Puny god!

 

“Puny god!” 

One can hear the Incredible Hulk grunt it at Loki or Thor, both sons of Odin, a father/god.

Keeping that in mind, one can hear the same voice talking to a different son of a  father/god.

“Puny god.” 

Can’t answer prayers. Can’t feed the hungry or heal the sick – no matter the flimsy tales that comprise the miracles of G-zus. 

Miracles supposedly done 2000 years ago. None with a shred of evidence.

 

And fast-forward to now? Crickets. 

Bone cancer in children? Meh.

Eye-ball eating worms? Meh. 

Malaria? You get the picture.

 

Got a cancer victim you’re paying for? Prayer and pure chance are neck and neck for effectiveness. It is just as likely that remission is a lucky fluke than as a result of prayer. It matters not how fervent the supplication might be.  

“Puny god.”

There are lots of stock answers regarding the seeming disregard for the troubles of humanity.

War?: ‘Free will’

Hurricanes?: Punishment for exercising free will.

Plague?: Yeah, punishment again for being humans doing the ‘free will’ thing. (Not choosing to be a toady to the Lord, for example.) 

‘My will be done!’ or else it's bunions and rain-storms of blood for y'all.

Or your car keys get misplaced. Watch out!

 

Of course, all that Old Testament warrior/god stuff morphed into the sweet, loving New Testament god/son of G-zus in a peculiar unilateral, self-serving deal: Sonny-boy, G-zus, is sacrificed to ‘Itself’ for crimes against Itself by creatures It ‘created’ which acted as predicted by Itself and violated a secret law made by Itself in a secret test for obedience of the creatures which It, Itself, knew would fail the test and be expelled from paradise to suffer, toil and die just as It knew would happen. 

Huh? 

Does that story make any sense to anyone not already deluded by a god-spell?

Let’s try a different telling of the down-the-rabbit-hole tale:
‘God’ creates Adam and Eve in order to keep ‘him’ company and to know, love and worship ‘him’ as the be-all, end-all. First, he creates them in a lovely garden -  a paradise – where their every need is taken care of. Their every innocent want and desire is met by the supreme generosity of the ‘god/father’. 

Then father/god poses the pair a little problem regarding the fruit of two trees in the garden; one the tree of eternal life, the other the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  

Why? 

Surely ‘god’, the all-knowing, would already know the result of this test, so why bother?

Puny god. 

Then a talking snake (yes, a talking snake!) convinces Eve to eat the fruit of the 2^nd tree; the one of knowledge. 

(Not my first choice either, but it’s not my story.)

So, what the father/god knew would happen, happened and the father/god got supremely miffed about the very thing the father/god knew would happen. God/father kicks them out of paradise to toil and suffer and die. 

(Not to mention how it was the talking serpent (!) had access to the paradisiacal garden in the first place.) 

How nice.

Puny god.

The Pelosi 'Problem'

 

Nancy Pelosi has Landed! And left…

After her trips to Singapore and Malaysia, Speaker Pelosi landed in Taiwan at the Taoyuan Airport.

 After much hysteria ginned up by the MSM, Pelosi landed thumbing a collective nose at Beijing and President Xi.

After living on this island for more than 30 years, it must be said that the general feeling of the people on Taiwan has been understated at best. All the while that USA MSM was airing clips of military activity, there was little concern.  Xi blustered and bloviated about egregious, drastic action and the people of the Republic of China didn’t even manage a shrug. 

 

Since 1949, Beijing has threatened Taiwan. Taiwan is plenty used to hearing sabers rattling and grimaced alpha-male visages.

That is not to say that there is no threat from the People’s Liberation Army. No. There is always the threat. It’s just that the threat has been so commonplace that, like earthquakes and typhoons, the threat is simply taken as part of the fabric of life. 

 

But let’s look at this with a clear-head. If Xi wants to slit his own throat, he’s capable. He’s capable of bringing to ruin the ‘China Miracle’ of economics. He’s capable of tossing the PRC onto the rubbish heap of international diplomacy. He’s capable of risking and losing blood and treasure in a military escapade. He’s capable. The PRC is capable.

