The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou does, except God be with him.
Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?
Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.
That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.
The wind blow where it list, and thou hears the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goes: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
Nicodemus answered and said unto him, How can these things be?
Jesus answered and said unto him, Art thou a master of Israel, and know not these things?
Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen; and ye receive not our witness.
If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?
And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up:
That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
For every one that doeth evil hates the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. ~John 3:1-20
I keep seeing this bullshit.
Now, I don't know who needs to hear this, but the Bible does not say "For God so loved His neighborhood" or "We are the light of the neighborhood" or "Love only those that love you." He said "For God so loved the world." We are the light of the world. Love your enemies, and do good to them that hate you.
What people like this Joshua Haymes motherfucker and all these other morons that are preaching a small, cruel, malevolent, merciless "god" who says love only those who are like you, are actually doing is preaching a Christless Christianity. (More to the point, these fools don't want to help people in their own neighborhoods either.)
That's wrong. If you're a Christian...well, I'm sorry, but your primary authority should be the Bible, as written, with (I think) a fair amount of acceptance of variables in, but also accounting for one's preferred translation and whatever one chooses to focus on. Everybody does that. But according to how I was taught, one is supposed to take the whole of the text into account and consider it and one's acts as best as one can. Throw in an actual educated preacher with a vocation from God if you want to, but it's not a requirement. There need be no moderator between God and Man because Jesus is (according to trinitarian Christianity) both the moderator and a part of the triune God Himself.
Christ was the sacrifice, the substitutionary atonement needed to create a bridge between God and Man, so that Man could be offered repentance instead of making offerings to God.
But you have to take it.
Man cannot Save man, only God...in Christian terms; Christ can do that.
All you need to do is ask.
No hard lifestyle or religiosity is even needed. The work's been done.
More to the point, to ignore the plain text of a verse like John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." is to literally ignore a core tenant of Christianity as I was taught it.
For fuck's sake I'm not a born-again anything. It's what I read. Did reading comprehension levels just drop off a cliff in the last 20 years or are you people being stupid because you think you'll get something for it??
In my opinion, to ignore or twist so important of a part of the Lord's Word in favor of listening to the words of small, selfish men...let alone wannabe Antichrists like Donald Trump or Elon Musk...is to put one's soul at risk.
I get it, Trump 3:16 is basically "Fuck You, I've Got Mine, And Fuck Those Radical Leftists Too!!" And the mob roars its adulation.
I get that some people think that shit feels good.
Trump preaches "Hate Thy Neighbor." More to the point, he specifically teaches people not to repent.
This, my friends, is how you go to hell.
We are not supposed to live in our baser urges and our own shit, and you don't have to be religious to understand that, but philosophy or religion is at least supposed to add structure to keeping one's body, mind and soul out of the gutter.
Yes, loving the world is hard, loving people in a general sense is often difficult. I get that. That's the entire fucking point.
If you believe in Christ, the whole fuckin' idea is we're not just doing this on our own. He is supposedly right there with us. Belief in Allah or YHWH is basically the same thing, just with different bullshit rules. Non-Abrahamic religions? Buddhism, Paganism, whatever? Doesn't matter which one, you really shouldn't need a god (or even an enlightened person) to tell you not to hurt other people!
It doesn't work that way.
Non Solum Nati Sumus. We are not born for ourselves alone. Yes, I've studied Latin and Greco-Roman Platonism and Stoicism too. There's "Western Civilization" for you, yo.
People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are, right now, trying to break America, fire the government and steal the treasury for themselves. This is not Okay. It's not Christian, and it's not right.
There is nothing conservative or Republican about any of this bullshit. This is nihilism and sociopathic behavior.
And I'm a be honest: I've seen way the fuck too many people basically asking "Can we be racist yet??" I've heard too many stories from others about people all but openly (or even quite openly) asking "Can we say slurs now??' To think that, guess what, that's exactly what's been going on here this whole time. That's the point of all this Trump shit. It's what they want!
And they want it so bad they're willing to break America to bits, destroy its culture, its government, its laws and military and society right down to sub-family units, its very Imperial position on this Earth, not to mention let Elon Musk steal their futures, their retirements, their aged relatives sole incomes and pick the money right out of they own goddamn pockets, if they think doing that will give them a chance to call a Black person a N****r.
Okay, what happens when you say it, you still get punched in the face, and then you realize you basically gave up your country and your life to dumb-fuck assholes for absolutely nothing??
'Cause that's where this is headed if nobody steps up and stops this bullshit.
But now this ain't just about you.
Elon Musk and his people tried to hack into the disbursement system for Social Security.
My Mom lives on Social Security.
Stop and think about that for a second, cuz if you're my age, I bet your Mom does, too.
