Tyranny of Chance - opposite of Intelligent Design

Tyranny of Chance is the opposite of the half-assed concept called Intelligent Design.

Tyranny of Chance is my intelligent free will human response to ID.

The universe is either a controlled, managed stage set with scripts as in ID or it is the randomness and tyranny of possibilities.

Life is static or it is fluid. It is all a question of energy.

I am reminded of the story about how Charles and Diana, Prince and Princess of Wales, were onto the concept of reincarnation as a matter explaining their rank and good fortune. Like how could so wonderful a dual be blessed with so much wealth and power unless they deserved it from another life and it was just a formality to carry it all from one soul incarnation to another.

Sounds rather intelligent, Eaton, Oxford, and all that from their point of view. Don't you think? You don't think. That's the whole point. You are not Intelligently Designed or that well made on your level and as an offset of that, you are not sanctioned by God to rule over others? Yeah right.

The rest of us get the leftovers in life, this life. We have not tried hard enough to be as good or as lucky or as full of grace as Charles and Diana. Or so it goes.

Am I mixing apples and oranges mixing the odds of being born royal and throwing in ideas like reincarnation and the unfairness in life in general to the majority of us?  Perhaps.

This present top down culture where elites rule in politics or elites invent Intelligent Design to justify their ungodly paychecks and perks is a culture that needs some re-examination on a macro and micro level in this modern age.

Were Charles and Diana destined to have been born into such pomp and luxury or was it merely the tyranny of chance? Only one bum gets to sit on the royal throne so to speak. The rest of us I suppose are shit out of luck - sounds like tyranny to me.

The universe is pure chance. It is also a tyranny of chance by our intelligent evaluation of it. Any intelligence in any equation of the forms and energies of the universe is purely human and not “divine”. The Creator remains the creator and that creation is in motion to any, all and other points in history. Whether the Creator is intelligent, I cannot say, not having ever yet met that entity.

Otherwise, they, Charles and Diana, have had God’s imprimatur stamped in red ink on their shiny white heinies in this and every succeeding lifetime. The rest of us I guess just lose out in such a random equation of such things.

Just a thought.

Memorial Day - USA - 2010

Memorial Day is a local personal thing.  Local communal picnics follow small Main Street parades that visit memorials to the dead fallen in wars.  We acknowledge too what the living have given in service to their country. 

If our friend above playing Taps is not in full regalia or uniform, it is in the spirit of the day. Sacred rememberance and secular pride and muted celebration in backyard barbeques blends into the change of season into official Summer - reminding all of the cycles of life.

The dead in war are remembered and the we share this day with them in the joyful spirit of living.

Sacrifice for country honored - gone but not forgotten.


Memorial Day - USA - 2009

Ayn Rand's Pagan Religion

Most people in a secular society give lip service to altruism. It, as phrased by Any Rand, is the basis of the current moral standards in the west that fall short of her Objectivism which states that individual selfishness is the right approach to reality.

As in some cases, a visual is more informative.   A picture is worth a thousand words.

Viewing some ancient Ayn Rand interviews on YouTube, I felt that this pagan high priestess of the New American Fascism Free Market Capitalist philosophy does not see the forest for the need to piss on the tree right in front of you.

I can see that the so-called altruism of Christianity has not been fulfilled fully over the centuries. Some progress on a regular basis on the evolutionary scale and toward a better humanity is the implied overall message, reality, of Christianity.

Ayn Rand’s anti-human atheism is being touted more than ever before as America is trying to get its fix on its place in the brave new global reality.

If Fascism is the best way to go mixed with Fox New Fear and Lies agitprop rumors, then chaos is not only here temporarily but the eye of the storm moves back to the permanent violence and chaos of nature - a dark age.

That building a better world and being able to share it is the make or break moment of any civilization and more so now in the evolution of our species at this point in time in global history.

Look at the ash tray above.

Individual pleasure and selfishness says to smoke. Burdening your lung cancer treatment bills on insurance companies or the Government is the real end result of this false fucked up Tea Party philosophy. Total individual independence in the middle of your own forest is a myth long gone from the reality of the American landscape. I doubt that any of these arm chair fascist philosphers espousing Ayn Rand and her wanna be new American State Religion are really going to do the lung cancer treatment thing out of their own pocket.

That is the basic flaw of Ayn Rand – time marches on and a static philosophy must change or adapt to present situations. If you are locked into a never changing religion/philosophy/dogma of selfishness, you are already the ash (the dead past) at the bottom of the ashtray in terms of not trying to any make meaningful contributions to the present and continued future interdependence of humanity.

The filled ashtray of history to date is Objectivism, sad to say. No brave new light to the future there.

BP’s Tony Hayward the real John Galt?

Rahm Emanuel knows nothing about oil. Therefore President Obama knows nothing about oil.

Brit Hume on Fox News is on video saying “Where is the oil?” meaning what by FOX News' deregulated journalistic standards? Meaning that there are no visuals for the TV like oil on the beaches and millions of dead fish? Right? (right).

In July 2009, at a lecture to the Stanford Business School, the CEO of British Petroleum Tony Hayward explains to attendees that BP was going in the wrong direction before he took over as CEO because, "we had too many people that were working to save the world."

Kevin Grandia – BP CEO Hayward – Huffington Post – May 21, 2010

“Save the World” = too much government regulation.

Is Tony Hayward a direct descendant of the infamous John Galt, the once famous man of myth who in his time marshaled  the most productive men on the planet to refuse to contribute toward the common (yuk) good of humanity?   Tony Hayward has gotten rid of all those people at BP that were "working to save the world" for a reason?

Where has John Galt taken all those once intellegent, creative people at BP? 

Has he come to finally liberate us from all the government regulations crushing business to the ground like Obama’s “Boot on the throat of BP” as Rand Paul had so brilliantly phrased and accurately framed the skinny of the situation?

Tony - stand up to this Democratic socialist monster that put so much stress on you with backbreaking regulations that caused a minor quality flaw in some of your 1950’s technology to be overlooked and the equipment failed. Mistakes happen.

Is Tony Hayward the return of John Galt come to save us or is this whole Gulf of Mexico much ado about nothing? Is this whole oil spill thing just another faked Moon Landing preceding a massive government handout, bailout, bribe to BP, British Petroleum, and more production stifling Government Regulations?

