Amazing grace, I do believe . . .the Bible is for me.

Diverse communities of the modern era rely upon the Bible as (a) divinely inspired literature and (b) some communities believe in the stories of the Bible as literally true.

I hope to convince you that both a and b are conclusions and only in hindsight to be valued for efficacy and worth to the reader of the Bible.  Why is my offer of insight a helpful one?  Think of a preacher of the Gospel, any preacher.  Does he call the Bible the "Word of God?"  Is that not a tad presumptuous?

Why, what is to stop someone from just making stuff up and then telling folks that the words he writes down were words God told him to write down?  Absolutely nothing.  However, if he or she is struck by  lightning on the spot for his claim of authenticity, we will tend to believe he or she has been entirely discredited.  So are we suppose to believe every yokel that comes along who makes such a claim and is not struck dead on the spot?  I think not.

If you've a mind to do so, keep listening and I will give you in a manner of speaking the wherewithal to deal with charlatans and false prophets of the words of God. They are here, yes here, in the modern age just as assuredly they have always been present in every generation since the dawn of creation of humankind.  Who knows?  I may be one!  And so the question hangs in the air:  "Priest, rabbi, elder, bishop, do we all not know you to be God fearing as Abraham and know you to be persons subject to judgment for your deeds consistent with your words?"  

And so it is that each would be witness of the word of God comes to you as one who is being put to the test for the proof of his or her testimony.  The witness is living in fact and in deed the words of one who is God fearing and as one subject to the judgment of God.  The witness can be anyone!  Why, could it not be me?

What's missing here?  I think you know.  You.  You need to show up in the conversation.  Read your Bible, process its contents, listen to the learned and the God fearing who are respectful of your intellect and capacity for God as a human designed with a certain innate quality.  The quality, I believe, is reducible to words, and so here goes:  "You are an intelligent creature capable of faith and trust in God."  Abstract words and phrases are useful here too.  Some recent commentators say that we humans have been created with a capacity for relationship with God.  Believe absolutely that "you are a creature capable of faith and trust in God" and stuff will start to happen in your life.   Transformation of your life becomes your hope and absolute purposefulness in living your life becomes your limitless gift from God that can not ever be eroded or thefted from you.

God will want you like God wanted Abraham to be.  He will want you to be as follows: a person who believes in God, trusts in God, and does God's bidding even in the midst of despair and insurmountable odds and the disfavor of your fellow human beings!  Read the Book of Job; read it again.  To what purpose?  You will belong to God and God will be your God.

By becoming a reader of the Bible, you with your own reason and experience and hopefully wise counsel of family and church can honestly react to each story, especially if the story puts words into the mouth of God.  Did God really say such a thing as God is said to have said in these stories?  At some point, you will find yourself commenting in three ways: (1) bunk, (2) definitely a Godlike thing to say, or (3) I just do not honestly know and I'll just go on "hold" until I know more.

I offer you this: your comment (even if it's "bunk") tells you exactly what posture you have taken as a response to the word of  God some preacher is talking about.   You are as some other preachers like to say interacting with the "Living Word of God."  And like it or not, you are living the word of God.  That can be earthshakingly important in how you come to live as authentically as the person God created you to be.

I tell you this, because I believe it to be true:  One day, you can in all honesty say that you have had an experience of God which is your own experience and to which you too can witness to others!

Wow!  Isn't that amazing?  You will actually come to know why a believer weeps during the singing of  a hymn like "Amazing Grace."

The Bible first should be trusted as the literature of the Jewish people and honored for what it can teach about ideals which reflect upon a people and a person in their trust and reliance upon a God and two other very profound truths: (a) God keeps his promises to people; and (b) people capable of faithfulness to God are often and predominately unfaithful to God and subsequently thrown down upon the mercy of God.

What else is there?  Well, quite a bit actually.  The Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, and Epistles and even the Book of Revelations are also Jewish literature, but it's a Jewish literature that takes on the entire human race and shares the entirety of divine wisdom with all comers.  What?  What did that preacher man just say?

