Some years back I was walking with my nephew in Moscow when we came across a dead man lying in the street who had been shot by the Russian Mafia.
I pointed out to my nephew what a professional job it was. The man was dead before he hit the ground, which took a calm shot.
Obviously the world I was familiar with was not the world of my sister or Alan Dershowitz.
Someone else wrote me that the Bible was the key to America's salvation. This often goes with quotes from the Old Testament about saving the People of Israel.
That use of God gives me the chills.
This was my reply:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His Only begotten Son, who was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered unto Pontius Pilate, was crucified dead and buried.
On the third day He arose from the grave and ascended into heaven whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the holy spirit, the catholic church, the communion of saints and the life everlasting.
Amen.
The Amen means that that and that ALONE, is what I must try to believe in. It is the ONLY religion I believe in, and mostly I don't believe in that. I try to have faith the size of a mustard seed, and it is not easy for me.
CS Lewis warned against "Christianity AND ..." The second you begin to use God for a political theory, the Senior Demon Screwtape told his nephew Wormwood in letters straight from Hell, you have diverted it, done away with it.
He also pointed out to Wormwood that it made not the slightest bit of difference what the "AND" referred to. It can be an obsession with fighting poverty, but it can also be an obsession with fighting evolution.
God is not a politician. Satan is not a politician.
Screwtape, the practicing professional in damning souls, said that all that mattered was getting people off of concentrating on Christ and salvation and making them think about "the Crisis" (He specifically mentioned on great line, "Christianity and the Crisis"). Get them thinking that True Religion is about social policies like abortion or evolution or the poor.
To damn souls, said the successful old professional Screwtape, you just need to get people off of seeing Christ as a means to Salvation, and as a means to something else that they think is Good. Anything else will do.
Screwtape told Wormwood that in order to damn people, you need to make them think they have mastered salvation, and can now go on to more relevant stuff. What the "relevant" stuff is makes no difference at all.
Screwtape pointed out that the sin of gluttony has nothing to do with overeating. Jesus Christ was not a dietitian. As an example, Screwtape pointed to a very thin woman who was on the path to damnation through gluttony. She was obsessed with eating very little, and made unreasonable demands on people, especially overworked waitresses, to cater to her exact diet.
Today's vegetarian fanatics will fit very nicely into the place Screwtape has prepared for them. Gluttony is OBSESSION with food. It doesn't matter what form the obsession takes.
An obsession with using God in politics is a fine wide road to seeing Screwtape up front and personal. He doesn't care what the politics happen to be, and the damned won't either when the time comes. The obsessive pro-lifers and the socialists will be right there together.
The only thing I use God for is salvation. Jesus said stick to the Golden Rule and worry about your own soul. If the High Priest demands more, I will let the High Priest follow his Law and his scriptures where they lead him.
I am the grandson of a Methodist circuit rider. My first ancestor in America was the Reverend Alexander Whitaker, the son of a Cambridge professor. He was the first Anglican clergyman in America, arriving at Jamestown in 1609 "to convert the savage Indians." He baptized Pocahontas and wrote the first book in English in America.
His book, Whitaker's Good Newes From Virginia, is online and it is twenty thousand words long. It contains long quotes in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, all of which he had mastered. He was a very literate man, which becomes relevant below.
The Reverend Alexander Whitaker died in Jamestown before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
But as soon as the Methodist Church arrived in America, my literate ancestors left the Anglican Church and became Methodists.
John Wesley, the founder of the real Methodist Church, lived and died a High Church Anglican. In his Anglican church, the Nicene Creed was what adults use. The Apostles' Creed, which I recite above, is what children recite in the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican churches.
My literate ancestors knew that, and they chose to be Methodists.
Most Methodists were the coal miners, the frontiersmen, the people the Established Church ignored. Many of them never heard of Christ until Wesley came to them. My VERY literate ancestors joined his church. We are the children's church, the catholic church.
We knew that, too.
Wesley went out to the people the High Priests would not touch. So did Jesus.
