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Incentivizing innovation involves risk. Entrepreneurs typically set up corporations or limited liability companies to insure they are not personally liable for debts should the venture fail. In 2019, the failure rate for startups was about 90%. At that time research indicated that 21.5% of startups fail within the first year, 50% fail before they are five years old, and a whopping 70% fail by their 10th year.

If the company is unable to pay its creditors, unpaid creditors can seek payment by a variety of means. Under certain circumstances, a court can ignore the form of a company and hold executives, directors, shareholders and members personally liable for fraudulent conduct. When courts lift or pierce what is referred to as the corporate veil, individuals within the company can be held criminally liable for its debt.

It should be noted that the corporate veil is seldom lifted in the absence of fraud. And such fraud is almost always limited to questions about money. In June of 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported how PG&E Corporation became one of the few U.S. corporations to be convicted of homicide-related charges. In the Superior Court of California’s Butte County, where the 2018 Camp Fire razed the town of Paradise. The utility plead guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter.

The deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history claimed more than 18,800 structures, including 13,696 single-family homes and 528 businesses. Judge Michael Deems did not lift the corporate veil to incarcerate executives or officers of the company for what was widely held to be criminal negligence. The hearing, which was streamed across the Internet, was meant to serve as public chastisement of a company derided for its greed and stockholder-first corporate culture.

A grand jury report berated PG&E accusing it of a “callous disregard” for public safety, failure to heed warnings about its aging power lines and refusal to learn from previous mistakes. The 92-page report also said, and I quote: “Through a corporate culture of elevating profits over safety by taking shortcuts in the safe delivery of an extremely dangerous product – high-voltage electricity – PG&E certainly led otherwise good people down an ultimately destructive path,”

Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey said at a news conference that he hoped the guilty pleas would send a message to other companies in the United States. Unfortunately, the message it sends reinforces the United States Supreme Court’s sociopathic notion of corporate personhood, one in which the actual persons making life and death decisions with depraved indifference, are shielded from the kind of criminal penalties non-privileged citizens often face. While Ramsey described the culture of negligence that included badly overlooking maintenance and training, he said that during the investigation “it became clear that profit was a driving force.”

This was nothing new. In 2010, a high-pressure PG&E natural gas transmission pipeline segment in San Bruno ruptured. The explosion, in a residential neighborhood called Crestmoor, claimed eight lives while an entire block was destroyed. Authorities blamed the explosion on the company’s failure to properly maintain its gas lines. California regulators determined that in the years before that fire, PG&E had taken in revenue of hundreds of millions more dollars than what was authorized by the state while it had significantly underspent on maintenance and infrastructure needs.

According to Subsidy Tracker, PG&E Corporation also received state and local subsidies of $1,513,416 since 2012. It has received federal grants and allocated tax credits of $216,946,462 since fiscal year 2000. Notably, PG&E spent $5.3 million on state and local political campaigns in 2017 and 2018.

The recent Perdue Pharma opioid case demonstrates that individual corporate policy makers are routinely shielded from the consequence for their reckless indifference to the plight of those adversely affected. The Constitution of the United States, in its Preamble, requires our legislators, executives and judges to “provide for the common defense.” By any reasonable interpretation, this should include protections from the criminally insane, the deaths and injuries that are the result and due to the fault of the person wielding the knife, shooting the gun, driving the car, or implementing the policy.

Shielding an individual bad actor behind the corporate veil is routine in American jurisprudence. Certain Justices, masquerading as originalists and textualists, are fond of saying that the authorities of the government are limited to the powers enumerated in Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution. Such pretenders give themselves a pass on the obligations conferred by the Overarching Principles, the Mission Statement, and the Cardinal Precepts as articulated and delineated in the constitution’s Preamble. The contempt they have habitually shown for the most fundamental rights of We the People, is hard to ignore.

There is an engraving over the doors to the Supreme Court building. It reads: Equal Justice Under Law. When the justices began their flirtation with a corporate personhood, they conferred superior rights upon corporate executives. Most of the distortions within our constitutionally grounded democratic republic are directly traceable to the Court’s consistent failure to hold the man behind the curtain accountable.

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In Doha, Qatar on February the 29^th in 2020, the United States entered into an agreement with the Taliban. The four part “comprehensive peace agreement included the following two provisions concerning the security of the United States and its allies:

1. [It] Guarantees and enforcement mechanisms that will prevent the use of the soil of Afghanistan by any group or individual against the security of the United States and its allies.
2. [It] Guarantees, enforcement mechanisms, and announcement of a timeline for the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Afghanistan.

Just above the signing declaration at the conclusion of the agreement is one final operative paragraph that states:

The United States will seek economic cooperation for reconstruction with the new post-settlement Afghan Islamic government as determined by the intra-Afghan dialogue and negotiations, and will not intervene in its internal affairs.