How did a backward, wayward, perverse Aramaic people become at times the People of God, a people which could then anticipate and receive the Son of Man (the Messiah or Promised One)?  And the story just keeps getting better and better.  For then the Messiah does come and is killed for it, and then something else happens.  He is resurrected in glory.  Then he sends some of these same Aramaic persons forth into the world at large with the Good News of Salvation for all.

This is ultimately the grand saga, is it not?  Yes, a saga, an epic of  God becoming human, suffering as a human, and dying an ignominious human death (as if a criminal among criminals though he was without blemish and innocent of sin or crime), transcending death, not to prove he was God, but to redeem us from sin and death.

You mean he failed to prove he was God, or at least the Son of God?  He already knew he was God.  He didn't have to prove anything.  Well he did have to prove one thing.  He had to prove God keeps his promises for we truly difficult ones who need God to convince us that he is the God of Love..  He had to prove God's love for each of us.  God wants us to believe that he died on the cross to redeem us from our sin, our waywardness, our perversity, and our disobedience of the will of God.

I know it has to bother you that God made you knowing that you could and would disobey him.  Why would he do that?  I  think I know.

I believe God, being God, is drawn down from his heaven into our midst, or can be drawn down into our midst, by worshipful prayer offered up by his people.  Not just any people, but by communities of believers who aspire to be the people of God.  Read Psalm 22.  Not yet, Estelle, not yet!

When you get home, go into your room, close the door, and read Psalm 22 until it brings you to tears.  If it does not do that to you or should you tell me that you did not cry, I guarantee you that one day you will read it and you will weep, and you will weep, you will weep profusely.  And you will be filled with the Holy Spirit because you will have been emptied out so that the Spirit of God can fill up your cup.  Your soul will absolutely be brim full, spilling out, every excess of the Spirit that one can imagine.

This God thing really works.  It does.  And even more profoundly, when you conform to God's expectations, you love God and you love neighbor, you actually will come to see God.  And you will see the Lord.  Not only that, but you will see the Lord even before you should die.  How is it that I can proclaim such a patently exaggerated thing?   Why indeed?

Because you will see in the face of the idiot, the prostitute, the wife abuser, the homosexual, the tax collector, the oppressed and downtrodden, the widow, the orphan, the dying, the diseased, the outcast, the stranger, the face of Our Lord Jesus Christ. This call from God, this religion, is not for sissies.

Yes, you will suffer rejection and even self-abnegation, and despair, but God will send an angel to comfort you and you will come to no harm.  What is more, you will have given life over to the greater glory and honor of the God who does want you for himself.  He will say your name and welcome you into His glory and you will say, "When, dear Lord, when?"  He will say, "When you spoke words of kindness and compassion and when you met the need of those considered the lesser in the world from which you come.  You did it to Me as I commanded you to do."

Notice how the literature of the people of God ascends to theology over time, a theology of the God  of Love in all and for all.  It becomes a story of Divine intervention to turn us heart and soul back to God, whom though  we have forsaken God, wants us for His purposes, not our own.  He appears to have gifted us with willfulness (the power to disobey God) but that same will can turn us to faith, trust, and reliance on God alone as the source of our best interest and welfare.

Start living today.  Be Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Elijah, Job, Hosea.  Be the person, be the people of God.  Be Mary, John the Baptist, Peter, John, and Paul.  You will be the person, the people, that God created you to be.  You will speed the return of the Son of God in all his glory.  When this earth perishes and all we know of this world is ended, there God is and you will be there with him, safe, and in his care just as you learned to be when you walked and dwelt on the Earth.  Or you can do otherwise, but know this: you do it at your peril and to the detriment of your eternal soul.

That may seem harsh, but this God of Love is a jealous God.  This God wants you for God's purposes.  This God wants you to freely choose God as he designed you and me to do.  You can turn and walk away now, but you will be back.  You will ultimately throw yourself down on the mercy of God.  Trust that one thing you know is true.  We are not alone in the universe of science or of history.  God is not only out there, he is in here, in the human heart, and the heart does not lie except to its own detriment and brokenness.

Saturday, April 13, 2013.  Sermon notes for my readers.  Richard J. Hilber.

One Lesson: What would it be? It has to be the only lesson you will ever teach.

