Biden Said What?

From a speech Biden gave a couple of days ago in Atlanta, speaking about the Democrats' "Voting Rights Bill":

"I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?" Full Speech

Um, what? First of all - what able-bodied (or un-able-bodied for that matter) person in America today is unable to vote? Even in states with the most strict rules regarding voting (you know, the ones that require *gasp* an ID to vote), there is early voting and absentee voting available weeks before the conclusion of a Federal election. The polls are open, in the vast majority of states, for 13-14 hours on Election Day. There are organizations that will provide transportation to the polling place if you need it. There is little to no excuse that any would-be voter has, for not being able to vote. Lest you think that it stops at simply trying to make it easy for people to vote...oh no, this Bill also gives the Federal government control over how states conduct re-districting (also referred to as 'gerrymandering'). It also makes the Department of Justice the Federal agency that will have the final say about whether individual states can change laws related to voting. It is a complete overhaul of how elections are run in this country...

Democrats are woefully tone deaf on this issue. This is not an issue of race or ethnicity. This is an issue of integrity, and in ever-increasing numbers, Americans are rightfully questioning the security and legitimacy of elections. This isn't something to just dismiss as 'crack-pottery'. If there isn't overriding confidence in the security and legitimacy of elections, that erodes at the very foundation of the Republic. The descent from doubt to chaos, in lieu of something to shore up confidence, will be short and and fast. THAT is the importance of this issue...but the Democrats want to make it sound like we are back in the 1940s and 1950s and that certain segments of the population are being purposefully suppressed. That *might* be true in very specific individual cases (a small handful of them), but it is not true on the whole, not even close.

Federalizing elections and election laws is Unconstitutional and this Bill needs to be stopped. Think about what Biden said - he is basically saying, if you don't agree with him, you are an enemy of the United States. Jefferson Davis was the leader of the Confederacy. George Wallace was a proponent of segregation. Bull Connor stood against the Civil Rights Bill. Biden is saying that if you disagree with him, you are like those people (all of them Democrats by the way). What an insult!

Destructive Hyperbole

 I read this article this morning and the following quote came to mind:

"Hyperbole is in common use, as much among the unlearned as among the learned, because there is in all men [and women] a natural propensity to magnify or extenuate what comes before them, and no one is contented with the exact truth." - Quintilian

Modern political discourse in the United States, on both sides of the aisle, has become almost pure hyperbole, to the detriment of our political institutions, to political dialog among the people and, ultimately, to the Republic itself. No, January 6th was not a 'violent insurrection'. It was more a failure of Capitol security than anything else. Some people were hurt, yes, but these trespassers did not have weapons and they certainly did not have any meaningful organization as a whole (there were small groups of folks who came to the protest together). One of the trespassers (Ashli Babbitt) was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer, one police officer died the next day (Jan. 7th) as a result of a heart attack. Two others died of heart attacks during the event and one woman died of an amphetamine overdose. One dead capitol police officer, 4 dead Trump supporters and the only one killed by violence was a Trump supporter who was shot by a police officer. These are the actual facts. Only those who seek to serve their own (or their party's) agenda would argue otherwise. At the same time, we can all agree that those people involved in trespassing at the Capitol that day, along with any of the other illegal activities they engaged in as a result, should and will be held accountable to the law. Many of them have been incarcerated and many of them have been tried and convicted of crimes. It is possible to believe that the events of January 6th were, at the same time illegal, but not insurrection.

I would argue that if you believe in the "January 6th was a violent insurrection" narrative, then you haven't read anything that disagrees with that narrative. There are actual facts surrounding these events and it is worth the time to find out, insofar as one can, what actually happened that day. A failure to do so is to abdicate on your responsibility to think critically. Once you're into that kind of habit, you can be lead to believe pretty much anything.

