Grow Up and Vote, But Not for Jesus

 

Make no mistake, this writer would love to be able to vote for Jesus. He is precisely the one we need; he is incorruptible, and they wouldn't be able to kill him. They already tried that. The one big flaw in His campaign, for whatever office you might name, is that He is not on the ballot, and probably never will be.

Like William Tecumseh Sherman said, and Jesus would undoubtedly echo, “I will not accept if nominated, and will not serve if elected.” Unlike Sherman, who considered himself not fit for the office of President, Jesus would decline for even better reasons, He already has a job, and it is bigger than any other.

Yet, sadly, some tell me they are planning on voting for Jesus, and not for any actual candidate running for office. They must think they are being really clever, and above the fray with that approach, but the truth is, they should simply grow up. That's right, they should grow up and realize they should do the best they can with the tools and opportunities they are given, and not just whimper down and squander those chances.

The fact is that Christians who take that kind of stance, either voting for Jesus, or deciding to not vote at all are much like the wicked servant highlighted in the parable of the talents, Matthew 25: 14-30. Three servants were given talents to invest, and of the three, one of them said, in verse 25,”And I was afraid, and went and hid your talent in the ground...” Not voting, or casting a meaningless ballot for Jesus, or Mickey Mouse or whoever, is like that wicked and lazy servant, hiding your talent in the ground, and it is done out of fear, not reverence, or moral superiority, or even good humor.

Voting, and elections generally, in this self governing republic, are not just sporting events, or a way to virtue signal. The healthiest way to look at voting is to see elections as a kind of collective mind being engaged, all of us thinking together to work to solve our problems. We might, individually, not have the same opinions, but collectively, when we all sincerely engage to make the best decision, society will generally come to the best decisions. As such, we have a civic obligation to take part in the process, and to do it as well as we can. To just slough it off, to squander this duty, this opportunity, is very much like the wicked servant who buried his talent.

What's more, not taking a sincere and well thought out stance because you are afraid of offending some friends or relatives is doubly bad. Not only are you squandering your God given “talent”, but not taking a stance, in public, on vital, spiritually significant matters like justice, and judgment and righteousness, out of fear of offending others, is sure to offend the One who created and saved you.

You say, “But, but...I don't want to vote for the lesser of two evils. That sounds ungodly to me.”

Oh do grow up. In fact, let me be very emphatic about that, without resorting to the F-bomb so often used these days to indicate deep passion about something. Grow all the way up!

Yes, you will be voting for the lesser of two evils. It is good for you to recognize that, because that is how it has always been, and, until Jesus does return, how it will always be. Do grow up and do the best you can with that.

As someone said, “If men were angels, we wouldn't need governments.” Men, needless to say, are not angels, and so we have to have governments, flawed and dangerous though they be. The are a necessary evil, and so we must choose between the lesser of two, or more, evils. That is the sad reality folks, grow up and face it like grown human adults.

While we are on the subject, don't get hung up about whether or not your side wins every battle. Another passage from the Bible might help here.

Ecclesiastes 11:6 tells us.

“In the morning sow your seed,

And in the evening do not withhold your hand;

For you do not know which will prosper,

Either this or that,

Or whether both alike will be good.”

Whether you win or lose every battle, know that your best efforts, carried out as to the Lord, will always help the cause of Christ. Some efforts will work, some won't, but it is always a good idea to make the sincere effort. So get out and vote, and use the loving spirit you have been given to maintain relationships with other folks, especially with people who disagree with you, whenever you can.

Finally, never, and that means never, give into the temptation to sit on the sidelines, to squander the gift of self governance God bestowed on us through the work and sacrifice of our forebears. Don't deign in a spirit of phony virtue signaling to not vote, or to vote for someone not on the ballot, like Jesus. When you do that, when you bury and stifle your own “talents,” you merely prevent the knowledge and wisdom God has gifted to you from being entered into and effective in that collective mind we call self government. Sure, you can still pray, and have an effect in the spiritual realm, but so can the minions of the enemy, and they also vote. In high numbers by the way.

It is time for we, the Christian people of this nation, to stand to it like true men and women. To do our dead level best to move this nation in a righteous and godly direction. In short, it is time for us to GROW UP and vote.

And may God bless us as we do.

No to More Lefty Kool Aid

 

Prevent the rise of Christian Nationalism, preserve the separation of church and state, and never allow anyone to use the power of government to impose their moral beliefs on others. That, in sum, is the main battle cry of the modern American left, one they rally around with passionate conviction, and one that resonates powerfully with a lot of non liberal citizens. Which is all truly ironic, because the left, the Progressives, the big “L” Liberals, are not only the worst violators of those principles in the last one hundred years, but in that same time period they have also produced the most despicable and downright evil expressions of religious zeal combined with political ambition. I know, I know, I have some 'splainin to do about this, so let me explain.

The first big lie around all this separation of church and state stuff is the idea that it applies only to those beliefs that involve God, or some kind of deity. That lie can be easily dispelled by transliterating the term “religion” and converting it, as is done in solving mathematical equations, to the term “Belief system.” Then we can see that belief systems don't have to refer to any god.

With that insight in mind, let's look at public laws, and realize that every law is based on, or at least informed by, someone's belief system. Every law on the books is put there because of somebody's idea about what is right and wrong. Every law is imposing someone's moral conclusions on others.

Many of these moral conclusions most all of us agree on. Such as the laws against murder, slavery, rape and theft. There are, however, people who don't agree with those conclusions; we call them murderers, rapists, enslavers and thieves. Most of us feel it is perfectly acceptable to impose those beliefs, our beliefs, on such people.

Next we must consider laws which don't have such widespread support, laws which reflect belief systems held by only a portion of the pubic. This is where we will hear the leftists shouting, keep your God based beliefs and laws out of our lives. It is forbidden to impose your religious values on others. They will then turn around and impose their values, which are based on their unproven belief systems, on the rest of us.

Such as insisting that every city, town and village must remove prayer and bible reading from the public schools. Sure, some of that is being rolled back at this moment in some few states, but just wait until the Democrats are back in power and, as promised, pack the Supreme Court. Then all their agenda will be back in full force.

Once again, it will be prohibited to ban burning the American flag, because that is free speech, but burning the flag of some other nation is prohibited as hate speech and ethnic intimidation. Every little village must accept pornography, and pornographic expression, no matter how much it violates the local beliefs. Abortion must be legal, as must homosexuality, same sex marriage and transgenderism. In fact, not only made legal, but be awarded government funding when needed.

Traditional moral education must be removed from public schools, but it must be replaced by leftist beliefs. Tolerance must be taught, but tolerance only of certain identified groups and beliefs. Other unnamed groups are to be ignored, discouraged and demeaned, all in the name of conducting some kind of intersectional judgment day.

The Liberals will respond that they are merely protecting marginalized folks who need protecting. They are not imposing their beliefs on others. But then we must consider laws that force bakers to decorate cakes in ways the baker finds morally repugnant. Why not just force him to produce a cake decorated with pornography? There is no difference once we endorse the concept that forcing some creator to create something they hate is acceptable.

Medical personnel are required to perform surgeries, such as abortions and transsexual procedures, with which they disagree. Some store owners are legally required to use transsexual pronouns which they consider delusional. Sure sounds like the left is imposing their unproven moral beliefs, their secular religion, on others.

As to evil, and which side has engaged in more of it, the question becomes a little cloudy. Certainly, on the subject of sexual exploitation of children, there is plenty of blame to spread around, with both left and right wing churches sharing in the guilt, and both liberal and conservative political groups also complicit in the crimes.

When we look, however, at the last hundred or so years of the history of this troubled planet, the left wing starts to look like the more evil side. While they can point to Chile under Pinochet, Spain under Franco, or Iran under the Shah as examples of right wing excess, the crimes of left wing ideology, such as in the old Soviet Union, or China under Mao, dwarfs those examples. Russia, because Ukrainian farmers stood in the way of collectivizing agriculture starved many million to death in the Holdomor. China, under Mao and in the interest of doing what they considered the the right thing in bringing China into modern times, purged multiple, maybe hundreds of, millions of people to death. All that evil, and much more left unmentioned here, was done in the name of doing the right thing according to somebody's unproven secular humanist belief systems.

Back here in the good old USA, the liberal churches don't have hands that are nearly as immaculately clean as they imagine. A barely remembered episode in recent history points that out. Remember the Jones town Massacre from 1978, when about 900 people were forced by their pastor, Jim Jones, into committing suicide by drinking poisoned kool aid? After that happened we were never really informed about what denomination Jim Jones, and his People's Temple, was affiliated with. The media was content to let us assume he was just a rogue fundamentalist preacher who got badly off the rails. Not so.