Now if, despite all the ambiguity, the guarantees concerning the security of the United States and its allies somehow covered the withdrawal operations, why did they not commence immediately upon the execution of the agreement, in February of 2020? At that time, if indeed the withdrawal was covered, special squads could have moved throughout the countryside with minimal risk. They could have moved vulnerable individuals allied with the “freedom forces” to evacuation points where the aircraft could have also operated with minimal risk. 

Stephen Miller, then a top adviser to President Donald Trump, was incredulous during a fall Cabinet meeting in 2018. According to one person in the room Miller asked: “What do you guys want? A bunch of Iraqs and ‘Stans across the country?” According to CNN, several sources claimed the Trump administration was purposefully slow-walking the entry of all refugees – including allies who aided American soldiers in Afghanistan.

The Special Immigrant Visa program was created in 2008 It issues visas that are sometimes referred to as SIVs. The program was later expanded to offer visas to any Afghan who was able to demonstrate “at least one year of faithful and valuable service” to or on behalf of the U.S. government. Military interpreters – whose lives were in danger because of their work for U.S. forces in Afghanistan have sometimes had to wait years to obtain a visa through the SIV program.

According to data from the U.S. State Department, from the beginning of Fiscal Year 2008 through June of 2021, more than 76,000 Afghans, including visa recipients and their families, have been allowed into the country under the SIV program. The U.S. Congress amends the legislation every year, to make sure enough visas are available. It wasn’t until July of 2021, that lawmakers authorized an additional 8,000 visa slots and more than $1 billion to fund the Afghanistan evacuation.

The quarterly reports that are published on the State Department website show that between March and June of 2020, only 3 SIVs were approved. Between July and September of 2020, an additional 283 were approved.. And, from October to December of 2020, only 237 additional visas were approved. In all three of the quarterly reports, the number of people interviewed for the visas in Kabul was listed as zero. The reports do show that two Afghans were scheduled to be interviewed during the July to September period and nine were scheduled to be interviewed from October through December. According to the reports these interviews were to be conducted outside of Afghanistan.

According to the International Rescue Committee, “Only 16,000 Afghan SIVs have been issued since 2014 despite the availability of 26,500 total authorized visas during that time.” They said “There are more than 18,000 applications in the current pipeline, impacting a potential total of 53,000 individuals including family members.” The Congressional Research Service reported that 2,134 Afghan interpreters and family members were admitted in 2017. Then, in 2018, the number dropped to 524. In 2019 we saw that number cut by more than half to 248. And in 2020 it dropped to 98. Although some point to the Pandemic as one cause for the decline, the downward trend was well underway prior to the time CoVid even became a factor.

At this juncture we must consider the extent to which the outgoing administration was engaging in deliberate obfuscation during the 2020-2021 transition. The State Department’s slowdown, with respect to visa processing, didn’t became clearly evident until Biden took office and Antony Blinken was sworn-in as the new Secretary of State.

The desperation and bottle-necked evacuation we witnessed at the airport in Kabul, indicates a failure on the part of prevaricating politicians that refused to act on a timely basis in accordance with their prior agreements. No amount of blame shifting is going to resonate with those citizens that are cognizant of the agreement together with the timeline.

It should also be noted that the willingness of the Afghan Army to lay down their weapons was clearly foreseeable in light of the failure to adopt a coherent strategy going into the country twenty years ago. Ask yourself, why would any army stand and fight when their leadership had already fled. 

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Whenever we are in need of a humility lesson we would do well to remember that, with one trifling exception, the entire universe is composed of others. When Galileo tried to make the case that, likewise, neither our planet or its sun is the center of the universe, he was forced, under the penalty of death, to deny theory he floated. The abjuration of Galileo in 1633 is another thing we would do well to remember. For it read:

“I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei of Florence, being 70 years old, swear that I have always believed, believe now and, with God’s help, will in the future believe all that the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church doth hold, preach and teach. But since, after having been admonished by this Holy Office entirely to abandon the false opinion that the sun is the centre of the Universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not the centre of the same and that it moves, and that I was neither to hold, defend, nor teach in any manner whatsoever, either orally or in writing, the said false doctrine; and after having received a notification that the said doctrine is contrary to Holy Writ, I wrote and published a book in which I treat this condemned doctrine and bring forward very persuasive arguments in its favour without answering them: I have been judged vehemently suspected of heresy, that is of having held and believed that the Sun is at the centre of the Universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not at the centre and that it moves. Therefore, wishing to remove from the minds of your Eminences and all faithful Christians this vehement suspicion reasonably conceived against me, I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith these errors and heresies, and I curse and detest them as well as any other error, heresy or sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church. And I swear that for the future I shall neither say nor assert orally or in writing such things as may bring upon me similar suspicions; and if I know any heretic, or one suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of the place in which I may be.”

