Medieval Prayer, Reading, and Modern Times

Densitometer

We’re focused on ourselves and have been since the dawn of people. This is both a political and religious observation. The religious part of this is shown by an analysis of medieval books. Most books then were religious, and a device called a densitometer measures dirt density on pages; more dirt, more usage. The process was designed and developed by Scotland’s School of Art History at St Andrews, Professor Dr Kathryn Rudy.

The process shows people were terrified of illness, and prayers for protection and healing were used a lot. Prayers for salvation for others were used much less than prayers for self. Full article here.

I wonder if the same is happening now. Have we improved on that? I look at all the work Christians do helping others. The hundreds of $millions tithed and charities contributed to every year; shelters, food banks, missionary outreach that takes care of material as well as spiritual needs of people. Our prayers, though, still focus primarily on our own needs. Usually when we pray, it’s to meet our own needs. We need to train ourselves to pray to include others. Jesus knew this, which is why he gave us His prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, to guide us. This leads to the ACTS prayer formula - Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. Adoration, we praise God. Confession, we acknowledge our sins. Thanksgiving, we show gratitude. Supplication, we ask for ourselves. I had to train and discipline myself to go beyond even that, because there’s so much more to prayer.  

Our Father, which art in heaven,

Hallowed be Thy Name.  [Adoration]

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. [Confession]

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil. [Supplication]

For thine is the kingdom and the power and glory forever. [Thanksgiving]

A brief note on the political and self. No matter how many rules, regulations and laws governments pass, people look to their own needs first. Democracy and capitalism allows for this idea, knowing that by taking care of self, family, friends, and community, the greater good for all people are served. Marxism, socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism, all demand, upon penalty of death and imprisonment, that the government is first, beyond self, and it will decide what needs are to be met, and in what quantity. All must be done for the State. Of course the people at the top of government and those that choose to be subservient to them make sure their selfish needs are met first before addressing the needs of the citizens.

They deny citizens the ability of acting for Self, so they can meet their own needs. This runs against human nature, natural law, and is why centralized governments always fail, and have to murder and imprison people to survive and stay in power.

We pray for less selfish prayer, less selfish, self serving government, politicians that believe in the Scripturally based Constitution. We pray that we look to ourselves to determine how we, regular people, can serve each other, and not a centralized government. By serving each other we serve God, and that is what our government needs to be about.  

"If I wanted America to fail".

A simple cogent observation about jobs, environmentalists, and government.

http://youtu.be/CZ-4gnNz0vc

Governments make things scarce by design. That's the whole thing about Marxist Materialism. It's about things, and the main thing is to make the main thing about limiting things to control everything. Look at your energy bills and how much they've gone up recently. We are told we need to cut back, it saves money and energy. You're using less energy and the energy companies say they need to raise prices to meet their costs because people using less energy brings in less income. Huh? It's true of energy, it's true of income; reducing your income by raising your taxes. Not blatantly, but with hidden fees. It's not the rich getting soaked. It's you and me. Reducing the quality and quantity of your health care. Costs are already skyrocketing and if ObamaCare doesn't get ruled out or overturned, then, like energy costs, your utility costs will go up too; and government will decide who gets what care and how much will be paid. Frightening thing is, half the country thinks this is okay. Frogs in the pot.

Giving Up Liberty

Magna Carta Libertatum is the whole title to the document. It placed restraints on the king. The US Constitution placed restraints on the government, the political class. Both focused on the rights of people. The most recent attack on Christianity, specifically the Catholic Church, by the Obama Administration and the Democrat Party, is beyond just that. It’s an attack on liberty.

“I leave it up to the government to make good decisions for Americans.” Danica Patrick

For those that don’t know, Patrick is a sexy race car driver and model. She has hit here on the mindset of a growing number of citizens that it’s okay to give up individual liberty and submit to the State. It’s severely bothersome and disconcerting to me that for the five thousand years or so of civilization prior to the founding of the republic of America, Man has lived under tyranny. Just look how long and slow progress was; spiritually and physically. Just look at all the cool stuff we’ve got in the last couple hundred years or so. There’s more progress in freedom and goodies than all the history preceding the US Constitution.

The primary reason, arguably the only reason, for this explosion of creativity, innovation, and personal wealth is the power of the State had its wings clipped. People were able to do things for themselves, family and community, and all have benefitted. Now the State’s feathers of oppression have grown back.

The latest, of course, is the attempt to control the Catholic Church and by extension Christians, so Freedom of Religion gets clipped. Even those not tolerant of organized religion should take note because every tyranny begins with the crushing of Christians and Jews (anti-Semitism is on the rise). Freedom of Speech is clipped by “political correctness” and name calling. If you disagree with Obama’s policies you’re a racist, if you don’t approve of homosexuality or gay marriage you’re a bigot, if you don’t think employees or taxpayers should be paying for someone else’s abortions or contraceptives, you're a sexist.

Case in point from Chris Matthews: “There are a number of people who have chosen to convert to the Catholic faith because they don’t like the liberal positions taken by their sectarian groups, that’s a fact, you can write that down. . . .I’m saying that some people who are bigoted against gay people have changed religions, yes.”

Then there’s Obama’s statement: “So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” It’s an anathema to these Statists that people actually believe in God because they believe, not because the government isn’t fulfilling some need in their lives. Statists want Religion out of the way because it creates a vacuum for the State to fill. They want all citizens replace their religion with the Religion of the State like they have.

