I Saw a Rainbow

          Wednesday, Pastor Fred Phelps, the founder and leader of Westboro Baptist Church died. I'm not sure how I feel about it. Part of me thinks good riddance to all his hatred, vitriol and self-righteousness, while another part of me, the part that loves writing blogs about something idiotic Fred or the members of the Westboro Baptist Church had done, is sad. We’re better off with him gone, but it leaves a gaping hole where there was so much to laugh at and make fun of before.

   

        Bible-believing Christians may not like it but Fred was correct in his interpretation of what the bible says about homosexuals. It states very clearly that homosexuality is an abomination and that gays should be put to death. Fred and his church members were just a little more up front and in your face about it, but they are right on the money. Of course, the bible also says shellfish are an abomination so I wonder how soon we’ll see Westboro picketing Red Lobster?

          About an hour after I heard of Fred’s passing, I was going out to my car. In the sky to the east was a beautiful rainbow, and it struck me what that multicolored arc represented. God was having gay sex with Fred Phelps! Pastor Fred went from people seeing him and saying ‘what an asshole’ to God leering at his naked buttocks and saying WHAT…AN…ASSHOLE! So the next time you see a rainbow, remember that God is busy at the moment. Fred's 'gaping hole' has his full attention

The End of a Life

          I found out today that my wife’s cousin's only son (whom my wife called her 'nephew') was killed in a traffic collision on Sunday, March 16^th. He had had a rough life the past 15 years; going AWOL from the U.S. Marines, being caught and dishonorably discharged, being charged with drug possession and as a sex offender, serving seven years in prison on the latter account, not being able to find much work after being released, and finally, being killed when a teenage driver plowed into the back of his SUV. It’s a horrific end to what had seemed a promising life that somehow was interrupted about 20 years ago.

         In the early 1990s, we had gone to his family’s home for a big gathering, and he was proudly talking about how he wanted to join the Air Force and become a pilot after he graduated. At the time, he was a junior in high school, played as a lineman on the football team, and showed real promise as an artist. His bedroom was decorated with posters of sports heroes, airplanes and NASCAR vehicles. What happened to him afterward is still a mystery. I was told he became involved with the wrong crowd at school, began using crystal meth and other drugs, and let his school studies slip. He joined the Marines after he graduated in order to straighten out his life, although I’m not sure if he wanted to, or was ordered to. Marine life proved hard for him and one weekend he went AWOL. The Marines are good at tracking people, so they found him, put him in the brig for a while, and then dishonorably discharged him. His life seemed to spiral further downward after he returned home, became involved with drugs again, moved in with a young girl and got her pregnant. When her parents had had enough, they pressed charges against him since she was underage. He was sentenced to seven years in a medium security prison as a sexual predator. My wife corresponded with him on a number of occasions. I wrote a few times and encouraged his drawing as he seemed to have an eye for detailed artistic work. (I still have several pictures he drew for me while he was in prison.) One of the more bizarre things he wrote to my wife was how being in prison has strengthen his belief in Jesus and he had become a stronger Christian. When my wife showed me his letters, I couldn’t fathom why he professed a belief in something that, from all appearances, hadn’t done him any good. It was like saying his faith in garden fairies had blossomed thanks to the dread he felt all around him. His letters reflected how difficult and hard prison life was, with constant concern about his well-being and safety. If Jesus was comforting him and Christianity was strengthening him, why all that fear and apprehension? We visited him in the prison about a year before his release. It was a strange place to reunite with someone I hadn’t seen in almost 15 years. He had resigned himself to prison life and was just trying to get to the end of his sentence without going crazy. He said he mostly stayed to himself although he had made a couple of ‘friends’ while inside. We weren’t introduced to any but he pointed out one of them. I got a cold, hollow feeling when I looked at the man. The heavily tattooed, scarred, and scowling convict had the appearance of someone who knew far too much about prison life, and why people were there. I could only imagine what kind of effect he was having on my wife’s nephew.