Of course, neither the Earth or its sun is the center of the universe, but the Galileo experience underscores a much bigger concern. The man was not even free to advance a theory and was forced to deny his highest conception of truth and fact or lose his mortal life. He did this at the hand of a corrupt authority, a morally bankrupt and spiritually insecure church. Where Our Heavenly Father gave each of us the right to accept or reject the divine plan, the church engaged in intimidation and coercion. Turn or Burn was, in the long run, a vein attempt to usurp the authority of the Spirit of Truth. 

Spiritual unity should never be confused with uniformity. Where God bestowed a questioning mind through which we may discover, prayerfully consider, and freely embrace the divine attributes, the institutional church actually retarded progress through its own control freakery nature, its threats, and the demand for lockstep conformity. The Church was never supposed to be a Mechanical Bride.

Marshall McLuhan authored a book by that title. He was concerned by the size and the intentions of the North American culture industry. He wrote: “Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. . .” Are today’s academic institutions, with their own entrenched priesthood, better equipped to free us from certain habits of thought? Or are they, like the church of the dark ages, top heavy with dead intellectualism? It is not a question of being an educated fool versus a religious one, for ignorance concerning the true role of religion is pervasive. We, the earth bound, should be asking if lockstep conformity with the fleeting standards of either theological or political correctness is somehow superior to such conformity with any other dogma? At some point we must ask; “Where is the freedom in either case?”

The Book of Matthew describes a pivotal exchange between Simon Peter and Jesus wherein Peter exclaimed: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied: “. . . flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church . . .”

The pivotal moment consists of how some would interpret “this rock” to mean Peter while others see the Spirit giving rise to the revelatory experience. The “Get thee behind me Satan” rebuke Peter experienced just moments later betray any notion that the true church would be built upon anything other than the direct connection we can each enjoy with Our Heavenly Father who dwells simultaneously within our minds and at the Center of the Universe.

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In the United States, during 1933, there was a conspiracy to violently overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install a dictator. In the so-called Business Plot, the oligarchy had attempted to recruit a popular Marine General, Smedley Butler, to orchestrate a march of five-hundred thousand men with the goal of capturing, kidnapping, and killing Roosevelt. Butler testified under oath in 1934, before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities, also known as the McCormack–Dickstein Committee. He said that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans’ organization with Butler as its leader.

There is little agreement among historians as to whether the coup was actually close to execution. However, most do agree that a “wild scheme” was very much in the works. Butler had supported FDR in the 1932 US presidential election, he started denouncing capitalism and bankers in 1934. He said that, for 33 years, he had been a “high-class muscle man” for Wall Street, the bankers and big business. He labeled himself as a “racketeer for capitalism.” The bankers labeled Roosevelt as a socialist out to destroy private enterprise, by sapping the gold backing of wealth in order to subsidize the poor.

Butler supported Roosevelt in the election and became a strong critic of capitalism. Even so, the plotters felt his popularity and his good reputation would attract wide support. Butler said that, according to the plan, he would have held near-absolute power in the newly created position as “Secretary of General Affairs. “Those implicated in the plot by Butler all denied any involvement and no one was ever prosecuted.

At the close of the committee hearings in January of 1935, John L. Spivak published two articles in the communist magazine New Masses. The articles included portions of testimony to the committee that had been redacted as hearsay. Spivak held that the plot was part of a plan by J.P. Morgan and other financiers who were coordinating with fascist groups to overthrow Roosevelt.

The struggle between We the People and they the few has always been centered on the highest and best interests of the masses as opposed to the unmitigated selfishness of those with an exaggerated sense of self-importance. The inheritors, skimmers, and hoarders of wealth have long held a cynical view of the electorate while the politicians prostituting positions of honor and trust have had to pay no significant penalty with a constituency they regard as having the attention span of a fruit fly.

The economic royalists of our day have not only bought the politician, the opposition, and the watchdog; they have accumulated such vast wealth as to insure their outsized influence will effectively govern well in to the future. The only thing that will convert the vicious cycle into a virtuous cycle is a wide spread awakening on the scale of what took place during the 17^th and 18^th century Age of Enlightenment.

The illogical extremes, of those that cater to every whim of the most parasitic financiers, can be exposed for precisely what it is. However, our media is caught up in a faddish “advocacy journalism” that is not journalism any more than agenda science is somehow science. Even our churches have become bifurcated along Jesusonian versus Luciferian lines. And, a reckless indifference to the truth, has only served to eclipse “the way, the truth, and the life.”

Our politicians often put a wet finger to any political wind to determine which way it is blowing, to know where they must run so they can appear to be leading. To these prevaricators, actual statesmanship is an arcane, banished idea. Meanwhile, their addled constituencies amplify political talking points with no particular depth of understanding and no real interest in developing one. For every hour of each and every day they prove the axiom that a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek.

