We shall believe her, against any other consideration, yes?
Forgive me, but this is what I hear in so many places, in so many words:
“We are the Tribe of the Traumatized and since we were not believed, we shall not believe. We need personal space to explore our Trauma, to learn of its power over us, to understand it so that we may better serve it. Set us free to worship! Our Trauma is our only power right now and it shall be the hill we die on, with our shame proudly wrapped around us– brave heroines all! Our Trauma is our god: it shapes our judgment upon ourselves and all others. Trauma first, last and always, to the exclusion of any other consideration. We are helpless to move away from it. It rules us, and since we have no other godly, transcendent resource to heal it, we must bow to it in every aspect. Even Truth must die on the hill of our powerful Trauma. Just die already, shut up already, and our shame will die with you, and at last we will have safety.”
“Truth is boring, tedious to discover, and far less satisfying. Not when we can wrest some personal sense of justice and retribution (oops!) from this show. No matter if the Man is innocent, (No man is innocent!) our Trauma God needs a sacrifice right now if the Sun is to rise tomorrow. In fact, his possible (Impossible!) innocence is what makes him a perfect sacrifice! Let the Man see how he likes it! No, it’s not revenge-seeking, it’s an object lesson he should’ve learned a long time ago!”
If your Source is your Trauma, you will ever serve it. When you drink from the fountain of Trauma, you will thirst again. Take your trauma to the Source of Life and relinquish tribal affiliations that reinforce your trauma. You will never be free to love Truth as long as some other love sustains you.
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This is the frenzied religio-politico ideology that some people defend as being a cultural, civil right to practice– sure, within its own cultural bubble, it’s a shame, at the least, to witness from the outside. But to aggressively desire to import such a culture into one’s own nation, and to demonize anyone who blanches at its ramifications, is to present oneself as either a lunatic or an enemy. To tolerate, to welcome their misbegotten ideologies and politics into a classically liberal culture, to never require assimilation into one’s shared culture of mutual respect, is no badge of honor nor proof of compassion. It is unhealthy.
We share our Christian life within a nation of people who are preserved by our prayers …and our deeds. We have a responsibility to our neighbors who live beside us in an expectation of peace. Sure, we live in the Kingdom culture. Obviously, we are willing to love our enemies even at the cost of our lives. Of course, we fear no evil that we haven’t had to face, the kind that Asia Bibi is facing.
But to foist upon our neighbor, in the name of our God, a people who will bring them, not peace, but an upheaval, is something that I must prayerfully approach. My neighbor’s children also should have an expectation of safety and peace, that I am not harboring, in my heartfelt zeal, otherwise “nice folk” who believe that girls are for grooming for a life of rape, and that everything not approved is blasphemy. Why would I force my neighbor, whatever else he may be, to pay the price for my own convictions? If he loses his job because he has voiced an unpopular concern, should I upbraid his un-Christian intolerance? Too bad he couldn’t move on, grow in grace, embrace upheaval as a Good, leave behind his ignorance…
Is this a valid question? Perhaps my own obedience calls me to open my own doors wide at night and declare that whatever evil comes in and steals my children is from His hand. I’m free to fiercely believe that, but I’m not free to make make my neighbor live out my convictions.
Maybe my neighbor is actually my… you know… next door neighbor. Maybe he doesn’t need or want this:
Pray for Aasia. And rebuke and reprove the ignorance and darkness of her oppressors.
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I was quite young when I first came across the phrase, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” in the context of how to frame a question for a failing answer. That broad concept jarred my innocent assumptions: “Why would you want to do that?” And once having eyes opened to the manipulation of it, I began to see it everywhere. I’ve been observing this since high school.
This tactic used to be the realm of the salesman but I began to see it in journalists’ interviews, and then in the way everything in the media was artfully worded for a desired emotional impact. And yes, it was. It HAD to be, or else people wouldn’t buy it.
