Christians and Government

Should Christians Obey Government?


It is tragic that most Bible-believing Christians today are misguided concerning Biblical submission to government. God never intended for Christians to blindly yield to government tyranny, blatant abusive of power, and treason against it's own citizens. What ever happened to the Bill of Rights?

America's founding father's took matters into their own hands, reviling and revolting against the higher powers. The anarchy of America's founding father's violates the philosophy of nearly every pastor and Bible-scholar today, who teach that Christians ought to unquestioningly submit to government. Hypocritically, these same religious leaders heartily enjoy freedoms which were secured only through bloodshed inflicted by rebellion and revolt against the abuse and tyranny of the higher powers (i.e., England).

Capitalism vs. the Free Market

Adam Smith, like the other early classical liberals, was a revolutionary thinker who attacked the entrenched privileges of the landed oligarchy and the mercantile capitalists. It's almost impossible to go to a mainstream "libertarian" website these days without seeing the thought of Adam Smith misappropriated to defend the modern institution most closely resembling the landed interests and privileged monopolists of the Old Regime: the giant, state-subsidized, state-protected corporation.

As I suggested earlier, most people who display egalitarian reactions against existing inequalities and concentrations of wealth may well believe that what they hate is the "free market." But that's only because the rhetoric of "free markets" has been perverted, for the most part, by apologists for those concentrations of wealth which result from privilege and other forms of state intervention. What they hate, they rightly hate. They're wrong to believe that what they hate is the "free market." But it's hard to blame them, when you can't turn on the TV or read an editorial page without seeing a fundamentally statist economic system of special privilege and protection for big business and the rich described as "our free market system."

From:Review: The Mind of the Market, by Michael Shermer
at Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism

Jesus McCain

Georgia Republican Party chairwoman Sue Everhart said Saturday that the party's presumed presidential nominee has a lot in common with Jesus Christ.
"John McCain is kind of like Jesus Christ on the cross," Everhart said as she began the second day of the state GOP convention. "He never denounced God, either."

The Lord God Made Them All

All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom,
He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid,
Who made the spikey urchin,
Who made the sharks, He did.
All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.
AMEN.

-From a comment left here by Bing by way of Monty Python.

Can we find "design" in the fact that every animal lives upon some other, that every drop of every sea is a battlefield where the strong devour the weak?
Over the precipice of cruelty rolls a perpetual Niagara of blood. Is there "design" in this?-Robert G. Ingersoll

The Lion and the Lamb

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. —Isaiah 11:6–7

Biologists teach us that the bodies of predators are optimized for predation: teeth that tear into muscle or crunch bone rather than grinding vegetation into paste, jaws that unhinge to accommodate large, infrequent prey, claws that cling, muscles that spring, padded feet for silent stalking, digestive systems that separate meat and blood from useless bits of fur and bone, poisons that can paralyze, kill, or even dissolve the innards of a hapless victim. The words of the prophet about lions and lambs are beautiful to me, as beautiful as the notion of beating swords into plowshares (Isa. 2:4). But a lion that eats straw isn’t a lion.

So, what does the natural world tell us about its designer? By all appearances, on this planet, predation (and, by implication, death) is an integral part of the whole. It maintains the balance of nature. Pain, also necessary, has a different function. It works in the service of survival, and it does that job beautifully. But here is what these remarkable systems don’t do. They don’t systematically or predictably comply with the attributes for which we pay tribute to God: mercy, peace, compassion, tenderness, kindness, fairness, and love. Quite the opposite, in fact. Not that the natural world lacks these attributes. They too appear in nature. The problem is not that they are absent but that they are not the underlying principles guiding the system.
To view the natural order as primarily peaceful and benign means either you are viewing through a distorted lens or you need a magnifying glass. Who gets injured, who gets eaten, who starves in the winter, whose offspring flourish, whose don’t, all of these are decided by nature in ways that are indifferent to morality and goodness as we humans normally define them. Our values and the values we like to attribute to God are, for the most part, irrelevant. So is our wishful thinking about lions and lambs. If God is the God of nature, then he is the God of all nature. We can’t look at it selectively, pick the parts that give us a sense of awe or delight or mystery, and then say that those reflect the nature of God, while ignoring the parts that inspire fear, sorrow, or revulsion.

Is There No Hope?

From here.

I am one American that is ashamed of what this nation has become. I am sick to death of watching my country invade other nations for their oil. I am ashamed of the people we wantonly attack in the “name of democracy”. I cringe when I see police officers kill citizens with impunity and beat people as if they the police were nothing but state sponsored gangs. I am disgusted with this so-called Presidential race where you can’t tell one candidate but for their gender or race and the citizens of this country fall for the same old tired rhetoric that there will be “change”.

As for whether or not Obama represents real change, see here and here.

The Truth About Veal

Lying About Veal

Our Enemy In Blue

The enemy is armed to the teeth and wearing blue.

Under Siege

THE DISAPPEARING BEES

A new survey had grim news about honey bees: Slightly more than a third of the nation's commercially managed hives died in the past year. It's the second consecutive year of "substantial" losses of bees...