Wyatt's Torch is burning in the Gulf and will never be extinguished I fear and thanks to Tony, I mean, John Hayward (wink, nod).

IMHO - Galt lives !

I – My – U, Looking for a new definition of God in a Modern Age

Had a minor epiphany of sorts yesterday whereby a lot of things fell into a new place.

Above, I have written a descriptive using three words including a texting word “U”. I will explain shortly.

I am going back to my quest for a new definition of God in this modern age. I am dusting off something from Junior year in high school and the Jewish Philosopher Martin Buber. Indeed the picture of him in my religion textbook reminded me of Walt Whitman with the long beard and hat. Buber's I and Thou (Ich und Du) was publish in 1923. A similar idea, Freud’s The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es lit. "The I and the It”) was published the same year.

I for many years had merged a lot of the idea of I-it with the word Id and would often describe my job as a back office computer paper pusher as basically having an Id relationship with my PC. I also mixed in the concept of Zen in terms of getting a feel or a pleasure from the flow of the daily grind of that work. I am on a tangent here. Back to Buber.

Refreshing the high points of I-it and I-thou separates the reality of “I” from its surroundings or empirical from the analysis of the surroundings or abstract. You therefore have life broken down philosophically into the everyday real and everyday potential for the abstract.

I and Thou

What does it mean when a person experiences the world? Man goes around the world hauling out knowledge from the world. These experiences present man with only words of It, He, She and It with contrast to I-Thou. What this means is that the experiences are all physical and do involve a great deal of spirituality. Previously I mentioned that the world is twofold. What this means is that our experience of the world has two aspects: the aspect of experience, which is perceived by I-It, and the aspect of relation, which is perceived by I-Thou.

There is the I-thou into which the perception or concept or analysis and category regarding the concept of God falls.

Freud’s secular analysis of the world is one thing. Buber’s aspiration toward the divine is less known to the general world.

Thinking about this I-it and I-thou thing, I am adding a bridge word “my”. I say bridge word because the I-it and I-thou was a great concept in 1923 but it is almost a century later and I do not see much I-it or I-thou thinking in religious writing and theology or everyday religion practice. All I hear is the I-it when people pound their fist on the good book (It) in the pulpit. I do not feel much I-thou coming through there to comfort me.

Getting back to my bridge word “My”, I use it to describe intentional focus or attention to the empirical or the abstract. In other words, it the “my” focusing or touching the everyday world or by focusing on the meaning of it all – abstract – that places me in the universe in connection by a bridge from “I” to “It” or from “I” to “Thou”.

I – My – Thou. “Thou” is such an archaic word. I translate it modern into “U”.

Taking the idea one level above the empirical and into the spiritual, thou not necessarily divine, I am adding something of a holistic approach by combining all as I-My-U.

If I go a little further with the Quaker Idea of the spark of the divine in all living creatures, man in particular, then something merges here, has an energy of its own, that I recognized as such when I saw it happening. I thought of the four Hebrew letters or symbols that make up the sacred name of God. I have “Imyu” as a potential new name for God and everything (the universe).

Going back to the individual spark within every human being concept, perhaps if God in a Deist concept is a distant Creator, perhaps we each have the potential of being a surrogate of that distant Deist God in everyday life.

Adding more concept and or poetic license with Saint Paul's “looking into a mirror darkly”, perhaps, just perhaps, on occasion, you and I can look into the mirror of our souls and on a subconscious, if not conscious level, look into the mirror and see, quite briefly, God, in some abstract and or miraculous manner. In which case, the possible name of God “Imyu” becomes “Im- yu”.

I’m You.

Think about it.

Mosque / Resort Planned for Manhattan

I am getting mixed signals in the news about talk of a new high rise, 13 story mosque and spa to go up within two city blocks of the World Trade Center on Park Place in Manhattan. Park Place in that area is a mix of seedy old 19th century loft buildings and rising office spires and luxury apartment buildings.

New York's fury at plans for Ground Zero mosque

It (the property) formerly housed a Burlington Coat Factory store. The store's two selling floors were destroyed when the landing gear from one of the planes tore through them during the attacks.

Construction is due to begin on September 11 next year – the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attack.

A massive rally protesting the plans has been scheduled for June 6 as anger grows.

Rosemary Cain, whose fireman son was killed, said: ‘I think it’s despicable. That’s sacred ground. It’s a slap in the face.

'How could anybody give them permission to build a mosque there?’

And:

Bill Doyle, whose son was also among the 3,000 victims, said: ‘What I’m frightened about is that it’s almost going to be another protest zone – a meeting place for radicals.’

There is a need for a mosque in the downtown Manhattan area for many foreign born vendors and taxi drivers especially for a Friday service. There has in the past few years been a place for Islamic worship in an old loft building at 20 Murray Street where they lost their lease in 2008. Prices go up. Perhaps $20 million dollars worth of luxury lofts now occupy that building in a tight market split between gentrification and the slow comeback of office space and the new rising World Trade Center.

That mosque, Masjid Mosque, in now in smaller quarters at 12 Warren St. Plans to move one block south from Warren Street to Park Place seems to be crossing a line in the sand. It seems to be affront to the families and citizens of New York who are still very sensitive to the 911 attack by so-called Muslims in Jihad not against Christianity but the Secular West that Islam cannot separate in their view or mindset about America.

Nobody has disturbed private Muslim services held three blocks from Ground Zero these past few years. But when you want to do a tax free non-profit publicity stunt to insult New Yorkers in order raise Saudi blood money for a good Manhattan investment, the Masjid Mosque seems to have worn out its welcome in the formerly tolerate neighborhood.

Plans for a mosque at the old Burlington Coat Factory outlet were approved in December 2009 by the 12 member finance committee of the local Community Board. A full vote by the full 40 members of that Community Board is set for May 25 and the current controversy stems partly from that.

The heart of this controversy lies with the money. It is one thing to occupy a plain mosque within two blocks of the WTC and used by local New York Muslims. It is quite another thing to start raising money for a full blown bells and whistles Mosque and Spa for foreign Muslim tourists along with likely private luxury condo apartments for visiting Saudi Princes.  This  is what really pisses New Yorkers off!