         The last time I saw him was in 2011, just after his release, when we visited with his mom and dad and had a celebratory dinner with the three of them. He was trying to devise a realistic career path after what he acknowledged was a series of extremely bad decisions and poor choices. Shortly after our visit, he was ordered off his parent’s property by the court. As a convicted sex offender, he could not live near the girl who had his child and she happened to occupy a house very close to where his parents lived, so he was forced to stay with a family friend several miles away. Apparently, this put him back in touch with the people who had gotten him involved with drugs in the first place. Subsequently, he reverted to his pre-prison ways and became estranged from his mother and father. At some point, after the girl moved with her son out of state, he was allowed to return and live on his parent’s property in a old mobile home. We had seen it when we were there in 2011 and it was in shambles; needing quite a bit of repair and rebuilding to make it even semi-habitable. When he moved back, he made it his job to get it into a livable condition.

        When my wife’s cousin called last night, she told my wife that he was returning from community service that was required as part of his parole. He was about three miles from his home when he was hit at high speed from behind. According to the Highway Patrol report, he was not wearing his seatbelt and was ejected from the SUV when it rolled over several times. He died at the scene of the crash. The two teens in the car that hit him suffered minor injuries.     
        (I viewed the Facebook pages of the two teens who were in that vehicle. One of them is in the hospital, according to what he wrote online. He claims they had fun, other than the crash; thanks God that he and the driver survived, (Why didn't God just prevent the crash, or save all three of them?) then asks God to bless the other driver (my wife's nephew), that he is sooooo sorry he didn't make it, and he'll be in his prayers forever. (Uh-huh, I'm sure.) Many of his buddies seem to think its cool what happened. At least three entries end with 'LOL', although I can't tell what they are 'laughing' about. There are several entries on one page about beer drinking, cocktails, pot smoking, getting some easy pussy,  and trolling for more action at the beach. If those entries are any indication, the driver will probably face DUI manslaughter charges. That should stifle any further 'LOLs'. - Italics portion added on 3-19-14.)

        On my wife's cousin’s Facebook page today, along with seeking answers to the tragedy, is a Pinterest card she posted that states prayer shouldn’t be your last resort, it should be your first priority, with the tacit suggestion that prayer somehow works. I wonder, how much good does praying do? How did my wife’s nephew’s life change from all the prayers offered by his parents, his minister, or my wife, who prayed for him on numerous occasions? What good are the prayers for him (as people have posted on that Facebook page), now that his life has been snuffed out? How will those prayers ease the heartbreak and misery my wife’s cousin and her husband are experiencing? Do they truly believe God was watching out for their son, but decided on Sunday to let him die by being smashed against the road when he was thrown from his vehicle? If that kind of being exists, they are cruel and sadistic, and not worthy of worship.

        I am sorry for the loss of this man. I would say 'Rest in Peace', but there is nothing to indicate death is anything like a peaceful rest. I am sorry for the devastation it brings to his family. And I am sorry that so many offer up prayers to an invisible being who did nothing for this man while he was alive. It must give comfort to those who are doing the praying, by thinking they're contributing something useful and that the supernatural recipient will now respond in a positive manner. When that being doesn't answer their prayer, people will claim that we just have to wait, or that no reply IS the answer...unless that unseen entity doesn’t exist…which is the actual case. The nonexistence of an other-worldly super-daddy explains why these events happen. There is no one steering the ‘ship of life’. You are in control - whether you like it or not and whether you accept it or not. There is no script to follow. You write your own script every day. You choose what to make of your time while you're here.  Life is a series of random events. Some make us happy, some make us sad, some make us wonder what in the world is going on, but most are ordinary, mundane situations that we usually take little notice of. None of it is influenced by a cosmic invisible puppeteer, or some supreme being that requires prayers - as if they couldn’t figure out what to do unless human beings kept them apprised of things. Life is not a scenario to be acted out like a Shakespeare play...life just unfolds. It's up to each of us to do the best that we can with it. And life can be summed up in three words…it goes on. It just won't include my wife's nephew any longer, and that's a shame because he deserved better.

Nothing Fails Like Prayer

I received this email Prayer Request from an unknown sender today that said (in red):

When you receive this, please stop for a moment and say a prayer for our troops around the world.

