If Google Is Finished Ruining Things

"Silly Christian!" Said The Trendy Neo-Pagan

2011-10-07T22:07:00.000-07:00

This was on Facebook; he proceeded to list pagan meanings of day-names, and the various instances of Catholic-established holidays coinciding with prior pagan festivals. Pretending that this invalidated the CONTENT of the Christian faith, he concluded with a smirking, "Happy Samhain." So I took up the gauntlet he had flung.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Silly pagan. We already knew the origins of the names of days of the week; they no more determine the content of our beliefs than the name of a street you build on determines what the interior of the house will be like. As for the timing of the listed holidays, none of that was called for by the Bible, but was done for someone's convenience. Basic Biblical truth is about particular events, independently from what time of the year somebody had a fertility festival or whatever. Neither Osiris nor Balder ACTUALLY rose to literal life after a literal death; we have cause to believe that Yeshua the Messiah DID. (That, by the way, is something which I did not blindly accept as a child, but rather became convinced of as an inquiring agnostic in college years.)

Real-world information is particularly helpful in dispelling the big deal that is made of saying, "The resurrection story is only about flowers blooming in the spring, tra la." In Israel, where the events of the Gospels took place, the cycle of nature is quite different from the European environment where people "brilliantly discovered" that the resurrection story was only about springtime renewal. In Israel, the "dead" season of the year is precisely the SUMMER, when it is so hot and dry. Crops were anciently planted in AUTUMN, were helped to grow by rain rather than snow in winter, and matured for harvest in spring. Thus, at the time when Yeshua/Jesus died AND rose again, the life cycle for THAT locality was at the DYING time, equivalent in significance to a European autumn. So those who first told their testimony of the Messiah's resurrection WERE NOT "really" just praising the renewal of vegetation. They actually MEANT what they said: that they had SEEN Yeshua walking around alive again after His death. And if you know the circumstances, you know that THEY knew that they could not possibly GAIN anything but trouble if they were only making this up.

A Week After My "Loving" Fiancee Dumped Me

2011-08-29T21:29:00.001-07:00

I'm too tired and emotionally drained to feel like recording the whole story here--especially since no one comes here. I will say this: in dumping me, Shannon claimed that I made her uncomfortable with my performer's personality, whereas she supposedly was shy and retiring. But in the time she spent with me at the Colorado Renaissance Festival, by HER OWN choice and initiative she aggressively got into the act with me, chattering away at the customers I was meeting. Not a very good testimonial to honesty on her part.

Anyway, I will post here a glimpse into my stream of consciousness as a jilted man. By golly, the aftermath of a traumatic rejection DOES have something in common with the aftermath of a bereavement. I'm in doldrums not unlike what followed Mary's death and then Janalee's death. So I wrote a sonnet.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

It's actually a sign of my fatigue
If I let one more sonnet now be born.
The style's become familiar; it's my league;
' Twould be more work to use a different form.

I read the Book of Romans through last night,
Then did some Russian work today; but still
There is no new romantic love in sight;
Enthusiasm wanes, as does my will.

Next month I'm at the Santa Fe Ren-Fair:
Just going through the motions, truth be told.
I'll try, of course, to please the patrons there;
But if some lovely lady, acting bold,

Pretends to find me handsome and so nice,
My thought will be, "No, you can't fool me twice."
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

By the way, the reading of Romans represents my new effort to do more Bible reading, since "extracurricular" phenomena failed me utterly in their APPEARANCE of proving to me that God had sent Shannon to be my new love. Always a good thing to grow more strongly rooted in God's Word; but I can't help thinking that I could have increased my reading WITHOUT needing to be played for a sucker by a woman I loved.

To Someone Who Missed the Point of "Crime and Punishment"

2011-06-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

A fan of Dostoevsky ought to see
What Rodion Raskolnikov was shown:
It was precisely his autonomy,
His choosing to believe that he alone

Could redefine the right and wrong, that left
Him rudderless. That's why Raskolnikov
Thought he was authorized to put to death
Two helpless women. Thus he was cut off

From conscience and from wisdom, till he dreamed
Of how men just like him could wreck the world;
He had to yield himself to be redeemed,
Helped in this by a so-called fallen girl.

His trust in self trapped him inside a curse
Which only faith in Jesus could reverse.

Months of Thought Set Down in One Sitting

2011-03-16T12:43:00.000-07:00

If Not Ending With A Whimper, We At
Least Are Slowing Down With A Bang

This morning, my friend Bradley Ball, a Vietnam veteran and a minister of the gospel of Jesus, crossed over into his Lord's presence, by means of the exact same cancer that took my first wife Mary seven years ago. Three years ago, my second wife Janalee was taken away by a sudden heart attack. In Janalee's case, it was much on my mind that God might have called her home, instead of healing her, because He wanted her to be safely out of the way of the evils that were coming to the Earth. I now feel the same way about Brad.

Tomorrow, aggressive homosexual activists will once again be trying to make Saint Patrick's Day be all about them and their self-indulgence, even though this holiday is not about ANY kind of sexuality. They still pretend that they are poor, persecuted martyrs, when in fact they have been the darlings of pop culture for many years. Today, the Dennis Miller show discussed a novel about racial injustices of FIFTY YEARS AGO. Just what we need, still more of rehashing the Sixties--while in THIS decade, Eric Holder is allowed to run interference for the BLACK racists of the PRESENT time, who intimidated voters at a polling place. Is it really so much to ask, that people would forget the retro fascination, and address the actual troubles that exist NOW?

Yes, it probably IS too much to ask. Or if people do address the current problems, they'll offer exactly the wrong SOLUTIONS--as when politicians claim that the solution to our national deficit is to go STILL FURTHER into debt, or when labor-union bosses push and push to reinforce their privileged position, and too bad for everyone else. But it will not be any particular one of the existing crises that brings America low--NOT EVEN the Japanese reactor-meltdown crisis, which in my flesh-nature has me scared poopless. If enough Americans were now all the positive things that Americans at their best have been, we could with God's permission face and conquer ALL these perils.

What promises to devastate us is our people's loss of spirit, focus, integrity, and backbone.

Some thirteen years ago, my Mary and I went several times to a church which used lively liturgical dance in its worship services. There are Christians right now who sound the alarm against "show business" worship styles; but this church was not failing to preach the gospel. The problem in this church was neither an absence of Biblical teaching, nor the presence of dancing. The problem was to be found in the rank-and-file membership. When they had open-mike prayer-request times, Mary and I were the ONLY persons who ever brought up anything like praying for persecuted believers in other countries, or praying for the salvation of unrighteous officials. Most of what was brought up for intercession was, "Let me get a promotion at my job," or "Ask God to lead me in finding a boyfriend." Of course it was no sin to pray about these things; but when things like these were ALL that a congregation was interested in praying about, Mary and I could see that a chunk of Christendom was losing its vision. And if born-again children of God are forgetting to be salt and light in this world, how can we expect the unconverted to perform better?

So here it is, 2011, and all around us are empty-headed Americans worrying about their vacations, or their pet cats, or their yoga classes, or their self-esteem, instead of the life-and-death situations which ARE going to affect them whether they pay attention or not. All around us are teenyboppers who adore sexy vampires, but have no respect for the armed forces which have kept them alive and free TO adore sexy vampires. All around us are disciples of the entitlement philosophy, who will still be shouting "Gimme, gimme, I want MINE!" while the country collapses.

I am continually reminded of my powerlessness. I cannot do a single blessed thing to prevent radioactive particles from crossing the Pacific Ocean, if God does not choose to prevent it. Indeed, I can only even WRITE about these matters while a state of civilization survives; take that away, and I'll be just one more civilian trying to survive a few more days. But while I do still have an audience, I must say what's on my heart.

SOMETHING is going to hit us in our time of weakness. Collectively we have lost our self-discipline and our idealism--and it does NOT count as idealism when crowds chant, "Hope and change! Now give us more welfare goodies!" Still less does it count as idealism when Muslim terrorist Arid Uka murders two of our Air Force personnel in Germany (who had not been provided with the means to defend themselves), and the administration won't bother even to recognize this murder AS terrorism. Least of all does it count as idealism when almost all American Christians boast of "being spiritual" because they're NOT paying attention to events in their own country, not paying attention as their own freedom of speech is attacked, and not paying attention as power brokers behind the scenes do things we don't hear about in the news to ruin our system of representative government. In this our condition of weakness, we will be hit HARD: either by a cancer plague from fallout hitting our West Coast, or by our industries failing because tyrannical regulations deny them access to energy sources, or by Communist China asserting its growing power at our expense, or by some other very large setback. It will be the widespread loss of patriotic will, the lack of direction, that will make this blow so damaging to us.

If America is going to continue at all, it is going to have to be the way a heart-attack survivor needs to proceed: giving up various bad habits, limiting many activities. I don't mean we should give up having modern industry--that is something we need to RECOVER! But one thing we certainly will need to do, will be to DECREASE our overseas military involvements. This is NOT because it is automatically wrong for a nation to support its interests militarily, nor automatically wrong to defend allies. It is ABSOLUTELY not because our military personnel are bad people; the men and women of the United States Armed Forces display a quality of moral behavior such as few military establishments in the history of the world have ever come close to. Remember that my saintly friend Brad Ball was a military veteran. BUT WE JUST CANNOT DO EVERYTHING; and our ability to do ANYTHING is being diminished rapidly.

If it is not yet Chapter Four of Revelation, then we might still see America being granted a time of reprieve, an interval in which the message of Christ can go on being proclaimed. But in that interval, we will urgently need to clean house. We will need to PAY ATTENTION to circumstances, not claim that ignoring evil makes us more spiritual. We must look beneath the surface of our own government, and follow the tracks of weasels wherever they lead. For instance, although our troops in Afghanistan are doing their duty gallantly, and are not to blame for dirty dealing that goes on without their knowledge, not enough of us at home are investigating questions like "Who profits by encouraging the opium trade in that country?" I would feel much better about our troops going into harm's way if I could be sure that they were not on false missions for someone's private gain.

America has whimpered along in its wimpiness, and is now sure to be staggered by the bang of one or more catastrophes. Which ones, and how big, remains to be seen. But we're not going to be allowed to skate along with business as usual. So those Americans who HAVE kept their patriotic will, are going to need to REJECT business as usual. If God wills it, our country can still make a difference for good in the world, though probably not as a superpower anymore. I am reminded of this by humanitarian groups like Team Rubicon, which is currently standing by to render aid to any small Pacific island nations that might need help in the aftermath of the tsunami. There still is good in America; there still are more than fifty righteous men even in the modern Sodom. But for us to bear any good fruit in the dark days facing us, we will need BOTH to be able to accept America being humbled, AND to keep on trying to obey God's will in action. Let us not grow weary in well-doing....even if we're scared poopless. May the Holy Spirit provide us with the perfect love which casts out fear; we're SO going to need it.

Part of What's on MY Mind on Super Bowl Sunday

2011-02-06T18:53:00.000-08:00

A Reflection upon
the Fragility of Life

The huge volcano under Yellowstone,
Which pushes up the ground a bit each year,
Is in my thoughts as I sit here alone,
Inspiring what you may describe as fear.

If it cuts loose, the swift, unmeasured blast,
Inflicting death across this continent,
Will mean that all familiar ways are past;
Survivors will inquire where their world went.

The Super Bowl won't matter anymore,
Nor fashion trends, nor Twitter, nor I-Pod.
Whoever's left won't have a fancy store
In which to buy new clothes to meet their God.

Perhaps we need specific threats; then we
Are prodded to recall eternity.

Time Travel For A Six-Year-Old

2011-02-05T13:40:00.000-08:00

Wow, I've left this blog untouched for quite awhile now! Well, I can truthfully give the excuse that real life, in many forms, has kept me occupied. This has included being concerned with the grave illness of the very minister who performed my wedding to Janalee. It has also included generous amounts of my being treated with indifference, disregard or contempt by some (certainly not all) women of my acquaintance.

But just lately, on the anniversary of the evening when I proposed to Mary, I enjoyed good bonding time with Mary's and my grandson Dominic. I was babysitting him, because his school was closed for severe weather.

Since Mary left this world before Dominic arrived in it, he has not yet been told about her life. But on Wednesday, I made a beginning. Some of my friends are familiar with my narrative poem "A Red-Haired Lady In Heaven," which envisions Mary's arrival on the other side. Now I told Dominic a story about "The Red-Haired Nurse" and a true adventure she had in Vermont. It was a beginning. One day, I hope to show Dominic the video I have of his Mom, his Grandpa Joe, AND his Grandma Mary, on a scenic vacation in 1989.

Guilty Even When Proven Innocent

2010-10-29T21:49:00.000-07:00

Tonight, a good-natured college girl of my acquaintance reacted in a disappointing way to my online statement that some accusations of racism are false. The young woman chose to line up with a boy who thought it was clever to say that all people are racists but not all are bigots. Whatever the heck _that_ distinction means. The young woman sought to refine this dogmatic assertion by "explaining" that if someone's racism wasn't obvious, well then, it simply was _subconscious_ racism. I was reminded of satires of witch trials, like the one in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," where _every_ possible result of witch-finding tests is _equally_ treated as "proof" that the suspect is a witch. So I wrote the following to the college girl....

A belief in "subconscious" racism, in "subconscious" anything, can be a way of dismissing the need for _evidence_ of what one believes to be true about people. The people can go through every day of their lives without _acting_ like they ha...ve the quality that you insist they have--but that just means they _subconsciously_ have that quality! Then, no matter _what_ they do, it still somehow "proves" the same pre-chosen conclusion. This all-encompassing "subconscious" explanation covers all bases, trumps all contrary evidence.

________, you are the last young person I would have expected to use a "ghost in the machine" argument; but on your own showing, you see a racist ghost in the machine of every human mind. Whoever has encouraged you to think this way, must be smirking over their success--because, although your own friendly and appealing personality is NOT an arrogant and offensive one, this dogma of universally-present racism is causing you to do something which has the same _effect_ as arrogance. That is, it causes you to assume confidently that you know what is in my personality better than I know it. Well, you _don't_ know my personality better than I do.

But I believe I know why it _seems_ as if racism is everywhere. For various reasons which are not _synonymous_ with genetic heredity, certain attitudes and preferences have come to be shared by large numbers of persons who also happen to share an ethnic background. For instance, when politicians spend decades relentlessly telling African-Americans that they are automatically entitled to welfare handouts, there _will_ be many African-Americans believing that they are automatically entitled to welfare handouts. Then, when someone like me _observes_ the concrete fact that many African-Americans have been taught to expect handouts, those who have themselves been _taught_ to see "racism" in everything, will think that they are seeing racism in me. But they're NOT seeing racism in me; what they're seeing is the fact that I'm aware of a _sociological_ process going on. There is enough real racism in the world, that statements NOT motivated by racism can get mistakenly lumped together with actual racist utterances.

Tossing me a bone by telling me that my supposed racism "isn't immoral" does nothing to negate the presumption of _telling_ me I'm a racist. I'm not claiming such conclusive knowledge of _your_ insides as you claim you have of my "subconscious" racism; but if it should ever occur that you wanted to dismiss some opinion of mine as unreasonable without needing to _prove_ it was unreasonable, it would be mighty handy to be able to say, "Well, Joseph just thinks that way because his racism is distorting his thinking."

________, however you personally came to have this belief in that sneaky goblin of invisible racism, it does happen to be identical with a presupposition used by a LOT of hardcore-leftwing politicians. They use it, not to promote understanding of human nature, but to _silence_ all disagreement with _their_ agendas. "If you don't see the _same_ solutions to social problems as we see, that's your subconscious racism impairing your judgment." Only, they're not usually as nice as you are; they'll go ahead and accuse dissenters of _intentional_ racism. But I don't buy it. You shouldn't buy it either; such a well-intentioned girl as you are ought not to fall into lockstep with this politically-correct falsehood.

The young woman then "clarified" further, by citing research findings which prove that people can't easily recognize differences in _visual_ appearance among members of a different ethnic group than they were brought up with. WELL, DUH! By the same token, I could fail to see visual differences among rocks or trees or machines or buildings of types that I was unfamiliar with. But the politically-correct establishment _will_ use this irrelevant fact of sight-perception to support its race-card playing; and this girl, highly intelligent but far from wise, is prepared to let them do it.

A Timely Intervention

2010-10-09T17:23:00.000-07:00

I saw in the news that a schoolgirl in Fresno, California was kidnapped by a pervert. As the pervert was driving to reach whatever place he intended to use to have his evil way with his innocent victim, a man on the same road spotted him, and used his own vehicle to block the path of the kidnapper. This enabled the child to escape.

That's right: a citizen who was NOT a badge-carrying police officer intervened, and SAVED a crime victim. By the exact reasoning which is used AGAINST private gun ownership, this good man should have minded his own business, and said, "ONLY the police are allowed to do anything." Then the little girl would be dead now, but political correctness would be satisfied.

Root for the Home(school) Team

2010-09-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

Today the online community where I am most active saw some really acrimonious debate over homeschooling. A teenage boy who had been homeschooled accurately identified the bigotry which is often directed AT homeschooling families, but in his bitterness he blamed homeschooling families themselves FOR that bigotry. So I weighed in with the following. (Note that I began by mentioning a forum member who was defending homeschooling.)

This will be courteous, but relevant. ________ and I have never been each other's rubber stamp, so when I take her side here it should be plain that I have a substantive reason.

It often happens with any kind of minority that its members resent _being_ in a minority, resent being treated as inferior outsiders by the majority. So they try to distance themselves _from_ their own group. Pop psychologists refer to this as "self-hatred;" and as usual, pop psychologists are off the mark. It is not _themselves_ that these resentful souls hate; they hate the _circumstance_ of being treated with disdain.

Be that as it may, history provides illustrations of minorities disassociating themselves from their own group. In Fifties America, for example, black women not only went to considerable trouble to straighten their hair, they even purchased cosmetic products to lighten the color of their skin. Persons pursuing self-worth in such ways may despise _others_ of their group--as if it were the fault of those peers that the group was disadvantaged; but they don't really hate themselves. If they truly hated themselves, they wouldn't be seeking to _give_ themselves an improved situation.

If a homeschooled kid rebels against homeschooling because in his or her case there was "cultic" abuse, that simply is not what I'm talking about. Those black women bleaching their skin in the Fifties did not necessarily have bad parents; they were trying to cope with a broader situation in society which affected them. Likewise, a homeschooler with _wonderful_ parents might _still_ rebel, because of pressures which are not at all of the parents' making.

It is alleged that homeschooling demands too much conformity. Excuse me, public school _doesn't_ demand conformity? I went through public school, Kay through Twelve, and THE CROWD there is quite capable of mercilessly persecuting the "different." The administration likewise; remember those kids in California who recently were told they couldn't be seen wearing American-flag shirts because it might "offend" the group the school was pandering to?

Public schools of some kind have to exist in a society which both is pluralistic and forces many households to have both parents working. But having tutored at numerous public schools, I have seen their shortcomings. All other things being equal, a homeschooled child _will_ emerge smarter than a public-school child, at least in the average public school as they are now. So the more families are able to make a go of homeschooling, the better.

A quick invitation

2010-09-13T09:28:00.000-07:00

One of my Facebook friends is a Christian woman named Traycee who is a firefighter. She is also a patriotic American--AND an African-American who is NOT fooled by Barack Obama. Traycee started a separate pro-American forum, which I have joined. I recommend it to others. You can find it at:

http://patriotsforfreeamerica.com/

Addendum to my item about HR1388

2010-09-04T16:36:00.001-07:00

Snopes.com recently made a big deal of insisting that HR1388 was not nearly as broad in scope as had been thought. (That was why I kept my language moderate on HR1388, though I stand by everything I said about the general issue of government monopolizing humanitarian service.) If the Snopes people have an agenda to cover for leftwing politicians, telling us to quit worrying about HR1388 could be a piece of illusionist's misdirection, to prevent us from looking at ANOTHER piece of legislation which IS more inclusive in its dictatorial effects.

HR5741, the Universal National Service Act, is that other piece of legislation-- which, if what I now hear is true, is FAR more destructive to our liberty than the other law that only affected students. What I am told is that the U.N.S.A. authorizes the President to create new service agencies at his unilateral discretion, and to compel even persons as old as forty to work for them, if those persons have not yet already served in the armed forces or some equivalent.

If anyone is actually looking, I urge you to investigate this act for yourself, and don't take ONLY Snopes.com's word about it. If Barack Obama cared about helping people AS SUCH, he would be just as happy to let private charity do its job. He wants government to GET ALL THE CREDIT for any humanitarian activity, so as to set in concrete our passive dependency ON the government.

For the PIECES of Jerusalem

2010-09-04T01:45:00.000-07:00

When Christians mechanically recite "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem," I realize that they mean well, that they do wish for the beleaguered people of Israel to be safe. But it comes across to me as--well, to use that particular Scripture just sounds as if they think that Jerusalem CURRENTLY IS at peace, and only needs to maintain it.

This is like looking at a city block which is engulfed in flames, and saying, "I trust that the people on this block will continue to be able to prevent fires. It would be unfortunate if any of these buildings burned."

Jerusalem, with all of Israel, is under attack NOW. All kinds of war are being waged already against the civilized people of the only Middle Eastern country with a stable representative government. The Barack Hussein Obama regime was waging a kind of war against Israel when it pretended Israelis had no right to build homes in THEIR OWN historical capital city. Now Israel is being expected to give up half of that city. The American hard-leftwingers who enable terrorists are CHOOSING to forget that Israel DID offer just such a concession to the Muslims a decade ago, and all the thanks they got was the Islamist rioting that the Palestinians had INTENDED ALL ALONG to do.

Praying for peace is too little and too late. The war IS on, and HAS been on since 1948 at least. Islamic orthodoxy will NEVER tolerate anyone OTHER than Muslims controlling any territory that Muslims feel like saying is theirs. Remember Spain: it pulled its troops out of Iraq, and the only thanks IT got was Islamists continuing to claim that Spain is also their territory.

I don't know what can be done. America has allowed itself to become SO weak and ineffectual. Islamists on Facebook are getting cockier every day, confident that their cause is unstoppable. (One illustration of their smugness was when a character calling himself Xmox Khan had the gall to cite Moammar Qadhafi as an authority on peace!) Of course we can still pray, but I can't help feeling that prayers are better if they are worded in a way that reflects the actual situation that's being prayed about.

The peace of Jerusalem has already been stolen. Hezbollah may open fire from the north at any time now. I pray for the SURVIVAL of Jerusalem, for waffling Westerners to recognize evil when it's spitting in their faces, and for that evil to be DEFEATED.

HR-1388

2010-08-31T05:07:00.000-07:00

Has anyone been paying attention?

I'm told that the "G.I.V.E. Act" has passed Congress, requiring American citizens to serve in federally-controlled public-service organizations. This is the logical progression of a governmental philosophy which I've been denouncing for many years: the lie that, if the central government isn't meeting human needs, then human needs aren't being met at all. The very pretense that this new government service network is necessary at all, is the same thing as claiming that the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, World Vision, Feed The Children, Doctors Without Borders, and other independent humanitarian agencies haven't been doing anything all these decades.

Am I making myself clear enough? Even without bringing hysterical charges of totalitarian tyranny, it should be enough for you to know that I am right when I say that the justification for HR-1388 is a lie. Not a mistake, not a difference of opinion: an intentional falsehood, an attempt by government to make us believe things which government figures themselves know to be untrue. Even if it is only a limited group of persons who are called on to render government service under HR-1388, for those who are affected by the legislation, it remains a piece of indoctrination in favor of government being the source of all humanitarian provisions. One more intentional step in the direction of regarding private charity as redundant and useless.

Independent charities have IN ACTUAL FACT accomplished great things in America's history; and the incremental "change" to federal control of all charity adds nothing good. The one and only thing the "G.I.V.E. Act" adds to the field of charitable activity...is progress toward a federal monopoly in decision-making. Once the same government supremacy spreads far enough, we will no longer be allowed to use OUR judgment about what things people need. When attempting to help our neighbors, we will have to let the government tell us what we are allowed to do for them and give to them. So if some bureaucrat is too stupid to understand a particular need, then it's just too bad for the persons in need--the bureaucrat will insist on distributing air conditioners in Alaska in winter, or providing ground beef to feed our horses.

Can anybody NOT see this?

Anybody who doesn't see it, isn't looking, or does not yet know where to look...and certainly never lived in the Soviet Union.

If Americans can get their act together this November and gain ground against the Government-Is-All philosophy, it will not be even nearly enough just to throw out some of the power-drunk traitors currently in Congress. We must, we absolutely MUST, put the pressure on, and KEEP the pressure on, to repeal and reject this dictatorial centralizing of all humanitarian activity.

Spiritually Active at the RenFest

2010-07-04T02:31:00.000-07:00

Without ever having to be "pushy," I find that customers, by THEIR OWN initiative, will start meaningful discussions with me when I'm in character at the Colorado festival.

Yesterday, for instance, one teenage girl dragged another one up to me. The one being "dragged" was part of the act; she had on weird contact lenses to make her look weird. The one doing the dragging told me "Archbishop, this girl is possessed by a demon!" I sensed that they wanted me to act out an attempted exorcism, SO THAT they could mock me and mock God by having the "possessed" girl act out being unaffected. Instead, therefore, I slipped out of character and told both girls quite solemnly that they would not find ANYTHING fun about a REAL demonic encounter. They were given much food for thought.

Later the same day, a slightly drunk woman asked me where she could find the palm reader. I was obligated to tell her, and did tell her; but she did have the wits about her to realize, if a bit late, that palm reading JUST MIGHT not be compatible with my Christian convictions. Since she herself asked me about that, I could freely tell her that while I couldn't tell her NOT to see a palm reader, it was indeed alien to my faith. She, also, had food for thought when she and I parted company.

The Shield Bearer's Tale

2010-06-22T04:56:00.000-07:00

Something like eighty-five years ago, on Long Island, an Irish-American lady named Gladys Havens married an Italian-American architect named Erman Scudellari. The surname Scudellari means "Shield Bearer." When Gladys was about to give birth to her first child, a boy to be named Vincent, her doctor warned her of dangerous difficulties, and said it might come to a choice between her life or her baby's. Without hesitation, the courageous Gladys told him, "Save my baby." In the event, Vincent and his mother both pulled through; and Gladys went on to give birth successfully to three more sons, and one daughter.

The one daughter was Mary Anne Cecilia Scudellari, born on 28 January 1937, and destined to be married to me on 15 April 1979. I have wanted, ever since my Mary passed through the Door Into Summer, to write a thorough biography of her; but God has always kept my attention on persons who were still in mortal life and still needed attention. To the extent that I have obeyed God in this, I have been emulating Mary, who was a longtime nurse, a fiercely loyal friend, and a pro-life activist who did NOT "forget about the woman." Still, on this exact sixth anniversary of the Tuesday morning when my first wife crossed over, I can offer some fragments of what belongs in her biography.

Mary was never anything remotely like a pampered child; her father was cold and distant with her. But Mary grew up tough and strong, while still being capable of love. She became a nurse at New York's Bellevue Hospital, where her best pal was a fellow nurse named Meg Hendricks, whom I eventually had the satisfaction of meeting. Mary and Meg enjoyed their work, and enjoyed outdoor activities like camping.

Mary, not her brothers, cared for both parents in their final illnesses; and it was she who inherited the family house. Prior to this, the only one of Mary's brothers to have loved her, David Scudellari, had also died. So with no one left on Long Island to hold her there, she decided to give up the house and move west. Before she had revealed her intention, she experienced what seemed a sign from God that her plan was right. A little girl in her extended family--a daughter of one of her brothers, I believe--came up to her and, out of the blue, said to her, "Happy landings."

She meant to join a concent in Minnesota, but got no farther west than western Wisconsin, where she worked awhile at raising goats. Then she headed south into Illinois, where she made a living for several years by private in-home care for elderly women. She participated in a Catholic Charismatic fellowship in Rockford, and like many Charismatics, was very open about mingling with Protestants. In fact, for a long time she ceased to feel a need to stick with Catholic churches.