Ground Zero is not Disney Land!  It is hallowed American ground.  Even if our country is mortgaged to these Muslim oil warlords, we have not all sold our souls to them yet.

In terms of official real e$tate maps, Warren Street lies in TriBeCa (Triangle Below Canal) and Park Place is in the Financial District. Good investment territory, hallowed WTC ground be damned.

There is a question according to FOX News if the Masjid Mosque does in fact hold title to the property in question now causing so much controvery.

Muslims in NYC Planning to Build Second, Smaller Mosque Near Ground Zero

As controversy surrounds the construction of a 13-story mosque just two blocks from Ground Zero, FOX News has learned that an effort to place a second mosque close to the hallowed site in New York City is in its advanced stages.

The Masjid Mosque has raised $8.5 million and is seeking an additional $2.5 million to begin construction. While it apparently has not settled on a final location, it has told donors it plans to build very close to where 3,000 people were killed in the September 11 terror attacks.

In fact, the website appealing for donations boldly states that it plans to “build the 'House of Allah' next to the World Trade Center. Help us raise the flag of 'LA ILLAH ILLA ALLAH' in downtown Manhattan."

One source said he believed the planners are considering a five-story building on 23 Park Place, closer to Ground Zero than the 13-story mosque the Cordoba Initiative is planning to build. But a tax record search shows that 23 Park Place is in private hands and has not changed owners since 2008.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf sounds more like a promoter, P.T. Barnum type than a religious cleric in his money raising tactics for a thirteen story mega mosque, spa and private luxury condos for visiting Saudi Princes in Downtown Manhattan.

I do not think any New York Unions will touch, build, this PR failure, insult to New Yorkers from this Investor Cleric from Malaysia.

So it goes.

Billy and Diana - Philly Mascots

Something strange happened to me last week. I had been looking though some old research and I came across one of my favorite art objects in a photo.

There is the Augustus Saint Gaudens statue of the Roman goddess Diana that decorates the main hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I am of course aware of all the trials and triumphs of this statue as art and its ability to survive. It started out as a weathervane on the second of four Madison Square Gardens. The second Garden was actually right off Madison Square in Manhattan.

To make a long story short, this one time symbol and “goddess of Manhattan” got ditched when they tore the building down and it survived to become art in Philly. There is even an O. Henry short story, rather dated in language and understanding, The Lady Higher Up, in conversation between “Miss Diana” and “Aunt Liberty” in the New York harbor.

More boring details I will not talk about. But the strange thing is that when I looked at this statue, this work of art, and its setting in a treasure house of human culture, a museum I have many times visited, I slipped into the transcendent and felt spiritual and close to the Divine.

Art, and not pagan idol, touched something in me. The feminine road to the Divine was more pronounced in ancient, primitive, obsolete pagan cultures. Maybe that pathway should consider being reopened in the traffic jam of today’s uncertain global common culture.

I have to wonder how the world progresses that if some art might be a true pathway to the divine.

Speaking of superstition, there is the local Philly myth of the Curse of Billy Penn.

Curse of Billy Penn

The Curse of Billy Penn was an alleged curse used to explain the failure of major professional sports teams based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to win championships since the March 1987 construction of the One Liberty Place skyscraper, which exceeded the height of William Penn's statue atop Philadelphia City Hall.

The curse was supposedly overturned by placing a small statue of William Penn on the top of the tallest building in Philly, the Comcast center at 975 feet, in 2007 just in time for the World Series Title in 2008.

Superstition, myth, religion – many times wishful thinking and self fulfilling prophesy.

In any case, in an ancient sense and in honorable titles, Statues, Art, are mascots, honorary gods, in a vaguely pagan parameter, at Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, the Quaker City.

Pagan Transcendency into the Divine

Christianity is not a holistic religion in the ways that ancient religions were concerned with the whole and the parts of the whole and the interdependence of those parts.

By strictest definition, the word pagan means rural. In the context of ancient Rome with it hundreds of official and non-official gods and temples, pagan was a label for a country bumpkin religion with a country bumpkin god etc. As such Rome was the big time and so were its gods.

Along comes Christianity and every non-Christian religion gets a pagan label and then gets the heave ho off the side of the boat. Past wisdom, culture and insight got tossed as well. A respect for nature got a bad rap and label in the Christian stream of thought thing.

I have to laugh when I hear the apocryphal story of the mother of Jesus coming to live her last days in Ephesus and living with Mary Magdalene.

I do not think that that happened. Ephesus was home to the largest and grandest Greek style temple on earth, pictured above, and dedicated to a Greek earth goddess called Demeter. The temple was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Demeter can also be Gaia etc. The Roman version of the name Demeter is Diana.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the best you can do for a basic earth goddess in the male dominated monotheistic Christian religion. With a handful of sentences mentioning her in the NT, Mary is the stuff of myth and legend and not based on much sacred scripture.

I was doing some recent research or refreshing my memory from Freshman highschool English class whereby we had to memorize all the names of the Greek and Roman gods as a background to reading stories of ancient mythology.

What’s wrong with myth? Nothing. Before there was culture or churches and mosques, there was myth. Myth is the verbal and later written down sharing of culture around the small community nightly fire. Tribes are smaller than modern day countries. Myth is no longer small. Small myth sometimes now covers big modern countries and cultures but not too well. Something missing perhaps in old myths not properly retrofitted to today. As such, most myth is relegated to obscure storage and forgotten library shelves.

Myth or no myth, the western culture follows ancient Rome’s hatred of Nature to this day. Rome is long gone. Western civilization is not far behind using the British Petroleum’s behemoth haphazard failure to manage nature responsibly as a watershed mark in human history.

Do we finally take macro responsibility of the planet or do we, and all cultures globally, continue to ignore our environment? Our platform of life, on which we see life happening on many levels, must be shared with other living creatures in the oceans and on the lands. One species, if it goes extinct, sets the stage for other extinctions including our own species.

The ancient religious myth that God set us in change of Nature is a poorly written piece in that it leaves out the implied statement that we must take charge of nature responsibly.

I am not talking Neo-Paganism here. I am talking about resuscitating those portions of ancient culture that saw, felt and acted in response to the key points of nature that cause mankind to survive and prosper.