(Apparently, this person thinks mumbling words in your head for a minute or so will convince some supernatural entity that, for the moment, you are sincere about the troop’s well-being. But digging beneath the surface, what it implies is; “Fuck you, troops. I’m too busy talking to myself to do anything more constructive".)

There is nothing attached. Just send this to people in your address book. Do not let it stop with you. Of all the gifts you could give a Marine, Soldier, Sailor, Airman, & others deployed in harm's way, prayer is the very best one.

(This sanctimonious nonsense must have made the originator feel self-satisfied, safe in their own home, far away from any fighting where they don't need to be armed to the teeth to stay alive. Rather than have someone stop for a minute and think a few words about our military personnel, wouldn't those troops prefer to get the hell out of harm’s way, out of the combat zone, or at least have a fully functioning automatic weapon in their hands? If God is going to protect them, wouldn’t it be easier to eliminate the enemy, or eliminate the circumstances for the troops being deployed there? Why not ask for that if you really believe your praying is going to help?) 

Dear Lord, Hold our troops in your loving hands. Protect them as they protect us.  Bless them & their families for the selfless acts they perform for us in our time of need. In Jesus name, amen.
(So, if any of our soldiers, sailors, marines, or airmen get killed from this point on, can we sue God, Jesus, or the person who sent this email, for not honoring that plea? There’s nothing about stopping whatever it is they are there fighting, just begging for protection after our government started the war and sent them over there. And I have to wonder, is that blessing also extended to the soldiers, private contractors, or CIA who have committed crimes against the Afghani and Iraqi civilians?)

MAY GOD BLESS YOU FOR PASSING IT ON!!
(Of course, all capital letters means shouting so that God heard them say it. At least the writer is consistent...May nothing happen to you for forwarding this since you just did nothing for our troops, and now others can do nothing too.)


Believe                                                                 
(When a Muslim or a Hindu tells a Christian to 'believe' in their god, what is their reaction? Also, isn’t ‘believe’ what the people who’ve been abducted by aliens tell us we should do, just believe their story or believe in extraterrestrials?)

The irksome part of this gobbledy-gook is the people who send this junk email around actually believe they are doing God’s work. God isn't aware of this 'need' so they have to act as surrogates for this invisible, non-involved supernatural omniscient/omnipotent/omnipresent thing. This being never instructed them to pray for soldiers fighting in wars their government initiated in faraway places. Look through all the Bible verses you like…which one tells you to do anything close to what they ask in the email above? It’s simple…none. Jesus even supposedly said 'Love your neighbor', not slay your neighbor.

Here’s what ought to scare you if you believe in this God…what if he WANTS all those soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen and women where they are because he has plans to kill them all, or maybe it’s to allow the Taliban or al ’Qaida to win and show the people that Allah is the right God? 

Prayer…Jehovah already knows what you want, right?…So now he just want to hear you beg? That’s one hell of a god you believe in.

The War on Christmas Disbelievers

         

            Is there really a war on Christmas? It appears Christians need to get thoroughly riled up at this time of year, otherwise, who would take their religion seriously? If there is a war, it’s a war on those who do NOT believe; it's a propaganda war based solely on Christian’s exaggerated indignation. It doesn’t matter that the bible doesn’t agree on the details of the Christmas stories in Matthew or Luke's accounts, which are the only ones in the four gospels (Paul doesn’t even refer to it in the books claimed written in his name and he is credited with writing his accounts BEFORE any of the gospels were written.) You have to show respect for Christian idolatry and their interpretation of Christmas, or all is lost, and the nation is doomed. With that false premise, they have made up a war and then claim they must fight against those who deny their fantasy.

Inside Florida’s capital building in Tallahassee, a festivus pole (a six foot tall stack of empty beer cans) made Fox TV national news. Commentator Bill O'Reilly lamented Florida's tolerance for such persecution of Christianity, while Gretchen Carlson and Catholic League guest Bill Donohue expressed disgust that someone would slight their beliefs by celebrating their own holiday at the same time near a Christian nativity display in a government building. Apparently the U.S. government is supposed to allow crèches and crèches ONLY between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day at any public facility. Gretchen even added to the false sense of outrage by suggesting she took her children out to view the nativity scene, but her kids couldn’t see it because a three inch wide pole stood in front of it. You drove your kids all the way from Greenwich, Connecticut looking for a crèche, didn’t see any in front of churches or private homes for 1500 miles, and when you finally found one down in Tallahassee, you couldn’t walk three feet to the left or right of the beer can pole so your kids could see it, Gretchen? Is it any wonder why few people take you seriously?

