When Logic Fails

For me a title like that is as unlikely as Billy Graham posting a newspaper article headlined "God is Dead", but let me elaborate. You remember President Bush when he was talking to the Kinessent in Israel was saying "These liberals think if we just presented an argument so impressive in its logic to the terrorists that they would just roll over and capitulate". This isn't how life works in most cases. There was a Simpson's episode where these kids were stranded on an Island and there was this wile boar scaring the little ones, and then one day Lisa Simpson discovered that the boar was being kept alive by eating this green slime that grows on the rocks and she reasons, "If it's keeping the boar alive it will keep us alive, too". Unfortunately if you're dealing with a group of young boys (or any other normal human being) there is a much simpler solution to the problem and that is to kill and eat the wild boar. So the kids ate well that night dining on barbecued pork. Animals don't use logic in their relation with one another. Their relations are dictated by nature. Just as men and women don't relate to each other by logic but by the inherent differences of both sexes. The way anyone can know that homosexuality is wrong is that neither men NOR woman want to forsake their customary relation to the opposit sex. Sometimes relation is everything. For instance this morning I went out to see how our bird in a cage was doing. The first thing I noticed was that he was much more perky and alert looking out of the cage right at the edge. This is Atypical behavior for him. Then I noticed there was another bird now in the cage who was cowering in the back of the cage like the first bird used to do. Now the first bird had assumed a position of dominence. We had two cats when I was younger named Bo and Al, who were brother and sister born in February 1972. Before his time the male cat, Al died of one of these comon urinary aliments that causes blockage. One thing that was noticed after that was it was now the female cat, Bo, who was getting in all the fights in the neighborhood protecting her terroitory. She had now assumed the mail role of protector. A lot of times Rush Limbaugh is right when he says women want to be dominated. With all due respect to Johnny Wendell, sometimes the golden rule doesn't apply pertaining to relations between the sexes. If a man is about to have sex with a woman in the back seat of a car he doesn't sit down with her and say "Let's talk about our feelings and discuss the consequences of our having sex or the consequences of not having sex". No, he's going to tell her every lie in the book to get her to have sex, and he's even likely to throw something in about Destiny and how "this thing is bigger than both of us". Some fall into the "Reasonableness equals Rightness" trap the EST people talk about. Dr. Phil frames the question as "Would you rather be Happy, or be Right?" Sometimes even a person who seems "right" and "logical" can still be "off". I was just looking at old Malcolm X videos last night on You-Tube. Even though Malcolm's logic was impecable and he was right on- - in his analisis of relations between the races, he was still "wrong" in that he wasn't connecting with his White interviewer. In one case Malcolm X was explaining how Black people have lost their heritage so that they didn't even know their family last name in Africa but took on the identities of their White devil slave masters. It was like a comedy routine as the interviewer- - a good liberal, probably, but he was clearly bored and exasperated asking the same questions over and over of Malcolm, as if he hadn't heard. Of course Malcolm believed that this whole "Civil rights movement" was something Black people should not embrace. But he did say however that if a white policeman's dog attacks you, you have the right to kill the dog- - and that includes those "dogs" who walk on two legs. But in general as I looked on all this footage, most of which I'd seen before somewhere- - it all seemed rather "out of date" and "wouldn't sell" today because it wasn't "up with the times".

