Beloved Conqueror

Just wanted to highlight a friend's blog. Please feel free to check it out, and if you like what you see, spread the word. I'll post a link here, and for future linkage, please see my blogs list on the right hand side of my blog. Beloved Conqueror will be there with many others.

http://belovedconqueror.wordpress.com

Racist Tea Party??

There has been an accusation floating about for the past several months about the tea party movement. For those who do not know, the tea party movement is a grass roots movement that has been in existence since around April of 2009. In that time, this movement has grown to the single most powerful grass roots movement I have seen in my lifetime. One of the consistent accusations by those who are political enemies of the movement is that the people involved are racially motivated. The only thing even remotely resembling evidence they have had to offer has been a miniscule percentage of signs with racist statements on them caught by camera at tea party rallies.

Well, the results are in, and the question is this, "do the results of the elections seem to justify the claim that the tea party folks are a racist bunch or not?" Who was elected that would most clearly benefit from the tea party philosophy?

Republican Jaime Herrera became Washington state's first Latina representative in Congress.

Marco Rubio is the country's 7th Latino Senator and the first GOP senator since Mel Martinez resigned in 2009.

Tim Scott and Alan West became the first Republican African American members of Congress to enter the House since 2003 (both backed by Palin).

Nevada elected its first Latino governor in Brian Sandoval (Republican).

Susanna Martinez (Republican) is New Mexico's first female governor and one of the country's first two women of color governors.

Nikki Haley (Republican) of South Carolina became the country's second Indian-American governor, the state's first woman governor, and one of the first two women of color.

Also, three Senate candidates that were put forward by the tea party but failed to be elected were Sharon Angle, Christine O'Donnell, and Linda McMahon. Therefore, the representation by females in the U.S. government would have been much higher had some of the tea parties' female candidates won. It looks like they weren't a bunch of male chauvinists either.

Hell

Many, many folks have a problem with the concept of hell. I thought I would provide some of the best thoughts I've heard spoken in regards to the concept of hell.

1. This thought was contributed by a Christian talk show host I heard recently whose name I know not. In regards to the inequitable or overly punitive nature of hell when looking at it as crime and punishment he said(I'm paraphrasing), "consider that the same act is often treated differently when committed against different people. For example, two brothers fighting leads to one hitting the other, the father or someone in the family may simply step forward and separate them while they cool off. However, if one of the sons hits his mother, this will be handled much more severely, including possibly calling in law enforcement. If this same young man hits a police officer, he will most certainly go to jail, and if he even charges the President and attempts to strike him, he will be charged with a federal crime. The point is that the further up the chain of authority, the more serious the charge and, therefore, the more severe the penalty. Extrapolate that out to spitting in the face of the almighty God of the universe, and you will get my point."

However, to be clear, I do not subscribe to only or even primarily a crime and punishment reasoning for hell. I will now proceed to point 2 about hell.

2. This short and sweet point in regards to the existence of hell is courtesy of a Christian speaker and author whom I have much respect for, Winkie Pratney. Simply put, Winkie states that he does not believe that justice is accomplished in this life, therefore, there must be a means to accomplish justice after this life. When an innocent life is taken, or even worse many times, an innocent life is made to live through years of mental, physical, sexual, or other forms of abuse, even the taking of the life or the incarceration of the victimizer does not accomplish justice. Hell is a means to accomplish justice.

3. Finally, this is the insight into hell that I believe captures the most important element about hell, what it is, and why it exists. Imagine that a person consistently says they don't like water. They want no part of water in their lives, and they continue to speak of the evils of water in spite of the reality that they live daily with the benefits of a world sustained by water. In the liquids they drink, even if they don't realize they contain water, they depend on water. From an ecosystem that is completely dependant on the water that is all around us in our environment, they still curse water. Finally, they are are given what they claim to have wanted all along, a desert world without water. This analogy was also given by the nameless talk show host. C.S. Lewis puts it even more succinctly when he says, "Those who bend the knee to God and say 'Thy will be done,' will be allowed to enjoy Him forever, but those who stubbornly reject God's lordship and offer of love and pardon will be told, 'thy will be done.'"(paraphrase)

Hell is an eternal separation from God that God seeks to rescue all from. I don't claim these eliminate all misgivings about hell, but as I stated I think they are valuable insights into the rightness of the existence of hell.

In the words of Abraham, "Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?"

The colors of language

This is a very strange post for me to choose to make my reentry into the blogging world, but it is something I've been thinking of recently.....just goes to show you, you never know what's going on up here in my noggin.

OK...short and sweet. Have you ever interacted with a small child as they learned their colors? They learn the rainbow plus maybe a few more, and everything MUST fall into one of those categories. As we grow a little older we learn about pink, violet, teal, gray, beige, and we begin becoming aware of the growing number of possibilities for categories to place colors. Finally, we are sitting at some decorator's desk or at our local home improvement store, and we are confronted with an insane array of colors that include bizarre names like charred sage and robins egg. Most of us are annoyed at this level of color choice and have begun writing our congressman for some rainbow only legislation to be passed immediately.

My wife loves color. She's the arteest of the fam. She can capture whatever that quality is about some scenes that make them riveting and translate it onto a canvas. This is what I strive to do with writing. Language is like color, and words are like the growing spectrum of individual colors. I hope to capture something riveting and translate it into something unique that makes it my own expression of that something. Many times it is spiritual, social, political, or somewhat random, and sometimes it is a very obscure, personal rambling thought about something like color and language. I write because I enjoy it. It helps me process both the world around me and my own internal world. It is primarily a relaxing, organizing process that I occasionally place into a "bottle" on this blog and chunk it out to sea to see if anyone else can relate.