Avoid the "My Religion" Trap; Get Outside

I've never understood why "religious" folk, those who take the name of Christ and become 'Christian', fall into the trap of thinking they know more than God about how He should do things.  God says "Forgive," and they say, "But only if they ask with the 'proper' humility."  God says "Love your neighbor as yourself," and they say, "But only if they hold to the correct doctrines."  God says, "The dead know not anything," but they say, "Oh, no, they must suffer by burning in hell forever."  Jesus says, "Don't call your brother a fool," but they say, "What if he is a fool?"

God does not need PR people to maximize attendance in his church. He doesn't need preachers to frighten sinners into being good by telling stories about souls living in torment in Hell that the political church borrowed from the Greeks to use in keeping its members frightened into submission. Why are some who cherish "my religion" so afraid God is going to fall down on the job that they are willing to lie, intimidate and terrorize their fellow man into submission. 

© 2013 by Glenn Sackett

God needs children who will love Him with all their hearts and their neighbors as themselves. He does not ask us to become spiritual stormtroopers. It is a dangerous thing to add extra burdens onto the backs of our fellow men and women that He has not placed on them. When we do so, we make our personal world narrower and narrower and ever more focused on those things we have added to our 'religion' in our misguided efforts to help God out a little where He's gotten slack over the millenia. We come to think of it as "my religion" and when your religion belongs to you, you reduce God to a size you can handle instead of experiencing Him in the utter vastness and splendor that makes you realize that you are really quite a small fellow in a wide world after all. That terrifies some people and they shrink from it, seeking to reduce God to a size they can handle. Once they've done that, then they begin to find fault with the way God does things.  Not big flaws, just minor procedural problems of the sort someone like you could manage quite nicely, so as not to have to bother God about such trivialities anymore. He does have so much to do after all. Why should He be bothered to discipline a few troublesome saints when you are perfectly capable of handling that without having to bother Him at all?

That need to protect God from His own kindness is why so many of us become imprisoned in our own little insular circles.  We do not forgive. We do not leave outcomes in God's hands. If we really look hard at it, we'd find that we don't trust God to be tough enough on others who aren't as "spiritually mature" as we are. And because our reach is not as vast as God's we soon find we can control only that which is within our own very short reach. As a result, over time we imprison ourselves within a tiny space limited by the range within which we feel we can exercise full control over everything in our lives.  Tragically, once we have caged ourselves within that narrow world, we find that there is no room left in there for God. We have shut Him out and are left alone with our self-torment unsuccessfully trying to manage even our own tiny world - a job for which only God is truly suited.

More people should visit the beautiful outdoor places of the world such as the ones in the pictures that accompany this story.  If you spend enough time in such places - the ones built by God - you find that the need to control everything melts away like mud in a hot soapy shower.  When confronted by the majesty of God's creation, it becomes far more and more difficult to hem yourself into the small world of the sort that so many of us "religious" people create for ourselves. When we experience the breath-taking places God has made, we are lifted above our petty selves and as Isaiah said, "will....ride upon the high places of the Earth."  If that's not enough to set your soul free, then you must be enjoying your chains more than I ever did.

© 2010 by Glenn Sackett

© 2013 by Tom King

Three Things I Can Do to Get to Heaven (That I know how to do)

by Tom King - (c) 2010

Since I was a boy I have been told by an endless string of preachers, camp-meeting speakers, radio and tele-evangelists how to get to heaven.

"Fall on the Rock," they say.

"Lean on Jesus," says another.

"Confess your sins and give your life to the Lord."

"Submit yourself unto the Almighty."

"Take up your cross and follow Him."

The problem with all of those exhortations to salvation is that I could never get a satisfactory explanation as to what any of those things meant.

"Preacher," I asked. "What does it mean to fall on the Rock?"

"It means to take up your cross and follow Him."

"What does that mean?"

"It means to submit yourself to the Almighty."

 "How do you do that?"

"Well you confess your sins and give your life to the Lord."

"And how does that work?"

"Well, you lean on Jesus!"

"I don't know how to do that."

"Well, it's easy. You take up your cross and follow Him."

"I don't have a cross!"

"It isn't a literal cross.  What you do is, you see is, uh, you fall on the Rock."

And round and round they went. When finally I came to the Lord, I came as a skeptic. Some may find that a dubious way to start your discipleship, but then, my name is Thomas and Jesus has a history with skeptics named Thomas, so I was baptized, took up my cross and went stumbling after Him looking for answers.

I bought a tiny Bible that fit in my pocket. Not a New Testament, but the whole thing. I wanted the full treatment. I read it cover to cover as I walked back and forth to school, in spare moments when I was working at camp and in my dorm room the next year when I worked my way through Christian boarding academy.