I first met Mary at a Charismatic meeting in the summer of 1972, when I was a Fuller Brush salesman. I considered her attractive from the very first instant of our acquaintance; but as she was older than I was, I initially felt she was out of my league. Really, she WAS out of my league until I grew up some more. But there was nothing to stop me from being friends with her, nor from joining the Birthright chapter she had co-founded in Rockford. With no sexual element in our early relationship, we were free to get to know each other as persons in great depth. We also worked together at a nursing home.

Mary was popular with the young men at Faith Alliance, my first church. Some of them nicknamed her "Scoots," in tribute to how energetic she was. Like me, they enjoyed being pals with her; she would give them haircuts and homemade cookies. And she actively encouraged those of us who were in music ministry. Unlike the other guys, though, I progressed into having much deeper feelings for her. (During the same period, she and I went for our first time ever to a Renaissance Festival, the same kind of activity I have now become part of in my old age.)

Mary and I got married on an Easter Sunday. It is a cheerful memory for me that, on our wedding night, we literally collapsed the bed.

At that time, in 1979, I had a blue-collar job in a warehouse. The next year, unfortunately, I was laid off. The Rockford area was suffering economic troubles then (as it still is now). On top of this, in the summer of 1981, Mary suffered a miscarriage, which the Holy Spirit had warned her would happen. God was not going to let us raise a baby of our own begetting; but later, He providentially made the way for us to adopt a Korean toddler named Ahn Mee-Hwa, who was to become Annemarie Rosalind Ravitts--now Annemarie Martinez, the successful working wife of Anthony Martinez and mother of Mary's and my grandson Dominic.

The need for employment propelled me into the U.S. Navy in 1986. Becoming a Navy wife, Mary charged into this new role the way she always charged into things: with a sort of intelligent recklessness, and a resolve to carry more than her weight. She was an ombudsman for my submarine's crew families in Connecticut, and homeschooled Annemarie when we were stationed in Japan.

Our last duty station was at Fort Meade, Maryland. As always, Mary made it her own duty station too. For instance, she participated in a large seminar on base to discuss quality-of-life issues for military families; she even acted in a comical skit which illustrated the issues. She was as brave as ever, taking a commmunity-health nursing job which sent her into the dangerous neighborhoods of Baltimore; and as compassionate as ever, performing volunteer hospice work until she herself was laid low by cancer.

To be truthful, she had her dark side--which was purged out of her by the ordeal of her own cancer. It was an inclination to excessive anger. This well of indignation inside her was partly resentment of unloving family members back in New York, partly annoyance at people who wouldn't do their share the way she did her share, and partly disgust at the moral decay of society that she could see all around her. Though God did not choose to heal Mary's body, her spirit was healed, and the rage eliminated, by experiencing how much love was lavished upon her during her sickness.

She got to plan her own funeral. One Scripture she called for was Job 19:25-27, the famous "I know that my Redeemer lives" passage. And she made her crossing to the sound of the hymn "There Is A Fountain," sung by me, my sister Tammy, and two hospice ladies who were in attendance.

As I near the conclusion of this terribly incomplete biographical sketch of my true love, the time in the time zone where she died is about nine a.m.--less than an hour and a half before the actual time of her departure. As I am fond of saying, if it had been anything like a fair fight, Mary would have kicked the butt of that cancer until it was crying for its mommy. Nonetheless, Mary's grain of wheat fallen into the earth has borne good fruit. Her visitation and burial were attended by an astonishing diversity of people, from a lesbian neighbor we had befriended, to a Muslim couple from next door, to a U.S. Navy admiral who had known us in Japan, to a Navy honor detail which carried her casket.

The maturing I acquired by my life with Mary was what made me a suitable husband for my second wife Janalee. I'm just one of many persons Mary inspired to do better things and be better people. As for my Mary herself, she now dwells where she always longed to be, in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ.

A Civilian Remembrance On Memorial Day Weekend

2010-05-29T22:47:00.000-07:00

On Memorial Day weekend of 2005, I was still in the Navy and stationed in Maryland, but was using my time off to visit home to Rockford. Of course I saw family members; but the supreme reason for this _particular_ visit was to see the former Janalee Whippler, with whom my deceased Mary and I had been acquainted long ago. That final Saturday of May 2005 was the first time Jan and I were ever physically in the same place....with both of us unmarried.

For more than two months preceding this meeting, I had been rebuilding and expanding my friendship with Jan via telephone calls and writing. I had learned much about how God had cleansed her from the straying into sin that had ended her first marriage. In fact, Jan's ex-husband Rich had _encouraged_ my growing closer to Jan. So, with geographical distance giving the benefit of keeping our first interactions purely spiritual and personality-based, Jan and I had already grown close in ways that mattered, even _before_ I knocked on her apartment door and saw her again.

Jan and I ended up getting married--with me in my Navy dress uniform--a year and a half after my Mary's arrival in Heaven. Mary had seen me into the Navy; it was left to Jan to share my retirement ceremony. Jan was given two and a half years to live as my wife, before God called her home also. Now, it has been more than two years since Jan crossed over to glory; but on this Memorial Day weekend, I am particularly remembering her.

Some people don't get it. I did not stop loving Mary when I married Jan; and I have not stopped loving Jan just because I don't feel duty-bound to be a hermit for the rest of my earthly life.

Followup on Linda

2010-05-27T15:06:00.000-07:00

No, I won't be marrying her. Linda herself has acknowledged that we are very different in our interests and priorities--which doesn't make her a bad person, but makes US a poor combination. The more so, since she has still MORE ailments than I realized at the start, and MY ailments (chiefly high blood pressure) would be aggravated by having full-time responsibility for her welfare. I do, however, find SOME things I can do at times to assist her in her difficulties.

My colleagues in the Colorado Renaissance Festival were told at our first meeting of the season that I was "in a relationship." None of them read this blog. I will, for the time being, NOT be telling them about the "cancellation" between Linda and me. As long as they think I'm still involved with someone, I can enjoy friendly conversations with the women but not be perceived as hitting on them.

Salty Socialism

2010-05-01T19:47:00.000-07:00

When I go grocery shopping, I often buy salt-free canned vegetables, in view of my high blood pressure. Salt-free or low-salt foodstuffs have been available for many years, BY THE INITIATIVE of food companies, WITHOUT the government needing to tell them to provide this alternative.

Recently, however, I heard about calls (WHAT a surprise, under the Obama regime) for direct federal oversight of salt content in foods. Big-government advocates are willfully ignoring the fact that there is ALREADY provision being made for those who need to lower their salt intake. And as a caller to a radio program pointed out, forced across-the-board salt reductions would NOT be making provision for persons with severely LOW blood pressure who actually need MORE salt than most of us do.

Count on big government to insist that one size fits all, as well as to insist that no one can do anything constructive unless government is in charge of it.

More recently, I heard Great Britain's Gordon Brown saying something in a debate which didn't make sense at first. Brown was passionately denouncing British conservatives for wanting, as he put it, to take large amounts of money "out of the economy." I knew that British conservatives, like American conservatives, wish to reduce tax burdens, which means common citizens having more money to spend, and money spent by consumers is very much IN the economy. But at last I realized that for Brown, the government and "the economy" ARE ONE AND THE SAME. For this neo-Marxist, money ISN'T in the economy at all, UNLESS it is in the hands of government, or at least having its use tightly controlled by government.

Gordon Brown's notion of what the word "economy" means is akin to our Democratic Party's notion that no one can possibly avoid being overdosed on salt unless government micromanages their diet. It's all part of the relentless push toward putting every last detail of our lives under ironclad supervision.

When you hear leftists talking up the benefits of more and more government control, be sure to take what they say with a grain of salt--if they'll still allow you to HAVE a grain of salt.

Almost at the Two-Year Mark

2010-04-24T05:20:00.000-07:00

This coming Friday will be the second anniversary of Janalee's arrival in Heaven. Earlier this month was the thirty-first anniversary of my wedding to my FIRST deceased wife, Mary.

A woman named Linda, who knew Mary and me long ago, has reappeared in my life. She has a load of health problems, most of which are not at all of her own making; much of her trouble has been caused by the sinful negligence of healthcare providers. I am praying for God's clear guidance as to whether Linda is meant to be my third wife; God knows, I have experience in caring for ailing women.

Fighting Apathy

2010-03-10T01:09:00.001-08:00

This weblog has lain idle for a long time: for most of the period since Janalee went Further Up and Further In. I myself have not been entirely idle; for one thing, I have performed in a Renaissance Festival--though if it had been up to me, I would have forgone the festival and had Janalee healed. Anyway, here is my latest "Empowered For Freedom" article....

I'M NOT A JUROR, BUT I SEE FALSE WITNESSES

Aurora, Colorado, March 9, 2010: Imagine two things with me, please. Neither of them is that there's no Heaven.

First, imagine that someone says to you, "There's a right, and there's a wrong, and there's a God Who knows the difference." If you have the sense to know it, America's Founding Fathers, and all the saints of the Bible, would have heartily agreed with this plain statement. Even many agnostics would agree on the first part.

Second, imagine that you have written a book, and that you prepare a summary of its contents as a way to get readers interested. You have complete control of what goes into this summary, so that if it fails to be truly representative of the message of your book, this failure is no one's fault but your own.

Okay, hold those two thoughts, while we travel back in time to last spring--by chance, precisely to Cinco de Mayo of 2009, which has no bearing on this article. That just happened to be the day on which I was one of a crowd of summoned people at the Aurora courthouse, waiting to find out which of us would be selected for jury duty. On the waiting-room TV set was the left-wing talk show "The View;" this day they were discussing the issue of whether any Christian ideas can ever be mentioned in public schools, and likewise whether it's okay to speak definitely _against_ faith in public schools.

Joy Behar said something which, taken in isolation, was true and right, even laudable: "The solution to bad speech is not to silence speech; the solution to bad speech is good speech." This statement, applied with anything resembling honesty, would cut the legs out from under all movements to censor the media under the lying pretense of "protecting us from hate." Unfortunately, Ms. Behar was not clear, in this instance, about _which_ speech in school she regarded as the bad speech: a Christian student's expression of belief, or someone else attacking that belief. So I had to suspend forming any strong opinion about Ms. Behar; but I kept it in mind that someone on the left had admitted in principle that truth should be able to refute falsehood _without_ cheating by resorting to forcible censorship.

The year of hope and change proceeded. In July, getting less public attention than the healthcare issue, Senate majority leader Harry Reid was relentlessly promoting the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act. This bill was labelled with intentional and cynical dishonesty, reflecting the lies which had been circulated at the time of Matthew Shepard's murder. The young gay man's death had been loudly blamed on "Christian bigotry;" but in actual fact, the murderers had not been Christians at all, just ordinary thuggish goons. The hard-left media had as usual been selective in their outrage; another homosexual was murdered in the East around the same time as Shepard, but the killers in that case were black, and so that murder was not widely reported. The media establishment would not allow any nonwhites to be seen as bigots (unless the nonwhites were Christians). Reid knew perfectly well that his hate-crime legislation would not add _anything_ to the prevention of murders, because, well DUH, murder already was illegal. The real purpose, just as with the also-falsely-labelled Fairness Doctrine, was to silence Christians and moral conservatives.

Talkers and writers on the left were never worried about the censorship campaign, because they knew it was not aimed against them. It was around this time that an atheistic writer named Joel Grus was promoting his book, Your Religion Is False, which was aimed at "proving" that every sort of belief in the supernatural, with no exceptions, is not only mistaken, but ridiculous. Now, do you remember the second of the thoughts you were holding? That one comes in here. Joel Grus published online a summary of his book; here, he had complete power to present the parts he wanted to present, complete power to make his summary accurate and reflective of his intent. He wasted no time getting into his mockery, which he doubtless regarded as "fair" because he insulted ALL faiths (except his own humanist creed). The following is from the very beginning of his summary:

...you are probably familiar with religion, although –- depending on your circumstances -– you may know it as "why daddy is required to hit me with a brass ﬁreplace poker when I fail to show him proper amounts of respect," or "those expensive skin-galvanometer sessions I submit to in order to further my show-business career," or "the reason the beautiful, beautiful act of a man making love to another man is in fact ‘an abomination.’ “

You can see a powerful hint of his self-serving motives here. He would call anyone who raised ANY objection to his apparent preference a "hatemonger;" but his concern about hate speech only runs in one direction; HE still is allowed to hate as he pleases. And, as if this were accomplishing anything to prove his points true, he had the cover of his book illustrated with a cartoonist's distortion of a famous painting of Jesus taken from the Cross. This is what C.S. Lewis would call Flippancy: acting AS IF you had already proven your opponents wrong, even if you haven't.

Grus' flippancy continues throughout his lengthy summary, seemingly preaching to the anti-choir, counting on a favorable response from cynics like himself who already _want_ God to be non-existent, and so will gladly treat a shallow joke as if it were an awesome intellectual proof, provided it "proves" what they wanted to believe anyway. Here's another bit:

Most of the religions we will show false involve some sort of “god,” a magical being who lives on a cloud in the sky and throws lightning bolts at his enemies and watches you while you’re showering.

You get the idea: by refusing a priori to allow for any possibility of a transcendent moral authority and source of life, he can _pretend_ that faith was proven false at some point in time, use ridicule as a substitute for organized reasoning, and proceed to his victory celebration without having fought the battle.

A weblog visitor challenged the caustic assertions Grus was making; and with a true leftist's faith in the all-purpose "You took me out of context!" defense, Grus raged at his challenger for forming an inaccurate impression due to not having read the whole book yet. But Grus had had every opportunity to make his excerpts truly indicative of the book's content; if anyone took him out of context, he took _himself_ out of context. Grus, in fact, was merely practicing the leftist double standard, giving himself license to say anything about anyone, but acting like a poor wounded victim if anyone talked back. I myself encounter this all the time, and I do mean ALL the time.

Of course, Joel Grus was only one of a legion of hard leftists who knew perfectly well that hate-crimes legislation would never be invoked to censor _their_ hatred. An editorialist for my own local newspaper, the Aurora Sentinel, expected to be taken seriously when he claimed that protestors against the Marxist takeover of all health care were terrorists. This man doubtless would have gone ballistic if anyone had called the war protestors of the Sixties terrorists--yet it was _their_ movement that generated riots, and even acts of targetted violence which really did qualify as terrorism, _unlike_ the Tea Party rallies now held by law-abiding citizens INCLUDING ME.

(The Associated Press, meanwhile, was shamelessly making partisan use of loaded language in supposedly objective reporting of the healthcare debate: calling members of Congress "recalcitrant" if they didn't blindly follow the Democrat Messiah in his campaign to federalize every last aspirin tablet.)

Now it's time to bring forward the first thought I asked you to hold: the thought of someone saying, "There's a right, and there's a wrong, and there's a God Who knows the difference."

The revisionist cable-TV series of "Battlestar Galactica" already made it the murderous Cylons who talked about believing in a single God instead of the multiple gods the humans believed in. But now, in 2010, we have the spin-off prequel series "Caprica" making the earlier God-bashing seem subtle by comparison. In "Caprica," those words about right, wrong and God were spoken by a _human_ character....who was recruiting for a _terrorist_ force called "Soldiers of the One." So it isn't just the Cylons; the writers ruthlessly insist that _anyone_ believing in a single Supreme Being is, by that very fact, a dangerously warped lunatic. That's right, Mother Teresa was no different from Osama bin-Laden. And the _only_ really happy and functional household I've seen depicted in "Caprica" is a bisexual group-marriage commune; so even the _temporal_ norms associated with the Biblical God are to be scorned as inferior if not outright harmful.

The directors and writers working for the SyFy Channel have no fear at all that "hate speech" rules will be invoked against them for any of this; they, too, know that the censorship movement is intentionally selective.

Hard-core leftists, if seeing this column, are likely to miss the point on purpose, and to try to dismiss me by saying, "Conservatives criticize liberals as often as liberals criticize conservatives, so quit complaining." If they say this, they will be proving themselves (depending on the individual) either ignorant or deliberately dishonest. When we conservatives criticize liberals, we are NOT simultaneously working through the judicial and legislative processes to gag and censor our opponents with the force of law. The liberals ARE trying to gag and censor us--as witness brat-actor Sean Penn saying that reporters should face legal penalties for calling Venezuela's Hugo Chavez the socialistic dictator he is. I'm not aware of Mr. Penn ever getting on the case of Democrats who yelled "Bush is Hitler!" (Not idealizing Bush, but he WAS on the receiving end of this double standard.)

I eventually found an answer to the question of whether Joy Behar is fair and impartial. She showed her true colors when Rush Limbaugh got to be a judge at the 2010 Miss America pageant. When Mr. Limbaugh was introduced, and was loudly applauded, Ms. Behar insisted that he was being booed by the audience. She may have had pals seated near her who did boo, but they were a tiny minority at most; nonetheless, she _wanted_ it to be true that Mr. Limbaugh was being rejected and repudiated. My Tea Party friends need to understand that my bringing up Mr. Limbaugh does NOT mean that I regard him as meeting all our standards; but understand further that for someone like Ms. Behar, anyone even _slightly_ aligned with true moral conservatism is an enemy to be smeared, the way Carrie Prejean got smeared last year. What Ms. Behar did to attack Mr. Limbaugh's reputation, she would just as enthusiastically do to any more genuine conservative you care to name.

The previous could have been an adequate wrap-up for my return to real column writing; but there's always more. Just the other day, at a Big Lots store selling books, I encountered a novel whose motivation is again explainable in terms we were given by C.S. Lewis. In the same book where he discussed flippancy, Mr. Lewis pointed out that people tend to guard against imaginary dangers while ignoring the real ones; he called this "rushing about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under."

The novel, A Pagan's Nightmare by Ray Blackston, depicts on its cover the Christian fish symbol altered into the likeness of the menacing shark from "Jaws." Blackston portrays a worldwide Christian dictatorship, in which non-Christians are treated as badly or worse than black Africans were treated under apartheid. If this author has ever lived on the surface of the Earth, on an inhabited continent, he _knows_ that right now there are plenty of groups and factions far more likely to create such a dictatorship than modern Christians are; but he feels free to slander us, precisely because he _also_ knows (however much he pretends to be afraid of the "menace"we represent) that we _won't_ issue fatwas calling for his death. In other words, Christian-bashing is a cheap and easy way to flatter yourself that you're "taking a daring stand" when you know you're not really being the least bit brave.

Some people not at all friendly to Ray Blackston, or to Sean Penn, or to Joel Grus, or to Joy Behar, are gleefully taking advantage of the political correctness which focusses on gagging Christians and patriotic Americans. I know from direct dialogue with fundamentalist Muslims that they claim the right to have territory (notably Mecca) reserved for Islam alone; but they don't want anyone _else_ to come even close to having the same right. Thus, when the Mayor of Lancaster, California said in January that his town was "a Christian community," the pro-jihadist organization C.A.I.R. jumped on him furiously, pretending to believe that this was "hate speech." Of course they would be just as furious in their denials if _they_ were accused of hate speech for their _more_ aggressive statements about "a Muslim cantonment."

So the race is on between two forces of tyrannical censorship which are not really compatible with each other, but which are briefly allied because they both want to shut up the testimony of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Sports fans, place your bets: will America's domestic neo-Marxists be first to make open Christian witness illegal as "hate speech," or will imported Islamists pull ahead on the turn and make open Christian witness illegal as "Islamophobia"?

Praying for America,
Joseph Richard Ravitts

Ut fidem praestem in difficultate!

Happy Birthday, Janalee; You're Well Out Of This Mess!

2008-11-03T05:47:00.000-08:00

My wife Janalee, now residing up in Heaven, doesn't have to endure being treated like an evil space alien because she _didn't_ get an abortion when she was raped as a teenager. But all of the physicians who tried to help her during her long struggle against disability are close to being treated like evil space aliens if _they_ refuse to _perform_ abortions.

When my _first_ wife Mary--also now in Heaven--was with me in Japan, she learned that Japan _requires_ abortion on demand; any Japanese doctor who refuses to kill babies loses his license. That's coming here in America, if the Lord High Savior Barack Obama wins this election.

Just to be clear, I'm talking about the same Lord High Obama who makes the pitch about "spreading the wealth around"...but whose _actual_ degree of spreading HIS OWN wealth around has been documented on Paul Caron's "TaxProf Blog" as follows.

Here is a summary of the figures:

0.5 percent in 2001.
0.4 percent in 2002.
1.4 percent in 2003.
1.2 percent in 2004.
4.7 percent in 2005.
And 6.1 percent, whoop-dee-do, in 2006.

Paul Caron writes: "What is surprising, given the recent controversy over Obama's membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ, is how little the Obamas apparently gave to charity -- well short of the biblical 10% tithe for all seven years. In two of the years, the Obamas gave far less than 1% of their income to charity; in three of the years, they gave around 1% of their income to charity. Only in the last two years have they given substantially more as their income skyrocketed -- 4.7% in 2005 and 6.1% in 2006. (Of course, it is possible that the Obamas may have made gifts to other worthy causes that were not deductible for federal income tax purposes.)"

I (Joseph Ravitts) can state as a concrete fact that I, a military retiree, give away a higher percentage of my annual income than the oh-so-compassionate Lord High Obama does, including "gifts to other worthy causes that were not deductible for federal income tax purposes." That's because my idea of compassion _doesn't_ mean forcibly taking away _your_ money to pay off my voting base. But I confess that I didn't give to one cause which Obama has heavily supported with his own money: the ACORN organization, which is dedicated to falsifying election results in his favor.

If enough real and fictional voters are swayed by the mindless mantra of "Change!" to put Obama in the White House, he'll get the chance to prove what he means by "Freedom Of Choice." He means just what the "pro-choice" movement has ALWAYS
meant by its double-talk: "freedom" in ONLY ONE DIRECTION, always and everywhere FOR abortion, and too bloody bad for anyone who has a conscience.

But that's okay, dear Change Zombies, because you won't have to listen to the voices of morality objecting. The Lord High Obama is also an advocate of the Fairness Doctrine--"fairness" having of course the same one-way meaning as "choice." It isn't enough in the great Obama's eyes that the hardcore left in America already has ALL the major broadcast television networks, ALL the country's biggest newspapers, ALL the slickest movie and music-video stars, and other media resources besides, totally and one-sidedly on its team. Any and every communications outlet that conservatives do still have must be diminished and restricted, until we have one-party airwaves to match a one-party government.

To doctors who DO remember the Hippocratic Oath...and to radio station owners who naively think they have the right (under the same First Amendment which leftists appeal to when it suits them) to run the programs _they_ prefer...and to "bitter Americans" who are so primitive as to believe they should be allowed to defend themselves against criminal assault inside their own homes...and to Christians who _don't_ think marriage needs to be redefined as "any sleeping arrangement anybody likes" ...and to our military personnel to whom Obama has said that military service warps their personalities...I say, I'll be praying for you, praying for us all.

And Janalee, I trust you'll be praying for us from up there.

JOSEPH RICHARD RAVITTS

Ut fidem praestem in difficultate!

A Not-At-All-Pleasant Greeting From Hallmark

2008-08-23T09:22:00.000-07:00

I have often had cause to think about what evils my Janalee may have been spared from by being called away to Heaven so early and quickly. I was mostly thinking in
terms of horrible disasters and plagues in which Jan might have died slowly and painfully. But one thing I _didn't_ foresee for her to be _spared_ from was the
poisoning, the defiling, of something that she cherished.

I mean the Hallmark Corporation, whose cable-TV channel provided my darling "penguin" with hours of enjoyment in the form of Michael Landon's "Little House on the Prairie" program, and Michael Landon Junior's adaptations of Janette Oke novels. It would not surprise me if I could find out that Jan has by now gotten the elder Landon's autograph up there. But Hallmark is now getting its hall all marked up, with a mark alien to the Ingalls family.

Today I learned that, in its original sector, Hallmark is now selling....HOMOSEXUAL WEDDING CARDS.

I had already smelled a rat when I saw the Hallmark Channel give huge publicity to a TV movie featuring the fanatically anti-American, anti-Christian, pro-Communist and pro-terrorist Vanessa Redgrave. But this move with card merchandising still caught me by surprise.

How long will it be now before the cable-TV outlet is instructed by corporate HQ to start conforming to the philosophy reflected in the new cards, that homosexuality
is completely normal? Will my Jan, and Mr. Landon Senior, have to turn their eyes away from Earth, as the Hallmark Channel premieres a new "family" series called "Little Gay Bathhouse on the Prairie"? Actually, the mortal viewers down here may scarcely even notice, with all the gay-matchmaking programs _already_ airing on basic cable.

Even before Hallmark sold out to the sodomizing tail that wants to wag the national dog, a local newspaper here in Colorado had shown its loyalties by going out of its way to spotlight a gay-male couple when it wanted to do an article on choices in home decoration. And the McDonald's chain has adopted the so-called "Out & Equal" program to advertise homosexuality. Their defenders pretend that this is "only" a matter of allowing suppliers owned by gays to do business with the restaurant chain; but this is a transparent LIE, since there is nothing that would stop McDonald's from going ahead and buying beef and potatoes from gay suppliers _without_ specially trumpeting the glories of homosexuality as such _while_ buying the groceries.

It probably is not too soon to start betting pools about which other "alternative lifestyle" will be _next_ in line to demand that society declare it normal, complete with its own Hallmark cards. I hear that incest is getting a boost, with Julianne Moore starring in a movie about a mother having sex with her son. But don't count polygamy out of the race, what with Muslim audiences increasing in numbers. Maybe necrophiliacs can derive some leverage out of the current fad for vampire novels. And, I'm sorry to say, the beloved British TV series "Doctor Who" has not only started featuring gay characters, but also did a story in which we were told that an Earth woman had been able to bear a child to a space alien who was not at all humanoid in his true physical form; whether intended by the BBC writers or not, this episode might be grabbed onto by proponents of bestiality.

I invite _anyone_ to give me a convincing reason why I should _not_ expect ALL these "variations" to demand public respectability as loudly and petulantly as homosexuality has demanded it.

Are those crickets I hear chirping in the silence? Will someone please tell Chuck Norris what they're doing to the company that's been airing his pro-Christian "Walker, Texas Ranger" series?

JOSEPH R. RAVITTS

Playing House And Playing Victim

2008-07-22T11:47:00.000-07:00

Written on the third anniversary of the day when I proposed marriage to my Janalee, who now has a Heavenly mansion to dwell in--close to my first wife's mansion, there in the Kingdom where there is no rivalry or jealousy.

Long ago, around the time I got married to my Mary, there was a vacant house across the street from the formerly-vacant house we were homesteading under a city program. The owner of this unused house was hoping to rent it to someone. What he got was fifty percent of what he was looking for: that is, he got all of the burden and none of the reward. What happened was that a homeless family literally BROKE INTO the house, just like burglars, and began helping themselves not only to shelter, but also to heat, light and water that were being paid for by the owner.

The owner of the house hated to turn poor people out on the street, so he WENT ON paying for these utilities, which he could have cut off--much as the government of Israel in recent times has shown mercy to the very Palestinians who shoot rockets at them from Gaza, by NOT instantly cutting off their electrical power supply. The house owner, however, was so evil and mercenary and wicked and inhuman as to ask if the thieves using his property might consider paying him rent.

When months had passed with no rent forthcoming from the thieves, the owner of the property finally decided that he had given them a free ride at his own unrewarded expense long enough. So he called on the police to evict the long-term burglars. That's when the real fun started.

The liberal establishment in our city immediately erupted in furious outrage against this EEEEEE-vil, GREEEEE-dy landlord who had so cruelly turned out his poor "tenants." That's right, the thieves were spoken of as "tenants." The leftwing establishment was careful not to mention the inconvenient fact that the squatters
WERE NOT tenants, that they were nothing but burglars in the very truest sense of the term. It made a better story for the owner of the house to be dressed in a Snidely Whiplash outfit, complete with top hat and cape. The thieves, being white American citizens, didn't have the race card to play; but the class-envy card was enough to make them innocent victims. They weren't evil right-wing capitalists, so they could not be wrongdoers, that wouldn't fit the script.

As I say, this happened a long time ago. Enough time has passed that the children of that family may by now be doing their own break-ins just like Mom and Dad. But I've been reminded of the incident because of recent mortgage problems nationwide.