Today we need a message that will "sell". Christianity is one message that "sold" well when it war formed- as a way of justifying hatred tword the Jews. Yet as Ron Hubbard points out, and I have quoted before, "If you're in a fire engine streaming twords a fire to put it out- - you aren't going to pay any attention to the dogs nipping at and chassing the fire engine". And yet all Jesus seemed to do was "nip at the dogs" even though "Such action would be quite mad". Rather than "put out the fire" of abolishing human sin from the earth as Daniel 24 discussed, Jesus preferred getting in sparing matches with the pharisees where Jesus "I'm God; worship me or spend eternity in Hell". This wasn't part of his comission. Of course getting back to Bush's statement about "ingeniousness of argument" I was going to write one of my local pastors a letter Friday morning when I was inspired "Spelling it all out about how Christianity has affected my life, and why it wasn't working for me" but this other voice said "It will never work. His defences are too great and his rationalizations are too entrenched. You've had thoughts like this before and have written other letters. He knows the facts but is purpously ignoring them". Certain relationships just naturally form like the relation between Mallery and Skippy on "Family Fies" where Mallery says "Skippy, I thought our relation was pretty well established. You grovle for acceptance and I reject you". So it is with the relation between me and God. Don't fall into the "Reasonableness equals Rightness" trap. It could be that the Calvary Chapels are just "constitutionally incapable of accepting me". But here is something new in the way of evidence about the early formation period of Christianity. No, we're not going to talk about Mary Magdolane" but something else just as revealing. As you may or may not know a comon theme in Calvary Chapel sermons is this idea of attacking gnosticism and the accusation that the spirit and flesh are separate entities so if you cater to the Flesh in sin, then the Spirit is free to go its merry way. I've looked up Gnosticism and this isn't a part of it. What Gnosticism is, is something that came from Egypt about AD 90 to Rom and caught on there like wild fire. What gnosticism is, is the idea that God himself "degenerated" and fell into impurety generating other Gods of moral and litteral inferiority and finally Jesus emerged as the lowest God, according to one source, but he as it were "redeemed the notion of Godness" back to "The One", or first outraying of the Divine. What Christianity did was take this idea and rather than apply it to God, applied it to humans. How do we know this? If Gnosticism hit Rome about AD 90 then what about letters of Paul to the Corinthians where he talks about how "Knowledge" is what some people do to excuse sin. And he says "We all like to think we have Knowledge" referring to licentiousness. He goes on to say "All things are lawful to me, but not all things are expediant". He quotes the gnostic proverb, "Food is for the stomach and the stomach is made for food". By this Paul claims is how Gnostics excuse sin. But if Christianity came BEFORE gnosticism, how come Paul is writing to an infant Church he just founded- using Gnosticisum as a comparrison in a letter that claims to have been written about 50 AD or so over forty years before Gnosticism existed? Whoever promigated Christianity knew about the "Reasonableness equals Rightness" phallocy, and wasn't going to fall into it. Sheer "ingeniousness of arguments" just wasn't going to cut it.

Captain Piccard once said, "I am content to live with a mystery". Many people are concerned about trying to prove how evolution came about or IF it happened at all. This is not an immediate concern of mine. We have the rest of our existance to figure out the mysteries of evolution. The important thing is that life is HERE and how do we relate to it? The same is true with the "modas opperandi" or whatever the phrase is- - the driving force behind the people who thought we NEEDED Einstein's theory of relativity. The whole thing comes down to trying to figure out "Which way the ether wind was blowing" and how come we could NEVER detect ANY "ether wind" in the Universe no matter how many tests we ran? To me- - I am content to live with a mystery. How come we get the same reading on the speed of light all the time? I don't know, but it's not a pressing concern of me right now. Some people wonder what will happen to man's soul after he dies. I'm not bothered by that. Ask me again when I'm dead. Some wonder whether our governmental system is perfect or whether we need to radically change the Constitution to "make it more democratic" and not give Supreme Court justices so much power- - even on matters of WHEN they step down so as to exercise maximum political power. Some are concerned that we have too many rural senators who control congress with their right wing rural politics in congress. Sometimes you have to be a social darwinist and set logic and abstraction aside for the moment. Why do animals hunt, kill, and eat their prey, and can an animal ever be "taught" that "this isn't the best way"? Certain people dominate in certain situations. To rail about it as Malcolm X does is fine. But Malcolm X was an honist man and he ended up dead, killed by his own organization, who turned against Malcolm because he saw the truth and they couldn't handle that. It's not just a matter of KNOWING the truth; what you have to be able to do is SELL the truth. This is a lesson Berock Obama needs to learn. (Selah)

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Last night it was At the Movies, and then it was Sixty Minutes. They had this segment where Chiquita bananas was paying “protection money” to this Columbian death squad army austensively out to fight Marxists. This was twenty years ago. Both sides were bloody and brutal. But now Chiquita is being faulted saying they should have let their many employees who work in the fields die. Should Chaquita have adopted the addage: "It's General Patton's guts- - but our blood"? Should the Chaquita people at the top have said "We're willing to sacrifice down to the life of our last employee" just to maintain that illusury "primciple" and "moral high ground"?But Dole and Del Monte are also being accused of paying protection money. Now they are trying to lay the responsibility for all the deaths from weapons purchases- - at Chiquita’s door. That is so patently unfair. They say they should have gone to the authorities, The US declares a group a terrorist outfit and that’s supposed to make everything all right. That's about as realistic as Jewish shop owners in Nazi Germany going to the equivelent of the Nazi "better business beauro" to redress grievences of vandalism. Then they had a thing on medical care for illegal aliens. One woman was given Resperidol for a mis-diagnosed condition but later she got her act together and went on to study computer. So "things worked out OK for her". I take Resperidol and it hasn't killed me yet. One man had a lesion on his penis and demanded treatment. Finally he got it on his own. He got a biopsy and soon thereafter had a John Bobbit job performed on him. Perhaps some Federal employee should have said “There’s the knife drawer; help yourself”.