James Freeman Clarke got it exactly right one hundred and fifty years ago when he said: “A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.” A politician that is more concerned about a primary challenge than the health of our nation is not just putting party over country. That common type of cowardly vacillator is governed exclusively by self-interest, and they have no plausible deniability on that.

The threat of a violent overthrow was very real during the Business Plot of 1933. It was real on January 6^th in 2021. And it will be real during the election cycle of 2022. There are people who are addicted to Luciferian sophistry and they have been mainlining deception. They represent a system of values that sentient beings find abhorrent. And, because of this fact, the only way they can win elections is by cheating.

To pretend you care about our constitutionally grounded democratic republic while tolerating voter suppression, voter intimidation, election subversion, and dark money politics, is to perpetrate a fraud on your friends, your family, your countrymen, and your God. There are, however, people of good will among us. And, their religion is not a fashion statement.

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We each have faithful companions that sometimes go unrecognized. One is the Promised Helper that sojourns with the human soul. Jesus referred to this Spirit of the Son as The Spirit of Truth that will guide us into all truth if we are sincerely willing to be led. He was also referring to his personal spiritual presence when he said: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock, and if any man will open, I will come in.” If you sincerely desire to reach your highest and best destiny, then this divine Spirit will gently and lovingly lead you along the pathway of sonship and spiritual progress. Every step must be in accordance with our own thoughtful free will. It will be one of many steps taken as we embark on a journey through intelligent and cheerful co-operation.

Jesus said: “I will be with you, and my spirit shall go before you into all the world.” Clearly the Spirit of the Son is empowered to do precisely what Jesus promised. Throughout our history, humanity has encountered and been told of many spirit influences, both “clean and unclean.” And, once the Spirit of Truth was “poured out upon all flesh” at Pentecost, it became the faithful guide while coordinating the full spirit complement that indwells and envelopes us. Even so, true Spirit leading is never tainted with coercion, nor is it in any way compromised by compulsion.

There is also the Holy Spirit. This is Our Creator Son’s Spiritual Consort that has been conceived of, throughout history, as the Creative Daughter. In addition, there is the direct presence of Our Heavenly Father, nested within the minds of humankind. It is an integral part of that endowment resting gently upon the electrochemical mechanism we think of as the physical brain. We have something from The Father himself which actually dwells within us while our minds and bodies serve as temples.

When Paul wrote: “in Him we all live and move and have our being,” he was cognizant of Our Father’s all pervasive nature. God is omnipresent in addition to being omniscient and omnipotent. The knowledge of the Spirit is profound in addition to being complete. That part of God, that indwells our minds, is able to reveal things to us as needed in service of the Kingdom. 

Ours is not merely an elemental, fundamental, or even an intellectual religion. It does not stem from the religions of arbitrarily assumed authority but is rather a truly experiential religion of the Spirit. Likewise the Sovereignty of Christ is not one of arbitrary assumption. Jesus lived a bestowal life characterized by fatherly devotion and tender affection within the context of personal relationships. He faithfully submitted to the will of Our Father, not because of any unworthy motivator such as fear. He did so because they truly love one another just as Jesus admonished us to love one another.

Faithful submission also serves our highest and best interests within a vast universe of universes. Within this diverse creation, we each have the potential to be perfect even as the Heavenly Father is perfect. This can occur only within the context of Divinity, that characteristic unifying and coordinating quality of Deity.

The carpenter always has some important reference within the larger creation and uses visual clues to “true up” or align his own creation with that larger truth. For a painter, the quality of the work always depends upon the quality of light falling on the canvas. A musician must work with the components of sound to build a soul satisfying connection with the audience. The individual notes that comprise a chord are not unlike the color combinations used by the visual artist, and like the latter, the overall effect on any good work will be consonant, dissonant, diminished, augmented and ultimately resolving in ways that are pleasing to the listener. Without taking the time to tune however, the individual musician cannot contribute much to the creation of beauty or give what would be termed a good performance.

What the true Lover, Painter, Carpenter and Musician have in common is high motivation. Through their commitment to the high mission of art, they foreshadow a higher reality. When Jesus said “Love one another as I have loved you” he was underscoring the fact that his life was lived in accordance with an overarching commitment to that which is true, beautiful and good. The act, in accordance with the Golden Rule, yields good habits, the healthy conditioning we have been seeking. 

The Divine Son who admonished us to love as he loved had, in effect, redefined and upgraded the golden rule. For his love has always been expressed in accordance with the highest concepts of Truth, Beauty and Goodness comprehensible by us. While it is true that the prophets who walked before him always taught in accordance with the light of their day, Jesus is the whole light, the rule, the standard reference, the first violin, the perfect pitch, the Truth. And his Spirit of Truth is right now laboring to move us into a greater appreciation of that Truth.