According to the book, “Cult City” by Daniel J. Flynn, Jim Jones was intimately connected to the liberal political establishment in San Francisco. In fact, he and his flock at the People's Temple (the name reveals the agenda) were instrumental in getting Harvey Milk, who at the time was the first openly gay person to run for public office, elected to become City Supervisor. Jim Jones was a radical left wing preacher, steeped in blasphemy and heresy.

The conclusion is that before we go off and think that liberal, progressive and wonderfully minded folks are nothing but good and never harmless, we should consider the kinds of evil they have proven themselves capable of. We should take that into consideration when they try to impose their values on us in the name of preventing us from imposing our values on them.

Even more, we should consider all that before we give our support to a new generation of left wing blaspheming heretics like James Talarico and Adam Hamilton. The campaign ads the good Reverend Hamilton puts out portray him as a reasonable, compromise minded man whose simple wonderfulness will bring good solutions to the mess in DC. Just as, it must be assumed, he influenced one of Americas oldest and largest Christian denominations, the United Methodist Church, into painfully splitting up.

Think long and hard about what kinds of horror such seemingly well meant liberalism has led to in the past, and are likely to lead to in the future if we let them. Don't buy into their myths about separating church and state, and by all means, don't drink their kool aid.

What Means Free?

 

There is a charming (and probably true) story in my family that might hold the key to untangling the political morass we find ourselves in today. My Great Great Grandfather first came to America by boat from Bohemia (now the Czech Republic, or Czechia) in the 1870's. After clearing quarantine on Ellis Island, the first thing he did on the streets of New York was get arrested for taking some fruit from a fruit stand. His defense was that he thought this was a free country, which means he thought everything was free. He soon learned that American freedom was not that kind of freedom.

The meaning of freedom, and how we should see it and use it, is at the heart of where this nation has taken a wrong turn. Many modern Americans seem to have adopted my Great Great Grandfather's mistaken notion (definition) of freedom, and completely lost sight of what the Founders (and the Bible) mean by that word. Because of that, we have forgotten the profound importance, and inestimable blessings of true liberty.

This mis definition of freedom is the central principle of the modern left, even though many “conservatives” also like it. My eyes were opened about this in a recent election, when it was obvious that abortion, especially keeping abortion legal, was the big driver of voter turnout.

While pro abortion groups like to describe it with the “pro choice” phrase, our purpose is better served by returning to the name first given to this issue; “free love.” Legal abortion greatly enables “free love”, which is irresponsible and consequence free sexual activity.

So the left wants free love, along with free stuff, free services (medical care and education, food, clothing, housing and transportation). That is what the left means by the word “freedom”. You've undoubtedly seen the memes, “How can the richest country in the world not have...universal healthcare, or allow hunger, or restrict abortion?” And of course, they assert Jesus must be a socialist because he said we should give food to the hungry and clothes to the naked.

The fact that “Progressives” have been moving the language in that direction for decades is revealed by looking at FDR and his four freedoms (freedom of speech, to worship, from want, and from fear) from the 1930's. Freedom FROM want, fear, or anything else was never part of the Founders idea of what a free government should provide.

The system of governing that has grown out of this mis definition is, technically speaking, not freedom, nor is it libertarianism or socialism. What this system should be called, if we are going to be honest, is libertine socialism. When see in that light it is easy to understand why it is so hard to talk people out of it. Libertine Socialism is extremely attractive because it allows people to live any way they want, free from personal responsibility or accountability, and yet no matter how badly they have screwed up their life, family or community by making bad personal choices, the federal government is to always be there to take care of them and clean up the mess.,

This “system” will work fine, until it doesn't. Until, that is, it falls apart due to its own internal contradictions, which are both economic and moral. Even when it starts collapsing, it will remain so attractive that the masses will continue to clamor for it like an addict seeking drugs. So its collapse won't mean it is ending, rather, as will be explained, the economic and moral collapse of libertine socialism will just bring about the next stage of the wicked plan.

History demonstrates that systems like this have a corrosive effect on the moral and ethical thinking of the masses. Shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the newly free government of Russia invited American Christian groups to come in and evangelize the people. It seems the moral thinking of the masses had declined so far under 70 years of communism that achieving social cohesion without an authoritarian government was proving to be impossible.

The Founders considered that kind of licentious freedom, and rejected it. To better understand how the Founders saw freedom, it is best to start where they started, which is with the Bible. In the book of John, 8:32 it says, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Again, in verse 36, John writes, “If the Son shall therefore make you free, you shall be free indeed.” Freedom of this sort is mentioned in a number of other places in the Bible.

The question immediately arises; how did this biblical, this obviously personal and spiritual form of freedom, come to mesh with the political freedom the Founders were hoping to establish? The answer lies in the definition.

Rejecting license as their ideal, the Founders embraced a form of freedom that has long eluded a clear definition. The closest to a workable definition that embraces both the inner spiritual life, and the external civic reality goes like this. Freedom is being unrestrained and unencumbered from becoming the person you were created to be. Thus under this form of freedom, a person is not held back by external oppression, nor are they prevented, by vice, addiction, or sin, from becoming the full person they were created to be.

Under the American form of freedom, people were free to pursue their own paths to prosperity, and were free to keep the fruit of their labors. Because of that, the economy produced much wealth. Certainly that was not true for those excluded from citizenship, but that highlights the fact that all who were included in our system of freedom did enjoy its economic blessings.

The moral aspect of freedom immediately came to the fore, and that aspect reveals the greatest blessing of American freedom. The issues of medical care, education, housing, jobs, infrastructure, environmental care and many others all have to be dealt with by any society which hopes to sustain over time.

The way that played out in America went as follows. The individual was free to seek their own good; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and all that. But while the individual has those freedoms, physical reality requires that each person live in some place, some locality. It is within those localities that the American system of liberty placed the powers and responsibilities of dealing with those social issues with which any healthy society has to wrestle.

There is an old, nearly forgotten concept that freedom has to be balanced with responsibility. That old proverb really comes alive in the context of local communities having the freedom and responsibility for meeting social challenges. Within those free communities, which free individuals are free to choose between, all those social decisions, those inevitable trade offs, are made. The decisions about what kind of lifestyles to endorse must be balanced with the need to provide medical care to deal with any negative results from those lifestyles, and all of that must be balanced with the power of deciding what kind of moral thinking to instill in the young through public education. The need for a strong economy must be balanced with the need to regulate corporate abuse, and the environmental and health outcomes from those commercial enterprises which the community does allow.

Those and any number of other issues are to be decided by local (and state) governments under the system of American freedom. The powers of self government enshrined in local communities must be exercised responsibly or that community will not last. In the context of Local Community Moral Self Government, freedom and responsibility are organically tied together.

It is when those powers and responsibilities are bundled together at the local level that the blessings of liberty start to manifest. When almost all the powers and responsibilities of self government are bundled together and decided by the same mind, the mind of the local community as expressed through local government, then that quest to balance liberty and responsibility starts to affect the individual in a positive way.

When they (he or she) are in a community which must protect itself and answer the challenges reality throws at every community (disease, disaster, economic challenges, family breakdown, etc) and the community is small enough that the individual can have a real effect on decisions, then that positive dynamic kicks in. The mind of a governor, the thinking of one who has both the power to make governing decisions and also bears responsibility for how those decisions affect the community, comes to life in the minds of individual citizens. Then most people come to realize the importance of the local citizenry possessing strong moral values, and for most of us, that results in a personal determination to live a more moral life.

Thus, American style freedom first enables the individual living in it to cast off the external shackles that prevent them from working for their own benefit and happiness. Additionally, by investing almost all the powers of self government in local communities, our system organically encourages an ever rising moral consciousness in the hearts and minds of the people. So, in both the political and spiritual sense of the word, American style freedom enables the individual to grow ever closer to becoming the person they were created to be. All restraints and encumbrances to that growth are slowly lifted, if the individual so chooses. In that system the economy will naturally be strong, and the people will require little governmental control.

With the other definition of freedom, the one the Founders considered to be license, the opposite dynamic takes hold. People feel no connection with the decisions made by government or any personal agency in the making of those decisions. They feel only appetites for stuff and pleasure.

