Guard Dog

I really don't know. The relationship between a person and God (whomever they acknowledge that to be) is actually extremely personal. A prayer is such a quiet thing. Words only meant for one to hear. It's ironic that such a private and singular connection is inextricably tied with collective activities such as public worship services in churches, temples, mosques, etc. I've managed to become a pretty religious man while eschewing any participation in organized religion. Going to church certainly reinforces faith. Doctrine gives it structure and differentiates on faith from another. But, to my knowledge, God himself has never issued any specific instructions regarding what those faiths or doctrines should be outside of the four eyewitness accounts of Jesus's life. And even then for those to be credible you'd have to acknowledge Jesus's divinity. Certainly something not everyone can do. And those four eyewitness accounts of Jesus's teaching do not exalt any faith over another. If anything they reinforce the idea that the relationship between humans and the divine in entirely personal and singular. When it comes to spiritual needs I think people want to know there is a meaning and purpose in life. That there are reasons why things happen the way they do. Maybe there is. Maybe there isn't. And even if there isn't it does not preclude the existence of God. And even if there is it does not mean it's something we can understand. Attending church services, salat in a mosque, shabbat in a temple, or mass in Rome will certainly make people feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves. That might be called a spiritual need. The affirmation you are not alone. It's no too unlike being at a home game for your favorite sports team. I don't know if that makes you closer to God. But, IMO only, no matter what you are doing if you feel closer to God then you are. So I guess my answer is: Is there a meaning in life? Am I alone or part of a greater whole? The only two I can come up with. Edit: Just re-read this. I kind of wandered around it a little. Hope it makes sense.

I don't want to be assimilated! Do you?

Damn! I thought it was going to be the Church of Belichick

Hmmmm.... I own a lot of rural real estate now. This might be an investment opportunity: http://news.trust.org/item/20191223102815-rp1cx After all, they are "my" people. Why not make some money off of them! Hell just about everything about my home has been done for a SHtF scenario.

It was just an example of what a 2nd Civil war might look like. It won't be fought by armies. It will be fought by individuals who say "this far, no farther"

You are assuming the Blue-Green coalition won't the one to secede? calexit push for secession Besides, I seriously doubt a second CW will look anything like the first. There are no blue or red states in their entirety. Mostly they are all purple. A second CW will be a LOT messier. And if a state did vote to secede I seriously doubt the rest of the country will go to war to keep them. Last time it was happening it was done to protect the practice in slavery. This time is will be over politics. The former was worth fighting over. The latter not so much. I figure it this way, for me the 2nd CW begins and ends at my property line. Suppose gun confiscation becomes a thing. I will not comply with it. If they want my guns they will have to come to my home and take them. When they do I will die and kill as many of "them" as I can. Better to die that day as a free man defending his home and property than live the day after in a country where the government can send armed thugs to take whatever it wants. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees. If they don't come to my home my guns will never trouble anyone. I'd say the same thing about my bible or my chainsaw or my dogs of the bottle of bourbon on top of my fridge. Gromnir once accused me of fetishizing my firearms. But he was wrong. It's about private property. Everything inside my property line is mine. Exclusively mine. The soil I plant my garden in, the home I live in, the things I bought and paid for inside it, all mine. THAT I will fight for. Pass all the laws they want and I won't care. Take one hair off one of my dogs, one feather off a chicken, one leaf off a tree and I'm going to be shooting. That is what a 2nd Civil War looks like. Individual armed citizens fighting back. It will be awful, bloody, probably futile but maybe not. Edit: A few pages back I told you I was the biggest anti-marxist on the board. This is why. Collectivism is abhorrent to me. The labor of my hands, the ideas in my mind, the fruits of those are mine. Exclusively mine. Everything I have I worked for. They will only be taken from me by violence and so I will defend them with violence.

So one guy wants the entire practice of religion outlawed. What would the penalty be for refusal anyway? The other wants the poor ignorant wretches educated out of it. I guess the idea of live and let live is just a nonstarter for you guys? But hey, who can live under the same sun with someone who's thinking "wrong thoughts" I guess. Of course I'd say the same thing to the evangelical types who think it's their duty to "save" everyone's souls. As if it were their place to do so. That's why we haven't fought our last Civil War. Hell we may not even have fought our second to last Civil War.