Big Mac? A Tax!

The idea of taxing fast food came up in New Jersey recently and Gov. Jon S. Corzine called it a "constructive suggestion".

"I think this country has gone too much in the direction of fast and unhealthy food, and if people are taxed they may terminate that and turn toward more healthy foods," said West Orange resident Maureen Felix.

In other words, because Maureen Felix doesn't like the way other people choose to live their lives, she wants to change their behavior by taxing it. This is a perfect example of the danger of giving government the power to rule over us. It leads ultimately to this kind of fascist thinking and policies. Most fast food may not be very healthy, but then a lot of restaurant food in general isn't good for you. Neither are many items you can buy in the supermarket. Should we tax ice cream, frozen pot pies and potato chips as well? I was sitting in Jack In The Box just yesterday after a hard day of moving and watched as an obviously not-well-to-do family enjoyed a hot meal purchased from the dollar menu. Burgers, chicken sandwiches, fries, tacos, all available for about a buck each (or in the case of the tacos, two for a dollar) and while a steady diet of such foods would not serve anyone well in the long run, their cheapness makes it easy to get out of the house and have a little fun and fill an empty stomach. If I am ever homeless, the spare change I manage to scoop up will partly be used to get a quick hot meal from such places. Thank God for fast food, and the freedom that made fast food restaurants possible. Thank the other guy and his evil minions for pro government busy bodies like miss Felix that want to control our lives. To hell with such dictators!

The Only Good Deal Is No Deal

So last week I happened to catch Dull or Not Dull? It was the episode where "President" Bush made an appearance. One of the contestants was Joseph Kobes, an Iraq War veteran. Mr. Kobes served a tour of duty in Iraq and then volunteered for two more. This lead Deal or No Deal host Howie Mandel to call Kobes "the ultimate American" and then gush about how this hired killer had "served our country" and that he was a "hero" and the he had "protected us" while in Iraq and that he (Howie) was "proud to be here with you" and lots of other bullshit. Whether or not Kobes actually killed anyone personally as a solider is irrelevant, he was sent to kill and "serve" by helping to illegally and immorally occupy a country we had no right to invade in the first place. This makes Mr. Kobes a criminal agent of a criminal government and even more so as he willingly served two more tours of duty. One might argue that he could not have known when he joined the military that War Criminal Bush would send him to Iraq, but Kobes is without excuse for his last two tours in Iraq, for he volunteered. He was praised by Howie and the audience for this, when he should have instead been booed and tarred and feathered and booted out of the studio on his traitorous war criminal ass!

I would like to ask Howie (a good juvenile name for an ignorant juvenile fool) how exactly Kobes served us by being in Iraq? What benefit have the American people received from such service and how, Howie, has this "protected" us? And why exactly does joining the military and getting yourself wounded (the jackass Kobes received the purple heart; big fucking deal) make you the "ultimate American"? More of an American than everyone else in every other profession, no matter how much real good they do? Any idiot can join the military (and many do, as the standards have gone way down due to the shortage of pawns recruits) and even get themselves killed but this does not make them a hero or a better American than anyone else. We should praise real heroes who support and defend our constitution by opposing illegal wars and the vast evil we have committed against the Iraqi people. I'll bet we'll never see Cindy Sheehan on Howie's idiotic, time-wasting, super moronic game show, but if anyone should be dubbed the ultimate American, it should be her. Instead we get NBC on their Deal or No Deal website saying of Kobes "A true patriot gets personal thanks from the President", a true patriot! How about all those who do real acts of courage by protesting this evil, illegal Iraq War and those who defend the Bill of Rights against the outrages perpetrated against civil liberties by the Bush administration? How about those who are sickened by the evil of holding people for years without charging them with a crime, as our government is doing now at Guantanamo Bay and that is considered just a joke to some, something to laugh about rather than cry about. But on Deal or No Deal we get an appearance by Bush, the man ultimately responsible for the injustice of Guantanamo, laughing it up and making jokes about his low approval rating from the American public. I guess its okay to have an unpopular criminal "President" on your show though, isn't it? That's not too controversial, is it lapdog NBC, you cowardly, unpatriotic traitors! And by the way, if Bush is so unpopular and the people oppose his policies so strongly (else why is he so disliked)? wouldn't the "democratic" thing to do be to change your polices to suit the people's wishes? Wouldn't that be "democracy"? I guess democracy is okay for other countries where we are supposedly trying to establish it by force but not good enough for Americans, eh, Howie, Kobes and Bush? If Howie had the guts (as a real man would have) to denounce Bush and his crimes against America on the show, well, then Howie would have been the true patriot and the real "Ultimate American." By the way, the idiot Kobes kept turning down the banker's offers and ended with just $26,000, at least until he spun the wheel at the end and tripled the amount to $78,000. During his case-opening I was rooting against him (I always root against military assholes) but just so you don't think I'm completely without empathy even for bad people, I was hoping he'd triple that $26,000. That's how much of an ultimate American hero I am. Praise me and kiss my ass!