They might go so far as to riot to get that free stuff with which to satiate those appetites, but they won't feel any inner drive to be responsible about it. So instead of slowly inducing more enlightened thinking among the people, the licentious form of freedom tends to result in those same masses becoming less moral, less able to rise above their own internal constraints, less able to become the people they were created to be. In short, they become less free.

Nonetheless, libertine socialism is still very attractive and almost impossible to talk people out of. The internal contradictions driving its collapse are easy to see when we examine the philosophy behind it. Simply put, it comes down to the questions of authority and responsibility. In libertine socialism, the individual has authority over their own life, but the state has the responsibility to ensure the well being of the individual.

This split between responsibility and authority will, in times of economic stress, come to give increasing power to the party who is responsible. The people will become increasingly divided, dependent and powerless. After the system collapses, when the government becomes bankrupt, it will then have the rationale to start rationing what stuff and services folks are to receive, and how they are to live. It will also have the power to carry out those decisions.

Everyone might still have access to food, but that food might be nothing but stale bread, and one must stand in line for hours to receive it. An even more ominous scenario is likely to develop around healthcare, which can and will be rationed. In fact, it already is rationed in countries with so called free healthcare. Look at the waiting lines for procedures in the UK and Canada. In the US our system of rationing is based on who wants to pay. While that might seem cold and mercenary, when one desperately wants a procedure, for themselves or a loved one, in our present quasi free system they have a better chance of getting it in a timely manner than in a big government system.

Of much more concern is that if our health care is directly connected to the federal government, health care will be the biggest drain on that federal budget. When and if the federal government becomes bankrupt (any day now) the thinking will go far beyond merely rationing healthcare. The rationale will then be in place for the big central government to start dictating diet, lifestyles and any other aspect of our existence. Which means it will become a truly totalitarian government.

The thinking will be that healthcare is costing so much that we simply must reduce that expense. The way to do that is to ensure that everyone is living as healthy a life as possible. So even if you are a healthy twenty year old, we will still insist that you not smoke, or eat fatty foods, or consume anything deemed unhealthy, and that you engage in proscribed exercise programs. Even though you might not need health services today, you eventually will. Therefore since the state has to eventually foot the bill, the state has a legitimate power to tell you how to live today. What's more, anyone who objects will be labeled a threat and dealt with as such. The ongoing existential national emergency caused by bankruptcy will not tolerate any dissent.

That is the way societies have always gone once the people buy into that false definition of freedom. That is, when the masses start thinking that being empowered to live in a licentious and irresponsible way, and to be provided with all the free stuff the mob might demand is the proper function of government. It sounds good, but it actually leads us away from being the prosperous and morally enlightened people that true freedom impels us to, and demands of us. My Great Great Grandfather learned that lesson after one rebuke. If we stumble into this mistake as a nation, and it seems like we are doing that, it might take a very long time for us to figure our way out of it.

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Undividing Christ

 

The American nation is severely, maybe even fatally, divided these days, and the greatest force driving that division is the hate filled division of the Christian church in this nation. This ongoing tragic/comic process of division is caused by both the left and right, both the conservative church and the liberal church. The probable first response, being voiced by many at this moment, that the only real problem is the wrongs of the other side, is the heart of the problem. We have fallen for a never ending “what about-ism”, finger pointing at the sins of the other side and using that as a rationale to ignore the gaping holes in the Christian integrity of our own side.

To begin this analysis, let us consider the one big sin that both sides of our divide cherish in common, which is materialism. First of all, the prosperity doctrine infects both left and right with its presumption that gain equals godliness. It is admittedly more solidly rooted on the right, but many on the left believe it, even if they are quiet about it.

There is also a deeper meaning to materialism which both liberal and conservative Christians, to their shame, buy into. That is the idea that the material is more real than the spiritual. In its extreme iteration, it is the conceit that the material is the only real aspect of life. In ways this is the worst sin of all, because it leads us to diminish human beings, denying the spiritual nature of humanity. Both sides do this, even though they do it in slightly different ways, which is how it so viciously divides us.

To illustrate this point I must embark on a personal narrative. I belong broadly to the conservative side of the church. I do this not because I agree with them on every point, but because the conservatives at least give lip service to adhering to biblical standards. When I have attended liberal churches, I have found bringing up the Bible as a normative authority makes me very unwelcome very rapidly.

On the other hand, when I bring up biblical passages which bolster some liberal cause, such as defending the poor, while my conservative brethren are rarely persuaded, they at least put up with me making the case. For years I have advocated for the homeless. Some of my co believers here in rural Kansas have let me know that the one or two times they visited the urban poor, they were told that the homeless consider themselves to blame, that they should just try harder, and so I should not take the cause of the poor so seriously.

When I inform them that I have as many years working with the urban poor as they have hours, they don't like it. Then I agree that most of the poor should look to themselves for the solution to their problems, and that I tell them so when I minister to them. But then I add that when I talk to the movers and shakers, the developers and bankers, and even those in the middle class, I focus on the structural causes of poverty and homelessness, and changes that could be made. That conversation, in small town USA, usually ended, with a mumbled “I doeknow”; until recently.

I had occasion a couple of months ago to read one of my favorite passages, Psalm 82. Among other things, that chapter says, “Defend the poor and fatherless

Do justice to the afflicted and needy.

Deliver the poor and needy:

Rid them out of the hand of the wicked.

With that Psalm, and some other new ideas, fresh on my heart, I went to fellowship early one morning. When the conversation came around to that subject, I let them know that the biggest thing I have against socialism is that it has taken the plight of the poor out of the heart of believers. Since the socialistic programs seem to take care of their needs, conservatives not only don't work to relieve that kind of suffering, they kind of resent the poor for being so shiftless and dependent..

Part of what was motivating me at that moment was a recent quote heard from Elon Musk, talking about the homeless industrial complex, something I have experience with. Many contemporary homeless ministries don't seem to exert any effort to get the homeless back on their feet. This is because the ministries are now subsidized NGO's, which get government funding based on how many folks they feed, clothe, and house. So they prefer clients to stay in a mode of having given up, just hanging around everyday for sustenance. Worse, in some big cities, Mr. Musk noted how some of these organizations have become “zombie farms', looking the other way at drug dealing and severe drug abuse, as long as the clients stay in the area to pad the numbers which convert into government funds.

So on the left, the dehumanized poor are simply the recipients of materialistic support, while their worth or destiny as spiritual beings is denied. On the right, that material support is assumed and used as a cover for indifference. The poor are then resented and once again dehumanized as nonspiritual beings. Neither side sees them, or treats them, as potential and precious children of God. Socialism is thus used by both sides as a rationale about why they don't need to follow biblical guidance regarding the poor and downtrodden.

A number of years before that I was in a heartfelt discussion with a liberal Christian brother while we ministered together at a Christian coffeehouse (before it was an NGO). He made the assertion that if one were to remove every statement regarding helping the poor from the Bible, it would be a much thinner book. I agreed, but then I responded that if one were to remove every warning in the Bible regarding sexual immorality it would likewise become a much thinner book.

I think that God emphasizes both sins, that of sexual immorality and economic oppression, much more than other sins because unlike sins like murder, theft, or even lying, it is often not intuitively obvious to us that those things are wrong. It is, and always has been, easy to sit on the top of some economic pyramid and blithely ignore the suffering of those doing your bidding, and increasing your wealth. It goes on today, and it went on in ancient times. Look at Ezekiel 16:49-50 to see that that was the root of the problem in ancient Sodom.

Speaking of Sodom, sexual sins are also not intuitively obvious to us. When we are involved in some kind of iniquitous relationship, it can often feel like the most right thing in the world. Which is why God warns us so sternly about both kinds of sins; they are not easy for us to see on our own..

Liberals are right to concern themselves with establishing justice, and relieving oppression, but they make a mistake in using those sentiments to give power to secular, materialistic authorities to carry out those good intentions. Yes, Jesus told us to treat the poor and helpless as though they were Jesus incarnate, and give them the help they need. But He most definitely did not tell us to use force of arms (state power) to seize wealth from others to carry out that commission, and that is what socialism amounts to. Quite often, as with the homeless industrial complex, such plans backfire, making the actual lived lives of the poor even worse. Look at what has happened to inner city communities since the advent of LBJ's socialistic “Great Society.”

In their turn, conservatives are right to stand for moral purity. The allure of adultery and fornication, of all stripes, is a kind of intoxicant by which the nations are made drunk. The selfish mind of the flesh then takes control, and society has thereby been gradually seduced into total depravity. Conservatives (often hypocritical on this subject) are nonehteless mistaken in rejecting the persons of those caught up in sexual and lifestyle sins, wrongly rejecting both the sin and the sinner. The right in this country comes perilously close to fulfilling a dire prophetic warning, that because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall grow cold.

