The other night I watched again (I first watched it at the Surf Theater in San Francisco many years ago) the movie Gimme Shelter about the Altamount Speedway disaster, where The Rolling Stones looked like idiots. Then tonight I listened to the Let it Bleed album. The Stones were not tough guys. They weren’t bad asses. They were artists. Let It Bleed is an artistic masterpiece.

I think it ultimately comes down to obedience. Can you define your own existence, your own morality? Are you a God who goes to the gym and keeps to his diet and loves his neighbor whenever He decrees? Or are you a weak sinful delusional creature who only imagines himself to be devine? You came from dust, not by your own doing, and to dust your mortal body, which you had nothing to do with creating, shall return. It is the Creator whose love gives, and patiently, lovingly, sustains your life. It is obedience to Him that gives you strength and courage, and fulfills His promise of eternal life, in the unforeseeable future, and now. It is pride (the sin of) that seduces you into thinking otherwise. It is prayer to His Son that reconciles you to Him.

It is inevitable that the euphoria of President Trump’s victory will turn to disappointment as he fails to fulfill all of the dreams of a peaceful prosperous world free of corruption. Original sin will see to that. But a little more free speech, a little less war mongering, a little more attention to the forgotten people who are struggling to make ends meet, a more secure border, a little less genocide, a little more respect for the other nations in the world, would be nice. A moderate dialing back of the homosexual, transgender, pro abortion demonic agenda would also be welcome. We shall see. I expect miracles, but not from the political world.

If we had an honest press, a just Department of Justice, a fair legal system, an uncensored social media, and an unbiased internet search, Trump would have won every state.

Those who voted for Kamala are the people who believe the “news” they see on NBC and read in the New York Times. Their number is shrinking, as this election has proven. Realizing that you have been lied to the whole time can be painful. It is a process we all have to go through. So have some compassion for those still stuck in the web of lies. The good news is that once you step out of the bubble, there is no going back. The propaganda is not working.

Paul went from town to town, bringing the good news. He was beaten, stoned, imprisoned, ship wrecked, and finally executed, but he left behind communities of believers all around the Mediterranean.

“Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

— 1 Corinthians 1:20-24

President Trump was prosecuted because a bookkeeper in the Trump organization received an invoice from a lawyer and entered it as a legal expense. As heinous as that crime is, I think an imaginative DA might be able to come up with crimes committed by President Biden that are almost as bad, but, thanks to the Supreme Court, Joe doesn’t have to worry.

Obviously the collapse of the evil American empire is going more slowly than I expected. I’ve been betting on it, off and on, for 60 years and it has not happened. Recently I opted out of the stock market because of my expectations of imminent collapse and it has so far cost me a quarter of a million dollars. I still think it is inevitable, but I have to admit to grossly underestimating the timeline.

In spite of our crumbling infrastructure, ever-widening gap between the rich and poor, decline of the middle class, the decay of our military, the massive corruption of government at every level, we are still the richest country in the world. We are still protected from invasion by two oceans and a military that is, if not the most powerful in the world anymore, still pretty powerful. We still have lots of nukes. The dollar is still the world’s reserve currency.

As Adam Smith said, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” In fact, if we gave up the psychopathic dream of world domination, the insane belief that any country that disobeys us is a mortal enemy, if we applied to join BRICS, and quit supplying Ukraine and Israel with weapons, and took our rightful place in the community of nations, we could avoid the inevitable, but that, I fear, is not in the cards. The military industrial complex does not care about the United States of America or its people, and they are in charge.

Pray for some kind of revolution. Hopefully one that doesn’t involve killing people.

Maturing in faith is an endless process of refinement. Every time some little thing doesn’t go my way — it rains and ruins my plans, my razor falls on the floor and I have to pick it up, my wife interrupts my web surfing to ask me to help her with something — and I respond with a twinge of irritation or resentment, a sigh of why me, I am doubting God, just as Eve did when the serpent said, “You will surely not die.” I am believing that what I want is superior to what God wants for me.

The practice of Zen also requires that one forgo all resistance to what is, to inure oneself to the undesirable, not as an owed sacrifice to the One who created and loves us, but rather as a technique to eliminate suffering.

There is no such thing as the elimination of suffering, but there is such a thing as the sharing of our suffering with Jesus Christ who suffered with us and died to deliver us from the domain of darkness and transfer us to the Kingdom of God.

Words are important. A friend of mine said that Christianity has its own language. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it’s true. Words like salvation, justification, sanctification, regeneration, redemption, catholic, apostolic, penitence, confession, and many more. These words are also used in non-Christian contexts, but they have very different, specific meanings when spoken by a Christian. Part of becoming a Christian is learning the vocabulary. Jesus Christ is the Word. He is the Word that created Heaven and Earth. “In the beginning was the Word.”