President?

We're supposed to believe that an apparently maligned and victimized political group can now make these demands because of this shooting, and past events, and these demands are made before all the details of the investigation have taken place?

We're in a cold civil war, which is only being recognized and acted on at all by one "side" of the conflict. And that "side" doesn't have much power in our current administration.

So how far are they willing to go to change that? They're the only ones that truly know, and the administration has done everything they can to try and defuse the situation.

They'll only end up making it worse. Like Icarus on wings of wax, the higher we fly the farther we fall as a consequence of our hubris.

I'd prefer a negotiated split over no negotiations and "to the victor goes the spoils".

Daily Bible Study - Proverbs 11:1

Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord,
But a just weight is His delight.

Proverbs 11:1 (NKJV).

God desires a high-trust society, and for us to deal with others honestly. This is enabled by seeing past the immediacy of selfishness to understanding both the temporal and eternal consequences of sin, the denying of God's order and design in favor of that which denounces God, and good.

The problem is that, and this this is an issue that is difficult for a lot of folks, because so many were brought up under false pretenses, under empty rhetoric which should have been suspicious, that has put down deep roots, and it's hard to tear that up and face reality.

Trying to behave honestly with those who are dishonest is not "justice". That's a dishonest scale, though not for the reasons that may be most obviously apparent.

Denying truth is not something that aligns with God's desires, God's nature. If someone is dealing with you dishonestly, and you ignore that to pretend like they are dealing with you honestly, you are denying truth in your circumstances. While I don't think that qualifies as sin, nor would being the victim of a circumstance you could have averted, it would affirm that you are a fool, and we've been hearing a lot about them throughout Proverbs.

God desires that we deal with people honestly, but that doesn't mean we ignore what's literally happening in front of us, that we deceive ourselves. If someone is being dishonest, the scales are not made just because of our actions, because of our ignoring their sinful attempts to attain selfish gain.

Proverbs was written in an era of Israel's history when it was likely high-trust. The reason we can tell is from the punishments for those who broke The Law. Consequences are foundational to trust because, if someone wrongs you, and there is no consequence, why wouldn't someone do so to benefit themselves? There's no consequence for the act, so how could it even be considered "wrong"?

Thus why Israel, in obedience to God, with consequences both eternal and temporal, would have been a place which should have trended towards trustworthiness because the cost of deceit was so high.

Should have.

Thus the difference between what God desires and what God allows, what God abhors but will judge eternally and that which God abhors and will judge both temporally and eternally.

This does not excuse sin, it just means that the modern interpretations of sin, where one's own pursuits of justice, one's righteousness, counts for anything, is a tragic lie that has brought much pain and suffering which would have otherwise been averted. People have been fools, thinking God would reward their foolishness, and that's simply not the case.

We should strive after what God desires, but not partake in deceptions and lies, even if only to ourselves, in order to accomplish it. God will not only not honor what we accomplish, we will be judged by the arrogance in presuming that our way, and not God's way, is the correct path for demonstrating obedience to God.

Daily Bible Study: Proverbs 8:32-36

“Now therefore, listen to me, my children,
For blessed are those who keep my ways.
Hear instruction and be wise,
And do not disdain it.
Blessed is the man who listens to me,
Watching daily at my gates,
Waiting at the posts of my doors.
For whoever finds me finds life,
And obtains favor from the Lord;
But he who sins against me wrongs his own soul;
All those who hate me love death.”

Proverbs 8:32-36 (NKJV).

Blessed are those who find wisdom and heed it, but those who hate wisdom love death.

Without objective truths existing, this type of passage in scripture becomes nonsensical. If objective truth, truth which is not contingent from our perspective, does not exist, then extolling a particular lifestyle or set of behaviors simply doesn't work.

For example, look at adultery. If adultery is always a bad idea, then it's always wise to avoid adultery. If it's only a bad idea because people aren't good at "getting away with it", then it's only wise to avoid adultery if you aren't good at "getting away with it". It changes the connotation of "wisdom" from being universally applicable to only being conditionally applicable.

This is why it's a "cop-out" if someone ever claims that debating proverbs can't be done, because the philosophical foundation of such writings requires objective truth to exist. The ideas presented are done so universally, and so if the tenet put forth is not universal, you've got an argument that the wisdom being shared is not all that wise after all, or perhaps is at best conditionally wise.

The dynamic plays out in both the temporal and eternal frames as well, in that if sin is only physical, only material, then regardless of what you do in this life, your eternal destiny is likely to be unaffected. If sin carries an eternal burden, then even if you don't face consequences in this life, you might in the next, so especially if you're going to be reincarnated based on how you lived this life, you should adjust your behavior even if you can't fully comprehend all the possible consequences.

What's sad is that, barring the reincarnation aspect, this is how we should teach discipline to children. A child is not always going to understand the full measure of consequences, but their behavior still needs to be guided, and we see this when they disobey their parents and cite only the known consequences as being "handled", them then expressing exasperation that there were further consequences they hadn't been told of which may have swayed their opinion in one fashion or another.

God, throughout scripture, prescribes specific behaviors and practices without always really explaining why. From a logical standpoint, we could deduce why there is no logical inconsistency given that God is good, but emotionally we "just don't like it."

It's the emotional need for more information, to feel like we're participating in the process, to by any means necessary take some credit for the outcomes we experience that drives us to declaring the most illogical things about truth.

That's how those who hate wisdom can love death, not because of some logical argument, but out of the emotional commitment to the desire to be responsible for the entirety of one's fate, of one's future, of us wanting to be God and understanding everything. Those who hate wisdom, who hate a "natural order", or order at all, are going to be drawn by chaos, by destruction, by death.

It's easy to see this in the current social climate with regard to abortion. Never mind that "not having sex" is 100% effective at preventing conception from occurring in the first place, we cannot deny the hedonistic pleasure pursuit, so instead of taking responsibility, we've instead made it a moral imperative that a woman have the freedom to kill her offspring before they've been born.

Try to suggest abstinence? Marriage? Personal responsibility? All of these things are wise, they either provide a control to prevent or a circumstance to appropriately manifest that which people desire from hedonistic pursuits, but instead of that we'll just make it "legal" and "socially acceptable" to kill unborn children and pretend that there is no other choice available.

In fact, if you do suggest these things and anybody is really paying attention, you'll be faced with mountains of hate for suggesting personal responsibility as the proper path forward, and it's not just about sexual activities either, but branches out into political and financial topics as well.

People don't like being told that they are responsible for the bad outcomes in their life in addition to the good outcomes. We just want to take credit for the good and blame someone else for the bad, all while trying to convince ourselves and others that we are god and the universe is just playing "hard to get."

Listen to wisdom. Appreciate the coherence in its universality. Enjoy a life in alignment with God's designs instead of defining yourself through antagonism.