However, what will they gain other than a blasted rock peopled with die-hard insurrectionists? To be honest, Xi has little to gain and everything to lose by attacking Taiwan. 

 

Perhaps first and foremost is $$$! Taiwan is the source of loads – the lion’s share – of investments on the Mainland, second only to the USA. It’s clear; attack Taiwan, threaten Taiwan’s democracy and all financing from the USA, the E.U. the UK, Japan, So. Korea, Canada, Australia, etc, etc will be pulled.

Attack Taiwan and any of the political prestige enjoyed by the PRC will be forfeit. Beijing will be an international sick man once more.

Attack Taiwan and any diplomatic leverage would be undone. One likely response would be the recognition of Taiwan by the UN and other international organizations which have thus far balked under pressure from Beijing.

 A militarily assault would be far more demonstrative in immediate effect. It would be a gruesome, bloody folly. It is close to an impossibility for the PRC to launch a successful amphibious invasion of the island nation. It would be expensive in both blood and treasure. One need only look at the difficulty that the Russians are having in Ukraine and consider that all the Russians had to do all was drive up the road to Kiev! Comparatively, the PRC has 100 miles of ocean – the Taiwan Strait – acting as a deep-water protective moat. 

The US 7th Fleet stand on the ready nearby, as well as the Japanese navy, the So. Korean navy, the Philippine Navy, the UK Navy, the Aussie navy, etc... Not what anyone would call a ‘walk over’.

 

Moreover, should the invasion succeed, sad as that possibility is, Taiwan would be turned into a blasted rock without any commercial value except as volcanic slag. Taiwan is fortified from stem to stern and has been since the early 1950s. Pill-boxes stand at the ready on every hill-top and at every juncture. (Fact; until rather recently a hike in the mountains or a day at the beach required a military ‘hall-pass’ for national security reasons.) Furthermore, should such an all-but-impossible military invasion succeed, any of the remaining population would be a die-hard insurgency that would take a generation to subdue. 

 

Ask the Russians. Ask the Americans re: Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam.

 

Much needs be said and done in support of Taiwan. It must be stated that the situation - while superficially comparable to the Russian invasion of Ukraine – has many critical details which are critically different.

In short, unless the PRC wishes to slice its own throat (hint: it doesn't) it will continue to use the ROC as a diplomatic anomaly and its ‘situation’ as a red herring.

 

It has little choice because there is far too much Taiwan money invested in Mainland enterprises. Far too much American, Canadian, Aussie, Japanese and British money to toss in the rubbish. 

The Lion of C.S. Lewis

 

C.S. Lewis had it right. ‘God’ did not. 

Lewis chose a massive lion with the power to speak and influence hearts as his representation of the ‘Christ’ in his Narnia series. 

 

Why, then, did ‘god’ determine that the best incarnation for a proposed ‘savior’ and deliverer of a ‘New Covenant’ to rule human society should be a member of a back-water, illiterate community subjugated by the Roman Empire without status, education or influence?

 

That is an immensely vital question to be answered by any who assert to being followers of the Christ or by anyone seeking to affirm or deny the veracity of the claim made by Christians for millennia that Y’shua ben Yosef of Nazareth was divine. 

Or at the least noteworthy.

 

Imagine if the god of the Old Testament had sent a creature of the characteristics of Lewis’ Lion, Aslan to deliver the new covenant. Would that have not been a most remarkable, historic and earth-shattering event? One which historians of the age would have most assuredly documented and broadcast throughout the Roman Empire? 

Would that not have been far more miraculous and divine incarnation than an itinerate preacher – one of dozens – who purportedly proclaimed the imminence of the ‘End Times’ and an establishment of ‘God’s Kingdom’ on Earth? Would not that have been the stuff of legends, irrefutable and well-reported? 