Now, I've never pretended to be an economics expert. My grown daughter (who, with her husband, actually PAID FOR the place where they live) works for a credit union, and understands far more than I do about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But I don't need to be a degreed economist to notice a slant in the public discussion. When home-buying is the subject, almost all I ever hear is how EEEEE-vil the sellers and lenders are. I don't deny that there are crooked businessmen and heartless rich people; my Mary came up against privileged, pampered crooks in a different context in the course of her honorable career as a nurse. But I know for a certainty that
there's ALSO such a thing as irresponsible behavior by some buyers, borrowers....and thieving squatters.

If you insist that the EEEEEE-vil rich people by themselves constitute the entire and complete explanation of the mortgage crisis, then you're not really looking for a complete explanation; you're only looking for a convenient villain, and you figure
that "Thou shalt not steal" should only be binding on the wealthy whom you want people to envy.

Saturday's memorial service in Colorado went well.

2008-06-16T05:38:00.000-07:00

People who had only met Jan--and therefore had come to love her--in her last year on Earth, got the chance to find out more about her life previous to Colorado. Not so entirely new to Jan, and paying their respects, were my daughter Annemarie with her husband Anthony Martinez, and my cousin retired USAF General Wayne Schultz with his wife Susan. One person among those present whom I had _not_ met before was a young mother named Dawn, who had received the last one of the baby blankets Jan had knitted to give away via our church (along with a mitten set). Dawn showed us her treasures, mementoes of Jan, and told me that she had at least glimpsed Jan on several occasions when Jan was volunteering in the church's childcare space.

Although I lack the technique to post pictures directly onto this weblog, a kindly brother in Christ has made it possible for me to provide a link to the last photo of Jan ever taken in mortal life. The very timing of this picture even occurring revealed God's merciful providence, ensuring that there would be a very recent image to let those who love Jan remember her in a happy time.

http://royalmagi.org/janjoe.jpg

After all, we can't look straight up into Heaven from here and behold Jan as she is NOW--apart from the one dear girl who was given the vision of Jan seated at ease up there. But while all trace of illness, pain or aging will now be gone from Jan's immortal features, her same lovely smile will doubtless be recognizable.

God's Gestures Of Consolation Are Diverse

2008-06-08T17:49:00.000-07:00

Lots of mail accumulated for me in Colorado while I was in Illinois and points east. upon coming home and picking it up, I found many kindly cards. One was especially intriguing.

It was from a Colorado address, and the sender was a woman I had never heard of. So a thought came to me: "Wouldn't it be neat if this person turned out to be one of
the impoverished young mothers for whom Jan made baby garments under the auspices of our church?"

Then I opened the envelope, and that's _exactly_ what it was. The woman told of receiving a blanket Jan had knitted, and said she would cherish it gratefully. A
piece of Jan's bread cast on the waters thus returns.

The picture on the front of the card featured a yellow butterfly. And on the long walk I took today, precisely at times when I had been thinking about the
heartwarming condolence card, two yellow butterflies at separate moments flew past close to me. This is the kind of occurrence I call "a postcard from Heaven;" and for
that matter, the first comforting "butterfly incident" I experienced after MARY'S passing also involved a yellow one. God likes to show patterns in events, letting us know that we are not struck in a coldly meaningless universe.

Fruit From A Fallen Grain Of Wheat Includes The Revival Of My Ability To Compose Music

2008-06-02T01:49:00.000-07:00

Before I share the lyrics of the new song I've written, let me mention that God had a distinct reason for letting me seem to hear Jan calling my name as already described. It was leading up to something. On the Friday after Jan's homegoing, I received a sympathetic e-mail from a pastor's wife Jan and I had known in Maryland. In it, this good lady included Isaiah 43:1, in which God says to the believer, "I HAVE CALLED YOU BY NAME." That is just one of the ways in which God has come to my spirit's aid in this loss.

The following song was initially inspired by our use of a wheelchair during Jan's final earthly weeks. The part about the mountain and the breeze acknowledges another of God's signs of comfort. A teenage girl we were acquainted with, who had recently come to Jesus, was granted a mental image of Jan up in Heaven, sitting at ease on a cliff edge where she could look down and see me. My thanks to that sweet girl for sharing the vision with me; it is now the way my mind sees Jan. And the Scriptural phrase "Taste and see" came to mind because one of Jan's effects from her head injury in 2001 was a near-total loss of her sense of taste. The angels must now be bringing her hot-fudge sundaes, which now she CAN taste.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

"LADY JANALEE WAITS"

Under dark brown hair, green eyes are aware
Of all others do to love and to care.
When I step away, she waits for me there;
I always have returned.
In her chair she waits, with trust on her face;
The carriage will come, to find her in place.
Her body so frail will feel my embrace,
My love once more confirmed.

Lady Janalee, you came to me
Afflicted by your burden;
When I met your need, I gained indeed,
Loved by a fellow servant.
I'm so glad we had our dance
While your strength remained;
Your sweet hands could knit romance
From the yarn of pain.

Maidens who are wise, as mentioned by Christ,
Will watch for the groom with oil for their lights.
And my love as well, through uneasy nights,
Is waiting for her King.
I can see the haze of pain in her gaze;
She needs help to walk; she totters and sways.
But almighty love has numbered her days,
And soon her soul takes wing.

Lady Janalee, your faith in me
Inspired me to be worthy.
Would that God on high would say just why
He called you home so early!
But it was your setting free,
Never your defeat.
Henceforth, there'll be fruit to see
From your grain of wheat.

Now the other side is home to my bride;
From there, ever since the day she arrived,
She can, when she likes, behold him who tried
To lighten her hard load.
On a mountain fair, with breeze in her hair,
She waits for the day when I'll be up there.
For now, Janalee can still offer prayer
To help me on the road.

Lady Janalee, eternity
Has been made even richer
Since your childlike heart became a part
Of Paradise's picture.
Taste and see that God is true,
Till I find you there;
Those green eyes will prove it's you,
Under dark brown hair.

(c) Joseph Richard Ravitts

God Has Taken ANOTHER Loved One Away From Me

2008-04-30T21:29:00.000-07:00

This morning (Wednesday, 30 April) at about 10:25 a.m. Rocky Mountain Time, Janalee Ravitts, born Janalee Green, was launched up to Heaven from an emergency room in Aurora, Colorado. The cause of death was a massive heart attack, for which no warning signs of any sort had been detectable. In fact, only two days before, she had had a doctor's appointment in which her vital signs looked good. None of us knows when God will summon us to meet Him. But I do know that my Jan, like my Mary before her, went there clothed in the righteousness of her Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

The biggest apparent problem Jan had been facing in her last earthly weeks had been her worsening mobility. The chronic headaches which had plagued her since well before I married her were at least somewhat under control, as she regularly took no less than six prescription medications in this connection. (Maybe those very medications were exhausting her heart, though I have no evidence that this was so.) In the area of sensory impairment arising from her brain injury in the car crash in 2001--in fact, EXACTLY seven years ago yesterday--she had been enjoying some "breakthroughs" of being able to taste and smell things. But her ability to walk was dramatically worsening, making her feel embarrassed to be seen outdoors. And she was losing enthusiasm for life; her appetite was less, and she was not so often eager to have me read books to her, though on her last afternoon she did have me read some to her (from Janette Oke's Christian novel "A Quiet Strength") in the bedroom where she lay.

Part of the walking problem was in her mind. Poor Jan had fallen down several times over the last two months, and a fear of falling was practically paralyzing her. I enrolled her for physical therapy--ironically, at Spalding Rehabilitation Hospital, where my Mary had once been an employee!--and I was experimenting with what was the best way I could hold her up walking. A side-by-side "promenade" stance was working best, as long as she had any strength left; but in the last few days, the only way she could move appreciably forward on her feet was while actually held in my arms, face to face, with me retreating before her. This was more and more turning into outright carrying her.

Yesterday, she said her legs were hurting--which at first I logically supposed was muscle cramping from the vigorous therapy of Monday afternon. But the real trouble was that, for reasons that were never determined, her left leg had swollen up hideously. I had her lie with the leg elevated, and called her physician to get the soonest possible appointment to examine it.

This morning was when she was supposed to be seen about the swelling. It gives me some little comfort to be able to say that, when Jan opened her eyes in bed this morning, she saw me right there beside her and smiled. After breakfast (cooked by me as usual), Jan said she wanted to brush her teeth. So I wheeled her in her wheelchair (bought only a matter of weeks ago) as far as our bedroom door, where I had to lift her out. As I was "embrace-walking" her toward the bathroom, Jan said to me, "I'm sorry I'm such a pain." I replied, "I'm sorry you are, too." Based on our many past conversations, she knew that I was not saying this to suggest that she was at all to blame for her disabilities. I went on: "But you can't help it. And I'll never stop loving you, because you're my sweetheart. A mobility-challenged sweetheart, but still my sweetheart." This pleased her.

I thank God that I did say this to her; because not long afterward I was nagging her on to make an effort to keep her feet under her, as I took her out of the wheelchair at our front door and tried to help her to the van, intending then to bring the wheelchair along. In our last two-way conversation on Earth, Jan said little else but "I can't!" As we reached the van, she could no longer keep her feet under her at all. I tried to place a lawn chair for her to rest on...but she was already sagging down like a wet sandbag...and then her eyes rolled back.

She did not die instantly, though. She coughingly breathed for a little while, not responding to anything I said. So I dialed 911 on my cellphone, then tried to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while awaiting the ambulance and paramedics. Saying that she was "agonal," they worked furiously over her on the driveway, then loaded her into the ambulance, in which I rode with them to the hospital.

A chaplain named David Reeves waited with me in a "quiet room." Then Doctor Robert Howe came in and told me that Jan's heart was totally non-functional, despite everything they could do. As soon as they gave up the CPR, she would die. But on the basis of his extensive medical experience, he assured me that Jan would be able to hear me if I came and spoke to her at once. I therefore went to where she lay, bristling with medical hardware, and said approximately these words:

"Jan, sweetheart, it's Joe. I hope you know I've tried to do what was best for you. I wish I could have done more. I'm sorry if I failed you in anything, but you know I love you. If there's anything you would have wanted to say to me, just remember it while you're waiting in Heaven; and you can say it to me when we're together again, in the place where there is no jealousy or pain." (The reference to jealousy was because Jan had sometimes been jealous of her predecessor Mary.) "I promise you I'll try to help comfort your family. Pray for us up there." Shortly after I said this, Jan was hearing another voice saying, "Welcome to Heaven, My dear child."

Doctor Howe was later to explain the evidence which proved people on the edge of death could still hear speech. Thus he promised he was not making it up when he insisted that Jan had heard my loving farewell. And he added that, veterans of life and death though he and his staff were, my words had moved them all to tears. (Perhaps this was a very early start in fruit being borne by Jan's grain of wheat fallen into the earth.)

Because I experienced chest pains after Jan passed away, they detained me at the hospital for EKG's, blood-enzyme work and X-rays. This was the first medical attention of any kind I had received since I retired from the Navy. Stuck at the hospital, but having with me both my cellphone and Jan's, I made many calls, mostly to Jan's family members. My cousin Wayne afterwards drove me home from the hospital--as I struggled with realizing that I would have to stop calling it "our" house. Then I was mobbed by sympathetic neighbors for a time, before I could commence my first session of talking to Jan in Heaven while seated in a lawn chair. As with Mary, I make no stupid attempts to conjure a REPLY by self-delusion. And yet..you never know.

Twice during my writing of this, I have felt certain I could hear Jan's voice calling me, as so often she would call me away from the computer when she needed something. So each of those times, though I didn't think it was actually Jan speaking, I went up to the bedroom and spoke to Jan for awhile. The days to come will be chaotic; but I will speak to Jan again.

I often used to fear that Jan, in her vulnerability, might end up dying a long and miserable death in some disaster. But she has been spared from that; her departure was quick and sudden. I wish that she were still here. But I remember how she used to say she wished she were normal; and now, she's BETTER than normal. I also wish I had a recording of her singing in her sweetly childlike voice; but when I see her in Heaven, I'll ask her to sing in that voice for me before she goes back to her angelic voice.

Sharing A Lesson In How Logic Works

2008-04-18T02:15:00.000-07:00

I wrote this up for the benefit of a young
person whom I'd been helping with schoolwork.

=======================================

Did anyone ever teach you what a syllogism is? It is the basic pattern that all logic HAS TO follow. It is used by all intelligent minds all the time, whether or not they know it's CALLED a syllogism.

It consists of three parts:

1) A Major (or "First") Premise, presenting some truth which is assumed to be true and reliable.

2) A Minor (or "Second") Premise, providing some fact connected with the Major Premise.

3) A Conclusion, reached by putting the Premises together. Note that if a syllogism is done right, but one or both of the premises are false, the conclusion will also be false--and yet still be logical!

Here is an example of a syllogism which is both factually true and properly logical:

Major Premise: All insects are invertebrates.

Minor Premise: All butterflies are insects.

Conclusion: All butterflies are invertebrates.

Here is an example in which the logic moves correctly, but there is a mistake about facts:

Major Premise: All Africans have green hair.

Minor Premise: Robert is an African.

Conclusion: Robert has green hair.

And now for a syllogism in which both premises are factually true, but the conclusion is illogical because the premises did not do a good enough job of defining the situation:

First Premise: Some women are psychologists.

Second Premise: Some psychologists are men.

Conclusion: Some women are men.

Syllogisms, like drugs and guns, can be used for good or evil. Far too many men in history have lived their lives based on the following syllogism, which IS LOGICAL, but whose premises are lies:

Major Premise: A superior being has a right to enslave an inferior being.

Minor Premise: Women, by being women, are automatically inferior to men.

Conclusion: Men have a right to enslave women.

We need more men, and women, to follow THIS syllogism instead, one whose premises are true statements and whose conclusion is perfectly logical:

Major Premise: Jesus Christ deserves to have His example followed.

Minor Premise: Jesus Christ routinely practiced kindness and generosity.

Conclusion: We should routinely practice kindness and generosity.

Draining Away Hope Is Worse Than Drinking Blood

2008-04-18T01:41:00.000-07:00

17 April 2008:

The Sci-Fi Cable Channel has long been misnamed. It seems
always to have had more horror and occult programming
than science fiction. So how optimistic should we be that
a movie selected for showing on the Sci-Fi Channel, when
it uses a paraphrase of Hebrews 2:14-15, is actually
acknowledging the promise that Jesus Christ can set us
free from the fear of death? Oh, I guess about as
optimistic as we should be about the killer Jason
really staying dead at the end of one of the
"Friday the 13th" movies.

To check on this, let's drop in on two supporting
characters in the Clive Barker horror movie "The
Plague," which I just saw tonight on Sci-Fi. This
movie is maybe the five or six hundredth "Everybody's
turning into zombies" movie. The two men we're
looking at are hiding out from the zombies inside
a deserted church. Not that they expected any help
from God, or have been given any cause by the writer
to expect help; the pastor of the church was caught
outside by the zombies a few scenes earlier--and
the writer made a heavy-handed point of having the
pastor die an especially cowardly death, screaming
and blubbering more than most of the victims did.

One of the men inside the church has rummaged around
to see if there's anything to eat. When he finds
something, the other man asks, "What have you got?"
The first man says, "Body of Christ--want some?" Ha
ha, wink wink, nudge nudge, those Christians were
sure stupid to trust God, weren't they? Indeed, not
only explicit faith in God, but all the virtues which
naturally accompany faith--love, loyalty, courage,
kindness--are made into doormats for the zombies to
wipe their shuffling feet on. Most of the movie
simply consists of the still-human characters being
picked off one after another, like bugs being eaten
by a long-tongued frog, with all of their efforts
to save themselves OR save others accomplishing
NOTHING except to prolong the agony.

Now you know how much of a legitimate interpretation
of Hebrews 2:14-15 to expect in a Clive Barker movie.
In a feeble attempt to elevate the story a few inches
above "ordinary" hack-em-up films, the hero is made
to ponder a "profound" message which is a revision--
or evisceration--of the Scripture passage. Anything
about Jesus is removed (kind of the way Jesus was
removed from the "Touched By An Angel" series,
come to think of it), and the message is that
somehow fear will be overcome by "offering one's
soul" to the zombies. I'd be more inclined to
suspect that it's Clive Barker who has offered
his soul to the wrong purchaser; but anyway, in
the movie, the hero giving himself up to the
zombies looks like it sort of appeases them--
leaves them apparently in charge of the world,
small detail, but sort of appeases them. As an
inspiring, uplifting conclusion, this does not
rise very far above "Night of the Living Dead."

It seems to me that a story like this--and it is
SO very much NOT unique in today's popular culture
--invites the audience to come away with any one
of several attitudes, all of them as hostile to
Christian belief as the writer himself manifestly
is. Some viewers will come away feeling at ease
that there won't be any zombies coming in the
windows after bedtime --not because they believe
in God, but because they don't really believe
in anything outside their familiar mundane life.
Others will come away consciously or subconsciously
thinking, "Death itself, without needing monsters,
will take all of us eventually, just as those
characters in the movie were taken; so let's
party and fornicate while we can." Still others
will come away not so much thinking about the
zombies, as thinking about God having done
absolutely nothing to help the doomed human
characters--thus feeling, in C.S. Lewis' phrase,
"angry at God for not existing." And (while I
never did hold with the claims that seeing some
bloodshed on a TV or movie screen automatically
fills the viewer with an eager lust to kill
people in reality) a few moonbats in the
audience will doubtless fantasize about BEING
zombies or other undead sorts themselves.

What all these options have in common, of course,
is that all of them are calculated to exclude
from consideration any hope of benevolent
intervention, in this life or any other, by
a personal and righteous Creator.

Hell has been imagined as having a sign at its
entrance which reads "ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO
ENTER HERE." With so much existential despair
being touted as entertainment, a sign might be
displayed right on Earth, saying "THE ABANDONMENT
OF HOPE IS ENTERING HERE." Merely depicting lots
of people getting violently killed is nothing
compared to transmitting a message that their
lives counted for nothing anyway. "Braveheart"
had many scenes of bloody killing, but ITS ending
was uplifting and filled with hope.

I recently chatted with a buddy of mine named
Tim Stoffel about another offering on the Sci-Fi
Channel: their new and extremely revisionist
version of "Battlestar Galactica." I would never
have thought I could nostalgically miss the heavily
piled-on Mormon propaganda of the original
"Galactica" series, till I saw the new version.

The old series at least allowed us to believe that
love and courage were not a pitiful joke, that good
could win against evil. The new series yanks this
belief away from us even as it takes rayguns away
from the heroes and leaves them with only bullet-
guns. In this new series, everybody spends each
episode stumbling around, getting lost, panicking,
doubting, quarrelling, complaining, giving up,
deserting friends, losing their purpose--anything
BUT winning against evil. And even the identity
of the evil to be fought gets blurred, as the
Cylons (and this is actually the biggest change)
have been redefined: no longer of non-human
origin as in the old series, but having been
created by the human race itself. This is almost
certainly a scarcely-even-disguised restating
of the fashionable far-left falsehood that
"America has no right to be against Muslim
terrorists, because it was America and its evil
oil companies that CREATED the terrorist groups."
If you can't get people to give up entirely all
hope that it is possible to beat the bad guys,
then try to convince them that they don't DESERVE
to be able to beat them. ("LEXX," a past series
on the Sci-Fi Channel, spent its final season
pounding away at similar America-bashing.)

I could go on exploring the sales pitches of despair.
For instance, Joss Whedon with his good-guy-vampire
series "Angel," ending by killing off almost ALL the
good guys including the title character, while making
a point of telling us that their deaths do NOT achieve
any lasting gain for the side of good. (Note that my
objection is not to having a self-restrained vampire
be the good guy, but to saying then that his efforts
to help innocent people accomplish so little.) More
importantly, though, I have to ask myself: who gains,
and what DO they gain, from promoting so much pessimism?

Conscious motives of the writers and producers of
despair stories (maybe a better term nowadays than
"horror stories") are probably as diverse as those
assorted possible reactions to the Clive Barker movie.
I don't think that the directors all get together in
a secret hideout and lay plans together to destroy
faith, hope and love. I am, however, quite certain
that no one making movies and shows like these is
particularly trying to PROMOTE faith, hope and love.
And in the shadows behind them, or maybe the shadows
among them, there definitely is a presence which
wants to extinguish light and strangle hope...at
least, to eliminate the REAL hope of humanity.

People just cannot function without some kind of
hope. So an evil power which denies our hope in
Christ is not likely to stop with a mere denial.
Rather, it will surely get around to OFFERING what
it CALLS hope--only, a hope not founded in Christian
truth, or even in healthy pre-Christian ideals. We
will be increasingly urged to join the People's
Collective, or to embrace Mother Gaia, or to walk
around every maze we can find, or to stand in front
of mirrors worshipping ourselves. Any false hope
will do, as long as people DON'T remember the true
hope. Best of all, from the evil power's viewpoint,
would be our supposing it does some good to offer
our souls to the zombies.

I can feel now, quite forcefully, what C.S. Lewis
was feeling when he said that writing "The Screwtape
Letters," useful though that book has been to many
Christians, made him feel he was in a world filled
with "dust and grit, thirst and itch." I feel
somewhat the same after finishing the above
paragraphs; I do not at all regret writing them,
but the problem I was compelled to describe has
left a bad taste. So I won't let the crushers of
hope have the last word. Instead, I'll remind you
of what the last of the original Apostles tells
us in First John 1:5: "This is the message we have
heard from Him and declare to you: God is light,
and in Him there is no darkness at all."

Those are words to turn to for hope, when liars
and fools try to make us think it's darkness that
is all-powerful.

P.O.1 Joseph Richard Ravitts, U.S.N. Ret.

Ut fidem praestem in difficultate!

I'm Fed Up With Geraldo Rivera

2008-03-28T19:49:00.000-07:00

Just this morning, I heard Laura Ingraham interviewing Geraldo Rivera on her radio program about illegal immigration. Rivera stood adamantly for two political points:

1) If you oppose ILLEGAL immigration, even if you make it exhaustively clear that it is ONLY the illegal kind you object to, you are STILL somehow against LEGAL immigration as well, and are making it harder for all immigrants--that is, for Hispanic immigrants, the only ones he seems really to care about.

2)If you express ANY concern about a fact which has been all too well covered up by the hard-leftwing media establishment--the fact that a seriously high proportion of illegal immigrants from Mexico have been committing predatory violent crimes in the United States--you are a racist, or at least you are enabling racists.

Men like Rivera, who demand that their own ethnic group be given privileges and favoritism far beyond what ANYONE else gets, call to my memory an interesting and instructive situation that occurred in the entertainment world some years ago.

Someone wanted to make a movie about the early-20th-century lives of the Mexican Trotskyite Communist couple, Diego and Frida Kahlo. Actress Laura San Giacomo, an Italian-American, eagerly pursued the chance to portray Frida in the movie. But my readers will not understand the true significance of the way her desire was treated unless they know something about the history of Hispanic actors in the English-speaking cinema. Stay with me, now; Miss San Giacomo will wait for us to get back to her.

Over most of the history of talking movies, Hispanic actors have been in a position to portray characters from an amazing variety of racial groups. Hispanic actors--Ricardo Montalban and Cesar Romero among them--appeared as American Indians, India-type Indians, Arabs, Chinese, French, and certainly Italians. But guess what happened to Laura San Giacomo when she tried to be cast as a Mexican woman?

It might have been the reason why she ended up calling her TV series "Just Shoot Me."

Hispanic-supremacist activists, who had NEVER complained about a HISPANIC actor portraying an ITALIAN character, went ballistic at the outrageously offensive suggestion that an ITALIAN actor be likewise allowed to portray a HISPANIC character. Miss San Giacomo was given the boot; in fact, the entire project was shut down until they found an actress who wanted the role AND who had the politically-approved kind of chromosomes, namely Salma Hayek.

No one even slightly more honest than Geraldo Rivera could fail to recognize the rejection of Miss San Giacomo as a textbook example of a gross double standard, of "What's Mine Is Mine And What's Yours Is Mine." But that's no more hypocritical than the policies of the Mexican government--which refuses to let ANY language other than Spanish be used for official business in ITS offices, and yet pretends to believe that upholding English as the dominant language of the United States is uniquely racist. And those who champion this double standard, KNOWING that it is a double standard, rely on confusion of issues to keep from being held accountable for their dishonesty. Perhaps most notably, they will claim--KNOWING this to be false--that any call for Hispanic immigrants TO learn English is the same as an attempt to force them NOT to remember Spanish AT ALL.

The more I encounter of self-serving logic-distortion by Hispanic illegals and their front men, the more I wish to see almost EVERY OTHER nationality being given preference over them for admittance to the United States. Of course, Geraldo Rivera would want to believe that this is because I'm a racist. To which I would reply, "NO-O-O-O...it's because I'm 'prejudiced' against DISHONESTY, no matter which collective group is showing the strongest performance in it at a given time."

REALLY Despicable Songs

2008-03-05T20:55:00.000-08:00

Even before I knew Jesus as my Savior, I was capable of recognizing some wrong things as wrong. For instance, I was capable of realizing that it was wrong for a man to use a woman sexually at his whim, insisting that everything be on his terms only, giving her no loyalty or stability in return. Therefore, when the folk-pop song "Gentle On My Mind" came out, I knew it for the heap of garbage it was, pleasant though its melody might sound. That song, from the viewpoint of a profoundly selfish man, spoke as if the man were doing the woman a favor by taking all she could give yet leaving her at will.

Because ideas have consequences, entertainment has moral significance. The entertainment community self-servingly squawks about supposed "censorship" any time someone like me raises this issue; but what I'm advocating is ANSWERING the liars, not forcibly silencing them. Accordingly, I invite members to identify other songs, recent or not, which support and glamorize things that are actually evil and wrong. Remember Isaiah 5:20: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil."

It's an old example I've chosen, but I hope that any Christian reading this will take more thought for analyzing and refuting the grossly wrong ideas conveyed in popular songs. They can do real damage. Someone said, "If a man were allowed to write the songs of a nation, he need not worry about who wrote the books." Often the best way to answer evil songs is to ridicule them appropriately. (Conservative singer Paul Shanklin has proven in recent years how powerful satire can be as a weapon on the side of truth.) "Gentle On My Mind" begins with these words which mock the very idea of marriage:

Well, it's knowin' that your door is always open
and your path is free to walk
That makes me tend to leave my sleeping bag
rolled up and stashed behind your couch.
And it's knowin' I'm not shackled by
forgotten words and bonds,
And the inkstains that have dried upon some line,
That keeps you ever moving on the backroads
of my memory,
And keeps you ever gentle on my mind.

So, back when the song was new, I parodied it in such
a way as to mock the selfish exploiter instead:

Well, it's knowin' that I've got you suckered
into thinking that I really love you
That makes me tend to leave my sleeping bag
rolled up and stashed behind your couch.
And it's knowin' I'm not bothered with responsibility,
'Cause you never seem to catch on to the trick,
That keeps you ever moving on the backroads of my memory,
And keeps you ever gentle on my, er, uh, mind.

That may be a little coarse, but it is all at the expense of the evildoer. The very conservative minister who married Jan and me has heard this parody, and completely approves of it because of its intent. As a matter of fact, Kevin shares with me an appreciation for a Christian singing group called Apologetix, which has done many superb send-ups of secular songs. Not necessarily wicked songs in their case; but the parodies always serve a good purpose.

An obscure early song lyric of mine, preserved

2008-03-05T20:48:00.000-08:00

"Jesus Never Lies"

Jesus, in His years of living as a man,
said the most important things in plain words.
Many things He said are hard to understand,
but He wasn't playing games with vain words.
Jesus, on the night He was to be betrayed,
had a lot to say to the Eleven:
Told them that they never ought to be dismayed,
told them that there really is a Heaven.

Isn't it great that Jesus told the truth,
and tells it still?
--Never has lied a single time, and never will!
Isn't it great that Jesus told the truth,
and tells it now?
--He reminds us we must repent, and shows us how.

Sin won't go away if we deny it's there;
it's a thing that someone must atone for.
Freedom from a guilty heart, and from despair,
we must look to Jesus Christ alone for.
If you hear a self-appointed prophet say
there's another way to God than Jesus,
Let him hear the truth and send him on his way;
we must never let the Devil seize us.

Isn't it great that Jesus told the truth,
and tells it still?
--Never has lied a single time, and never will!
Isn't it great that Jesus told the truth,
and tells it now?
--He reminds us we must repent, and shows us how.

