Bill Maher: My Faith is not Fair to Hate

Bill Maher says religion has the power to divert men to destructive courses.

I do not disagree. The “wrong kind of” Man tends toward power over others, any vehicle will do in that pursuit. Implicit in his statement, Bill Maher sees himself as a better man than the diverted one. I would also agree with the proposal that he operates on a level of care and concern for our world. He is not, in my estimation a “bad man”. It seems also implicit that he wants it understood that he manages to be “good without stilts” in full self-determination. We have a good solid point of agreement. I think Bill Maher is who he is, and cares about where we’re headed, without outside influence or help, just because he’s a Good Guy.

Mr. Maher, however is not without a desire for power of a certain sort, he has his own crusade, stating that the trajectory of religion is destruction of the world, “religion must die in order for mankind to live”. He asserts an urgency to this, it has to happen quickly, it’s almost, if not already too late.

So, I’m religious. I’m the enemy. I’m part and parcel of what has its finger on the trigger about to demolish our world. Mr. Maher has pronounced death to me. Quickly. Hurry before it’s too late.

Now THAT, to me, is disturbing. I do not like him as my god, I decidedly do NOT, Sam I Am. I hardly hurt flies, certainly never turtles, and most certainly no one like Mr. Maher or any for whom he cares.

Somehow I think the preeminent danger to mankind is the presence of nuclear capacity at the whim of feuding governments and greed. How many weapons has man created (and many of those men in power claim godlessness) that have not been deployed at some crazed point in history? Whatever can be devised for destruction of “other” is eventually unleashed.

Fact check here: hmmmm, Jesus said “do unto other as you would have done” is the guiding precept. Definitely, my dangerous religion stands against blowing our world up a hundred times over.

Back to Bill: He says to be guided by God in affairs of state is the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.
There ARE entrail reading sects, yes there are. There are head-chopper-offers in the name of Allah. There are scores of religions that in our day and age call for harm to other in order to benefit one’s own creed and tribe. Again, the world is certainly awash in dangerous practices built on lewd and lascivious lies, but the true practice of Christianity is not one of them.

Bill: since there are no gods talking to us

If I am one of us, and I am, you’re wrong. It’s an unintentional lie, I realize, but Sir, you do not speak for me. I hear God, I see God, and I follow God. You don’t believe God, why would you believe me? You would not. Again, you posit yourself as the authority which rhetorically purports to have some power to persuade others, but it is built on a garbage heap of presumption you do not have the right to assert.

I hear God, therefore I know God is talking to some, therefore it is false by logic that there are NO gods. Until you have tested, and even after you have scientifically measured all that you can, all you will have is a theory, a mere hypothesis that there are no gods. Your control group is a minority with a premise that has already failed. What you might need to ponder is, maybe there are good gods and bad gods as men who follow voices hear them. Try that ethic for awhile and see what spins out. My position is one Real True and Good God, and all the other “false and bad”. In reality if only by ethic as you have probably by now decided if you followed me down this road of argument at all, all the voices are present, and men ARE listening and acting on what they will, which IS a dangerous thing.

Bill: Doubt is humble.

Then you also, doubt, for you have the correct and high opinion of yourself as a good man, therefore you have the humility of doubt. Interesting that you do not permit that in your posturing these statements. So truly, in your heart, if you were to find it beneficial to be governed by God Law if it be benevolent, then you would admit to doubt, or even may I suggest, hope?

Or is your only aim to hold out the doubt cookie to be bitten by others, to rend the foundation of their faith and so begin your mission, your crusade may I say, to save the world? You are the benevolent one? But not to me, me you must destroy.

Bill: rational people, anti-religionists … must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves.

Where have I seen THAT happen before? Let me think, ah yes, Nazi Germany when the “rational people” asserted themselves. They first broke down the churches as is happening today. Their first target was Judaism, but it wasn’t a bad place to start to annihilate god-folk, since they’re the center in our creed. Is it too bold of me to say I don’t LIKE your version of rational or what it portends?

