Category: god

Unto You Is Born This Day…

We all must bear some burden. What is your burden? Is the weight so heavy that your soul is unable to lift your spirit thereby causing literal physical or emotional pain? It’s okay…a baby told us so.

At Christmas time the daylight increases and metaphysical relief is revealed to us, but we must be present to accept the gift. Three wise kings may have had their physical gifts to give, yet only one King could give the Gift of most value. And so it was revealed!

Jesus needed to live a pretty full life before even he understood the meaning of this Gift. His Jewish brethren were responsible for teaching Jesus many truths about human nature as revealed by God through previous decades and centuries. These truths are the basis for spiritual enlightenment which is why religion must always have its place in our physical world. Why would humans ever remove God from our common understanding? Jesus knew the answer to this riddle, and the government of his time definitely didn’t want the answer known.

Truth: history repeats itself! “This Day” is like “That Day” in ancient times when the Roman king wanted no other king but himself. Today we understand that kings, like governments, wholeheartedly enjoy their “privilege” of giving and removing rights for those they “rule”. However, natural rights are God given which means that no human, no matter their perceived “privilege“, can give or remove them. Jesus didn’t die because the Roman king made it so…He died to show us all that our human suffering is limited to the physical world. God has more for us when we understand our metaphysical nature. AND more importantly, Jesus was born to be the ultimate example of a human life lived in the physical world with the liberty of an individual possessing divine worth that is separate from kings or governments and the happiness as expressed by one’s God given talents.

Let there be no doubt about it, Jesus is the reason for Christmas. His Gift is our Blessing. Let’s fulfill this promise by continuing to live humbly in God’s grace. On This Day He shall lift all darkness!

The New Abolitionist

Identifying with a group or a cause can be a fulfilling experience in some ways. You understand that you are not alone with your thoughts and your emotions. Identifying with other people about an issue can even motivate you to act…These emotionally motivated activists are plentiful in our current politicized culture.

When emotions outweigh rational thinking you can be sure that disaster will follow. The social emotional learning (SEL) tools that are being introduced at K through 12 schools are experimental and require that teachers take on a psychologist persona. SEL helps a child identify into a system of compliance that favors groups over individuals.

From kappanonline.org: “Although SEL has been conceptualized in various ways, it can broadly be understood as the processes through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to manage their emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions (Weissberg & Cascarino, 2013). More specifically, Roger Weissberg and colleagues (2015) have identified a set of five core clusters of social and emotional competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making.”

Sounds nice doesn’t it? However we must understand what their term “broadly” actually means. In the case of SEL I believe the term applies to a broad form of behavior compliance…Individualism is sacrificed for the collective. This spells disaster for our Constitutional Republic. Universities are creating activist teachers who in turn use SEL to reinforce measures of control on vulnerable students.

Many school teachers have given up on their traditional core clusters of reading, writing, math, history and the scientific method. During the pandemic the latest NAEP test results (2019 through 2021) show disappointing drops in academic performance for 4th and 8th grades across the nation. This is not just because of a pandemic! Teachers were failing their students even before then…No Child Left Behind became Common Core which then became Critical Race Theory. SEL is simply the tool now devised to grow student activists who will champion for a government collective. The World Economic forum makes this clear: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/07/what-is-collective-governance/

The ideology of collectivism is slavery. This was wrong in Roman times and it was wrong before the Emancipation.

If you use discrimination in an effort to remove discrimination you achieve nothing meaningful. The new abolitionist is one who maintains a firm action of inclusivity based on the character and merit of the individual. Absolutely no group of people can be thought of as monolithic because the new abolitionist creates space for the individual to learn and thrive objectively rather than subjectively.

The new abolitionist has the emotional maturity to position differing opinions as opportunities for deeper understanding. Parents know this. Sadly the teachers unions have identified teachers as the activist group to develop a society of like minded collectivist slaves.

The new abolitionist is faithful to Godly principles and knows that humankind’s imperfections and ego can harm this faithfulness. Idolatry has no place in a heart that serves God.

Our children are too precious to condemn their lives to government control. Yet this is where we are headed. Enough is enough!

Houston, We Have A God Problem

As we mere mortals reach for the stars and the moons and the galaxies, we must first ground ourselves in Truth for it is this Truth that paved our way to the stars, moons and galaxies.

God’s creation is an orderly approach to what then become the creations of men and women. Notice that there is nothing humankind can create that isn’t from an existing element which only God could create. In nature, only elements up to atomic number 94 exist; to go further, it is necessary to synthesise new elements in the laboratory. All synthetic elements are unstable, but they decay at widely varying rates: the half-lives of their longest-lived isotopes range from microseconds to millions of years.* Scientific methods are human made. We should not consider ourselves as God because only His creations, including you and me, are infinite.

Alternatively, the human mind is much more than a creation of God. Human kind can use the mind to imagine and act out a multitude of scenarios. The mind is chaotic and requires proper guidance. But who’s guidance? I believe it must be guidance by God. Hence the formation of the Torah, the Bible and other religious books and systems. ‘In the beginning was the Word’ means ‘at the beginning of everything, there was the entity we know as God, who embodied, and created, the rational principle on which everything is founded’. Divinely inspired Truth is the fundamental basis of human thought which lead to the natural rights ensconced in the U.S. Constitution. This is what makes us a free people in America.

