I had really hoped that after getting married my impulse to write about controversial topics would go away. I mean, I would have a family to protect. Time to become the ‘Die Stille im Lande’ and not put my family at risk by spouting unpopular opinions, right? For several years now I’ve been looking for a way or excuse to shut this site down permanently and move on. I realize now that if I believe something strong enough I’m just getting to blurt it out no matter the cost. Maybe something in my brain, that thing that restrains most people, didn’t develop correctly? Whatever the case is, you’re stuck with me until you unsubscribe after I topple your favorite sacred cow…
Month: October 2023
I Don’t Care What You Call It
I feel the need to preface this once again with a trigger warning for those who won’t read through and will miss my point. No, I’m not saying what Hamas did was justified. Nor am I saying that Israel should not respond. But I am trying to confront a bias, motivated by a misuse of Scripture, that is leading our side to look the other way at what amounts to dumping white phosphorous on innocent children and then pretending this is a just response to the death of Israelis. I am addressing what clouds the moral judgment here and not saying that one side or the other should just take the abuse.
I’m addressing the false dichotomy exposed in this letter from Albert Einstein (Jewish) in his opposition to the terrorism that was taking place. He wrote this right after a massacre carried out by Zionist extremists and warning of what would eventually become the horrendous reality of the Nakba and why Palestinians today are reluctant to leave their homes today. They know the history even if you’re ignorant. Read what Einstein wrote and then study what happened next…
To be clear, Einstein was not against a Jewish homeland. He was simply against the violent means being employed that have led to the current hatred. Had more followed his advice then we wouldn’t be facing yet another bloody war today. When will we learn?
Framing Issues
Had the British managed to put down the bloodthirsty terrorists who fought to “water the tree of liberty” by violently taking over their American colonies, does that mean they never existed? No, they (along with their weird pagan offshoot religion that required regular human sacrifice to keep their tree nourished) did exist and they existed as a distinct entity the moment that they declared themselves to be independent. And to say otherwise would be dumb.
One of the stupidest arguments ever made is “tHeRe Is nO PaLeStINe” as if the millions of people pushed into Gaza and West Bank simply do not exist. By that sort of semantic and legal argument, there was never a state of Israel prior to May 14, 1948. Sure, there were a people called the children of Israel and a kingdom of David, but never a STATE by that name, and certainly not one that was a Western-style democracy, prior to a bunch of Europeans moving to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine (which is what it was called) and most certainly a nation with the world’s strongest standing army is not the same one as found in the Scriptures. No, that doesn’t mean they should be run into the sea or not recognized as a legitimate nation (although many do not) and yet we must deal with the reality that the land was occupied before European settlers arrived to claim it. Historical claims may make a nice romantic script, for those with no skin in the game, but telling people that their grievance of being displaced doesn’t exist because you don’t like the name is asinine. It is reasoning that may get you likes in your echo chamber but suggests you are silly and should not be taken seriously by those with a modicum of intelligence. It’s not like the Palestinians are going to stop their fight against those who took their deeded land because you claim they don’t exist.
Furthermore, legal recognition does not change what something is. By now we all should know this. The governments of the world can call black white or white black and it doesn’t change the nature of color. Calling a man a woman or your affinity for your pet a marriage doesn’t make it true. We have the absolute right to question legal precedent or to hold to whatever existed in our minds prior to their changes. Maybe your modern definitions are simply ignorant of the original meaning and the other side is right. You might eventually be blotted off from the face of the Earth and forgotten. But it doesn’t mean you or the perspectives you held don’t exist. A person’s perspective still exists even if opposed by the powerful who have better propaganda and denying it exists is plain dumb.
Palestinians exist even if they are erased from the land or never officially recognized by many in the United States. That’s not a statement that will suit many from my fundamentalist religious background. But they’re simply not dealing with reality, it is denial, and ridiculous. Einstein called it Palestine. It was Palestine. The modern-day Israeli state came after.
Who were the Samaritans?
They were people deemed illegitimate by the pure-blooded religious elites. They made a counterclaim to what the other descendants of Abraham Jesus mingled with saw as their own exclusive property. The Samaritans had their own priests (apparently descendants of Aaron directly) and, contrary to the belief of their Jewish rivals, also continuously occupied the land like their Semitic cousins.
