Ignite the Pulpit
America Unplugged – The New Lord’s Prayer
Those who can hardly stand the syntax and rhythmic schemes of the English usage in our Constitution will not find any magnificence or beauty in the Elizabethan phrases of the Bible’s King James Version. Not to worry – other versions are readily available to elucidate and amplify; there is hope for those whose cognizance has been slighted.
King James says:
O ye sons of men, how long will ye turn my glory into shame? How long will ye love vanity, and seek after leasing? (Ps 4: 2)
The hurried generation doesn’t employ, nor is familiar with terms like ‘leasing.’ Visions of new car leases or Fifth Avenue apartments that rent for five million dollars or more, per year, are not the subject spoken to in the King’s most regal version of writ.
Let’s use a simpler version, broken down for the hurried minds and the erudite of the day. Here is a chance for those fully endowed with acquired knowledge, but who remain unable to engage the ancient, revered yet fully preserved mechanism by which to use knowledge correctly; commonly referred to as wisdom.
The easier version, quoted from the Message Bible removes the clouds thus rendering it accessible even to the minds of children.
You rabble—how long do I put up with your scorn? How long will you lust after lies? How long will you live crazed by illusion? (Opere citato)
A Geneva Bible, translated 1560, printed 1612. Photo: Mike Quinn, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic License
The ‘everything came from nothing’ crowd, (Big bang,) insists that God could not have actually spoken these words. That’s OK, because the same crowd is still wrestling with the question of whether the tree falling in the forest makes any noise in the absence of anyone to hear it. Passing by their own fully accepted, empirically derived, definition of sound, we should not be surprised that they haven’t arrived at a fully supportable definition for the beginning of the universe.
To review: whether a falling tree in the forest makes a big bang cannot be answered – but a big bang in outer space can make a universe. No witnesses for either event but an entire society that believes one big bang equals one big universe. This raises the specter of two more great questions. First, if a mind asks a question when no one is there to witness it, does it create a great intellect? Second, do you actually want to leave the explanation of the universe in the hands of people who think like this?
As they wrestle with the question of trees in the forest, we at least already know, that not one human being was present to hear the big bang, subsequently, explanations for the origin of the universe are still, knocking, flailing and floundering at wisdom’s door.
If wisdom arose, he would no doubt rebuke those who pounded on his door. He would ask the question of why he should have to speak to them a second and third time on the subject he has addressed so often and so concisely. Why should he have to repeat it again to the dull of hearing when there are those who haven’t heard it for the first time? Have you heard it yet?
Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. (Ro 1: 19-22)
After such a scathing rebuke, would they not only cease to seek father wisdom, but they may be inclined to warn others that he doesn’t have a clue. If that didn’t work, they might cut off his lines of communication, or as we say here in century twenty one – pull the plug.
The unplugged version of society is busy running around pulling the plugs of scripture, constitution and academic curiosity in so many ways that it would require a full non-fictional omnibus to cover its brief (about one generation) but frenzied history.
Prayer yanked out of schools, placards removed from courtrooms, words forbidden in classrooms, political correctness choking the media and a fear, fully formed and carefully outlined by PC engineers, then cast upon an entire generation that would bring pride to the likes of Hitler, Mao and Mussolini.
This generation has figuratively re-written the most well-known prayer in the world. Unspoken but, clearly heard, it is the very supplication and petition of the unregenerate.
Our Father which art in heaven, please erase your name from our classrooms, courtrooms, places of public discourse and most everywhere else – if you please. And by all means don’t let your kingdom come, especially not now, because we are very busy in our all new enlightened world. And lest we forget, please dump that daily bread thing, we want more millionaires so we can tax them and use the dough to support the entitled and less fortunate. Would you mind easing back on that temptation thing because political hooligans, pop-culture heroes, Hollywood’s hacks, Playboy’s Heff and the internet’s Huff have assured us that; ‘lust is for life’ and we really can’t seem to get enough of that good stuff these days. And by the way would you stop emphasizing that sin thing. We have pretty much dealt with that and now, we allow most everything, except murder and child abuse – but at times we’re not too sure about that either, as our ground breaking new HBO series, “Angry Boys” should fully indicate to you. Finally God, about that kingdom, power and glory thing; we already have a narcissist in chief (Barack Obama) so lighten up a bit for now.
