Thursday, February 2nd, 2006

                                                 Spiritual IQ

     Often we see people on the news who we know are smart, but who think, believe, and say dumb things.  "Public education is a great boon to America.",  "The ice caps will melt within the next century, and life as we know it will be destroyed."  "More government spending will help."

     High IQs have thoughts that reflect reality.  The more that our thoughts do not reflect reality, the dumber we functionally are.

     Spiritual reality is simple.  God, the Father Almighty created Heaven and earth.  He had one Son, Jesus Christ, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. He was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.  On the third day, He rose again.  He ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.  He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His Kingdom shall have no end.

     The more our thoughts differ from that, the less well our minds will work.  Our spiritual IQ will drop.  That paragraph is "home".  The farther from home we get, the more likely it is that we will be lost. 

     Soon, those who get too far away from home are stuck living the bestial kind of life where they have to endlessly lie to justify stealing from their neighbors.  Soon, they end up accepting the inevitability of having to kill their neighbors, starting with the unborn and damaged. 

     Soon, they are dumbed down so far that they can't even tell how stupid they've become, every thought propped up with lies.  They've no hope at all except for the possibility of stealing even more from those around them.

Monday, February 6, 2006

                       Public schools' basic lesson:  we love money more than children.

     Usually, youngsters discover that some public educators hate them when they realize that they aren't learning anything in school.  They see that every school has a library, and that hardly any children are able to check out or read its books.  The brighter ones understand that school libraries exist for two reasons, to provide jobs for librarians and funds to buy books to enrich authors and publishers who are politically correct.

     Children can't understand why they have to ride busses for an hour or so a day to get back and forth to school.  They don't know why they have to lug huge, new, bone-warping textbooks.  They can't understand why they aren't learning as much as students in other countries.

     They can't understand why so many of them are put in "special" classes, unaware that the increased funding that accompanies "special" students is more important than what's best for mere children.

     Pay and benefits are so good that many "good" teachers become part of the mire.

     There are two types of parents, independent thinkers and apple-polishers.  Apple-polishers do whatever teacher says.  That way, they can help their children get jobs as teachers. 

     They willingly join groups and committees to fight against any meaningful reform.  They say they "understand" and are "sensitive to the needs of others".  Their children learn to be apple-polishers, too.  It is rare, and maybe impossible, for such people to love their neighbors enough to Heaven.

     To be sure, we have to love those in public education, even as they work to extort more money from us while turning our children into illiterates.  Understanding how desperate and insecure they are makes it easier.

     Many of them are beyond salvation.  They are so mired in striving for shorter hours, money, benefits, and increased tenure protection that they can't see the higher truth beyond.

     Since we can't reach them, all we can do is encourage people to understand them.  

Tuesday, February 7, 2006

            It's bad that good medicine is carefully controlled to maximize elitist incomes.

     One of history's greatest inventions was the first antibiotic.  Made from bread mold, it had miraculous healing powers.  Antibiotics have done more to improve human health than any other invention.

     So, why are antibiotics so hard to obtain? 

     Since antibiotics keep people alive, they can be sold at high prices.  Rather than simply let people go to drugstores and buy antibiotics, a distribution system has been legislated into a cash cow for all those allowed to participate.

     Instead of market freedom, a very successful campaign continues to convince the more gullible people that free access to life-saving drugs is bad for them.  "If people take too many antibiotics, germs will become immune to them, and we will all die."  An amazing number of otherwise intelligent people believe that.

    It's just not true.  In South America, antibiotics were long available over the counter.  No needless deaths were reported.

     Antibiotics were first made from bread mold.  Some diseases are cured with a mold that often grows on oranges.  It would be interesting if one of the readers of these columns had any experience in actually curing illness with home-grown antibiotics.

     It would be important to find out.  Lives depend on it.  No group of people has less disposable income than young parents.  When their children get sick, they can't just go to the drugstore and buy antibiotics.  They must first pay a doctor for access to medicine to cure their children.  If they had some cheap bread mold. . . . 

    The same economic interests make sure that similar difficulties exist when people are in great pain.  Millions of people suffer needlessly because they can't go to the drugstore (which is why they're called that) and buy what they need to feel better.