Jesus never comforts anyone with lies;
flattery's the method of the Devil.
Jesus tells the truth, and sets us free to rise
up into a higher, better level.
There are many mansions in the Father's place;
Jesus would have told us were it not so.
When we're taken into the angelic race,
we'll be well aware of how we got so.

Isn't it great that Jesus told the truth,
and tells it still?
--Never has lied a single time, and never will!
Isn't it great that Jesus told the truth,
and tells it now?
--He reminds us we must repent, and shows us how.

(c) Joseph R. Ravitts

Okay, another for February: about Christian romance novels

2008-02-26T22:56:00.000-08:00

Because I read books aloud to Janalee, I've grown
very familiar with Christian romance fiction. Some
of it is very good, such as the works of Karen
Kingsbury; but even in good Christian romances,
a problem persists. Numerous authors don't seem
entirely to grasp the command of Scripture not to
be mismatched with unbelievers.

Hypothetically:

Sarah Slushy writes a novel called "Love's Ooey-Gooey Sentiment." In it, Christian man Bill Whitebread has been continuously and unwaveringly in love with Tina Guttersnipe since he was four years old and she was three. We encounter them in Chapter One at ages twenty-five and twenty-four. Throughout the twenty-one years preceding the opening, and on through the first thirty-eight chapters of a forty-chapter novel, Tina continuously and unwaveringly denies the existence of God, accuses Christianity of being the direct and sole cause of the Nazi Holocaust, throws rocks through church windows, and supports every subversive Marxist cause she can find. She also brags incessantly about how much smarter she supposedly is than any Christian, including and especially the hero. During all this, Bill ignores the dozens of good Christian women who are interested in him, remaining fixated on Tina, insisting that she is sure to become a believer any minute now.

Somewhere around Chapter Thirty-Three, Tina decides she likes Bill after all--that is, likes HIM, without agreeing to anything about his professed faith. So they have some fluttery kissing scenes, leading up to their becoming engaged... with Tina STILL denying Jesus as much as she ever did, and Bill seeing no problem with this. Not until Chapter Thirty-Nine does the author slip in a deus-ex-machina, having God speak audibly to Tina. God is depicted as saying to her: "My dear sweet cuddly child, I know that your only problem is that you don't love yourself enough. So let Me assure you that I absolutely adore you and EVERYTHING about you, exactly as you are, with no need to change anything, except that it would be nice if you acknowledge My existence so that I can feel better about showering My unconditional blank-check approval on you." Tina's cool with this, and she marries Bill in Chapter Forty.

Bill is never called to account for having utterly disregarded First Corinthians 6:14-17; and the reader fails to derive the important lesson that compassionate concern for a soul in darkness is not supposed to be the same thing as becoming emotionally DEPENDENT ON that unbelieving person WHILE he or she REMAINS in darkness. And girls being the chief readers of these novels, we get another generation of disastrously naive Christian girls who think they can marry a man who contradicts and mocks their faith, and somehow he'll spontaneously change after the wedding.

Even if I only get one post entered in February....

2008-02-26T22:53:00.000-08:00

I want to display these haiku that I wrote for
my wife Janalee for Valentine's day:

Adult concerns, yet
Childlike pleasure in worship:
This is Janalee.

Seen at odd moments,
In the midst of dull routines,
Her beauty leaps out.

Like an Amazon,
Slaying monsters, she defeats
Depression, sometimes.

New glasses don't make
Her eyes lovelier; her eyes
Improve the glasses.

By necessity
She crosses the streams of pain
On stepping-stone pills.

As long as she still
Is able to stir a hand,
My hand will hold hers.

Counsel I've given to a new believer in Jesus

2008-01-28T11:08:00.000-08:00

First, I'll tell you about an incident in the Bible which I often tell young people about when they are just getting started with Jesus. It's the last part of the 6th chapter of John's Gospel, which is the 4th book of the New Testament.

Jesus had been doing some preaching, some of which was intended to make the audience understand that it wasn't enough for them to do this or that good deed; they needed to have a relationship with Jesus Himself. Many of His hearers decided that this was too heavy for them, so they quit listening to Him. Jesus then asked His closest friends, the Apostles, "Will you also leave?" Then the Apostle Peter--for whom Peter in the Narnia stories is named--replied, "Lord, whom could we go to? YOU have the words of eternal life; and we believe, and have come to know, that You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God."

This episode shows that there is no substitute for Jesus, no "Plan B." Sometimes an emotional mood, having nothing to do with actual facts, makes us feel as if the Christian life isn't working out. At such times, it's important to remember that Jesus is THE ONLY hope.

A Poem, As A Reminder That Spring Will Return

2008-01-25T21:31:00.000-08:00

I wrote this in rebuttal to faith-debunkers who try to
convince us that everything spiritual is "really" only
a clumsy interpretation of naturalistic phenomena...

The trees condense a cloud of leafy mist;
And, like the robins coming home to perch,
Once more the skeptic and materialist
Wield springtime as a flail against the church.
“Your Resurrection’s just a metaphor
Of spring’s renewal!” Saying this, they tell
The world that they don’t know, or they ignore,
The different climate in old Israel.
There, winter was the growing time, and spring
Meant harvest, endings, dryness—not rebirth;
Yet there and then the resurrected King
Leaped far above the seasons of the Earth.
While spring, as we know spring, serves for a sign,
There’s more than metaphor in the Divine.

Originally from September 2006: "The Enigma of the Enabler"

2008-01-22T21:33:00.000-08:00

When King David was nearing the end of his days in
I Kings 1, "Then Adonijah the son of Haggith [Haggith
being a member of David's harem] exalted himself, saying
'I will be king' [in disregard of God's decree that
Solomon must inherit David's throne]....And his father
had not displeased him at any time in saying ' Why hast
thou done so?' "
I am not sitting at the keyboard to discuss front-line,
over-the-top evildoers who wake up every morning eagerly
planning how they'll do harm today. Neither am I here
to discuss persons who are forced to do the bidding of
evildoers by direct threat of death, like the Western
journalists who recently were forced at gunpoint to
recite nonsense about how the dogma of their Islamist
captors was so good and merciful. I have in mind a
vast, blurry spectrum of enablers--persons who do NOT
wish to do evil, and who don't have guns at their heads
either, but who are externally deceived or self-deceived
into passively or even actively helping evildoers to
succeed in wickedness.

King David, with whose case I began, is easy enough to
remark on. He had committed such great sins himself that,
after he had repented of them, he felt as if he had lost
moral authority to rebuke others. Thus he had been
indulgent with his selfish son Adonijah, and likewise
with Absalom before this time; and each of these princes
had rewarded his indulgence with open rebellion and
attempted usurpation. But there are other enablers
of evil who themselves have never sunk so far in moral
degradation as David had sunk for awhile...who really
do not wish to do wrong or to acquiesce in wrong
...and yet who still find themselves giving a green
light to the most blatant and aggressive sins by others.

Just as there are various motives for the aggressive sins,
there are also various reasons why well-intentioned
bystanders hold the door open for the offenders.

Where David was inhibited from opposing wrong because of
his individual guilt, others may be similarly inhibited
because they feel that they fall under a collective guilt.
Many white Americans are conditioned to think that, if
they criticize any black person for any reason whatsoever,
this will prove them to be racists--or anyway, cause them
to be accused of racism. Jesse Lee Peterson, an outstanding
African-American clergyman, deals excellently with this
area of enabling in his book "SCAM." I recommend it
unreservedly; and along with it, I recommend Joseph C.
Phillips' autobiography "HE TALK LIKE A WHITE BOY."

Next, and symbiotic to the previous, are persons who hold
themselves to be members of an innocent-victim group--and
who, though they would not commit crimes themselves, are
prepared to make excuses for fellow victim-group members
who do. Thus, there are Muslims who would never
themselves wish to murder or terrorize anyone, but who
make excuses for Muslim terrorists because they think that
the terrorists have legitimate grievances.

Of course, the terrorists love having decent, civilized
Muslims run interference for them. Fascists and Marxists
always love to trick well-meaning people into identifying
with them. One of the sneakiest tricks the Nazis pulled
off was to make many civil-service jobs part of the SS!
In this way, harmless accountants and clerks found
themselves wearing SS uniforms...and wanting to believe
there was nothing wrong with the agency to which they
now belonged.

But let's bring it back down to a more personal level.
I said earlier that I was not concerned with people giving
in to a natural fear of a threatened violent end; but
there are forms of cowardice which are not about physical
danger. Suppose, for instance, that a go-along-to-get-
along male executive works in an office where one or
more female coworkers are known to be skillful at playing
victim. One of these women, having chosen to take a dislike
to a new male employee, concocts a false accusation of
sexual harassment against him. The executive, afraid of
being falsely accused of enabling the imaginary harassment,
is quick to join in the condemnations, pompously telling
the falsely-accused man, "YOU KNOW what harassment is!!"
Actually, it's the spineless executive who "knows" what
something is: he knows that, for politically-correct
lynch mobs, the mere fact that an accusation is made at
all is proof that the accusation is true (provided that
the accuser is part of a sacred-cow more-victimized-than-
thou group). Having once taken the side of the false
accuser, the executive has a stake in NOT searching for
the actual facts; if no defense for the accused is
allowed, the executive will manage in a day or two to
convince himself that he ISN'T a wimpy coward and he
ISN'T enabling slanderers.

Keeping peace within a family is a root of all sorts
of craven concessions. The squeaky wheel not only gets
the grease, it may also get preferential treatment by
its parents, cousins, etc. If one could study all the
group activities of an assortment of extended families,
one would sometimes find all selections of activity
(baseball game vs. movie, swimming vs. museums, etc.)
leaning heavily toward ONE family member's preferences
--because that one is grossly and stubbornly selfish,
and all the others give in to him or her just to
"keep the peace."

Christians not only are not immune to becoming enablers
of wrong conduct; often we EXCEL at enabling. C.S. Lewis,
in "The Screwtape Letters" and elsewhere, warned against
taking only one portion of Christian doctrine and
regarding it as being the whole thing; but it still
happens. And partial following of Biblical ethics leads
to indulgence of whatever sins are not recognized
as being prohibited by that part of God's Word on which
we focus.

In past generations, many Christians fixated on doctrines
about authority and submission, and thus (to our lasting
shame) would make excuses for slaveowning and wife-abuse.
But now the big fashion is to fixate only upon tolerance
and forgiveness --with a result amazingly similar to the
older fashion, in that wrongdoers STILL get a free pass.
The way it works now is that, precisely because a blatant
wrongdoer makes heavy demands on our patience and forgiveness,
by concentrating our attention on being patient with him
we can feel good about ourselves. "Look how much Christian
love I'm showing to him!" we tell ourselves--while we
completely forget the less-demanding and thus less-
interesting persons whom our favorite injures.

Christians of the invertebrate sort want us to "forgive"
--read, CONDONE AND APPROVE--a female "Christian" singer
and a male country-music star for having both left their
first spouses to marry each other. The husband whom she
abandoned, and the wife whom her lover abandoned, are not
straining our patience, and so are not contributing to our
pride in how tolerant we are; therefore, that abandoned
husband and that abandoned wife don't count. All the
grease goes to the squeaky wheels.

Even if there were no dictatorships or terrorists for us
to make useless appeasing concessions to, there would
still be this problem of making wrongful concessions to
the sinful conduct of individuals all around us. Preferring
the offender OVER his victims only does more harm in the
long run. Easy there, I am NOT suggesting that we all be
severe, judgmental critics of everything others do; but
for all of us there will be some occasions where the right
and wrong are clear, and we must make a stand for
what's right instead of pampering the troublemaker.
Proverbs 28:4 says, "They that forsake the law praise
the wicked; but such as keep the law contend with them."

We need not forget about grace and mercy to oppose evil;
in fact, sometimes it IS precisely our OPPOSITION to evil
that wakes wrongdoers up to their need of repentance. Many
a soul will needlessly end up lost because he was "lovingly"
enabled in unrepented sin when he should have been reproved.
God help us, not to enjoy condemning others, but also NOT
to be foolish or cowardly enablers of what's wrong. Of course,
the enemy of our souls will try to confuse us on the question
of what is enabling and what is valid Christian tolerance;
that's why we must always pray for the Holy Spirit's guidance.

Clarifying the Definition of Self-Pity

2008-01-17T08:19:00.000-08:00

When I was a college boy, I felt very sorry for myself
because I couldn't get dates with girls. Pop psychology
would say that I had low self-esteem, that I did not see
myself as good enough to deserve attention from girls;
but pop psychology would be dead wrong. I did think I
deserved to get dates; my _high_ self-pity co-existed
with _high_ self-esteem, as I resented being denied the
respect I always thought I deserved.

The cluelessness of pop psychology about what is entailed
in self-pity has also infected the evangelical realm, as
I have seen terribly often.

There have been countless times when I've heard pastors
preach a message amounting to: "Your problem is that you
don't think you're good enough to be loved by God; you
think you're so bad that He'll never forgive you. Well,
here's the good news: you can quit beating up on yourself,
because God's love is unconditional! Yayyy!" On some of
these countless occasions, I have said to the pastors
afterward, "Where are you _finding_ all these people who
are so ashamed of themselves, who want God's forgiveness
but think they're too sinful to receive it? I haven't
been finding them; what I find are conceited, arrogant,
stubborn rebels who not only _don't_ think they need
God's forgiveness, but even flatter themselves that
they're _better_ than God and He owes _them_ an apology!"

Then the pastors always assured me that yes, they really
do routinely encounter humble souls who fully understand
and admit their guilt for sin, and whose _only_ problem
is not having confidence in God's unconditional love.
This discrepancy baffled me for a long time, since I
was sure those pastors would never knowingly lie.

Then it struck me.

I'm not a pastor...so people talking to me don't feel
compelled to say what they assume a pastor would want
to hear! Suddenly it all began to fall into place.
Now, I am convinced that there are many people who
_want_ to say, "God's demands are unreasonable; I'm
afraid that I'll never get His approval, not because
I'm so bad, because He is insanely vindictive." That's
what they _really_ think; but they don't dare say this
to a pastor, so they change it to "I'm not good enough
to be forgiven." The well-meaning pastor goes into
his memorized pep-talk about unconditional love; and
the person counselled goes away with his or her actual
self-pity problem completely unaddressed and unresolved.

I'm not saying that there are no genuine cases of people
deeply remorseful for their sin and meekly afraid of
being condemned; but there's already _more_ than enough
unconditional-love talk circulating to meet their needs.
What _isn't_ circulating nearly enough is discussion of
REPENTANCE: the very thing that is needed to break some
self-pitying souls out of the mental bondage in which
they imagine themselves _entitled_ to approval without
having to change any of their own attitudes.

In Fairness to the Left

2008-01-15T20:41:00.001-08:00

Although some liberals want to believe that persons like
me refuse ever to see anything wrong with private enterprise,
it is not so.

Some weeks ago, I was listening to a bit of Air America, and
Robert Kennedy Jr. was denouncing the Chevron Oil Corporation
for dumping toxic chemicals, untreated, right into the water
supply of many South American towns. He told of numerous people
and domestic animals being poisoned because of this criminal
negligence. From what I heard, I see no way anyone could get
away with faking this report for long; so I do believe that
Kennedy was telling the truth.

Contrary to stereotyping, social conservatives do not actually
desire to see the whole biosphere incurably poisoned. So if it
takes a liberal to expose this particular crime, go for it!

Joseph tells a true story that DOESN'T make him look very good

2007-12-18T01:19:00.000-08:00

THIS WAS ORIGINALLY PART OF AN ESSAY
SERIES WHICH I CALLED "FAILURES TO THINK"

Word-picture time:

Suppose you have a four-year-old daughter, and
you are playing hide-and-seek with her, someplace
outdoors. It's your turn to hide, so you choose a
spot from which you can keep the child continuously
under observation, for her safety. You watch and
watch, never losing sight of her while she wanders
here and there searching for you. After three or four
minutes, she finally blunders on your hiding place,
and squeals, "I found you!" And since becoming
aware of someone's exact location, even if not as
a result of Sherlock Holmes brilliance, constitutes
finding that person, her statement is true.

At this point, you angrily snap at her, "No, you
didn't find me! You could only say that you found me
if you took me completely by surprise! Since I saw
you approaching and allowed you to find me, you
can't say that you found me!"

What's that? You say that you wouldn't say this to
the little girl? Actually, I knew you wouldn't. But
Christians often say similar things when discussing
the experience of conversion.

A brand-new believer, speaking of his encounter with
Jesus, describes the questioning and searching he
went through. Then he reports, quite truthfully,
that there was a particular moment when he first
realized for sure that Jesus was Lord. He expresses
this in the perfectly applicable words, "I found Jesus."
And then the self-appointed humility police get on his
case: "You didn't find Jesus--JESUS found YOU!" The
new Christian's face takes on the look of a boy being
informed only retroactively that some ordinary action
was a violation of rules he had never been told. He
hadn't been told that his new spiritual family would
be full of one-upmanshippers, looking to score holier-
than-thou points over a mere choice of words.

If only everyone in church would think about the
simple fact that it is possible to become aware of
a person whose attention was already on you, this
particular point-scoring ploy would be retired.

What I have just described is one manifestation of a
larger, vaguer problem. It involves a failure by many
believers to do a good job of categorizing or defining
things. Thus, in my "Jesus found you!" illustration, the
reprovers wrongly (and subconsciously) defined the
verb "to find" as only indicating a sovereign initiative
in which the one doing the finding knows all and the
one found knows nothing. This led them to believe
erroneously that the young Christian was claiming
something like divine sovereignty when he said "I
found Jesus."

A broader example of this problem--and one with some
connection to the trouble the Apostle Paul had with
legalists--is a failure to understand that some things
are OPTIONAL. Millions of Christians, out of their
desire for the security of predictability, subconsciously
want to believe that everything in life is either clearly
required or clearly forbidden.

I remember a conversation I had about thirty years
ago with a crotchety old woman running a Christian
bookstore. She was saying with a straight face that it
was a sin to play any electrically-amplified musical
instrument, simply because the Bible did not explicitly
command us TO play such instruments. There was no
point in asking her how many references the Bible
contained to any electrically-powered invention, or
why she was committing the sin of reading Bibles that
were printed by electrically-powered printing presses.
She was deriving too much satisfaction from deceiving
herself that her personal preference was the same
thing as a commandment from God.

But I would be letting my readers off too easily if
I stopped here and we all just agreed with each other
what a fool the old woman was. Unfortunately, in the
very act of denouncing legalism like hers--in the very
act of trying to exalt grace above all--we can fall into
still another intellectual and spiritual snare.

I now have in mind the snare of not thinking about
the relationship between general things and their
particular forms. More specifically: the relationship
between SIN as a general phenomenon, and sin-ZUH
as particular misdeeds.

When we dissect the bitter old woman who hates rock
music, we find that her self-righteousness is based on
rejection of particular things (like Bose amplifiers)
that she perceives as bad. Persons who are unambiguously
heathen also draw moral categories by particulars--
missing the point about the sin nature Jesus came to
save us from. No one can be Biblically orthodox who
won't face the reality of sin as the total phenomenon.

Everybody's with me so far; we all subconsciously (at
least, I hope only subconsciously) will congratulate
ourselves for understanding our holistic need of grace
to cleanse our whole being, not only isolated parts. But
we're not out of the experiential woods ourselves.

It's obvious that we can fail to see the forest for the
trees--i.e. we could recognize individual faults and try
to correct them, but never address the sin-nature issue.
We preach and preach on this theme. What we often fail
to think of, however, is the fact that one can make a
mistake in the opposite direction as well: having an
aerial view of the forest, but seeing no single tree.

In large Bible-teaching churches, it's easy to find
one or more persons who never tire of saying, "I know
I'm a sinner, I know I deserve to go to Hell, I know
that I'm only saved by grace"....but who NEVER get around
to APPLYING this theoretical humility to any concrete
area of conduct. They're so contrite about vicariously
eating the apple with Adam--but they never admit to
being wrong in any argument, never apologize when
they hurt others, and never acknowledge any reason
why they should sacrifice their self-interest in any
of the specific situations of daily life.

I myself have never been slow to criticize legalism
like that of the old woman in the bookstore. She may
have been responsible for needlessly creating a bad
impression of Christianity itself in the minds of many
unbelieving youngsters who met her. Frankly, though,
I believe that those who go wrong in this other way--
using claimed grace as a shield for their selfishness
in particular dealings--will do more damage to the
appeal of the gospel.

When writing a message like this one, it's always
good to accuse yourself if you truthfully can. And I
sure can. I am about to confess one of my most painful
memories of wrongdoing on my own part--a specific
wrong action, which I wrongly cloaked with grace. I
never even told my Mary about this one. She'll know
now, up in Heaven, but there she'll understand better.

Back in college days, long before God brought me
together with Mary, I became friendly with a woman
maybe a year or two older than I, whom I had vague
notions of leading to Jesus, and toward whom I felt a
not-so-vague erotic attraction. (I did not necessarily
flatter myself that she would ever be interested in me,
but I felt attracted to her.) Just in case she ever might
become aware of this article, I will identify her--since
all the shame of this episode falls on me, and none of
it on her. I forget her first name, but her last name
was Lapp. She had dark brown hair, and a terrific figure.

Perhaps I should have saved up this illustration for
an essay on the ways men behave toward desirable women;
but I feel as if God wants me to use it here. In either
context, it is worth noting that the action of mine
which I am about to describe is the sort of thing that
one sector of popular culture advocates. Most of the
morally worst things I have ever done have been
instances of obeying the popular culture.

Up until this one single event, all was pleasant and
friendly between Miss Lapp and me. But all it took to
ruin this was one act of rudeness--which may work for
the leading men in certain movies, but look where the
film industry has gotten to.

It was in the campus cafeteria. Seeing Miss Lapp
standing with her tray on the serving line, I sneaked
up on her from behind, and swatted her behind with
my open hand, causing her to stagger forward. It also
caused her to change her mind very rapidly about her
former opinion of me as a nice guy.

Who knows, it's possible that Miss Lapp would have
accepted my apology...if I had bothered to apologize.
But at this point in my Christian life, I was full of
grace this, unmerited favor that, substitution here,
imputed righteousness there...and no place in all of
that for true humility. Well, of course, given true
humility, and the consideration for the rights of
others that accompanies it, I would have kept my hand
off her hindquarters in the first place; but you get
my drift. In fairness to me, in the years prior to
first meeting Miss Lapp, I had tried being chivalrous
with girls, only to see girls preferring guys who
treated them like dirt.

Still, in view of Miss Lapp clearly not preferring to
have me treat her with disrespect, it was tragic that I
failed miserably to think my way back from theoretical
recognition of sin and grace to relevant repentance
for a specific offense. I dishonored Jesus by using His
mercy as an excuse NOT to beg Miss Lapp's forgiveness.

And guess what?

"You have not, because you ask not."

Once it was clear to her that I wasn't apologizing,
she never spoke to me again; and it is one hundred
percent MY fault that she never spoke to me again.

I probably would not have had a shot romantically
with Miss Lapp even if I hadn't swatted her. Obviously,
God had another woman designated for me, one with
red rather than brown hair. The pain of this memory is
far worse than regrets for a supposed loss of romantic
opportunity. My sin did incalculable damage to Miss
Lapp's chances of getting to know Jesus, because I
gave her every reason in the world to regard Christian
talk about grace as a phony excuse for bad behavior.

I've prayed belated prayers for her salvation since
college days. If she should end up eternally lost, her
blood is right on my hands.

And what unifies this anecdote with my current series
theme is the fact that a minute of clear thinking
could have prevented me from spanking Miss Lapp.
Even after spanking her, it might have been possible
to undo the harm--if I had kept my head on straight
enough to repent of my individual sins as well as
trusting Jesus to cure the overall sin-nature. But I
didn't think properly beforehand, I didn't apologize
afterward...and I didn't honor God at all.

Our emotions, when unguided by good sense, have
a really lousy batting average when it comes
to honoring God.

That bears thinking about.

God the Father--anyone remember Him?

2007-12-14T18:50:00.000-08:00

Because counterfeit-Christian cults typically deny the Deity
of Jesus, many genuine Christians develop a notion that Jesus
is the only Person of the Godhead Whose Deity ever needs to
be asserted. But here I will discuss a different erosion of the
Blessed Trinity.

Let me begin one evening at a Christian coffeehouse, not so
long after I had received Jesus as my Savior. A young man
leading prayer on stage was addressing Jesus directly from
beginning to end, with no recognition of the Father: "Thank
You Jesus for this, thank You Jesus for that..." and finally:
"Thank You FOR SENDING YOUR SON."

Think that one over.

The Jesus-Only heresy often gets a free ride, with even people
who are not explicitly part of that heresy figuring that as long
as you name Jesus it's okay if you wipe your feet on the Father
and the Holy Spirit. Especially on the Father. The Holy Spirit
has a claim staked out in inspiring the Bible, convicting of sin,
and giving the gifts and the fruit; but for everything else, there's
Master Card. That is to say, for everything else, the Father gets
bumped aside in people's minds in favor of the Son.

Absolutely every God-manifestation anywhere in Scripture which
is not obviously labelled "Holy Spirit" gets attributed to Jesus
and onlyJesus by those who skate close to the Jesus-Only doctrine,
though they do have a little awkwardness about Who it was that
said "This is My beloved Son" when Jesus was standing there
listening. Essentially, the Father is left with _nothing_ to
do, and nothing but that one token line to say. If not actually
in the Jesus-Only sect, they'll _say_ that the three Persons are
co-equal, but they really make the Father LESS co-equal. (When
you note that the Virgin Mary's pregnancy was actually caused by
the Holy Spirit, that _really_ appears to leave the Father with
no role--not even as a Father!)

So why do they do this? Because they, like the heathen, go on
emotions; and Jesus, visibly suffering and visibly rising from
the dead, naturally arouses more emotion in us than the unseen
Father can. So they put their theological investment where their
emotional investment is. Reinforcing this is the lazy mind's
hunger for simplicity.

There are those who try to get farther than simplistic emotions,
and they desire God not only to be loving but also transcendent.
Such persons can see the sentimentalist motivation of those who
lean to Jesus Only--so they lean the other way, figuring that
the very Deity of Jesus must have been trumped up in the first
place by precisely such an emotional approach. If I had ever
fallen away into a cult, it would have been for exactly this
reason; but by God's grace, I stuck with (small-o) orthodox
Christians until I became able to digest the Trinity. And I
was not helped in this digestion by people saying "Believe
it because I say that God's Word means that," whereas I was
_greatly_ helped by the arguments that C.S. Lewis offered
for the Trinity in "Mere Christianity."

Being now a set-in-reinforced-concrete Trinitarian, here is
what I might say to help a seeker who is put off by seemingly
excessive concentration on the Second Person only:

"I agree with something G.K. Chesterton wrote: that being
multi-personal allows God to experience love and companionship
_within_ His own essence, even before He created anything.
This upholds His transcendence, showing that He did not NEED
to make living creatures to save Himself from loneliness, He
CHOSE to make them so that He could extend His love. This is
also what enabled Him to keep on being God and yet also enter
_into_ created life in the Incarnation. There's a passage
in Isaiah which says that God could not find a man to work
deliverance, so His own arm brought Him victory. God would
not delegate the hard job of Atonement to a created man,
even a sinless created man who was willing to make that
sacrifice. His love would make Him prefer to sacrifice
Himself, and being Triune made it feasible for Him."

By the way, the fact that God would need somehow to continue
being God while also coming down for us leads us to an irony.
The Jesus-Only teachers don't realize this, but they come full
circle and end up saying almost exactly the same thing as those
who _deny_ the Deity of Jesus. If you insist on only one Person
in the Godhead, that Person has to exist _outside_ the body of
Jesus that hangs on the cross, so that the crucified one has
Someone _TO_ Whom to be saying "Into Your hands I commend My
spirit." Thus Jesus-Only teachers are forced to believe that
their unipersonal God was NEVER entirely _inside_ the human
life of Jesus, but only had a hand stuck into it, as into a
glove or a puppet. That's what a denier of Jesus' Deity would
also say! By contrast, a "detached" Person of the Trinity could
get ALL the way inside human life and human death, while leaving
the other two Persons to carry on the business of being God
and sustaining the cosmos.