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It was the 90s, a new decade. The cold war had ended and the highly contentious relationship, between the United States and the Soviet Union, was no longer being played out in a high profile way, on the United Nations Security Council. Even China was behaving well, as it was dabbling in the global market economy. It appeared, for a time, that the world had become a more friendly place for people reclaiming their right to be the arbiters of their own destiny while expressing themselves through their fledgeling democracies.

Mikhail Gorbachev had relaxed restrictions on private property and introduced initial market reforms. The privatization of Russia’s state-owned assets had begun as Boris Yeltsin, the first President of post-Soviet Russia set a goal to sell state controlled assets to the Russian public. To facilitate wide participation, vouchers were issued so all Russian citizens, including minors could buy shares.

Vladimir Putin had commanded the FSB, a successor to the KGB, as Director. He was later appointed as Prime Minister and uniquely positioned, early on, to manipulate markets and benefit personally from the rise of the oligarchs that had by then captured most of the equities intended for Russian citizens. Putin attached himself to the Russian oligarchy in such a way as to receive a piece of their action that, according to some, amounted to as much as fifty percent.

The oligarchs and Putin had not only redirected the new equities, they also stole the emergent democracy out from under that country’s citizenry. Putin became president in 2012. It would appear that he could hold that position for as long as he wants it. In 2018, China also removed the term limit on their presidency giving Xi Jinping that power for life. These factors, coupled with the diminishing authenticity of democracy within the United States, makes the five member United Nation’s Security Council about equally divided between the forces of Autocracy versus Democracy.

The United Nations was never a federation of democracies nor was it ever intended to be. It was formed and informed by experience gained; from a failure of the League of Nations to the hard fought victories of World War Two. The primary consideration for the Allies then, was to insure there would be no backsliding into the conditions that fomented that devastating war. And so, they gave themselves veto power over any UN initiative.

It is that veto power that stands in the way of humanity’s greatness, of self government, of world peace. The people of Russia, of China, and of other so-called rogue nations are not the enemies of representative government. It is, rather, their egomaniacal leaders, together with others who possess an exaggerated sense of self-importance. 

Why is it that the most animalistic savages continue to terrorize the people of Afghanistan? Why do developed nations have immigration problems? Why are there no safe-havens in Central America where people from strife-torn countries can gather to strategize on how best to regain control of their respective homelands? The United Nations, as presently constituted, is largely impotent.

On April 5^th in 2000, The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations published a report titled United Nations Peacekeeping Missions and Their Proliferation. In that report it was revealed that “since 1995 U.S. participation globally in U.N. peacekeeping missions has generally numbered 500 to 1,000 troops, less than 5% of the total, and today’s total includes primarily U.S. civilians (not soldiers) at that.”

Even when it does mount peacekeeping missions, it is so internally conflicted as to render those missions ineffective. Why else would UN Peacekeepers be on standby in Rwanda while the Hutu slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis? In May of 2019, The American Foreign Service Association published an article titled Why Peacekeeping Fails. That article included the statement: “. . . U.N. peacekeeping has become a way for rich countries to send the soldiers of poor countries to deal with conflicts the rich countries do not care all that much about.”

It is clear, that the International governing body that our world looks up to, is a politically stymied debating society first and foremost. That having been said, there have been positive developments within the World Court. But, even in that venue, the Security Council members have given themselves the kind of absolute immunity that stems from the supposed infallibility of popes and kings. 

The world needs a true federation of democracies with all that implies including most favored nation status for the most authentic of the democracies. For that to occur, the UN must be re-chartered to protect the world from the tyranny of the most self-serving minority. What would incentivize the authoritarian members of the Security Council to agree to such an arrangement? Money!

If the UN fails to evolve into a world federation of democracies, one of the regional federations will undoubtedly succeed. If most favored nation status is then keyed to the authenticity of each constitutionally grounded democratic republic, the business community and the consumers will notice, while the three flows of commerce; capitol, goods, and information will be directed to the most deserving of those entrepreneurial nations.

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We possess free will. With this endowment comes responsibility and the potential for error, evil, sin and iniquity. Though we are the final arbiters of our own destiny; pre-destination and fore-ordination are reality factors with which we must contend. To put it another way, each child of destiny has the power to accept or reject the divine plan. Whether we achieve our first, best destiny is entirely up to us.

Within our wide range of choices are perfection and imperfection, the mature and the immature, the complete and the incomplete. Between life and death stand the committed and the uncommitted. To every person across a far-flung universe of universes, Our Creator’s message is consistent; “I set before you life and death, therefore choose life.”