     While the pain imposed by our governments isn't usually as agonizing at that inflicted by Pontius Pilate, an earlier government control freak, our response should be the same as the founder of our Church.

     Easier said than done.    

Thursday, February 9, 2006

                                              Looking for ultimate truth.

     Truth is hard to find.  A simple statement like" one plus one makes two " is always true in the abstract but is never true in reality.  One apple plus one apple are never exactly two apples because molecules are always leaving the apples at different rates.  We know that because apples have an odor. 

    It may be true that "one apple and one apple are two apples at absolute zero", but that presupposes that they will still be identifiable as apples.

    Once we see the difficulty of finding "one", we see that everything based on "one" is always changing.  Even "one dollar plus one dollar makes two dollars" is suspect because the value of the dollars are changing every minute.  By the time we've said the second "one dollar", it's value has changed.  On one hundred different exchanges the dollar may have, or will have, dozens of different values. 

    Catholic Fundamentalists do not really care about the general or specific of such things.  A good example of ultimate truth for Catholic Fundamentalists is "No one needs any more tattoos."

Monday, February 13, 2006

                                                       People

     We think we see ourselves in a mirror.  But, if we are disfigured in an accident, our reflection does not reflect the fact that we are the same person we were before the accident. 

     If we have renounced sin between one mirror viewing and the next, we are totally different, but our reflection appears to be the same.

     Appearances, then, are always deceiving.

     What are we?  Catholic Fundamentalists think that each human being is a program with free will and the ability to replicate.  Our program was complied out of all the material we received from all of our ancestors.  It was compiled at the very instant of our conception by as many angels as were needed to do such wonderful work.

     Our intellect (individual programming abilities) was draped around the soul that sprang into being at conception.  Our minds and bodies were made out of minerals absorbed from the outside. 

     We each have different ideas about how to get along with other free-will creatures.  It helps to understand that we are not dealing with what a person appears to be, but with their soul, the invisible nucleus of their being.  Souls are targets in an ongoing war.  Each is surrounded by a cloud of spirits working to lead it one way or another.

     Most of our fellow free will creatures do not understand that each of our souls is a smaller image of The Programmer. 

    "Ye are as Gods", Scripture says, and so, of course, we are.   We have free will and a life with no end.  Worldly people don't want to hear much about eternal life.  Their concern with created things keeps them from thinking, saying, or doing things that may be seen as "extreme" or "radical" to other people with similar priorities.  There's no other way to move into the Kingdom of God.

     When we encourage others to move toward The Kingdom, we want to understand, but not be silenced by, their outward attitude.  All of us are souls; all of us are, to some degree, lost; and all of us need to move closer to Our Father, Who is in Heaven.

     A short verse sums it up: 

                        "Behind each face a mind.  Within each mind, a soul

                        Who's crying out for God to make it whole."

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

                              To hit the target, keep your head in the clouds.

     We've all seen pictures of the egg-sized cloud of electrical discharges that moves around in our mind as we think about first one thing, then another. When people talk, one cloud of electrons communicates with another. 

     When we think we're talking to a flesh and blood person, the flesh and blood is a smokescreen disguising the real person, the soul, living within.

     Worldly people spend a lot of time and money altering the appearance of the skin.  Some spend an inordinate amount of effort expanding and contracting the underlying tissues.  Beneath all that is the soul, each surrounded by a cloud of charged particles with which information stored in the brain is accessed.

     When we try to convince someone of something, we are actually trying to get through to the soul beneath the cloud of charged particles.  The only reason to look respectable is so that the people we're talking to think we're plausible.

     In the late 1400s, the one of the holiest men in Spain was a cave-dwelling hermit who was to become Cardinal Ximines, advisor of Ferdinand and Isabella.  They wanted someone they could trust, and the simply-dressed hermit was the man who could inspire their souls with a love of God and Church.  His advice was so good that they ended up with Spain and much of North, Central, and South America.

     If we are to have an effect, we must be believable as we try to alter the arrangement of thought particles in the minds of listeners, changing them to openness toward God and His Kingdom.

     Changing minds is a little like shooting at a clay pigeon made of a fast moving cloud with another, faster cloud.  In an argument, we have to know where the charged particles from the other party are going, get our own cloud there first, and neutralize them.