Today the impact of phrasing has drifted into “scientific polling” and we’ve disdained the poets for science that isn’t science within cultural surveys of all sorts. 坚果锁屏-坚果锁屏下载 1.2 安卓版-新云软件园:2021-11-17 · 玲珑加速器 6.2.11.2 安卓版11-30 摩贝密盾 5.0.0 安卓版10-22 安全先锋app 7.6.4 安卓版10-22 X浏览器旧版本1.9.0 安卓版10-12 杀毒清理大师安卓版 1.010-12 斑马隐私管家 1.0.4 安卓版10-12 阿里净化工具 1.0 安卓版09-27 “Why would they want to do that?” Indeed, why?
Soon, if not already, your workplace will have you take a “survey” to see how racist you are. It is not science, no matter which lauded institution of higher learning touts it. It is art, and an extremely complex and clever one. But its sophistication does not make it an accurate picture of your soul.
Manipulation is the devil’s playground, and it’s why we are reminded in the bible that he is the accuser of your soul, and you mustn’t give him that authority. Besides, it’s where all the money is made. There is HUGE money in this latest attempt to have vast numbers of people self-negate in order to feel better about the horrible mirror that such manipulations hold up for them to see. This is a false framing of the problem, a false burden of sin, and a false salvation for your soul. All dressed up as systemic compassion as an answer to the oppression that the accuser brings to the world.
I’m sorry, but we can’t love eternal, evergreen Truth and “like” Salon. Or Fox News, HuffPo, NYT or NPR etc. Best to see oneself as an observer of such fare and not a consumer of it.
Playing with the Truth is the devil’s only real power; he can’t create a single thing. I don’t think he turns away from such an effective and long-proven weapon against the human soul. I think he makes it fun! with lists! and memes of outrageous! tragic! righteous! heroic! exclusive! and mostly, a/musing.
We naturally tend to heap our “likes” on the cultural information that reinforces our self-image– especially if it makes us feel morally fit. If we’re honest, it’s more real-time comforting to us than God’s divine assurances of our loveliness and acceptance in Christ’s atonement, because that was so five minutes ago.
Every “like,” “share,” and “comment”; every click of the mouse, is reinforcing to ourselves who we are. Every selfie is our attempt to convey who we are, and if we are honest, we know we are “selling it” to our best advantage. And we think folks who get paid to do such things are above “selling it” to us for their best advantage? Do you know who they are when they’re not selling ideas to you? Do you care?
Look, we don’t have movies because we want a calm and contented world-view, we want escape. And we have made-up “reality” shows because we want to experience otherness… CHANGE. We positively ache for newness every morning but we substitute it with mere news: who died, who offended, who sang, who is our new champion of the moment? It’s in our DNA. It’s a powerful and attractive force.
But we don’t seek the newness of God’s mercy. Nor the joy of His Truth, or the beauty of His creation– a force that wants to awaken us to CREATE instead of CONSUME. God’s in the creation business and your spirit, if you’re a Christian, is hungry for it. The enemy is in the distortion business and your human soul is satisfied with the empty calories of it. You’re soaking in it even now, in this stew-pot of likes and shares and selfies.
It’s not really a “news” cycle nowadays, since very little of it is news. It’s more of an entertainment cycle. And today’s viral star is Fake News.
It doesn’t matter what news items flow into and through our daily glances, true or not, it grows stale and mouldy like yesterday’s manna. We don’t really remember the warehouse fire of X days ago, unless there is an emotional bond. We don’t really remember the horrific highway crash of last winter because we’ll blindly hug the bumper of the car in front of us this winter, unless or until it becomes personal. So news, real or faked, doesn’t have the emotional hook into us. Our appetite for this sort of “newness” is voracious as we skim the facts and ask, “What else ya got?” The advert media outlets oblige us 24/7.
But I’m perfectly skeptical of the “Fake News” news stories, the Buzzfeed survey results, the hand-wringing and fake-shaming going on. It’s a pantomime behind a screen. This is all about restoring the Alphabet Network’s –and thus the Elite’s– devastated credibility. The slight-of-hand trick is working, the surveys are pristine and respectable if you don’t question what the weighted factor is, and they are all vying for our trust so they may continue their merry mayhem of race-baiting, hand-wringing, and showing you how much you need them in order to live another day. They will save you, inform you, watch over you, tell you why that news story in that big city could be a problem in your podunk village and 坚果app官网下载, and how diverse they are even though there’s not 1% mixture of non-white people in said podunk burg, and anything that happens anywhere could happen to us here! Oh noes!