In my reading I found three things that God asks me to do publicly:

1. Be baptized - I'd already done that.
2. Worship Him in fellowship with fellow Christians on the Sabbath (at a minimum). That's easy to figure out how to do.
3. Participate in communion services - I did that even in the summer when I worked at camp. My churchs practices the footwashing ordinance as part of communion and because I ran barefoot all the time at camp, the ground-in dirt on my feet used to turn the foot-washing water black. Awkward at times, certainly a test of humility, but simple to do all the same.

God asks me to do these things without promising me they will get me to heaven. They merely publicly acknowledge that I am His man.

I also found in all my study of the Bible, that there were three other things that God asks me to do personally that I actually knew how to do. I was a bit foggy on how to trust God, have faith in Him, lean on Him and all the rest of those things the pastors exhorted me to do. In my reading I found out where they got all those exhortations by the way - they're all in there in some form or other. So, as I studied, I wrote down only the things God asked me to do that I actually know how to do. They are: 

1. Study: Jesus said to know God was eternal life. How do you know God except by studying his Word and the world that he has made and the way he deals with mankind? Being a rabid and curious reader and habitual student of everything, that wasn't too tough to do.
2. Pray. A somewhat mechanical process at first, but as you gain experience and become comfortable talking to God, you soon find yourself praying constantly; sharing little things with God on the spot instead of waiting to kneel beside your bed. That was pretty easy too.
3. Share what you learned from praying and studying. There I hit a snag. My first experience with this requirement was "witnessing", an exercise in tenacity that my church conducted weekly, where you went around to the homes of people you didn't know and asked them to take "literature" from you. It was a painful exercise for shy people like me and really put me off the sharing bit. But as I continued with praying and studying, the Lord placed me in situations and places where I found opportunity to share what I was discovering about God's character as I prayed and studied. So, he not only gave me a way to communicate with Him, I found that He also took care of setting up all the appointments for sharing my experience with others.

The thing I discovered as I carried out God's program for going to heaven was that I began to change. My tastes began to change. My language changed. My responses to people and events were altered. I found that I did not resist the change. I actually quite enjoyed becoming a decent, kind-hearted person. All the talk about being clay in the potter's hands began to make sense to me. I had tried the "grit your teeth and try to be good" routine, but had failed as miserably at being good on my own hook as miserably as St. Paul and Martin Luther did.

The great thing is that God requires very little of us other than to place ourselves in His presence through the three activities above. Do them consistently and you will be changed. You cannot help but become a new man or woman if you do. The golden rule will be written upon your heart as surely as a child will grow up if you feed it regularly.

But what's really cool is that you will become, not a carbon copy of every other Christian, but the absolutely unique and special individual that God made you to be. Satan's idea for establishing order in the world calls for all men to be all alike except for a few privileged folk like himself who run things. God's idea for the new world order on the other hand, calls for all men to be truly themselves, each contributing his or her own special talents and ideas to the mix. We give ourselves to Him 1,2,3 and He gives us back ourselves better than He found us. Satan wants cookie cutter slaves to serve their masters. God wants free individuals, sons and daughters, who run things for themselves and to whom He can give gifts in abundance.

Not only that, but God makes His children free by doing for them what they cannot do themselves - giving them the power to make choices for themselves, unencumbered by a crummy childhood, environmental factors, genetic predisposition or cultural influence. Freed from the power of heredity and environment, we may then choose to do what we really, really want to do and not what some unsupected subconscious influence pushes us into doing against our wishes.

Talk about an Extreme Makeover.  How unbelievably cool is that?

Tyler, TX

Light One Candle

Light a Candle in Your Window

December 21, 2009
On this day in 1981, the candle of liberty was being snuffed out in Poland. Church watchers were sitting outside churches and synagogues watching to see who entered and were taking names. The secret police raided Lech Walesa's solidarity union offices. The leaders of the Polish freedom movement were being imprisoned as the Soviet Union threatened military intervention. In the midst of this, the Polish ambassador escaped to America where he met with President Ronald Reagan. Ron and Nancy fought back tears as the ambassador told the story. Vice President Bush comforted the ambassador's wife who had begun to weep. Then the ambassador turned to Presiden Reagan and made an unusual request.


"Would you light a candle in the window of the White House for the Polish people?" he asked.

In typical Reagan fashion, he rose from his chair, went straight up to the second floor and placed a candle in it. As the ambassador watched, he lit the candle with his own hands. Then, Reagan did the ambassador one better. He called a press conference and went on the air before the nation and gave a speech. In it, Reagan appealed to all Americans to put candles in their own windows that Christmas to show their support for the Polish people in their hour of peril.

