TO BE LIKE GOD--REALLY

 "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:4 & 5, NIV)
Be like God. I emphasize those words as I ask myself, what did our conflated far ancestors conceive as 'being like God'?
I can guess. Most of us still imagine 'being like God' as being able to order the world to revolve around us, am I right? To be all-powerful, self-sustaining and immortal to boot, am I right? And have we any reason to think our prehistoric and early-civilizational forebears imagined anything different? I think the answer to that is a rather resounding 'NO'; don't you think so?
But such clues as we have to the nature of God--and if we call ourselves Christians, we follow, some for real (and I'm not at all sure of most of us), the God made flesh in Christ Jesus. His life is supposed to show us what it really means to 'be like God'. And those clues are at least 180 degrees away from what our human imaginations conjure up.
Jesus lived and died like 'the least of us' whom he called 'his brethren'. And when his apostles were scared and disheartened, God raised him as He had promised to do. But the point here is, Jesus lived and taught (and, I believe, still lives and teaches) the way to be like God is to empty oneself as we live the lives of servants to one another and to Creation as a whole.
I think a whole lot of dough-colored faces started to redden to varying degrees as I wrote the above lines. These evil-minded, greedy, essentially cowardly dinkyjohnnies and the shrivelled walnuts who are their consorts want to rebuild a caste system in our country with themselves as the actual owners of everything--and, yes, of everyone else as well. And they routinely violate both the Third and Ninth Commandments in their misuse of the name of Jesus in their attempt to reduce the rest of us to actual and perhaps again to legally defined slavery as well!
And now they'll whine they seek to 'serve' the rest of us by compelling us to live like them. Rather like Granny Clampett brandishing a rifle and declaiming, 'Th' code of th' hills holds ever'where!'
No, 'ladies' and 'gentlemen', that is not 'service'! That is imperialism of the worst kind!!
One salient trait of real service is, it listens seriously to those it seeks to serve. You seek to do no such thing! You seek to be served by the rest of us!
And what fuels you is rage. Rage at having not been listened to for decades! But you have very much the wrong targets for that rage! You have brethren who have also gone unheard, not for decades but for centuries--and who now welcome you to the Club of the Unheard! And we all have the same enemies: cunning dinkyjohnnies who have stolen from all of us for at least decades (and in some cases for centuries) and who have bullied those with darker skins even while they humbug a majority of us into the lie that, because our skins, hair and eyes are paler, we are intrinsically superior to the rest of humankind! Join those of us who are wise to their vicious game NOW!
Unless you wish to be content with stomping those who your puppet-handlers have taught you to hate--and this means, few if any tangible benefits for you--in order to have the nice things that most of us want and don't have, you'll need to make common cause with those of African, Native, Hispanic and Asiatic heritage who now share with you the trait of being willfully unheard! As Franklin said when he signed the Declaration, "We must now all hang together or we shall most assuredly hang separately."
So it is now with all of us. If you really wish to 'be like God', you must choose the way Jesus lived and showed and instructed us to follow. You need to let go of wanting absolute earthly power and be ready to share it, and earthly wealth, instead. If you don't, the rest of us--and the world at large--will know that you are not, and were never, real Christians at all but only greedy savages trying to misuse God's Name! And I hope you remember that God Himself will not hold you guiltless for that--and neither will I, for one!