The first point of law is life. We are, first and foremost, commanded to live. Evil is more than just a reverse spelling. It runs contrary to survival. Now we often have problems thrust upon us or difficulty letting go of certain things, attitudes, and patterns of thought that tend to eclipse or impair a full and fruitful life. Figuring out what’s good and what’s evil is part of the growth process, right? Is experience a necessary part of life? Yes! Is there the potential for error? Yes! Are you responsible for your decisions? Of course! Are you unjustly held accountable for the sins of your forebears or everything that goes wrong in your life? Hardly!

Our ultimate survival is not so much about the things beyond our control or programmed responses, as it is about gaining control through our free will choices. You’ve heard or read that all have sinned. You’ve also learned that the wages of sin is death. So why aren’t we all dead? If justice reigned supreme throughout this universe, we probably would be. Fortunately, for all of us, true justice is tempered with mercy, and divine justice will not destroy what God’s mercy can save. Mercy takes into account the fact of our weaknesses as growing, imperfect beings.

Our Father did not create evil, although he did create the gift of free will. In so doing he created the potential for evil. At our stage of growth, learning to prove all things and adhering to that which is good is an essential part of life. There will undoubtedly be errors, bad habits and perhaps even compulsion to overcome. But once we’ve identified actual or potential evil and continue to choose it, or refuse to let go of it, well, that is what we call sin.

Where the term ‘sin’ traces its roots to archery and missing the mark, iniquity is wholehearted rebellion against the Divine will. It is not something we mistakenly choose, stumble into, get goaded into, or lured into. It’s not something we reluctantly choose or are forced to accept in a time of weakness or out of ignorance. It is not an attempt at choosing the lesser of two evils. Iniquity is willful defiance. It is when evil or sin is deliberate, because it is contrary to Divine law.

Iniquity is a direct assault on the organizing principle of the universes, an attack on the unifying and coordinating qualities we’ve come to know as truth, beauty and goodness. Our rightful inheritance is family unity. Jesus told us: “I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” Where Our Father sows love, our enemies sow hatred. Where we would reap love, the forces of evil would advance chaos and have us fully immersed in ill will.

Some believe that unity is obtained through uniformity. Others hold that unity is only achieved at the expense of honest deliberation. And so, I put these questions to you in light of these historical considerations: Was the Lucifer Rebellion quashed? No! Was any effort made to suppress? No! From the start of the Lucifer rebellion each individual was left free in his or her choice.

The rebellion was permitted to run its full course. Or, as John wrote in the Book of Revelations, “The dragon was loosed for awhile.”

Why is that? It is precisely because we are a family. And Our Father is dealing with a universe full of free-willed individuals who must be afforded every opportunity to make an informed, deliberate, wholehearted and final choice. There is no enduring value in corralling individuals into a superficial allegiance through fear and intimidation, through the hellfire and brimstone imagery of ages past. Those who simply go along to get along are not likely to exude the quality of loyalty when tested. 

We must each get to that place in our own spiritual journey where we can, with depth of conviction and in all sincerely, pray to God saying; “It is my will that your will be done.” For after all is said and done, Our Father desires only the devotion that is voluntary and sophistry proof.

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There is nothing uglier than a lack of appreciation. And American news viewers can see it every day in the faces of Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, and Jim Jordan. In contrast, the police officers that put their lives on the line to protect these scoundrels would do it again because, unlike their ungrateful protectees, the officers sworn to protect the capitol and its inhabitants are principled. January the 6^th in 2021 revealed the extent to which almost a third of our national adult population has been snookered.

Most of us can see the difference between an elected representative acting in ways true to their oath, and one that would sink our constitutionally grounded democratic republic to hold on to their form-fitting seats. The participants in the racist riot were chanting many of the right words, while also failing to recognize just how far afoul they had strayed from the principles to which they payed lip service. Their emotion driven pastors believe in their own supposed subject matter expertise within each and every discipline.

Many of these are the same people that railed against moral relativism just a few short years ago. Now they champion it. They thump the King James Bible while justifying their attitudes of white supremacy. They traded their Christian witness for a masquerade long ago. Atheists and secularists point to the pseudo-religious hucksterism together with the way its practitioners parade hypocrisy as a point of pride.

The Trumpeters shouted “Jesus is Lord” while dishonoring almost everything about his exemplary life and teachings. The Jesusonian observation that “he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword” is altogether ignored by the fearful hoards that place their faith in kinetic weapons. Love your enemies is hardly apparent in the videos of police being beaten with flagpoles on the capitol steps.

While counterfeit Christians would likely agree, on some cosmetic level, with a Top-40 playlist within the about Jesus genre, they exhibit a reckless indifference to the truth as exemplified by The Way, The Truth, and The Life. And, it appears to those secularists, who would minimize the Jesusonian influence, that people chanting his name have very little regard for the religion of Jesus. A couple of decades ago people within the churches were asking themselves “What would Jesus do.” Now, it seems, such questions are avoided as if they are masks and vaccines.