I went to the flea market in Dyersburg yesterday. I saw something I just HAD to have. It's a cast iron, flat top, pot belly stove. It burns wood or coal for heat. It's terribly rusted and has no ash pan or exhaust fitting. The door won't even open. But I'm pretty sure I can fabricate what it needs and restore the rest. I started last night. I got it up on the bench (SOB is heavy as hell) and started working on the rust with WD-40 and a soft steel pad. On the back I uncovered the name Magee and the date 1891 and No 247 cast into the iron backplate. After an hour or so of work I put penetrating oil in the door hinges and left it for the night. I was curious because I'd never heard that name before. Apparently Magee Furnace Co, operated a single foundry and show room in Boston. They went out of business or were bought up somewhere around 1900 because the last thing I found on them was a bill head from 1899. I also found this on the site for the Huntington Library and Art Museum. It's an advertisement from 1875: The one I have is small. It dies not look anything like those two.

This is why we can't have nice things: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/that-little-free-library-on-your-corner-is-at-the-center-of-a-feud-over-a-family-legacy-and-a-trademark/2019/12/18/586d01c6-1aa3-11ea-87f7-f2e91143c60d_story.html

I miss the days when Congress stayed in their lane (Article I). The President stayed in his/her lane (Article II). The Court stayed in it's lane (Article III). All of them stayed out of the State governments lanes (Article IV). And everything the US Government could or could not do was contained in just 7500 words over four sheets of paper (10th Amendment). When the powers of the state were limited you didn't need to worry so much about who was running the State. I miss, LOL! I was born in 1971. It has never been that way in my lifetime! More is the pity.

WARNING: Do NOT have a drink in your mouth while watching this!

Yes, it happened to me a few years ago. The package arrived in a damaged box a week after the refund. Bummer for me it was $30 item and not a TV or something.

I completely agree with every word!

Nah I'm not. Even if you were being insulting I am very seldom slighted by what people say on the internet. And you were not being insulting. What if the Westboro Church were the Westboro Rotary Club? Or the Westboro Moose Lodge? Or the Westboro American Legion? Would that make it any better? Of course not. Nor would the mere affiliation by a handful scumbags reflect on the other chapters of that organization. Now as far as what the bible does or does not say about (insert thing here) that is along conversation that dives way deeper than I care to go. But let me point out that religion, much like a political platform is what you make of it. You can accept or reject any part of it you wish. Practitioners of every faith are not monolithic. You can be baptist and still dance. You can be Catholic and still believe your dog will go to heaven. You can be Muslim and still have a beer. No one is stopping you. No religion that I know of teaches it's practitioners to hate or do violence to anyone. For the most part it's exactly the opposite. If people who call themselves Christian actually read the words of Jesus and tried to follow His example the world would be a better place for it. Not Jesus's fault if they don't. The only thing I'm trying to do here is get you to think a little bit. You are painting with a pretty broad brush when you talk about the evil of religion and it's deluded followers. Maybe I can get you to put the big brush down for a minute. There are two thing I absolutely believe about God and religion There is a God I'm not him That's why you'd never here me tell you you are going to hell or New York City or somewhere like that because you don't believe. I don't know anything like that. Besides, from what I can tell you are a good guy, you take care of your family, you are respectful to other folks. It does not matter so much whether Gfted1 believes in God as whether God believes in Gfted1. I think you're fine with him.

To tell the truth very little that has been done in the name of religion has ever been done for the sake of religion. Take the Crusades as an example. The Seljuqs had been fighting the Byzantines for over 100 years by the Council of Clermont. They had cut off pilgrimages by Christians to Jerusalem as early as 1065, some thirty years earlier. But no one in Europe gave a s--t until they defeated the Byzantines in Anatolia and cut off the Silk Roads to Asia in 1081. When trade with the far east was cut off THEN it was time to go to war. But how do you get peasants, poor landed knights, and petty kings to fight for Iberian, French, and Italian trade? Get the Pope to say "Deus Vult!" The Crusades were not about God or religion. they were about money. In 1488 Sea routes were found to India and everyone in Europe stopped giving a s--t about who controlled the Holy Land. I could go on and on with examples where actions taken in the name of religions had absolutely nothing to do with religion. People are vain, greedy, violent, and altogether nasty critters. If they are not fighting for one reason it's for another but the ends are almost always enrichment of the self or tribe rather than stopping someone else from "thinking wrong". The other thing is no one who follows a particular faith owes an apology for the terrible things that were done by other followers of that faith no matter what the reasons were. The average US Muslim has never attacked nor harmed anyone. It's no fault nor business of theirs if someone else does for any reason. The same way you and I don't owe any apologies to descendants of slaves or American Indians or (insert oppressed people here). WE didn't do that. No one alive today in the US ever burned someone at the stake for being a witch. You can't hold things like that against them. HoonDing brought up a point about the Catholic Church and covering up all the BS they have. The Church is not a religion. It is not the end all be all of the Christian Faith. The Pope does not "rule the world" in God's name despite the title Vicar of Christ. There is nothing in the Christian faith that says it's OK to rape children or anyone else. The people who practice a faith don't owe an apology for the bad acts of the other people who do. Here in the US no one is oppressing you personally is there? If so there are legal remedies for that. You've been talking to me for years and apparently have not been bothered that I am a "judgmental POS that believes in fairy tales". Or if you are you've been hiding it well.