Gaia as the earth goddess is not really an ancient concept. Gaia as resurrected myth is an accumulation of many ancient earth goddesses. And what are earth goddesses? They are symbols of the sacred feminine.

The west and its hatred of nature is mixed with hatred of women in the mean desert monotheistic religions. Nature is buried along side with the feminine. The Roman military calendar replaced the lunar calendar. Conflicts were settled in blood along with the destruction of ancient pagan belief systems, based many times on nature. A world religion like Hinduism is based on many previous cultures and many previous cultures’ beliefs, gods and goddesses. Inclusive is one way to do religion.

Christianity, if it wants to survive must look differently at the world and be part of nature, God’s nature or be prepared to quickly, at this point in time, fade out permanently of historic view.

Part of a culture war in recent years in the west, or more accurately America, is between the dying western culture and against Secularism or Neo-Paganism. Neo-Paganism also goes by the name of Pantheism, whereby you believe in many gods instead of the mean singular desert gods of Judeo Christian Islamic monotheistic myth.   The many gods or idols that some secularists or neo-pagans would seem to worship are science, technology, cars, fast food, fashion, and greed and or success.  Any means to succeed including warfare are okay so long as you win at any cost.  Any cost these days means at the expense of humanity and the fragile nature of our planet.

Of course, the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims do not all agree that they are talking about the same god. As such and to such people, I label their beliefs myth. There seems to be many gods even amongst the so-called monotheists.

Transcendence into the energy of the universe is possible on any level, at any time and in any culture.

Transcendence into the concept of God is a way pagans used to channel into the Spiritual. The universe did not live, breath and evolve for a billion years waiting for the one true religion (there are so many) to finally arrive on this planet.

The ancients, the pagans, the pre-Christians did a thriving business in many belief systems. Those forced from the scene belief systems were many times balanced in being male and female. Transcendence into the energy of God was possible within some of those belief systems. Human or animal sacrifice though crowded out the clarity of any hoped for vision of God as we think of Him today.

Western civilization is in a way an extension of a single male god myth – now gone sterile over time. Western Civilization on the religious level is an extension of a long, out of date myth created by Constantine. The forced male only paternalistic religion thing does not work anymore in a total member, total cultural global society. That the culture attached to that lone god myth has perhaps travelled as far as that culture and myth can travel.

Time to think outside the sterlile (at present) western Christian box.

Any ideas I have at the moment are to restore at the very least the regular value of the feminine if not the sacred feminine back into western culture and its institutions in order to save it at this critical time in history.

Time to re-examine some of the ancient pagan ways of reaching out to the spiritual and the Divine that are in true balance with Nature and Nature’s God / Goddess.

Thomas Olmsted - High Priest of Phoenix

After St. Joseph's: Are Women Still Safe in Catholic Hospitals?

Even the Catholic Church, whose official doctrine demands that women be sacrificed in order to preserve fetal life, has for many years made no attempt to impose such a draconian policy upon its vast network of hospitals in the United States. Until last week. In a radical move that is likely to inflame the abortion debate even further and, more disturbingly, to endanger the lives of millions of expectant mothers, Thomas J. Olmsted, the Catholic bishop of Phoenix, Arizona, has condemned and excommunicated a highly regarded nun who approved an abortion necessary to save a pregnant woman's life.


The Irish nun at the center of the case is Sister Margaret McBride, an administrator at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. McBride was part of a hospital ethics committee that approved the termination of an eleven-week-old fetus after the mother developed a case of pulmonary hypertension that threatened to kill her if she continued with her pregnancy.

Although the specific details of the case have not been revealed for reasons of patient privacy, Catholic Healthcare West, which operates the hospital, has described the woman's death, in the absence of termination, as all but certain. In response, Mr. Olmstead declared that the nun was "automatically excommunicated" and warned that: "While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother's life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child. The end does not justify the means."

Of course life is sacred but sometimes the life of one already here must be considered first in a dangerous life threatening situation. 

I do not understand this ongoing and continued hatred of the Roman Catholic church towards women and womens' medical needs.

Bishop Olmsted is a major Creep (the only "C" word that I can use here in good taste) as far I am concerned in this matter. 

Sister Margaret McBride is a Saint!

God forgive Tom Olmsted's total lack of humanity towards half the human race!

British Petroleum's War on Nature

There is a lot of talk about how to revive a seemingly dead Christianity in this seemingly dying planet’s stage of history.

I am thinking that the dying part of the dying planet has to do with the removal of the sacred from nature and Christianity helped manage with that disconnect centuries ago. If nature had a mythical god associated with it, the god, its shrine and the worship of some sacred aspect of creation got destroyed or discounted into nothing within the fanaticism of the new, world is about to end – repent – join now or regret it later in hell – Christian religion.

The rape of the Gulf of Mexico continues under knuckleheads more suited to be failed CEO type bishops running the RC church into the ground. BP and the RCC answer to nobody, not even God it would seem these days.

So much for venting the frustration of watching corporations destroy America and the Western Culture all for the sake of a quarterly profit, or yearly bonus by “short-term bottom-line thinkers” (knuckles dragging).

Rome was not built in a year nor was it destroyed in a year to put a matrix on the idea. The idea perhaps fits the concept of the decline of a culture, our present culture, where the old myths centered around the old Roman state religion of Christianity do not meet the needs of modern culture such as now and with  ideas such as environmentalism.

End Time paranoia helps a religion get started out of fear. If you do not want to survive with me, please jump out of the lifeboat – the boat is getting rather crowded. It is the twenty-first century. The end of your world did not happen in the first century or the fourth, or the tenth of the twentieth centuries. Something missing in that success formula I think.

Mixing science perhaps with ancient myth, the idea that the Earth represented by a goddess named Gaia came into existence to give some metaphoric momentum to a new idea, or more accurately an old idea, about how man is or should be in balance with nature.

The man responsible with mixing ancient myth with modern science is James Lovelock. James Lovelock defined Gaia as:

a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet….

James Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS (born 26 July 1919) is an independent scientist, environmentalist and futurologist who lives in Devon, England. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical environment.---(Wikipedia)

Green thinking in terms of new innovative ways to fuel our economy without nineteenth century petroleum robber baron technology are what is needed right now.