We're almost through! Let me return to the matter of people
diminishing the importance of God the Father. The distant and
un-seeable character of the Father may be _precisely_ what
makes it possible to say that we see God fully in Jesus, and
yet somehow _don't_ yet see Him fully. Note that, where I John
says "When He appears, we shall be like Him," it is NOT, NOT,
NOT saying "When _Jesus_ appears," though numerous people make
themselves believe that this is what it says; it is referring
to the FATHER, for the Father is the ONLY antecedent given for
the pronoun. So there IS something worthwhile about the Father
in Himself.

And what is that something? Well, it can indeed be strongly
argued that all God's perceptible actions and audible speech
in the Old Testament were Jesus at work; but consider how Jesus
Himself said that the Son does what He sees the Father doing.
There, I think, is our clue, and there is the Father's niche.
The Father's place is as "first among equals;" it is LEADERSHIP
within the Trinity. I believe that the Father was the Person
Who said in Genesis, "Let Us--". I believe that it is the Father
Who _originates_ the ideas of the Godhead. This gives Him a job,
so to speak, even if He is not visible to us up front. And that
is why Paul can write that the Son will remain subject to the
Father for eternity, without it meaning that the Son is inferior.

Someone to whom I presented this reasoning let it pass right
by him unheeded, saying to me something like, "That's right,
just like you said, the Father submits to the Son and the
Father obeys the Son." Huh??? The emotional pull of "Jesus
Only" is that strong, even for those who have not committed
themselves consciously to the heresy. But as long as I'm here,
there will be at least one Christian who does NOT relegate God
the Father to being only a background spear-carrier with no
lines of dialogue in the show.

Food should be food, not a caustic corrosive

2007-12-12T22:29:00.000-08:00

Where numerous makers of chili and chili seasoning love to give their products names like "Nuclear Death" or "Throat Exploder," I set out while still in the Navy to produce a chili which could actually be EATEN, by anyone. I call it "Joseph Ravitts' Non-Toxic Nutrition Chili." Here is my recipe (from which you can simply delete the beef if you're feeding vegetarians):

2 lbs. lean ground beef
Packaged fajita seasoning
2-4 green bell peppers
5-8 fresh tomatoes
1-2 cups of peas
A bunch of asparagus
At least 10 oz. of black beans
1 can each of baked beans and refried beans
About 8 oz. of tomato paste
A few ounces of shredded cheese of your choice
Half a cup of flaxseed, if available
(look in healthfood stores)

Brown the meat separately, so you can drain away the grease before combining with the other ingredients. Go on simmering the meat with the fajita seasoning. Cut up the tomatoes, peppers and asparagus; make sure the asparagus is in SMALL pieces, and get rid of the hard woody ends of the stalks. Boil these items, along with the black beans and the tomato paste, in just enough water to mix them and avoid scorching. Stir frequently.

The cheese and flaxseed can be added at any point; but put off adding the baked and refried beans till near the end, since these come already cooked. Run the peas through a blender, with just enough water to allow for the blending. If you have no blender, cook the peas separately and mash them before adding them to the chili. Either way, mix the pulverized peas into the chili for a thickening effect. When all vegetable ingredients have been put in, add the meat, stir thoroughly again, and keep the completed chili simmering for at least 10 more minutes. Serve the chili on top of rice, crackers, potatoes or chips. The amount indicated here will feed five adults with good appetites.

The Denver Post just did an obit glorifying a "peace" activist...

2007-12-10T02:59:00.000-08:00

So I sent the following to the obituary writer.

Dear ________ :

I never met Pat Hutchinson, but I have met hundreds of her exact
duplicates, all congratulating themselves on "heroically" protesting
against the foreign policy of a nation which will permit them to protest
unhindered if they do so peaceably, while never sticking their necks
out to go protest against a dictatorial regime whose rulers would arrest
or kill them.

Do you know who Vo Nguyen Giap is? He is the prominent North
Vietnamese general who has admitted in his memoirs that, contrary
to the lies of hard-leftwing journalists in America, the Communists
in the Vietnam War were being thoroughly crushed by the American
military, and would have given up if not for "heroic peace activists"
like Pat Hutchinson who set out to make America lose. The "peace"
movement in the West was the ONLY thing that enabled Hanoi to
conquer South Vietnam; and once the conquest happened, the
"peace" activists tried to make themselves not see that the direct
result of their work was MORE people dying in purges than all who
had died during the war.

I will give Mrs. Hutchinson the benefit of the doubt, and assume that
she did not set out consciously desiring to cause the massacres
performed by the victorious Communists in Vietnam, Cambodia and
Laos, nor the persecution of dissenters which continues in Vietnam
to this very day. But while gullible fools may not deserve condemnation,
they don't deserve admiration either.

Sincerely,
Joseph Ravitts

Now those of us not thrilled by Harry Potter will be called homophobic, too

2007-12-03T19:08:00.000-08:00

"Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling waited for a moment when
the last volume in the series had been released, and the Potter
franchise was drawing closer to losing momentum. Then she
stirred the pot with a remark that she imagined the beloved
old wizard-professor, Dumbledore, to be a homosexual. It was
crafty timing. Earlier, and she might have turned off some of
the Christians who had been buying her books "because they
depict good against evil." As it was, she already had plenty of
Christian money in her bank account. Now it was time (1) to
get the privileged gay elite rallying around, perpetuating Harry
Potter's fame, and (2) to spray on a little Eau de Controversy,
so that she would remain a topic of conversation and fans would
remember to be looking forward to other books from her.

A columnist for one of our Colorado newspapers was quick to
publish an editorial, amounting essentially to the predictable
insistence that anyone having any objection to homosexuality
was a knuckle-dragging, retarded goon. This was concurrent
with her paper doing an opinion poll. Poll respondents were
asked whether or not they agreed that Ms. Rowling's remark
was a potential cause of trouble for gays as well as being a too-
early initiation to sexual subjects for child fans of the fantasy
series. Note that the concern for children was tightly bound up
with the always-hyped boogeyman of "homophobia;" the poll
made no allowance for any possibility that the well-being of
children and the preferences of homosexuals could ever be
mutually exclusive.

I wrote a letter to the columnist, knowing that she would not
answer it; but I can make further use of it here.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Dear Ms. Bornstein,

Having read your column of 27 October, I ask you to consider
the following.

If I, as a heterosexual man, meet a heterosexual woman, any
of several things could happen: (1) we are both indifferent to
each other sexually, (2) we are both attracted to each other,
(3) I am attracted to her but she is indifferent, or (4) she is
attracted to me but I am indifferent.

If two homosexual men meet, all of the above alternatives are
possible, but an _additional_ possibility exists which cannot
happen among heterosexual persons: the two men become
rivals for the attentions of a _third_ homosexual man. Any
two gays might, in the course of an acquaintance, be each
other's lovers AND each other's rivals for someone else. This
means that there are more different, conflicting ways one gay
person can feel toward another than there are or can be among
straight people.

Your column showed that you want to believe that anyone who
has any objection to homosexuality _must_ be irrational and
hysterical. But the meaningful difference I have demonstrated
between heterosexual relations and homosexual relations is not
hysteria, it is a matter of seeing what obviously and inevitably
follows from same-sex attraction. A person could see a problem
in that greater potential for instability, without thereby being
irrational--or "biased."

Speaking of bias, it's interesting the way your newspaper has
worded its reader poll about J.K. Rowling calling Dumbledore
gay. The way they are worded, the two choices amount to
(1) "Homosexuality is normal, so let's tell the world," and
(2) "Homosexuality is normal, but we should let children
wait a little longer to be let in on it." No option is even given
for anyone to say that homosexuality is not normal in the
first place. You folks are clearly familiar with the principle
that whoever gets to define the terms can claim to have
won the debate.

But reality will keep leaking through your kind of subtle
censorship. That includes the reality that same-sex attraction
is NOT fixed and unchangeable. I need look no farther than
a female neighbor I had, who was a committed lesbian--but
then changed over, fell in love with a man, and married him.

Meanwhile, I am left to wonder if you are also going to be
arguing that brother-sister incest is normal, when that
"alternative" starts making more noise for itself, which it
will if current trends continue.

Sincerely,
Joseph Ravitts
Aurora, CO

How a whole month proved crazy

2007-12-03T15:00:00.000-08:00

HERE WE GO GATHERING
NUTCASES IN MAY, 2007

I lately heard audio of the fanatical atheist Christopher Hitchens
claiming that the late Jerry Falwell was a crook, "sniggering over
what he got away with." He was saying this because he _wanted_ it
to be true, in total disregard of the fact that people as far removed
from Falwell's positions as Jesse Jackson have borne witness that
Dr. Falwell's personal character was actually upright and exemplary.
A rank-and-file supporter of Hitchens called the Michael Medved
program with a dazzling bit of originality: comparing Dr. Falwell to
Benito Mussolini instead of the usual Hitler. This radio caller's
profound argument was that Dr. Falwell expressing his views in
_words_ was exactly the same as Mussolini ordering executions
and helping to enslave Europe and North Africa. Why, of course
it's the same; we've all heard how many people get shot to death
by 45-caliber words and rocket-propelled editorials!

Hitchens flung his mud more broadly, calling all evangelists
"pickpockets" because they accept _voluntary_ donations. But
naturally, the hard left has no objection to a central government
TAKING our money by FORCE.

The month of May 2007 has been a fertile spring not only for
Christian-bashing, but also for bashing the Western civilization
that grew from Christianity. On a public-radio program--ironically
originating from American University--a leftwing historian was
interviewed about his book, which claims that the United States
trying to enforce its vital interests AT ALL is the same thing as
the Roman Empire conquering, possessing and enslaving other
nations. In the same vein, I listened to a "special broadcast" of
"The Prairie Home Companion," in which Randy Newman, another
devout mocker of all faith, sang a politically-correct ballad of highly
selective moral indignation titled "Great Nations Of Europe Coming
Through," finding and magnifying every possible fault of European
colonization of the Western Hemisphere. He gave not the slightest
acknowledgement of all the slavery, human sacrifice, and even
cannibalism that were practiced against Native Americans BY
OTHER NATIVE AMERICANS before Columbus ever sailed,
nor the fact that Hernan Cortez was SUPPORTED BY INDIANS
because the regime he brought COULD NOT be any worse than
what the Aztecs were inflicting on Mexico.

Speaking of Mexico and issues relating thereto:

Geraldo Rivera offered a splendid example of cognitive deficit,
and also of the fact that the FoxNews Channel is NOT guilty of
hiring only conservative talent, or indeed even only truthful talent.
In keeping with his pet cause of removing absolutely all restriction
or control over immigration to the United States, Rivera set up a
tearjerker interview with a Haitian man who was (cue violins to
play) going to be deported from this country. The Haitian openly
_admitted_ to Rivera that he had spent eleven years in prison for
narcotics dealing; but Rivera made himself not hear this, and with
a straight face described the jailbird as "doing nothing but good"
for all his years in America!

Also in this month of May, not for the first or second time, George
Bush has embarrassed the conservatives who voted for him--
by being as willfully blind as Geraldo Rivera to the truth about
the illegal-invasion crisis. Mr. Bush, for one thing, showed support
for allowing untrained Mexican drivers, in Mexican semitrailer
trucks that have _not_ passed meaningful safety inspections, to
have unrestricted access to U.S. highways. And if there's anyone
remaining in the Western Hemisphere who thought that John
McCain was a conservative, his lockstep dance with Teddy
Kennedy on amnesty legislation surely will have dispelled
this delusion.

Meanwhile, Democrat ambulance-chaser John Edwards gave a
speech about compassion for the poor...and was paid more than
fifty thousand dollars for giving that one speech!

There has been so much politically-correct lunacy this May,
that I just can't remember all the examples as I sit here typing.
But perhaps the most irritating single piece of nonsense was in
the border-violation connection again. It appeared in a newspaper
photo of a march protesting against enforcement of America's
national sovereignty. A big banner was being displayed which
read: "NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL."

Okay, let's examine that. As on so many other occasions, the
emotional flailing conceals a line of reasoning that's full of holes.

Given the immigration context, in which American patriots are
objecting to foreigners wanting to consume our nation's benefits
without giving any loyalty to our society, that banner is telling us
that our objecting TO AN ILLEGAL ACTION is one and the
same thing as declaring that the person doing the illegal action
is in some abstract way _entirely_ illegal as a person by nature.
(A political version of Total Depravity doctrine?) Any opposition
to what the poor little border-jumpers do (including if the border-
jumpers are members of the homicidal Mara Salvatrucha gang)
is the same as invalidating their personhood, which is bigotry.
Once again, therefore, the liberal way of thinking decides that
the only crime is to oppose crime.

But if calling criminals criminals is a crime, _every_ illegal
deed has to get a free pass. If I had been a psychotic murderer
on the scene of that protest march, and if I had begun throwing
firebombs into the middle of the dense (in more than one sense)
crowd, BY THEIR OWN LOGIC, they would have had NO right
to raise any objection to my action--because calling my _action_
illegal would, by their own logic, be calling my very _personhood_
illegal, and we know that no human being is illegal.

I guess there's a certain comfort in the marchers' reasoning. Or
should I say, a certain comfort food? The blank-check approach
to morality certainly is convenient for Mexican border-jumpers
who, enroute into El Norte, kill and eat the cattle of border-state
ranchers, then move on, leaving piles of garbage and feces at
their picnic sites.

But through that sewage smell there wafts a hopeful breath of
sociopolitical fresh air. In Hazelton, Pennsylvania, something
happened that I don't think has _ever_ happened before in the
United States: _both_ Democrats and Republicans nominated
ONE AND THE SAME PERSON as their candidate for mayor!
That man was the incumbent Republican mayor of Hazelton, who
has been courageously resisting the takeover of his town by the
growing influx of illegal aliens who refuse to assimilate to United
States culture. Democrats in Hazelton had gotten just as fed up
as their Republican neighbors, and so they WROTE IN their
mayor as _their_ candidate also!

Take note, all you red-state rednecks who've been told that
you are being racists if you don't like American hospitals going
bankrupt from giving free medical care to swarms of parasitical
border-jumpers: it IS possible to resist. If they keep calling you
white supremacists, let me know, and I'll gladly tell them about
my efforts to assist a _Chinese_ legal-immigrant couple (who
are so uncool as to want to be _loyal_ United States citizens).
We could even revise an old hippie-era slogan to say something
like, "SUPPOSE THEY GAVE A RECONQUISTA AND
NOBODY CAME?"

--- JOSEPH RICHARD RAVITTS

A 30-Second Commercial from "Empowered for Freedom"

2007-12-03T08:10:00.000-08:00

Start with a heartbeat sound effect; then--

Do you take the advice of all the movies to follow your own
feelings, only to end up hurting _other_ people's feelings? Do
you demand that others apologize to you, but refuse ever to
apologize to them? Do you listen to your own heart, only to
find yourself in conflict with others who are busy listening to
_their_ hearts?

You could be a case of Deceiving Heart Syndrome!

Jeremiah 17:9 says: "The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?"

Every criminal follows his own heart; every psychopath
follows his own heart. Following your feelings is only as
good as the amount of truth your feelings will accept; and
our feelings have a deeply-rooted problem with truth.
Proverbs 14:12 warns: "There is a way that seems right
to a man, but its end is the way to death."

The cure for Deceiving Heart Syndrome is a transplant of
truth from the heart of Jesus Christ, Who is God Incarnate.
He says in Revelation 3:20, "Behold, I stand at the door
and knock..." If your feelings do not immediately respond,
reach your hand for the doorknob anyway. Once you let
Jesus in, He'll help the feelings to get their heads on straight.

Something of my own testimony

2007-12-03T08:01:00.000-08:00

This is copied from recent correspondence I had with members of a ministry in southern Wisconsin:

There are three advantages, all closely related, to NOT having been raised as a Christian and only coming to Jesus after some time in "the world." One advantage is that you know it's YOUR conversion, not an echo of your parents. Another is that you appreciate salvation: "He who is forgiven much, loves much." And thirdly, the memory of how it was to be in darkness allows you to understand better the people to whom you witness for Jesus. My parents, alive to this day, are agnostics. Having no Christian upbringing, I was left on my own for years to GUESS whether God was real or not. Christians tend to assume that Romans 1 means that _every_ individual, just by looking at rocks and trees, clearly _knows_ that God exists. But my own experience argues that there has to be more to it. I would say that Romans 1 shows that mankind AS AN OVERALL GROUP has an awareness of God and is resisting this knowledge; but it has to be possible for individuals to have grown up under so much deception that they DON'T recognize God in the rocks and the trees. I know this has to be so, because I myself ABSOLUTELY DID _NOT_ automatically know God existed when I was a boy. This was ABSOLUTELY NOT a matter of my just refusing to admit that I knew He was real; I _wanted_ God and Heaven to exist, because I was afraid of dying, but I knew that my wishing by itself could not _make_ God exist.

Only in college, as a history major, did I start to find evidence that could penetrate the ignorance which the world had imposed on me. Once converted (in 1971), I could then reach out to other young people who were also in that darkness and confusion. To this day, as I have opportunities, I enjoy answering for young people the questions I used to ask myself in bed at night.

The Trap To Capture Superboy, And Us

2007-12-02T15:06:00.000-08:00

Written around the end of May 2007--

"He dies for lack of discipline, and because of his
great folly he is lost." -- Proverbs 5:23

"A prudent man sees danger and hides himself; but
the simple go on, and suffer for it." --Proverbs 22:3

Long ago, before they had the competition of Marvel
Comics to force them to do better, DC Comics tolerated
some awfully mediocre storywriting from their staff.
Nonetheless, one scene from those years of blah plotlines
sticks in my mind as having been clever.

It was in a Superboy comic. The young Lex Luthor, already
up to no good, constructed a cage that was made partly out
of kryptonite, with lead sleeves to prevent the kryptonite
from making itself known too soon by sight or feel. The
kryptonite would only be uncovered, and its harmful effect
unleashed, if someone stepped inside. Since no force at his
command could compel Superboy to enter the cage, Lex relied
on Superboy to fall victim to curiosity. So, having placed
the cage where the super-victim would find it only after
Lex was well away from its vicinity, Lex left a sign on
its open door, saying simply:

"TRAP TO CAPTURE SUPERBOY.
ENTER HERE, PLEASE."

And enter it Superboy did, only to find his powers drained
by a sudden surge of kryptonite radiation. I forget just how
Superboy survived that blunder and lived to become Superman;
but the lesson of the self-announced trap has stuck with me.

A study of history will impress you with the tragic fact that
many of the great calamities were breathtakingly avoidable.
It would have been so easy to build the Titanic with complete
anti-flooding compartmentalization, instead of only the partial
barriers which in the crisis failed to contain the incoming water.
It would have been so easy for the leaders of Europe to look at
Mein Kampf and say to themselves, "By Jove, that Hitler chap
really does intend to conquer us!" It ought to be just as easy
for present-day European leaders to listen to the recordings
obtained of routine sermons in European and Middle Eastern
mosques, and say to themselves, "Those imams really DO
intend to impose Islam and Sharia law on all of us by violence
and fear!" But people keep walking into the kryptonite cage.

I've said in my recent columns that I anticipate evil taking
a different line once Islamic terrorism has exhausted itself (or
has been annihilated in the Gog-Magog event from the Book
of Ezekiel). And the preparation being made for that new line
to succeed is going on right in front of us. The kryptonite cage
we are being invited to come and be caught in is the cage of
PASSIVE DEPENDENCY ON CENTRAL AUTHORITY.
Since I began by remembering comic books from my youth,
let's look at another phenomenon of youth. For everyone who
has a driver's license: wasn't it a great liberation, didn't it make
a huge difference, when you became able to drive on your own,
no longer depending on your bicycle or your parents to drive
you to places? In the first year of owning your own car, would
you have wanted to go back to having Mommy chauffeur you?
Even for Americans who know nothing about Patrick Henry
or John Paul Jones or Francis Scott Key, this kind of personal
recollection of the value of liberty should count for something
--should make people wary and hesitant about going in the
opposite direction, toward helpless clienthood. And can it be
that Americans have completely forgotten what was the evil of
all evils that our Founding Fathers fought against?
It was the evil of a government which could take anything
away from us, and impose any burden upon us, without ever
having to answer to us.

Now, think: what would you say is going on when all of the
following trends are occurring at the same time?

-- The federal government steadily increasing its meddling
with local school boards nationwide, encouraging uniformity of
subject matter in all public schools.

-- Christians being threatened with gagging and censorship
through "hate speech" laws, though hate-speech prohibition
is NEVER applied to stop Christian-bashers in the media.

-- Embryonic stem-cell research, whose acceptance MUST
reinforce the attitude of individual human lives being expendable,
still being touted even when it has already been proven that
benefits can be gained from other stem-cell research methods
which don't kill innocent babies to get the cells.

-- Leftwing politicians keeping up the pressure to confiscate
all privately-owned firearms, even though those politicians all
KNOW that violent crime is consistently reduced when honest
citizens are allowed to carry guns for self-defense.

-- Financial institutions trying to move us toward a "cashless
economy," one in which no purchase can be made that is not put
into a database, until the very act of buying something is like
being forced to testify against yourself in court.

-- The establishment news media trying to make our brave
and honorable military servicemembers look bad when they
uphold America's interests, but helping the United Nations to
cover up its appallingly bad handling of "peacekeeping" tasks,
trying to help legitimize the U.N. as a world government with a
right even to tax all ocean shipping.

-- Voices periodically being raised to advocate more central
control over health care, as when the Clintons formerly supported
the idea of commanding all medical schools that they must follow
a quota system regarding how many students were allowed to
study each specialty.

-- The Democratic Party wanting to raise our taxes again,
while at the same time trying (in the name of "lobbying reform")
to close off the channels by which citizens can acquire information
about new legislation that affects our legal rights.

-- A vast portion of the American population blindly accepting
every new erosion of our self-determination as free citizens, in
the belief that government handouts justify everything.

All of these trends point toward making us more vulnerable
to coercive control by a rule-from-the-top-down authority,
with federal authority preferred over local authority, and global
monopoly government preferred over our federal government.
The centralizers always promise us great benefits in return for
our submission to ever-greater intrusions upon our personal
independence; but when they have all the power in their hands,
just how are we going to compel them to keep their promises?
Once inside the kryptonite cage, we won't have a lot of assets
left with which to bargain with Lex Luthor.

How much we can do against this trend essentially depends
on how close we are to THE End Times. Although, as I have
just been saying, the wrongness of excessive central control
is maddeningly self-evident, it is entirely a different question
to foresee when we will run up against that final excessive
central power which has to be allowed to prevail for a time in
God's plan. Consider this: in Revelation 13:7 we are told that
the Antichrist will be allowed to "make war on the saints and
conquer them." Christians alive at that time (or "Tribulation
Saints," depending on your eschatology) surely would have to
know that the Antichrist can't be defeated by human efforts;
yet this verse appears to predict that at one stage they will be
resisting him all the same, and will be overcome by force. It
seems to me that, knowing global dictatorship to be wrong in
principle, these end-time believers will already be resisting
it before the Antichrist assumes command of it, and God will
approve of them in principle even though His apocalyptic
plans require Him to let them be vanquished--the fact of
the saints being vanquished probably serving as one sign
that the Antichrist is now on the scene.

The fallen heroes of this last resistance will have their
satisfaction, their payback, when Jesus comes back to Earth,
NOT any longer as passive Lamb but as avenging Lion, and
the villains find out that they have no kryptonite that works
against Him. This promised moment is foreshadowed in John
Milton's "Paradise Lost," when the Puritan poet imagines
the pre-incarnate Jesus taking over the crushing of Satan's
original rebellion in Heaven. Jesus thanks and commends the
righteous angels for faithfully fighting the corrupted angels
--but, in Milton's imagining of the scene, says that it is
appropriate for Him to finish the action Himself:

"That they may have their wish, to try with Me
In battle which the stronger proves, they all,
Or I alone against them, since by strength
They measure all, of other excellence
Not emulous, nor care who them excels;
Nor other strife with them do I vouchsafe."

Inspiring words, for me at least. But it still remains for us
to discern what WE are to do meanwhile. To this tricky but
urgent question I say that, since government is increasingly
trying to be worshipped as God, we are increasingly obligated
in conscience to tell government, "No, actually, no, you're not."

There will be much diversity in the ways God calls different
Christians to resist the centralizing trend. A favorite notion of
mine--first brought to my attention long ago by an elderly
Christian gentleman, whose name I seem to recall as Bennett
Griggs--is a different kind of "cashless economy" from the
ruthlessly-monitored model the international banks wish to
foist upon us. I refer to BARTER NETWORKS: that's right,
my tutoring your children in math for your fixing my car. This
does have the merit of being a nonviolent form of resistance.

You who read these words may have ideas of your own.
God knows, we don't need one monolithic central authority
micromanaging all efforts to resist the monolithic central
authority. But resist we must. We may in our lifetimes be
forcibly shoved into the cage, but God would not have us
WALK in of our own foolish accord.

Yours for Jesus and America,

Joseph R. Ravitts

Without occultism involved, I can let the departed co-founder of "Empowered For Freedom" be heard

2007-12-02T14:56:00.000-08:00

17 April 2007:

My first wife Mary, now residing in the presence
of Jesus Christ, was a veteran nurse. She was also
a neat-freak who nagged me about my pack-rat habits.
But those very same pack-rat habits caused me to
save a newspaper clipping from about 1998, which
I found again just this morning. The clipping is a
letter Mary wrote to one of the newspapers of Denver,
Colorado, back when I was stationed in that area.

Early in our relationship, Mary used to work part-
time for an addict-recovery program in Rockford,
Illinois. This job, and the other job she had back
then as a jail nurse, were just part of the experience
she had in dealing with narcotics-addicted persons.
Later, as needle-exchange programs became a fad,
Mary was aware that many addicts would simply share
the new, initially-clean needles immediately upon
use, thus defeating the purpose of the exchange.
The letter she wrote about this issue is reproduced
below. First, though, I should mention something
for the benefit of any reader who may think that
this letter shows Mary to have been somehow hard-
hearted. In the months when she cared for prisoners
at the Winnebago County Jail, she demonstrated such
compassion and integrity in treating those under
her care, that hardened criminals loved her as if
she were their mother. Keep this in mind as you
read. (And of course, where she says "drugs," she
means narcotics, not legitimate medicines.) ///

"DISPENSING NEEDLES AKIN TO ASSISTED SUICIDE"

How "Kevorkian" of Mayor Wellington Webb to want
to use citizens' funds to promote safe drug abuse!
Those who use drugs to practice a slow form of
suicide, are now to be aided by your tax dollars.

Money saved on syringes can now be used for a
better knife or gun to rape or rob you or your
neighbor before the next "fix"...while the supplier
can continue to live in an expensive home, and
support politically-correct causes, borne by the
manufacture and sale of drugs.

Use of drugs is a crime. But while D.A.R.E.
programs teach kids to say no to drugs, their
local government counters with infector-control
measures that promote addiction. To use my taxes
for any needle exchange violates my right to
religious freedom, by forcing me to be an
accessory to the crime of someone else's sin
of drug abuse and moral degradation.

If you want to stop addiction, use tax money to
develop broader-based methadone treatment programs
and counselling. Emphasize rehabilitation, instead
of promoting the slow-death action of addicts.

Mary C. Ravitts, RN, BSN

Pardon my being random; this one goes back to January 2006, based on an idea I had long before that

2007-12-02T14:47:00.000-08:00

"THE FALSE FORGIVENESS OF THE FAITHLESS"

Back in the '60's, Bob Dylan could do no wrong in the
eyes of the popular culture. He was allegedly a giant
of creativity, the conscience of the Western Hempisphere
(that was a typo when I first wrote this, but in view
of what many of Dylan's fans were smoking I decided to
retain it).

All this changed the very instant (in 1979) that he
claimed to have become a believer in Jesus Christ. Now,
suddenly, former Dylanites decided that he was arrogant
and self-righteous. In fact--much the way the Soviet
Union used to call dissident writers not only treasonous
but also untalented--they decided he was not a giant
of creativity after all. "Saturday Night Live" did a
supposedly clever sketch which depicted Dylan as having
stolen his major song ideas from Woody Guthrie--an
accusation they would never have aimed at him as long
as he was politically correct.

