Don Henley May Have Been on to Something

  I don't  make a regular habit of watching broadcast television, for a variety of reasons.  It's a huge time-sponge for starters, and then there are concerns about content, obviously. I especially avoid  news reports though.
  Does anyone else think  its a  little  psychotic the way  television news is delivered?  It's all soft lights and  exciting theme  music and color  coordinated ties and teleprompters. Its so  much pageantry and theatre over substance as to stagger the imagination, and the easiest way to see it is to abstain from it for a length of time, and then watch a broadcast.  If you stay away from the shiny box for a while, and then  take a peek, you'll begin to understand why they call it 'programming'.
  If you flip through the channel;s during news time you'll see the  exact same stories covered in the exact same  order with the roughly the same amount of time given to each and sometimes  all of these independently talking heads will all use the same  buzzwords and catchphrases, as if they are issued from on high by some  TV news fatwah.  If you then listen to the conversations of people who  get their news this way, you'll hear them repeat these  viewpoints and phrases in parrot-like fashion with no thought as to what they are saying and no  conscious realization that they  were spoon-fed that opinion.
  Every story covered is  in its own little self-contained pre-packaged universe. That's how the news anchor can report on tornado deaths in Oklahoma with a  sad look on his  face and literally seconds later turn to another  camera,  put on a smile and talk about how baby pandas were  born at the  local zoo.  Real people are incapable of compartmentalizing all the  happenings in their life that neatly, that succinctly, but broadcasters do it for a living, and in doing so they present to you a neat compartmentalized, emotional vapid reality that has no bearing on your day to day life. They regularly  spin you half-told tales about people you will never meet. The  goings on and bed-hoppings of  celebrities (whose only skills are their  physical attractiveness and their ability to pretend to be somebody else all day) are treated as if they matter.They mention tragedies that not only have nothing to do with you, but that you are incapable of affecting one way or the other.. They manipulate your emotions  with close up shots of grieving widows and burned out  school houses.  They adopt a worldview and narrative about an event  and  all reporting is filtered through that worldview and   edited to fit the narrative. By doing this , they crowd out valuable brain space and trick you into investing emotional capital in all the wrong places. Filling your head with trivia and banality,  they hope to keep you from thinking too much or looking too closely at what's behind the window dressing, My question is always not 'what did they say?' but rather 'what are they not telling us?'
 "Hey, your government has  declared for itself the ability to kill you without a trial, but look, Angeline Jolie had a double mastectomy! Isn't she brave? Isn't she pretty?  And now  a word from our sponsors."
  Our local news has real  problems with the English language.  During a recent tragedy they reported that  'approximately 15 were confirmed dead'. In my mind, the words 'approximately' and 'confirmed' sort of cancel each other out. How many dead are there?  Are there 'approximately' 15 or  have you confirmed that there are 15?  Doesn't matter, we've got an ad for  Pop-tarts to show you. 'Approximately 15' could be as  high as 20 or as low as 12. But let's not think about that, let's move on to who wore the  most low-cut dress to the Oscars.
  During the 2012 presidential campaign, word came from the fatwah that Ron Paul could not win. The reasons  given were never reasons of substance, to simply declare him unelectable was enough. Step one is to declare his defeat and then step  two was to ensure it by ignoring him and marginalizing his support. Over and over again durng the campaign people were told things like "He's too old", or "he's too extreme" or "He can't possibly win". Both  Democrats and Republicans joined in this chorus until eventually the man on the street would say to you "He too old, he's too extreme, and besides, he can't possibly win".  The shiny box told you that supporting him was  'throwing your vote away', and pushed the idea of 'the lesser of two evils'.  Thousands of people gathered to hear him speak  even as  'conservative' Fox News   reported the decline of his campaign. You see, truth is secondary to the agenda. The agenda is  to keep you rooted on your couch and give you just  enough information to make you think youre informed.  Give you a few talking points that you can recite if the topic comes up around the water cooler, and let's move on to the advertising.
  The advertising's whole point ( and to be honest, I find marketing fascinating) is to make you discontent with what you have, or what you are, and then propose their product or service as a solution. The point is to emotional  manipulate you in order to provoke a controlled response. Too fat? We can fix that.  Old car?  We can fix that.  Never mind that your husbnad   still adores you and thinks you're all that, the shiny box  says you're fat, and here's how you fix it.  Never mind that by keeping your current car ( which runs)you can stay out of debt. we need you to be in debt, we need you to live beyond your means. On and on and on drones the shiny box, 24 hours a day 7 days a week , talking when there is nothing more to say, and slowly  liquiifying your brain.
  Stay with us, the shiny box says. TV time is family time. Oh look, a train wreck in Nebraska, and some celbrity was arrested for driving drunk. Look at those scary peopll with their  AR-15's. They shouldn't have those guns, should they? After all, you don't need an AR-15, do you?  Wouldn't some popcorn be good  right now?  Only cultists homeschool their kids. Police are heroes.Hours slip away, precious precious time, and still the box never stops pumping out nonesense.
  But hey, people love dirty laundry, right?
 