Have you noticed, Mr. Maher that the genocide in our present time is disproportionately aimed at good and innocent people? At Christians and Jews alone? Families, mothers, fathers, children who were Tutsi’s were killed to the 800,000’s. Tutsi’s were Catholic. What is happening today in Sudan? It is war against Christians by people who torture, maim, and kill in the worst possible and most publically shamefully boasting methods. Tunesia. Nigeria. Stalin’s Russia. Mao’s China. Always God’s People are the target.

Why are the Jews treating members of Hamas and their families in their hospitals while Islam wants the whole race wiped off the face of the earth? There is a good versus bad, good God and bad god in operation. The blindness to that is horrifying for me. We need Truth above all else. You don’t want examination, you want continued blindness, and that, is VERY dangerous. You would lump radical Islam in with compassionate Yahweh and you would be mistaken for if we are not looking and counteracting what drives evil, evil poised against our very right to exist, then we COULD fall. You cannot say these are “only men acting on their own agenda” when the agenda is historically always present beyond men or cultures. There is a “thing” of a nature that want’s the other opposing “thing” of a better nature destroyed and it plays out in all lives before and beyond ours. Your inflicted “humble doubt” leaves the troops delusional, disarmed if they believe there is “nothing”.

Here, you will deny that the God of Jews and Christians is at all good. You would want to dredge up the Old Testament battles and the Crusades into the Holy Lands to discredit my God’s teachings; well you and I weren’t there. We are here. Let’s begin then with what we have as directly apprehensible today. I have answers to those in distant history as well, but if we can’t ground ourselves in reality to what’s within our reach, then how can we possibly assign understanding when even you said is “human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong”? There is probably, possibly, no certainly, some error in the retelling of those events and our perception of them. We will put those aside, temporarily in order to come to some basis for our own argument about the urgency of ending all religion now and today.

Bill: religion is bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance

What is the way of Evolution? Where goes the trajectory under the kingship of almighty biology? Have you seen ducks? There is always one at the base of the pyramid in the pecking order. Nature, I would propose, is the ugly goading mistress of those ills you state. How species cull the weak to promote the strong is behavior that follows sheer ignorance of the finer, what we Christians call, Sacred quality of Life and Being. Our way lifts the woman from the ground where she is being stoned. Christianity alone among all the cultural ethics, gives women status and asserts that in marriage: the woman is to be strong, working, merchandising, teaching, and honored. When Christ was being led to his death, Peter struck the ear off one in the party arresting him, Christ replaced it and cried out “Forgive them” as he was murdered. On which side do you find the violence in my creed? I am governed by Love, Sir, as directed by my God, who is Love Itself.

Your teaching turns all against me, stating a believer is “an enabler, a mafia wife, for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travelers”. You lie about me and my kind, and drum up your own followers to mock and molest me without ever questioning themselves or my heart. You would beat me bound to stocks in the city square and scream to the crowd, “here, see the hater” and feel just in doing so. You may never awaken to the devil calling you to act or speak these things, and so I tell you truly, you join the killers of all things good and right and innocent as they ignite hatred. You speak only the sentence of your own truth.

Bill: Jesus with the virgin birth and the dove and the snake who talked in the garden, that's cool. But the Scientologists, they're the crazy ones.

Bill, where do you stop reading, how far back do you allow yourself to go in studying say, the Classics? Was Socrates cool, or Homer? Have you ever looked at a Hieroglyph? I know you have, you have a degree in History. Do you take any interest at all in any civilization, philosophy, a search for meaning, purpose and “what’s it all about?” What do you think of Alexander the Great? What if the more you studied trying to figure out if there IS a pattern, you found it all fits together like a cool puzzle and there’s a message in the thing once you’re able to reconstruct it?

What if there’s a message that brings us to that salvation you talk about wanting so fervently, so urgently, for mankind? Would that, or would it not, be cool?