This is what makes how Jesus recognized these people so significant. We learn, in his conversation with a Samaritan woman, that true worship wasn’t about location, including Jerusalem, but about Spirit and truth. If this wasn’t clear enough, the parable of the good Samaritan was a slap in the face of those whom Jesus addressed. A Samaritan more righteous than their own best? Jesus was intentionally antagonizing. He intended to offend and insult them.
The point, however, remains that salvation is not a birthright. It is not about your claim to be or ethnic inheritance. The Christian truth is about what we do, and how we love, and never a matter of our worship ritual or genetics. The measure of Christian pedigree is faith, pure and simple, like that of Abraham—which is what makes a person a son or daughter of Abraham.
Jesus didn’t mince words when addressing those who believed they would be saved by their ethnicity or Abrahamic bloodline:
Abraham is our father,” they answered. “If you were Abraham’s children,” said Jesus, “then you would do what Abraham did. As it is, you are looking for a way to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. You are doing the works of your own father.” “We are not illegitimate children,” they protested. “The only Father we have is God himself.” Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
(John 8:39-44 NIV)
There are not multiple paths, according to Jesus, but only one way, truth, and life for all to come to the Father. Galatians makes it clear that Abraham’s seed is fulfilled fully in Christ and all who believe in Him:
The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ. […] So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
(Galatians 3:16, 26-28 NIV)
Romans affirms what St Paul said above in Galatians:
So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. […] What then? What the people of Israel sought so earnestly they did not obtain. The elect among them did, but the others were hardened…
(Romans 11:5, 7 NIV)
The “remnant” is those who believed in Jesus. While the “hardened” are those who rejected Him and, in their unbelief and ignorance, crucified the one who was called their King. And, for those who contort and turn the Gospels inside out trying to revert to a Covenant that passed away, Hebrews 8:13, I despise your bastardization of truth. Those who would replace His Kingdom “not of this world” with a modern secular state are not legitimate scholars or Christians.
I reject your ignorant religion.
I reject your indifferent religion.
I reject your false religion.
The true Christ isn’t an ethno-nationalist or waiting on yet another stone temple to be built. And I don’t really care what your Scofield reference or some random guy on YouTube says. Christian Zionism is a contradiction of terms. I’m perfectly fine with European Jews finding a homeland and defending it. But it should never be confused with the fulfillment of anything more than that. We should instead be looking for the new Jerusalem. So stone me like Stephen for repeating what he said: “The Most High does not live in houses made by human hands.”
Count me with the Samaritans.
A blessing or a curse?
Since the 1950s, no other nation has shown more perfect loyalty or full allegiance to the state of Israel than the United States. The Biden administration is no exception and doubling down on what Trump started. For this have accumulated a mountain of debt, a decay of our institutions, and sharp moral decline as more and more Americans fall away from faith. Sure, we are materially wealthy, for now, but churches are empty and those that remain are temples to consumerism rather than self-sacrificial love. If support for this country is a blessing then I guess we’ll need to redefine that word like we have been with everything else lately. Or maybe consider we’ve gotten things wrong?
The direction of the US doesn’t look good right now and maybe that is because we’re like the Jeruselum condemned by Ezekiel:
“‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen. Samaria did not commit half the sins you did. You have done more detestable things than they, and have made your sisters seem righteous by all these things you have done. Bear your disgrace, for you have furnished some justification for your sisters. Because your sins were more vile than theirs, they appear more righteous than you. So then, be ashamed and bear your disgrace, for you have made your sisters appear righteous.
(Ezekiel 16:49-52 NIV)
Maybe it is time to stop focusing on the sins of Samaria and consider our own. Sure, maybe IsRaEl hAs ThE rIgHt To DeFeND iTsElF, but then so do the other Semitic people in that region. Consider that we are Haman, from the book of Esther, unwittingly building our own gallows as we justify our unjust vengeance against undeserving people. We’re not a righteous judge. The children of Gaza did not attack Israel. It is not anti-Semitic to stand with Einstein or recognize the unjust suffering of the Semitic people in Gaza. It is not our allegiance to the state of Israel that will bring us blessings, only allegiance to the king of the true Israel can do that and we must all repent of our delusions otherwise.
My Great Pumpkin Moment
Linus believes.
Peanuts could be profound.
I’ll never forget the gang of characters visiting Normandy, with Linus reciting the poem In Flanders Fields and turning to his companion, “What have we learned, Charlie Brown?”