Like the seed dropped in shallow soil, Dylan could not
take the persecution. So he "repented" of the "offense"
of taking an interest in Jesus. In an interview with
SPY Magazine, he said that it didn't matter if Jesus
was the Son of God or not. Of course, he was smart
enough to realize that NO ONE would EVER say this
unless he was convinced that Jesus was NOT the Son
of God; thus, his saying that it didn't matter was
an absolute capitulation--a clear declaration to the
leftwing establishment that he was abandoning all that
Jesus-freak foolishness, so wouldn't they please let
him be a giant of creativity again?

It worked. The leftwing establishment, in its secular-
humanist grace, "forgave" Dylan and gave him permission
to be admired again. If a rooster crowed three times
around then, Dylan wasn't listening--probably too busy
counting his thirty pieces of silver.

That reminds me: someone once wrote a little poem
that warrants reflection--

"Strange to think how man
By man himself is priced;
For thirty silver pieces,
Judas sold himself, not Christ."

I wrote this less than two weeks before I retired from the Navy

2007-12-02T14:41:00.000-08:00

The latest idiotic-but-pretending-to-be-clever
bumper sticker I've seen reads: "UH, THE FOUNDING
FATHERS WERE LIBERAL EXTREMISTS; SORRY TO RAIN
ON YOUR PARADE." This is a fine example of "He
who gets to define the terms, wins the argument."
Or perhaps better to say, "He who gets away with
obscuring the definitions of terms can flatter
himself that he has won the argument."

America's Founding Fathers were liberal extremists
only relative to the starting point of monarchy.
An oppressive king being at the right-wing end of
the spectrum, breaking free of his power could be
considered a move to the "left." But in spite of
the myth of all the Founders being Deists (a myth
more than adequately exploded by the research of
David Barton and his Wallbuilders organization),
no informed person can consider them to be liberal
extremists in the sense which that label bears
TODAY. George Washington did not cross the Delaware
to abort babies, nor endure the winter at Valley
Forge in order to build a gay bath-house there.

But odds are the composer of that bumper sticker
doesn't even believe what it says himself; he
just wants to throw conservatives and patriots
into confusion. Doubtless next week he'll be
back to condemning Washington and Jefferson for
having owned slaves. That's much like the liberal
extremists who pretend to care about the Jewish
people's welfare only long enough to pillory Mel
Gibson; the same lefties will soon be back at
their pastime of rooting for Muslim terrorists
to destroy Israel.

Speaking of the Muslim terrorists, I continue to
pray AGAINST their evil plans. I get so tired of
wimpy, smarmy prayers for "peeeeeace"...in which
those who pray are so often assuming that the
whole silly quarrel only started by accident,
and both sides can be reasoned with. No, both
sides CAN'T be reasoned with; I'm sorry to rain
on THAT neo-hippie parade. Only three outcomes
can occur with Islamist fanatics: (1) they get
their way, (2) they repent of their sins and
submit to the REAL God through Jesus Christ, or
(3) they are deprived of their power to do harm
--via death, disarming or detention. I pray for
the side of civilization to WIN the war.

15 July 2006: The Subject Of Joshua (Heavy!!)

2007-12-01T21:54:00.000-08:00

Some Ground That Christians Should
Have Been Defending Long Before Now

God, I pray that there will still be _time_ for such
a message as this to be seen and considered, before
the malice of tyrants in Iran, Syria and elsewhere
brings on such widespread violence as will drown out
all calm discussion. Amen.

Very early in my Christian life, I went sometimes
to a highly liberal mainline-denominational church,
because for awhile I was dating the daughter of its
music minister. At a Bible study there, the teacher
began saying that the Jehovah's Witnesses were not
a genuine Christian denomination. For a moment, I
dared to hope that he was going to defend Biblical
orthodoxy. Silly rabbit. I found out my mistake
when I heard what he gave as the _grounds_ for
disapproving of the J.W.'s. It had nothing to do
with their denial of the Deity of Jesus, nor with
their claim that only they have the real gospel,
and least of all with their refusal to show loyalty
to America. What gave this Congregationalist teacher
a red flag was the belief of J.W.'s that Jehovah
had really ordered the Israelites to kill the
people in Jericho and other Canaanite cities.
This, he said, could not be the God worshipped
by Christians!

Some of you will remember an article I wrote
about people drawing spiritual dividing lines
in the wrong place. This teacher had drawn a
line which placed every believer in full inspiration
of Scripture on the same side as a fraudulent cult.

It was this incident which prompted me to compose
one of my earlier songs. I called it "JOSHUAPHOBIA."
I'm not sure it ever got performed for an audience;
it was definitely strong meat, not fill-my-cup-and-
make-me-whole sweetness. I don't think a complete
copy survives now; but I can remember the melody
and some of the words. I don't have the means of
sending music online, but the lyrics of "JOSHUAPHOBIA"
began thus:

Twentieth-century liberal man, how you condescend
To a proven friend of God Almighty!
Joshua seems to embarrass you much; "Primitive," you say;
You regard his way as quite untidy.

Even as an infant Christian in the early 1970's, I
was able to recognize an irony to which the liberal
teacher probably was oblivious. His church was one
which never missed a chance to insist that this or
that passage in the Old Testament was only symbolic,
not literal fact. If he had simply assumed the account
of killing the Canaanites to be _another_ symbolic
whatsit that never actually happened, there would
be nothing to be angry about, because the mass
executions never actually happened. On the other
hand, if I had brought this up to him, he might
have said, "Well, of course that didn't happen,
since it's all symbolic. What I dislike about
the Jehovah's Witnesses is that they _imagine_
God would order people to kill others."

I can see his reasoning. A God Who saw no need
to bother giving a reliable factual record of
His dealings with creation probably also would
not bother insisting on any societal moral
standards for whose repeated violation a wicked
society might have to be destroyed as a corporate
entity. Still, my song was trying to encompass
the whole issue of God's authority in such a
way as to answer this very attitude. The next
part of the words I remember says:

What do you think that it means to be God? Has He not the right,
As well as the might, to punish evil?
Look in Leviticus, chapter eighteen; you'll see God was just
To feel great disgust with Canaan's people.

Of course, you might be out of luck if you look
for that chapter in a Gideon Bible. Homosexual
actor Ian McKellen is said to be in the habit
of ripping out the pages of Leviticus he doesn't
like when he stays at hotels with Gideon Bibles.
That provides another irony. Christians will
sometimes hold book-burnings, in which the only
books being burned are ones voluntarily handed
over for burning by their owners; this was done
once in Ephesus, as I recall. But Christian-
bashers choose to believe that this is the exact
same thing as Nazi book-burnings, although the
Nazis were burning books taken by force from
their owners. McKellen sounds as if he would
join in such an accusation against Christians;
and yet he is willing to deface a Bible which
does NOT belong to him. The hard left never
tires of practicing double standards...which
is why it is conservative student newspapers,
and ONLY conservative ones, which routinely
get stolen and destroyed on many big university
campuses in America.

Unfortunately, Christians do get tired--tired
of having to defend doctrines which are distasteful
to many hearers. We'd rather just preach our five-
hundredth sermon on unconditional love--that can't
alienate anyone! So, over the decades since I wrote
"JOSHUAPHOBIA," there seem to have been fewer and
fewer pastors bothering to explain why God could
have had reasons to order those pagan cities wiped
out. And the less the effort is made, the less
the effort _can_ be made; that is, it becomes
harder and harder to get people to listen to the
harsher part of the truth. Yet there are modifying
elements in the story told by the Book of Joshua.
For those who do not demand that God practice
infant damnation, there is a crucial piece of
solace with regard to the small Canaanite children
who were killed. As I wrote--

Don't you believe there's a Heaven?
Well, that's where God brought those babies!
So, will you stop treating Yahweh
As if He'd gone mad with rabies?

Moreover, that same Book of Leviticus makes
references to non-Israelites being allowed to
join in serving the true God and in enjoying
His favor. So there was a way out, and some
Canaanites availed themselves of it. Note that
when later portions of the Old Testament speak
of the trouble caused by the remaining Canaanites,
they mean the Canaanites who had _not_ genuinely
accepted the Lordship of the true God.

It's important to realize that God's order for
extermination was not an open-ended policy. He
ordered the destruction of one civilization
which had become extraordinarily evil, and whose
continued presence would make it frightfully
difficult for the Israelites to perform their
function as the training camp and laboratory
of human-divine relations. God _never_ told His
people to expand the extermination beyond the
Promised Land. Thus, what He commanded was not
at all the same thing as when radical Islam
labels the WHOLE non-Muslim world as Dar al-Harb,
"The House Of War," meaning that all non-Muslims
_everywhere_ are fair game to be killed or
enslaved. In this perilous time, when Christian-
bashers love to draw a false dividing line
placing Christians on the same side as Al-Qaeda,
the true distinction must be made.

Of course, that Congregationalist teacher would
be quick to say, "But it's all so simple! We can
make the distinction by proclaiming that our God
of love would never want anyone to be killed for
any reason whatsoever, not even in one place at
one time." This, however, can only be done by
denying that the Old Testament is a reliable
history; and if we make this concession, what
is to prevent the New Testament from being
likewise dismissed?

I suppose we can say we are distinguishable from
the Islamists if we accept having a God Who never
said anything and won't do anything. But when
the Christian faith is NOT distinguishable from
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood...when we have nothing
more to say than "Be nice"...we will have no means
of inspiring discipline, fortitude or self-sacrifice.
Pacifistic Christian love is designed to win over
individuals, and it _is_ winning over millions of
individuals, including Muslims; but when whole
Muslim nations are applying their full power to
an effort to annihilate Israel and points west,
the sterner virtues will have to be remembered,
or there won't BE enough sweet peacemakers left
alive TO have any substantial impact with
Christian love.

So we need an authoritative standard, a God Who
_does_ call some things right and others wrong,
and Who _does_ let us know what He wants. If
you don't think that the Bible truthfully conveys
this, you are free to make up your own religion,
as Charles Taze Russell did in founding the J.W.'s
and as Dan Brown is doing with "The DaVinci Code."
But those of us who believe in the Jesus for Whose
honor the Apostles accepted martyrdom (and their
martyrdom was not about murdering the innocent
as terrorist "martyrs" do) need to be teaching
God's Word. God's _WHOLE_ Word, not only the
happy and convenient parts.

You know what? I don't believe that Joshua found
it fun to kill people. He was given a thing to
do which has not been demanded of us, and I am
thankful it has not been. But at a certain time
and place--if the Bible is not a fairytale--it
_was_ nonetheless commanded. If God is the giver
of life, He has the right to say when each human
life should end. If we say that He is only allowed
to give commands which are not upsetting to think
about, we are actually saying that He is not
allowed to give commands. This, in turn, will
mean that no man is allowed to say that his
actions were ordered by God, which leaves Joshua
to be despised by well-dressed scholars who never
had a life-and-death issue to cope with.

"JOSHUAPHOBIA" ended with these words, in which
"him" refers to Joshua:

I won't apologize for him,
Since none of your scorn is due him.
If you reach Heaven at all, friend,
YOU will apologize TO him!

Because the nature and implications of God's
authority have _not_ been adequately taught, a
false dividing line has been drawn which may be
impossible to erase; it may still be there,
confusing people, until Jesus Himself returns
to destroy the Antichrist regime. This line,
existing in the minds of secular humanists
everywhere, places _everyone_ who says there
is a dependable source of divine revelation in
the same zone as Osama bin-Ladin. If it is not
already too late, we have to try to reposition
that line. The true choice is not between the
always-wrong idea of divine authority and the
wonderful freedom of having no rules or standards;
it's between having the RIGHT standards and
having FALSE ones.

Muslim terrorists and Muslim dictators are going
to do enormous harm in this world; it has already
begun. But they will not be the last word in evil.
Right now, Muslim terrorists are drawing a line
which groups Christians, Jews and atheists all
together on the infidel side; but the cold-blooded
reptiles of materialistic totalitarianism (borrowing
New Age mysticism for a little religious camouflage
as it suits them) will have their day to draw their
own line. That line will put Christians, Jews,
civilized Muslims, and anyone else who believes
in a transcendent moral authority, together in
a classification as backward primitives who are
blocking the glorious progress of evolution.
Psychotic criminals who delude themselves about
hearing from God will be viewed as typical
specimens of the disease called faith.

What are we to do? Certainly, we are NOT to give
up witnessing to people about God's love. But if
we make this love into empty calories, with no
principles or expectations, we are abdicating
our obligation to give the _whole_ counsel of
God. That's what has been increasingly occurring
for years now, and it has resulted in Christendom
being put on the defensive--"defensive scarce,"
to use John Milton's phrase. Joshua was able to
go on the attack; but for Christians today, the
most we can do in many theaters of action is to
slow down the loss of territory.

This trend will not be cured by saying that our
God never had any right to possess that territory
in the first place. If we let ourselves agree
with the secular world that God's Word is _not_
authoritative and reliable, and that the moral
truths contained there are only opinions, we are
doing the opposite from John Paul Jones: we ARE
surrendering without ever having begun to fight.

There's always another complication. I'm afraid
that some supposed Christians will say, "That's
right, we need to stand firm on the Bible's clear
commands that the United States must unilaterally
disarm, that private ownership of property must
be abolished, that the status of marriage must be
given to homosexual and incestuous couples or
threesomes, that the federal government must be
able to overrule parents in all questions of
child-raising, and that abortion and euthanasia
are to be made into sacraments." But I've
touched on that angle in past writings, and
may do so again another time. I pray there
still IS time.

Yours for Jesus and America,
Joseph Richard Ravitts

Sharing A Little Friendly Theology

2007-12-01T21:22:00.000-08:00

During my Navy career, I became friends with a Chinese-born Christian lady also serving in the U.S. Navy. When she told me about her upbringing under Communist repression, I realized something you rarely hear from the pulpits. While it's true that long-term persecution strengthens the backbone of the church, it also deprives Christians of chances to learn "solid-meat" doctrine. My friend's faith in Jesus was very genuine, but by no fault of hers she was woefully shallow in Scriptural knowledge. In December of 2004, she told me how she had been approached by supposed Christians who said odd things, so I promised to write for her some explanations of spiritual issues that had come up. Here is what I wrote:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Before discussing what men say, let's look at
what God says--or didn't say.

In ancient times, most cultures had a pretty
poor idea of life after death. Mythologies
like the Egyptian variety based their version
of Paradise not on the justice and mercy of
a good, loving and just God, but on the same
system of social rank and privilege that existed
on Earth. If you were a prince or princess, you
could expect endless parties after death; if
you were a peasant, your soul got tossed away
in some corner.

This, of course, was one of the many things which
the real God set out to correct in His long process
of teaching the human race. The Egyptians, among
whom the tribes of Israel had lived, were obsessed
with life after death but ignorant of the true
giver of life; so God took exactly the opposite
approach, making His people concentrate their
attention on Him while scarcely even thinking
about what came after death.

In the Old Testament as originally written in
Hebrew, the next world is described simply by a
Hebrew word whose meaning translates as "the pit."
There is almost no description of anything after
death in the Old Testament --only just enough to
show that the soul does not simply cease to exist,
plus very small hints that the righteous soul is
better off in eternity than the wicked one. It
would not be much use to say "Good people go to
Heaven"--if you were talking to persons who had
no idea at all WHAT IS good. So God spent centuries
teaching what is good.

The later Old Testament books, particularly Daniel,
do begin to suggest God's judgment after death. And
in what is called the "Intertestamental period"
(meaning the time between the writing of the Book
of Malachi which completes the Old Testament, and
the coming of Jesus), Jewish people grew more and
more convinced that there was a definite Heaven to
go to and a Hell to avoid. Jesus, in His parable
of "Lazarus and the Rich Man," confirmed this
separation of good from evil in the next life.

From some of what Jesus said, and from the bits
of information in the Old Testament, it seems
that before Jesus died and rose again, although
God's children did have a better situation after
dying than other souls had, they were not yet
in what we usually think of when we say "Heaven."
It seems that there were upper and lower sections
of "the pit," with saved souls at peace in the
upper section, but possibly not yet directly
seeing God.

Then, when Jesus entered "the pit" and came out
again, it is commonly believed that all souls
that were saved from sin were allowed to come
out with Him and enter "actual" Heaven. The
Apostle Paul, writing years after Jesus rose
from the dead, said that "to be absent from
the body is to be present with the Lord." This
leaves the evil souls in the "lower pit," which
is more or less the kind of place we mean when
we say "Hell." But as things get better for
God's people, it seems that things get worse
for the wicked. Near the end of the Book of
Revelation, it says that all whose names are
not written in the Book of Life will be thrown
into a sort of super-hell described as "the
lake of fire." The only hint of an optimistic
note in this part is that it does NOT say,
"Everyone at this judgment is automatically
left out of the Book of Life, and is thrown
into the lake of fire," although that is what
the Calvinists want to believe it means. Instead,
it says that IF any person's name is not in
Jesus' heavenly book, that person is doomed.
As for however many souls are saved, it seems
that before Jesus returns to Earth all these
people will enjoy a very happy existence--but
without physical bodies such as we have now.
Then, once Jesus does return, all of His
followers--both those who have died, and
those who are still in earthly life when He
comes back--will receive new bodies. These
bodies will be physically real--but they will
not prevent us from living our spiritual life
in Heaven, because our new bodies will be
indestructible, with more strength and power
than we can imagine, and filled with spiritual
life. To put it in traditional Chinese terms,
you might say that our new bodies will have a
supply of chi that never runs out. Also, a
whole new planet Earth will eventually be created,
where there will never be pollution or any other
bad thing; for all purposes, this new Earth will
be a "department" of Heaven.

So there are four situations after death which we
can find in the Bible: good and better, bad and worse.
This, of course, really means only two destinations:
lost or saved. If anyone insists that they "know"
the truth of eternity in greater detail than this,
be careful not to accept what they say without
investigation. Some people's "extra" ideas are
only silly, while others are harmful mistakes or
even outright lies.

Among ideas that are in any way Christian, the
most famous "extra" idea is Purgatory, which
Catholics believe in. Their idea is that the
same gradual correction process about which I
spoke to you is often still unfinished when a
Christian dies, so that more still has to be
done even after death. In Catholic belief, any
soul who is in Purgatory will finally
arrive in Heaven, but will have to go through
some sort of "disciplinary action" first. This
idea is NOT Biblical. The closest thing to a
Bible passage actually supporting it is where
the Apostle Paul writes about our work from
our earthly life being "tested by fire," with
worthless things we did being burned away; but
it does not clearly state that WE will be burned
in the process. I am personally angry at the
Catholic church for insisting on believing in
Purgatory --because it caused Mary, with her
Catholic background, to be needlessly afraid
that she would have to undergo still more
suffering after her suffering from cancer
ended with her physical death.

Since you said that you heard someone speak
about "levels," I have to wonder if you heard
a Mormon speaking. Mormons, to put a complicated
religion in very simple terms, believe in at
least two separate Heavens--the best one for
Mormons, and the still-heavenly-but-not-quite-
as-wonderful one for decent non-Mormons. There's
a lot more to it than that; but it's enough for
you to know that Mormonism is NOT Christianity,
no matter what Mormons themselves tell you.
They just have too many beliefs that go against
clear statements of the Bible. Just to pick one
false belief, the Mormons believe that God the
Father has a physical body like a man; but God
the Father told Jeremiah that He is a spirit
Who "fills Heaven and Earth."

Avoid the Mormons, who are also called "Latter-Day
Saints." The reason they call themselves this is
that their founder, Joseph Smith (I hate his having
the same first name as I have), claimed that all
other churches existing in his time were completely
false; claimed that the "real" church had been lost
for many centuries; and claimed that his new church
and only his new church would bring the "real"
faith back in latter times. So, although Mormons
demand that we accept them, they started out by
rejecting us. And if they were right about "real"
Christianity being completely lost for so many
centuries, that would mean that God didn't care
enough about us to make sure that the truth was
not lost!

Don't let yourself worry much about the little
details of what people think Heaven will be like.
What really counts is knowing what kind of personality
GOD has, and seeing that this personality is just
what you want to have keeping you company forever
and ever.

Yours in Jesus,
Joseph

In A Lighter Vein, Something From June 2007

2007-12-01T21:11:00.000-08:00

IF I CAN'T BEAT THE REVISIONISTS
OF SCRIPTURE, WHY NOT JOIN THEM?

Okay, here is an atheistic humanist's version of The Lord's Prayer:

Nobody's Father, who aren't in Heaven,
Who cares what your name is?
It's our collective that comes,
And evolution's will is done.
We'll take the bread from the bakers and redistribute it.
We'll forgive ourselves for trespassing,
Delivering ourselves from having to call anything evil
--Except, of course, a belief in the Creator;
And ours is the Party, forever.

Now, here's the radical-Muslim terrorist's version:

Our Allah, who parks suicide bombers in harems,
Hatred be thine aim.
Thy killing come, thy mullahs' will be done,
In London, Washington and Bangkok as it is in Tehran.
Give us this day some Jews and Christians, dead.
Forgive no infidel for anything,
But let us kill children, and others who are defenseless.
Lead us not into the temptation to quit being evil,
For thine is the contract to be powerfully gory
With anyone we don't like, Amen.

This one's for the sort of wimpy churchgoers who don't have the
spine even to argue verbally against the previous two groups:

Somebody's Parent-figure, who might be in Heaven,
We're still discussing whether we can hallow your name,
Since any talk of your kingdom coming
Might offend someone.
Give us this day our daily pablum;
Don't give us discipleship classes,
Because that might turn someone against us.
Lead us into equivocation,
So we can appease evil;
Then we'll have enough self-esteem to say that you have glory,
Some of the time.

If I made up what gay-marriage activists might do with the Lord's
Prayer, any parody I had the stomach to invent would probably still
be LESS disgusting than what they might actually say. So, to conclude,
here's a version that might be used by the new-model New Age space
cadets who will be trying to fill the spiritual power vacuum once the
Muslim terrorists are finally defeated:

Our Earth-Mother, who distorts the concept of Heaven,
Thou canst be called by any name.
Thy karma come,
And our wits be dumbed down,
Emerging in a syncretist Heaven.
Give us more ways to delay repenting;
And redefine our trespasses,
So we don't feel indebted to grace.
Lead us into reincarnation,
And let us change the Word to please people.
For thine is revision, calling Scripture just a story,
Till there's never an Amen.

Selecting one more at random while I'm archiving

2007-12-01T11:16:00.000-08:00

FROM 30 APRIL 2006--

ANYBODY SEE WHERE DIOGENES' LANTERN WENT?

The movie "UNITED 93" is out now, celebrating the
courage of hijacked airline passengers who went down
fighting against their murderers, and succeeded so far as
to prevent their plane from hitting Washington. I want
very much to believe the most heroic interpretation of
this event--the more so since lying down passively and
letting terrorists have their way has a marvellous record
of accomplishing no good at all.

Sadly, at this very time there are more and more clues
piling up to the effect that events on 11 September 2001
may have been very different than loyal Americans have
believed. It's being said that the passengers on Flight 93
should not have been able to reach anyone on the ground
by telephone at the time they were thought to have done
so; that plane wreckage found at the Pentagon did not
match the airplane type that was supposed to have hit
there; that video footage of the second plane striking
the World Trade Center suggests it was a military
transport jet posing as an airliner; and that the steel
in those towers could not have melted from jet-fuel
flames unless additionally damaged by explosives.

The hard left is getting louder and more explicit in
its accusations that George Bush did not merely fail to
prevent the 9-11 attacks, but rather that HE ORDERED
THEM HIMSELF, intentionally murdering American
citizens in order to give himself an excuse to wage wars
of aggression and conquest for his own gain. And it's
hard to deny this possibility, since it would not be the
first time a Republican administration staged a fake
enemy attack to stir Americans to war. I have in mind
the Tonkin Gulf incident, in which North Vietnamese
forces were supposed to have attacked the U.S. Navy,
leading to our active combatant involvement in the
Vietnam War. It was later found that no such attack
had even happened; it was a fabrication, carried out
under the presidency of the Republican Lyndon J--

Hey, wait a minute!
Dang, Johnson was a Democrat, wasn't he?

Well, I won't go too far pointing out things like the
way the Democratic Clinton administration allowed a
heavily slanted reporting of conflict in Yugoslavia to
make it look as if all the fault there was on the part of
the Serbs, causing us to side with Albanian Muslims
who did and still do have terrorist connections. (There
are politically-correct films being made, nonsensically,
about the threat of _Serbian_ terrorists.) None of that
erases the doubts about 9-11. I confess I _don't_ know
what the truth is about the current allegations. If all
the evidence exists which is being said to exist, this
would make it impossible to believe that the standard
story is all true. On the other hand, there could still be
many possible explanations; it would not be instantly
proven that Mr. Bush willfully murdered his own people
just to gain geopolitical advantages which his evil oil-
company friends are supposed to have gained for him
already anyway.

So let's consider some things which I _do_ know to
be true, and whose truth cannot be changed by ANY
of the plausible explanations of 9-11.

The Communists who achieved the armed conquest
of South Vietnam never had any moral qualms about
torturing and murdering defenseless noncombatants
in large numbers, for fun. They were doing it _long_
before the Tonkin Gulf incident was fabricated. As for
Muslim terrorists, they were not only doing the same
thing before any American government falsified any
incidents--they were doing it before any American
government even existed. With regard to both sets of
predatory evildoers, even if we believe the VERY worst
explanation of American actions that any evidence can
support, the predators remain predators, who would
be preying on the innocent even if they had not been
made the object of someone's cynical manipulation.

Much of the impetus for the present accusations
against Mr. Bush comes from a generalized, visceral
feeling in people's minds, that America's prosperity
_must_ somehow have been stolen rather than earned;
that ANY use of American armed force to support our
interests _must_ be an act of wicked imperialism. But
to give credit where credit is due, some of our _enemies_
have had the honesty to judge us more kindly than that.

Remember the British actor Michael Caine? Back
during the Vietnam War, he appeared on an American
TV show and said that we should regard the Viet Cong
as being like our Colonial patriots in the Revolutionary
War. There is no uncertainty about this; I myself was
watching and listening as he said it. Thus, we can be
fairly confident that he would not commit any fraud
or deception in _favor_ of American action against
Communists. Well, many years later, Michael Caine
found himself in Vietnam to film a remake of "THE
QUIET AMERICAN." Coming back from this trip,
he told reporters that Communist Vietnamese officials
had told him something interesting. The Communists
had admitted to him that THEY KNEW that America
had NOT been trying to conquer and possess Vietnam
as a colony--only supporting the opposite side in the
war. In other words, the Communists themselves had
admitted to Caine that all the hippie-era talk about
the "Amerikan empire"--talk which Hanoi had gladly
exploited to its advantage--had been false.

Goodness, could it be that FOES of America and
of its armed forces might have been dishonest??

I still don't know all the facts about 11 September
2001. I don't want painful truth to be swept under any
rug, even if its exposure will cause much I have believed
in to be proven false. But I do know that none of it can
disprove certain basic facts, like the fact that hard-
line Islamists ARE aggressive warmongers who do NOT
need to be "provoked" to be aggressive. Even if it were
proven that Mr. Bush personally planned the whole
9-11 assault, this would not change the fact that Islam
has been imposing its will by violence ever since the
lifetime of Muhammad himself.

Note that last phrase. The Spanish Inquisition, and
other events which are harped on to indict Christianity,
could not occur until enough time had passed for the
original intent of Christianity to be altered. But Islam
was producing violence from the very _start_ of its
existence--because, although of course not every
Muslim is a violent person, the doctrinal foundation
of Islam contains a built-in warrant for advancing
that religion by armed compulsion.

Whatever turns out to be true about the 9-11
attacks--and for the record, I do _not_ believe that
Mr. Bush purposely killed American citizens--it won't
change the fact that Islamic fascism is waging a war
against freedom and civilization. I dread the prospect
of Americans deciding: "Since our leaders are suspect,
that makes Al-Qaeda's leaders innocent, so we must
appease them and let them have their way worldwide."