Bloodlands

I'm currently reading the book "Bloodlands" by Tim Snyder. I cannot remember reading a more difficult-to-stomach book. He published it in 2010,  and it is the definitive account of the killing machines of Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. It chronicles, in painful detail, the attempted extermination of the Jews by Hitler. It chronicles, in painful detail, the horrifying conditions of widespread State-sanctioned starvation in Ukraine and some of the other Western Soviet Union countries during the early part of WWII, that saw people resort to cannibalism (sometimes of their own children!) to stay alive. It chronicles, in painful detail, mass shootings and mass poisonings of all sorts of different groups of people by the evil governments of Germany and the Soviet Union. It sometimes prompts audible reactions of horror from me as I read. To fully comprehend the evil and the bloodshed of non-combat civilians during the period from 1937-1945 is staggering. I love this quote in the book - a reason why remembering and knowing all of this is important:

"It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding...Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible. To yield to this temptation, to find other people inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history."

And then one more:

"...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew passing through some abstract notion of death 5.7 million times. It means countless individuals who nevertheless have to be counted, in the middle of life..."

Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI)?

I'll state, out-front, that COVID-19 is real. I'm not debating that. It can be seen under a microscope. It's real. What seems less than real, however, is the hysteria associated with it. For example - my co-worker called this morning and said he was taking the rest of the week off because someone who was at his house last night tested positive for COVID-19. I asked, "are you feeling ok?" to which he replied, "yes." "Is the person who tested positive feeling ok?" "Yes," he replied, "she only got tested because her daughter, who she recently saw, had a positive COVID-19 test." Never mind that EVERYONE involved in my short story has a nearly ZERO percent chance of being hospitalized or dying from COVID-19. All are healthy, in the 50s and 60s, no co-morbidities, no other systemic health issues. Turned out a few hours later, after the home-test originally showed a 'positive', a test administered at a health facility came back with a 'negative result'. Everyone, rest assured, is ok, minus some frayed nerves.

I'm starting to this that what is really happening here is what psychologists call a "Mass Psychogenic Illness" or "MPI" for short. Here is the definition:

"Sometimes people in a group start to think they might have been exposed to something dangerous, like a germ or a toxin (poison). They might get signs of sickness like headache, dizziness, faintness, weakness or a choking feeling. If many people in the group start to feel sick at about the same time, we might think they have mass psychogenic illness. The group might be a class in a school or workers in an office. Mass psychogenic illness is sometimes called mass hysteria or epidemic hysteria." - American Family Physician Foundation

This phenomenon has been documented for hundreds of years and even a cursory Google search provides a long list of likely instances, many of them having occurred in the last 100 years. You might say to me something like, "well, people are dying and being hospitalized!" To which I would say yes, I don't disagree, but don't underestimate the power of the mind on the body. If you think you are sick and you stress about it enough, your body is going to have something called a psychosomatic response. That is, it is going to manifest real aches, pains and otherwise.

Name another time in modern history where we have had one single illness blasted at us, from every imaginable source of news, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for almost 2 years? Maybe the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s? What does that kind of myopic focus and obtuse portrayal of real life risk do to the psyche of millions of people? Add to that the constant visual cues of masks, everywhere you go? Is it possible to delude the entire world? Would scientists and public health officials speak up if nearly everyone in power, around the Globe, is demanding a response to the COVID-19 boogeyman? Would they? Or would they play along? Would they perhaps even stoke the fear because it is bringing them the kind of attention and professional satisfaction they have always dreamed of?

COVID-19, for the vast majority of people, is a mild illness, at all ages. By 'mild', I mean, it's equivalent to a cold or mild flu. Studies have shown that in perhaps as many as 40% of the 'cases', there are no symptoms at all, the afflicted end up being fine. For children, it literally is a cold in terms of symptoms and severity. More children, in fact, have died from Influenza, during the existence of the COVID-19 pandemic, than have died from COVID-19. I believe the latest CDC statistic I saw was that 99.997% of children (under 18) survived their 'bout' with COVID-19.

The truth is that it is mostly the elderly that are dying. The elderly and the already-sick. I'm not sure if you have hung out with many elderly people lately - I can't claim to know tons of them, but I do have several that I talk with regularly - they are a somewhat health-hyper bunch. Not as a rule, of course, some of them, like my wife's grandmother say things like "well, if COVID gets me it gets me, but I'm not going to stop living life!" Most of them, however, are somewhat fearful of it. Now, my question is, what is the effect of non-stop coverage and fear-mongering on them? Could it cause stress levels so high that they end up dying from it? If an otherwise healthy 50-something has an anxiety attack, they will most likely be ok - but what if that happens to a more-frail 75-year old?