Said the Teacher to his Student at just about every turn: 

The answer you seek, the one that defines you, at least if you had to say, is spiritual work to know. 

Does the human "heart" require this work of you? 

Has this work always been there waiting for you to finally phrase it, say it out loud, then live it, or if you have been living it, live it more deeply and with absolute conviction? 

Looking outside of oneself helps, but be wary of the "madness" of permitting others to define you. 

The person God created you to be gave you a spirit which is at best a question which lies in your very center of being, a seed really. 

A human being has within him or her the "God particle" which makes all things possible to he or she that believes it to be so. 

Be the person God made you to be. 

Take charge of your life. 

Take responsibility for directing yourself and your time and talent. 

You really do not have anything else to do really except maybe to just give it away, give it away, this gift God gave you, LIFE!

Art and Spirituality as One's Experience of God and About that Mary Mother of God Belief

As Catholics the full measure of faith includes acceptance of Mary's status as the Mother of God as through her the Son of God became the Son of Man (and Second Adam) and so the virgin birth (immaculate conception), the assumption of Mary into heaven without first having to die, and her coronation as Queen of Heaven have all in turn been the focus of Catholic devotion to Mary as the intercessor at the throne of God.

Some Protestant Christians take exception to the elevation in status especially as the intermediator as between God and humankind is Jesus Christ and none other (with which Catholics will certainly not argue).

The Catholic understanding though is that when we pray for our spiritual and material wants and needs and most especially for the blessings of God upon others that we mere humans are interceding, and so not even Protestants ultimately take issue with the veneration of Mary the Mother of God as an advocate at the throne of God.

The use of icons and statues is disconcerting to many Protestants as if Catholics were praying to an idol, but this has a point of diminishing returns when you consider the mystical experience of Juan Diego of Mexico and the artifact of the image of Our Lady of Guadeloupe.

The image of Our Lady of Guadeloupe encapsulates how artists have apparitions on an exceptional basis when the artist's experience of God later expresses itself in art.  If Juan in seeing Mary and speaking wtih her was delusional, his delusion does not become the focus of our attention.  Rather, his story comes to us with his cloak loaded with flowers as he had been directed to gather by Mary for Juan to carry to Juan's bishop.  When the robe is opened, the flowers spill out and emblazoned on the cloak is an effigy of Mary the Mother of God as she had appeared to Juan.  Mary's message to the bishop was to build a church.

The bishop in seeing the display as a miracle was conceding that Juan's experience of God was to emphasize an article of the faith; the bishop realized he must permit the story of Juan and the Mother of God to reach its audience (which is what happens when the basilica church is built and pilgrims travel to the church to pray for God's favor before the garment).

There is some speculation about Mary the Mother of God which tends towards acceptance of the Divine Feminine.  Why not?  A people's experience of God someway, somehow, must be encompassed in imagery especially if not otherwise disclosed or available in existing art!  The Catholic Church in Mexico in embracing Our Lady of Guadeloupe as a sign of God's favor was giving the people of Mexico a cultural icon in line with the teachings of the church,  Over the years, the veneration Our Lady has proven an exceptional portal for reception of God's grace by the people of God.



Author's Note 1.  Many come to faith in God through the Divine Feminine (as in gender assignments for God are problematic and culturally embraced as useful in theology to a point).

Author Note 2.  I am a Methodist Christian and embrace my Catholic heritage as integral to my experience of God.  If you wish instruction in the Christianity of the Catholic faith, please seek persons learned in the faith who are practitioners of this  living faith.  If you wish instruction in the Methodist faith or other Christian denomination, please seek ones learned in the faith who are practitioners of these living faiths..

What Jack knows down deep in the well

April is National Poetry Month.  So here is a poem for my readers.  The persona in the poem is the familiar character Jack, though not necessarily he of the beanstalk, but something of that Jack for the trouble he has gotten himself into, and more obviously the persona is Jill's Jack which twins together went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.  However, here the twins are on this particular day separated and not together fetching a pail of water.   Here goes.

The Twin in the Well

So far down in the well am I,

Will parents hear my cry?

For now a circular patch of blue

Is all I see of sky above.