SOLD SOULS

   Sold souls.
What do I mean by that?
Simply this: those who have sold their own souls for the ultimately worthless gewgaws of this world, chiefly for wealth and power. Mostly, for the power to stomp on the faces of others with impunity. Always of those with less eartthly power than the stompers and usually 'different' in some relatively unimportant way such as sex or orientation thereto, skin color (A BIIIG one!), national origin or faith community.
And, having sold their own souls for such trash, now seek to sell their followers out. The prime example of this is the arms manufacturers and their lobbyists, with the NRA leading this pack of TRAITORS!
Their followers are mostly my 'fellow' male dough-faces, although they do include an alarming number of women, nearly all of whom are also dough-faces. Most of those with darker skins seem to be wise to them, mostly because they've always been among the sufferers from what the bullies do. Jews are an exception to this: most are neither dark nor dough-faced, but at least a millennium and a half of being pushed round, proscribed, exiled, expelled , re-expelled and massacred tends to teach one to recognize the signs, if you follow me.
But they too are human and, hence, not immune to such dangerous blandishments. Stephen Miller, I'm looking right at you. You too, Benny boy. Not at you though, Caroline.
Right now, such bullies are not found on the left side of North American or European politics. They might be found on that side in 'People's Republics' such as China, North Korea, Venezuela and maybe Cuba. But in our political world, they are almost all among today's fascisti. Yes. Use. The. Correct. Word. FASCISTI.
And they bait their followers with promises that they too may one day stomp on those who they hate--or those who they believe, from being lied to constantly, hate them. Which is not so. We are big believers in 'live and let live'. For y'all as well as us.
And yet, they are not the most dangerous characters featured herein. If an African-American blues musician can sit down and talk with Klansmen and by God's Grace get them to come to the light and give him their robes as tokens of that change (and he has done so with 200+ of them so far!) then, again with the Grace of God, they are yet reachable when God gives the strength of character and understanding to some of us to do so--part of which needs to be avoiding the addytood (thank you Philly!) of the Yankee schoolma'm who thinks she knows it all and we don't know s**t.
The most dangerous characters are those who, so long as what's in their wallet or purse continues to grow, could frankly care less about anyone else or the nation, much less the planet, as a whole. And yet, when the underpinning of such 'growth' collapses, as it does with sickening regularity, is there anyone who wails, yelps, snarls and whimpers with as much noise as they? Here are the hardcore Judases, who would sell out the rest of us and be content with probably only five pieces of silver per head, never mind thirty!
These are the ones who either don't, or say they don't, understand that the way to build lasting prosperity on this whole planet is to invest in both our natural capital and our human capital. This means re-planting the Amazon rainforest, protecting the Boreal Pines, capturing carbon and re-enriching impoverished soils with it, sweeping up the Pacific Plastic Patch and finding real uses for all that plastic. Could we build an island for all those selfish billionaires with it, I wonder? Anyhow, that's just a fraction of such investment!
We invest in our human capital by doing all we can to nourish and educate them. The GI Bill and FHA are examples of how we invested in our (white, OK) human capital. And the result was a turbocharged economy for thirty years. Imagine what investment in all our human capital, along with investment in our natural capital, can do--for all of us!
But first, every single sold soul, at every level of government, must be voted out, thrown down and be barred, somehow, from any office of public trust which they have abused nearly to the utmost! They control the Senate, are too many in the House and own too many state legislatures! WE need to change that this November! Think about what a future we can make together--and how we will surely implode if we don't vote out all the sold souls!
Apologies for the lack of fire and brimstone seasoning; it's a great flavoring but we dasn't get addicted to it.

SOMETHING ABOUT FIRE & BRIMSTONE

Something about what we call 'fire and brimstone'.
It can energize and it can....burn.
What does it burn up? I really don't know. Considering liberal, democratic and Democratic aversion to it, does it burn out the neo-cortex which is indispensable for being fully human? Does it burn out hearts, leaving only a stony residue therein? Our side is glad to have, and sometimes a bit too proud to have, both organs which we all try to nurture as God gives us the light to do so.
Which brings me to the sorely misguided members of what is, for good or ill, my paternal tribe. I hope I don't disappoint those who like the flavor of my fire and brimstone with this post because as of now I sort of suspect that, in this column, it may only be a flavoring as opposed to a serious portion. But, be that as it will.
I think about those who have known little else but fire and brimstone from those they've been taught to trust and defer to as 'leaders'. What of their internal earths have been so scorched that, unless Christ Jesus reaches down and touches those stretches of their psyche, nothing can grow except briars, thorns and brambles if even them? How many hurlers of brimstone have included salt in their mixture? How many of these children of God have had their souls, or parts of their souls, sown with salt by those they trust?
When land is sown with salt, that means nothing--repeat, nothing--will ever grow there again absent divine intervention!
And now I address myself to those sadly abused brothers and sisters with questions, viz.
What have those you call 'leaders' really done for you? I mean, do you have any physical benefits from supporting them? Is your house in better repair? Are you and your family eating better? Do you have assurance that a medical emergency won't utterly ruin you and your family? Or is all they give you what W.E.B. DuBois called 'the psychological wages of whiteness'--that is, the lie that the lowest among us is still 'better than' the best persons who happen to have darker skins? How much does THAT do for you when your bright and beautiful child or grandchild is sick and you know you can't afford medical attention?
Brothers and sisters, cry out to God in Christ Jesus to restore your soul's scorched, and possibly salted, grounds! Throw away the hateful lies which those you call 'leaders' and those who claim to tell you the truth but feed you with the anti-human junk foods of hatred of certain differences heap on your plates!
Cry out to Jesus that he may indeed restore your souls and strengthen those restored souls against being re-scorched and re-salted! But for Him to do this, you must throw away the lies that you've been fed about skin color and act as Jesus would have you act--that we are all brothers and sisters, regardless of skin color, national origin or faith community!
If you feel the need for healthier instruction (and I'm sure you will) consult first with our African-Americnn brothers and sisters. But first, explain to them, when they ask why don't you seek instruction from those of us who are 'woke', that we will do that but we want a guide which will keep us from choosing teachers who have the air of that obnoxious character about them that nearly ALL we Southerners of all colors can hardly abide: the Yankee (and I mean real Yankee, not generic Northern) schoolmaster or schoolma'm who acts as if they know it all and we don't know s**t!
Every one of us down here, of any color, knows that the North, and especially Greater New England (the original, except Fairfield County, CT, most of upstate New York and the area around the Great Lakes) is nowhere near as enlightened as they like to think and that the truth is STILL much closer to a Herblock cartoon to which I'll provide a link at the end of this 'sermon'.
In any case, we need help from somewhere to point us to teachers who won't act obnoxiously superior and thus put us off the things we need to learn.
I reckon fire and brimstone is something with which we need to flavor our speech more, but we need to handle it carefully.
Brothers and sisters, those you look to now for leadership are leading you, and all of us, to a very dead end. Remember I said before, they lead you now in a DEATH CULT! You cannot tune them out, and tune in more truth, quickly enough! You cannot grasp Jesus's Hand with one hand and hold an AR-15, along with the lies of 'whiteness', in the other! Choose life, with Jesus, that we all, and our descendants, may live!!
Apparently I'm being prevented from sharing a link to that Herblock cartoon. But it's dated March 1963, and the caption is: 'What's the matter? We don't say 'n***ers' up here.' Sorry, best I can do just now.