We must pray, on both sides, that the good we see ourselves called to by scripture be something we embrace in holy and loving ways. We must pray that our balanced calls to establish justice and righteousness be carried out by us in warm, tender and loving ways, not by relegating our fellow humans to the status of material objects to be dealt with in material ways, nor to reject the spiritual lives of those who struggle with sins we don't share.

The beginning of the idea that the flaws of my side can be overlooked because of the enormous flaws on the other side is rooted in the mistaken, and deadly, notion that God grades and judges on a curve. Those who think that seem to think that God is going to accept them into heaven if they are merely better than some other people. To come to these conclusions they must think that God is egotistically driven in the manner of human rulers, and is thus desperate for followers. They then presume that God will accept some deficient followers in order to swell the numbers of His adherents.

They are completely mistaken, because God does not grade on a curve. God is not trying to raise an army, nor is He the gatekeeper for some kind of cosmic country club. Simply put, God is raising, or at least trying to raise, His children. Because of that, we must attain unto a very high level of purity and holiness, just to exist in His presence. As such, He has set himself a challenging task, because for us to be His children, we must, first of all and by definition, have free will.

Given that goal, and both our free will, and out nascent creative potential, we were placed into a world, that since the fall, is an insanely confusing place to raise children. So, in His grace and mercy, He anointed some specially chosen people, and through them imparted to us His Word, The Holy Bible.. By doing that He provided us with one stable point, a spiritual anchor, that we desperately need to make sense of our lives in this swirling ball of confusion What's more, in the process of imparting His Word over the centuries, He made it a point to illustrate that not only does His Word contain the wisdom we need, but that if and (probably) when we turn away from His guidance, disaster always follows. Just a cursory reading of the Old testament, with a focus on passages like Psalm 78, reveals how important it is to God's plan that we adhere to scriptural guidance.

Then, with that lesson firmly set (after many centuries) in the hearts of at least sincere Hebrew believers, He sent his Messiah, in the form of a helpless infant. With the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Creator provided a way for those who believe in him to make it through the process of becoming His children. Contrary to what some like to think, this is not an automatic process that all will survive. Jesus himself said that the way to eternal destruction is wide, and easy, and many go that way.

In fact becoming a child of God is an infinitely complex and impossibly fragile process, one which no one can complete on their own. It is only by accepting the sacrifice of Christ, and thereby receiving an unbreakable relationship with our divine Father that we even have a chance. The demands of the teachings of Christ, His Word, the balancing of tender, loving gentleness with a call to righteousness so demanding that it is likened to ruling the nations with a rod of iron, are so all encompassing that it is not possible for a person to do.

With man it is impossible, but with God, all things are possible, and if we believe in Jesus, we have God, in the Holy Spirit, to bring us through the demands of this divine obstacle course, and to forgive and guide us back to all righteousness when we weaken and stumble. That ongoing relationship with our divine Creator is ensured by our faith in Jesus Christ, but the process of being formed into His image and likeness must still be gone through.

With all that in mind, we can now take another look at the terrible division in the modern church. Both left and right sides of the church seem to recoil from that glorious path; that divine process of becoming God's children; of allowing Him to grow us into His image and likeness. Instead they have each been deceived into embracing some much less christianesque ideology or the other, one which aligns with the desires of their fleshly heart. They then justify their personal stance, along with the stance of their fellow travelers, and any personal or collective sins and failings, by pointing to the sins and failings of those on the other side of the (for now allegorical) barricades. This is “what about-ism” on stilts, and the division it engenders is destroying both our nation and our Church. Time for some specifics.

On the right, they are sure God and scripture are on their side. In ways, they are correct. But the right is so sure they are right that they figure they deserve to give themselves license to be greedy; greedy as all get out, greedier than any nation has ever been. God wants us to be prosperous, don't you know? So even though the poverty level income in America puts one in the upper percentiles of income globally, many prayers are sent up from conservative Christian churches, pleading with God to not deprive us of having more than enough. As already stated, many liberal Christians are also not innocent of this sin.

Along similar lines, conservative pew fillers hold militarism up as an idol. The movement of some obscure land marker in lower Mongolistan might somehow be construed as a dire threat to our national security, so we must maintain a military capable of projecting overwhelming force to every corner of a spherical planet. They thank God we can do that. The oppression (and oppressors) we must engage with to maintain our consequent global military/industrial empire are another of the spiritual failings our liberal brethren throw in our faces, even though they slyly manage to leave it in place when they are in power.

Speaking of the liberal church, the leftists. Their major spiritual malfunction is that they have abandoned the use of biblical scripture as normative. Many shy away from even considering Christ as the only way to God the Father, even though Christ specifically claimed that role. They like to say that everything is true, and that all paths lead to God, ignoring the fact that that idea is straight up Hindu doctrine. They find idolatry of every stripe more palatable than rubbing shoulders with bible clinging “Christians.” So Buddhism, Paganism, witchcraft, Secularism and even Islam are accepted as equally valid with their watered down Christianity. In many ways, their drift away from biblical fealty has caused them to see Jesus Christ as just another teacher, and maybe a good role model, only useful if his teachings coincide with the movement to bring about some man made paradise. Certainly not a personal savior.

Along with raging idolatry, the left has been incrementally seduced into embracing a wide spectrum of sexual deviancy and perversions, all of which violate God's Word and loving guidance we so need to attain unto our created destiny. In the Garden of Eden, Satan began the temptation of Eve by asking, “Has God really said?” That same question, “Has God really said,” has long been the slogan of modernism, and is now the battle cry of the liberal church.

The normative guide to liberal churches honestly seems to have shifted, from the Bible to the policies advocated by the Democratic Party. In the 1970's. it was no fault divorce and legalizing abortion. Then gay rights rose in the 1980' and 90's, and the doctrine of liberal churches changed with those times, while asserting they would never favor same sex marriage or anything like it. As late as 2008 the Democrat Party opposed same sex marriage, and so did the left wing church. They both changed positions, seemingly in lock step with each other, a few years later. Next came the same dance step regarding trans-genderism, with the same ending notes.

These days, the rising controversy is around pedophilia (re-branded minor attracted adults, don't ya know) with both the left wing church and the Democrat Party bravely holding the line, until, if history is a guide, they decide they won't. Bestiality will probably be the next issue, if the left continues to get its way. It is not that these sexual and lifestyle sins are worse than other sins, but it is the case that any sin, if not repented of, will not be forgiven. The ideology of the liberal churches denies that some sins, even though they are are clearly identified as such in scripture, are even sins. This greatly reduces the odds that those afflicted with these sins will ever repent..

So idolatry and adultery lead the list of left wing sins, and naturally amplify into heresy and blasphemy. (Asserting that God is so cruel that He creates a person in the wrong body is a deeply blasphemous concept, impugning the very character of our Creator) It is hard to pin point where any particular individual starts on this slide away from biblical Christianity, but the whole process is summed up in II Thessalonians 2:10-11 “...because they received not a love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:”

These ideas, and the delusional doctrines that grow from them, inflict dreadful spiritual wounds which severely cripple those fragile and developing children of God the church should be nurturing up.

These doctrines are as harmful as, if not even more harmful than, the oppression, greed and militarism of the right. But there is one more devastating sin unique to the left, one which grows out of their easy acceptance of idolatry and materialism. It is that they have come to worship the secular state, to see the government, especially the socialism we have grown into, as the ultimate source of good, and the appropriate vehicle with which to deliver Christian mercy. Both left and right must repent from this big government approach, and instead rediscover the free market, cultural and community based remedies to poverty that used to be so effective. Just as the right is flirting with fulfilling some bad prophesy about becoming cold hearted, the left is flirting, with its embrace of the socialist state, with worshiping the literal Beast of Revelation.

Rest assured, this treatise is not intended as just one long two sided scold, but before we conclude with a restatement of our only real hope, we must take a look at one more big failing that both sides have in common, which is racism.

At first blush, racism seems to balance heavily to the conservative side. Just look at some of the language and comments online, some of the laws proposed, and some of the attitudes still present in everyday life in conservative areas. Racism is still deeply rooted there, although there has been some definite improvement. However, the sentiments expressed by Malcolm X, that he preferred the open racism of the red necks to the falsely friendly backstabbing of the White liberals, still rings true today. Many left wingers hide their racist mindset behind a thin veneer of loving smiles.