Here and now I apologize for the counterfeits in Christianity. You are very angry, and I'll bet my socks you have good reason to be. You told Bill O'Reilly that Jesus wasn't the problem, the problem is that His followers aren't more like him.

It is with that statement that you and I find common ground.

Prosperity theology is a sham. Jihad is evil, in any language. The Vatican is too rich and abuse too rampant. You have something to say about men and their practices, I get that, but I do think that you are inciting an attitude that WILL sooner rather than later do great physical harm to me and mine. You are dismissing too many of us who do aim to follow Christ worldwide. You're drawing down fire we don't deserve. Angry men with hatred and evil intent quote you as they turn toward us. I beg you to throw down your ample verbal weapons for awhile and look a littler harder through the temperance of that doubt.

The urgency isn't where you think it is.

KH Benefield
June 26, 2014

Warming up for a run

Life has been whittled to the few essential basics on my end. We're in critical times. The "that's what they all say, in all ages" chorus can be heard across space and time, but wait, this is different, truly different.

If a book handed down across hundreds of years can be shown to have FORETOLD with complete accuracy, events happening in our lifetime, it's something worth intent study.

With my Master's Degree in Literature, and a huge helping of History/Technology/Science/Philosophy study, I can say to you with whatever authority academia has to offer, that the Bible is unique.

Wars and rumors of wars? Check--but it's always been "check" on that score.

Israel brought back to its homeland? Check, and add miraculously preserved. If you don't believe me, look into "Against All Odds," a documentary series about what has happened during conflict. Explicitly for times' sake, check out the one about the land mines that were uncovered by a huge windstorm.

Earthquakes in divers places? Check, we have unprecedented catastrophic weather, and did you know that Old Faithful ISN'T faithful anymore?

We're getting into the "earth wobbling on its axis" and roaring seas part now.

What's next? It's easy to know if you read the book. "Edom" is in trouble for acting in hatred toward its brother. The anger turned upon the Israeli's by surrounding nations is drawing them to attack Israel like a "hook in the jaw," but the troops will be miraculously destroyed. Those who align viciously against Israel are wrong to do so and it is important to take a stand against such hatred.

Events foretold but I don't understand the sequence:

Egypt and Syria will be "down but not out," and will align with Israel to build a road for commerce connecting the three nations and crossing Israel.

Damascus will be so utterly destroyed that it can never again be inhabited. The description makes one think of a nuclear event. Babylon will also one day be similarly destroyed.

Someday, Babylon will be the seat of economic wealth. There will be a council of ten, somehow three of those will have one leader emerge as preeminent. The council of world leaders will choose to step aside and allow that one leader to "take point" on attacking Babylon. He will preside over the destruction of Babylon.

Israel will be exceedingly prosperous and secure for a time, but the "north" will attack, motivated by greed and joined by the south. It may be this point when 200 million amass against Israel. Again, these forces are defeated in such a way as could only happen through God's intervention. The blood will run up to a horses bridle and clean-up of the remains will take seven years, with workers being sent into the valley to find and bury stray bones that an unnatural number of birds of prey have left after devouring what they could.

There will be a time when phenomena in the sky will make men look up and fear that the earth will be destroyed.

Now, when all these happen will you be ready to read? You don't have to believe anything, just watch.

I need a Blog Poll

I have three blogs now, but at least I imported my Wordpress (keevah dot wordpress dot com) into my new webspace on Hostmonster keevah dot net. This one still rolls like a fast go-cart on a raging downhill slope. The other is staggering, uncertain of any pure direction but expresses a variety of interests.

Maybe that's a good thing. It's all "too much text" when there's so much exciting multimedia to be displayed.

I've come late to the party. Is there time left for me to sip, munch and mix before the lights go out and everyone trudges or stumbles on to something else?

And which couch do I stake out? Blogger? Wordpress? Second Life? or my own paid-for district on the ISP? The learning curve here seems to be the blade of a scimatar.