Lest you think I'm crazy - this whole thing is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I understand that COVID-19 is actually taking some people's lives. What I'm curious about, however, is how the hysteria of it all is affecting the situation. I don't think its an understatement to say that the hysteria itself is perpetuating the pandemic.

On the Relationship Between Church and Culture

"Christians are often tempted to get into 'weed pulling'. Do you know what I mean by that? We are so anxious to clean this world up for God that we say, 'God, we're going to pull the weeds up.' The owner of the field says, 'Don't pull the weeds up, you might destroy the wheat.' When the harvest is ripe, the angels, says Jesus, will come. They are the reapers, not us. We are the labourers, to produce the harvest. It is the angels who will come and take the tares out of the harvest field which is the world - not the church. They will take out of the world everyone who does evil and everything that causes evil, and throw the weeds on the fire.

In fact, by the grace of God we are called to turn weeds into wheat. When I went to Winnipeg, I was intrigued. They put me on television as soon as I arrived. I happen to have read a bit of the history of Winnipeg and discovered to my astonishment that an ancestor of mine had founded that city by emptying the Scottish highlands of people to make room for sheep, and sending them off to the Red River. So I said, 'I'm happy to be here because you wouldn't be here but for my family, so I'm really interested to be here.' That really got them listening, even the cameraman. But I said: 'In the early days, the pioneers came here and they established the city, and the next group to come along were the prostitutes, and the women came to take the money off the pioneers. The next groups to come along were the families, and then after the families came the evangelists and the pastors to start churches, and that was how the mid-west towns were established. Then the churches decided to have a united anti-evil crusade, run the prostitutes out of Winnipeg and close down the red light district. All the churches rose up in enthusiastic union. They did it, and they cleaned the town up and the women moved further West, and all the Christians thought this was a great victory. I am not sure that the Lord thought it was. They pulled the weeds up, but Christians did not go to those prostitutes and tell them of the love of God. The gospel is not getting rid of them that way - and not one preacher preached to the men who had been their customers to tell them to repent.'

If we are not careful we are going to get into a 'weed pulling' crusade in this country and think that that is Christianity. Think that though very carefully. The Lord will come with his angels to deal with godlessness and we must look for his coming and pray for it, and leave judgement to Him. Our task is the task of getting people saved and making sure there is wheat growing, because the wheat and weeds will both grow together. Some Christians talk as if the church is going to get so strong we are going to push Satan across the English Channel. He can go to France and they can cope with him - as if we are going to clean up England. We are not. The kingdom of Satan is going to get stronger in England. There are other Christians, who are natural pessimists and take the opposite view, saying, 'Oh, we're in the last days. Aren't things terrible? Things are going down and down - in fact, when the Lord comes back, there could be only you and me, and I'm not sure if you're sound.' Have you heard that kind of talk? I am a realist who believes with Jesus that both are going to grow together - the kingdom of God is going to get stronger and stronger and the kingdom of Satan is going to get stronger and stronger, and there will be an increasing battle between them and increasing confrontation, until finally Jesus Christ and Antichrist face each other, and I know who is going to win because that is when Jesus will come with ten thousand angels. He has not told the church to establish the kingdom. The angels will establish it finally, but Jesus has told us to get on and announce it, and get everybody we can into the kingdom. That is a balance which is needed in Christian thinking." - David Pawson (A Commentary on Jude, 2011)

Storm Clouds Gathering

"A time of painful testing, even persecution, is coming. Lukewarm or shallow Christians will not come through with their faith intact. Christians today must dig deep into the Bible and church tradition and teach themselves how and why today's post-Christian world, with its self-centeredness, its quest for happiness and rejection of sacred order and transcendent values, is a rival religion to authentic Christianity." - Rod Dreher, "Live Not By Lies"

It seems to me that people, in general, are bad at seeing persecution coming. If they could see it coming, the instances of it would be more rare because people, seeing what is coming, would avoid it. It is often said, too, that "history does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes." The next totalitarian regime in the World isn't going to look like Nazi Germany (and yet people are always talking about "the next Hitler"). It will be no less destructive and oppressive, but the people who get sucked into its' orbit will think everything is OK (maybe even great), until it isn't.