A song bird on the open lid

And the wind vibrating that

Drown out my calling:

“Dad, Mom, I am in the well.”

What’s to become of me?

Why did I lean in so far?

Was it to see bottom

For what I could see, a cloud?

Who only knows the end

Of me can not go well?

I can hold on here.

But cold and wet, how long?

God, I promise I will

Make it all right with Jill.

She can have the rope.

It’s mine to give her.

Just so she brings it

Right down here now.

She knows to ask

Where I’ve gone.

RJH.  Thursday, February 28, 2013.

Marriage and the Prospect and Promise of Marriage

Saturday, April 06, 2013.

 On the way to meeting up with God, I found he spoke to me before I should ever see the face of God, and in small and quiet ways the Deity asserted Himself and His predisposition for love as the greatest requirement of our common humanity.

[This being my treatment of the topic of marriage and its prospects.]

By Richard J. (Rick) Hilber

A broken heart is a terrible thing to mend, but it is required to live again, as opposed to merely surviving.  We have to heal in the broken places and grow strong, but the process is fraught with challenges.  Prayer and good times are prescribed antidotes to the poison that pools in our being when we are hurt.  This is especially true if the hurt be not dispersed and watered down to a painful memory with little or  no power over us.

Picture one of the most hurtful scenarios of our day and age, the parent who withholds approval of an adult child who enters into a marriage union, and even worse interferes in the responsible conduct of his or her adult child.  The parent has a broken heart over a life choice and only manages to alienate the adult child as a consequence.  No prisoners taken in this particular encounter, only banishment. 

However, there is something worse, and it would be in an adult child’s failure to be true to himself or herself.   The hurt that results is that prisoners are taken, sometimes spouses, and even more cruelly children who we could have empowered to live their own lives, make their own choices, and have their own consequences both good and bad.

We fault former lovers not for our having loved one another, but for proving all too human and short of our idealization of one another (which is to err on the side of objectifying the loved one).  Marriage is an undertaking that soon takes us to other quarters than any idealization of the "other" termed "romantic." 

Spouses in love with one another have transcended romantic love by loving the actual person (or not).  Freedom to go or to stay is an enpowerment that provides second life (and later lives) to mature spouses.  That's the commitment to relationship those who aspire to marriage want for themselves. 

They gladly trade in the rashness and intensity of romantic love episodes they may or may not have had for the prospect of actual intimacy and trust in another adult.  The intimacy and trust are as byproducts of marriage commitment the first children of every couple (regardless of gender assignments). 

Kudos to those with the commitment and passion for marriage and its rebirth.  Your marriage by definition can not be childless if you actually have a true marriage (and regardless of state sanctioned marriage provisions of the law, actual child progeny of the marriage, or child adoption). 

Persons who have true marriages or true marriage experience know of what I speak.  Let's not forget this commonality in the midst of enlarging the sphere of state sanctioned marriages and rights for all.

 

It of course makes me more than a little sad, that not all marriages are respectful and open to growth for both partners.  I have known a measure of success, but I also know the other side of the coin.  Divorce sometimes becomes an altered state of being when there are actual children of the marriage (but that’s a topic for another day).

As a parent and grandparent, I ask would I fail  my progeny (child, step-child, et cetera) for his or her marrying a person of the same sex?   The same can happen when an inter-racial marriage is undertaken but that one seems not to have much sway over me.  In Christian charity in answer to my question, I should say not.  I just hate it that my moral stances are so often at odds with institutions which I serve  and  honor with my  allegiance, church and country.  Again as an adult, I find I have no place to hide.

Here, I have tried to state my values as conservatively as possible, but in a manner which is respectful of persons different yet the same as myself.  This is not about hedonism or a descent into perdition.  Clearly it's about family values and the efficacy of covenant relationships into which even atheists can commit.  If married, you become fulfilled and evolved and you reach your potential, who is to say you are not the best promotion of the married state itself.  (Again, the efficacy of the single life is a topic for another day.)

As a Christian, I too experience sadness that the marriage covenant perhaps does not become the covenant of the spouses with God as the third partner, but the substitute of accountability of the spouses to one another is as good or better.  You be the judge, and I will be the respecter of your freedom to believe in God, or not. 