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

                                                         Iraq

     Pope John Paul II was opposed to the Iraq war.  There were over a million Chaldean Catholics in the region, and Saddam needed them to add to his bloc of minorities.  One of the Pope's fears was that if the majority Shiites took over from Saddam's minority Sunnis, the Chaldean Catholics would be exterminated the way Armenian Christians were slaughtered by Turkish Muslims. 

     The Pope was not the first to be concerned with Iraq.  When the Roman Empire was at its height, it was attacked from the area.  Roman armies were sent to the Tigris-Euphrates valleys several times, but couldn't permanently pacify the region.  Many legions were wiped out.

     Julius Caesar had a grand plan to clean up the area.  He sent a vast army east, with the intent of making Parthia (one of the old names for the region) safe.  His plans were to leave Rome on the 20th of March and catch up to the legions already on the march.  Five days before he was to leave, he was assassinated on the Ides of March. 

     Were the seemingly idealistic Brutus and his co-assassins bribed by Parthians?  An awareness of how European history has long been influenced by bribes from the Middle East inclines many to wonder if Bush's most vocal critics are getting money transferred into secret accounts from the same place. 

     Al Gore, for instance, is one of Mr. Bush's most strident critics.  His father, a senator from Tennessee, worked very closely with Armand Hammer, who is said to have made great personal profits from his support of Lenin, who, according to one observer "had Senator Gore in his pocket".  Interesting link at: http://crm114.com/algore/hammer.html    

     After considering Mr. Gore's shameless pandering to those who funded 9/11, one may wish to ask two questions:  Would the Saudis have paid Mr. Gore 5, 10, or 15 million into a secret account to publicly appease them?  A hundred pounds of gold?  Does the apple fall far from the tree?

     While no one could compare George Bush with Julius Caesar (the infinitely more brutal Caesar killed or enslaved and sold three million people in what would become France), he certainly has the same keen eye for identifying and trying to neutralize a source of damage.

     Iraq and Iran are now more dangerous than in Caesar's time.  They are at the center of a vast, multi-country area whose theocracies have destroyed their own economies and whose peoples' only hope of gain is to take over larger pieces of the world. 

     Bush's efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are analogous to planting seeds of radioactive material into a tumor.  When the sick tumor of tyranny is destroyed, the body has a chance to heal itself.

     It only takes a few people committed to freedom to overthrow tyrannies.  Mr. Bush has given freedom-lovers a haven from which they can expand their influence to set their peoples free.

     May God help them do so.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

                               Who are the Iraqis?  Why are they important?

     Those who take the Bible seriously know that the Book of Genesis makes it clear that all human beings are descended from Shem, Ham, and Japeth.  Genetically, the Iraqis are, like most Caucasians, sons of Shem.  Middle-eastern people have appropriated the name "Semite", but its application extends to all Caucasians.

     The Arabs, south of the Semite countries, are descended from Abraham and Hagar, a Hamite.  Abraham had many other Semite children besides Isaac. They spread out from the area of the Caucasus, which is why white people are called Caucasian. 

     Advancing into Europe, they drove out the earlier Hamite and Japhethite settlers who'd named many of the towns and villages they settled.  As many as a hundred Scottish place names, for instance, contain the syllable "bal", or variants thereof, showing that their inhabitants were once Hamites.

     Ancient legends trace many European lineages to Japheth.  They commemorate Japhethite settlements that often replaced Hamite domination.  Over time, the European Japhethites were replaced by Semites.  Semites also moved into India, dominating all but the Southeastern part.  Ur of the Chaldees was close to the Semite point of origin.

     Iraqi people are closely related to those of modern Europe, Pakistan, Russia, Afghanistan, the Americas, and India.  They are, in fact, near the geographic center of the Semite Empire in Eurasia.

     Their present religion has forced them into unity with the Semite/Hamite Arabian people to their south.  This is an unnatural condition, reflected partly in the divisions between Sunni (Semite) and Shiite (half-Hamite).  Eventually, they will rejoin their Semitic brethren and the religion they embraced for the first 700 years of the Christian era.

     These were the people from whom the Three Wise Men came, the first to know that the Kingdom of God had arrived in the person of their distant cousin.  St. Eusebius wrote in the 300s that he had personally seen a letter to the Parthian King, Abgar, sent to him from Jesus Christ.

