Just Say Why

Celebrating Jesus
by
Paul Johnson

Today I saw a sticker on the back window of a car that made me sad. Why was I sad?

The sticker was a picture of a tortured pained grimacing face of Jesus, wearing a crown of thorns. How very strange that we celebrate Jesus’ life by endlessly showing icons of his darkest hour.

Should Jesus come to earth today he would be shocked and horrified to see his icon in every Christian church being a cross depicting his final hours.

Jesus did many wonderful things during his life here on earth but we don’t idolize that part of his life. No. We idolize his death. Why?

Jesus spent his life helping educate people, helping the poor and downtrodden. He healed the sick, especially those without insurance. He fed the poor. He spent his life helping those struggling to survive.

Why don’t we make an icon that depicts something more representative of his life? Because it’s not what matters most to us. What matters most to us is what we can get out of it. We iconize the cross because it’s what’s in it for us. We got cleansed for our sins. We have a chip in the big game, now. How selfish!

If Jesus came to earth today he would be as hateful of most of the Christian churches as he was in The Book of Revelation. The churches don’t try to follow his teachings or his hopes. They don’t even support a national health plan that would help the sick. All the things Jesus tried to do like help the poor, are the political things almost every Christian church opposes. He would be so very disappointed.

And that makes me sad for all of us who have lost track of what Jesus thought was important in his life. We go to church and pretend to be good Christians, we give lip service, and all the while we’re too selfish and greedy to help  the sick and the poor. Helping means more than giving money. It means living the dream of Jesus. Oh, my, he would hate these churches as much as he did those before, and for much the same reasons. Sad!

So, tell me. When is the last time your church taught you about how Jesus died for your sins and when was the last time your church reminded you how important it is to feed the poor and heal the sick? If your church is anything like the many I’ve been to in the past ten years, every sermon is about being saved by Jesus’ death (the selfish sermons) and none have been about voting for the party that wants to clothe the poor and heal the sick.

What would Jesus think of your church? Sad!

 Loading ...

Email Silliness
by
Paul Johnson

Got a funny one in my email today and just had to share with you. The message:

AGREE  OR DELETE

If You Choose To Delete You Are Part Of The Problem

Me? I’m Passing It On.
It seems to get worse daily.

This is by a daughter of a murdered couple in   Raytown ,   MO , who had a Bible and Bookstore on   63rd street ….

Just one more example:

When I had to testify at the murder trial of my parents a week ago, I
was asked to raise my right hand. The bailiff started out “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”

I stood there and waited but she said nothing. She said “Do you?”

I was so stunned I blurted out “What happened to “so help me God’?”

She came back with “Do you?” I replied yes, but I was perplexed.

Then the judge said .. “You can say that if you want to.”

I stopped, raised my right hand, and finished with “So help me God!”

I told my son and daughter that when it came time for them to testify, they should do the same.

It’s no wonder we have so many problems in this country. If I’d had my wits about me I’d have told them that taking God out of the courtroom is only going to result in more criminals and murderers.

I don’t know what can be done about it, but it’s time for us to step up and DO something.

NBC this morning had a poll on this question.. They had the highest number of responses that they have ever had for one of their polls, and the percentage was the same as this:

86% to keep the words, 14% against. That is a pretty ‘commanding’ public response.

I was asked to send this on if I agreed or delete if I didn’t.

Now it is your turn.. It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God.

Therefore, I have a very hard time understanding why there is such a mess about having “In God We Trust” on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Why is the world catering to this 14%?

If you agree, pass this on, if not, simply delete…..

In God We Trust

A quick trip to snopes.com and we see that this email message has been started and restarted and restarted since 2004. If the sender had a shred of respect for his credibility, he really should verify things before forwarding them off to everyone under the sun. The questionable source of this should be enough to stop anyone with any self respect from forwarding, but alas, someone sent it to someone who sent it to me.

Obviously this fictitious author never took or failed in her civics and American History courses, either one which would have educated her about why we have and should maintain a separation of church and state.

Ms. Anonymous, have you even looked at countries where there is no separation of church and state and can you find even one that you would like to live in? How about looking at the obvious examples of church run governments, the Muslims. It is obvious, even for a closed minded fanatic, that the governments always end up exploiting religion to control the people. America’s creators were determined to ensure that there was a clear separation for just that reason. Read your history, sister.

Another example is Israel. Again, is that the kind of country you think America should be? God, I hope not. If it is, go there and leave us to a country that respects the wishes of our forefathers and respects the separation of church and state.

But, of course, there is no real Ms. Anonymous, it’s just a scam written up by someone with an agenda and sent out over and over for the past five years and people are still naive enough to continue to forward it.

Think! And do a little Snopes research before forwarding things that may make you look naive or worse. And, when you get tired of the stupidity and lies, it’s never too late to write the sender and point them to this post or just ask them politely to have a little self respect and to show you some while they’re at it.