In my conservative spiritually, the assent or yes to God is obtained by commitment to my fellow human beings and when they fail me or I fail myself, it only serves to throw me back upon the mercy of God.  No easy out.   And definitely no embrace of hedonism.   The sacrament I am called to over and over again is to love God and love my neighbor and to forgive myself and others for the hurt that results of our common humanity.   

Why I am a Liberal and Why Humanists Tend to be Liberals

Thursday, April 04, 2013

Why I am a Christian Liberal (Christian Democrat).

By Richard J. Hilber

A consistent liberal posture includes and furthers  use of state and federal power to effect a just society while watchful of the results which indicate movement of a government towards either anarchy or statism.  I define statism as the unnecessary and excessive exercise of power by the state forsaking the humanism of individual rights and responsibilities.  Anarchy, or unbridled license of individuals to do as they please,  is no more American in my experience than is statism (being that America is a premier example of limited government by design and by grant of limited powers of the governed to the government).

As a Christian and an American, I share in what is best termed the quest for the “just society.”  Notice that the aspiration is not to a perfect government, rather an approximation of the ideal in both governance and results.  Even if I share my home country with atheists and those that are not humanists, if we have a regard for the ideals of  a democratic society with respect for minorities, even of the smallest minority, the individual, we can join together in common enterprise.  Humanism found in many religions as a high regard for human life and the furtherance of justice and charity make the vast majority of the religious persons of the world my fellow travellers.

By definition, the just society will not and can not embrace anarchy or its philosophical parent, libertarianism.  Nor can it further the excess of its opposite, statism, which in the Twentieth Century was identified as the common abomination which was Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and even the Benito Mussolini’s  Fascist Italy.  These three experiments in government, just to name a few of the failed states in which statism was triumphant, resulted in debasement of life and the erasure of any pretence of aspirations to being a just society.   Christians in all of these statism experiments were or should have been at odds with their governments at just about every turn, and to the point of non-violent protest and imprisonment. 

In each of the three named experiments in statism, Christians who participated in the experiments or even stood by and failed to object or suffer political consequence were later to be discredited as quislings, collaborators, endorsers, and encouragers of the evils perpetuated (thee game altering evil being pogroms, executions, and disenfranchisement of disfavored persons and classes of persons).   

If the Christian who aided the oppressed populations (populations harassed by the state on grounds of ethnicism or religion or politics) paid for their conscientious objection, moral support, wealth, or other assistance, with his or her life, we as Christians would be derelict not to find them martyres and persons worthy of canonization for sainthood evident in the acts of conscience of adherents of Christ.  The same would be true of Christians who failed to object, for their failure to object  would indicate unworthiness of a subject for sainthood.  Persons of power and influence found themselves in the crosshairs of history in which normative pursuits such as peace treaties brought into question a person’s moral compass.

In time the conduct of  Christianity in times of persecution of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and persons with disabilities would be reviewed and criticized.  Pope Pius XII in silencing German Catholic hierarchy and laity did so to protect church vested interests under the Nazi regime.  Even the Lateran Treaty which yielded Church a Vatican State at a time of triumphalism of Italian nationalism has become the subject of valid criticism.  Historians have to ask: did the Pope not speak out in disfavor of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s edicts.  It is clear it  would have been counter-productive to winning soveignty of the Church and property rights in a Fascist Italy.  Needless to say the canonization of Eugenio Pacelli has stalled and principally because of morally ambivalent results of his efforts for accommodation with Nazi Germany as papal nuncio to Germany and then once he became Pope in his own right.  The record of this Pope is not easy to judge as he was hostage in Italy to first Italian nationalism and then a German usurpation of soveignty, which is when he took personal risks and advanced the cause of  his faith in a manner to reclaim his soul.

Personally, I think Pius XII was in his long reign to be credited for his growth in spirituality and resolve to rectify the results of the era of accommodation with statists like Hitler and Mussolini.  Did he ever challenge the phalangist Franco in Spain whose nationalistic socialism survived the reign of Pius XII into the 1960s.  Franco one must remember for using German supplied bombs and planes to destroy civilians in bombing raids on his own Spanish people in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.  His killing innocent children and non-combatants gave the world fair warning of the implications of all out war which soon would rain down on English, French, Polish, Russian, and German and Italian cities as well. 