Thanks for making my point! Exactly how does that oppression work anyway?

The thing that struck me the most was the way status updates to the higher levels are painted in such a way that everything looks like a success. But the upper levels KNEW they were getting bad info because they ordered it that way. I believe it was Mattis who said the whole effort became a "self licking ice cream cone". The invasion of Iraq was a total unforced error. The invasion of Afghanistan was not. It HAD to be done. The worst response to 9/11 would have been to do nothing. But once the Taliban were defeated and removed from power there was a opportunity to either incorporate them into a new government, or break the country apart altogether and let the individual tribes self govern they way they has before the British. Either would have worked I think. Bush however thought an egalitarian republican country could be built even though there is no history of such nor inclination for such in the people there. He thought the same thing about Iraq. That inside every Iraqi was a little american just waiting to come out. They willfully refused to understand the people they were dealing with. The structural problems are only in the politics. The military and intelligence services perform their functions well. But what is done with those is the failure point.

Practicing Christians are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to politics. One one side is a political party that has become openly and unabashedly hostile to them. On the other is a political party that champions their cause while being the the exact opposite of what they believe in. Of all the political alliances that make up the Republican party base this would be the easiest one for the Democrats to break. All that they would have to do is drop the hostility. But they can't. As an example just look at @Gfted1 comment about Mike Pence last page. As President there is very little Pence could do to integrate his religion into the government. Sure he can talk the talk but there is little he can DO. But that doesn't matter. It's because he THINKS the way he does. Hostility to religion is, in the end, hostility to people who just think differently than you do. It's like the persecution of a thoughcrime for lack of a better word. And Gfted is no leftwinger by any means. If God is not real then God does not become real because people believe God is real. If God is real God does not cease to exist because some people do not believe in God. The separation of state and religion in the country has worked pretty well for the most part. But it was never meant to purge any religious practice from the public eye until recently. And the more zealously it is applied to suppress religious expression the more pushback it gets and the more the people who feel oppressed by it fight back. And that pushes them into strange camps. Like Trump's. In the end the so called culture war is little more than a bunch of people who have differing opinions about something that cannot be proven one way or the other doing things for the sole purpose of infuriating each other. And they can't stop. It's pretty stupid when you think about it.

If you have not read the Washington Post's work on the history and errors of the invasion of Afghanistan you really should. It is worth it to buy a 1 month subscription to get behind the pay wall IMO. Most of it is in the clear though. The Bush, Obama, and Trump admin's have been spectacularly incompetent. And all of it stems from an arrogant and obstinate refusal to try and understand the country they were trying to rebuild. Willful ignorance was the first failure point. There are definite lessons to be learned here but that sad part is they won't be. It doesn't have to be this way but it is. The Gulf War and incursions in Grenada and Panama demonstrated lessons learned in Vietnam. A limited and specific objective. More than ample force to achieve that objective. An exit map that is followed after the objective is achieved. Afghanistan & Iraq had none of those things. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/documents-database/

Trump is privately plotting "vengeance" according to Daily Beast: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-tells-michigan-rally-hes-not-worried-about-impeachment-privately-plots-vengeance That should be interesting. According to CNN yesterday he's planning on suing Adam Schiff. For what I do not know. I am genuinely curious what a Revenge of the Trump might look like. How much lower can he go? Let's see if rock bottom has a basement!

I think the day I "cut the cord" so to speak and cancelled DirecTv can access to cable news my IQ ticked up a few points.