Yes, she has a pension too, but it's not much...because our whole damn system is designed around things like Social Security that've been in place for 90 years (which is longer than most people now living have even been alive) and people have depended on this stuff for going on four generations now.
(And then stop and think about how the full faith and credit of America is wrecked now, not just for the rest of the world...but for its own citizens. Nobody trusts us, we can't trust our own government, etc.)
My Mom did everything right, hell, she had her own business for the first half of my life! We had money. I mean, fuck, I had a job! Between my Grandpa and my Mom I was pretty often working 30-40 hour weeks well before it was legal for me to and I damned well did it because I could and I wanted to and I wanted to have money and be able to buy my own D&D books, Nintendo games, and tennis shoes. Bought my own first car, too, with $3500 Cash.
Shit, I wish I had some of that money now. Think about that for a second. Living like that is how I was taught. How many White Americans these days can even say that??
(And if I don't want to live in an America without Social Security...)
I mean, seriously, I was pretty much the only kid in my class (if not my school) that reliably had a new pair of $100 Nikes every school year...and if they got beat up or scuffed and I had the cash, honestly I'd just go to Foot Locker in the mall over here (back when that was a thing) and get a new pair. More than one of those old or scuffed pairs of shoes got passed on to somebody who wasn't as lucky as me, just 'cause I had an extra pair in my locker and some kid didn't have gym shoes. Sometimes, they'd buff the shit out of 'em and them shoes would look brand new.
'Couple times I even helped out a kid I didn't like, because if I didn't they might get in trouble for not having proper gym clothes and was gonna get sent to the office. As often as not it was the same ones over and over and that shit stacked up until eventually they started getting suspended for it. I lived then (and live now) in Northern Michigan. Poverty sucks. It's all around here. I see it every night I work. I've been poor, too. You know what? Even then I remembered "Love your enemies."
That's how you win people over to your side. I mean, I ain't saying that I helped people 35 years ago (or yesterday) to sound like I'm a good person. I could be a dick, too, still can. The Air Force made me better at being a dick, age just made me more effective.
Being a dick is not the sole purpose of life.
This kind of stuff is how we differentiate ourselves from the goddamned Orcs, alright?
My Mom worked very hard in her life, one of the things she did with a big chunk of that work when I was a kid was send me to Christian schools, where I learned things like "For God So Loved The World..." and values like "Love Thy Neighbor."
I'm no longer a Christian, but I don't intend to see her efforts go to waste. I still have a lot of those values.
Now I help my Mom out, because she's old and she needs it and she's just an old retired person living on Social Security. We've had our issues over the years, too. Honestly I think she's still kind of annoyed that I've fucked up my life repeatedly.
I can live with that. After all, she's not wrong.
But that's what you do. Love Thy Neighbor. Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother.
Sometimes, it is good to be human.
And because too many people didn't get off they ass before, now humanity is something we're going to have to fight for, ain't it??
As is any kind of religion that's not simply a cudgel to be used by the powerful to harm and subjugate the helpless...and here's a reality check from a disabled veteran; Anybody can be rendered helpless. We're all looking the wrong way or a wrong step away from an accident, years away from age and enfeeblement. Life is precarious and precious, and so far as I know the respawn rate sucks.
And we're up against people who don't give a shit about life, not even their own. Modern "Conservatives" thrive on bitterness and lust after living in a world where everything sucks for anybody that isn't a rich man, because that makes them feel validated in their shitty beliefs.
It's more important to them, to hurt other people. They'd rather hate than eat, they'd rather kill and steal than live.
But there's a reason that Jesus said it was easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter Heaven.
In 2020, I felt a lot of bad spirits around. They all seemed to go away after the election, but after awhile it felt like all those bad spirits went into These Fucking People, MAGA's, Republicans, whatever you wanna call 'em.
This is gonna blow up.
A lot of us are gonna have to pull together, just to survive.
Stop trying to ignore or negotiate with this shit, they're going to come for us anyway.
It's going to come down to a fight, soon.
You either believe in freedom or you don't.
Слава Україна!
Peace is not the product of terror or fear.
Peace is not the silence of cemeteries.
Peace is not the silent result of violent repression.
Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all.
Peace is dynamism.
Peace is generosity.
It is right and it is duty. ~Saint Oscar Romero.
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.
I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran
So, what have we learned? What's the lesson for today, for all the never-ending days and restless nights in Oz? That morality is transient? That virtue cannot exist without violence? That to be honest is to be flawed? That the giving and taking of love both debases and elevates us? That God or Allah or Yahweh has answers to questions we dare not even ask? The story is simple. A man lives in prison and dies. How he dies that's easy. The who and the why is the complex part the human part the only part worth knowing. Peace. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO Series "Oz."
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