 

A Perspective on Wealth

(Note:  Most of the numbers on this post were done a few years back for a Sunday School class I was teaching. I simply updated the  prices, and marveled within myself as to how much  the price of things had gone up.  If anyone has better numbers I would love to see them.)

There is a lot of talk about wealth, and money, and people appear to be as obsessed with  it as they always have been. Forbes magazine prints a compendium of wealth  every year in which  it names the  most wealthiest people on earth, and their net worth.  I personally think their list is incomplete, but that's a  topic for another day.  Empires rise and fall and  today's hot name will be tomorrow's old news.The wealth  most people on the Forbes list enjoy is  ,in the grand scheme of history, small potatoes.
  In the book of Exodus, commands and instructions were given in regards to the construction of the Tabernacle.  It was to  be  a portable, or at least a de-constructable, structure that would be assembled, broken down and reassembled as the children of Israel moved from  place to place.  It would be the  centerpiece and focal point of the  Jewish  religion until the construction of Solomon's Temple several centuries later.
  The materials assembled for the Tabernacle are described in detail in Exodus 35-38 and summarized in Exodus 38:21-30.  The total  quantity of gold collected was approximately  one ton; of silver 3/4 tons, and of bronze 2 1/2 tons. At todays prices gold is  approximately $1376.50 an ounce (compared to $500 in the original version of this).  Silver is currently priced at $22.46 an ounce ($12 originally) and brass is trading at  33 cents an ounce.
  The gold used in the Tabernacle winds up costing a little over $22,000 a pound or $44,000,000  a ton.  The silver  comes in at a paltry $459 a pound or $918,000 a ton. The brass is so cheap is almost seems like a waste to do the math, but I really like math ( no calculator, and I show all my work), so here we go; 33 cents an ounce  is 10, 560 bucks for a ton.  Now there's only a ton of gold in the Tabernacle,  3/4 of a ton of silver, and 2 1/2 tons of brass. The cost, just in raw metals, laying aside the historical or spiritual  significance of the  items themselves, looks something like this:

$ 44,000,000 in gold
$      688,000 in silver
$        26,400 in brass
$ 44, 714,400 in materials

   It's hard to find some basis of comparison, since  there is nothing like it in our modern world. Anything you might hope to compare it to turns out to be a permanent structure, but that just makes the  comparison more remarkable. For example, thee Tabernacle cost more in  raw materials alone than the total  cost of  the Empire State building in the 1920's, including the labor and the property it sits on ( just over 40 million). That wealth was  held by a group of  former slaves on the way to their  homeland, and had apparently been gathered up as they were leaving Egypt when the Egyptians 'loaned' them some jewelry.  It does make one wonder how much wealth was sitting in Egypt at the time, if they could  loan a bunch of slaves the equivalent of  $44 million.

  Several centuries later, a king arose in Jerusalem named Solomon.  His accomplishments really are  almost inconceivable, and  could be delved into in great detail, but I'm going to zero in on one aspect of his accomplishments; his income. The Forbes list tends to focus on the net worth of the individuals listed, which is a  perfectly reasonable standard to go by, but for the purposes of this article, I'm going to discuss income.  Solomon had an  unspeakable net worth , with  houses and cities and servants and 40 thousand horse stalls and  12,000 horsemen.  He had a house  built decked with precious  jewels and  gold ornaments on the walls.Solomon gave  gifts to allies of his in other kingdoms consisting of thousands of measures of wheat and oil a year,but aside from all that, how much money did the man bring in every year? And how does it compare to  the  economic titans of today?
  He received a one-time gift from the king of Tyre  that was 120 talents of gold. He received a one-time contribution from Ophir that was 420 talents of gold. He was regularly showered with  gifts of ivory and peacocks and apes and servants from other kingdoms, but I'm not going to count any of that.  I really don't want to try  and figure out the going rate of ivory and peacocks; you'll simply have to forgive me. I am simply  going to look at the scriptural account of his annual income, which is listed as 666 talents of gold.
  Now a talent  differs depending on who you read, and what country, and what  time period.  the  numbers  run as high as 130 lbs to a talent I'm gong to use the  lowest number I  could find which  is  57 lbs of gold for one talent. so 666 talents of gold winds up being 37,982 POUNDS of gold, with a modern value of $835,604,000 a year.
  Bill Gates of Microsoft , although no longer possessing the  title of 'world's richest man' (a title  probably not worth the hassle and scrutiny) is still the  icon of American wealth, so we will  use his listed annual income of roughly $30,000,000.  Now it beats digging ditches for a living, but honestly?  Old King Solomon makes Bill Gates look like somebody living under a bridge.  I had read somewhere once ( and I can't find it now) that  1/4 of the wealth in the world at the time  flowed through Israel when Solomon was on the throne. Yet according to Jesus Christ, the lilies of the field are better clothed than he was.Just a  bit of perspective. Do with it what you will.