Having this most thoughtful conscientious character spend his time in a pumpkin patch, vainly waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arrive, had to be a self-reflection of the creator regarding his own religious faith.
I can identify with this struggle.
In particular, in the cartoon special, when Linus accidentally says “If the great pumpkin comes,” and then proceeds to beat himself up for even doubting the possibility that the Great Pumpkin isn’t true:
Linus: [to Sally as she walks away with everyone else] Hey, aren’t you going to wait and greet the Great Pumpkin? Huh? It won’t be long now. If the Great Pumpkin comes, I’ll still put in a good word for you!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060550/quotes/
[realizes what he just said]
Linus: Good grief! I said “if”! I meant, “when” he comes!
[calmly]
Linus: I’m doomed. One little slip like that could cause the Great Pumpkin to pass you by.
[calling out]
Linus: Oh, Great Pumpkin, where are you?
It perfectly captures this idea that if you only had enough faith then you would finally see. This is a prominent feature of religious folks in my life and their advice. It is really a nasty manipulation that makes the fault of every disappointing outcome somehow our own fault.
Charles Shultz, in an interview in 1999, described his philosophical views as having evolved and that he considered himself to be a secular humanist. But, like his title character, the message of the comic strip seems to be to keep trying despite failures and the football being pulled away once again.
There has always been a part of the dismal, melancholy, and yet somehow still hopeful tone of Peanuts that resonated with me. Shultz, now dead over 23 years, left a legacy that masterfully captured his own life experience and lingering questions.
My own religious and spiritual life has taken a turn similar to if Linus finally wakes to the delusion of his blind faith and comes out unscathed in the end. I’ll never rule out any possibilities. I do believe that my life has taken a wonderful turn despite the wilderness I had to cross.
However, I won’t be sitting in the pumpkin patch anymore. There is no moment where it all comes together, where all doubt is completely washed away, and it doesn’t matter how much you believe that your own deliverance is close at hand, but we can keep going even after the collapse of delusion.
But We Don’t Chant Death To Gaza!
“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
Aldous Huxley
Most on one side of this issue likely will not even get this far into reading this. For daring to question the narrative they’ve swallowed I’ll probably be quickly dismissed by some as a “terror apologist” or worse. Nevertheless, for those who know that I don’t take positions lightly or without due diligence, this post will help explain my position on the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. But more important than that this blog is aimed at addressing the brazen dishonesty of the fundamentalist cheerleaders.
First of all, for anyone conservative who has come through the past few years and is still lacking skepticism about what the political establishment is saying really deserves to be exploited. Now that Hamas has attacked we can now trust the same media that saw riots as “mostly peaceful protests” and then calls MAGA supporters “insurrectionists” for their questioning the election results??? Are you really that dumb?!? Why don’t you at least consider that the same people who distort the truth here, who seize upon the parts of the evidence that support their own agenda on domestic issues, might also do the same thing there?
Second, okay, so you never heard ‘our side’ chanting “death to Gazans” and yet let’s not be cute about this. Both sides are dedicated to the destruction of the other. Israel slowly but surely takes all of Palestine. Hamas is fully committed to ending Israel. How genocidal that would end up being is anyone’s guess—but these stories from a couple Israeli Defense Force veterans can give us some idea, they burned people alive and shot school children—watch them talk about it and then moralize to me about how only one side is barbaric or evil.
No, this horrendous history of atrocities on both sides certainly does not justify anything that Hamas did in the past week. But what should we expect to happen when that boy crying when an air strike killed his entire family grows up? Is it a surprise when he’s angry and blames the nation that dropped the bomb? Are we just going to gloss over the fact that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, is in a leaked video saying to make it painful for the Palestinians and that basically anything is a military target? What does that mean? Are we going to play ignorant?
This is why I can’t take seriously people who only condemn one side and never the other, this selective moral outrage is not about true care for children. Those who quickly share unverified accounts of beheaded babies and then never even acknowledge those thousands of innocent Palestinians who have died in the indiscriminate and brutal bombing campaigns are being dishonest. No, not saying that there must be complete equivalency or proportionality in a war. but let’s not pretend that only one side is a victim of terrorism. It just looks really disingenuous to only care about the children of one side.