  
        Bill Donohue writes about the bloody engagements he's seen in this never-ending 'war': “There is little doubt that the anti-Christmas side is weakening. But the war is hardly over. The big battle won by the Thomas More Law Center in securing the right of a nativity scene to be erected on a public median in Warren, Michigan is evidence that we need to fight for our rights. Thanks to the Catholic League, senior citizens in Newhall, California got their Christmas tree back after management tried to ban it. Children who attend Terry Elementary School in Little Rock, Arkansas know about the War on Christmas: their planned trip to a local church to see “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was cancelled. An anti-Christmas billboard in Times Square that shows a depiction of Jesus crucified (Wait…wasn’t he?) is testimony to the vile nature of the War on Christmas. There is no shortage of such examples.”
So someone putting up a festivus pole or asking to use government property to promote another holiday is considered vile, but telling people they are going to hell for not believing like, say, Donohue, O'Reilly, or Carlson do, is not.

             In the state capital of Oklahoma, Satanists want to put up a display near the nativity in that federal building, and in Mississippi’s capital, secularists asked to exhibit a Winter Solstice sign, which would be located in the same lobby as a nearby nativity. Reacting to this news, one of Fox’s other bubble-headed bleach blondes, Megyn Kelly, announced that the war on Christmas is comparable to the Holocaust. Megyn is counting on gullible viewers to believe that Christians across the country are being rounded up, put into concentration camps, and then killed in record numbers for celebrating Christmas...because having to look past a Satanist display or a Solstice sign to see a crèche is identical to being murdered by Nazis. Who’d have guessed?

But the whole contrived mess is based on a fundamental flaw; the bible stories themselves.Those accounts are filled with problems that start with 1) the genealogies, which don't match...2) when the birth supposedly happened (was it during the reign of Herod, or Quirinius? There is a ten year span between them.)...3) an empire-wide census that required people to return to an ancestral city (There are no records to indicate the Romans, or any other civilization, ever required that.)...4) the murder of thousands of children by Herod's soldiers...and 5) the time of year it happened. For example, in the Matthew and Luke accounts the sheep are in the fields. This means the event happened in the late spring or early summer, not in winter. If it was in winter, the mangers would be filled with sheep trying to keep warm, not free for people to use as impromptu delivery rooms. Mangers were small caves hewn into a hillside for keeping a shepherd's flock safe and contained, and they were terribly unsanitary, with years of sheep and animal droppings everywhere. They were never cleaned out, so they would constantly reek of manure. If any baby were born in a manger, it would have died, or at best, suffered from some disease contracted from the waste in the wattle, or kicked up by the hem of the mother’s clothing. But why let facts get in the way if you are promoting a unsupportable ideology and fighting a phony war?

This is how Constantine's Christianity became a world religion: at the point of a spear.

        In reality, the bible's 'Christmas' stories are nothing but fairy tales made up to promote the Jewish god and his ‘savior’ son to compete with the other popular deities of the time. The reason we celebrate the holiday in December is because there were celebrations to the god Saturn, who was the god of the harvest, and Mithra, who was the god of light. The emperor of Rome in 336 CE was a Christian named Constantine, and he concluded that all the pagan rituals were detrimental to the Christian cause. But what to do since those rituals were immensely popular with the people of the Roman Empire. Solution? Proclaim December 25th as Jesus Christ's birthday, because it was right in the heart of all the pagan celebrations. That would trump all those pagan gods.
        During these pagan celebrations it was customary to give gifts, sing songs, have a feast, and decorate homes with pine boughs and greenery. Kings and clergy co-opted these traditions and rituals and claimed them as Christian in order to get the heathens to worship the god they supported, and to attend Christian services where royalty and priests would benefit from the money they could fleece and demand from the pagans. Every one of the current Christmas rituals is just an improvised version of the pagan rituals. The Christmas tree would come later when it was adapted from a Norse tradition of bringing a tree into the house and decorating it as a celebration of life in the midst of winter, not because of a baby’s birth.