Queers are Destroying Mankind
by
Paul Jonhson

The Pope says Queers are destroying Mankind. He’s Sick! Just plain SICK!

Isn’t it time for another Jesus to rise up and shine some light on the folly and poisons coming from the orthodoxy?

No better way to show your love for you fellow man than by spewing this hatred, and no better time than Christmas to show the sickness known as organized religion.

Benedict, you should be ashamed and you should be removed, but the entire organization is so corrupt that it will not clean out the posions.

Merry Christmas!

War of the Worlds Revisited
by
Paul Johnson

Hello, again, to all my loyal readers. Please forgive the long hiatus, but I am back.

While away, I heard an interesting story that I just knew you would all enjoy.

The year is 2009 and Bush and his corrupt Administration, along with almost all the Conservatives in DC have left office and America is looking forward to a fruitful and prosperous recovery from the latest Conservative government, even worse than the last one. But, the optimism is short-lived.

As it turns out, Earth is invaded by aliens from other worlds, here to satisfy their need for our resources. These new invaders are far superior to us lowly humans and can predict and thwart any attack we have planned. Before long, all humans are rounded up and pushed off to the far reaches of the planet to try to eek out an existence without sufficient space or resources.

More than half the population die in the first few years and only by the work of the new rulers are some humans saved.

We try to negotiate with the rulers and plead for humane treatment, but always hear the aliens say, “so what, they’re just humans.”

We humans realize that our new rulers are far superior to us intellectually, but lack the simplest of morals. How could they be so insensitive to our basic needs. When new resources have been found around our human colonies, entire towns were simply eradicated of the troublesome human presence.

A most morbid event happens every spring. A few of the more aggressive of the aliens single out some of the most educated and healthiest of the humans and free them, only to hunt them down and murder them in cold blood.

We humans can look at our new leaders and know in our souls that we have the upper hand when it comes to morals. These new leaders know nothing about treating others as they would like to be treated.

What kind of morbid creatures would decimate entire populations of lesser creatures just to have room to exploit the environment? How sick and twisted must these aliens be to hunt down and kill the most promising of our species. What kind of morbid immoral superior race would say, “so what, they’re just humans?”

Well, I’ll tell you. The kind of superior race that is so morbid and immoral is the human race. These things that we would all recognize as reprehensible and ruthless being done to us are things we have learned to ignore when we do it to other species.

When God gave us dominion over the Earth, he didn’t exonerate us for terrorizing and murdering lesser animals for our morbid pleasure. He gave us this Earth to respect and honor and take care of. Do you think God is proud of his children when he sees what we have become? We can fool ourselves all day long about how noble it was to attack Iraq, but we all know in our hearts that God knows the truth and is horrified by our actions.

We are polluting and destroying the Earth, the gift He gave us, every time we fire up that ol’ gas-guzzling SUV, and He knows we know and that we continue to do it anyway.

He sees the hundreds of thousands of people that die every year due to lack of health care and know that it’s our greed and lack of morals that makes it happen. Would God love a national health system for America or would He prefer to see our children die?

Oh, we see ourselves as so intellectually superior but in reality, we’re no better than those monsters who invaded the Earth for our resources. It’s time to wake up and put things in perspective. It’s time to get Progressive.

Where Do You Get Your Morals?
by
Paul Johnson

Let’s start by considering two people who we would agree are moral and two who we wouldn’t consider moral and see what shakes out.

Mike and Marv are two moral people. Mike goes to church regularly, and has been brought up getting his morals from the church. It’s the Golden Rule and the 10 Commandments that he lives by.

Marv goes to church regularly and feels that his morals mesh well with the church-taught morals, but feels that it’s important for him to know “why” some things are moral and others are not.  He says that understanding “why” helps him better decide the morally correct decision in areas not so well defined by the Bible.

Mike says that his Bible tells him what he needs in order to make decisions, and if he can’t find it, he can always seek guidance from elders in his church. He would never consider deciding on his own without considering his religion.

Now let’s consider Billy and Bobby. Billy is devoutly religious and knows that he’s doing the wrong thing but just “can’t help” it when he’s doing immoral things. He knows that being gay is wrong but he can’t help his homosexual inclinations, though he suppresses them as best he can. He also knows that the man is the king of his domain and his wife better just succumb to his demands or he has the support of God in his brutality.

Bobby was raised in a religious family but feels that his church is persecuting him and his friends for being gay. He says if God made them gay, then the church has no right to condemn him.  He wishes he wasn’t gay but he feels he is who he is and is healthier for accepting the facts.

Which of these people would be better able to make moral decisions and which would have difficulty?