I remember that Christmas. A candle went up in our window too and in millions of windows across the nation in solidarity with the freedom-loving people of Poland. It was an incredible display and the people of Poland still talk about it to this day.

In Iran, the people are stirring. The secret police take the leaders of the unrest off the street and throw them in prison or shoot them. The mullah's are watching. In Iran the common people yearn for freedom, yet America's new president is silent.

The reason is becoming increasingly clear. In the United States, Homeland Security compiles lists of Americans - gun-owners and preachers, radio personalities and community organizers (the real kind that don't get paid by Acorn). The Congress plans to meet on Christmas Eve to take one more giant step toward taking our liberty from us and our President waits anxiously in the wings to sign into law a scheme to further compass us about with the chains of federal control. Maybe our ambassador should defect to Poland and ask the president of Poland to put a candle in his window for us tonight.

When we are without leaders, it falls upon the American people to become their own leaders.
 
Let all freedom-loving Americans light a candle in their windows tonight as a symbol that we will not allow the light of freedom to die; a symbol that our prayers go up to our brothers and sisters in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea who live under the thumb of despots and criminals and who long for freedom.

More than 2000 years ago a babe was born in a manger and angels proclaimed "Peace on Earth!" The prophet Isaiah said that He would "Proclaim liberty to the captives" and on the night of his birth that light of liberty was kindled and grew into the greatest free nation this Earth has ever seen. False kings and proud emperors have been cast by the wayside in building this powerful force for good. This nation has not only fought against tyranny, but has freed countless peoples from their own chains by direct or by indirect action - often by the mere fact of our existence.

We stand now at the end of the world faced with the greatest threat mankind has ever known. Our president once again bows to kings and potentates. Our representatives sell our liberties for 30 pieces of silver. The light of liberty is threatened.  

Until the author of our liberty returns, I would call upon all men of peace, all believers in freedom, justice and righteousness to rekindle the flame of liberty everywhere. 

Let's start with a single candle in our windows this Christmas.

I'm going to go light mine right now.

Tom King - Flint, TX
(c) 2009 - permission to reprint with credits is granted to all.

The Screwworm Letters – Part 1

"with apologies to C.S. Lewis"

From:
Uncle Screwworm - Administrative Assistant
Office of Grand Marshall Goebbeleninstalin.
Bulgea 1313 Fifth Circle
Attila the Hun Memorial Administrative Complex, Hell

To:
President Wormtongue
The Whitehouse
Nation Whose Name is not Spoken Among Us, Earth

February 2010

My Dear Nephew Wormtongue,

Are you surprised, then, that your attempts to generate support for your reforms through open forums have been such a dismal failure. Have you actually begun to believe your own propaganda? Never assume the Americans are so completely asleep that you cannot disturb their slumber. I agree that the window of opportunity to initiate real reforms in this abysmally chaotic land is absurdly narrow, but you must remember the words of Caesar Augustus, one of the best reform leaders we ever had, "Make haste slowly." Using this method Augustus finished the Roman Republic once and for all and built an empire that lasted half a millennium.

Of course, it is obvious that intellectuals like yourself are best suited to lead the drooling masses. Our educational reforms have, over the past century, successfully reduced the intellectual capacity of the average American by some 20%. These sheep are so much more easily led these days. Most wander through life practically asleep, their minds fuddled with worrying over who is going to get kicked off the island, which girl the Bachelor is going to pick and who Brad, Jen and Angelina are dating lately.

Nonetheless, there are still large numbers of individuals in this plaguey country who slip through the educational system with the inexplicable ability to think independently. I blame that Andrew Carnegie fellow who tried to assuage his personal guilt for some small excesses as an industrial baron by building all those libraries. A nation with all those books lying about in the open is damnably hard to entirely control. Some of its citizens actually read for fun if you can imagine it!

If you overreach, grab for power too quickly, before you've adequately anesthetized the intellectuals, you may stir some of them to action. And by intellectuals, I don't mean the degree festooned boobs we've trained to run things down there. I mean the real intellectuals - the free thinkers; the ones that read things that weren't on our reading lists; the ones that don't ask what everyone else's thinking before they think themselves. If you wake these people up they will cause you no end of grief as you have discovered at your poorly planned health care forums!

Before the next phase of the transformation, you must move forward with the seizure of control of all sources of information. It must happen quickly, before an alarm can be sounded effectively. Remember, this useful argument. "The constitution is not a suicide pact!" You must escalate the climate of fear and urgency by fanning your two major smoke screens.