Reviews: Spartacus Series

I'm an old world girl, I'll admit it. I want intellectual discourse, not "bullets and balls," as my friend Farrah called the male counterpart movie types to my favored "chic flicks."

So, given that I don't like gratuitous sex OR explicit voyeuristic violence, you can see where I'm going to go with shows like Spartacus, Tudors, or Deadwood; but I think more needs to be said than "I don't like it." I think it is wrong to depict for consumer consumption every aspect of intercourse or harm for fundamental reasons of the promotion of civilized, not barbarian, behavior.

Our culture used to understand the evils of bloodsport, but we're quickly moving in the direction of sanctioning, even developing the taste for it again. In Spartacus, the gladiators are brought to us as they once were in reality, with slow motion exaggerations of the moments in which horrendous wounds are delivered and suffered.

We are a free nation. Does the right to freedom mean the promotion of even the most debased media like "Faces of Death," in which real footage of the moment of human death has been compiled for viewing?

There's something wrong in this. I want my freedom, but I want security as well. There is a balance. There are so many fronts on which the value of human life and wellbeing are assaulted.

If the answer is, "then just don't look," my respone is that it's getting harder to operate so that I'm not at each turn affronted by things the country that bore me never before subjected me to.

Our World Today, Are we still free?

I'm worried. I was born in a country that had faults, surely, but had an internal mechanism for correction because it was guided by acknowledgement of a moral absolute, a standard, a just, righteous, holy and unique God. God didn't go anywhere. He is real. He exists and we only exist because of Him, but our nation has turned away from truth, and hence, it will lose its course. It's that simple.

Our course in history has been as protector and blessed nation. Has the nation's people always conducted themselves rightly? No, but they always strove toward that goal and hence, slavery was abolished, civil rights were instituted, massacres were eventually if not timely, addressed and ills within the practice of this society came to light and were voted into correction.

I'm a rational and educated woman. I have advanced degrees and even more advanced personal accomplishments. The Bible is a true document that stands as authentic and unique among all of history and literature. One would have to study to know this. Many have and many do. I, also, know this, and knowing this, I also know what trends assert themselves that have been long ago foretold. I know what end global warming, trouble in the Middle East, and celestial phenomena will come to. I know where this is going, not the timetable, but certainly the trajectory.

What I did not expect, never wanted to dread, was a departure of my own people from a sure inheritance of justice, peace, honor and good will we have worked, and sometimes fought, so hard to obtain. As we embrace radicalism we will in effect, move from that natural tendency for ethical correction into a realm of "anything goes."

When anything goes, everything goes.

I am so proud of the civil boundaries we've eliminated. There is a reason to this marvelous social and civic evolution that we are forgetting. "One Nation Under God" means we have a compass set to True that though the vessel waft, it will never truly wander.

We're a ship with no steerage if we abandon the God who has blessed this verdant nation with unprecedented bounty. God is love and as we truly follow the teachings left us in a document unlike any other, we follow the example of a man who two thousand years ago was the greatest promoter of human sanctity and liberty who lived before or since.

Our own churches, our own most visible practitioners who profess to follow God behave as the "enemy in the camp," ever begging for funds and working toward one purpose of personal prosperity thereby discrediting the truth they pretend to preach. Even this would correct over time if our country's leaders continued to direct their actions by first seeking guidance and wisdom.

When we look to a star for direction, we're acknowledging something beyond ourselves, needed in order to sustain our way. When we pray, we are doing no more than that, realizing that for a straight course, one must tie to something stationary and beyond one sole self. Our mortal lives are transitory so there must be something else that is not. How is it that each finite being can raise a fist and deny that there is anything greater than the arm which holds that defiant hand?

To whom does it protest?

Oh my people, you are losing your way and I am sad.