What's more, once we get past the idea that racism is a problem only in the White community, we can see that some of anti racist ideas, such as DEI and intersectionality are themselves deeply racist. Trying to get rid of racism by using racist tools is like trying to fight an epidemic by using infected needles.

Sadly, the situation gets even worse. In the last couple years I attended an historically Black church a few times. I was deeply shocked to see a weekly focus, in Sunday school, on how this or that biblical passage should be received by African Americans, and how the passage could be used to advance the cause of reparations for slavery. If it had not been a Black church, I would have walked out the first week, but since it was a Black church, and I have had wonderful fellowship in Black churches in years past, I gave it a few tries. Sadly, the racist emphasis seemed to be a permanent fixture, and it was and definitely is a liberal church. The upshot is that I don't honestly think either side, or any side, of the divided church can claim victory or innocence on the subject of racism.

In conclusion, we must acknowledge that THE Church has gone into a downward spiral because of our bitter divisions. That downward spiral gets steeper every time we engage in what about-ism; every time we ignore our own nakedness and our own sins by pointing out the unclothed status of the other side. The solution is obvious, which is to humbly pray the Lord will restore us to spiritual wholeness, to the path of becoming His children, as we turn from our wicked ways.

This will involve the liberals abandoning their never ending quest to wiggle out of scriptural guidance: all the well constructed equivocations, dodges and spurious logic. Yes, Jesus did not mention homosexuality or abortion, (or at least it isn't recorded that He did) but He also never mentioned torturing prisoners, or robbing banks, or a whole lot of other things. It is spurious to say that His recorded words constitute an exhaustive list of specific sins, and everything not mentioned is okay. Rather, we can infer His deeper meaning from what He did teach. On a subject like sexual ethics, He told us that if a man even looks on a woman with lust, he has committed sin. That is about the most common and mild sexual offense imaginable. It is disingenuous to assert that sexual desires which are more intense, actually committed, strange and unnatural aren't included in that original sentiment.

Likewise abortion. It is not mentioned specifically, but Jesus did mention how highly He treasures children, and murder is definitely a no no. It is once again highly disingenuous to dodge that kind of guidance, just for the foul goal (let's be honest here) of enabling convenient adultery.

On the right, they don't exactly reject the guidance of scripture, but there are many points, especially regarding justice for the poor and seeking peace, where they resort to a long practiced myopia. They are good at disingenuously ignoring the clear spiritual call to treat the downtrodden with the kind of love and care they would want for themselves in that situation. Similarly, they rarely take seriously Christ's advice to turn the other cheek, or to pray for those who abuse them.

The ruined lives and depravity engendered by their sin of indifference to the poor is hidden to their eyes by blaming society's moral decline on the immoral policies of the left. Then the solution they offer seems to be some kind of theocratic revival, the nebulous Christian nationalism so dreaded in some quarters.

Of course, that conservative mistake is mirrored on the liberal side. So many of the immoral policies the right legitimately complains about grew out of a kind of left wing theocracy, a Secular nationalism, which was imposed in the 1940's by some Supreme Court blunders. This same Secular theocracy (ideocracy?), threatens to morph into the most frightening thing of all (even worse than Christian nationalism), a Secular globalism, an international atheistic theocracy, with a fascist oligarchy behind it. That could become a real Beast of biblical proportions.

That is where we are, as a Church, today, and that is how we got here. God help us. No really, please God, HELP US, because we all must turn to Him, in deep humility and sincerity, if we are to come out of this. It might be cliche, but this passage from Chronicles, if taken sincerely, as we should take all scripture, and not taken in some myopic, allegorical, Pharisaical or phony way, is really the only path which can take us through this crisis.

II Chronicles 7:14

“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

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The Great Falling Away

 

2 Thessalonians 2:3 tells us, ”Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day (the return of the Lord) shall not come except there come a falling away first...” That verse and chapter continue on, bringing to light some important warnings which will be touched on in a bit, but first let me share a recent an insight regarding this “falling away” stuff.

It seems to have been happening, at least in the Western world, for more than a century. Faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ has greatly diminished in recent decades. Masses of people have been falling away.

The new insight is that this falling away was inevitable ever since Christ put His social changes into motion. In fact, this great falling away is mostly just the latest iteration of man's most common failing, that of worshiping the work of his own hands.

Jesus Christ, and those who followed in his path, initiated a spiritual and social movement that has changed the world. Male and female, slave and free, Jew and gentile, black and white, are all equally welcome in Christ's mystical body. With that intention at the base of the movement, and aided by the grace visited on each sincere believer, Christians have been able to overcome the divisions thrown at us by unregenerate human nature. With that growth in unity, fellowship and understanding, Christendom, as a culture, has risen to unprecedented heights of beauty and truth. In many ways, this cultural growth has been a centuries long reversal of the fracturing of human culture which occurred at the tower of Babel.

You remember the story. Humanity was all together at the time, and started building a tower that was to reach unto the heavens. Then, in Genesis chapter 11, verses 6,&7 it says, “and the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down , and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.”

Since the advent of Christ, that fracturing has been getting reversed, but there is a big problem with the process. The problem arises because along with sincere believers (the living wheat seed) there has also grown up a large number of evil, wicked hearted non believers (the noxious weeds, or tares). God has always known they are there, having grown up along side and in the midst of a Christian culture, and like the parable says, the angels will sort out the wheat from the tares in the last days.

Until then, we have a problem. Because of the wonderful achievements of Western culture such as science, industry, human rights, medicine, modern agriculture, and all that, many voices have been raised against continued faith in Christ and God. Their basic idea is that we don't need God anymore because we have science. They foolishly say this while ignoring the fact that science as we know it could not have arisen except in the fertile soil of a Christian culture.

Nonetheless, many boldly proclaim their faith in a Godless existence. God didn't create the universe, or the Earth, or life. They have scientifically investigated it, and even though they have no idea how to replicate creation, they are sure that everything just kind of happened; no God needed thank you very much.

We certainly don't need to rely on some bronze age fictitious character for providing rain and sunshine for food. We have irrigation, and bio-engineered crops. If people have deep emotional problems, we certainly don't want to see them as spiritual problems, but rather they are emotional problem curable by the science of psychology. Or at least the symptoms can be held in check by using the proper drugs. Most of the time.

In that way, science and the high tech culture we have built on the movement of Christ has been co-opted by the wicked hearted tares. Now we worship science, the work of our own minds and hands (gifts from God), and leave any gratitude toward or worship of God out.

Even Christian morals are seen as distinct from Christ. The ideas of equal justice, freedom, mercy, concern for the poor and working for peace have been so (nominally) accepted all over the world that Christ has been relegated to being just a good moral teacher. But the fact is that without the grace that comes with faith in Christ, most folks don't really, can't really, live those moral values out in the real world. Additionally, outside of the Gospel, those values have been merely glued on to other faiths and beliefs, and the glue will not hold in time of stress.

So that is why, in my opinion, the great falling away was inevitable, and therefore predictable. God knew that we would, in following the way of Christ, gain tremendous powers, and many would then start worshiping those powers. Now, let's consider the rest of the thought, which tells us where this falling away leads us.

2 Thessalonians 2;3-11 “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? And now ye know what withholdeth that he night be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming; even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie; that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”

Sound like anyone you know?

Solving Illegal Immigration

 

Illegal immigration has become, in this moment of American history, THE existential question upon which this nation will either sink or swim. This is similar to what happened around the issue of slavery in an earlier time, decades of letting an unrestrained problem get worse has now triggered a time of severe law enforcement. That vigorous law enforcement effort has provoked, in turn, a passionate response of protest and riot verging into insurrection. As a result the distinct possibility of civil war looms once again on our national horizon.

Before we march further along this hate and anger filled path, absorbing a possibly deadly blow to our body politic, we should step back and realize that peaceful and equitable solutions are available to us. The thing is, the only way we can get to those peaceful solutions is by identifying, confronting, and overcoming the actual bad actors in this illegal immigration mess. To get directly to it, those bad actors are two groups of rich and powerful people: Commercial interests which employ massive numbers of illegal aliens, and international criminal cartels which profit from the trafficking of both drugs and humans.

Both of those groups are politically entrenched and immensely wealthy, so they will be formidable foes. But taking them on them is the only way we can solve this illegal immigration mess, and preserve our nation.