Catastrophic global climate change legislation needs a couple of good catastrophes to get it pushed through. The boys in disaster promotions are working on that, but you need to remember to insure that your people not don't call it global "warming". It's far too inflexible a term and leaves you no wiggle room. Stick with global climate change, then whatever happens, up or down, you can call you subjects greedy, blame them for the problem and give up some liberties to save themselves.

You've just about blown the health care ploy by moving too quickly without the proper preparation. Your plans to enlist children to help sell the idea is only going to rouse thinking Americans even further.  For now, I suggest you spend the rest of the month shopping with the missus, sailing and building sand castles with your daughters and let the home office see if we can salvage something from this mess you've made.

And since it's too late to cancel the public school speech, at least try to say something soothing and innocuous - preferably something Rush Limbaugh won't quote you on. And for goodness sake get some new communists for the Czar program - some that have the brains not to have admitted it on camera! We're really pushing fried foods with Glenn Beck, but he just won't die. In the meantime, tell your people to try and clean up all the embarrassing video, old books and tax problems before you have 100,000 farmers and truck drivers on the White House lawn with pitchforks and torches.

We won't be able to help you then.

Your loving uncle,
Screwworm

Climate of Fear: The War for America's Shy People

The rhetoric in this countryhas become ridiculous - on both sides! Saying this will not get me a large audience as a blogger. Many conservatives have decided that telling lies is okay as long as your intent is good. The hard left has been doing so for years. Wild stories and inflammatory language is one way to have a popular blog, though.

Me, I'm congenitally unable to do some of the things you have to do to be a successful blogger - among those, tell "good" stories if I know them to be untrue. I'm not very good at writing to be search engine optimized. It seems dishonest to write so that you repeat key words that are popular search words on Google, Yahoo, Bing and the rest. Technically, I should find a way to mention, for instance, Ted Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne, Chappaquiddick, Robert Novak, Michael Jackson or Rebecca Gayheart and Eric Dane (some sort of romantick entanglement I believe). All these are high on the most often searched list of keywords this week. Unfortunately, four years of Mrs. Creel's English classes taught me the evils of artificial writing and I cannot do it and feel good about myself, no matter if it would help me get one million "hits".

If I wanted to rile up some conservative readers and win their allegiance, I should mention Van Jones, Glenn Beck or Town Hall. I do, if I have something to say about those things, but writing an article where I repeat those names simply to get the search engine to move me up in a word search seems as disingenuous as Michael Savage calling himself by his full name instead of using pronouns like "I" or "me". Makes me want to smack him!

According to master blogger, Robert Stacy McCain, some other tricks include finding ways to insert popular women in not much clothing into your blog, picking fights so that you gain lots of enemies and spending a LOT of time self-promoting.

Ah, well, I guess I didn't really want to be a wildly successful blogger anyway. I think I'd rather write honestly. I sleep better at night that way.

Now that I've wandered off topic, let me get back to it. I read a piece in which a liberal someone had gone to a town hall and waved around a map with Iraq on it. He found (surprise, surprise) that 75% of those who opposed Obama's health care initiative were:

1. Unable to find Iraq on a map though it was brightly colored and in the center of the map.

2. All stupid white people who only memorized anti-health care junk that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity had sent them by e-mail or were paid by some mega-insurance companies that had paid them to spread lies about Obamacare.

3. All were probably either on Medicare or Veteran's Care and were hypocrites anyway.

Again I am shocked.

Okay, that was sarcasm. I admit it. It's just that once again, we're getting the same old Democrat tactic. I remember it from high school where it was a popular way to keep the cool kids in power. No matter what happens, if you don't believe and act the way the popular kids did, you were labeled stupid and ignorant even if you have a 139 IQ, a 4.0 GPA and actually knew what you are talking about.

It's the rhetorical equivalent of the masterful comeback, "Oh, yeah!" The Democrats are masters of it.

They'er using it to marginalize the frighteningly large numbers of angry mainstream Americans who are showing up for Health Care Town Hall meetings this summer. The target to be intimidated and "guided" into correct liberal thinking by this particular anti-free speech campaign, however, is not the mythical moderates. It's not conservatives. It's not even the liberal base that supports the health care takeover. This tactic is aimed at people who, by nature, don't want to make a fuss. They don't want to get into a screaming match. They don't want anybody to be mad at them and they do not want to be thought of as "different". This is the group that is truly the swing vote in US elections. They are the go-alongs. It takes a lot to move them and fear that something bad will happen that will upset their world is one of the biggest things that motivates them to action. It takes a lot to get these guys out to a town hall meeting. It is not in their nature to go against anything, much less their duly elected congressman or woman. They don't really understand all the ramifications of political stuff like this because it really doesn't concern them. Only when something threatens the health, comfort and safety of their families. Why else do you think the message is, "Don't worry. Health Care Reform won't hurt you. It will make everything good for all Americans. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain....."