Obviously, Mike admits that he is unable to “make” moral decisions on his own and must rely on moral decisions defined thousands of years ago and rewritten countless times. Mike has never exercised his moral decision making process. What kinds of decisions does he make on a daily basis? Basing his morals on his book, how often does he apply the wrong moral to a situation? Of all the Mikes I’ve known, there aren’t any that I would trust to make a moral decision on their own.

Marv would certainly do better at making moral decisions as he has demonstrated a desire to understand the issues and has a demonstrated experience at making moral decisions.

How about Billy the wife beater? He can justify every awful evil thing he does by following the letter of the religious laws while not understanding or caring about the intent. How would you feel about having someone like Billy on a jury?

How about Bobby? Does his religious upbringing make him better at moral decisions? Since he has abandoned them, I’m inclined to say no.

How about if we take someone who is really awful and who confesses to not having a religious moral compass? Stalin comes to mind. He was responsible for millions of deaths and murders. We certainly wouldn’t want him making moral decisions for us. We know who he is.

Mike, on the other hand, frequently makes moral decisions involving people around him. Mike may even be a president of some third world county. Then again, so may Billy. Their religious decision making process is not only broken but outright destructive. We would be less inclined to accept Stalin but could be worse off still with either Mike or Billy.

The defining difference between someone good at making moral decisions and someone bad is the obvious criteria, knowledge and experience.  Dogmatically following a religion’s moral decisions makes us really lousy at making moral decisions. Only when we understand the premise of the morality we find in our religions or elsewhere, can we be good moral people.

In other words, you don’t become more moral by going to church, but you certainly could be less moral.

Capital Punishment and Justice
by
Paul Johnson

So, it’s just a coincidence that the Bush Administration has decided to wait until now to prosecute bad guys #1, #2, and #3, all responsible for 9/11. (By the way, I thought Bush was responsible for failing to protect us from 9/11, but that’s another story.) So, if we ignore the unreliable nature of tortured confessions, and ignore the totally unethical and deceptive Bush Administration, and ignore all the questions about how Saddam (oops, I mean Osama) has gotten EVERYTHING he demanded from the US, ignoring all these things, if we find the bad guys guilty and everyone really believes it, how do we punish them?

On another note, there has been new evidence discovered around the finding of the latest dead victim of the Nevada UNR serial rapist. The charity fund to help find the poor missing girl is now redirecting their efforts from finding the girl to exacting “justice”.

In yet another news story, there have been hundreds of deaths every year caused by greed in the medical industry. Back when our country was young, and for thousands of years before that, when someone killed or crippled a friend or neighbor or customer through greed or stupidity, we felt obligated to ensure that the victim and his family were taken care of.

So, what is justice? I should remind you that justice is not, in any way, the same as revenge. Revenge is a lousy moral trait. No amount of killing or suffering will ever bring back someone’s ability to walk or live and breath.

What is capital punishment? It’s nothing more than revenge, plain and simple.

Electrocuting someone to death doesn’t bring back loved ones, it only causes more pain, suffering, and death, and not just for the hopefully correctly convicted convict, but for his friends and family as well. And why should we care? Because we’re better people than that.

The Death Penalty does not exact justice, but only revenge.

Pay attention to the number of people on death row and in lifetimes of incarceration who have recently been  found innocent. Imagine how many have already been put to death who were also innocent. In these cases, the “justice” in the form of revenge, has become murder, cold blooded murder on our parts. That’s not something we want to be a part of.

So, what is the purpose of our penal system if not for revenge? I suppose everyone can answer that. Our penal system is supposed to serve two purposes, first, it acts to discourage wrong-doing through fear of the consequences, and the second is to protect society from the bad apples.

In the first case, the term penal system is incorrect. What we really need to call it is a re-education system. The best way to ensure that convicts, innocent and guilty alike, turn to crime when they leave the penal system is to fail in our efforts to rehabilitate or re-educate them.

In the second case, the penal system isn’t intended to reform or re-educate criminals, but to prevent them from doing further harm to society.

In neither of these cases is “Penal System” the correct solution. No wonder it doesn’t work.

So, we seem to have a pretty good handle on what “Justice” is not. But what, exactly, is it? How, exactly do we reform our penal system into a correctional system?

Looking at the three examples in the beginning of this essay, we have three overlapping solutions to three very different crimes, and yes, malpractice is a crime.

#1. Will fear of death prevent religious zealots from trying to infect the rest of society? I guess that’s pretty obvious, but needs to be stated. Punishment, especially the death penalty, does not discourage the mentally unstable. This is true not just of religious fanatics, but applies equally well to any crimes done out of emotion. In other words, the only crime that punishment will discourage is crimes done by high-society aristocratic spoiled kids getting their kicks. This will not discourage emotionally driven people, and will obviously not discourage desperate people.

Putting to death religious zealots will only breed more religious zealots.