The movie "UNITED 93" may not be as true as I
like to think it is; but I know that the other movie,
"V FOR VENDETTA" is absolutely _absurd_ in its
trumped-up concern about a _Christian_ tyranny
being the great threat to liberty. God help us if the
public follows ridiculous p.c. red herrings, while
giving up on the effort to halt the REAL menace.
I never swore any oath to keep Republican leaders
immune from investigation; but I sure did swear an
oath to defend the existence of the United States. It
remains true that Islamofascism is an actual threat
to us, not a fictional one. Not even all the EEE-vil
oil corporations combined have the power to falsify
the total historical record of Muslim imperialism
and repressiveness. That repressiveness is genuine,
and will still have to be dealt with no matter what
we find out about our domestic politics.

YOURS FOR JESUS AND AMERICA,
JOSEPH RICHARD RAVITTS

===================================

After I originally wrote and distributed the above
column, a friend informed me that "Popular Mechanics"
had published an extensive rebuttal to all claims
that the 9-11 attacks were in any way faked.

These date farther back, to January 2002

2007-12-01T10:50:00.001-08:00

I am a great admirer of Alan Keyes; Mary and I once
heard him speak in person about his experiences at
the United Nations. During that brief, blessed period
when Dr. Keyes had his own TV talk show, I twice had
occasion to write to him...
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Dear Alan:

My wife and I met you once in California, and we
voted for you in the last Republican primary. Your
new program is the first thing we have ever made
a special point to watch on MSNBC. (Let me also
applaud you for your pro-life insights given on
James Dobson's radio program "Focus On The Family.")
The following concerns your Wednesday night show
on capital punishment.

I am not a very adamant advocate of capital
punishment, but my reservations are based on the
danger of executing innocent persons, and on the
hope that a criminal might repent of his crimes
and be saved from Hell if given time...NOT on
any silly idea that murderers don't _deserve_ to
be punished in proportion to their offense. And
there is great merit in your argument about
preserving the force of the law.

I'm afraid that women did not score high for good
sense on the broadcast in question. To address the
most obvious foolishness first, Jane Henderson was
simply grossly wrong to say that executing murderers
"brings us down to their level." If she can't see the
obvious difference between the innocent victim and
the guilty murderer, how on Earth can she sort out
_any_ moral distinctions?

Ms. Henderson's reliance on cliche was also to be
seen in her claim that executing terrorists "only
makes martyrs of them." The self-pitying, self-
adoring mentality of the terrorist will fabricate
martyrdom out of any defeat or setback. The only
way to be _sure_ of not creating any fake martyrdom
for terrorists is to yield to all their demands,
to give away the store and surrender the whole
world to them.

Top honors for cliche-dependency go to the phone
caller "Mariam," with her all-too-typical reliance
on the blindly over-broadened application of "Thou
shalt not kill." You properly told her that the verb
in the commandment (ratsah) means "murder," NOT all
taking of life without any distinction. If you had
had more time, it would have been appropriate to
explain to Mariam that this word is rare in the
Old Testament, used only to describe criminal
homicide and private blood-revenge.

My gentlest criticism, but still a serious criticism,
goes to student Abbi Crutchfield. She deserves credit
for acknowledging the moral authority of God, and for
noting that His judgment is supreme; but her view of
the roots of human evil shows that her education has
been sadly contaminated by fashionable political
correctness. She said that the ultimate and
foundational element of evil is hatred. As you
already know (but just didn't have the time to
explain to Abbi), that is totally false.

Not all evil is hatred, and not all hatred is evil.
Psalm 97 tells us that "The LORD loves those who hate
evil." Those who do evil may or may not feel hatred;
when they do feel hatred, the wrongness is not in
the emotion, but in the fact that they hate unjustly;
they hate persons who do not deserve their hatred.
The true core of evil is self-centeredness. The
Devil did not begin to go wrong by suddenly hating
God for no reason; he went wrong by loving himself
too much, which derivatively led to a hatred of
God because he envied God's superiority.

Abbi's view that prison is always a sufficient
penalty for crime fails to take adequate account
of sinful human nature. Many murderers are depraved
predators who feel a sick delight in having power
over persons weaker than themselves. For monsters
of this type, sending them to a prison where they
can torment and sodomize weaker prisoners is almost
a reward. Because of these monsters, prison often
ironically becomes _more_ of a punishment for less-
vicious convicts than it is for the most vicious.
There are some souls who simply have chosen to wipe
out their own conscience in the course of enjoying
the deaths of others; by their stubborn refusal to
repent, they forfeit all right to demand that
society let them live on to continue preying on
the weak.

European nations flatter themselves as being better
than America, just because they don't execute murderers;
but for those punishments that do exist in European law,
the protections for the accused are far less than in our
legal system. So which is the greater injustice: to put
a real murderer to death after giving him exhaustive due
process--or "merely" to imprison a man who was falsely
accused of murder, having wrongly convicted him through
a judicial system that has no presumption of innocence?
You will agree that the answer to that is obvious--and
is not favorable to Europe's Napoleonic legal systems.

Thank you, Alan, for setting a high standard in moral
discussion. We've had more than enough of those who
assume the audience to be stupid; even though some
who participate in dialogue with you frankly are not
very bright, you at least offer them the opportunity
to rise to higher levels of understanding.

Yours in Christ,
Joseph Ravitts

* * * * * * * * * * * *

I WROTE THIS IN RESPONSE TO THE PROGRAM IN
WHICH DR. KEYES AND HIS GUESTS COMPARED THE
HARRY POTTER STORIES TO "LORD OF THE RINGS"...

Dear Alan,

I'm beginning this letter before your fantasy-
discussion broadcast is even finished. Entertainment
does influence people. Politically-correct
Hollywooders deny this truth when it suits them to
do so; but just try making a movie in which gays are
shown as villains, and then see if they'll agree that
entertainment is harmless!

All favorable statements about "The Lord of the Rings"
are well-deserved. Mr. Tolkien, a believer in Jesus
Christ, put up a firewall around his story to prevent
it from prompting people to seek occult powers: the
story is long ago in a made-up land, and the
supernatural powers are connected with types of
beings that obviously don't exist in our world.
This frees us to enjoy all the instructive
elements of which Connie Neal spoke. But Ms. Neal
absolutely misses the boat when she extends equal
approval to Ms. Rowling's writings. Harry Potter
is seen as existing in our world--which inevitably
gives the message that, if we were offered a chance
to obtain magic powers (even, perhaps, by means of
a certain ring??), there would be nothing wrong
with grabbing the chance. And, as you indicate,
that would be insisting on a power in ourselves,
independently from God.

Everybody who defends the Harry Potter stories
repeats the same refrain--that as long as it has
ANY concept of good defeating evil, there can't
be anything wrong with it. But no Christian can get
by with seeing only horizontal moral relationships;
the vertical relationship with God is crucial, and
indeed even defines the horizontal dimension. The
Hebrew slaves in Egypt had a valid horizontal moral
grievance against the Pharaoh who held them in
bondage; but resorting to false gods for liberation
would not have been "just as good" as relying on
the real God. It makes a difference to everything
whether your solutions to Earthly problems are based
on eternal truth or not.

In the group-discussion section, Chris Dunn continued
the failure to see the point. He said that parents
should be protecting their children from drugs and
crime instead of worrying about witchcraft. But
those who actually deal with youth crime and youth
addictions know that these phenomena often are
closely connected with occult experiences.

I expected clearer thinking from Mona Charen, but
she only showed again that failure to acknowledge
the whole truth about God leads to confusion about
mortal life. She gave no place to the Lord Jesus,
and therefore ipso facto she could not get the
whole picture clear. It is _N_O_T_ enough to say
that a book says you should be good and oppose
evil--notwhen the _means_ offered for achieving
good are inherently wrong. Harry Potter's wizardry
is _N_O_T_ in any way to be likened to the miracles
of Biblical saints. The saints did all they did in
conscious obedience to God's authority (not just
an empty abstraction of deity, either, but the
actual God); in contrast, Harry Potter seeks
autonomous power, not answering to the Creator
for anything. Harry's pursuit of "good" ends has
no more ties to God than did the Narnian dwarf
Nikabrik, who was prepared to bring back the
White Witch if only she would help him against
King Miraz.

Perhaps it will bring the matter of horizontal
and vertical relationships closer to home if I
point out a very tangible expression of wrong
metaphysical ideas. Abortionists are now using
fake spirituality to deceive the conscience of
girls at abortion clinics; they tell the girls
that the aborted baby will simply be reincarnated,
and so will not lose anything by having been killed.

No, God is _N_O_T_ magic. Magic allows for multiple
magicians, but there can only be one God. Magic
allows for frivolous and even vicious uses; but
God is never frivolous, and He never allows His
supernatural power to be co-opted by created beings
for evil. (Remember, for instance, "Your silver
perish with you, because you thought the gift of
God could be purchased with money!") Any hypothetical
supernatural power that is equally susceptible to
good and evil use is just not the same as God's
power. Remember that, in "The Lord of the Rings,"
the evil Ring tries to deceive its potential users
that it can be made to serve good purposes; but
that's a lie. God has nothing to gain by erasing
the distinction between His power and witchcraft;
it is the real-life equivalent of Sauron who has
a vested interest in creating that misunderstanding.

No, I do not expect that children who accept Harry
Potter will begin performing bloody ritual murders
under a full moon; but I guarantee you that children
who are deceived by Harry Potter will thereby be far
less capable of ever combatting or even recognizing
the deeper evil that does lead to such crimes.

Yours in Christ,
Joseph Ravitts

Saving another essay, this one from October 2006

2007-12-01T10:35:00.001-08:00

THREE AND A HALF KINDS OF HORROR

I John 4 assures us that perfect love casts out fear. In
Hebrews 2 we read that Jesus frees us from the bondage
of the fear of death. Both of these promises come up
often in my prayers in these perilous times. It may be
edifying to discuss what ARE the fears from which we
need liberation. Christians hear plenty about the supreme
fear of having to face God's wrath for our sins; and about
rather trivial fears, like a fear of social embarrassment.
But there's a vast wilderness of other apprehensions and
anxieties, which often gets less attention than either the
greatest or the smallest fears. The Halloween season
seems like a suitable time to explore this ground a bit.

Lon Chaney Senior, the first superstar of scary movies, once
tried to illustrate the essence of horror thusly: if you saw
a circus clown standing at your front door in the middle of
the night, without explanation of what he was doing there,
it would be creepy. A clown is no more able or likely to
harm you than any other man is, but the situation would
give such a sense of things being out of place as to be
alarming. It would suggest that something was wrong with
the world. Before horror movies degenerated into mere
physical bloodbaths with victims being mowed down like
grass, it was really this sense of things moving outside the
normal that gave us those delightful shudders.

In a way, fears oriented to the state of the universe
are a testimony to our being made in the image of God.
We fear a derangement of the universe because we have
some concept of how the universe SHOULD be--which
means that there is more to us than mere animal desires
for comfort and an animal fear of dying. Folktales have
always been a device to process our fears, both crude
fears and relatively noble fears; and the invention of
motion pictures broadened the folktale audience.

The "big three" of old-time horror cinema were Count
Dracula, bringing the rest of the vampires with him; the
Wolfman, bringing the rest of the werewolves with him;
and Frankenstein, bringing the rest of the mad scientists
with him. Each story type carried a different flavor of
dread, all of them extending beyond characters merely
being afraid of being killed. Each type had a different
way of upsetting the natural order--a different clown
to stand outside your door at midnight.

Doctor Frankenstein stood for man himself upsetting the
natural order, arrogantly presuming that his wisdom can
command all the forces of creation. In the greatest mad-
scientist stories ("Dr. Jekkyl and Mr. Hyde" falls into this
category too), the scientist does not set out _wanting_ to
produce harmful results, but his experiment gets out of
his control. The very _absence_ of supernatural elements
in most mad-scientist stories enhances their brand of
horror; it says that we're on our own, with no grounds to
hope for divine intervention that could remedy our blunders.
A great many recent scientific advances, as they affect
health care and the environment, invite comparison to
the story of Doctor Frankenstein; but people disagree
about _which_ activities of science deserve the reproach,
and this article has no space to sort out their positions.

Dracula stood for something almost exactly opposite
to Frankenstein. Where Doctor Frankenstein probed
_outward_ into the unknown, Dracula embodied evil
breaking _into_ our normal world. He represented a
dark force alien to us, intruding upon us as a predator.
Where Frankenstein caused harm by mistake, Dracula
caused harm very much on purpose, with a gigantic
egotism and selfishness that _should_ be repugnant to
us. I say "should," but increasing numbers of horror
fans wish that they could BE vampires and enjoy the
power to victimize others--an attitude that would have
been unthinkable to classic horror actors like Boris
Karloff, who were highly decent people in real life.

The growing prevalence of movies in which vampires
_cannot_ be driven off by anything associated with
God (the "Blade" movies take this attitude, although
the comic series they came from said that vampires
_could_ be held off with a cross) attests to the wish
of many fans that they could be vampires themselves
...AND be immune to any divine counterforce. This
may be motivated by the wish to escape from having
to answer to God for sin; but the same wish could also
arise from a pessimistic fear that God won't help us
against evil, so that we'd better try to join evil, the
way Saruman sold out to Sauron in "Lord of the Rings."
(The classic horror stories of author H.P. Lovecraft
seem to have been motivated by the same desire to
offer appeasement-worship to evil.)

Okay, so far we've got the fear of our own plans
going disastrously wrong; and we've got the fear of a
diabolical power which so insolently defies God as to
make some of us think our only hope is to placate
it by identifying with it. But for purposes of a fairly
short essay, I think the third archetype of cinematic
horror is actually the most fascinating: the Wolfman.
Larry Talbot, the title character of the film so named,
offers a wealth of material for theological discussion;
but first, let's consider the "mood" of werewolf stories.

Both mad scientists and vampires retain something of
human personality; thus, it could in some cases be
possible to reason with them, to offer them something,
to talk them out of killing and destroying. (Even the
monster created by Frankenstein, in the original book,
was no grunting goon, but an intelligent being, who
would never have become a menace if his inventor
had handled him wisely.) But who can negotiate with
a werewolf while he's in his animal form? Werewolves
(for those who are not wishing to BE them) represent
our fear of chaos, of utter lawlessness. They have no
sophisticated agenda; they merely kill without mercy.
We may be able to destroy them or confine them,
but we can make no treaties with them. If werewolves
really existed, they would be a powerful argument for
a cosmos which has no pity on its inhabitants.

But the werewolf theme can venture in two differing
directions, which is why I titled this essay "Three And
A Half Kinds Of Horror." What I am about to describe
can also occur in mad-scientist or vampire stories, but
I believe it is best understood with werewolves.

The really old folk stories of werewolves or other
"skin-changing" monsters, predating the movies, tend
to depict the monsters as unabashedly evil. They have
complete control over their transformation; they turn
into beasts because they _want_ to, and kill innocent
people because they enjoy it. Several centuries ago
in France, there were some insane men who believed
they were werewolves, and who murdered children
for fun. These men found out too late, courtesy of
angry mobs, that they could be killed _without_ the
use of silver bullets. But speaking of insanity: the
advent of motion pictures roughly coincided with
the advent of Freudian psychiatry. Thus, when the
Wolfman was put on the silver screen, he was at the
same time put on a therapist's couch, so to speak.

Cinematic lycanthropy is a disease, transmitted to
anyone who survives being bitten by a werewolf, not
a premeditated choice to do evil. In "The Wolfman,"
protagonist Larry Talbot is thus bitten, by a werewolf
that is changed all the way to wolf-shape rather than
a still-humanoid shape; the attacking monster fails to
finish him, because he kills it by striking it with a
silver-headed cane; but the curse has been passed to
him. Thereafter, Talbot becomes the Wolfman each
full-moon night, and kills people--entirely contrary
to his good and decent character as a human. When
he is the Wolfman, he loses his own personality, and
afterward he wakes up confused about what happened.
Only gradually does he come to understand. Thus
we have the already-mentioned fear of mindless
violence for all the potential victims; but for Talbot
there is another fear: the loss of humanity, the loss
of reason, the loss of control over his own actions.
All through the movie--and in the sequels, when he
is brought back despite being killed before--the hero
is tragically tormented with guilt.

Larry Talbot's ordeal _could_ have been handled as
a parallel to the Apostle Paul's experience of doing
evil that he didn't really want to do; but the scriptwriter
of "The Wolfman" intentionally dismissed the hope of
grace, as shown by the rhyme the irritating old Gypsy
woman recites: "Even a man who is pure in heart and
says his prayers by night / Can become a wolf when
the wolfbane blooms and the moon is full and bright."
At the end of the series, in a pleasant surprise, Talbot
_does_ get cured of being a werewolf, survives an
encounter with Frankenstein's Monster despite losing
his own super-powers, and even gets the girl. (This
was in the film "House of Dracula;" the Big Three
monsters appeared in each other's movies more than
once in the old Universal Pictures era.) But his cure
is the work of a scientist, not of God.

Working a guilt-obscuring psychotherapeutic view
into horror stories produces an odd spiritual hybrid.
Larry Talbot is dramatically remorseful over all the
murders he commits as the Wolfman, so much so that
it's easy to feel toward him the sympathy we feel
for a criminal who sincerely repents and receives
Jesus as Savior. But at the same time, he's juggling
the implications of his werewolf curse having been
caused without his consent, so that it's not "really"
his fault. Some of us, I'm afraid, would probably like
to be admired for our noble confessions of guilt...but
still go on doing the things we're acting remorseful
about. It's also possible to forget that some truly
uncontrollable urges did not START as uncontrollable
urges. An alcoholic cannot rid himself of the craving
...but there was one point in time when HE CHOSE to
start drinking.

If I were in Larry Talbot's situation, as soon as I
realized what was happening, I would arrange to have
a deep, smooth-sided pit excavated--one from which
even a werewolf could not escape. Then I would have
myself lowered into it shortly before the next full
moon, and make sure there were witnesses watching to
see what happened when the moon rose. With me thus
confined, no innocent person would be in danger, and
efforts could get underway to find a cure for me. If
Larry Talbot had been _entirely_ serious about not
wanting to harm the innocent, he should have done
the same thing. (Indeed, the character of Oz in the
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" series did come up with
a similar way to keep himself from killing people.)
Without failing to realize that some things _are_ out
of a person's control, we should beware of using a
sense of "uncontrollability" as a blanket excuse for
such sins as we ARE able to restrain ourselves from.

There is a real monster out to get us: the one who
used to be an angel of light, and can still appear to
be one. Satan is in some ways like Dracula; the very
name "Dracula" means approximately "Lesser Devil."
Satan would like some of us to become like mad
scientists, others of us to become like werewolves...
and the rest of us to tremble in helpless fear. But
even some horror movies have acknowledged that there
is a power greater than Satan's; in fact, Bram Stoker's
actual novel "Dracula" testified to the ultimate
superiority of God over all dark powers, and some of
the Hammer Films Dracula movies made it clear that God
intervened to help the good guys. Rather than try to
appease the forces of evil by joining them, we should
be calling on the Name of Jesus Christ, Who crushed
the Serpent under His feet.

-- Joseph Richard Ravitts

One More Before I Go To Bed

2007-11-30T02:08:00.000-08:00

THE VARIOUS WAYS THAT GOOD DEEDS ARE PUNISHED

The cynical saying that "No good deed goes unpunished" is not
a verbatim quote from Scripture, but quite a few Biblical characters--
even besides Our Lord Himself--did find themselves being punished
precisely for doing good. Elijah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Peter
and Paul come readily to mind. But it should hardly be necessary to
explain why they were abused and persecuted: evil, unrepentant men,
who were dedicated to wickedness because they enjoyed the selfish
pleasures wickedness brought them, were trying to silence truth, as
in the case of the corrupt Herod Antipas not wanting to be rebuked
by John the Baptist.
But more examination may be required to understand why doers
of good may be "punished" by persons who are NOT acting out of
a conscious and obstinate persistence in recognizable evil. Friends,
family members, fellow believers, and recipients of acts of mercy
all may "punish" a Christian who acts in good conscience--and they
may even think they are doing it for their target's good. So, allow
me to list, in no particular order, the occasions for "punishment."

1} A Christian--indeed, anyone acting upon even flesh-based
kindness--will often come up against astonishing ingratitude from
persons toward whom he or she has displayed generosity. This is
usually because those recipients, whether as individuals or as a
politically-correct victim-group, have learned to have an inflated
sense of entitlement. They feel that they already had a _right_ to
be given whatever help or benefit the generous person gave them,
so they owe that person no thanks or appreciation. They may even
have the attitude "You should have gotten here sooner and given
me more than this; what's wrong with you?"

2} If we do a good deed that someone else _ought_ to have
done and didn't do, even if we are unaware that this other person
was any part of the situation or had any power or duty to act, the
person who failed to act may feel that we are purposely trying to
shame and embarrass him or her. Now, it is true that we should
try to avoid intruding on someone else's territory carelessly; if
the need was not urgent, we should consider the possibility that
the "assigned" person might indeed have attended to it one hour
later if we had kept our noses out of the business. Unfortunate
misunderstandings in matters like this, even where neither party
started out with anything but good intentions, can devastate
friendships. But on the other hand, sometimes the need we see
IS urgent and can't wait for the expected person to intervene;
in that case, it becomes our duty to do the good deed at once,
and it's just too bad if someone else's feathers get ruffled.

3} Someone who is not evil, but who has a different opinion
about exactly _what_ good people should be doing, may perceive
your good deed as going in the wrong direction. For instance, a
perfectly genuine Christian, who simply has never sufficiently
thought through the consequences of making people passively
dependent on government, may look upon an opponent of big
welfare-state government as "having no compassion" and
"siding with the rich against the poor." The fact that liberal
Christians mean well does not make it hurt any less when they
impose caricatures of "right-wing neofascists" on those of us
who sound the alarm about central-government tyranny. Of
course, the liberals would be quick to retort indignantly that
_they_ are hurt by being stereotyped as associated with hard
Marxism; but although this of course also happens, the plain
fact is that present-day media outlets carry FAR MORE slurs
against conservatives than the reverse. (Just try to find _one_
recent action movie in which any large industrial corporation
is depicted as a _good_ thing!)

4} I recall a saying from C.S. Lewis: "Sometimes your only
reward for doing a good deed is to be called on to do a harder
and better one." If you do a good deed which is very costly to
you, and which you simply do not have the power to repeat at
frequent intervals, onlookers and associates may nonetheless
assume that the deed actually came easily for you--and so it's
perfectly all right for them to start demanding that you DO
keep repeating the action daily.

5} Some fellow believers will concoct reasons to claim that
your good deed was "unspiritual." The self-appointed piety
police will accuse you of "exalting yourself" or "trying to earn
salvation by works"--even if nothing of the sort ever crossed
your mind. If you run into difficulties, as doers of good usually
do, your critics will pounce like the false friends of Job, saying
that this is the Lord "showing" you that you're out of His will.

6} AAAAAAAAAAAND of course....the same God-hating
secular establishment which will call you a hypocrite if you
_aren't_ visibly doing good deeds....will call you self-righteous
if you _are_ doing them.

Nonetheless, I urge you in the words of Paul to the Galatian
church: "Let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season
we will reap if we do not lose heart." If we wait to be active in
God's service until we feel sure that we will be appreciated and
will not be unjustly criticized, we might never get started.

====================================

After this recent article was distributed by e-mail, one Christian lady who had seen it suggested another "punishment": people might tell you that the good deed you just did should have been done for someone else rather than the person you did it for.

And Now, Back To Preserving Things Written SINCE My Old Blogs Froze Up

2007-11-30T01:48:00.002-08:00

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WAVES AND SEAS

6 AUGUST 2007:

If I were a passenger in the foremost car of a bullet train that was traveling south at 100 miles per hour, and if I rose from my seat and began walking toward the rear of the train, would I really be moving north? No, I would be moving south at 100 miles per hour minus my walking speed. For simplicity, I leave out the movement of the Earth in space, and the rotation of our galaxy on its axis. There can be forces in life that carry an individual or a society in quite a different direction than superficial movements may seem to indicate.

I gained a greater appreciation for this truth during my Navy career, when as a submarine sailor I learned the nautical distinction between “waves” and “seas.” Ocean waves, properly speaking, are merely ripples on the surface caused by the wind, in which a momentary _shape_ moves across the water; but “seas” refers to
the water _itself_ really moving, under the influence of tides and currents. Thus, a wind out of the northeast would produce waves that made it look as if the ocean’s water were moving toward the southwest, but the real motion of the current could be in exactly the opposite direction. That’s why the traditional good-luck wish of the Navy is “Fair winds _and_ following seas!”—referring to two independent variables.

Speaking of social trends as being toward “right” or “left” is a simplification, like omitting the Earth’s movement in space from the bullet-train illustration; but as in that illustration, a simplification can sometimes correctly focus our attention on those things that actually affect our lives. Thus it is not wrong to
say that, during my entire lifetime, there have been periods of _wave_ motion in society toward the right, but the _seas_ have always kept moving left.

Forty years ago, anyone who advocated giving homosexual cohabitation the full dignity and honor of marriage would have been universally recognized, by those approving of him as well as by those denouncing him, as being on the left. Now, however, in all trendy circles, dogmatic support of homosexual “marriage” _combined_ with unquestioning approval of totally unrestricted abortion is only _barely_ enough to prevent you from being branded as an ultra-reactionary RIGHT-wing extremist.

Forty years ago, the hippie movement, powerful though it was with the help of other pro-Communist forces, was still on the fringes of American society. By now, the graduates of hippiedom have become the establishment, and have many Americans convinced beyond question that everything hippies ever wanted, including the abandonment of Southeast Asia to tyranny, was always so noble that no one but a depraved idiot could argue against it.

A politician like Rudy Giuliani, who favors both abortion and homosexuality AND is himself an unrepentant adulterer, could never have hoped to pass as a moral conservative when I was a teenager; but now he can. I recently heard conservative
radio host Michael Medved speaking on the air with a Giulani supporter, and Mr. Medved allowed his guest to get away with the weaselling evasion of calling Giuliani’s intentional adultery merely a “mistake”—the very sort of evasion Bill Clinton would use to make premeditated immorality sound like a mere accident. Medved permitted this, not because he himself or the conservative movement as a whole have begun approving of adultery, but because these days there scarcely even _are_ any more politicians of adequate prominence who have not gone even farther left on the scale than Giulani has. Much of politics has gone from good guys against bad guys to bad guys against worse guys. {How I wish Duncan Hunter had been given a fair chance!}

I have pondered how the difference between fleeting waves and persistent seas applies to President George W. Bush, a man who continues to be vilified by the hard left for showing ANY remaining vestige of conservative policies—and yet who is himself an advocate of causes which properly belong to the left, such as pressuring Israel to make suicidal concessions to absolutely unappeasable enemies in the name of “peace.” In at least one area of policy, I think that Mr. Bush in the very act of doing a left-wing thing may be trying to be _relatively_ conservative. I have in mind his endless pandering to illegal aliens, and to the Mexican government which he _knows_ is urging them forward in their parasitism upon the United States.

Mr. Bush has lived around globalists all his life. It is my opinion that he believes that the tide of world events is moving unstoppably toward the merging of nations and the loss of our sovereignty. If Mr. Bush is promoting a North American Union, it may be that he is not preferring this _over_ a free United States, but rather that he is preferring it over a single, complete one-world monopoly dictatorship. It may be that he hopes to make waves contrary to the seas, allowing _only_ a regional union as a power center that could resist the still-worse totalitarian planetary regime that the United Nations wants to impose on all of us everywhere.

If this is indeed the President's opinion and hope, I say that we should be at once more optimistic and more pessimistic than he is. Let us fight global totalitarianism as if it were still possible to keep the United States intact, AND prepare our souls for the worst as if the planetwide commune were certain to be in place next week. And as long as we have any strength and freedom left for the fight, we need to try to understand what are the trends occurring around us--as I have tried to do a little bit in this article. Even if we can't change the trend of the seas, the waves we make might nudge some people a little closer to a saving knowledge of Jesus--Whose authority is what the one-world system _really_ wishes to destroy.

Ut fidem praestem in difficultate!