     American and European troops there are showing our Iraqi brothers and sisters that there is a better way than tyranny, and that way reflects that which Abraham, Moses, and the Founder our Faith received from God.

Monday, February 20, 2006

                                    Breaking free from conventional reality.

     One of our most difficult problems is to find truth.  We are surrounded by lies, we are swimming in lies, and we listen to lies.  Often, hopefully unwittingly, we tell lies.  We are stuck in lies like fish in water.

     St. William of Ockham may not have been clear when he said "entities should not be multiplied needlessly", but he was made more readily understandable when the passage was restated "cut away everything unnecessary."

     We can find truth by cutting away almost everything we've ever learned.

     When we understand that God can program in many dimensions, we increasingly see how believable the six day Creation recorded in Genesis is.  Why would God waste time?  If He is powerful enough to make the world in six days, why would he have taken twenty billion years?  Frankly, the other side's long timelines become more ridiculous the more we explore His ability to program actual particles. 

     Once we see that He could have programmed all things and put them in motion, and that He did so in such a brilliant way that no human being could prove He did it, the Catholic Church helps us see that He went to all that trouble to give us free will.

     The steps to breaking free from conventional reality are these:

          1.  Think about God as a powerful programmer who programs what we see as actual particles.

          2.  Consider that God could have programmed the nine orders of angels as sub-programmers who help Him with programming needs.

          3.  Put the thought in your mind that you are so important that He did all this so that you could have the joy of finding Him.

          4.  Understand that it's possible that He wanted you to be reading this now so your own faith would be deepened to help lead others to Him.

          5.  Ask others if they think that God has the ability to program actual particles, program their motion, and compile things and movements in such a way that we could never prove He did it.

          6.  Wonder if He put into place a special organization, and appointed a leader and structure to replace itself for all the time the Program would run, to tell people of every age about God and his love for us.

     Then, we simply pray. 

     Every day.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

     It's easy to get angry or upset about people who keep us from getting ahead.  We should be thankful for such people.  Catholic Fundamentalists think of them as "levelers". 

     As their name implies, they try to keep anyone else from getting ahead, usually by mandating vicious levels of taxation and regulation.  Such personalities often gravitate to occupations where they are able to control the activities of others.  Saying "No." gives them great joy.

     Welcome such people into your life.  Love them like a brother.  That helps cure our own excessive vanity and may help them see that there is another Kingdom.

     Our job is to get into Heaven, not to have our own way.  Loving spiteful, mean-spirited people is a sure way to build up Heaven Credits. 

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

                                    They kill the ones they say they love.

     Many conservatives appreciate principled, traditional positions that are pro-life and for lower taxes.  Those who propose such legislation are routinely demonized by a few who are not pro-life and want higher taxes.  

     When traditionalist legislators take stands, they are viciously criticized.  For instance, "Our representative is against homosexual marriage, therefore he may be a homosexual."  This sleaziness of this kind of thinking is seen by asking ourselves "Are Mothers Against Drunk Driving  closet alcoholics?”  “Are those against cruelty to animals sadists at heart?”  “Are those of us who support Israel actually anti-Semites?” 

    Such legislators are correct on a higher level, as well.  A quick google search of "homosexual life expectancy" shows several studies indicating those life spans are twenty to forty years shorter than those of heterosexuals. 

    Traditional legislation on marriage does not encourage life-shortening activities.  Such legislators are not killing people by popularizing dangerous activities. 

     It is a mystery why those who encourage, for instance, homosexual marriage do not value the lives of their neighbors enough to encourage abstinence from life-shortening practices.

     Such people are concerned mightily about largely imaginary dangers of high-fat school lunches, whole milk, Teflon, trans-fats, and ozone holes. 

     In many schools, leftists work to put pro-homosexual, life-shortening agendas into the curricula.  At the same time, the very same people complain bitterly about pop machines and whole milk in those same schools.  School pop machines in schools and whole milk in cafeterias have not been proven to have shortened anyone’s life by twenty to forty minutes, much less by twenty to forty years.

     Not one leftist has ever written to advise changing or abstaining from sexual practices that shorten lives.  Rather than loving their neighbors, leftists use them as cannon fodder in their war on life.   

