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.”

The pandemic was a hoax. Climate change is a hoax. The war on terror is a hoax. These fake crises, and there will be more of them, are designed to scare people into submitting to global control. They are also mechanisms for making a few people incredibly rich.

I don’t know if it’s good advice or not, but when I look back on it all, I have no regrets about any of the times I took chances, no matter how it turned out. I only have regrets about the times when I did not take a chance.

I don’t want to be anti-Semitic. I love and appreciate my Jewish friends. I acknowledge the contributions of Jewish people to science and medicine and literature and philosophy, not to mention law, but killing and/or exiling all of the Palestinian people from Gaza in order to create this insane zionist vision of greater Israel is more than I can stomach.

I blame the Christian zionists, the majority of zionists, even more than the Jewish zionists. This is not Biblical. Yahweh has not granted a deed to this land to a bunch of European Jews. This is might makes right fascism pure and simple.

I’m a little worried about the new anti-Semitism law being proposed in Congress. If I don’t wear a yarmulke and deny Jesus will I lose my job and be imprisoned? Asking for a friend.

Becoming and maturing as a Christian is a process of knowing your self at an ever deeper level. Unfortunately (but really fortunately) this process only goes in one direction. The more you know, the more layers of the onion are peeled, the less pretty the picture becomes. The parts of you that are hidden are not the pretty parts. The process never ends, but one Sunday and thence forward, you say with awareness and sincerity:

“We are deeply sorry for these our transgressions. The burden of them is more than we can bear.”

Thanks be to God, Jesus Christ has paid the price for these our transgressions. We have been delivered from the domain of darkness and transferred to the Kingdom of His beloved Son.

Whenever you get to really know someone, after having navigated beyond their character flaws and weaknesses and bad habits, you inevitably discover a marvelous, unique being, flashing into the infinite universe, a being who is so obviously created by no one less than an almighty and everlasting God, that his or her potential immortality cannot be denied. These people, fallen and sinful as they are, are not toys to be cast aside. These are divine creations gifted with Godly free will and Godly creativity.

God sent Himself as His own obedient Son to Earth to redeem as many of His divine creations as possible by His ultimate sacrifice, taking on all of our sins, past, present, and future, pain and torture beyond imagining, death itself. He then rose again, ascended into Heaven, and promised to come again. God is love. He could not do otherwise.

All that is required of us to begin our eternal life is to believe, confess, repent, and be forgiven. Prayer, listening to the Holy Spirit, and obedience will take us the rest of the way.

Happy Easter!