Now the government tells us what light bulbs we can use, even though the one’s we will soon be forced to buy provide worse light and are dangerous and toxic. Some public schools are forcing parents to buy school lunches, deeming home made sack lunches not healthy enough. I read one incident where the school didn’t let a kid eat his lunch meat sandwich from home and eat at the school cafeteria; the replacement meal was “chicken” nuggets. Really? The government is installing “smart meters” on homes to control your house temperature, what and how many appliances you can run. They have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to ban smoking in cars and homes. They tell restaurants how much sugar and salt they can use in their recipes. The tax code is designed to limit your income; they are mandating how much you may earn.  In California parents have to keep their kids in booster seats until they are 57” tall. Some kids will be in them until they’re 10 or 12 years old. This was a safety problem? If the people vote on something, and the government doesn't like the outcome, they just get a judge say it's unconstitutional and overturn the will people and their representatives.

“We are only a few days away from fundamentally transforming America!” Barack Obama, November 2008

Obama’s “accommodation” to the Catholic Church is to have insurance companies pay for contraception and whatever else, so the employees will have these for free. Statists say things are for free, if only we give them more power and money. Power to not obey the laws the rest of us are forced to obey, and money so they can live large with the things we can no longer afford because they took our money.

The cost of all that free stuff? The U.S. government debt is currently $44,215 per person. Obama’s own budget numbers show it will rise over the next ten years to $75,000.

“I leave it up to the government to make good decisions for Americans.” Truly?

Government As Its Own Special Interest Group, Paid for by Taxpayers

If about a third of Americans work for government, and about 47% suckle at the teat of govenment, don't contribute so are beholden to the Dems, how much voting power do the rest of us have. You know, the ones that pay taxes, go to work every day and contribute to the well being of America socially, politically and economically. We get this frightening scenario.

http://youtu.be/xOAgT8L_BqQ

American Socialism: The Promise, The Dream, The Reality

The Dream of the Left

Whenever I get the urge to engage a Leftist in a discussion of their political and economic views, I’m astounded what they think Socialism is. Most, if not all, put forth the notion that America is already a Socialist nation; that combining the public’s resources to pay for roads, education, law enforcement, fire departments, and the military are examples of socialism. It comes down to definitions, so I thought I'd flesh some out.

We’ve moved away from the dated Marxist model to something ever more insidious. Random House Dictionary:

“…a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.”

The ‘insidious’ part is that our government doesn’t need to claim ownership anymore, it can just control. Obama and the Dems tried outright ownership of GM, Chrysler and some financial institutions by using printed money and taxes not yet collected to purchase them, and it has been rejected by a majority of the American people. Through regulation though, control had become key. The private sector can’t breathe because the python of government has so constricted it.

Here’s the breakdown; public provision of non-public goods and central planning. According to economists, public and non-public goods have what’s known as rivalry and excludability. Rivalry is if one person uses something, another person is denied that thing. A road doesn’t fit this, because someone using that road doesn’t deny usage by another. Something that’s excludable has access limited to who wants to pay for that good or service.

Those things mentioned before, law enforcement, roads, etc., are public goods, they’re non-rivalry and not exclusive. The other things that my Leftist friends identify as public goods like welfare and Obamacare are excludable. This may be well intended, but everyone is forced to pay for them regardless of whether they use them or not.

Central control, or using the Marxist phrase, central planning, the Soviets and Chinese Communists implemented, and our government is implementing the same. This is where the ‘socialism’ part comes in. We keep getting legislation passed that regulates the private sector, in fact controlling it, plus legislation creating ‘public goods’ that only a small sector of the population uses. That’s the control part. We are, as a nation, moving closer to having all goods and services controlled by the government. The stated goal by Democrats and other Leftists (and yes, some Republicans) is to ensure a leveling of incomes through redistribution (mostly through progressive taxation).

This provides control of goods and services usually provided by the private sector. That it’s successful as a method of redistribution was brought in to question by an overt Communist, the Left’s much admired Mikhail Gorbachev.

“Wage leveling has a destructive impact not only on the economy but also on people’s morality, and their entire way of thinking and acting. It diminishes the prestige of conscientious, creative labor, weakens discipline, destroys interest in improving skills, and is detrimental to the competitive spirit in work. We must say bluntly that wage-leveling is a reflection of petty bourgeois view which have nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism or scientific socialism.”

Since the inception of the Democrats “War on Poverty”, we have the same amount of poverty in this country.

Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, a vital part of the private sector real estate market have lost billions of dollars, is controlled by the government. The government doesn’t have to own Fanny and Freddie; it just needs to control them. Traditional socialism was about ownership of production; now the insidious part is the Socialists just need to control, not own it. It runs in the background, so not many pay attention to it. They're busy working and raising families. That’s why we hear the Democrats always saying we need more regulation, it’s how they control, quietly.

Leftists control education, the auto industry, the banking industry, the agricultural industry, the real estate industry, the financial and insurance industries, and have done so putting forth the idea this control is for the purpose of redistributing the wealth. It’s in fact about redistributing power from the people to themselves.   

Quotable Quote

"We warned of things to come, of the danger inherent in unwarranted government involvement in things not its proper province. What we warned against has come to pass. And today more than two-thirds of our citizens are telling us, and each other, that social engineering by the federal government has failed. The Great Society is great only in power, in size and in cost. And so are the problems it set out to solve. Freedom has been diminished and we stand on the brink of economic ruin. Our task now is not to sell a philosophy, but to make the majority of Americans, who already share that philosophy, see that modern conservatism offers them a political home. We are not a cult, we are members of a majority. Let's act and talk like it. The job is ours and the job must be done. If not by us, who? If not now, when? Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society. Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, galloping inflation, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people." --Ronald Reagan