What is lost in all of this of course is that appeasors such as Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Pius XII hoped to avoid the consequences of not working out an accommodation with the “modernist” regimes of  Germany and Italy.  The then and  now apparent consequences being the all out wars of aggression bent on empire and supremacy over nationals and foreign populations alike and the wars of self defense that would follow.  The Papacy of the late 1930s was in effect being left behind as a player in world affairs, having little to do of consequence about the ravages of Asiatic countries by a militaristic and nationalist Japan, with enormous suffering which resulted of the imperialism in Korea, China, IndoChina, and the Phillipines for starters. 

Even in experiments in statism which had a humanistic flavor, the collaboration of communism and statism produced results which indicate a war on the propertied classes (instead of the usual target of statism, the poor, the indigent, or the disenfranchised).  The humanistic bent had to do with providing government services to the poor  which were a means to justify autocratic and dictatorial powers of the government as vested typically in a dictator who jailed detractors, objective minded critics, and political opposition.  So the common traits of statists whether fascists or communists bent is the suppression of dissent.   Even in my lifetime, I had a sister tell me I should not criticize Genreral Augusto Pinochet of Chile, dictator of Chile, because under Pinochet the streets were clean and the trains ran on time.  I was appalled and by the American corporation that maintained relations with a fascist regime that oppressed dissenters with kidnappings, imprisonment, and executions (the infamous “disappearances of the Pinochet Era in Chile).

The word conservative has been tarnished for me by its political uses as descriptive of the Nazi, the Fascists, and too the conservative Stalinists.  Liberal for me came to mean “humanism” as the ultimate regard for life and liberty (but not to the point of anarchy or disregard of the rights of others).  In my understanding, government was a necessary evil, and only if responsive to problems and capable of procuring and inducing a just society (i.e. the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s being the premier example). 

The world I was born into had served up reactionaries to the liberal ascendancy of Franklin Delano Roosevel and as well the just society that if necessary to defend freedom had to go to war and conduct all out war (i.e. use of the atomic bomb on civilian populations).   Born in 1950, I would look at conservative politics in the United States and be wary of the fascists and Stalinists of the American  stripe even whilst I was taught of the menace of international communism as a threat to America’s vested interests in control of the economies of the world (the American dollar being the essential and stable currency not the least of America's interests and concerns). 

The world I was born into was a world with a conservative Stalinism (statist in governance even if in rhetoric communistic)  at odds with a conservative capitalist ascendancy that at times would put world peace at risk in a nuclear age.  To be fair the conservatives of the era (both statists and capitalists) messed with mutually assured destruction of nuclear war as a deterrent to one another’s excesses (the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 comes to mind as the example of the brinkmanship required of both President John Kennedy and Premier Nikita Krushchev.)  I must say that the use of the phrase “Western Democracies” was used much like “International Communism” as proxy phrases for unbridled capitalism of the West and the statism of the Soviet Union (and its control of its satellite nations). 

The competition that was threatenting to either side was quite frankly over who was free and not free to exploit the planet without being checked by its adversary.  So during the Suez Canal Crisis, France and Great Britain would risk all to stop nationalization of the canal which process of ownership by Egypt was supported by an expansionist Soviet Union who aided Egyptian nationalists who had come to power.  The United States did not, even if it did, have to lift a finger to procure the result it wanted (it had ballistic missiles in Turkey pointed right at the heart of Mother Russia).

The results we have today many decades later are mixed and a moving target of problems and subsets of problems which have left  liberals open to criticism from those who have no conscience that equats with a societal disposition to be the "just society."  Christians living in this republic (representative democracy) tend to be responsible citizens by being liberals (persons with a social conscience).  Liberals have rightly been challenged for adoption of a libertarian stance on the right of a woman to have the say over her pregnancy (especially with the establishment of societal interests limiting those rights as established by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1968)).   As events have shown since Roe v. Wade, the expansion of rights of the state over the body of a woman have expanded.  The public debate is over the extent of those powers and the necessity for such an enlargement of state’s rights over the individual.  It is just the debate we who advocated for a just society need to have and over which we are likely to be at odds with ourselves. 

The Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and the Bush Presidencies have exploited this divide with a measure of success as socially conservative Christians take issue with results indicative of abortion on demand and abortion for economic reasons at best and inconvenience to the woman at worst (ignoring the fact that the life of the mother is hers to decide as a medical decision and the disinclination of society to fund the expense of raising a child to majority a public liability).  

Taking of human life by abortion or capital punishment is inherently evil to a humanist (or that word means nothing).  This is not to say that a state’s rights to incriminate a woman for abortion is to prevail in a just society on any account.  To wit, if abortion is outlawed than the state must police the medical profession and drive the practice of abortion underground into the nadir of medicine, into quackery, and into the immorality of  the extortionist portion of capitalism which includes the sex trade, the smuggling trade, and organized crime.

Libertarians (not liberals) espouse as large an exercise of personal freedom as maximizes the individualism of which our materialistic society is so enamored.  The libertarian view  wants for legalization of marijuana, abortion, weapons for high speed kills, and physician assisted suicide. 

Of such postures of libertarians, Christian liberals labor to see elements of the "just society" they could embrace in good conscience.

They do see elements of the "just society" in the ideal of a death penalty humanely administered, but the actual exercise of the death penalty is fraught with exercise of state and federal power that reeks of statism with tinges of racism and classicism as the persons executed tend to be black and of the impoverished class of persons, and even more daunting convicted on evidence that later proves or establishes lapses in the application of the rules of evidence or a harsh imposition of a sentence that constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” of criminal conduct (i.e. execution of the criminally insane and minors).  I learned today that even in Texas, the premier capital punishment state and society, only two per cent of those sentence to death will ever be executed (based on the state’s actual record of executions).  So who lives and who dies under such a system of laws is judged on de facto results to be “cruel and unusual.”

Part of humanism is a regard for the victims of crime.  We have a need to know that criminal wrong doing is to result in meaningful prosecution of sentences imposed.   It also suggests that for victim families there is no justice.  Why?  Because statistically only a very small percentage of victim families will ever see execution of the murderer of their loved one.  As humanists, we can disagree on the efficacy of capital punishment as a procurement of a just society.  Is there deterrence to any degree in making murder a capital offense when the results suggest only two percent of the population in Texas face execution at some point, usually years down the road?  The Republican Party which shuns liberals has exploited this divide as well, playing off one part of the humanist community from the other the same as it does in the abortion debate.

When I hear younger generations speak ill of liberals, I do ask these same persons to be wary of libertarians who have very little or no regard for the just society to which Christians and like minded persons must aspire. 

The consequence of libertarian influence and control and that of an underregulated and unregulated capitalism is a loss of public confidence in the will of the people to check the excesses of capitalism and too of the individuals who have very little or no regard for the just society which I would pass on to my children and grandchildren.

For conservatives and liberals alike (oddly not for libertarians), I say be wary of a political process in which our elected representatives owe allegiance to the highest bidder who supplied the funds necessary to sway the electorate at election time.  Be wary of the turnstile nature of elected officials who purport to regulate industry, diligently  to enforce regulations as executive branch officers, and then become the paid lobbyists and consultants of the very businesses they had been elected to monitor and control.  A libertarian would simply say more power to the person who can exploit the system for every dime of which it can be milked!  Good grief, even Republicans and Democrats alike place love of country over selfish aggrandizement and not necessarily in that order (some Democrat being more public spirited than some Republicans or vice a versa). 

Our moral fibre as individuals means we must procure the just society for future generations and we do so both to procure and to receive the blessings of liberty.  Libertarians are about taking the individual's stake out of a common enterprise called representative democracy in our American experiment which is now 237 years old.  Do your part.  Practice the acts of concern for the commonwealth of persons that make  up this great nation and its progeny.  Safeguard the environment.  Educate the young regardless of the immigration status of parents or foreign origin.  We are a nation of immigrants and we are all on a pilgrimage towards the just society that merits us a tomorrow as a nation.  That is my political faith as a liberal.  