     Like Marxists who deny Stalin's gulags, and Nazis who deny Hitler's death camps, modern leftists refuse to admit the relationship between homosexual activity and early death.  They’d rather that their neighbors be politically correct, even if it costs them half their lives.

     In this bizarre battle for souls, those who are dying at needlessly young ages turn for help to those who encourage the practices that are killing them.  And, those to whom they turn pretend to help, even as the deaths increase.

     If we ask how those who support early deaths are different than murderers, we are met with claims of how sensitive they are. 

     Still, the deaths go on.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

                  Justice is rarely found.  The pretence of justice, always.

     Some ask "What would Jesus do?"  when they seek justice.  When standing in front of Pontius Pilate after a kangaroo court had passed sentence, Jesus did not look for justice.

     He could have asked His Father for legions of angels to insure that justice would be done.  He didn't.

     He didn't expect justice.  There's no reason we should, either.  We can expect judges and juries to make decisions, but if we expect them to be just, we delude ourselves.  To be sure, sometimes justice is done.  Sometimes, it isn't.  Justice is random.

     What passes for justice is more consistent in tyrannies.  To tyrants, everyone is  always guilty. When long-time, faithful communists were sent to the death camps, they were unanimous in crying out:  "If only Stalin knew.  If Stalin knew, he would set us free.  Stalin would be sure that we were treated justly."

     Older prisoners snickered.  Some had been judges who were suddenly turned into criminals and sentenced to the camps.  There, they met the people, some of whom had been judges, whom they had sentenced to the camps.  Some would live to see the people who'd sentenced them show up in chains.  They knew Stalin knew exactly what was going on, and, in fact he did. 

     Stalin ruled by terror.  His terror would be stronger if it fell randomly, but it had to operate in a system that looked like its random nature was validated by an operating court system.  Simply assassinating people on the street wasn't enough.  It had to look good, it had to be inescapable.  No one could have any hope.  Soon, no one did.

     Every ever-strengthening state rules by fear.  Property is confiscated by governments and by political favorites; people are jailed for using the same drugs their grandparents could buy freely at drug stores; children are taken from parents to give the foster-care system more access to funds; students are sentenced to "special" education to provide funding for those who sentence them; prison populations rise; sentences for non-violent crime increase; new crimes are invented; more policemen are hired; more jails are built.

     Businesses worry that OSHA, whose hunger for fines can drive its inspectors to find something wrong with anything, will destroy them with a random inspection.  Medical practitioners worry that their records will land them in jail.  Property owners are haunted by the fact that any environmental, developmental, or government agency can find reasons for confiscation. 

     Everyone with something to lose worries that the power of the state will descend upon them. Most are deluded by the notion that they can expect fair treatment.

     The ways to be hurt by justice:

          1.  To expect it. 

          2.  To be angry when you don't get it.

          3.  To try to hurt those who deny it to you.    

     To profit from a lack of consistent justice:

          1.  Don't expect it.

          2.  Be happy when you don't get it, for you are being treated as Jesus was.

          3.  Pray for the strength to love those who denied it to you.

     Catholic fundamentalists try to live in God's Kingdom, Christ's proclamation of which is Thursday's Third Luminous Mystery of the Rosary.

Friday, February 24, 2006

                                  Fraud costs all who participate in it.

     Dante teaches that those who intentionally bear false witness for personal gain go to places of increasing pain.  Pain increases are proportional to the harm they've done, which increases with the complexity of the fraud they perpetuate.   Catholic fundamentalists try to quantify the process.

     We can classify a few lies of which we are made aware.  A colossal lie:  "Tsunamis are caused by global warming".  This is a lie so big that it has little credibility to anyone but the most fanatic.  But, it makes smaller, related lies (islands are disappearing beneath the sea, coastal wetlands will be uninhabitable in a few years, polar bears are disappearing, cities will drown, penguins are being blinded by the ozone hole) seem more reasonable in comparison.

     So, big, fantastic lies are as necessary to the other side as the garden variety, meat and potatoes lies.  Punishments are about the same, though the teller of the biggest whopper has sacrificed more imagination to the other side, and will reap the appropriate reward.  