Up to this point in the second Trump administration, the one bright side to the vigorous enforcement effort has been to reduce border crossings to near zero. Enacting and vigorously enforcing laws against illegal employment will be the key factor in maintaining a closed border and ultimately solving this mess. We simply have to turn off the jobs magnet which is attracting the workers.

The illegal employers don't want that to happen, and use devious means to oppose it. Rather than having an open debate, they instead raise a cry insisting on absolutely no form of amnesty to any illegals. This strategy at first blush seems to work against their interests, but by insisting on the impossible perfect they prevent us from ever achieving the feasible good.

To get to the heart of the issue, what we have to do is modify our hard headed, absolutely NO AMNESTY stance with some realistic compassion. This plan necessarily contains some fine nuance (it can't be a repeat of the 1986 debacle), which will be explained in a bit, but first let's look at how unrealistic, and fictional, the NO AMNESTY stance is.

As a conservative guess, there are probably at least 30 million illegal residents here today. They mostly have close attachments, via children (citizens who will remain citizens even if birthright citizenship is ended. No Ex Post Facto laws allowed, remember?), in-laws, and friends. So, at a minimum we are talking about a deportation process that will have traumatic effect on 50 or more million people. That is a lot of potential voters in the 2026 midterms.

Look at how things have actually been going. Yes, it appears that a million or so illegal immigrants have been detained and or deported, and once again, the border has been closed. That is a good start.

But most of the deportees have been the despicable criminals and gang members nobody wanted in the first place, along with those self deportees who were probably intending to leave soon anyway. In other words, they were the low hanging fruit. Even with all that going for the deportation process, the administration has still had to resort to multiple deployments of the National Guard to assist ICE, and the almost unheard of deployment of American combat forces on American soil.

To get from one million to 30 million, we will have to double that effort, and then double it again, and then double it again, and then double it again, and then double it yet again. Even now, many of the immigrant's home countries refuse to repatriate them, so we shunt them to third countries. That will work only in the short term and in small numbers. In large numbers, dumping unemployed foreigners into other nations will result in criminal gangs running amok in those countries, which will then also refuse to receive them.

It is hard to see how we can continue, let alone accelerate, down this path without resorting to martial law. So if we do continue down this path, a path dictated by a policy of “no form of amnesty allowed,” we probably will end up in either low intensity civil war, or authoritarian government control, or most probably both..

All of that will likely follow if we stick to the hard headed, absolutely NO AMNESTY approach. Or rather, our false version of that approach because let's be real here, that NO AMNESTY thing is a fiction to begin with. There is no intention of applying that hard headed logic to all the illegal employers. If NO AMNESTY were applied to illegal employers today, almost all the meat packing, construction and agri-business concerns would quickly be put out of business. Not only would they lose most of their workers, but they would be fined into bankruptcy, that is if we were serious about NO AMNESTY to law breakers.

Many will shout, “Whoa up and hold on there sport. A strict application of the law to deprive billionaires of some of their millions of dollars is a bridge too far, a tragedy too great to consider.” They will say this while smugly asserting that ruining the lives of millions of weak and defenseless workers is perfectly alright. This is extreme scapegoating in action.

So that NO AMNESTY thing will, in the fine tradition of American euphemism and equivocation, fall apart in the wink and nod, backroom dealings of the good old boy network. We all suspect that's how it will end, after we witness a time of highly publicized brutal enforcement. When immigration enforcement starts hitting the bottom line of some big campaign donors, the vigor of law enforcement will suddenly peter out, and things will go back to how they used to be. The problem of illegal immigration will remain unsolved. That is the way it has gone before, and that is how things will probably go this time, if we let them.

The pivotal issue to consider in defeating these bad actors is the rule of law, and how greatly it can benefit working people. This is THE issue that corrupt politicians (by definition) and corporate greedmeisters (by inclination) want to ignore.

As an example, think about how ignoring the rule of law effects workers in just one kind of job; janitorial work. It used to be that janitors were paid by the hour as employees, with benefits, overtime, vacations, insurance and such. These days that work is mostly subcontracted out,(largely to illegals) so the worker has no benefits and is expected to pay their own taxes. It’s still very low paid work, averaging little more than ten to fifteen dollars an hour, and the worker, as stated, is expected to pay their own taxes out of that. Hiring practices are similar in other trades, such as construction and landscaping.

Most of the illegal workers, classified as subcontractors, simply don’t pay their taxes, which maximizes their take home pay, allowing them to pay for their own benefits, if they want. Many choose instead to subsidize that pay by fraudulently relying on government services, like emergency room health care and food stamps. The only way for an American to compete for those jobs is to settle for taking home, after taxes, less than seven to ten dollars an hour, or to take the risk of not paying the taxes.

If the IRS comes after the illegal worker for back taxes, they can go underground, get a new phony ID, take a temporary deportation, or maybe just take their savings and depart for home. On the other hand, if the IRS comes after the American worker, they’re in a lot of trouble, with almost no place to hide. So the situation is that if the American is going to compete with the illegal, they tend to move to a marginalized legal status, effectively working under the table, just like the illegals. That’s how it is working today, how it has always worked when the law is being ignored, and how it will always work. Lawlessness always begets more lawlessness.

Now consider how this microcosm plays out when repeated millions of times over many years. Basically, if the rule of law continues to be ignored, (and if we allow it to continue it will only get worse) the status of illegal workers, both in this nation and abroad, will stay the same or slowly get worse, and the status of American workers (in terms of wages, protections, security, etc) will, over the course of years, be brought down to that level. This has been happening for decades now, and is a major factor in the widening disparity between rich and poor in this nation.

On the other hand, if we insist on the rule of law, requiring our government to do the will of the people and forcing businesses to obey the law, the status of the American workers (wages, benefits, and all that) will stay the same as today, and probably tend to slowly improve. The status of the low skill foreign workers, in this nation and abroad, will slowly be brought up to that level. Thus, many of the economic issues facing the masses will improve if we reject illegality and instead embrace the rule of law. Solving the illegal immigration problem by compassionately returning to the rule of law will benefit all working people, in this and other countries, and only minimally reduce the wealth of the already wealthy.

So it is easy to see why those bad actors want the border open and immigration law unenforced. The cartels obviously want an unending stream of illegal border crossings to disguise their trafficking schemes. Even more, the large illegal employers want the illegals to stay here, continue working for them, and remain illegal. All they have to do to keep this gravy train rolling, whenever the American people periodically rise up to demand an end to this mess, is to raise a howl for NO AMNESTY, demanding that the perfect remain the enemy of the good.

Up to now their plan has always worked. We are always left with this three way choice. Either keep going on this path, and risk civil war. Or get even tougher, avoid civil war by becoming an armed camp and engaging in genocidal levels of enforcement. Or, what is most probable, let it go back to the way it was before Trump tried to fix it. None of those choices is acceptable, so this time, let's look at a better alternative.

The alternative solution will first of all have to be based on keeping the border tightly closed. The first step has to be that everyone who comes into this country comes in through the front door, in compliance with our laws, whatever we decide those laws will be. That border closure must be maintained for as long as the border exists.

The next stage in the plan is to establish some date certain, in the near future, at which time all illegal employees, and their employers, are required to identify all illegal workers. This requirement will also be applied to anyone accessing government services. At that time each person will be assigned a provisional green card, with bio-metric data attached and downloaded to a data base. After that date, any worker or client without such a card, and a file in the data base, is subject to immediate deportation and the employer is subject to a fine, if not criminal prosecution if they have tried to evade this system.

Enforcement of these new immigration laws will, contrary to those defending illegal employment, be an easy task. Simply attach hefty fines to every instance of illegal employment, and make half the fine money payable, as a bounty, to those who report it. That approach would make enforcement very easy, and profoundly cost effective. In fact, that way of doing it would be so effective that it would actually threaten the economic well being of many big corporations.

Then the real world benefits of this policy would come to the fore. Rather than allowing themselves to go broke, the big corporate illegal employers would be forced to make their arguments regarding those foreign workers in transparent public debate, and not just in smoke filled back rooms. When the big business folks have to make their arguments public, we will probably soon discover that in some fields, such as agriculture and meat processing, we really do need some foreign workers, and then we would have an honest basis for establishing a fair guest worker program.

Concurrent with the assignment of a provisional green card to every illegal resident, each of them, when identified, will be entered into and subjected to a vetting process. The metrics of this vetting process will have already been established and made transparent to the public. These protocols will be designed to determine who deserves to gain permanent green card status.