You will hear conservatives descry humanism as secular or atheistic, but the lie in that attempt is in Christianity itself in which the man who eats, lives, and sleeps the Great Commandment and the Beatitudes of Christ has his or her heavenly reward even if such do not profess that Jesus is God (notice how guarded Jesus was of any but the freest acclaimation of His divinity).  Remember Christ said he was the way, the truth, and the life.  The attack on liberals as humanists is justified in almost all cases, but not the noise about it being secular or atheistic.  Liberals err when they embrace statism or libertarianism.  The consequence of either of these two extremes is either  subsequent justifiable rebellion to statism or the anarchy that results of libertarian mentality of its adherents.

Humanism, which is not theology, can err too.  I will be the first to admit that.  Theology is even more legendary as a source of err though (the Inquisition and the Salem Witch Craft Trials being a common ancestry of right minded individuals later proven to be evil incarnate).  Enough said.  

Delusional Gun Culture Controls Washington, D.C.; Chris Wallace needs a public spanking!

Recently, I had occasion to be reminded that the individual's right to bear arms is protected by the Second Amendment separate and apart from the bearing of arms in a well regulated militia.  An accurate reflection of the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court.  That does not change this reality: the "craziness" in the Gun Culture is afforded by the rest of us in society.  

Like many human freedoms, limitation on the federal and state government exercise of power over individuals (and groups) is inherent (known as the requirement of substantive due process to deprive a person of liberty or freedom to do as they please).

If anyone thinks a criminal conspiracy  can not result when you hand a gun to one contemplating the commission of a crime, think again.  If you have together planned all or or even a small part of a crime, it takes one action in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy and you can be convicted of criminal conspiracy even if the contemplated crime never took place.

The focus of "well regulated militia" in the language of Second Amendment is I believe operative in situations in which individuals want to have private armies.  Obviously, no state will stand its sovereignty being challenged by a private army.

And likewise no citizen of a state should be free of conviction of treason upon testimony of two witnesses for participating in a private army that plans the violent overthrow of the government of the state (this includes violent refusal to submit to arrest and detention by law enforcement).

The convergence of the Second Amendment, criminal conspiracy, and state sovereignty results in tragedy for the likes of Gordon Kahl of posse commitatus fame, John Brown of abolitionist era, and the likes of religious cults such as the one near Waco, Texas, during the Clinton Presidency.

The Ku Klux Klan white supremacists era strongly recommends and suggests that no government can fail to infiltrate such organizations with informers and agents.

The debate in Congress is serious because the gun lobby and munitions industry has so much at stake that their profits are placed ahead of disarming and quieting the crazies.  God help us all.

The NRA wants to wash its hands of the Newtown massacre of twenty kindergarten children and the adults who would lay their lives down for their role as educators.  This the NRA can not do.

Chris Wallace may  score points with the NRA in ways which attempt to embarrass the naysayers of unregulated gun sales, but he of the media can not white wash the self-inflicted damage of the NRA which forwards the culture of the firearm.  He does so at his own peril and professional reputation and at the expense of enhancement of domestic abuse success and prevalence and the conduct of the criminally insane with access to weapons and ammo (and kill capacity of a Lt. Calley at My Lai).

Chris Wallace should be wary of furthering an agenda that enhances the presence of guns in our movie theaters, our churches, our schools, and our byways, and yes, our homes and private lives.  This is a civilization that must afford a way forward predicated on self-control and effective remediation and regulation of anyone who will not abide the law (which includes taxation to afford gun control enforcement).  If the sub-machine gun is outlawed, then there is no bar to outlawing the assault rifle or any gun capacity that provides the same kill capacity.

It's idiocy to argue that rapid fire weapons are for sport.  Please!  You shame the word hunt and the word sport.  You are a sick killer, and I for one have no stomach for your bloodletting as an end in itself.  That's psychotic and you know it!  We are stewards of the land, water, and wildlife, and yes we do limit animal populations that might otherwise starve, and  I'm not talking about the legal taking of game for food consumption either.