Matthew Never Threshed Wheat – The Urban Gospels – “Chaff Farmers” – Cookie Cutter RC Bishops

I look at all the Chaff Farmers, American Bishops raised in farmland and the Midwest that now seem to dominate the once great RC dioceses on the East and West Coast of America.  

These Chaff Farmer/Clerics, had very few choices handed to them in their youth, their only meal ticket choice in Fly Over Country and or Nowhere USA was to either stay on the farm or to go to a seminary.

I am reminded by a comment elsewhere about all the really Chaff Farmers (my term) coming out of, or by their association with states like Wisconsin and Missouri.

I am reminded of my belief that the original gospels were probably not written by actual witnesses of the historic man and or myth of Jesus.

I am reminded that Jesus probably preached to the rural poor, to farmers, to itinerate day labor of farms, something I think Jesus did at one time or another.

I am reminded that Chaff is the part of the Wheat that is unwholesome and hard to digest and not being all that nutritious.

While the metaphor in the gospel of Matthew about God and or a Son of Man figure separating the wheat from the chaff, the unwanted part and throwing it and or they into fire is a metaphor that negates the idea that the very poor that Jesus preached to, like they had the luxury of wasting part of a food product in the day to day battle of survival.

Matthew 3:12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

Even if the chaff is a byproduct, it can be mixed with other animal feed to sustain those animals. It can be put back into the soil as a form of nutrient. It can also be burned but probably on a cold winter’s night in the corner fire place. It is not wasted. 

All in all, it fits into what I have previously said about the parable of the mustard seed, a product that something the poor of Palestine knew nothing about.  That up until the twentieth century with mechanized farming, modern transportation and marketing did mustard makes its way onto the middle class tables of the west as a cheap condiment.

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2012/01/fake-mustard-seed-parable-greco-roman.html

Indeed, I feel certain that the Jesus-y feel of the mustard seed parable has an overlaying stink of an urban scholar that knows all the aspects of primitive botany from books and also commodity profits of an earthy sounding farm product that Jesus must have had knowledge of, but probably did not.

In fact, in one of the synoptic passages, the mustard seed parable is preceded by a parable of weeds among wheat. While an urban dweller who wrote this mustard seed parable might stick his nose up at weeds, many weeds are indeed edible and the poor, the starving unentitled poor, Jesus’ poor, would have gathered up many of those weeds separated eventually from the wheat and ate them. Survival makes more sense than urban vested scholarship in the early church’s reconstruction of a holy man who few if any recorded any details about.

Not only eat the weeds, but dry the ones that were not edible and use them as fuel, not burn them up foolishly like waste in an urban middle class garden.

Which puts perhaps puts me at odds with the term Chaff Farmers. But in their case they seem to me of late a waste product interfering in politics and not understanding the delicate nature of the fabric of democracy.  

Indeed, for this modern crop of yokels, wearing thousands of dollars of silk robes they read rules out of a rulebook not unlike a Pennsylvania State Trooper on the Pennsylvania Turnpike but with less enthusiasm than the Trooper.

 

A cookie cutter class of cleric but one that are uniform in shape of their training and non-outlook in life, in their total lack of heart, since they only serve a kingdom not of this world, which might fool some unless they got to see the real balance sheet of the Vatican Bank.

God is not in a rulebook. Not 613 rules of the Torah or 613 odd pages of catechism. A richly dressed class of hypocritical Pharisees is still just a richly bunch of Pharisees in any time, place or culture.

Chaff yes. To be thrown out into fire? Useful? Hardly.

Moral? (rhetorical question) (more like a punch line) LOL

Have a nice day.

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American Education Ain’t Worth Jack Shit

The way the godless money men and women have commoditized education in this country, it is now out of reach of the common man, even with a gazillion student loans.  Considering all the college grads that I have trained over the years, the youngest ones that have spent the most money on their education seem to be the stupidest.