The Birth of Religious Freedom in America

  There are, in my estimation, some freedoms that, unless you have them,  make other freedoms   rather meaningless, but if you  do have them, other freedoms are not only possible, but amplified in their effectiveness.  A quick example is the right to  property. If you don't have this right, then the fact that you are 'free' to barbeque on weekends is really rather meaningless , since you exercise that 'freedom' at the good pleasure of whoever the overlord of the moment happens to be.
  One of the others is religious freedom. If anyone can compel you to believe something, or compel you through whatever means to confess to things you do not  really hold to be true, then you have lost the battle for your own conscience, and whatever other 'liberties' you might enjoy   pale rather  quickly by comparison.  For a man to hold power over another man's conscience through state power or ecclesaistical power ( which often masquerades one as the other), it is  the worst sort of tyranny, for it claims jurisdiction over the  innermost parts of  a man and seeks to reign over his soul.
   It is a great irony in American history that the Puritans who had fled to the New World for the chance to exercise their own conscience in matters of worship eventually became the very thing they fled.  Colonial America wasn’t an idyllic utopia of liberty, but rather a patchwork quilt of different understandings and tolerances of what freedom was all about. In many places, especially in Church of England dominated-areas, the line between church and state was so blurry as to be almost non-existent.    Church officials held  political offices and  church  officials exercised police powers, with a careful eye towards maintaining the status quo of doctrinal purity. This mindset revealed itself in activities like the witch trials in Salem or the ordinance passed in Massachusetts in 1644 that specifically referred to Anabaptists as “the troublers of churches in all places where they have been”. In 1656 when the first Quakers began to arrive on the shores of Massachusetts, the Quakers in question were imprisoned by their Puritan brothers, the women strip-searched under pretense of looking for witches,  and their religious literature burned as heresy.

  Existing side by side with these large religious behemoths were small pockets of men and women who followed their conscience regardless of what the ruling powers thought.   They worshipped both in secret, and in open, and preached outside of the established church buildings, taking the gospel out in public as the Bible commands.  For this they were fined, banished, beaten, arrested, and imprisoned. Their ears were, in some cases, cut off, and hot irons  driven through their ‘blasphemous tongues’. Their church buildings were burned, their properties seized.  They were Quakers, and Baptists, and Anabaptists, and a variety of other groups who simply sought to live and worship according to the dictates of their own conscience. They sought to practice what would later be called ‘soul liberty’.

  Because those abuses were so blatant, it drew the attention, and earned the condemnation of some of the most prominent thinkers in the colonies. As  we are seeing again today, the  state  overreacted, overstepped its bounds, and  men of courage called them on it. In June of 1768, four Baptist preachers were imprisoned in Spotsylvania County, Virginia for  preaching without  a state-issued license.  Patrick Henry  became involved in the case, and they were released. That incident, and incidents like it, caused great discussion among the  founding generation as the colonies moved closer and closer to independence. Local statues were  enacted and drafted by what would become some of the most famous men in history. These statues were put in place to protect the  consciences of free men from coercion by the state.  They presented, in writing, a philosophical thread that grew and grew until it became the 1st amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
  One of the most prominent was one drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and adopted in 1786  entitled "An Act for establishing Religious Freedom". In  three simple paragraphs, Thomas Jefferson laid out  not only  what  powers the state did not have, but why.  It's worth reading in its entirety, but I am going to cite a couple of prominent lines and then opine (probably in a separate post) on where I hope things are going in America today.  It is an axiom in my mind that all natural rights are interconnected, and the principles behind one can be applied to the others, as you will see.

Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness....