Beware the man made “systems” that remove God’s meaning and purpose. Secular is non religious yet was never meant to be non God. Religion is a man made system for being with and relating to God as science is a man made system for being with and organizing God’s creation on earth. Likewise government is a man made system for organizing a community of humans. Humans are a creation of God which He saw as good. However humans have the capability of committing acts both good and bad which is why God also created boundaries by handing down The Word through prophets and articles like the 10 Commandments. This is where secularists and atheists always get stuck…The “separation” of church and state is not a clause in the Constitution. Instead the Constitution guarantees no establishment of one religion for the state or states https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/885/establishment-clause-separation-of-church-and-state … Belief in God and the individual’s practice of religion was sacrosanct.

Fix reason in her place…

We have taken this freedom for granted. We can witness this in the human chaos that is all around us. The frailty of the human spirit is reflected in the blatant rejection (“revolution”) of the boundaries of scientific methods, man’s laws and the constitutional limits all of which have been traditionalized in our secular world. This rejection has conditioned many people to believe in human made false gods such as climate change, critical race theory and party politics…Modern day golden idols shining as stars and moons and galaxies for those who worship them and attempt to control others through them. Man’s misuse of the military industrial complex is an unfortunate outcome of this Godless control.

Ground yourself by getting real with God. Place importance in objective truths. If your faith in God is weak then you are vulnerable to the evils, the false gods, the golden idols of our material world. You don’t need to follow a church or a preacher, but you do need to educate yourself with The Word by following a kind and humble path with similar seekers. God is Love, Light and the Way.

*from Wikipedia

God is For Giving

Ah the Holidays! Traditions that give our existence in the United States a meaning that goes beyond the words we know as Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and New Year. And meaning is so very important to the human species…We all know these dates exist in earthly time, and attached to these dates there are national as well as religious and family traditions, but reverence is definitely the central theme for them all.

Reverence is a showing of deep respect. The Holidays during November through December allow us to set aside time in our lives to dwell on this deep respect. But what or who are we to be respectful of or to? Think about this for a moment, if we secularize these special days then why would respect ever enter into any part of a holiday’s recognition or tradition? The truth is, these are holy days and the secular has no place in them.

God is Love

Oh sure, Thanksgiving can be about turkey, Christmas and Hanukkah about lights and gifts, Kwanzaa about community, and New Years about starting anew. We can even give a “sinister” new meaning to them as Thanksgiving has unfortunately acquired because of our ability to associate current human progress with past human realities…Hindsight is always 20/20.

But a nation needs its traditions in order to build upon its positive communal spirit. And the best way to build a positive communal spirit is to give joy and love to our gatherings. God as the “Great Creator” is the silver lining of our most profound loss and the essence of everlasting Love. To revere God is to give the greatest gift of all which is compassion. A nation that builds upon Godly traditions is at its most compassionate. Secular traditions eventually become divisive because there is no unifying principle to humble the communal spirit. Turkeys, evergreen trees, presents, candles and ball-drops are not unifying principles!

Because God is forgiving, God is for giving. Our nation’s year-end celebrations are meaningful because God has shown us the way. May we be blessed enough to know this Love, respect it, and share it always.

Where Is My Church?

I left my faith two years ago.  Before that time I was very committed to the faith of my birth, Unitarian Universalism.  Ever since my children were born I served my church in various roles: teacher, membership chair, governing board member and past president, personnel committee chair, leadership facilitator, and docent of its historic site.

Unitarian Universalism is described as a liberal religion characterized by a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning”, open to all persons, and without a creed.  Long before gay marriage became legal, we affirmed this right of passage and performed many of these unions. Born out of the Judeo-Christian traditions, the faith now preaches that Love is their doctrine.

I have come to see that my church has lost its way during this time of racial upheaval and that it is trapped in today’s climate of identity politics.  It started after the 2017 presidential election when the Unitarian Universalist Association began to promote the “Resistance”.   During that time the Faith in Action Committee became heavily focused on social justice issues like the Black Lives Matter movement and White Privilege re-education.  Now they march for the Poor People’s Campaign, everyone’s right for employment, and sustainable living wages.

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The members of Unitarian Universalism have a long tradition of being inclusive and justice seeking which aligns well with the faith’s democratic governance structure.  This method of “doing church” helped me to ground myself in governance models that are inclusive and sensitive to just action.  These models I easily applied to my role as a city councilor, and I was able to create needed change in my community of diverse hearts and minds.  However, “doing church” and “creating communities of justice” is not the same as “worship”.

Worship is the feeling and expression of reverence for a deity.  One should not worship money, a privilege, or a social cause in place of God…this will cause emotional suffering when one comes to understand that the object replacing the worship of God is fallible.  I see this happening in our larger cities…Government is expected to solve all of humanity’s problems.  The more troubling thing is that most if not all churches now are misguided in their worship practice.

Like Jesus turning the tables of the greedy and manipulative money changers at the Temple, we must shake ourselves awake to our true purpose as caring individuals spreading the Good News that God wants us all to know; our Creator loves us and our prayerful good deeds lead directly to Him.  This would be my church and my proudest affiliation.  Does this worship experience exist for me here on earth without racial creeds or social justice dogma?  Like Jesus, each of us must find our direct link to  The ever loving God.

Peace always.