And when Jesus spoke of the Kingdom, He never pointed to the High Priest. He pointed to the children.
All this religion stuff embarrasses the mainline preachers. So they got together recently and declared that Christianity is all about helping poor people. This is a line that was old two thousand years ago.
Some people tried that line out on Jesus. He replied, "The poor we have always with us." He then explained that He was on this earth about salvation. His concern was not about Liberation or abolishing poverty. He was more worried about what greed did to the rich man's soul than about social conditions.
Jesus did not just minister to the poor. He ate with the rich tax-gatherers.
That embarrasses the High Priests of today exactly the same way it embarrassed the High Priests who spoke to Jesus. For today's leftists clergy the rich to are The Enemy. Today's mainline clergy wants to be "relevant" to THIS world and stop talking about a theoretical Other World they don't believe in anyway. The High Priests love the Old Testament because it talks about history and social conditions and other "relevant" things a lot.
For the old High Priests, Jesus was monomaniacal and just plain silly. For the new High Priests, Jesus IS monomaniacal and just plain silly.
What Jesus did not say was "read the scriptures to attain salvation." What Jesus did not say was "Praise God" in the old heathen way. He said LOVE God. The God of Jesus knows who He is. He needs no reminders from down here.
God is not a dietitian. God is not a cosmologist. God is not obsessed with THIS life. A person who thinks God is about the six-day creation or taking care of one's body or changing social conditions make great fuel for Screwtape.
Jews kept reminding Jesus that the Old Testament Messiah would come to save the Jewish nation. Every time they brought that up Jesus said, in every way he could, that "My Kingdom is not of this earth."
For those who want to show how "relevant" Christianity is, the Old Testament Messiah is very useful. He came to save Family Values. He came to save America.
And Screwtape says, "That will do just fine."
For Gator
Adam Smith wrote a whole long book on the simple observation of supply and demand.
Alfred Marshall had to write another book a century later covering that simple point even better.
Two or three thousand years, at least, before Smith and Marshall wrote merchants who survived took supply and demand as the basis for all their actions. In no age did anyone think it a smart idea to take coal to Newcastle.
There is only one law simpler and more universal than supply and demand. That is the law of gravity. It took the to work out the implications of THAT one. Every merchant took the laws of supply and demand for granted, but its IMPLICATIONS were not really laid out until 1776.
Every ancient man who carried home a dead animal felt the law of gravity, but no one studied its IMPLICATIONS until Newton.
Real advanced are made by looking at reality and thinking out its IMPLICATIONS. The Church fought Galileo and Newton because of the IMPLICATIONS their clear thinking brought out.
Asking "What are the IMPLICATIONS" the most common way of stopping independent thought. Today established faith, Political Correctness, is no different than earlier established faiths in this respect.
Gator sounds like what I used to hear in graduate economics: which set of WORDS will make us prosper? He wants ANYTHING but Race.
The Genome Project predictably told us that all humans are, variously, 99.999% (Bill Clinton), 99.8%, 97.5 % ore whatever you like, alike. That means that every moron, every congenital criminal, the strongest and the weakest, the healthiest and those who will die at age ten, are 99.99999999999% or whatever figure you care to throw out, alike.
In other words, it means nothing.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, the most accurate economic indicator of the wealth of nations is the color of the skin. All ancient civilizations that went down and STAYED are now brown-skinned. You can wake up in a country after a drunk, take a look at the skin color around you, and tell me what the country's standard of living is.
Whatever the magic words may be, no brown skinned country ever seems to invoke them. As I said, California is turning brown and its economy has begun its steady slide beyond stagnation down to the level of a brown-skinned country.
The environment will be saved ONLY if we colonize space or make other technological breakthroughs. Environmentalists are already screaming about what Brazil is doing to the rain forests. yet they insist that the future ideal is a "new race" like Brazil.
If you think nature has been crushed so far, just wait until a world-wide Mexico, or even a Japan, which is still killing whales, gets hold of it. Have you looked lately at what China and Southeast Asia are doing to the air?