These protocols will be based on things like time in country, legal record, work history, character references from friends and employers, record of family use or abuse of government services, and things like that. That way, a person who has been here twenty years, worked hard, paid their bills and kept their nose clean will be relatively assured, even before entering into the process, of gaining a permanent green card. That way, much opposition to the plan will be dissipated.

On the other hand, those who engaged in criminality, or who lived on the edge of the law, or were illegitimately brought in during Biden's open border fiasco, or who came here to game our system and take advantage of our compassion, will be filtered out.

While that vetting process is being carried out, all employees, legal or illegal, will, for the first time, have equal legal status. That means minimum wage, safety, and worker benefits laws will be in force. That alone will make it to where native born Americans will once again be able to compete for jobs in those fields. As the vetting process continues, many of the foreign born illegal workers will get deported, and even more native born workers will take their place.

Once again it must be emphasized that a closed border will have to be a permanent fact for this plan to work. From this point forward there will be no new illegal workers coming in. That will be the big difference compared to what happened in 1986.

With all those factors in place, over the course of just a few years, with our economy expanding as expected, the formerly illegal workers will be absorbed into an open, free and fair market. The problem of illegal immigration will largely be solved, and the rule of law restored. Some corporations will have slightly reduced profits, and the international criminal cartels will have much less influence. Most of us will be okay with those outcomes.

Then we can have full employment, with a dignified, legally protected and decent life for all workers. Our nation will be stronger, more inclusive, more united, and more peaceful. Isn't that an agenda we can all support?

We've Got to Get on Our Own Side

Our nation and our world are swirling in the chaos of seemingly innumerable scandals and emergencies. From the bombing of Iran, last year and next week? Tomorrow?, to the gargantuan fraud scandals that are just emerging, to ICE round ups, to the deportation of criminals and terrorists, to the deportation of upstanding family builders, to whatever the US is doing in Greenland, to Gaza, to Ukraine, to Iran's revolution, to what we just did in Venezuela, to American citizens being shot for demonstrating/ obstructing law enforcement, and a lot more issues that limited space doesn't allow to be mentioned here.

In all of these we find ourselves involved in passionate controversy. The worst part is that even though we have all this information technology at our fingertips, the truth, or at least the truth we can agree on, is almost impossible to find. Because of that we are in a time of deep and worsening division.

Here in America, the division is so stark that many are calling for a national divorce, or some kind of chaotic change in government. It is all so unnecessary because if we take the time to look at the situation with an honest eye, we can see a way to unity and national revival. However, if we do look at it with an honest eye, we will see that those on both the left and the right, Democrat and Republican, have been bamboozled. We have bought into some massive lies, lies which are going to destroy our nation if we don't reject them.

The attack on Venezuela of January 2, 2026 has raised questions about those lies; about our government, and how our Constitution is to be used. The response has been, besides the global celebration of Venezuelans, to object that President Trump should have gained congressional authorization prior to launching an attack. The first counter response is to warn that many in congress can't be trusted to keep such an operation secret, and so the President was justified in going it alone. Both sides of this argument, and the deeper arguments which follow, have some merit. We will focus on them now, because they reveal how all the whole raft of divisive issues are connected..

The legal issues come down to two clauses in Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution, wherein Congress is given specific powers. In clause 11, Congress is given the power to declare war. Those on the left say that Trump should have been bound by this clause, and that Congress should have declared war before he launched the operation to arrest Maduro. Those on the right say President Trump, as commander in chief, has the power to conduct legal and small scale operations on his own say so. What's more, they have a lot of legal precedents to back them on this, among which are American “gun boat” diplomacy of the late 1800's, Clinton's bombing of Bosnia, Obama's droning of multiple human targets, and the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya.

With all those undeclared precedents in mind, take another look at that congressional power to declare war. That power was last exercised properly at the beginning of World War II. Since then it has been violated on a regular basis by both Republican and Democrat administrations. Korea and Vietnam are glaring examples, but even the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with their Authorizations of the use of Military Force, fell far short of having proper declarations of war, even though war was definitely conducted in those nations. So squawking loudly about how Trump's actions are an unprecedented violation of the Constitution misses the real point.

The real point is that both sides are wrong, because all those unauthorized actions should be challenged for another reason, The more pertinent clause of section 8 that should guide us is clause 10, just prior to clause 11, which says, “The Congress shall have power: To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas and offenses against the law of nations.” That clause obviously covers piracy, trafficking in both narcotics and humans, and international terrorism. It does not, however, give the President Cart Blanche, but rather gives to Congress the all important power of definition. So when the subject comes up that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, it is the Congress, not the President, who is to make that call.

The way it could, and should, work is that Congress should debate the issues of foreign governments and organizations that threaten our national security. If the threat is dire enough, war should be declared. If the threat is low level, but still a threat, Congress should define who is really the bad guy, and how they should be punished. The President should then be authorized to carry out any punishment the Congress decrees. While the debate would be in public, any operational details, such as specific targets, timing and etc could be kept secret. That way, the enemy would not know when or how we are coming.

If such debates were held in public, transparent for the most part to the world, our adversaries would know that we are coming. Just having the debate might work to change their behavior and prevent war. What's more, once Congress did define some bad actor as a terrorist, or some foreign government as a violator of the laws of nations, the world would know that we, as a nation were united in our resolve, and that we mean business.

The big obstacle to our operating in that constitutional mode, and the first point of this essay, is those same unfaithful legislators mentioned earlier. Not trusting some legislators to keep national secrets is a real concern, but the situation is worse than that. Some congresspeople can't be trusted to seek the national good while debating in congress. Some of them seem to be pursuing the interests of other nations, or the dominance of some alien ideology.

Faithless legislators greatly hobble our nation. Take, for an example, how we should have dealt with Iran's growing nuclear capabilities. Even though that nation was clearly in violation, for more than twenty years, of the international treaty on nuclear non proliferation, we couldn't, due to the unfaithful legislators, do any constitutional thing about it. We should have used, Art 1, sec 8, clause 10, and given standing authorization for the president to act, forcefully if necessary, to prevent the terrorist regime in Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. However, some faithless left wing congress people would have vehemently opposed that, and due to the current hyper partisan spirit in congress, the Democrats, in lock step fashion, would have prevented that kind of constructive use of our Constitution. With that authority in hand, Trump might not have ever needed to bomb them.

Faithless legislators like that should be restrained by the threat of losing their seats in the next election. Too often, however, the unfaithful congress people are representing the wishes of their constituents back home. That then is the real crux of our problem, and one it is high time we addressed. There are a lot of people, in a lot of different groups, that don't really care for America to survive as a free and self governing nation.

All of those groups, left and right, singly and collectively, poison our national debate about the law and the Constitution; what it means, and how it should be used. For the most part, these groups use the Constitution as a cynical tool to wreak national destruction. When it suits their purpose, they embrace the most minuscule points, applying wrong headed readings of it to current issues. When it doesn't suit their purpose, they are happily capable of ignoring wholesale constitutional violations. They thus render our foundational national document into a kind of suicide pact, useful only when it degrades the national well being.

This latest incident in Venezuela shows that in action. Those on the left, which now includes Globalists, Marxists and radical Moslems, are deeply and touchingly concerned that every jot and tittle of their Constitutional misreading be adhered to in this case. On the other hand, when Clinton was bombing Bosnia, or Obama was droning wedding parties in Afghanistan, not a peep was heard from them.

This constitutional malfeasance is practiced by both left and right, Democrats and Republicans. What's more, the worst examples of this malfeasance are not minuscule, but extend to huge issues which touch every aspect of national life.

On the left, the biggest issue is how they ignore the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt, FDR, effectively repealed the Tenth Amendment in the 1930's. They will respond that the Supreme Court approved it (even though the Court was politically coerced due to FDR's court packing scheme), so in this case, the Court's word is final. This is unlike the way they receive court rulings that favor Donald Trump, such as SCOTUS approving his War Powers stance, or supporting his programs to deport illegal aliens, or the overthrowing of Roe v Wade. In those cases the court ruling is definitely up for debate, and not final.

Things aren't much different on the right. They might celebrate Trump's court victories, but their own fealty to the Constitution is suspect, especially when such doctrines as corporate personhood are scrutinized. Yes, they can point to favorable court rulings which support that odious doctrine, just as the left ignores the court approved neutering of the Tenth Amendment. What they can't point to, however, is where the doctrine of corporate personhood exists in the Constitution, or how it conforms to the vision of government the founders handed us.

