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.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Friday, April 18, 2008
Sharing A Lesson In How Logic Works
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.
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
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!
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!
Friday, March 28, 2008
I'm Fed Up With Geraldo Rivera
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."
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."
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
REALLY Despicable Songs
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.
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
"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
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
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Okay, another for February: about Christian romance novels
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.
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.
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