"Anti-Nonsense Alerts" Also Held What I Saved From The Old Homepage

2007-11-30T01:40:00.000-08:00

This example had been one of the longest-kept articles on the "Empowered For Freedom" site, an essay which had gone through several revisions after its debut somewhere around maybe mid-1997.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*** THE GREAT EITHER-OR

Suppose that a helicopter is carrying you into a country completely unknown to you. While still high in the air, you see below you a gigantic pile of ruins: a great stone structure newly demolished, the dust of its collapse only now settling. Tiny human figures are swarming over the rubble, but you are too far away to see their faces or get any impression of their emotions.

The pilot of your helicopter tells you, "That place was a horrible prison, a dungeon of tyranny and injustice. Those people you see are the prisoners, now liberated from an undeserved confinement. The destruction of their prison was the best thing that could have happened to them; now they're free!" But the copilot immediately contradicts him: "Nonsense! That structure was a fortress, which protected those people from their enemies; it also contained the only modern hospital in a five- hundred-mile radius. Having that refuge didn't mean that those people were prisoners---and losing it is a frightful disaster for them!"

Your pilot and copilot cannot both be equally right. The only way to know which of their explanations, if either, is more accurate, is to land the helicopter and investigate more closely. The "Empowered For Freedom" site is here to help you investigate.

If that unknown country is the U.S.A., the demolished structure is that general consensus on Biblical doctrine and morality which sustained our country from its founding until sometime this century. We say "sometime," because the spiritual structure of the U.S.A. was not shattered at a single stroke; rather, it was eroded and undermined. Many citizens nowadays will tell you that this Judeo-Christian consensus was a prison, unnaturally restraining people, and that Americans are better off without it. But we, and many others of both sexes and all races, maintain that it was our fortress, indeed the very foundation of American law and liberty; and that unless it is rebuilt, our individual freedoms are doomed to be lost. Both views cannot be equally true. Either a cruel dungeon, or a saving shelter; it's in your best interests to determine which it was.

Before anyone objects that this choice is too simplistic, let me show one of the complications myself: what I call a "three-sided dualism." The Biblical worldview has always had two major classes of competition: the belief in false gods, and the belief in no gods. Insofar as these two rivals of the truth are also rivals to each other, each will have its own take on the wrecking of the fortress--actually confusing the other falsehood with the Biblical view! Thusly:

A worshipper of false gods--for instance, your standard-model California New Age occultist--may regard Christianity and scientific materialism as allies to each other--strange news to the Christian and the materialist!---because the Christian and the materialist both use organized logic, and both reject the idea of casting magic spells. The occultist, therefore, will believe that he/she beholds the wreckage of atheistic science right alongside the rubble of Christianity in the demolished edifice, and consider it good riddance to both. Meanwhile, the atheist-materialist believes that the Christian and the occultist are more allied to each other than either is to science--because, of course, the Christian and the occultist both believe in supernatural powers at which the materialist scoffs. The materialist, therefore, sees the ruined fortress as the tomb of two supernatural approaches that are both long outdated and worthless.

It is, however, the Christian who actually stands farther removed from the atheist and the pagan than either of those is from the other...because no two false beliefs can be so profoundly separate from each other as all falsehoods are separate from truth. Any Christian adequately educated in history understands that materialism and counterfeit supernaturalism both helped break up the foundations of America's traditional worldview. So, when Christians try to rebuild a morally upright society, although we need not be so hostile to non-Christian involvement as Nehemiah was to the non-Jews who pretended to offer help in rebuilding Jerusalem (intending to sabotage the work), we must deal with non-Christians having a distorted understanding of what it was that collapsed, and what needs to be rebuilt.

To any non-Christian supernaturalist who reads this, I would say: if you've come this far without quitting the site in a huff, you probably are not someone who consciously desires to sabotage truth. Still, you need to be getting spiritual guidance from the right source--the Word of God--if your good intentions are ever to produce genuinely good results. And to the scientific materialist who's made it to this paragraph, I would say: if you even hope to achieve _material_ good in this life, you'd better work on your intellectual honesty. By this I mean that the materialist dismisses every form of faith held by the recognizably religious--yet the materialist himself/herself also operates on faith: faith in whatever scientific theory is in fashion at the moment.

For my part, I did not become a Christian without first considering the merits both of materialism and of occultism. As you continue through our website, I hope that by God's grace Mary and I will be able to show you that the Christian agenda for society is viable and beneficial--because Christianity itself is true and reasonable, not a thing of empty fantasy. So land your helicopter, and get down to digging for the evidence of what I say. In reality, those whose hearts are in Heaven are those who also do the best job of getting down to earth.

Okay, This Is Going Pretty Well, Knock On Wood

2007-11-30T01:27:00.000-08:00

By the way, I accidentally omitted the title of that Islam-related article. It was called "Disarmng The False-Guilt Bomb." And now to share what was the very _next_ "Empowered For Freedom" column that I displayed on "Anti-Nonsense Alerts." This one had first been written, as I recall, in autumn of 2005.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::

PREEE-SENTING THE _VERY_ FIRST
STRONG AND AGGRESSIVE WOMAN
_EVER_ SEEN !!

Forty or more years ago, the British TV series "The Avengers"
helped audiences get used to the idea of women who could fight
physically with men and win. The audiences did get used to it;
after all, they had already seen Wonder Woman comics for years,
and those who followed samurai movies had seen deadly swordswomen
on the screen. By the time "The Bionic Woman" and "Charlie's Angels"
were created, popular culture had almost forgotten that there was
ever a time when warrior women were not regarded as commonplace.

Audiences got used to it just fine. But scriptwriters could not get used to the fact that audiences had gotten used to it. They could not bear to acknowledge that the novelty had already passed. So they kept on trumpeting THE VERY FIRST powerful woman...over and over and over and over. The patriarchal straw man had to keep getting knocked down again and again, with each time the "first" time.

Sigourney Weaver in the "Alien" movies was a bold, innovative, unique, daring new
character: a woman who could fight her own battles! Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a bold, innovative, unique, daring new character: a woman who could fight her own battles! Xena the Warrior Princess was a bold, innovative, unique, daring new
character: a woman who could fight her own battles! Demi Moore in "G.I. Jane" was a bold, innovative, unique, daring new character: a woman who could fight her own battles! Claudia Christian's character on "Babylon 5" was a bold, innovative, unique, daring new character: a woman who could fight her own battles! The "Matrix" heroine Trinity was a bold, innovative, unique, daring new character: a woman who
could fight her own battles! Halle Berry as Catwoman was a bold, innovative, unique, daring new character: a woman who could fight her own battles! Milla Jovovich's character in the "Resident Evil" films was a bold, innovative, unique, daring new character: a woman who could fight her own battles! Aeryn Sun of the "Farscape" series was a bold, innovative, unique, daring new character: a woman who could fight her own battles! Guinevere in the recent "King Arthur" movie was a bold, innovative, unique, daring new character: a woman who could fight her own battles! The rewritten-as-female Starbuck on the new "Battlestar Galactica" is a bold, innovative, unique, daring new character: a woman who can fight her own battles!

Well, since women in Western civilization are so obviously being kept in barefoot-and-pregnant subjugation, what we clearly need is a bold, innovative, unique, daring new TV series which, FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, will depict a woman as being strong and independent, able to think and act for herself. That series, now to be seen on ABC-TV, is "Commander in Chief," starring Geena Davis of "Thelma and Louise" fame as President Hillary Clinton --excuse me, I mean as a fictional female U.S. President.

>> The male-chauvinist straw-man characters on this program plainly have never watched "The Avengers," "Buffy," "Xena," "Babylon 5," or the "Matrix" trilogy, since they just can't believe that a woman could be capable of leadership. I expect, however, that the real message of the show, aimed at us flesh-and-blood men, will be: "If you don't approve of a woman leader practicing far-left-wing politics, that is one and the same thing as you opposing ANY and all women in leadership!"

There's a message fit to fertilize the cornfields of Iowa.

Admirers of Ronald Reagan are typically also admirers of his ally Margaret Thatcher. The United States Armed Forces are full of men who have largely conservative political views, yet have no trouble at all obeying orders from female officers. Millions of conservative American men would happily vote for Condoleezza Rice as our next President, and are delighted to receive the socio-political insights of Michelle Malkin, Janet Parshall, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Star Parker and other smart women. Last time I checked, none of those women were being kept in slavish submission by conservative men.

So let Geena Davis have her TV fantasy of being THE VERY FIRST woman allowed to attain a position of leadership. But all of us who pay attention to actual facts know how far removed her sulking straw men are from conservative-male reality. If
this new series proves a hit, it will prove that many Americans prefer self-deception over easily available truth. But then, we already knew that; just look at
the way members of both parties are desperately deceiving themselves that Palestinian thugs don't mean what they say about continuing to attack Israel
regardless of how many concessions are offered. Or look at the way members of both
parties have ignored the totally predictable damage being done by millions of illegal immigrants feeding at the trough of America's welfare system without giving
America any loyalty in return.

Given the speed with which ignored realities can return to bite us, I think that the great American self-deception program, of which ABC's feminist dead-horse-beating exercise is only a small part, will not be able to stay on the air much longer. And
if America falls under totalitarianism, Nielsen ratings will be the very least of Geena Davis' worries.

Another Prior-Blog Salvage

2007-11-30T01:12:00.000-08:00

My second blog, "Anti-Nonsense Alerts," was begun in early January of 2006, because I saw that hardly anyone was taking me up on the gentle-dialogue invitation anyway. The second blog was an extension of a writing ministry that my departed Mary had actually initiated, which we called (and I still call) "Empowered For Freedom." An actual website by that name, which Mary and I had operated since 1997, sank into oblivion with the collapse of the fly-by-night web server Global Aloha.

My first post on the second blog (after explaining there why I was starting another blog) was this article which had originated in e-mail format, after our old website had begun faltering...

___________________________

Some years ago, a group of Wicca practicioners raised a great
stink against the film "The Wizard of Oz." They were outraged
that a witch was depicted as evil--even though another, equally
prominent witch was depicted as good. It wasn't good enough
for them for a film to say that some witches were good; ALL
witches must be above criticism. If a movie showed some
Christian clergymen as bad but others as good, any Christian
who complained about this would be dismissed as a thin-
skinned whiner; but for witches, whose very worldview entails
wanting to bend reality to their personal will, it's only
natural to demand favoritism and call it fairness.

Hold that thought...and turn your thoughts much farther
back in the history of cinema, to the silent era.
Douglas Fairbanks Senior, first of the great swashbucklers,
made a movie called "The Thief of Baghdad," one of the first
great fantasy adventures on film. It was set in a Muslim
civilization, and it portrayed Muslim civilization in a favorable
light. It was not the only American silent movie to do so. (How
did Rudolf Valentino become a sex symbol, if not by starring
in "The Sheik"?)

In 1935, Cecil B. DeMille released "The Crusades," which
(not without factual justification) depicted Saladin as a more
civilized and reasonable man than Richard the Lion-Hearted.
This was in an era when racism still was a very serious
problem in America, yet even racism did nothing to prevent
Muslim culture from being given a fairly friendly portrayal.
Not many years later, Asian actor Sabu starred in
Michael Korda's remake of "The Thief of Baghdad," and in
the new screenplay a very explicitly Islamic spirituality was
clearly shown as the supreme height of merit achieved by
Sabu's character. At least two more adaptations of the story
were to follow in subsequent years; and interspersed with
them would be seven or more films about the Arabian Nights
heroes Ali Baba and Sinbad--all putting Muslim culture in
a positive light.

One of Charlton Heston's earliest leading roles was in
"El Cid." This epic had a Muslim villain, but took pains to
indicate to the audience that this villain was NOT part of
the Islamic mainstream. The Christian hero is made at one
point to suggest that his converting to Islam is conceivable,
but none of the Muslim good guys _ever_ hints at becoming
a Christian. (Making Christianity "exactly equal" to other
faiths always leads to considering it LESS equal--not because
any flaws are discovered in Christianity, but because fallen
human nature has a bias against the gospel.)

Live theater in the English-speaking world has also been
generous to Muslims. Sigmund Romberg's operetta "The
Desert Song" romanticized Arabs; though the hero was really
a European, he sympathized strongly with the Arabs. The
later musical "Kismet" had an all-Muslim cast of characters,
including the historical figure Omar Khayyam. Both shows
also became films eventually.

"Lawrence of Arabia," "The Wind and the Lion," and
Brendan Fraser's more recent Mummy movies have all
made Muslims look good. Topping them all, however, was
Kevin Costner's revisionist Robin Hood film. "Robin Hood,
Prince of Thieves" not only practically made its Muslim
character the star instead of Robin Hood, but in addition
it promoted one medium falsehood and two whopping
falsehoods. Medium falsehood: suggesting that Muslims
invented the telescope. (It was a European who invented
it, after the period when Robin Hood would have lived.)
First whopping falsehood: claiming that male-female
relationships in Muslim societies, _more_ than in Christian
societies, are developed by open communication between
the sexes (when Azim says, "We talk to our women").
Second whopper: when Robin says that the land of Israel
is rightfully Muslim territory.

Add up all these productions, and can you seriously
say that Western media and entertainment have always
portrayed Muslims in a derogatory manner? Not if you
have any honesty, you can't.

But now it's time to remember those Wiccans fussing
about "The Wizard of Oz."

Radical Islam, the system that approved putting out a
murder contract on Salmon Rushdie because he wrote a
book Islamists didn't like, doesn't care how many movies
you make that show Muslim culture as good. If you let
even ONE movie be made that says _anything_ critical of
Islam, you're an Islamophobic bigot. Muslims are allowed
to arrest you in _their_ countries just for talking about the
Lordship of Jesus; but if in a Western country you say
that something's wrong with Islam, you're the intolerant
one. If you're Dutch, you may get knifed for it.

Muslim activists in America, taking advantage of the
level of freedom here which NO Muslim country grants to
Christians, have the gall to claim that our entertainment
media are full of unfairly negative images of Muslims. Of
course, they also claim that there have been many anti-
Muslim hate crimes in America since the 9-11 attacks;
but many if not most of those crimes have turned out to
be fictions, made up by Muslims who knew that Americans
are vulnerable to manipulation by false guilt.

In a time when virtually ALL terrorist threats in the
world _are_ in fact of Muslim origin, American TV and
movies have bent over backwards to pretend that it's
really the old standard white-supremacist neo-Nazis who
are behind everything. Yet when the series "24" actually
got around to having Muslim terrorists in the plotline, the
Council on American-Islamic Relations went ballistic. Didn't
we bigoted Judeo-Christian Americans know that Osama
bin-Laden is really a white South African fascist or something?

But in case too many people figure out that the typical
modern terrorist IS a Muslim and is NOT a white South
African, they have a backup plan. If movie reviews are
accurate, the backup plan can be found in the new movie
"Syriana." Okay, the terrorists are Muslims...but it's not really
their fault. It's the fault of the evil American oil corporations!

Yes, now it all makes sense. Muhammad plundered the ancient
Jewish merchant colonies of Arabia because of evil American
oil corporations. The medieval Turkish empire kidnapped the
sons of Christians to make them janissaries because of evil
American oil corporations. Arabs were taking black Africans
as slaves before slavery got underway in America, but it was
the fault of those oil corporations. American oil tycoons gave
Egypt the idea of refusing to hear testimony from Coptic
Christians against Muslims. And Chechen terrorists wantonly
murdered schoolchildren in Beslan, Russia because of evil
American oil corporations.

Maybe I shouldn't be saying this; George Clooney might make
a movie claiming with a straight face that all the sarcastic
statements above are literal truth. But even if he does make
such a movie, it still won't be enough to make the C.A.I.R.
types drop their fraudulent complaints. (In case you think
I'm too hard on Clooney--did he not make an action movie in
which the big threat was a Serbian terrorist? Come on, now,
how many Serbian terrorist attacks have you heard of? It's
the Albanian Muslims who have ties to bin-Ladin, and who in
addition are deeply into forced-prostitution trafficking.)

I myself have Muslim neighbors. Not only do I get along
just fine with them, but I personally cook food for them at
Ramadan time. They could tell me if they were suffering
from hateful harassment just for being Muslims, and they
know that I would side with them against any such injustice;
but they have no such trouble to report, because THERE IS
NOT any widespread persecution of Muslims in America.
The C.A.I.R. types know that American Muslims are not
oppressed; but it suits them to pretend that they believe there
is oppression, so that false guilt over supposed prejudice will
weaken our will to fight real terrorism. We cannot afford to
let them succeed in this cynical deception.

How about this as a cure for the induced false guilt: let
Americans read English translations of the lying propaganda
which Iranian mullahs and Palestinian thugs broadcast against
Israel--even reviving the long-discredited "Protocols of the
Elders of Zion"--and then compare this for hatefulness with
the American media's average treatment of Muslims. Next,
have people see how long it takes to watch all the pro-Muslim
films I described above. If, after doing this research, you still
think that Muslims have a valid complaint about how they are
portrayed in the West, I have a tropical beach condo in Finland
I'd like to sell you.

Yours for Jesus and America,
Joseph Richard Ravitts

What I've done so far was new blog material, but--

2007-11-30T01:02:00.000-08:00

Now, since this blog is partly a salvage operation, I will try here to preserve what was the first post of my first blog, "Faithful In Adversity," from 22 June 2005:

__________________________________

The Widower Greets You

UT FIDEM PRAESTEM IN DIFFICULTATE!

This is my Latin motto, which translates as: "May I be faithful in adversity!"
It was my private rallying-cry as I stood by my dear wife, Mary Scudellari
Ravitts, during her truly heroic struggle against the Damned Thief--which
is my name for the rare cancer which took her away from me and (no thanks
to it) sent her sailing through The Door Into Summer. I am creating this blog
on the first anniversary of her crossing over to the other side.

We who remain down here in the mortal world find ourselves in a time when
more and more people _don't_ feel like being faithful in adversity; when more
and more people are willing, if things grow difficult, to abandon someone whom
they had promised to love...even, for their own convenience, to "help" that
person go away permanently. This being the case, I hope to encourage the
promotion of LOYALTY in human relationships. I hope that readers of this
blog will share their feelings about what is entailed in staying true, in keeping
promises, in being there for people who depend on us to be there.

This blog is intended to cut right across the categories of all sorts of political
and spiritual persuasions. In the interests of honest disclosure, I will state up
front that I am a Christian heterosexual who usually votes Republican; but I
intend to try to respect the views of everyone who may post here. I do not
want to be involved in any disputes, certainly not angry disputes, if it can
possibly be avoided. Those who know me, know that I often do find myself
in debates; but I don't really _enjoy_ arguing with people--it's just that
sometimes conscience compels me. Here, though, it is precisely in line with
conscience that I want to be as positive and inclusive as I can be. I want to
see common ground between myself and persons who may be dramatically
different from me. So please come with your insights, EVERYBODY.

I won't say that there will NEVER be any political or theological discussion
here; but I ask everyone posting (1) to try to stick mostly to the theme of
loyalty in our individual relationships, and (2) to try to see the good in all
other persons who post here, avoiding direct contradiction as far as possible.
I have other outlets for partisan position-holding. This blog is meant to be
a home for "the better angels of our natures."

Best wishes to future acquaintances,
Joseph Richard Ravitts (pronounced RAY-vitts)
Columbia, Maryland

"Though lovers be lost, love shall not,
And death shall have no dominion." -- Dylan Thomas

_________________________________________________________

(I never did get the wealth of diverse dialogue I was hoping for. Maybe this new blog will work out better for that, though I am NOT avoiding politics.)

An Article From Early July Of This Year

2007-11-30T00:52:00.000-08:00

I suppose I could have been more organized in this new effort to preserve my writings; but priority responsibilities in the material world force me to grab opportunities like this at miscellaneous times. One consequence is that I can more easily post my stand-alone articles here, than articles that were part of a series.

===============================

LET US NOT OMIT FORGIVENESS...
BUT DON'T ALLOW FORGIVENESS
ITSELF TO BECOME AN OMISSION

I have read or heard public statements from a number of Death Row
convicts over my 36 years as a Christian. Terribly often, they fail
to show any genuine remorse for their crimes, even when they
ADMIT to having committed the crimes. Instead, they go in for
self-serving pomposity, solemnly criticizing this country's justice
system for executing guilty murderers--which, in their egocentric
minds, they somehow manage to see as WORSE than their own
act of murdering innocent victims.

Some, certainly, come to genuine repentance and salvation. I
particularly recall the Texan murderess Karla Faye Tucker. She
bore fruit that befitted repentance: she DIDN'T pretend that the
justice system was the "real" villain--rather, she admitted freely
that her crime was HER OWN fault, and that she DID deserve
to be put to death. It is that real contrition which assures me
that Karla Faye is now dwelling joyously in Heaven among the
ransomed saints. And when the parents of her victim publicly
declared their forgiveness of her, I could see that their act of
Christlike love and mercy was not in vain.

But this is only one of countless instances of people in such
a situation going to great lengths to trumpet their forgiveness.
The forgivers appear to outnumber the repenters. Now, I could
almost recite in my sleep all the standard lines about how hate
imprisons us and forgiveness releases us, yada yada yada;
every preacher who repeats them seems to think that no one
else ever thought of preaching forgiveness before. I don't want
anyone to think that I'm AGAINST forgiveness. But what I am
against is a harmfully incomplete understanding of any issue.
Sometimes it seems to me as if my fellow Christians cannot
see ANY other significance in a murderer besides an opportunity
to go offer someone forgiveness.

Forgiveness here, forgiveness there: that's all well and good, as
each element of Godly conduct is well and good. But if all that's
ever talked about is forgiving the murderers...what becomes of
the idea of PREVENTING them from committing their murders
in the first place?

If all that counts is the "closure" that comes with forgiving
the murderers of our loved ones, what becomes of the idea of
PROTECTING our loved ones so they don't GET murdered? If
your seven-year-old daughter is being strangled in front of your
eyes, does God command you to lean over the killer's shoulder
and say to your daughter, "Don't worry, honey, as soon as he's
done killing you I'll forgive him, and that's all that counts"?

An omission can be a horrible thing. Modern Americans have been
exhaustively trained in processing grief, but too few of us grasp
the fact that many griefs could be prevented by a timely use of
justified force against those who would cause the grief.

I remember how the TV series "M*A*S*H" tried to convince us
that running away, or surrendering, is ALWAYS enough to
protect us from suffering violence--as when a couple of the
characters were out in a jeep and Communist soldiers fired
off some rifle shots at a distance but never chased them as
they fled. Focussing all our attention ONLY on forgiving our
enemies, with no thought for maybe STOPPING them now
and then, is a form of running away.

There's a reason why we have police departments, not
just forgiveness departments. The reason can be found in
Ecclesiastes 8:11--"Because sentence against an evil deed
is not executed speedily, the heart of the sons of men is fully
set to do evil"; and in Isaiah 26:10--"If favor is shown to the
wicked, he does not learn righteousness." It was in the spirit
of these Scriptures that our Founding Fathers, all of whom
were either Christians or well versed in Christian thought,
gave us the Second Amendment--which confirms our lawful
right to be equipped with firearms in addition to being equipped
with love and forgiveness. (And anyone who thinks that both
types of equipment cannot coexist must not have heard of the
Civil War incident in which a Confederate soldier went around
a battlefield giving water to wounded men of BOTH sides, and
the Union troops who saw him doing this held their fire.)

In case anyone has failed to notice, we have some vicious
enemies right now, whose ONLY reaction to an offer by us to
forgive them would be to hack off our heads. I don't think we
can afford anymore to let military personnel be the only ones
who understand this conflict. It may yet come to our own soil
in full force, and we may ALL have to fight. We can still forgive
any terrorists we capture alive--AFTER they've been rendered
powerless to kill any more victims. That same combination of
warlike prowess and mercy to the defeated made an enormous
impression on Muslim Barbary Pirates of the early 19th century,
when America was forced to kick their collective butt. A sugary
forgiveness that is not part of a more complete understanding
of moral issues will only come across as weakness, to be
laughed at by today's Barbary Pirates.

Yours for Jesus and America,

P.O.1 Joseph Ravitts, U.S.N. Ret.

Since e-mail servers are also treacherous--

2007-11-30T00:43:00.000-08:00

This new blog will give me the hope of safeguarding some of my online columns which are distributed under the name "Empowered For Freedom." Here is something I wrote quite recently...

A SNAKE IN THE LITERARY GRASS

Literary skills, like firearms, can be used for good OR evil. My local newspaper's book-review section has lately provided an example of bad use: another case of what Isaiah 5:20 warned about, people _calling_ evil good and good evil.

Bear with me, here: Imagine that I set out to write a history of, say, America's Revolutionary War. I do lots of research on the era, and it shows in my descriptions of 18th-century weapons and military discipline, of how the Continental Congress deliberated, of how civilians endured the war years, etc. All very impressive. But then, suppose I rely on this to convince my readers that my research achievements give me a right to draw conclusions which are not supported by _anything_ in my data. Suppose I say, in effect: "These collected facts about Revolutionary War conditions prove that George Washington was regularly cheating on his wife, Benjamin Franklin enjoyed torturing little kittens, and Patrick Henry was the real founder of the Nazi Party."

Kind of dishonest? Yeah, but there are America-bashers who would pretend to believe that the reasoning was valid, because they WANT to believe that the United States is bad at the very root.

The same thing has just been done (for the zillionth time) to the Biblical record of history. A woman named Lesley Hazleton, lavishly praised by the hard-leftwing Denver Post, has written a book titled "JEZEBEL: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen." Note that it is classified as NON-fiction. To prepare for this project, Ms. Hazleton did extensive research into the archaeology of Israel and Phoenicia, the commercial and military relationships that existed among ancient countries. Well and good, but all of this does not by itself establish the personalities of historical individuals. What establishes _those_ in this book is what Ms. Hazleton _wants_ to believe.Ms. Hazleton wants to believe that the Biblical account of Jezebel trying to kill all prophets of Israel's God is only propaganda, a slander fabricated by those mean, intolerant monotheists. In her version of events, Jezebel is an enlightened pagan heroine, who meant no harm at all to the monotheists, while Elijah is the villain--you know, just like the Taliban. The Denver Post book reviewer is eager to endorse Hazleton's view that polytheism is tolerant and openminded, while belief in one Supreme Being Who actually has some requirements is one and the same thing as bigotry and hate. To do all this, Hazleton has to do something which none of her archaeological research would really have warranted: she has to presume a priori that the Biblical record _cannot_ have been divinely inspired, that it _must_ have been a forgery, and that Jezebel _couldn't_ have been capable of robbing and murdering the innocent landowner Naboth.

Part of this author's cunning is in her timing. Now that "The DaVinci Code" has enjoyed success, she can see that there is a vast readership ready to swallow _anything_ that lets them off the hook of owing obedience to the real God. Fans of Ms. Hazleton, as of Dan Brown, are demonstrating what Jesus said to unbelievers in John 5:43: "I have come in My Father's name and you do not receive Me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive."

Neo-pagans who may see my words here are sure to tell themselves that I'm "only against Lesley Hazleton because she's a woman." This is nonsense, and they themselves will know it's nonsense even while they're saying it; but that's the very trend that Ms. Hazleton is promoting: the post-modern trend of simply inventing any "truth" which appeals to your emotions. But if Ms. Hazleton wants to see just how much more tolerant polytheism is than monotheism, let her go to certain regions of the polytheistic nation of India and tell the locals that she has come to preach the gospel of Jesus. If, after doing this, she lives to write anything else, she will perhaps write more truthfully.
__________________

JOSEPH RAVITTS

If It Ain't Broke, Break It

2007-11-30T00:35:00.000-08:00

My first effort at blogging came when I wanted to honor the memory of my first wife Mary, called home to Heaven by cancer. I later added a second blog with (eek!) political and religious topics. The Blogspot people provided me a welcome outlet for things I wanted to say.

Then Google came along, took them over, and proceeded to lock me out of my own house, as it were. I have been unable to post in my original blogs ("Faithful In Adversity" and "Anti-Nonsense Alerts") for a long time now. At last I have decided to pretend I'm a newcomer. I'msure Google doesn't know the difference, since in my experience they completely ignore any and all requests for technical support. If I can just get back into the blogosphere, that will be something. Google owes me this much. I will be trying to copy past writings here, and posting new stuff as I have time. The time question revolves around my SECOND wife, Janalee, who has various needs that cannot be ignored. Not dying this time, just has disabilities.

JOSEPH RICHARD RAVITTS (pronounced "RAY-vitts")