  This includes the Infernal Revenue Service  dangling threats of revocation of tax exempt status over the head of ecclesiastical bodies and using that as a lever to  force entry into their  internal affairs.  If there ever was an organization committed to 'hypocrisy and  meanness', it is these  modern day publicans who are after all a political organ as they have so recently demonstrated.

...that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;

  An everday occurrence in America. I  believe it is  wrong to  steal, so I am stolen from. I believe it's wrong to mooch, so my stolen money is used to support the moochers.  Abortions are funded out of my own pocket after its been pilfered. In a thousand ways I am made by compulsion to support things I  hold to be wrong.

Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate,..

  As a minister of the gospel I  hold that  a society in which  there is no  state religion  offers me the greatest opportunity to persuade men from the Scriptures by earnest and heartfelt discussion and it offers me the greatest opportunity to hear their rebuttals. In fact, on a personal note,to do so is one of the great joys of my life.

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever,

   In a perfect world this would include the  peculiar  doctrines taught by the compulsory government schools.  Compulsory  government education has been one  of the greatest and most successful tools in  robbing people not only of truth, but of the ability to recognize the truth when it is presented to them.
  Jefferson proved himself by this resolution to be not only overtly brilliant, but a man who understood the issue and was able to get to the heart of it.  His arguments, his logic, his  very words, later became the heart of  the 1st Amendment, an amendment that  was an absolute condition for  Virginia's  ratification of the Constitution.
  Would to God we had a few more Jeffersons!

There's a Lot to Learn

This footage was shot by yours truly on Beale Street during the latest Beale Street Blast, which is a  public ministry outreach organized by Banners Unfurled and Ken Lansing of Memphis Tenn.   We go to Beale Street during the Music fest and we preach to the crowd there.  Iti s insanely loud, and the crowd can be a bit hostile, so the standard practice is to have the preacher at the moment up on a small ladder or stepstool and then have a buffer of men between him and the crowd, as the crowd is apt to snatch you off of the ladder. In this video, Bob Love of Smyrna Baptist Church is the 'front man' and he is dealing with a heckler that  technically commits several acts of assault on his person.
  From this we can learn a handful of things. We can learn that it is possible to be gracious and loving in the face of open hostility. We also  learn ( from the last few seconds of the video) that the  police are  sometimes quite content to sit back and watch while you get assaulted. I don't mean to berate the Memphis PD, as they  have done an admirable job in times past of protecting us from the crowd. I just find their response very interesting. Then again, maybe they saw that Bob Love had the situation under control.

No Paucity of Paper

 I have a deep ,dark, terrible, and  horribly kept secret. I love books. In fact, I  sort of hoard books.  If you came to our house in the last few years you would have noticed the  slow and steady accumulation of  bookshelves.  We had one or two in the living room, at least one in the back bedroom, and  one in the master bedroom.   There's a bookshelf my grandfather built and a small metal one we picked up at a yard sale somewhere. In addition to these  bookshelves being crammed with books on them, books lying on top of the books on them,  and books lying on their sides in front of those books, you  no doubt would have noticed the piles of books, and  boxes of books scattered around the premises.   I would say that its better now, but it's not, its just more centrally  located.  The entire  far wall of our bedroom is bookshelves and piles. In addition to that there are books stacked on  my nightstand and piled on top of every flat surface.  But the search and accumulation   never stops. I  cruise yard sales, and used book stores, and   I lie in ambush when our local library decides to  dump some books. I hit the  'free book rack' first, then I venture inside to  snatch up the dollar books. I dump them in the trunk of my car, and when I get home I try to find a  shelf or box or flat surface that they'll fit on.
   In my defense, if one could  hope to mount one, I don't  get books just for the sake of getting books. I actually read everything I  bring in. I suffer from an insatiable  curiosity about  a variety of topics. I recently picked up a tome  on how to conduct an exorcism. It's sitting in a pile right next to a book about the quest for the worlds largest small mouth bass. I have books on church history  snuggled right next to books on the search for Bigfoot.  I have a book of collected sea monster legends on the same shelf as a Ron Paul  book on Austrian economics.It is this eclectic  accumulation of dead trees that causes my wife to roll her eyes and causes me to sheepishly , and sometimes clandestinely, bring my latest haul into the house. Once someone gave us 17 long boxes of comic books ( about 250 a box), and I successfully  shifted them around the house to where my wife was never 100% sure of how many we had until I was able to sell off roughly half of them. But that's a whole different post.
  My insatiable hunger for the printed word seems to  chill when it comes to the  digital word. Yes, I wrote a book, and yes it was only available on Kindle for  a while ( I still am Kindle-less, cell-phone-less, and  ipod-less), but that was more a matter of economics than my love for small  flat e-readers. I just like books, and by 'books' I mean rectangular  compilations of pulpified  tree matter, not slim battery powered collections of magnetic ink and pixie dust.
  It may be a generational thing, but that's unlikely,  since my  wife loves her Kindle.  I got her a Kindle because a) I love her dearly, and b) her  collection of Amish romance novels was taking up valuable  shelf space.  I just like paper. I like the look of it, and the heft of it, and the smell of it, but I also like the fact that it  doesn't change.  I can write this blog, post this blog, then go back and edit this blog and you would have no indicator that I had changed anything. It is intangible, and subject to alteration.  Physical books are a set  quantity, and the   book I have from the 1800's ( yard sale) still say the exact same things, contain the exact same facts that they did when they were printed. They are  off-grid, untraceable and here to stay, at least until the paper rots.
  I can  justify my habit with  the best of them. After all, I'm always researching one thing or another, and I do refer back to them as needed, assuming I can find them. Ironically if Im doing  very mch internet research I will print it out so I cn hold it in my hand.  Plus we're homeschoolers! We're supposed to  have lots of books, it's part of the Code! Why just  yesterday my son needed to know the  difference between two different types of clouds (cumulus and stratus), and without the  Latin-English dictionary I snagged at an estate sale, why we'd be sunk!
  As vices go, I suppose its one of the more harmless ones. I dont do drugs, I dont chase wild women, I  pay my bills on time. But I'm always on the  prowl for more epistles. When the kids finally move out, one by one I'll probably take their rooms and convert them into more bookshelves. My  ever-patient wife will no doubt  accompany in my decling years, holding my hand and taking pity on me as I rummage through the local penny-saver  saying "Oh look, an estate sale!"
  Well I certainly feel better now that I've gotten this off my chest. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some things to get out of the trunk of my car before my wife gets home.