Turn it off. All of it. It’s the only way to be sure you’re not giving eyes to the fakirs.
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France and Paris have very strict gun control laws — even the police are unarmed — which seems about as “honest” as every gun-grabber expects the U.S. to be about gun control: Just get rid of guns.
Let’s have that honest conversation. I prefer the honesty of meeting evil force with like force, quickly and decisively. I prefer the honesty of protecting those we love with the hard promise that we will kill, decisively and quickly, anyone who aims to harm them. I’d prefer to let my child know that, like the President, she deserves nothing less than vigilance and protection afforded by good citizens armed with equal force to meet the bad ones. Everything else is a political agenda full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but a surrender of beautiful Reason for cheap, feel-good superiority.
Every survivor now grieving knows the hollowness of “honest talk” about gun control. If they’d had a gun at that moment, they would have owned the conversation and the outcome.
See the sad face in the picture below? Were she my child, she would know beyond any doubt, any law, or any “honest” rhetoric that I have no vision of strewing a street corner with flowers and candles in her memory but would destroy ANYthing that sought to make her one.
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[Re-posted from August 2013]
In my daily work, I have opportunity to meet with two or three couples in a day, with the intention to advise them on a life-changing shift in their circumstances and how best to handle the details. It’s a stressful situation, to move from point A to point B with your life still more or less intact. So I’m kind, genial and helpful, striking up the sort of patter that eases stress and imparts a sense of connection.
Most times, the couples are older, much older. They are down-sizing to move into an adult community or assisted living near their kids in some other state. Sometimes they’re mid-career, mid-family, mid-life, but in all cases they are well supplied with the necessary financial means to make the changes, up or down. In other words, people far above my station in life. They have more than they can say grace over. They have things up to their ears, or very large things, or very old things, and always expensive things.
So believe me when I say that their lives are complicated by all.that.stuff. Be it the wife’s furniture, art, or collectible figurines, or the guy’s workshop, electronics, toys and tools. It’s antiques from family members long since buried, or just a collection of family memorabilia with no significance beyond the outposts of the family branches. It can own you, you know; make you build bigger barns to keep it. Make you pay big money to have it follow you.
“We’re downsizing, I swear! It’s just too much stuff. And our kids don’t want it, and it’s too nice to just give it away. Do you have any idea how hard this is?” It’s a common, daily remark heard in my line of work, and it’s filled with stress.
“Yes,” I reply, “We, too, just downsized considerably. We’re living on our boat!”
And then I see it: the Pirate Glint. It’s the twinkle in the ancient eye, or the grim jealousy in the mid-life eyes, narrowing into my own, burning with intensity, “Really! On a boat! I’ve always wanted to live on a boat! Do you like it? Wow! It’s a lifelong dream for us, how did you make it happen?” Of course the wives have other reactions bordering on murderous intent, or bemused love for her life-long-boy-pirate Peter Pan. But the stress fades, the man is engaged now in the process so often left to the missus.
Ladies, you married a Pirate, I guarantee it. Not that fey, foppish Johnny Depp kind, either. Errol Flynn derring-do is what he’s all about; sails and water and freedom. Be sure to remember that when the hustle of obligations and things get up around his soul. Men are the true romantics. And they never, ever out-live it.
Never doubt it.
Another Bedtime Story
We outgrow our bedtime stories
trading monsters and fair maidens
for the hard-won moment’s glories
of an evening’s relaxation
Now we numb our thoughts and passion
give ourselves to faint blue light
let the subtler monsters rush in
selfish ogres, aging plights
Yet awaits a land to dream in
good and rightness there prevail
gentle lull of moonlight beams in
as she arcs the sky full sail
Take the hand of your moon maiden
dream of dragons, deeds and fame
you’re a ship with treasures laden
a fell pirate without shame
Cutlass-garbed and burden free
say goodbye to lesser mortals
venture into that bright sea
dream of lands with shining portals
bedtime stories never leave us
we just give them diff’rent frock
time for bed now, oh my darling
let us dream away the clock
-Joan Varga
******
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坚果app官网下载 by Joan of Argghh!