New ways of thinking is also perhaps a means to interject a balance into thought. This to reintroduce the idea of a feminine side, to balance wasted centuries of old male only perception in looking at a stark, male only, universe.

Corporate Whore of Babylon – British Petroleum

Tag, you’re it!


No criminal charges against the gangsters that run British Petroleum.

The rape of Nature in the Gulf of Mexico continues.

Word on the street is that BP has the technology to stop this but have chosen to play dumb just long enough to dump this whole corporate mess in the American taxpayers’ lap.

America is tired of being some Corporate Whore of Babylon’s bitch.

Nationalize BP assets to pay for this mess.

NOW!

Arizona Cracker Law HB2281

I used to stand and wait for a bus to go to work near a cemetery on Oracle Rd. in Tucson. I would be standing something like thirty feet from a huge granite tombstone of the infamous local financier Sam Hughes who orchestrated and paid for the Camp Grant Massacre in 1871.

Camp Grant Massacre

The tombstone is still there but the man is long forgotten. “The evil that men do lives after them.” The massacre deserves to live on in “ethnic studies” courses in Tucson that cracker Governor Brewer and the hack white Arizona legislature have banned in HB2281. Too Bad.

Arizona Legislature Passes Bill That Outlaws 'Ethnic Studies' (HB2281)

The new Arizona law:

“Prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that:

Promote the overthrow of the United States government.

Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.

Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.

Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

The target is Tucson, T.U.S.D., Tucson United School District, and the one progressive end of that state.

The first provision to not promote the overthrow of the U.S. Government is a dead give away about the paranoia of a dying white majority to deny the rights of ethnics claiming their heritage through the honest study of history.

Jan Brewer will do anything, say anything, sign anything to get reelected this year.

Wikipedia has Governor Brewer listed as a member of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.

I have looked through the internet to find comment of the LCMS on the recent racist SB1070 Arizona Immigration “show me your papers” law. No comment. A shrug perhaps. And they wonder why they can’t fill pews these days.

It is too early for that “moral” comment perhaps on this scraping of history from the history books - as is now law in this new White Only History - Arizona law. Is silence tacit agreement?

The Cross as Religious and Secular Icon

The image above is a piece of the destroyed World Trade Center pulled from the wreckage a few days after 911. Two beams crossed at a joint is an architectural necessity. Two beams crossed could also be a religious symbol or icon.

The above icon was on site at the new World Trade Center rising. It was temporarily moved two blocks to the side of St. Peter’s RC church on Church Street to make way for new construction. It will be returned to the finished WTC II. There will be no problem with a possible religious icon being displayed on private or corporate property, which the WTC is.

Ran into the following story whereby an American Legion War Memorial got put up in the California desert, with a cross, over eighty years ago. Somebody sued the government, the owner of the public land where the war memorial sits, and the case has been in and out of court all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court found in favor of the memorial.

Mojave cross at center of court fight reported stolen

A war memorial shaped like a cross that has been at the center of a Supreme Court fight has been torn down by vandals from its remote perch in a California desert….

The high court on April 28 ruled the cross did not violate the constitutional separation of church and state. The American Civil Liberties Union, which had brought the original lawsuit to have the cross removed, promised to continue the court fight….

The Latin cross was first erected in 1934 by a local VFW unit to honor war dead. It has been rebuilt several times over the years, and Easter services are held annually at the remote desert site. The site is on national park land that totals about 1.6 million acres, or 2,500 square miles….

The justices did not completely resolve the fight over the fate of the cross, but the conservative majority re-affirmed recent rulings that there is a limited place for religious symbols on government land.

"It is reasonable to interpret the congressional designation as giving recognition to the historical meaning that the cross had attained," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy. "The Constitution does not oblige government to avoid any public acknowledgment of religion's role in society."

Other quotes from this Supreme Court case that overturned the objection to this one case in particular but not setting any future precedents on the matter:

Supreme Court overturns objection to cross on public land

To Kennedy, the cross "is not merely a reaffirmation of Christian beliefs" but a symbol "often used to honor and respect" heroism.

He added: "Here, one Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion. It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten."

Dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens said: "The cross is not a universal symbol of sacrifice. It is the symbol of one particular sacrifice, and that sacrifice carries deeply significant meaning for those who adhere to the Christian faith."

As I have stated in this blog previously, I, as a secularist, do not object to all religious icons that have been there for decades and are therefore “grandfathered” so to speak into American public spaces and landscapes.

Now, with this haphazard crony nomination of Elena Kagan to the future 2/3 Catholic and 1/3 Jewish U.S. Supreme Court, I have to wonder if opinions such as by Justice Kennedy should not be more aptly labeled in the future as the opinion of Catholic Justice Kennedy.

My feeling is that all future cases to the Supreme Court will be tainted in terms of the extremely narrow cultural/religious diversity now seen on the Court.

So it goes.

Sarah Palin and the New American Fascism

With a dying Old Age of Boomers and Boomer Parents, there was an attempt to stir up rage on the right about the recent ruling that the so-called National Day of Prayer as mandated by Congress in 1952 was unconstitutional.

Indeed, Boomer Franklin Graham and his unmeasured hate sounding anti-Islam statements got him thrown off a scheduled National Prayer Day invite list at the Pentagon.

Franklin should do some research. The Air Force Academy makes room for Druids and any other religious beliefs of its cadets. The Pentagon at least on the spiritual side does not want to hear boilerplate Cold War sounding rhetoric from Franklin dissing Muslims. Franklin of course is trying to protect a meal ticket event like the NPD campaigned for by his Dad and company and imposed on the population in Harry Truman’s time.

The Prayer Day thing got greatly unnoticed. One and a half generations are fading away. The American Town Square and the forced compliance to be Politically Correct about religion or join the right white church on Town Square does not matter anymore. The world is global and nobody cares except Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin, is turning herself into the spokesperson, a product line icon identifying with what appears to be fascist themes that make her paid sponsors happy.

Sarah Palin, who along with the far right wants to return America to the so-called Christian nation started by the founding fathers.