 

Imagine a majestic, massive beast, a golden lion with the power of speech to stir the hearts of men; who epitomized goodness, justice and mercy. Imagine that ‘Y’shua ben Yosef’ was not a lowly carpenter of questionable means and without the least appreciable pedigree. Imagine that he was endowed with super-human strength and wisdom. Combine that with the reported miracles – raising the dead, healing the leprous, walking on water, changing water to wine, etc. - performed by such an exceptional and astounding creature as a talking lion. Would that not have been reported and noted by every historian of the era?

 

If a human’s imagination can conceive of such a thing in the fantastical kingdom of Narnia, why then, it must be asked, would a maximally powerful and intelligent entity such as ‘god’ not do so? Why would ‘god’ choose to place the New Covenant in the hands of rag-tag group of disciples of an itinerate preacher who made nary a ripple amongst those of his provincial area?

 

To be clear, the person known as Jesus of Nazareth from the Christian gospels is almost totally unknown and unaccounted for; the circumstance surrounding his reported birth are seriously doubted by all historians. The single entry by Flavius Josephus, a first-century Romano-Jewish historian and military leader, has been adjudged a forgery. 

 

The supposed census declared by Augustus Caesar was never declared. There is no record of such a declaration ever being made; meaning that the instigation of Joseph and Mary’s trek from Nazareth of Bethlehem never happened. The story of the birth at Bethlehem falls apart like wet bread.

 

The Slaughter of the Innocents commanded by Herod the Great, king of Judea never happened, either. Such a command must surely have raised the hackles of the People of Judea but nothing outside the Gospel of Matthew was ever reported. The Slaughter never happened.

Further, as meticulous as the Romans were in record keeping, no trial before Pilate was ever recorded and by extension, reports of neither the torture nor crucifixion of Jesus have ever been discovered outside of the Gospels. 

 

Moreover, the multitude of parallels between the Jesus story and the tales of Gilgamesh, Osiris and Mithra most definitely call into question many of the details given of Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection as simple plagiarism or generous ‘borrowings’.

 

None of these obvious vagaries would have been possible had ‘god’ been as creative and imaginative as the Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis.

‘The Pet Goat’

Anyone else remember that little children’s book? The one that George W. Bush was reading when the Twin Towers were attacked on September 11, 2001?

 

Upon being told that the US was being attacked, W sat, frozen and stunned; totally inappropriate behavior from anyone in a leadership position, let alone the Leader of the Free World.

 

Fast-forward to January 6^th, 2021, when Donald Trump sat in the dining room next to the Oval Office and watched gleefully(!) as the attack he had organized on the Capitol transpired.

 

This a very ugly juxtaposition of tableaus which should shame and enrage all Americans and all lovers of liberty, freedom and democracy.

 

The first scene revealed George Jr as an inept and cowardly leader who could not process a proper response to horrific acts of terror. The later bravado at ‘Ground Zero’ did not redeem him as a failed leader.

 

What Donald J. Trump did was far more heinous and egregious; Trump was the planner of the January 6^th attack on the Capitol. Donald J. Trump was the Usama bin Laden of that attack, no less than Charles Manson was the planner of the Tate/LaBianca murders.

 

Make no mistake, Donald J. Trump was a terrorist who planned the attack and set about organizing the attack with the help of Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and many other deputies just as bin Laden had deputies and co-conspirators, just as Manson had deputies such as ‘Tex’ Wilson.

 

The January 6^th Select Committee has laid out Trump’s culpability in plain sight. What must be inferred is that Trump’s deputies (Bill Barr, Mark Meadows, Mick Mulvaney and others) are also culpable just as Mohammed Atef was culpable as bin Laden’s deputy.

 

Further, it must be kept in mind that even those who chose to testify to the Jan 6 Committee had previously chosen to serve a monster in order to advance their own careers. Mike Pence and Pat Cipollone knew that Trump was a person of low integrity, lower ethics, devoid of a sense of civic duty, and yet they chose to serve a monster who would devour their very souls. 