Modern day deceivers work by selectively amplifying, filtering, and contextualizing facts. And it’s much easier for those intent on building a religion about Jesus to place emphasis on whatever suits them. The militant Jesus is depicted as an out-of-control maniac, ranting in the temple courtyard, while flipping over the money tables. The true Jesus was exhibiting a fatherly affection and was protecting his children from those who made a habit of exploiting the poor while turning the Father’s temple into a den of thieves.

The religion of Jesus is not quite so malleable as the religion about Jesus. Jesus is motivated by true love, not a lust for power. As the Creator Son, he placed high value on our right to be the true arbiters of our own destiny. When he said “I stand at the door and knock,” he also made it clear that he would honor our individual decisions with respect to whether or not we open that door to let him come in.

In contrast, the whited sepulchers of today would usurp the authority of each of us as individuals and our collective will as a great humanity. They have no intention of delivering anything close to fidelity of representation as they prostitute themselves for the inheritors, skimmers, and hoarders of wealth. And they have put their peculiar form of blasphemy center stage as they make a mockery of all things sacred. They have sullied the name of Jesus, as well as The Way, The Truth, and The Light.

The Goebbelian doctrine holds that the truth is the enemy of the big lie and is, therefore, the enemy of the state. Of course our state is not fully persuaded that it should wholeheartedly embrace the lie. There are still sentient beings walking among us. There are those who still hope for a glimmer of statesmanship as they try to see past the political sophistries.

The problem for McConnell, McCarthy, Graham, and Jordan is that the truth never suffers from close examination whereas the lie always gets exposed eventually. While their boisterous constituencies are addicted to the self aggrandizement that always accompanies an exaggerated sense of self importance, there are still people of good will working quietly to improve the human condition. There are two kinds of churches, the ones that lean Luciferian and the ones that are decidedly Jesusonian.

There are also two kinds of democratic republics. There are the ones that are inauthentic and there are the ones that are decidedly authentic. The authentic ones don’t like the kind of politics where “poli” means many and “tics”: means blood sucking parasites. Authentic democracies place a premium on true statesmanship.

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In the seventeenth chapter of Genesis it is written: “When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said; I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.” Although we can hardly hope to attain perfection in the infinite sense, it is entirely possible for us to fit perfectly into our highest and best destiny, to attain all that God has set before us. When we achieve this, in accordance with His will, we will be just as replete in our finite domain as God himself is in his sphere of infinity and eternity. We may not be universal, unlimited in intellectual insight, or final in any spiritual sense, but God is working right now to perfect our motivation, and our understanding of his will for us.

We live in a strife-torn world. And honing our effectiveness when the situation demands articulation in matters of faith and a world of competing ideas, is essential if we are to fulfill our ministerial obligations. Perfection in life temporal is a progressive attainment; and this applies to discernment and perception. God reveals himself to us in accordance with our capacity to behold him. Because we each minister within our own sphere of influence, it is important to see that world and its proper context within God’s Universe of Universes.

As we blow through our circumscribed world view and challenge each other’s assumptions, we become better positioned to explore the notion of adjusting to Infinity and Eternity. We are ambassadors of an Infinite and Eternal Heavenly Kingdom operating on an isolated, temporal, finite, rebellion torn world. Our understanding of this world and its people is crucial to our success. 

In what became known as his Whit Sunday Sermon, C.S. Lewis discussed “transposition.” His treatise is not so much about modulating from the key of C to D but rather taking Truth from a higher plane to a lower plane or from a higher to a lower language. Lewis illustrated the problem of portraying Spiritual realities this way:

“If you are to translate from a language which has a large vocabulary, into a language that has a small vocabulary, then you must be allowed to use several words in more than one sense. If you are to write a language with twenty two vowel sounds in an alphabet with only five vowel characters then you must be allowed to give each of those five characters more than one value. If you are making a piano version of a piece originally scored for an orchestra, then the same piano notes which represent flutes in one passage must also represent violins in another.”

He continued: “As the examples show we are all quite familiar with this kind of transposition or adaptation from a richer to a poorer medium. The most familiar example of all is the art of drawing. The problem here is to represent a three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper. The solution is perspective, and perspective means that we must give more than one value to a two-dimensional shape. Thus in a drawing of a cube we use an acute angle to represent what is a right angle in the real world. But elsewhere an acute angle on the paper may represent what was already an acute angle in the real world: for example, the point of a spear on the gable of a house. The very same shape which you must draw to give the illusion of a straight road receding from the spectator is also the shape you draw for a dunces’ cap.”