Leaving the legalistic wranglings around these issues for later, the point remains that many in our nation use our Constitution as a kind of suicide pact. Then the real problem, once again, comes down to these faithless legislators, and the millions of our fellow citizens who vote for them. Simply put, there are too many Americans these days who are not sure that the United States of America is a good idea anymore, or that it ever really was.

When we see that as the real problem, the awkward misuse of the Constitution makes sense. Far too many folks in this country have an agenda other than truly working toward a more perfect union. Some are out and out Marxist globalists (Progressives and Secular fundamentalists). Some are religious zealots, ranging from fundamentalist Moslems to Christian Nationalists, and some are racists, of various stripes, that believe in their own racial group's supremacy. All of them are deluded with the notion that America was always and still is a flawed nation, not really worthy of continued existence. They foolishly think that we should just let the republic go; that anything would be better.

It is easy enough to see why some, if not most, modern Americans have come to doubt that this country should continue. From day one, we have not lived up to our lofty ideals. It isn't that our system failed, but rather that we failed our system. We claimed all men are created equal, but we didn't extend equal rights to all men. At first we kept those just for wealthy White men; and then, after some reforms, to just White men; and then, after a brutal, probably inevitable war to end slavery, nominally extended rights to all men, even Black men, that were citizens. Then we eventually included Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans, along with every ethnicity of women. So while we began with great flaws, over time we have at least been trying to perfect the union, to mend its' every flaw.

Along the way, however, while we were distracted and not being informed about it, we lost the essence of our original system. First, some powerful interests got effective control of the free press, what is today known as the media. Then, while we weren't looking or being warned about it due to that corrupted media, those same elitist interests (who never did want a nation dedicated to liberty and justice for all) got the Supreme Court to declare that corporations are persons. That really changed the basic structure of our government, because the founders, with the intention of preventing corporate monopolies, had set it up to where the states could regulate corporations. After the court made that ruling in 1886, states could no longer keep the corporations on the short leash of community control. Interstate monopolies and trusts soon thereafter (in the 1890's) came to dominate our national life. to the detriment of us all.

After that there were a couple of other massive changes to our system, which even though they were done by constitutional amendments in the 19teens, worked to scuttle the original political dynamic initiated by the founders. Those were the 16^th and 17^th Amendments, which established a federal tax directly on individuals, and set up direct election of senators. The first erected a horrifyingly unbalanced tax structure, making individuals answer, as individuals, to a distant, all powerful, and unaccountable government. The second muffled most of the voices of the states in the halls of the national legislature. Those combined moves actually reduced the influence that individuals could have on the federal government just as they gave that same federal government the power to insert itself into the most intimate details of our personal lives. The Founders would have rolled over in their graves.

A later unconstitutional usurpation of powers by the feds from the states occurred under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930's. During that decade, and in response to what he termed a national crisis, FDR moved many of the functions of government from the states and localities to the federal government. He effectively, as stated earlier, repealed the Tenth Amendment. Not only was that agenda initiated in that decade, but since then, with LBJ's Great Society and such, we have continued down that path, amalgamating almost all powers of government at that same, federal, national level.

These days almost all the functions of government, from education to healthcare to welfare to infrastructure to jobs, business, and environmental controls, functions which used to be under the responsibility and power of local communities, have been taken over by the federal government. It is then no wonder folks have come to doubt the goodness of America. We haven't lived in America for a long time, a much longer time than the lifespans of any still breathing.. We have been in a different country, a false America, for so long that the blessings, and the very feel, of liberty have been lost to our hearts and minds.

Think about how these changes (and there are others) explain so much of what has gone wrong in our nation, and how the truth of this cuts in all directions. A government which enables corporate excess and monopolies has resulted in many of us hating and fearing capitalism. That is a tragedy because the type of small scale, petite capitalism the founders embraced, and empowered the states to regulate, served the people well, and would not have led to these excesses.

Likewise, big, over-centralized government has both taken from us control of corporations, and created huge unaccountable bureaucracies which rule over the minutia of our lives. This over-centralized government has created a real dread of tyranny in the hearts of many. Ultimately, those who of us dread corporate excess have been divided from and set in battle against those of us who dread the ravages of big government tyranny. Thus our great national division is driven by our elite rulers.

Further, and most importantly, taking the powers of self government from us in our local communities has removed from us the greatest blessing of liberty which the American system previously provided. That great blessing is the kind of vibrant, involved citizenry that our system, with powers and responsibilities held in local communities, was intended to generate, and which it did generate until real liberty was lost to us.

The long term solution, not to get bogged down in specifics, is for us to think small, in terms of both government and business. We must stop thinking that big, central systems are the best, or only, way to go.

That is the gist of the problem. We know, and don't much trust, those around us. But then we turn around and place great trust in strangers, people we don't know at all, who live at a great distance and over whom we have no control. Why do we think such elites are better people who can be trusted? It is a kind of blind idolatry which we exercise toward both government and business elites, and it serves us very poorly.

We must regain the wisdom, the determination, that all government is dangerous. With that determination, we must come to see that the smaller and closer to the people a government is, the more likely we are to be able to keep it under control. The same principle holds true for business, smaller and decentralized is safer, more accountable and generally better for us than bigger and more centralized.

By de-centralizing government, empowering local and state governments, we will be able to de-centralize corporations. This would empower us to put the corporate (and technological) beasts back on a healthy short leash of community control, while retaining a system of free enterprise. That would give us the ability to deal with all the other challenges mentioned earlier, from environmental concerns to run away militarism (which has always been the illegitimate child of over-centralized capitalism).

On the other hand, giving in to the temptation to throw it all up as a bad effort, to abandon the American experiment, would just land us deeper into the clutches of the elitists bent on our enslavement. Any moves to break up, destroy, or divorce ourselves as a nation will almost undoubtedly make it easier for those same forces of bigness, that same nebulous elitism, to gain even more power over us.

When we ponder getting back to the Constitution in this country we ought to recognize that it's probably about the only time human beings, on a mass scale, ever got government right. But that is definitely not because it was mostly cooked up by just a bunch of White guys

It is true that they were the ones most involved, but the important thing to notice is that they were in a desperate bind. They were obliged to use all the (formidable) education they collectively possessed. and combine that with all the knowledge they could garner, and use all that to conceive of some form of government that would be stable enough to keep the British from eventually hanging them.

In the course of nobly and courageously protecting their own interests, the Founders accidentally stumbled upon something better than they knew. In September 1787, they knew that any government they produced would have to pass muster with the most politically astute people the world had yet seen. So they made it up the best they could, and gave the people more real power than many of them were comfortable with. Even the Founders didn't realize how powerful a popular tool it would prove to be.

In a lot of ways, our decline has been inevitable. It is just the way that nations, and republics especially, go. The thing is, and why we should strive so hard to revive our system, is that ours truly was a unique experiment in government, one that proved itself to be very empowering for the common people, and really did work to elevate the moral consciousness of the masses.

Before we allow this tremendous gift to drift away forever, we ought to realize that for all its flaws, it was still the best system of government humans have ever stumbled upon. If we choose to, our revolutionary fervor, which is legitimate and growing, could be diverted into not burning this system down in favor of some untried and probably ill intended fraud, but rather into putting our good system back together better than ever, truly empowering we the people to renew our quest to establish liberty and justice for all.

The most important question to ask is; Where are we going into the future? The alternatives to American self government that are on offer, from some kind of theocracy to some kind of totalitarian socialism, while they might be attractive to this generation of Americans, are attractive only because they, and we, all of us, have forgotten the great promise and reality of the American experiment in popular self government. We need to remember and re-imagine how well our system can work, and how well it can accommodate our diversity and our differences without causing us to devolve into mutual hatred and hostility.

What's more, we must realize that those corrupt elitist interests who deformed and mutilated our system into being repugnant are waiting in the wings to take complete control if we let them. Just throwing up our hands in frustration, just chucking it all, will play into their agenda.

There is an old saying, “Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.” This means that when one goes to clean up a big mess, don't lose sight of what is truly precious. Don't dispose of that precious baby while getting rid of the messy, objectionable crud that has gotten attached to it.

Getting rid of our precious system of free popular self government in favor of some corrupt and corruptible elitist system would be far worse than just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It would, in fact, amount to throwing out the precious baby of Liberty, and retaining what we have come to loathe, the filthy, crud filled bathwater of oppressive elitist corruption. So not only should we not throw the baby out with the bathwater, we definitely should not make the greatest mistake of all time; that of throwing out the baby and keeping the bathwater.