You ‘spose to

I’m supposed to what? Behave in a way pleasing to you, whom I’ve never met and know nothing about? I am somehow expected to behave in an unknowable, amenable way because you read this blog. Even if I were able to discern the ways in which I am supposed to behave according to you, not gonna happen. This blog is not a place where you can find a reliable, comfortably self-revealing, intimately autobiographical narrative about its primary author. You find lies here. You find difficult opinions here. You find fictitious drunk aliens watching Jerry Springer reruns and purported Emperors of the People’s Democratic Free Republik of Bezerkeley (PDFRB pronounced pudfarb). There are trolls and obnoxious posts. Yet you read it. And that, somehow, means I am obligated to behave in a way pleasing to you. Good luck with that.

We are in a rather legalistic mood lately. The answers to life’s problems seems to be more law, more policy, more strictures on behaviors currently unfashionable. The way to make things more amenable to fans of this zeitgeist is to punish those who won’t comply through a mountain of bureaucratic bullshit and legal sanctions. If that’s you, fuck you. Fuck you, fuck your parents, fuck your ancestors, fuck your dog, your cat, and anything else associated with you. Fucking get out of my face.

Are we clear? No? Ok, I’ll say it again so there is no mistake: F U U U U C K YOU!! I have an orthodoxy I subscribe to. I follow a way started by a martyred carpenter who died and rose from the grave over 2,000 years ago. My way, my faith, is absurd. I know that. I believe anyway. I have no sacred cows. Cows are food. My sacred lamb is the lamb of the cross, who died for me to save my soul.

If you are good with that, cool. If that bothers you, skip up two paragraphs and read the second paragraph again starting with sentence 4. Got it? Right. I don’t understand because I don’t agree. Paragraph 2 again, please.

We are not free if there is a limit on free speech. Speech is only free when dissident voices can be heard. This better not be news. Y’all that cower in locked study rooms in college libraries declaring that only a select few can be in your safe spaces have succeeded in creating your own prisons. You are chained to oppression of your own making.

As long as this space exists as it is, as the cantankerous, transgressive, troll space that it is, there is safety. Once it goes dark because someone in the government declared it to be illegal, there will be revolution within a single lifetime. That’s not a threat. It is a fact of history. As soon as the government becomes sufficiently large and overbearing it sets a course toward its eventual demise. One of the steps in that direction is the limiting of free speech as advocated by the Black Lives Matter crowd.

I do have an answer. It isn’t a new one. It’s progenitor was killed by the Romans at the behest of his church over 2,000 years ago. Four centuries after his death his followers counted the Emperor Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus as one of them. We are like Hepatitus C. We can’t be easily cured once infected by the Holy Spirit. The whole of the way can be boiled down to a paragraph: Love God with all your might, all your heart, mind & soul. Love family, neighbors and enemies alike. Seek to serve those who can be served and pray for the rest. Read and know the Word, read it again. Confess everything hurt, habit or hangup to the Lord and repent. This one from Rupertus Meldenius is good too, “In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas,” usually translated as, in essentials, unity, in non-essentials, liberty, in all else, charity.

If our Jesus was anything, he was an anarchist. He paid his taxes to Rome with a coin pulled from the mouth of a fish. This current mood we are in, that cries out for a king, that has iterated and is saying again that 4 trillion dollars in annual spending isn’t enough, that it should be more so those with not enough get more and those with too much don’t have more than they need, is a bastardized and corrupt shadow of what Jesus taught. It is what you get when you try to restore Caesar to his throne without the moderating influence of the church.

I live by the word of God in the Bible. I’m so over the intolerance of some who yell about liberty and fairness and yet their solutions do everything but foster liberty and fairness. They say they are for democracy but what they cry out for is a reincarnated Constantine. It amuses me greatly that at the core of much of our national conversation about how to govern ourselves are debates reaching back to the Nicene Council.

As I was writing this post Bing Maps helpfully threw up a warning that this site might be spoofed and a phishing scam. Hmmmm. Listen, big brother, that this site says things which are angering is not evidence on its face that it is a scam. You need more than that.

I will not behave amenably for you. Down that road is a nightmare we defeated most recently in WWII. It has risen from the grave again in the loud and bloody minority of apocalyptic Muslims who believe paradise can be made by man through Sharia Law and a very brutal form of Islam. I am a court jester, a harlequin, a clown mocking the insanity of our current mood. To be more polite, more politically correct, is to line up on queue for the gas chambers. I’m crazy, right? I hope so. I’m a lot less funny or deadly if I am more agreeable. If you have a problem with that, scroll back up to paragraph 2, starting with sentence 4. Keep reading until you have read through paragraph 3 again.