In summary, Lewis said: “It is clear that in each case what is happening in the lower medium can be understood only if we know the higher medium. The instance where this knowledge is most commonly lacking is the musical one. The piano version means one thing to the musician who knows the original orchestral score and another thing to the man who hears it simply as a piano piece. But the second man would be at an even greater disadvantage if he had never heard any instrument but a piano and even doubted the existence of other instruments. Even more, we understand pictures only because we know and inhabit the three-dimensional world.”

Jesus routinely shared concepts that were foreign to many of his followers. The mysteries of the kingdom were presented in what he called parables. To his enemies such parables were not understood and thus would not arouse antagonisms. The parabolic analogy, whereby the story has a directing arc and a principle focus, is also an ingenious way to convey meaning that gracefully transcends gender, culture, and time. When you are working with masses, individuals, or groups of varying intellects and temperaments, you cannot speak different words for each class of hearers. You can however tell a story to convey meaning and each individual, will be able to make his or her own interpretation of your parable in accordance with their own intellectual and spiritual endowments.

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When they arrived on the scene, Adolf Hitler wasted no time in making the pronouncement: “This is a God-given signal.” He continued: “If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.” The scene was the parliamentary building in Berlin, the Reichstag, that went up in flames from an arson attack. The date was February 27^th in 1933.

It was a flashpoint event that made it possible for Adolf Hitler to play upon public and political fears and thereby consolidate power, setting the stage for the rise of Nazi Germany. The competing narratives and revisionist history only added to the national chaos, while also facilitating power grabs. To some, it was a Communist plot, to others the staging of Antifascism. It is certain that Hitler played upon the FIBS of Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear to consolidate power, thus setting the stage for the rise of Nazi Germany. Today, the “Reichstag Fire” is a powerful political metaphor that serves as a cautionary tale.

Germany’s liberal democracy was first established at the conclusion of World War I. The 1919 Weimar Constitution called for the president to be elected by direct ballot. The legislators that comprised the Reichstag were also elected by popular vote, while the president would appoint a chancellor to introduce legislation. The president held the power to dismiss his cabinet, the chancellor, and even to dissolve an ineffective Reichstag. In cases of national emergency, the president could invoke Article 48, which gave him dictatorial powers and the right to intervene directly in the governance of Germany’s 19 territorial states.

The economic and political unrest of the early 1930s meant that no single political party had a majority in the Reichstag, so the nation was held together by fragile coalitions. The political chaos prompted President Paul von Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag over and over again. With each dissolution came new elections. Hitler rose to the head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazis. By 1928 the group’s membership exceeded 100,000. The Nazis denounced the Weimar Republic and what they called the “November criminals,” that had signed the Treaty of Versailles. That treaty had forced Germany to accept responsibility for World War I, pay reparations, transfer territory to their neighbors, and limit the size of the military.

When the Great Depression hit, sending the U.S. and Europe into an economic tailspin, the number of unemployed in Germany rose to about 30 percent of the adult population. As one might imagine, with 6 million unemployed, there was massive social upheaval. This the Nazis exploited. By 1930, they won 18.3 percent of the Reichstag vote and became the second largest party after the Social Democrats. The Communist party gained about ten percent of the vote.

The Nazis, by attracting voters from other right-leaning factions, then garnered 33 percent of the vote. In January of 1933, Hindenburg reluctantly appointed Hitler as chancellor in the desperate hope that the other conservative parties would join with the Nazis to keep the Communists out of power. The Nazis infiltrated the police. Hitler also used his powers as chancellor to enroll 50,000 Nazi SA men, known as the brown shirts, as auxiliary police.

On February 28, Hindenburg invoked Article 48. The cabinet drew up the “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State.” The act abolished freedom of speech, assembly, privacy and the press. It legalized phone tapping and interception of correspondence. And, it suspended the autonomy of federated states. That night around 4,000 people were arrested, imprisoned, and tortured by the SA.

The SA was founded out of various emotionally charged and intellectually stunted elements that had attached themselves to the fledgling Nazi movement. Its early membership was drawn largely from armed freebooter groups. These were mainly ex-soldiers, that battled leftists in the streets in the early days of the Weimar Republic. Outfitted in brown uniforms after the fashion of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Blackshirts in Italy, the SA men protected party meetings, marched in Nazi rallies, and physically assaulted political opponents. 

In the United States today, the former president has repeatedly characterized those protesting the systemic murder of black citizens as “thugs,” “terrorists,” and “anarchists.” He has also praised individuals who participated in the insurrection of January 6^th in 2021 as “great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” Trump empathized with those who had violently stormed the Capitol, saying, “I know your pain, I know your hurt.” He then said, “We love you.” 

Former White House chief of staff General John Kelly recently wrote that, during a 2018 visit to Europe to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, then president Donald J. Trump said: “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things.” Many have since compared the Reichstag’s Fire to the White House deceptions that were architected by Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Miller, a protege of Joseph Goebbels. During his stint as the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Goebbels the defined truth as “The enemy of the state.”