 

Do not lose sight of that fact. Amid all the back-slapping and kudos for their service to the nation, do not forget that they chose to serve a monster whose lack of character led him to attack the very government that they had sworn an oath to protect.

 

Terrorist Trump

 

Let’s get this straight: Donald J. Trump masterminded the insurrection. (Not alone, of course. Donnie is a bumbling doofus and needed the nefarious help of Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn amongst other treasonous, seditious arseholes.) 

However, Donald was the one who championed the cause to over-turn the election and to over-throw the constitutionally based government of the USA. This is the point which everyone seems to tip-toe around. Donald Trump is a domestic terrorist just as the ‘Proud Boy’ Henry ‘Enrique’ Tarrio is a domestic terrorist.

 

Donnie expected his ‘militia’ to be armed and far more dangerous than they were. That explains why he had whined so vociferously about the ‘mags’ (the magnetometers, the metal detectors).

He was correct in saying that the Proud Boys et al. were not there to harm him. He knew they weren’t a threat to him because they undoubtedly had been given a wink and a nod by their ‘handler’ Roger the dirty-trickster Stone to be packing and on the hunt for the Speaker of the House, the VP and other unsympathetic congressional leaders. If the ‘militia’ was armed, then any resistance given by the paltry number of LEOs would be swept away in a trice. Fatalities were without doubt considered and factored into the planned assault to disrupt Congress.

 

Donnie demanded that this coup take place. What else explains the de facto ‘stand-down’ orders which hamstrung the National Guard, the State Police, the DC Police and the Capitol Police. 

This was tantamount to the ‘dog that didn’t bark’. If - a big if – order was to be restored, the Attorney General, the director of Homeland Security and the Pentagon would have been called and directed to quell the riot forthwith. None of that was done, of course, as the most recent testimony in the public hearing of the January 6^th Select Committee revealed.

Where was Donald Trump when the nation was under attack? He was in the private dining room watching the assault on his favorite television channel, Fox News. As former federal prosecutor, Glenn Kirschner, put it, “On January sixth, Donald Trump was not the leader of the country. He was the leader of the coup.”

 

Donnie wanted a coup and very nearly got one.

This cannot and must not be ignored. It could not be more obvious that Trump wanted the coup and wanted the election over-turned. He wanted to remain in power no matter the cost to the nation, his ‘militia’, the Congress or his Vice-President. All of that mattered not a jot or a tittle. He even refused to say that the election was over on the following day, January 7th. All that mattered to Donnie was what Donnie wanted. Donnie wanted to keep his power and his privilege, no matter the cost.

 

As a fear-inducing brain-teaser, imagine if ‘Enrique’ Tarrio, Stewart Rhodes or any of their psychotic gangs had been allowed to keep and bear fire-arms when they assaulted the Capitol? Imagine if the guy who carried the pipe-bombs had done so on that fateful day in January? It would have meant the death knell for the Republic and the imposition of martial law - as Mike Flynn recommended. 

 

Donald J. Trump must be tried as a domestic terrorist and found guilty.

Again with 'Belief'?

 

“Science is just a bunch of wild guesses.”

That was what one responder claimed. He reiterated that claim several times. “A bunch of wild guessing assholes…”

It’s more than evident that this dude had no idea about scientific method, the process of peer review and specifically what the word ‘theory’ means.

In science, theory is a technical term. In normal informal language ‘theory’ might be a wild guess. (e.g. My theory is that he wasn’t hugged enough as a child.) However, in science, the word ‘theory’ is reserved for a working hypothesis which serves as the best answer to a phenomenon. 

More precisely: “A theory is a carefully thought-out explanation for observations of the natural world that has been constructed using the scientific method, and which brings together many facts and hypotheses.”

 

We’re not talking wild guesses here. There’s a lot of problems with the lexicon of science which derails appreciation. Other examples are the words ‘fact’ and ‘law’. Look them up as they are used in discussion of science by scientists. 

