111 Some Things Will Never Change

If there are two peoples in history who show that the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from it, it's the Germans and the Jews.

Not many people seem to share my personal sentiments toward the soon to be relieved from office President of the United States George Bush. At least not many seem to have the guts to openly admit it, except for, perhaps, the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, for which he will always have my admiration, a few Canadians, and the guys from Counterpunch, bless their hearts.

Of course there are millions of Arabs whose sentiments toward G.W. are even far less benign than mine, including those of the Iraqi population, even if they are not in a position in which they can freely admit so.

Then there are the Germans, thousands, probably tens of thousands of whom are quite daring to share their sentiments about the probably worst dictator the United States ever had, anonymously somewhere on Youtube or elsewhere when they've had a beer or two to many, but one thing hasn't changed about the Germans since the Hitler regime: they're still a bunch of cowards. Maybe rightly so, since cowards tend to live longer... But what sort of a life?

And cowards seem to breed ever more cowards.

That's why there isn't much to be seen or heard from the German public about what's happening in Palestine right now. Just as their ancestors did 75 or 80 years ago, they prefer to watch and say nothing. They neatly swallow the government propaganda of today the same as it was then. "The Palestinians have brought this upon themselves, just as much as the Jews brought the 3rd Reich Holocaust upon themselves."

It's the great indifference that is killing the innocent, now, as it did then.

The Davids of the past have become today's Goliaths, the persecuted of yesterday have become the persecutors, and the one thing that hasn't changed at all is the indifferent stupor of the masses that just stands by and watches the slaughter.
Worst and most sickening of all, some Christian outfits think they need to publicly sympathize with the Israelis, perhaps in order to rectify some guilt of the past. They didn't learn anything at all. They just swallow the same propaganda their parents or grandparents did, only from different sources.

No wonder Jesus vowed that he would vomit some of His supposed followers out of His mouth because of their lukewarmness...

As for those who claim to be the heirs of Abraham, the day will reveal all that is being concealed.

110 We Haven't Even Yet Begun

One of the biggest killers of progress and moving forward is the notion to have arrived. People who think they already know don't seek any further knowledge, their hunger to learn is stifled. They stop absorbing, soaking up the new, and so they stagnate and stop growing.

This applies to so many aspects of our lives:

We think we've already seen it all, and so we stop looking for new things, for new possibilties.

We let the TV do its job and fill our craving for new visual input, and close the door to the possibility of whole new worlds in existence that we might yet discover, would we only lay aside the remote control long enough, or the joystick or computer mouse, for that matter.

We think we've already heard it all and trust the radio and blaring noises & Satan's sirens to fill our vacuum for new audio input, and have unlearned the art of listening to our hearts and the whispers of our Maker.

We think we already know it all, and trust the institutions of education and the mass media to supply us with whatever they think we ought to "know," and have perhaps come further away from true knowledge than mankind has ever been.

We think we already give so much, when we will not be judged by how much we give, but by how much we still have left, and how much more we could have given. (Remember the lesson from "Schindler's List.")

Indeed, our self-image is an utterly deceptive one. We say, "I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing," and know not that we are "wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked" (Rev.3:17). We behave like spiritual primadonnas and "sit like a queen," convinced that we "shall see no sorrow" (Rev.18:7).

That's why Jesus said you can't fill new wine into old wine skins.

Someone special once compared faith to a vacuum of the sort that a baby creates in its mouth in order to suck the milk from its mother's breast (if you take any offense in that idea, get real, dude!).

So, what is it that hinders our growth? A lack of vacuum, a lack of desire, of yearning, of a need for more, new spiritual food.

What's causing the lack of desire? The abundant supply of junk-food we're not only being offered, but virtually flooded with from all sides.

We haven't learned the art of saying "no" to the wrong kind of voices, the wrong kind of input, the wrong kind of spiritual drugs. But before we learn that, we'll never be able to say truly "yes" to our Creator, the only One Who can truly satisfy us and fill our needs.

So, next time you feel tempted to say, "I've seen it all," or "I've heard that," or "I know all that," be still and listen to the knock and the whisper at your heart, which may tell you just the opposite: "You ain't seen nuthin' yet!"

We may feel pretty much defeated by the circumstances of life and surrender to our fate & say, "That's just the way it is," or we can say - as John Paul Jones is supposed to have said when it looked as if he was defeated - "We haven't even yet begun to fight."

We haven't even yet begun to love, to live, to give, to see, to know...

We haven't even yet begun.

109 "Left," "Right," - Where Should a True Christian Stand, Politically?

As a Christian, (as in follower of Christ's teachings) who chooses not to ignore what my true Commander-in-Chief has to say and who won't allow any man-made, government puppet to usurp that position of leadership and souverignty over my life, either, I cannot subscribe to the political choice of most of my supposed fellow-Christians, who presently seem to believe that problems are solved with guns and granades, and think a weekly hour of pew-warming will do to hide the fact that the gods they're worshiping in reality are Mammon (god of wealth) and Mars (the god of war).

I'm speaking of the political right, as in Bush-ites or McCainians, the kind who would love to put a bullet into the man they call the "antichrist," just because he has a different color of skin than they do, and because he doesn't bend over backwards to kiss their flag-waving and pew-warming butts as much as his predecessor did for no other reason than convenience, because he didn't want to make the same mistake his daddy made earlier by failing to please the Bible belt during a time when most of the colored U.S. population wouldn't have cared to drag themselves to a voting booth, because they rightly figured it wouldn't have much of a difference, anyhow.