I say stupid because somewhere along the timeline the myth that college taught truth and or knowledge got wrapped up with the value of bundled mortgage securities and the like.

My most cynical line over the years has been that if Harvard could teach you anything worth knowing in life, they could charge you $250,000 a credit.  Well they still cannot teach common sense, Jack Shit to be honest, but the academic whores at Harvard are close to charging that $250,000 a credit for their stamp, imprimatur class of ediocation.

It is not to say than some kids with college degrees these days are not intelligent.  But do they know where Belgium is? Do they know who engaged in the American Civil War?  Or more importantly why? Do they know if blue is green?  Huh?

I have seen my son’s college text books.  The books, the paperbacks cost hundreds of dollars.  The shit in them is changed every six months like a 1990s personal computer.  The flavor of the month history, political science (they don’t call it that anymore) and literature is more geared toward some as yet to be revealed unknown political agenda. 

Is it actually an education agenda intertwined with the Publishing Industrial Complex that gets their bribes and inflated kickbacks from the Universities to enslave these poor kids in eternal debt. And worse than that, the books are printed in freakin China no less.

Of course, colleges can teach professions.  Doctors, Lawyers, Accountants to name a few. But all this other stuff seems more like bullshit than education.

And the little tin gods who run departments with triple degrees in bullshit are the morons in charge of the top end of this education morass.

I don’t like the thought of home schooling mostly because on that end of the spectrum, they only seem to just want to teach Jesus and dinosaur husbandry.  But looking at the idiots, the educationists, I have had to deal with through the years trying to get a learning disabled child to conform to their totalitarian world view for testing and learning conformity and turning young minds into cookie cutter robots in life, I can see why this country is so fucked up across the board.

There was a time when college was for people who wanted to be ministers or doctors or chemists.  And the son of the factory owner killed time there on his way to inheriting the factory - the only true formula to American success.  Back then on a small scale it was a necessary evil.

But who has ever proven that a college degree from an Ivy League college meant anything in terms of intelligence.  Look at George Bush as a sad example of how money can buy a degree at Yale and Harvard and not produce an improvement in personal intelligence or incremental increase in benefit to society.

To all the baby boomers that sat in classrooms and conformed and got a sheepskin on a wall to get an above average salaried job, those glory hole days are over.  If these young kids want to make a living, they've
got to hustle the old fashioned way, show some sweat, and not sit around running up student loan debt hoping the jobs are going to magically reappear from India or China.

In other words, get a life.  Start a factory, sell something, and create something other than a video game.  The future belongs to the people with common sense, old fashioned horse sense or as I sometimes call it Farm Sense.

Farm Sense means that if you don’t make the hay, don’t feed the cow or the pig, you starve to death.  That is where America is headed I fear.

I know Obama looks good in his $3500 suits and I saw him on Leno last night. He has all the right degrees etc.  But he won the lottery in life a long time ago.  He was the right poise, the right perfect PC brain dead language that sounds like a perfect delivery of a Ronny Reagan news conference script written by his keepers. 

His recent pandering to help students with student loan debt makes him just another tool of the Man.  Don’t be fooled.  A used car salesman in a $3500 suit is still just a used car salesman.  (Look under the hood.)

Don’t believe the myth that you can buy into the privileged silver spoon class with the right education.  Some can win that lottery, like one in a million.  Truth is - only the children of the rich who go to Ivy League schools, whose parents and grandparents went there as well, are guaranteed a country club crony place on the board room table of a bank or a brokerage house or partnership in a Wall Street law firm.

 

The rest of you are just education fodder ground up and spit out by the Education/Publishing Industrial (For Profit only) Industrial Complex and charged an arm, a leg and an asshole for the privilege.

Get a life.  Create your own job. Don’t waste time instutionalized in an American university where your intelligence and ambition will get turned into, useless in real life, educated mush.

If you must get a higher education – learn some languages - go overseas or abroad.  America’s time has come and gone.  Good luck.