MORE FIRE & BRIMSTONE. APPLIED TO FENCES.

 It seems as if all the mass murders, as they continue, will keep my fire and brimstone flowing.
After hearing of what happened in Tulsa (and that the murderer actually bought the murder weapon after leaving the hospital!)  that sets my f.& b. moving again all right!
Again, Gentle Readers, imagine me verbally hurling this message at a gang of dough-faced ammosexuals.

Do you know what you are?
Do you believe you are 'washed in the blood'? If you do, and if you own assault weapons and ammo clips of more than ten rounds, I have seriously bad news for you: you are much mistaken about your purported 'regeneration'. Why do I say that? First, tell me why you own assault weapons with such large ammo clips. Surely hunting rifles are enough to put meat on your tables and scare dangerous critters away, right? And, if you have need of personal protection or have a job which requires you to be armed, surely sidearms such as pistols are quite adequate for that job, aren't they?
I can tell you with some confidence that no one--repeat, no one--will be coming against you. No 'n***ers', no 's**cs', no 'Injyns' and certainly no 'weirdos', to quote from the sewage systems which are the minds of many of you! I also understand that your 'news sources' have been lying to you about this. Yes, they have lied to you in order to keep you whipped up with fear and rage and buying lots of things they have you believing you'll need. If you want news from sources that tell you the truth, then return to the old networks--PBS also tells the truth, as do CNN and MSNBC. They make no bones about their editorial stands, but they don't twist the news to conform to their ideology as do your probable current sources.
By the way: you do remember that the performers of the 'Boston Tea Party' were actual white men masquerading as 'Indians', don't you? Well, it might be said that Fox, OAN, Newsmax and the Sinclair Broadcasting stattions have done the same to y'all. Think about it.
Rage, fear and hatred are serious barriers to something you say you all crave, as believers. They are barriers to your regeneration and to the infusion of God's own Holy Spirit into your own beings!
As of this moment, you are NOT even 'pro-life' in any meaningful way; you are--and, yes, you may not realize it--members of a DEATH CULT!!
YES---A DEATH CULT!! You have chosen to rely not on the living God in Christ Jesus but on your assault weapons, ammo and your pale skins which you've been deluded into believing mark you as superior! Don't try to lie to me; remember I'm also a Southern white man! If you were 'pro-life' you would cast aside these weapons of war for the weapons with which Christ Jesus can give us and train us in using IF we are willing to learn from Him!
If you become truly 'pro-life' you will reach out to other working people who have darker skins and work with them in order to compel our representatives to give us the things we all need and desire!
And you would listen to our darker brothers and sisters when they caution us not to listen to those who say, 'There's only so much available' with intent to re-divide us!
You know what the FHA and the GI Bill after WWII did, right? It created a much larger middle class than any country had yet had! True, it was almost all white, but that's not your fault nor mine as none of us knew how hard it was for people of color to get those benefits. We might have, and eventually did, ask about that, but the architects of those laws also were very discouraging of such questions from we who benefited from them.
In any case, the making of such a middle class turbocharged our economy! In light of that, imagine how strong our economy would be if people of color had been included among the beneficiaries of those laws! Now do you understand how we've been lied to and deliberately divided from one another?
Brothers and sisters, put down the instruments of death! Leave your death cults and grasp the hand held by the Lord Jesus Christ! Choose life, indeed, that you, your children and our brethren of color may ALL live!  But remember you cannot grasp the hand of Jesus with one hand and have an AR-15 in the other!!
Some of you may know an old religious song; I don't know if we can call it a hymn. I think the title is Sunday Morning and it sings about  being able to 'tear down the fences that fence us all in/Fences created by such e-vil men' and being able to 'live together again'. This is what Our Lord calls us to do: do our part in the truly godly work of tearing down those fences! Join Jesus and me in this holy work and save your souls, yourselves and our country!