If, as we like to say, ‘one lie only leads to another’ what shape is the last day’s generation in, since they choose to accept the ultimate and biggest lie of all the previous generations, namely, that we are no longer or, perhaps, were never accountable to God at all? Are we already running headlong into the scripture that declares “And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie?” (2Th 2: 11)
It is clearly safe to say that the day has arrived when lies, not love is what makes our world go round here in America. We have as the best example, the re-election bid of Barack Obama. Here is a man with stacks of 2008 campaign promises fully undelivered and rotting on their pallets down at the White House docks. With almost four years to make good on any promise, policy or proposal, he can now only say the exact opposite to the campaign crowds he addresses today and hope they won’t notice that he is quite full of the proverbial baloney sausage.
Gas prices climbing to the moon do not supplant the all but deleted space program, but it is clear that prices at the pump will reach the moon long before we make our second attempt to get there. Obamacare is under the scrutiny of the Supremes and it doesn’t have a good prognosis in that august body. Social tinkering to promote the gay agenda has become a runaway train belching out whistle, smoke and terror as it approaches our children’s security and their very childhood innocence, at breakneck speed.
Joblessness, bank failures, failed bailouts and green policy that is stifling energy production, bring up the rear, but the campaign rhetoric goes on, replete with hedging, prevarications, evasiveness, equivocation and fibbing. That’s an awful lot of words to use for civilities sake; when we all know that the real word to use is simply – lies.
Besides lies, there are the old trustworthy political devices like, blame gimmicks and the old stand-by – unmitigated gall.
We thought there was nothing left to blame George Bush for, until now. Then we saw the start of the gimmicks, like ‘the Buffett Rule’ and the ‘War against women, working moms, the church, the unborn, marriage, the rich and America itself. The only thing left is the gall with which Barack Obama expects us to believe that re-electing him would be anything other than the beginning of a national disaster.
Let’s get plugged back in to some higher wisdom America and bring this great streamlined locomotive into the station in one piece, with some dignity and some national pride to go along with it!
I can think of plenty of names like Washington, Lincoln, Reagan and others whose words would serve to remind us of the wisdom and nobility that was once used to form this nation. But I would rather remind my readers of the real words of the Lord’s Prayer which may serve to direct our attention to the one whose words are far more than quotable – they are the words of life.
“Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.” (Matthew 6: 9)
http://www.americanprophet.org has since 2005 featured the articles of columnist Rev Michael Bresciani along with news and reviews that have earned this site the title of The Website for Insight. Millions have read his timely reports and articles in online journals and print publications across the nation and the globe.
American Prophet, The Website for Insight, believes in the inspired, inerrant and infallible Word of God. Our doctrine is the Bible from cover to cover. We believe that Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of the Living God who died for the sins of the world by dying on the cross, he was resurrected on the third day and will return to earth at the end of time as we know it.
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Every dictionary definition of lying includes a deliberate attempt at spreading falsehoods. In order to properly use this term, especially on the scale you are suggesting, one needs to demonstrate two things. The first is that someone’s statement is untrue, the second is that the one who stated it knows that. Knowledge that someone may be empirically wrong without bad intentions is the basis for respectful disagreement without the perception of hostility. By the way, your straw man argument about the falling tree was adorable. Let me clarify something. There are some left wing philosophies that secularists and scientists also think are crazy. Try talking to more of them. Were a very friendly bunch, and you may find there’s more in common than you realize. Especially when it comes to bashing post modernism. Remember, there is no way to categorize climate change as a lie, nor the big bang when these theories are built through honest research, and the academic curiosity. Remember that you can be dead wrong, and we’ll still love you, so long as your not matching the real definition of lying.
Yeah, well, hey: maybe the Rev. didn’t have the evidence of deliberate attempts at spreading falsehoods. But I did.
How’s that for evidence that anthropogenic global warming is not true, and Phil Jones and company knew it was not true?
Its like the Aljazeera conversation all over again. A little background research, and OH NOEZ!!!
There is a massive global conspiracy amongst the scientists to use “tricks” to hide a decline in…… The thickness of tree rings? Wait a minute, this has to be one of the most epic quote mines in history. And how was this quote obtained in the first place? I’m pretty sure it started with a ‘t’ maybe an ‘eft’ in there somewhere, add an ‘h’ near the beginning? And Phelps proves that there is accepted dissent and discussion of the issues within the scientific community.
Congrats, you just proved intentional dishonesty, on the part of the climate denialist movement. Then again, there is the possibility that they simply didn’t read through all the emails, or make any attempt to put some context onto that quote which makes them not lying, but simply wrong. Then there’s the stealing part to deal with.
Ever tried reading random emails from that bunch? Saying there was a big conspiracy on the part of the scientists to hide climate stability won’t put one into those emails. Instead you find more “whoop’s, I sent my data to the wrong person, ITS SO EMBARESSING!” or “I’ll need to go over the temperature maps again to take calculation X into account”. Still haven’t stumbled on that big conspiracy yet, although I can’t wait to find out how the guy who sent his data to the wrong dude will ever work up the courage to face his colleagues again. Teh suspense is thrilling!