If you go to a town hall, watch how these plain simple folk react when they get really angry at their congressman. Watch them shake their heads as they speak. It's as though they are saying "No, no, no, no, no..." all the time they are confronting this powerful person that they may actually have voted for because they were comfortable with him. They don't want to be there. They don't want to confront this person. They look over at the union guys and the liberal plants sent there to intimidate them and they just flat want to go home and hide. Even their body language says "I don't like doing this."

The problem is that even if they agree with someone, if that person or group resorts to the tactics of shouting, fear and intimidation, they drive those same people away. It's a careful dance between just enough intimidation and too much. Joe McCarthy failed to understand that back in the early 50's. He was right about Communists infiltrating Hollywood. It really was happening. Americans were frightened by it. But when he resorted to Gestapo like tactics, he lost America's shy people. There was a point in the McCarthy hearings where the country gave a collective cringe and turned off their radios. After that, no one cared how much of what he said was true. They weren't listening anymore.

At first, Washington, the Adams boys, Jefferson and Patrick Henry were considered rabble rousers and the American colonists by and large really didn't want to hear them. Mel Gibson captured the sentiment in his character's reaction to the revolution in "The Patriot". He just wanted to take care of his kids and his farm. He wasn't looking to confront power. He knew what the cost would be and he shrank from paying that cost.

I don't blame him. I don't blame any of the grandmas and grandpas that have driven to the town halls in their pickups and big grandma Buicks. It happened during the Revolution. Britain got cocky and pushed their grab for power too far too fast. They made the silent majority, the shy people of America fear for their way of life.

That's what's happening in the first months of the Obama administration. They chose the quick grab for power over the slow, steady approach. The Cap and Trade and Health Care Initiatives are the equivalent of a "Hail Mary" pass in football. I think they've decided that this is the last chance for socialism and if they risk it all on this one roll of the dice, they can win!

Bloggers, talk show hosts and conservative action groups are fighting a delaying action, hoping Americans will wake up to what's happeing before it's too late. We need to block that Hail Mary pass or time may actually run out on us. We'll be left with a frightening new system of government with the power to destroy all opposition in its way.

Delay and Sound the Alarm!

We need night riders like Paul Revere to wake up the country to its peril. We also need the informants that found out the British were coming and where they were going to. Soon we'll need the patriots at the bridge standing toe to toe with a foe that is disciplined, well-armed and confident. But on that day, which side will America's shy people be standing behind? That's the critical factor in whether we win or lose in this fight for freedom.

I think I can tell you which side they'll take. It'll be the side that best convinces them it can protect their way of life - the things they most value. The side that best articulates its case without malice or brutality (or at least without the appearance of malice and cruelty) will carry the field. As Ghandi and Martin Luther King, the original Martin Luther and Jesus Christ himself demonstrated, it may require some of us to have nerves of steel - the ability to hold our fire till we see the whites of their eyes. We may have to risk our lives and our honor, our wealth and our safety. Some of us may be ruined in the effort. Some may not survive. The way to win may well be for enough of us to go down with dignity and reveal the foe as a cruel tyrant by his behavior. We may lose talk radio, conservative news, religious broadcasting and independent publications before it's over. We may lose a lot of things we value before America fully wakes.

I hope not.

In this current, and what I believe may be final, conflict, we must tell the truth, no matter what. We must not pass along lies and rumors just because it works to make people believe like we do. Our opponents do that very well. They lie themselves and then convict us in the press of lies we never told. They make up things to support their agenda, no matter whether they are the truth or not. We must not do that too! We must not resort to the tactics of Goebbels, Stalin, Mussolini Saddam Hussein and their ilk simply because lying is an effective tool to get what you want.

Let us be careful in this conflict to tell the truth. I'm listening to both sides and there are many out there who believe that what our government is trying to do is wrong. Many tell the truth scrupulously no matter what their critics say to the contrary. Others say exciting things that will get them ratings without any concern for whether the things they say are true or not. If it sounds good, they'll use it. I get a dozen e-mails a day from people I care very much for with stories in them that are lies. They are great stories and may make me mad at people I should be mad at. Nonetheless they are lies and we hurt ourselves by telling them.

It is harder for a righteous man to fight a war. There are weapons we may not use; tactics in which we may not engage. The clerk at my local grocery store believes that Jesus's coming is imminent. That may well be the answer to the prayer that many freedom-loving Americans have been praying lately.

God help us!

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