SARAH PALIN ON NATIONAL DAY OF PRAYER CONTROVERSY

O'REILLY: All I have to do is walk into the Supreme Court chamber and you'll see the 10 Commandments. And so we know that you're absolutely correct. The Founding Fathers did base not only the Declaration of Independence but the constitutional protections on what they thought was right and wrong. And what they thought was right and wrong came from the 10 Commandments, which is Judeo-Christian philosophy. That is beyond a reasonable doubt.But here is what's happened. America has, as they say in California, evolved. And now we're a much more secular nation than we were back in 1776. So the opponents of spirituality in the public marketplace say, "Hey, this is a violation. We can't be pushing any kind of spirituality." And you answer?

PALIN: Well, that new kind of world view that I think is kind of a step towards a fundamental transformation of America that some want to see today, I think, again, that it is an attempt to revisit and rewrite history. I think we should kind of keep this clean, keep it simple, go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant. They're quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 Commandments. It's pretty simple. I think what's missing in...

The founding fathers did not found a Christian Nation. They founded a Secular Nation. They did not want anything to do with religion. They and their immediate ancestors fled Europe and Europe’s religion obsessions and religious wars.

One of the founding fathers in the following quotes later on does not reflect Sarah Palin’s valium induced visions for a future Christian America.

Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814


The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

That if anything, considering the twelve million dollars Sarah Palin earned last year speaking, “Writing” etc., she is becoming a Betty Furness of the Right Wing Causes. (Betty was an early famous TV spokesperson for Westinghouse products 1950s, 1960s.)

Even if Sarah does not know what she is endorsing for a price on FOX etc., she is in fact becoming IMHO spokesperson for a not growing as yet but very vocal through her – an American Fascist Party movement not unlike the one described below. With the Tea Party being a slice of and seeds of that movement.

Is the Christian Right a Fascist Movement?

In his new book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press, 2007), veteran journalist and bestselling author Hedges argues that the Christian fundamentalist movement emerging today in the United States resembles the early fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the beginning of the last century. This radical Christian movement, known as Dominionism, promotes the Christian faith and patriotism as a means to gaining more political power.

Hedges contends that the Dominionist movement has many of the same characteristics as fascism: a claim for moral and physical supremacy of a master race, in this case American Christians; blind obedience to a male hierarchy that often claims to speak for God; intolerance toward non-believers; and disdain for rational intellectual inquiry. This movement’s goal is for America to become a theocratic, totalitarian country.

The founding fathers were more interested in a democracy of slave and factory owners.

National Days of Prayer and references to the Christian Nation of the founding fathers is pure delusion Sarah darling.

Non-Christian SCOTUS?

Another Nanny ? Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court?

Obama to pick Kagan for SCOTUS

NBC News has learned that President Obama intends to nominate Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court, to succeed Justice John Paul Stevens.

She was also the first woman dean of Harvard Law School. And she taught at the University of Chicago, where she met a young Barack Obama.

Obama is entitled to nominate any kiss ass academic type with little or no real experience in life – not unlike himself.

Ms. Kagan is Jewish. That will make three Jewish Justices on the Supreme Court to ? balance the six Catholic Justices.

Where is the NEW TESTAMENT?

Not that Catholics are not in theory considered Christians, but aside from the weekly two minute soundbite of the Gospels at Mass each week, who in the RC church has read the bible?

I sound ignorant and prejudice – I know. I feel duty bound by conscience to write this.

I know very little about Miss Kagan’s background except her religion.

I have a bad feeling about this in that I know that Obama has not anointed her but the powers behind his one term Throne of Presidents.

Where’s the Beef? Where is the Protestant?

Global Culture War Continues

In my search and sometime mediocre comments on what might be an emerging global culture I am many times distracted or distraught and have to reconcile myself to the fact that the rest of the world does not see things the same way that I see things.

What might be a global culture war is going on all around us. The west, America and Europe, may have reached a brave new secular world supported by technology and science and the east may be lagging behind and or not want to join the dance with the west.

In retrospect, as the Internet and other communications become reality within reach anywhere on this planet and within seconds, maybe too much view and too much analysis does not increase the quality of life locally or globally.

I have to wonder how the young will have to deal with this not so brave new world but rather a cold push button reality.

One case in point, the war in Asia is spreading to Pakistan. It is not so much that one or several branches of local Fundamentalist Islam aka the Taliban are any real immediate danger to the United States so much as their control of Pakistan and control of a dozen odd nuclear weapons would, could radically change the face of global politics.

The US turned a blind eye and or may have added some help when Pakistan started its nuclear program while the Soviet Union was the current next door world power stuck in the quagmire of Afghanistan in the early eighties.

Now a few or even one nuke could destroy a city somewhere in the west. That Pakistan with nukes as a deterrent to the Soviet threat or India (not in our camp back then) was a temporary, now permanent, foreign policy mistake of administrations back when.

Now the CIA and the US Air Force can target any “raghead” in sight in our Asia land war run amuck.

No-name terrorists now CIA dron etargets

Once upon a time, the CIA had to know a militant's name before putting him up for a robotic targeted killing. Now, if the guy acts like a guerrilla, it's enough to call in a drone strike.

It's another sign of that a once-limited, once-covert program to off senior terrorist leaders has morphed into a full-scale -- if undeclared -- war in Pakistan. And in a war, you don't need to know the name of someone on the other side before you take a shot….

In Pakistan, however, the opposite has happened. Starting in the latter days of the Bush administration, and accelerating under the Obama presidency, drone pilots have become more and more free to launch their weapons.

The situation in Pakistan is more on a macro level. On a micro level is how a Pakistani who spent ten years in our country repaid our cultural hospitality and education with a failed attempt to bomb and kill tourists in Times Square. I should add that killing anybody in Times Square, crossroads of the world, would be an attack on the United Nations considering the variety of tourists and foreign nationals as tourists on that particular piece of Manhattan turf 24/7.

I was rather taken aback when I saw the article below. While the government is trying to look for terrorist training camps to drone out and are looking for a money man behind the attempted Times Square attack - the bottom line is that Faisal Shahzad, would be Times Square Bomber, spent about $7000 on rent, a used car and gasoline, fertilizer and firecrackers in his failed attempt.

And that in all probability, this creep was self financed by a home equity loan of $65,000 he received on his house in 2009 from Wachovia Bank.

Bizarre. Bizarre. Bizarre.

Times Square plot may have cost as little as $7K

Until that departure, there was no trail of lawsuits or missed payments indicating he was in trouble. In fact, his financial history was clean enough that Wachovia Bank gave him a $65,000 home equity line in January 2009.