Getting this out of the way…
My point is not to convert you from one side to the other. My point is that the common presentation of this conflict is a false dichotomy and we have the option of choosing none of the above. We can stand with the true victims, those innocent people caught in the crossfire, and oppose all of the militant parties. That is where I stand. Furthermore, I will mostly address the propaganda and war crimes of one side. Why? It is because my typical audience is completely biased toward the West’s narrative and certainly not because I am unaware of what the other side has done. We don’t need to be partisans.
The big lie is that this conflict is not about ethnic cleansing on both sides. Israel has systematically, since May 14, 1948, pushed the native inhabitants out of their land and then played the role of victim when their militarily weaker opponents employed asymmetrical warfare tactics against the occupation. Israel has turned Gaza into an open-air prison, but we only care when Hamas strikes back. American Evangeli-cons believe every claim without skepticism when it is made by Israel (burned babies) as if a party in the conflict has reason to be truthful—why are we such fools?
It Is Okay To Bomb Nazi Children!
Maybe you do not know what Jewish neo-con Ben Shapiro (as well as Isreal’s Prime Minister) meant when he pronounced the people of Gaza to be Amalek?
But I do:
This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’
(1 Samuel 15:2-3 NIV)
We call that genocide.
Sure, maybe Shapiro is emotional, he has a right, but these chants of “kill the Arab” or about Gaza becoming “a cemetery” with no school children left alive didn’t start last week. And maybe that’s what US Senator Lindsay Graham wants when he says this is a religious war and he suggests the solution “level the place,” while also braying for a confrontation with Iran? Apparently, it is okay when Israel ‘defends itself’ by wiping out men, women, children, and infants of any who resist their claim to the land. I guess it is the privilege of being a chosen people, right?
Like an Israeli official said we shouldn’t care about Palestinian civilian deaths because they’re all Nazis. Much of this is based on unverified accounts of partisans repeated as fact, even embellished by Joe Biden who claimed, with great sincerity, that he had seen the pictures of beheaded babies himself only to have the claim retracted. So now we’re collectively punishing people, looking the other way at inhumane things done by the military, using the circular ‘punch a Nazi’s logic of the far-left and misuse of religious texts. Are we better than them?
So let’s just be honest about it! Let’s not say that this is about human rights or preventing ethnic cleansing when it is all about clearing the place for a Jewish ethnic state. Stop being a coward, and say that you’re okay with babies being killed (as long as it is their babies) and with millions of people who are being displaced from their land—all because you have stupidly embraced an errant eschatology that replaces the Church, which was established by Christ, with reemergent nation of those who have fully rejected Him.
Or you could just join me in agreement with St Paul:
Understand, then, that those who have faith are children of Abraham. Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: “All nations will be blessed through you.” So those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. […] The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ.
(Galatians 3:7-9, 16 NIV)
Understand yet?
Support for a modern ethno-nationalist state has no connection to the promises given to Abraham. Sure, many have been made into useful idiots for this cause, by the twisting of Scripture, but Jesus didn’t promise a patch of land along the Mediterranean coast and the Jews do not share Christian values any more than Muslims do. Both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have chanted for the death of the other. One sees us as being Infidels and the other calls us Goyim. When has Israel, a country declared ‘our greatest ally’ according to many of our greasy-haired politicians, ever defended our borders? The blessing is they get a ton of US aid and send propaganda pictures of their most attractive women in uniform in return.
There’s no denying the tragedy of what has been unfolding over the past few days. We have seen the pictures and videos, very real, of terrified young people. One moment they were enjoying a music festival, the next they were being mercilessly gunned down. And yet I did not see the same level of concern from fundamentalists for the victims of the Pulse nightclub attack. These same people overwhelmed with concern about Israel do not think twice about collective punishment and forcing Gazans into the desert before there is provision for them—this isn’t about protecting innocents or looking out for the most vulnerable, it is about wiping Gazans off the map by wherever means available at this time.
Christian compassion is that none should perish and all will be saved. It isn’t about a political entity called Israel or any kingdom of this world. Our battle, if we were indeed servants of Christ as we claim, should not be against flesh and blood. Jesus commanded us to love our enemies and do good to those who mistreat us. That’s coming from a man who was tortured, unjustly nailed to a cross, and killed by an occupying power. So why again do we support the death of Palestinian children simply for living in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Shouldn’t we love these little ones as much as their other more fortunate Semitic cousins?
Irregular Ideation 