ReachOut

My parents read things to me that one would read to grownups, or certainly not a 6-7 year-old child. _Call of the Wild_ is hard core for the soft hearted. _Moby Dick_, have you ever tried reading some of that on a day when you need to RELAX? For my seventh birthday, added in the stack was a leather bound Bible with my name engraved in gold leaf. The edges were gold leaf too, and there were masterpiece paintings reproduced at delightful intervals. Of course, I was in what Piaget termed the "concrete stage of cognitive development" so when I read the inscription by my parents about a treasure to be found in the pages, I turned the thing up and shook it, looking for the money. Concrete is concrete.

As my introduction, mother read me the "Book of Job." She'd prepared me well. I could handle it after recovering from the terrorization of dogs and whales and assimilating those natural conditions into my schema of "how the world operates." Job made sense. It was the right place to start. She didn't know it was the oldest book written of them all. When you read it and the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ they do that: they mesh. There were giants and creatures and old worlde realities in days gone by that we can only read about now and imagine.

I was primed for a life of literature. I read the whole book on my own. It took awhile and several flashlight batteries because I had a full day and an imposed bedtime. Dad sneaked me the batteries. I went from that to Homer, Edith Hamilton's _Greek Mythology_, _Swiss Family Robinson_ and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, all the Twain and Dickens books, then the Brontes, Jane Austin. By ten I knew fact from fiction pretty solidly.

I didn't have any problem seeing the Bible as fact. I went on to get my Master's degree in English Literature and added the credits for an MA in Writing while I was at it. The ancient Greek stuff had history, theology, philosophy all mixed in. I loved it all. My teachers were frustrated because school was B O R I N G and my California Achievement Tests had me maxing out anything they had within their reach to teach me on grade level. I preferred to play jacks, work in the library, scheme ways to make money and look for book buddies.

I'm still looking for book buddies. I "know stuff." When you know you want to share.

Reaching out. Yeah. Doing that.--Keevah

Time to Talk

I have multiple bookshelves full of books I've read and I have to wonder to what purpose? How do I bring about some conjunction of knowledge and understanding and do more than hoard it quietly to myself? There is so much I have learned and continue to learn, so much I've been shown and so very much that I enjoy added to so much that concerns me, it's impossible to consider just being "silent."

There was a biography of John Lennon on a PBS station tonight. His enlightenment ended with himself. A song he wrote and recorded states that he doesn't believe in a succession of things, Jesus and the Beatles included. They fell away as myths to him and what he was left with was himself alone. If that is so, then death is final. That's not good enough. There's more. I felt sorry that he was his own god because at the business end of a bullet, his god had no power to save him. In order to be plucked free of evil, there has to be something over and above it to wrench us from harm's influence.

It takes a big shrug to conclude there's nothing ultimately loving or sustaining with the power to overriding the tragedies that strike us all. The worst onslaught is death itself. Death is an enemy. It's universally a "bad thing," along with pain and suffering.

There has to be a universally good thing to counter it.

Balance ... justice ... joy ... where do they originate? Only in the imagination?

No. And there IS no such thing as justice if death is all there is to end our time here. Death is the wrong team winning after all. That's not how it is.

My books on philosophy, history, theology and biography all bring me closer to truths I'd prefer to share in a life informed by even something more, something that communicates inside out. I'm most frustrated by institutions and individuals, "enemies within the camp," that counterfeit the truth in order to obtain some shadow form of power or profit. I think if you deal in lies, profit is a temporal and elusive term. One might seem to prosper when the "gifts" are rolling in, but the life taken in context won't really succeed over time. A person pays for the character they choose to assume. Mr. Televangelist with a Rolex and a 10 minute Infommercial begging for money with each broadcast isn't doing the work of a Universal Diety; he's pitching for himself period.

So I'll start with the Didache which instructed early apostles to have a trade and support themselves. The ministry wasn't something one did as a career. How revolutionary a notion is THAT in today's Theoconomy? We shouldn't be selling the message or the service. We give, as we are given to. WE being those who stand alongside Christ, following his teachings and trusting his Word.

Check out the text: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/didache-roberts.html

VERY interesting. --K