I wonder why banks are still making home equity loans. I wonder why the money is not invested better elsewhere in the economy. I think that Big Banks are only an ATM or Internet push mutton robot to disperse wealth to anyone. We need small local banks to administer and make loans and mortgages. There is no local humans left in the US in the banking equation. Your local bankers used to know who you were. You were not anonymous in terms of using the banks’ local depositors' money.

That and I have to wonder why Faisal Shahzad, even if he was witness to "man’s inhumanity to man" in Pakistan, why does he see justification in trying to kill his local neighbors in Connecticut/New York in the scheme of things.

Perhaps while the global statement to “Love your Neighbor” sounds good in theory but may only work locally at best. My global vision is a farce I fear and perhaps an impossible dream as well.

Obama – Jokes in Bad Taste

Barack Obama is by some sources Christian Lite. The fact that he possesses some Christian convictions or way of looking at the world is not good enough for the mean spirited holier than thou right.

The left’s elites are many times non-believers. That term these days could mean anything from atheist to just don’t care about organized religion.

In many ways the comments from Rush Limbaugh about an eastern establishment controlling the media, aside from his corpulent self serving gluttonous eastern establishment self, have some basis in fact. Obama gets free passes from that media on the religion thing.

Of course Obama heard Reverend Wright say nasty things about America. Reverend Wright and his generation have some right in airing grievances against a country that once officially and now occasionally treats him as a second class citizen.

Obama distanced himself from Wright when the self serving right focused media started to magnify Reverend Wright’s political incorrectness.

The whole thing about not wanting to inconvenience church congregations by attending church in Washington D.C. with thirty odd vehicles in the Presidential entourage makes sense. And besides, these days, who goes to church every Sunday anymore.

All in all, I give points to Obama for not wearing his religious beliefs on his sleeve or a pin on his lapel. He does not go on and on in boring nonsense about being a born again whatever.

I do draw the line at bad jokes. No, not the jokes with bad or racy language. I draw the line at part of his delivery this past week at the Correspondents Dinner where the host Jay Leno proved himself the non-talented hack that he is. I refer to Obama’s unchristian inhumane joke about Drones:

"Jonas Brothers are here, they're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don't get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming. You think I'm joking?"

Barry bombed with that joke as far as I am concerned.

One of the things rumored to have turned half baked American citizen Faisal Shahzad into a half baked would be terrorist bomber and mass murderer is his reaction or witness to the death of innocent citizens in his native Pakistan by use of these robots of mass murder.

Drones may look good on paper and the generals in the Pentagon can watch live on satellite the death of real terrorists mixed with the general population getting vaporized in some sort of cost saving modern day Pentagon Video Game.

Just because a half baked Christian or Christian Like President signs off on these weapons of mass destruction in a foreign artificial theatre of war is no reason to joke about the misuse of these weapons as tools for collateral damage as he used last Saturday night.

Obama. Fire your asshole joke writer.

Obama. Consider what it really is, besides political, to be a true Christian.

Faisal Shahzad and the American Dream

Pardon me for harping on this subject one more time. Aside from the American dream not working for Faisal Shahzad, his need to measure success on perhaps a fallback to native culture and native pride takes me nowhere.

In the secular culture that America has become, one assumes that the golden rule or some sort of love thy neighbor filters through that secular veneer of day to day living.

Faisal from what I have read is not religious. He is secular. His apparent hatred toward strangers in Times Square is an act by a sociopath, one who does harm to others and in general has no basic regard for others.

That America rolled out its welcome mat to Faisal Shahzad and he turned on us, would kill us - is an insult to our long standing good nature and good will as a nation.

That illegal Mexican immigrants are not plotting to blow up our institutions or our people and many on the far right would reject them and accept a son of privilege from Pakistan as a preferred person in terms of visas, education etc. over illegals. This is a strange norm these days but conforms with class structures in societies everywhere. Money talks.

I include a video from Al Jezeera that the other world out there, a muslim religious or a muslim secular world will see. No doubt the thought runs through the minds of many there as it does here – America is where the world wants to get to – why did you not make more effort to succeed in the business of life? Why did you have to turn to death?

America is a hope to the world still. But maybe just maybe, secularism on the planet has not yet reached a satisfactory norm of moral balance.

America has always stood for fairness even if things were not fair for some or for many. The foundation of American confidence lay in the abstract of hope laid out in our founding documents of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

I will not say that the American Dream is dead because Faisal Shahzad on a micro level just shrugged and walked away and worse than that tried to kill us in the process.

I don’t know what Islam is about but the core of Jesus’ message is to love your neighbor in Connecticut, New York City or Pakistan.

Without that core human belief in dignity and respect for your neighbors on planet earth, the fabric of our global civilization is doomed!




(click on start arrow, then click on screen to enlarge image)

Faisal Shahzad - Financial Analyst

I am reminded of once working for a brokerage house in the back office. I didn’t sell smoke like the front office. Back then I did not know it was smoke.

I can remember trying to train my job functions, for a few days, to a twenty something recent college graduate. He did not see the need of training to know what the back office did. It was not relevant as far as he was concerned. He was going to start a Hedge Fund by age twenty-five and retire as a billionaire at age thirty.

I see our disloyal citizen Faisal Shahzad had recently been working as a Financial Analyst for some no doubt store front brokerage firm and earning in the $50,0000 a year price range. Even with that salary he could not keep up the failed American dream – post September 15, 2008 and the meltdown. Apparently there are still jobs in the financial industry/ ponzi investment area if you are under thirty and have an M.B.A..

No doubt, Faisal saw the writing on the wall with his turning thirty and being a total business failure by Lloyd Blankfein’s impeccable standards and quit his financial job before he got the boot and they outsourced his job to India. Perhaps in the back of Shahzad’s mind he thought he might catch up to his old job when it arrived in Pakistan. Time to kill. Why not kill and maim a hundred tourists in Times Square. Haven’t you ever heard of Golf Faisal?

There are no doubt a thousand aspects as to why this young man who was plugged into the American success queue: college, graduate school, youth – what went wrong. If he were a native born American and not a naturalized one there would be a dozen standard cliché answers as to what went wrong. Loner, dissatisfied, a failure etc. and turning to mass murder which seems to be a hobby of sorts in parts of the world. Not that organized mass murder through wars and armies of established nations is that much different at times.