Another Christian victory in the 'War on Christmas'.

      Over the intervening centuries, the Christmas stories were promoted by the priesthood (who had a vested interest in promoting them) as historically accurate because they were in the bible, and by the 1100s, if you did NOT believe it was the truth, you could be burned at the stake as a heretic. Nothing says something is the truth like the threat of death if you don't believe.
      Just for the record, Christmas hasn't always been embraced by Christians as it is today. In the 1600s, England and the American colonies outlawed Christmas because of it's pagan roots.

         George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River on the night of December 25, 1776 took place at that time in hopes of catching the Hessian garrison in Trenton off guard because they'd be nursing severe Christmas morning hangovers. The Continental forces didn't celebrate Yuletide, and in 1776, they were busy putting boats in the river. After the Revolutionary War ended, celebrating Christmas fell out of style as most people in the new nation considered it too "British". 
        Christmas eventually came back into fashion in the 1800s, only this time around, it was given a more religious twist so it would get support from the churches. The clergy were only too happy to comply. Christians didn't bother checking whether the biblical information on the birth of Jesus was based on reality, or at least supported by some evidence. They just took it on faith that the bible got it right. That assumption became the truth, and from that, lies by the thousands have poured forth from Christianity.

     Why do Christians still adhere to the Christmas myth? Simple. People don't want to have their illusions destroyed. They've practiced them for so long, the illusions have become like a warm and fuzzy security blanket. When life becomes complicated, just fall back on stories and fables you were taught as a child, like the Christmas story, and tell yourself that all life's mysteries will be answered after you die, as long as you believe the right versions of the legends and myths. It is more comforting to accept a beautiful lie than to confront the ugly truth.
     There has never been a war on Christmas, only a make-believe war so that Christians can act morally outraged that others don’t prostrate themselves before the faithful's fairy tales. Christians are confusing ‘war’ with not getting what they want, which is everyone respecting and honoring their illusions and fantasies...and they are reacting like bratty, whiny, self-centered five year olds. Someone needs to tell them Santa Claus isn’t real too.

The John F. Kennedy Assassination - my perspective 50 years later

                It was the voice of Walter Cronkite that came crackling over the school loudspeakers sometime after 2 PM that day to announce that the President of the United States was dead. I was in 6^th grade math at Ontario Junior High School in Ontario, Ohio. On hearing the news report, our teacher burst out crying and ran out of the room. The rest of us began whispering to each other trying to make sense of what we’d just heard, but for most of us, it had no immediate impact. Two days later, my family had the TV on after coming home from a church service and we saw Lee Oswald get shot live on TV. The events completely baffled me. I couldn’t understand why someone would want to kill the president. Then, who would try to kill his alleged assassin right in front of a room full of policemen? Surely our government officials would get to the bottom of this and give us the truth.

           Yes, there were anomalies, like J. Edgar Hoover immediately claiming Oswald did it alone, before any investigation had been undertaken. (How did he know?) Yes, there were the Parkland doctors and nurses who said the president’s massive wound was on the back of his head, not on the side or front. (Apparently these trained medical experts were ALL wrong and only the Bethesda autopsy team, under the ‘guidance’ of a cabal of high-ranking military officers jamming the autopsy room and overseeing things, got it right.) Yes, the FBI and Secret Service said that all three shots hit their mark, yet they didn't account for the bullet that struck the curb across Dealey Plaza and slightly injured bystander James Tague who was near the triple underpass. (To this day, they still maintain that all three shots hit their mark and none missed.) And yes, there was the CBS report in the summer of 1964 that stated none of the expert riflemen they’d assembled could duplicate Oswald’s shooting, even when allowed all the time they needed for the first shot. (Cronkite claimed even if others couldn’t do it, obviously Mr. Oswald could.) I refused to believe our government would lie to us and mislead us, so I was sure they had solved the murder with the final report from the Warren Commission in September 1964. Its premise was: Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy, and he in turn was gunned down by Jack Ruby who, wonder of wonders on this weekend of wonders, just happened to time it perfectly, was armed, and in the right place in the crowd assembled in the basement of the Dallas Police building just as Oswald was being transferred to the county jail. The government let everyone know that any other scenario was conjured up by sensationalists, kooks, and people with an ax to grind, and their information was just utter nonsense. I had no reason to doubt it. I never even thought the immediate benefactor of the assassination, Lyndon Johnson, could be party to something so heinous. But in my defense, I didn't see the picture below until years later. 