     It takes very few direct liars to spread a lie.  First, of course, the Lie Committee reviews lies and clears them for dissemination.  A few years ago, the Lie Committee put forth the Global Freezing Lie. 

     They spread it around, but only half-heartedly because there wasn't much money in it. It was quickly replaced by the Global Warming Lie.  As Stalin showed by suddenly signing the non-aggression pact with Hitler, good liars have to be so flexible they can make a complete reversal the minute they are told of the new course.  Just as many weak liars (read:  people with a tendency toward truth) left the Communist Party after Stalin's stunning reversal, so many left the Environmental Movement after their stunning reversal from Global Freezing to Global Warming.

     When Lie Committee saw how much they made with the ozone fraud (scroll up to the column for January 3, 2006), Global Warming looked like the biggest bonanza.  The whole lot of them, from the Lie Committee to Media Twits to legislators and teachers of environment claptrap, obediently and immediately said that everything they'd said before was a lie and that the new lie was now the truth.

     The pseudo-intelligensia, many left over from International Communism, spread the new lie through their same friends and institutions in media, public education, government, non-government orgs, friendly businesses and all their many allies in all over the world.

     The originator of the "The ozone hole is bad, it is caused by freon, let's tax and regulate freon and make billions" lie is, for the sake of argument, in the Ninth Circle.  Those involved with the Lie Committee go there, too, along with those who do what they call "research".  A recent example is the "hockey stick", which "proved global warming", but only by not telling the whole truth.  The ones who profit from it are in the lower part of the Eighth Circle. 

     Lower on the totem pole of liars, and ending up in less painful portions of Hades, are a lie's pass-it-onners and believers.   The ones who pass on the lie are in Circle Seven.  Those who only believe the lie, even thought all they did was believe, are in the one of the upper circles, but, still in Hades.       

     Why are they condemned for merely believing?  They were given the intelligence to see through the lie, but were too lazy or cowardly to do so.  Like every human being, they were given enough intelligence to find truth (God would never give anyone too little ability to be saved) but chose not to use it.

Monday, February 27, 2006

                  Understanding cash flows helps us understand our own salvation.

     Catholic Fundamentalists look at cash flows to find both sin and the near occasion thereof.  While we have enough sin of our own to deal with, we want to be sure that we aren't getting into other sins as we develop different interests.

Partial definitions are in order:     

     1.  Government:  Earthly powers that are able to enforce, direct, and maintain cash flows from those they favor less to those they favor more.       

     2.  People:  Beings with free will who are forced to choose different cash flows to maintain the standards for which they choose to strive.  All people participate in cash flows.     

     3.  God as Judge:  He Who will judge the appropriateness of the cash flows in which we willingly participated and the effects of our participation.     

     4.  Appropriateness of cash flows:  The degree to which participating in any given cash flow joins or separates people from the Kingdom of God.             

          A.  Some cash flows in competitive markets can be good.  Agriculture, mining, construction, medicine, and manufacturing can be beneficial.  Pornography and gambling exist in competitive markets, but are always bad.            

          B.  Medical cash flows are good if they prolong life and reduce pain at the lowest possible cost so the largest number of people can receive the maximum benefits.

     Souls whose minds and bodies make a living from mandated cash flows must be very careful. 

    Consider a toll booth worker.  If he makes forty dollars an hour in a job that he has gotten through political patronage, and the job's real value is the eight dollars an hour that McDonald's and other employees who need similar skills pay for it, is the toll booth worker's soul able to be saved?  Can the souls of politicians who make such jobs possible be saved?  Can such a structure exist without overcharging taxpayers?  Is overcharging taxpayers different from stealing?

     Can the soul of a public school employee who is making two or three times what a parochial or private school worker makes, and will make as much more than that in pension, and who teaches in such a way (whole language, new math, etc.) that his students are forever more ignorant and unable to function at at capacity, be saved?

    Are any questions more important?

     We know that Jesus told the Roman soldier not to steal more than he was paid, but He also said that "if you lead a little one of mine astray, it would be better to have a millstone tied around your neck and be thrown into the sea."

     Catholic Fundamentalists assume from the above passages that the toll booth worker has a better chance of salvation, or, at least a place of less eternal pain, than the whole language teacher.