On the other hand, I can't subscribe to anyone advocating the mass-murder of innocent, howbeit unborn babies, nor to the notion that man is smart enough to solve his own problems without any help from God, not even if I'm as smart as Barack Obama...

I won't deny that I consider Obama the lesser of two evils, but that doesn't mean I subscribe to his politics. I'm happy for the Afro-American population to have for once received a chance to be liberated from the yoke of stupid white men, but I'm afraid their relief will only be temporary.

Call me a conspiracy freak, but I believe that the true powers that be (howbeit well hidden from public view by having bought the media and thus making sure they'll stay out of them) have always mastered the art of creating two opposing forces - be it fascism or communism in the thirties, or liberalism and conservatives in the nineties - that the broad masses are led to choose sides from, in order to create the illusion of democracy and freedom.

In reality, G.W.Bush has only fulfilled his part in the advance of the New World Order by making the world yet sicker of his supposed type of government and religion, and prepared his country for Obama, who will take it yet another step further toward the goal of replacing religion with the NWO'S universal ideology.

Those who call Obama the antichrist are the same type of wishful thinkers who believe that Jesus will whisk them into the sky before the coming leader of the New World Order ever reveals his true face. Barack Obama is a puppie compared to what the Antichrist will be, and he sure as heck won't be American, either.
America is a world power in its decline that's turning out a whole lot less smart than it managed to make the rest of the world believe for some time. The Antichrist will emerge from the resurrected parts of an empire the world presumed dead and will "liberate" the world from the show that the clowns in Washington and their stooges in Europe are putting on.


So, where should a true Christian stand, politically? Left or right? Well, if you listen to what Jesus had to say, you won't really fall for that whole left-or-right charade in the first place. He made it clear that just as He wasn't from this world, so His disciples wouldn't be, either. While we're supposed to subject ourselves to the powers that be as long as they don't interfere with the commandments God gave us to keep, that doesn't mean that there will never come a time when we will have to prove that we are to obey God rather than men and show on whose side we really stand.

Politicians are always bigshots and popularity hunters, and Jesus certainly wasn't a politician. While there may have been a time that a true Christian could also be a politician, if you look around, those days are pretty much over. Those in politics who call themselves Christians are like the guys who dressed up like Indians in the Boston Tea Party scam in order to get into war with England. They may even think they're doing whatever they do for a just cause, but so did the Nazis who were condemned at Nuremberg.

When the people of Israel in the Old Testament were asking for a king, they weren't doing themselves a favor, and God even warned them of this. It's because people - and especially politicians, it seems - are bound to disappoint you. They simply don't have the same qualities that our Maker does.

I'd vote for Him Who gave His own life for us any day before I'd put my money on any government-paid mass murderers, be their victims either innocent Iraquis or innocent unborn children.

108 Thoughts of Bono & Mammon...

Apart from the short line in my song "Donut" about Bono's desire to bring an end to world poverty, which was based on a piece of Yahoo news that had caught my eye around the time I wrote the song, I never really did waste another thought on the vocal frontman of the 80s band U2.

Of course, I have done my obligatory U2 covers in my time, even though I was never much of a U2 fan myself. I was surprised when in the early 90s an English friend told me that U2 was supposedly a Christian band. Never noticed. After that, whenever I saw Bono on MTV with his larger than life and blacker than death sunglasses, looking a bit like a man-sized insect, I just thought, "Christian, huh!"

Oh, and I read the Rolling Stone article in which he claimed to read the Bible every day, sort of like General Patton.

To be honest, for the longest time, I didn't know what to think. Good guy, bad guy?

He definitely outed himself for me, as far as "Christian" goes, with his live performance of "Sympathy for the Devil," strutting across the stage like someone with the same type of inflated-ego problems that you'd expect Lucifer himself to have. You just can't sing that song the way he did and afterwards run to Jesus, telling Him you're His friend.

But then, we've all had our compromises.

Some Christians view Bono and U2 among the avant guarde of Christian song writing. In an Interview with Christianity Today, Bethany Dillon quoted Bono on one of his secrets of writing smash hits (I guess the secret lies in camouflaging the message to an extent that even Stalin wouldn't have considered it "politically incorrect").

I don't deny that U2 have had a few big hits in their day.

Like the one, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," in which the singer practically tells the Lord, that he believes that He bore the cross of his shame and all, but - so what? "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." In other words, "Jesus, you may be sort of cool & all, but you don't really cut the cake..."

If you haven't found what you were looking for in Jesus, then what the hell are you looking for? Or perhaps it's safer to put it this way: If you haven't found yet what you're looking for, I doubt that you've really found Jesus! Unless what you're really looking for is the same old temporal counterfeit thrills & satisfactions that everyone else is chasing...

There's an adjective for that type of Christianity in the Bible, from Jesus' own mouth: "Lukewarm." The same type of Christianity that's being observed by the majority of Christians, by the way, who basically live their lives in the feverish attempt to prove Jesus wrong when He said, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon."

Well, the news about Mammon is, that his days are just about up. What you see unfolding in the economy right now is just the beginning of sorrows, and when the tale is told, and our "economy" is reduced to the value of what it's actually based on - paper - then there will only be one other alternative left, besides serving God, and if you're not going to feel too comfortable with that one, you'll wish you'll have found what you've been looking for by then.