         Johnson turns and winks at Albert Thomas immediately after taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One. Does either man look unhappy with the turn of events?

             It wasn’t until 1988 while working at a radio station in Raleigh, NC that I met someone who told me a completely different version of the assassination and its aftermath. At first, I thought they were crazy…no government could be that underhanded, that deceptive, and that malevolent. They wouldn’t really try to hide the facts of the murder from us and pin the whole thing on an innocent man. This researcher and writer encouraged me to read the books of Harold Weisberg, Mark Lane, and Sylvia Meagher and see what I thought afterward. I already had the Warren Commission Report and had read William Manchester’s The Death of a President so I felt I had all the facts at hand I would need to disprove any of those other authors and their conspiracy theories.

            At last count, I’ve read the works of 42 authors on the Kennedy assassination that cover the entire pro and con spectrum regarding the Warren Commission Report, all 26 volumes of the Warren Commission evidence and testimonies, seen countless TV specials on various aspects of the murder, heard hours of radio interviews with many of the people involved in the event and purchased 16 different video documentaries on the assassination. Without hesitation, I can say the books of Harold Weisberg are, by far, the best on the subject. None of the Warren Commission defenders have been able to find any fault with his investigation. Many have condemned him, by employing ad hominem attacks, but none have been able to refute his conclusions. Mr. Weisberg used the same information that was available to the Warren Commission, only he didn’t have an agenda to find Oswald guilty at all costs. He let the evidence the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Dallas Police Department collected speak for itself. Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t shoot anyone on November 22, 1963, and Oswald was killed to keep his mouth shut. He was exactly what he shouted he was in the Dallas Police Department building...a patsy!

             We’ll never know just who killed John F. Kennedy, but the cover-up in the assassination is still maintained by people within the United States government so there is duplicity on the part of our government officials even to today. If you don’t believe that's possible, take a look at just this one inconsistency. These are from the official JFK Autopsy photographs and X-rays that are housed in the National Archives in Washington DC. The keepers of our national inheritance insist these are authentic:

 

Does the “stare of death” photo of Kennedy coincide with what is shown in the X-ray? How can his face, especially his right brow area and eye, hold their structure and position when the X-ray clearly shows there is no bone remaining behind them with half of the right eye socket missing? How can these possibly be of the same body? If they can botch this up, and they have; what else has the government botched? The Archive information and Warren Commission evidence is rife with thousands of other inconsistencies that Mr. Weisberg has ferreted out, but check into that one first and see what conclusion you reach when you read about what kind of an autopsy was carried out on JFK’s body. It was a travesty.

The incomplete autopsy sheet that was verified and signed by presidential physician Dr. George Berkley who was the only doctor that saw the body at Parkland and Bethesda.

 

            We’ve been lied to for the past 50 years, and we continue to be lied to. One would think a government that had nothing to hide in the Kennedy assassination wouldn’t have locked up various records from the FBI, Secret Service and CIA until September 14, 2038. I’ll be an old man by the time they are released, but I hope to be there when they are. I’m not holding out hope that they haven’t already gutted those files of any useful information, but I’ll be curious to see just what was so important to the government that it had to hide it away from the American people for 75 years. By then, the perpetrators of the crime will have long since died, but I’ll bet there will still be supporters of this injustice.

Announcing Kennedy's death at Parkland Hospital, Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff indicates where the fatal shot hit the president; not where it exited, but where it entered.

            My trust in our government was shattered by the way they handled the JFK assassination. They’ve earned my disgust and condemnation. They’ve earned yours too.