#2. What is justice for the doctor who is performing so many operations that he can’t keep them straight and ends up cutting off the wrong limb? Just as in the past, this greedy doctor should be responsible for the victim and his dependents for life.  What about cases where the perpretator has no means of supporting the victim and family? Then a life of servitude is in order. Serve that family in any way you can, and if that means going door to door begging for food for the victims, then get to it.

Will a million dollar punitive damage settlement be fair justice? Perhaps, if that’s what will make the victim feel fairly compensated for the loss of his sight, or hearing, and if the family will feel fairly compensated for the loss of a loved one and the loss of decades of care, help, and income. But, really, would you trade your eyesight for a million dollars? How do you put a price on something like that?

Keep in mind, that this corrupt industry is trying their best to limit their need and inclination to provide restitution to those they’ve harmed. This is immoral in so many ways. Yes, we need to reform our medical industry.

#3. The serial rapist currently preying on the girls and young women of Reno’s UNR campus is not discouraged by fear of death. He is encouraged by his belief that he will not be caught. I guess if we had the cops that are currently busting people for smoking pot, or watching adult movies, or prostitution out there on the streets dealing with real crime, then the criminal would be much less inclined to rape and kill, but he would still yearn for it and would eventually succumb to his weakness.

When caught and convicted, will the correction system be able to rehabilitate him? Was Willie Horton on the path to rehabilitation? I’m not a psychologist, but I know that some people are not able or willing to rehabilitate. Can a jury decide this? I suppose not. Since I’m not a psychologist, I couldn’t decide, and nor could all but a very few jurors. However, many jurors are driven by emotions, especially in cases like this. Decisions based on emotion, are what got us in this mess, it’s obviously not the solution.

In cases where the bad apples must be separated from society, rehabilitation should still be a regular part of the incarceration, but keeping the bad apples out of society has to be the primary focus in these cases. For those who we are unable to keep out of society should then be considered candidates for a more permanent solution. Is that solution Capital Punishment? I don’t think so.

In conclusion, what do we do with the people responsible for 9/11? I suggest we start with impeachment. If we fail to impeach, will that encourage criminal behavior by future presidents? Maybe in some cases, but it’s not a solution in itself, either.

What do we do with the three 9/11 suspects delivered by Bush? Maybe we could start by apologizing for being so un-American and torturing them and refusing them legal council. Then, if they truly are guilty, we could rehabilitate them and use them as poster children on anti-terrorist propaganda to broadcast to religiously fanatical groups here and abroad.

by Paul Johnson

The Conservatives are out in full force disgracing Christmas. However, from listening from the O-Reily liar, one would think that the problem was that we Christians are showing tolerance for other religions. Gosh, tolerance, what an un-Christian thing to exhibit.

Lying to the American people about the war and then accusing everyone else of disgracing the military and then voting to strip the rights and benefits from the military is just oh, so un-Christian.  The Conservatives like all of O-Reily’s brain-dead followers, think the war on Christmas is about Christians’ mistake of being understanding, compassionate, and tolerant (all the things Jesus encouraged). That’s not the real war on Christmas. The O-Reily war on Christmas is the Conservative war on all things that Jesus taught.

Next time you hear “War on Christmas”, stop and think about what it really means. The Conservatives are destroying everything Christian in America. If they have their way, we’ll be just be like another Islamic republic.  That’s the real war on Christmas.

by Paul Johnson

We all know that a major part of the American revolution from England was about the need for religious tolerance. The “Church of England” or “The King’s Church” wasn’t to be imposed on America.

There are many references to this in the country’s founding documents, including the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

So why do we exclude certain religious beliefs on every single piece of money printed by our government? Why do we denigrate so many of our fellow citizens who don’t view religions as we do? Why do we point out our intolerance of them every day in our Pledge of Allegiance?

Isn’t this exactly what our forefathers were trying to get away from?

You even hear some saying that America is a Christian Nation. Oh, come on, now. Get real! Nobody really believes that trash. Thirty seconds reading the Constitution or the Bill of Rights would convince even the the most thick skulled amongst us.

“In God We Trust” is saying “Anyone believing in another god is not part of WE THE PEOPLE. Yes, that’s exactly the opposite of what our forefathers wanted.

“One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all” means if you don’t pray to OUR GOD, you’re not Indivisible and aren’t part of Liberty and Justice.

Does anyone really believe that this is what our forefathers wanted? I’m all for holding my religious beliefs and don’t like others thinking they have liberty to try to convert me relentlessly. But, it’s immoral for me to force these views upon others just as much as if enough got together and passed laws to change our pledge to say, “One Nation, Devoid of God…” or having all our money changed to say “We Trust in No God”. It sounds silly, but that’s exactly what we’re doing to others.

It’s not right. Let’s take a breath and try the golden rule. Would we like others doing to us what we’re doing to others who don’t think like we do? We’d scream bloody murder, and so should they. And — we should be sensitive enough to know it’s wrong.