You didnt even quote the email correctly. What it actually says is:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
The “decline” has absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Mann’s “trick”, unless you using a deliberately modified version of the quote. This decline has been openly talked about since the 1990s. What it is referring to is a divergence between actual temperatures and those derived from tree ring data. Temperature rises have been greater than what would have been expected based off of tree rings.
Also “trick” is a common term used in statistics and mathematics.
So you say. But there’s more. A lot more.
I went over this two and a half years ago. I even found a data set, made a graph from it, and got a curve that fit very well with what the weather was actually like, but looked nothing at all like the Hockey Stick.
“Anthropogenic global warming” is a scam. And if I needed any further proof, I could cite the total hypocrisy of the conduct of the Fifteenth Conference of Parties in Copenhagen. Fourteen hundred business jets? Renting out every chauffeured limousine on the continent? Are you kidding me? If AGW were even halfway real, the conference organizers would never have wanted to be caught dead indulging in such excess. They would have run it to set a good example for all the other people of the world.
If it’s that obvious, what’s with the out of context quote about the tree rings?
But hey, if there’s evidence, I’m game. Do you remember where the data set you mentioned came from? It is also important to take into account the data set’s scope, both over times and locations. The hockey stick’s appear to be fairly long term 600-1000 years according to the Wikipedia article on the controversy. Quantification of uncertainty is also an important step, as many of the hockey stick graphs appear to be without error bars.
It came from one of the e-mails in the FOI2009.ZIP archive, that someone leaked out of the CRU. You did not realize that, did you? Someone in the UK put me wise to that archive, after someone else had put it onto some sleepy little FTP server in some sleepy little town in Siberia. My first article on that brought in 35,000 page views in twenty-four hours. Not a bad showing for a semi-pro journalist just starting out.
So if you think you can fool me with your AGW folderol, you’ve got another think coming.
Yes, I certainly failed to fool you with my…….question.
Well, glad your early career went so well. Frankly though, no I didn’t realize that you scooped up those data from the middle of all that informal chitter chatter and drew your conclusion from that. I was thinking more along the lines of data from an actual scientific paper. Seems sketchy, but it does depend on what was in that particular email.
At any rate, I’m kind of disturbed that you’d start throwing out the accusation of deception. Right after the other guy says he’s willing to hear the evidence is generally not the time to do that.
Right though, I forgot, on the other side of the political spectrum, it’s only lies. There’s no such thing as wrong, or smear campaigns. It’s all part of an uber seekrit conspiracy by thousands of scientist from all the nations of the world to drive up the gas prices of their own auto mobiles. The Freemasons probably did it too.
That “informal chitter chatter” constitutes their own words. As such it points to whether those “actual scientific papers” are truthful or not.
Decades ago, a medical student named J. R. Darsee published several papers in The New England Journal of Medicine pointing to some striking medical breakthrough. I forget the details, but I remember this much: upon subsequent investigation, his advisers (including one of the biggest names in medical textbooks) had to retract them all. They didn’t realize, until years later, that J. R. Darsee was quite the trickster. In fact, he made up data and was sloppy in how he handled the data he didn’t made up. There’s a word for that kind of thing: “dry-labbing.”
I’m still waiting for the retraction of Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick” paper, and the other paper in Nature that inspired Phil Jones to pull that “trick” to “hide the decline.”
Could you provide a source for all of those numbers about the COP15 meeting (number of private jets, limousines, etc). And it doesn’t matter what politicians did at that meeting. The fact that politicians are wasteful does not disprove science.
If there were scientists who actually had doubts about human caused climate change, they would approach the problem and actually do research (you know, that thing that scientists do) to disprove climate change. But they haven’t. Because there is a consensus among virtually all climate scientists and every single scientific institution.
There is no “‘hockey stick’ paper” to retract, because the hockey stick graph was a very minor point of his research that was included in the IPCC report to illustrate a point. If you actually did the work of “semi-pro journalist” you’d have quickly realized that.
So I say? So the actual email says. Here is it in its entirety:
And you don’t think that any scientist has doubts? They’re coming out all the time and telling the world that they have more than doubts. In fact, the whole thing is a scam. They know it. And they are losing their fear of saying it. Nothing to lose, and nothing to fear. That’s where your side has pushed them.
You ask me what it would take to admit that I am mistaken. That would take more persuasion than the universe possesses. It would take a physical assault against me, involving a mind-altering agent designed to introduce permanent and selective amnesia for the evidence that I, personally, have seen and reviewed.