If they are 99.99999% like us, that .000001% must be a humdinger.
I don't have to prove cause and effect here. This is an OBSERVATION that is as universal as gravity or supply and demand. Once again the only argument against it is its IMPLICATIONS.
In the post-petroleum age, we need INNOVATION. There was a time when Japan was expected to outrun the West. All it did was what any observation of the Orient would have predicted: Japan caught up and stopped.
Sort of like the people who refused to see supply and demand, or, for God's sake, GRAVITY, sat around making up gigantic theories conjuring with Aristotle and Company which are laughable today.
So now we are talking about the end of oil while we are dedicated to getting rid of the only race which forms FUNDAMENTALLY CREATIVE societies. We can get rid of the race and conjure some words to take care of it all.
In fact, two Japanese heads of state got into trouble attacking the flow of Mexicans into the US. They both complained this inflow was lowering the average IQ here. That is simple arithmetic, but both were condemned as only an established church can condemn simple reality.
Most people could not understand this Nipponese concern. But it was important to Japan that the flow of technological advance they could see continue. A brown America was a threat to THEIR future.
Orientals tend to look at out obsession with their IQ scores as humorous. To them an IQ test if a puzzle. They are good at puzzles and they go to school twelve hours a day from Kindergarten to learn things by rote and to learn to solve puzzles.
This won't do much good in a post-petroleum world. That requires societies that can CREATE, not just ADAPT.
Naturally, in just such a time, our established religion is dedicated to doing exactly the wrong thing:
AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS, ASIA FOR THE ASIANS, WHITE COUNTRIES FOR EVERYBODY!
"It is said that there is this RACE problem. They say this RACE problem will be solved when the third world pours into EVERY white country and ONLY into white countries."
"The Netherlands and Belgium are as crowded as Japan or Taiwan, but nobody says Japan or Taiwan will solve this RACE problem by bringing in millions of third worlders and quote assimilating unquote with them."
"Everybody says the final solution to this RACE problem is for EVERY white country and ONLY white countries to "assimilate," i.e., intermarry, with all those non-whites."
"How long would it take anyone to realize I'm not alking about a RACE problem? I am talking about the final solution to the BLACK problem?"
"And how long would it take any sane black man to notice this and what kind of psycho black man wouldn't object to this?"
"But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of genocide against my race, the white race, Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am ANAZIWHOWANTSTOKILLSIXMILLIONJEWS."
They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.
"ANTI-RACIST IS A CODE WORD FOR ANTI-WHITE."
When Jenner proved the effectiveness of vaccination every Anglican pulpit in London rang with denunciations of his heretical procedure. When will Established Churches STOP being so predictable?
Someone said that since I was a Reagan appointee I should say something about Reagan.
The problem is that asking me about the Reagan Administration is like asking a minnow to give you a General Theory of Ocean Currents.
But after thinking about it, I came up with one thing I can talk about that relates to Reagan as a man and my personal experience. I played the Naive Southerner. Reagan played the Dumb Irishman.
When I saw high officials in Washington, the only boss I ever had who understood why he dragged me along was John Ashbrook. One of my bosses would always say, "Bob's doing good work, he deserves to come along."
The idea being that since Bobby had been a good boy, he couldn't take him to see an elephant but he could take him to see a Secretary of Defense.
So how did I react to this?
I was playing a kind of village idiot. There is a smart guy who would always show people how dumb the village idiot was. He would take people to watch while he offered the village idiot the choice between a great big nickel and a tiny dime. The idiot would always choose the big old nickel and the guy would get a good laugh.
Finally someone took pity on the poor village idiot and explained him that the tiny dime was worth twice as much as the big, shiny nickel.
The village idiot replied, "But if I ever take the dime, he won't offer me any more nickels."
I got a lot of nickels. I chuckled all the way to the back.
When comic characters made fun of Reagan by portraying him as dumb and kind of harmless and helpless, nobody laughed harder at them than Ronald Reagan did.
You see, he was laughing at them from his residence inside the White House.
That's one hell of a nickel.