When was the last real necessary honest war that American was engaged in???

Woulda. Coulda. Shouda.

In my mind, I keep going back to the college kid who didn’t want to know my one critical slice of back office operations. I think of how the FED having bailed out these coke head CEOs running around pretending to create wealth for the few is somehow the new mantra – the new America Nightmare posing as the American Dream at 200 West Street NYC (Goldman Sachs Global Headquarters of the ? New World Order).

Where are we as a nation when the best of each generation now must get ground up into college trained sausages that totally believe the new religion of greed and the near sacred philosophy of Bernie Madoffism. These youths blindly follow the Goldman Sachs golden idol pathway to secular heaven and the new standards of American success that eliminates most of humanity from any possible success formula?

Faisal Shahzad – human drone terrorist fails (this time)

The act of desperation in the middle east to is convince people that God or Allah is on your side and have those stupid souls commit a suicide bombing to die for a political/religious cause. This is part of the equation of ignorance and poverty we are fighting in the midst of the mess over there.

In a global sense we cannot walk away from a global situation that has manifested itself since 911.

Jimmy Carter started to tell us to stop our dependence on foreign oil in the late seventies. Congress, corrupt from oil money, has not followed through on a plausible energy policy since.

The growing oil slick and cancer on the environment in the Gulf of Mexico is coming home to haunt our inactions for decades. As a result, we are drawn into the corrupt Saudi and Muslim world politics of unknown places on the other side of the planet.

These acts of so called martyrdom or heroics that we see elsewhere are coming closer to us.

Except for the jihadist US Army officer shrink Nidal Hasan, the U.S. has been very lucky since 911 in terms of avoiding direct terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

I see a long distance pattern to these so called sleeper cells in the U.S.. While a Shahzad or a Hasan are already here, they in essence have to turn on the hand that feeds them here in the United States and try to connect to some native roots elsewhere for encouragement in their acts of mass murder or attempted mass murder.

The Christian west long ago made suicide a taboo for individuals while directly and indirectly blessing wholesale warfare in it place.

At latest news, the economy going south may have contributed to Shahzad souring on his piece of the American Dream.

Long distance is someone or some group trying to pull off a complicated bomb construction and bomb detonation here in America. The people such as the underwear bomber at Christmas or the Times Square attempted bomber - they did not succeed in that long distance connection from some ancient culture and religious hate thing overseas.

People that blow themselves up in Iraq and Afghanistan are poor and certain that their reward is in Paradise with the Prophet.

Foreign born people who live here, are educated here and have opportunities here are perhaps contaminated by our secular culture that chooses life over death.

That to drive into Times Square, perhaps playing some Timothy McVeigh like tape in your head, and walking away from a half assed built bomb and to save your half assed half American life is a flaw in the present evolving equation of hate, terror and mass murder.

To be young and stupid like this Times Square suspect is to be ideal and zealous in your hate against the U.S. even while you want your cake (life) and eat it too like an American.

This is really a screwed up equation of modern proportions on the domestic and international global world stage. I hope this is a temporary scenario in the ongoing long term march to the future.

Pathways and Roadblocks to Salvation

An unfinished thought occurred to me the other day in a previous article and I did not go with the flow. A lot of talk, thought being stirring up in the religious press because of Brian McLaren who knows that Christianity is doomed if it chooses literalism over flexibility in a world exploding with technology and knowledge. Many interesting stats, that by 2050 America could be a nation with a majority of non-believers. Rather a soul-less world so to speak of or envision. Kind of like France.

Viewpoint: Not every brand of Christianity can be the right one

In an interview with Christianity Today, Brian McLaren said "I don't think we've got the gospel right yet. What does it mean to be 'saved'? When I read the Bible, I don't see it meaning, 'I'm going to heaven after I die.' Before modern evangelicalism nobody accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior, or walked down an aisle, or said the sinner's prayer. I don't think the liberals have it right. But I don't think we have it right either. None of us has arrived at orthodoxy." ("The Emergent Mystique," Christianity Today November 2004).

In Mclaren's case I guess I don't know where he thinks the saved go after they die. He can't seem to define what it is to be saved, he has no "right" gospel message to give. Someone is wrong.

Why Christianity Must Adapt -- Or Perish

…A literal interpretation of the Bible offers regressionism and leaves little room for progress. This is exactly where McLaren finds the inherent problem with modern Christianity, and the exact thing that must change: the Bible is a ballast.

What of a new Bible, one that makes more sense examining the past and is pro-human when applied to the future, releasing past dogma for improvements and corrections? As you may have guessed, it is not necessary to replace the physical work and words of the Bible; it is sufficient to have it become a new book via a fresh reading.

The thought I had started the other day had to do with looking at bible passages and rather than accept them literally, to look at them in terms of human energy and or the energy of the Universe, a force of God. Of course that energy could also be represented not only by human words but also by simple symbols or common elements.

Except a man be born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God [John 3:5].

I think the above is one of the most perplexing quotes in the new testament. It also is a keystone of modern evangelicalism and their “born again” agenda as a marketing selling point.

Maybe, just maybe, the birth of water and the spirit is a birth of soul out of water and fire.

Very basic symbols but think about it. If you are mediocre and conform or never think much about passages in the bible or how they might be reapplied in a modern age or modern situations, maybe your way to heaven is a very dimly lit corridor on the other side of life.

But if there is a maximum of energy spent in the conflict between thought and non-thought, belief and non-belief, water which is life on earth and fire which is the fire of the spirit of God, the final victory over life is in having more fire in life to withstand the water of living of your everyday life.

The spirit, the soul, the divine spark within must dominate over the water of the perhaps drudgery of life which if in proper balance could be the kingdom of God on earth – to reflect the fire which should be within and recognized, cultivated and multiplied.

Life is a balance of yin and yang, water and fire, thought and soul, actions improper and proper. Life after death is a reflection of a life lived by your input and manner.

Salvation can mean much more and mean many more things than any sentence of words in black ink on paper from John.

To be a prisoner of words sometimes means being a prisoner locked away from truth, light, freedom and rebirth here and forever.