About those business jets:
The only correction I will make here is that 140 private jets were involved, along with 1200 limousines. I stand by my statement that this involved every chauffeured limousine available on the continent of Europe. Here is the article I wrote on the day that the opening gavel fell on COP-15.
And I repeat: had I been running that conference, I would never have let people fly those business jets into that airport. First, I’d schedule the conference in Tel Aviv, which is the easiest airport, on average, for everyone, from all points of the civilized world, to reach. Then I’d have people make their way to a handful of designated wayports and get their tickets from El Al. The purpose: keep the carbon footprint to a minimum. That conference had the most ridiculous carbon footprint I ever saw.
Add to it the freezing weather that socked Europe in at about that time. (And by the way: Shaddup, Algore! Every time you shoot your mouth off, we get snow at an inopportune moment. As we did this last weekend.)
Could you please direct me to a few recently published results from these scientists? Id be very interested to see them. Because, I, like every other scientist I have ever met, am completely open to any idea so long as there is ample evidence for it. If there were to be a study that showed that the recorded temperatures for the past 150 years were wrong, that recorded CO2 levels for the past few decades were wrong, that the modeled temperature rise from over a dozen teams was wrong, or that the CO2 in the atmosphere has an isotopic signature that more closely matches volcanic output than fossil fuels, I would be very excited to look into it. But such a study has not come out, at least not in the avenues whereby it will be read by anyone who matters. The few climate skeptics there are generally limit their criticism to popular media, rather than addressing it through scientific journals or conferences. And no, that is not because they would not be permitted. Some journals are indeed restrictive, but anybody can present their findings at a conference. It should tell you something that most of these climate deniers (a few of whom do make valid points) do not have the backbone to stand before their peers and present research on which they will be critiqued, just like every other science. The same goes for those creationist psuedo-scientists like Walt Brown.
This is clearly a news flash for you, but the scientists were not organizing that conference. Scientists were not even present. It was filled with politicians and attention-hungry celebrities. You are basing your understanding of scientific data off of what is fed to you through pop culture.
Yes, politicians are wasteful. Is that really a surprise? Are the thousands of climate scientists also living and travelling in luxury? No, they aren’t. Well a few of them are: the ones who are paid huge sums of money from oil giants to speak out against climate change.
What if low lying countries, such as the Maldives, were to cease to exist? Would that be convincing enough for you to admit that you were mistaken? Not being able to admit defeat is a sad trait to have. I am not a religious man, but I gather that you are. I suggest you review what your Bible has to say about humility and pride.
And just where was the outrage from the scientific community, over the excesses that you admit took place at COP-15? I never read, saw or heard one peep from you or any other “concerned scientist” about that disgusting spectacle, that travesty, in Copenhagen.
Now about published reports: You know perfectly well that the peer-review system shuts out any paper that does not “fit the narrative.” I’ve participated in peer review and I know how the system works. Nice racket if you can get in on it.
You wrongfully assume that all climate scientists are environmentalists, working for Greenpeace or some other hippie commune. Scientists follow the evidence, a concept that is completely alien to most politicians. Many of the scientists who have provided evidence that humans are causing climate change work for oil companies which have an obvious vested interest against any climate regulations. Most scientists probably
a) weren’t aware of the wastefulness at the conference, because they were busy working (doing science)
b) if they were aware realized that it was just yet another example of how politicians are completely out of touch with reality
c) didnt care about the conference at all, because many scientists would rather we take an adaptation approach rather than a prevention approach to climate change
Lets go back to basics: do you really doubt that humans have the ability to make serious changes to the planet we live on? I dont see how that is such an out-there concept. Is it such a terrible idea that we should leave our children and grandchildren with a world as wonderful as what we enjoy today? Are you also against environmental protection laws that allow us to enjoy clean air and water?
There are constantly breakthroughs that do not fit the pre-existing narrative. Did plate tectonics “fit the narrative”?
And once again, anybody can present at a conference. Why can’t these many climate deniers and creationist scientists do that?
Yes, I really doubt that humans have the ability to make any, repeat any, change to the climate. Humans might affect the immediate neighborhood where they live and work, but the whole planet? Never. To assume that puny man could do so is arrogant in the extreme. It is the stuff of science fiction (“terraforming,” etc.).
What you call “plate tectonics” was made to fit the most important narrative of all, which is: billions of years.
And as to “anyone being allowed to present at a conference”: If you believe that any climate skeptic would have been allowed through the door of the conference venue, for any purpose whatever, then I own a partnership share in a bridge spanning New York’s East River, and would like to offer it for sale.