Back to theories; Evolution is a theory. Yes!

So is gravity a theory.

So are cells.

So are germs.

So is the heliocentric model.

Plate tectonics is a theory.

The Big Bang is a theory.

A theory is the highest level that an idea can attain in science.

 

That said, another word that serves as a stumbling block for many is the word ‘believe’. (Cue the eye-rolls. Here we go again.)

Like many words in English, there is more than one meaning for this word. That plurality of meaning stems from context. If the word is used in an informal conversation, the word 'belief' might only mean ‘notion’ or ‘speculation’. (e.g. I believe it’s going to rain.) There is no proclamation of a deeply held tenet. It’s just an opinion based on a commonplace observation regarding an ordinary meteorological event. (Bring an umbrella.) 

However, in a discussion about religion, the word’s connotation changes with the more formal context; ‘I believe in the Bible’ indicates that that book is a basis for a deeply held religious tenet. In matters of ‘faith’, the word becomes a mighty touchstone. It takes on a technical definition specific to matter of faith much as the word ‘theory’ is a technical term in the fields of science.

 

The confusion arises when a person of faith asks ‘Do you believe in science (or evolution of the Big Bang Theory). Scientific theories do not require faith; they do not require ‘belief’ in the more technical sense of the person of faith. 

 

Whether or not you ‘believe’ in gravity, you’ll fall down.

Our Special Tribe; Wise?

 

Douglas Adams wrote a very compelling bit of allegory about a sentient puddle of water which, upon viewing its condition remarked how well the hole it was in fit it so perfectly; as if the hole was created specially to fit the puddle. Then, as the day went on and the sun rose higher and the puddle evaporated, a bit of panic struck the sentient puddle as it slowly became non-existent. 

 

The allegory was meant as a counter-argument to the proposition that the earth was made, designed, created especially for human beings. (That the planet is populated with thousands of species suited to this planet and no other seems to have gone unnoticed to the proponents of grand design.)

 

As record-setting temperatures continue to topple to new record-setting temperatures, as glaciers evaporate and melt to raise ocean levels rise, as droughts grind on causing crops to fail amid rising world hunger, it must be understood that our own species; Homo Sapiens Sapiens, a twig on the branch of the Great Ape family, is NOT the sentient puddle. This world was NOT created to fit us. Homo Sapiens have been around for fewer than half a million years. A slim trifle when compared with the estimated four billion-year existence of the earth, itself. 

 

It is estimated that more than 99% of all life on the planet has gone extinct over the course of the planet’s existence. Humans are but a slim sliver of the history of the planet of water, oxygen and life. Others of far more scientific erudition than this writer have stated that this is so and have provided reams of evidence in peer-reviewed papers.  

 

However, the hubris of humanity, bolstered by the self-serving mythology that ‘we are special’ has placed the very existence of our species at risk. We are at risk of destroying our own bio-sphere – the sentient puddle’s hole – upon which our survival depends. Excessive heat warnings are issued by meteorological agencies and scoffed at hubristically by those whose very survival is at risk. (Recall the sight of the US Senator offering a snowball as proof that climate change is a hoax!)

 

Our species is most assuredly special in many ways; others have counted the ways in Shakespearean fashion.  However, our species is less than 1% of all the species which were formed on planet earth and are now extinct. It must be kept in mind that there have been numerous mass extinction events on this planet; the end of the Age of Dinosaurs is but one such event. Another is the Permian Extinction – the Great Dying – which happened 250,000,000 years ago. It is the worst, most extensive extinction event in the planet’s history and all but eliminated life on ‘our’ blue marble. Keep in mind that there were at least 4 other mass extinction events before our little tribe split off from the bonobos, chimps and other great apes on our way to becoming Homo Sapiens about 300,000 years ago.

 

Doomsayers claim that we may be witnessing one more such mass-extinction event. Are we - Homo Sapiens Sapiens, the ‘wise man’- actually wise enough to understand how precarious our existence is on this tiny orb in space?