Glenn Beck and the Fatal Flaw

Someone gave me a copy of Glen Beck’s new book on gun control, entitled, appropriately enough, Control.  Now I do have some issues with Mr. Beck, which I won’t go into here. I don’t think it’s profitable for the people in the liberty movement to devour each other over perceived ideological impurities. Beck, love him or hate him, is a very visible voice that is, at least when his  handlers don’t pull his chain too hard, encouraging people to think about liberty and  he’s probably a fine fellow to read if you are slowly detoxing from the ‘government is good’ mindset.

  Having said that, the book is, over all, a very good collection of studies done by the gun control crowd which are then debunked, and quotes from the gun control crowd which are then examined in light of the  facts.  My issue with the book and it’s approach may seem like a minor point to some, but to me the very subtlety of it makes it a dangerous point.

  In it, over and over again, Mr. Beck makes the case that all we gun folks want is a reasonable exercise of our rights.  Nobody is asking for RPG’s to be legal, nobody wants a machine gun; all we want is what’s reasonable.  This sent up a big red flag for me. Who decides what’s reasonable?

  For Beck to say it’s unreasonable for me to  own a  grenade launcher is the ideological twin  of Feinstein  saying it’s unreasonable for me to own a  30 round magazine. In both cases, someone else has appealed to some external standard to decide for me what I should and should not have.

  Now I may well decide on my own, if I were allowed the choice, that a grenade launcher is impractical for me. I’ve made that decision with a variety of legal weapons, over issues of cost or practicality.  Ultimately I should be the one that decides what’s reasonable for me, not Glenn Beck and certainly not Feinstein.  In my estimation, anytime you surrender that decision to somebody else, whether you keep the articles you wanted to keep or not, you’ve lost the issue on a philosophical level.

  That philosophical surrender leads to your next loss as somebody else redefines what’s ‘reasonable’. Before long you’re disputing about what we’re asking to be legal. Since when do we ‘ask’ for freedom? As a friend of mine once said “a freedom that you have to ask for is a privilege’.

  If I was a  more conspiracy-minded sort of guy ( wait a minute here) I would entertain the notion that the Glenn Becks of the world are there to keep liberty folks from wandering too far off the reservation, and from thinking too deeply or from looking at things a certain way.  As long as we stay busy reacting to the other side’s definition of reasonable, and as long as we keep asking for permission to exercise  our rights, we can still be controlled. Or am I overthinking it?

It Must Just be My Paranoia

These pictures were taken by my wife of the sky over our house.  We almost never see or hear a  plane coming overhead, and we live nowhere near an airport.