The reason I feel such an urgency to share my faith these days, particularly with fellow Christians, is because, for some unknown-to-me reason, I feel like I can see what's coming. The moment we live in now feels historic, the winds of change are starting to blow harder. Maybe it is something peculiar to the time in which I was born - that I have been someone who has lived through the technological revolution that has happened over the past 30 years, I don't know.

What I have come to understand is that without a firm foundation, Faith is tenuous when hard times come. Whether is it a storm in our own lives (long-term illness, death of a loved one, financial hardship, etc) or a storm in society (persecution, government oppression, etc), these times of testing reveal what we actually believe is true. In some ways, I believe this is God's design - He is the one who laid the curse on humanity after the Fall in the Garden - and in the same way a father disciplines a wayward child, that Curse was meant to work as a discipline of humanity. The difficulty, pain, suffering, and hardship of life is meant to cause us to turn toward God. It doesn't work like this for everyone though. For the person whose faith is only surface level, when hard times come, they don't have anything firmly planted and the shallow roots of that faith are easily ripped out of the ground.

So why not prepare now? When we see the storm clouds gathering on the horizon, we grab a raincoat and the umbrella. We close the windows of our homes and make sure everything in the yard is secured. This is that opportunity. Root your faith firmly now so that when the winds really start to blow and the circumstances get more difficult, you know what it is that you're holding on to. You won't easily lose sight of the promises of God and the Hope we have in Jesus' return.

"Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash." (Matthew 7:24-27, NIV)

**I recommend that book I quoted from at the outset. I found it to be somewhat biased (I believe that there are equal dangers from the extremes of both the Left AND the Right, politically speaking, in this country) but nevertheless helpful. It certainly is helpful in making the case for 'preparedness' when it comes to Faith. It is also instructive in that it gives many insights from those who lived through totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. I very much appreciated their insight in how to resist at an individual or familial level.

God's Story in the Stars - Mazzaroth (Part 1)

I have to credit Tim Miller for turning me on to this topic. I was in riding in a van with him some time ago and this topic came up in conversation and what he told me was something I had never even heard before...so that set me to exploring and researching. What follows is the result of that work, all thanks to that conversation. This all all overview of what I have learned from others. A book that I highly recommend and which I will cite several times, it entitled, "The Mystery of the Mazzaroth" by Tim Warner. I also recommend a video you can find on YouTube called "The Star of Bethlehem" (Rick Larson). There is another series of 3 videos on YouTube called "Mazzaroth - Story of Yeshua" by Russell Judd which I also highly recommend.

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"The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world." (Psalm 19:1-4, NIV)

There have been times, over the past two and half years, where I feel like God has specifically brought something to my attention and this is one of those things. Generally speaking, if I take something on, I feel the compulsion to research it exhaustively and with God knowing that about me, I believe He does this on purpose. This is one of those things and I have to say at the outset, it has been so profoundly inspiring and encouraging, I couldn't wait to share it. It started, as I mentioned in the brief introduction above, with a relatively benign conversation that I was only a hearer of. Someone who I have a lot of respect for, Tim Miller, had written a children's book several years ago entitled "The Heavens Declare" and someone else asked him a question related to that book. In his answer, Tim was talking about how the constellations tell God's story, which was an idea I had never heard before. That same night, I stayed over at a friend's house and happened to be using one of their kid's rooms (thank you again, Parks' family!) and the next morning, I was getting ready and noticed on the wall a printout of the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. I thought to myself, "what are the odds? I have this stuck in my head and now I see it, randomly, printed out." It felt like God was tapping me on my shoulder saying "Adam, I want you to look at this." And so I started looking into it, and it is more fantastic than I could have imagined. Not only is it reinforcement of God's wonderful plan for the restoration of the Kingdom, but it also reinforces just how thorough and creative and merciful our God is.

This is going to be another multi-part series of posts. I want to introduce the ideas first and then dig deeper in subsequent posts.