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Go ahead, enjoy and celebrate a day that keeps the Mayans cryin’ because they lost their civilization when they put chocolate in their corn mush milk. It’s as awful as it sounds. Here’s something much sweeter:
We live in a day where we can now easily witness a real stoning on our iPhone if we choose: A real woman. Solid stones. Yielding bones. For us, a horrible snuff film. For the zealous of Islam, a righteous lesson and stern warning to the unbeliever.
Such zealots fear Christmas for their own reasons. I’m more interested in why we do, too. We’re not afraid to recite the story in the safe surroundings of the adjunct scenery: makeshift stables and glittering cardboard stars made by neighbors and friends, whose children giggle at Harold Angels.
But we don’t really, really want to contemplate what it means to believe it. What it costs. It’s bothersome. Maybe to ourselves, our own sense of tradition and sentiment we’ll admit a smattering of transcendent notions about some one, or some idea, or angels, and light feelings, and—
But not really, really. . . not. . . well, really? A virgin birth?
It’s so stupid. A virgin birth. *snort!*
Half a world and not so far away, angry, cowardly Islamic men stone women so that they can uphold the darker fairy tales of their own goodness and purity. But we all have attempted something similar in thought if not in deed. In some way, it’s a story as old as life itself: the shifting of blame, the shedding of blood, the scapegoat of our fears sent from our camp of awful reality– and so we are made good again. A fractured fairy tale of life as we seek a way out and up.
We live in a world of elites who tell us far grander fairy tales about ourselves, and we, being so wise in our fear of being stupid, we’ll follow any star as long as we don’t have to leave the couch. Vague comfort and diaphanous joy is all we seek. No need to saddle up and risk everything for more than that.
I’m curious. Is there some dark harm in believing in a virgin birth at that time, in that place, in those inconvenient circumstances? In believing in such a thing, am I inspired to fear and loathing, or might I share in an utterly unlikely miracle that makes me doubt my own goodness– and to look up for answers instead of around for a stone?
So, did a young girl, paralyzed with fear, have nothing to lose by telling a stupid lie? Or did she give birth to Life while under the shadow of death? What man of Joseph’s day would stand with such a woman, and not take up a stone, but instead take a wife?
I mean, c’mon, 坚果加速器app官网下载?
Yes, really. It’s all Good.
(From Christmas 2010.)
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Ladies, here’s what’s bugging me: why do you thirst for failure from your beloved?
Here’s my deal: develop a desire for your beloved to be successful in his quest to please you.
You’d listen to that kind of advice from a sex counselor, but you won’t embrace it for your emotional needs, fearing it won’t be “authentic” and worthy of glorious “you.”
Feh. Help a guy out. Help him love you, help him to know how. It’s not a contest of wills, it’s a lovely dance if you want it to be. I see so many petty women around me fiercely erecting walls of unspoken expectations for their man to scale. Then they go out onto the parapets of their pride and deride a man for even attempting the climb. It’s not fair; it’s not lovely or becoming to the sweet graces we’re given.
Guys, if your gal is holding some anniversary date a secret from you, I, a woman, grant you a “get out of jail free” card. I can’t stand that stupid crap; as though going to the altar was a tacit agreement to a game of Memory. Women pretend to airs of romance when they cherish certain days, and it can be that, but not when such tokens are reserved as ammunition instead of loving signposts.
The truth is, men are the true romantics and dreamers and you’d better figure out why you haven’t awakened that aspect out from under his other natural instincts of hard-ass attitude and hard-headed stubbornness. Fact: He loves you. He wouldn’t be with you a minute longer than necessary if that wasn’t so.
Tell him what you want him to know. Unless he has set out to be the Amazing Kreskin, he’s not a mind-reader and he certainly won’t apply for the gig.
But he wants to be successful in his chosen endeavors. So plant big, stupid hints. Cheerfully! Lead him into love and you’ll have something much more meaningful than a card or flowers; you’ll have his love, respect and gratitude.
Do you love him? Then why do you want him to fail in loving you? Why wouldn’t you want him to be successful in the most important endeavor of his life?
It’s not really a “news” cycle nowadays, since very little of it is news. It’s more of an entertainment cycle. And today’s viral star is Fake News.
[Re-posted from August 2013]
Wherein I Attempt to "Tumblr"
