Net Neutrality Update

Senator John Kerry has come out strongly in favor of Net Neutrality:

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest blog for SavetheInternet.com by Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.):

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On Wednesday in the Senate Commerce Committee I warned that those of us who believe in net neutrality will block legislation that doesn’t get the job done.
It looks like that’s the fight we’re going to have.

The Commerce Committee voted on net neutrality and it failed on an 11-11 tie. This vote was a gift to cable and telephone companies, and a slap in the face of every Internet user and consumer.

It will not stand.

I voted against this lousy bill for two reasons: because net neutrality and internet build-out are crucial to building a more modern and fair Information Society, and both were pushed aside by the Republicans.

Everyone says they don’t want the new world we’re living in to be marked by the digital divide — the term is so clichéd it’s turned to mush — but yesterday was a test of who is willing to ask corporate America to do anything to fix it, and the Commerce Committee failed miserably. Why are United States Senators afraid to say that companies should be expected to foster growth by building out their broadband networks to increase access?

Free and open access to the internet is something all Americans should enjoy, regardless of what financial means they’re born into or where they live. It is profoundly disappointing that the Senate is going let a handful of companies hold internet access hostage by legalizing the cherry-picking of cable service providers and new entrants. That is a dynamic that would leave some communities with inferior service, higher cable rates, and even the loss of service. Not to mention inadequate internet service — in the age of the information.

This bill was passed in committee over our objections. Now we need to fight to either fix it or kill it in the full Senate. Senator Wyden has already drawn a line in the sand — putting a “hold” on the bill, which prevents it from going forward for now. But there will be a day of reckoning on this legislation soon, make no mistake about it, and we need you to get engaged — pressure your Senators, follow the issue, demand net neutrality and build-out.

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Arise therefore, and be doing, and the Lord be with thee. 1 Chronicals 22:16

Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only. James 1:22

Save The Internet NOW

"The Internet can't be free." - A.T. & T. CEO Ed Whitacre

I am proud to join Bloggers For Net Neutrality.

Unfettered access to information is key to self-determination. You cannot make good decisions if the facts are kept from you or if you have trouble accessing them.

And make no mistake, the THREAT TO YOUR FREEDOM is real.

Therefore, it is vital that freedom and truth triumph now in regard to Internet freedom. Big corporations are deliberately funding campaigns to lull you into complacency so they may take over the Internet and insure only the content they want is accessible while gaining unnecessary profits at your expense.

Congress is a revolving door for corporate lobbyists. Those Senators who mean well and have good values, like Bill Nelson of Florida, are still uninformed about the bigger picture. They want to do what their constituents want them to do and, unfortunately, THEY HAVEN'T HEARD FROM YOU.

Please take a moment to see if your Senator is on the Senate Commerce Committee. If he is, CALL AND WRITE him NOW and demand that he support U.S. Senator Ron Wyden's “hold” on major telecommunications legislation recently approved by the Senate Commerce Committee until clear language is included in the legislation that prevents discrimination in Internet access.

Small Christian websites like this one will disappear - you won't be able to pull them up. Likewise if you have a site, a blog or a small e-commerce business, you will not be able to compete with the big corporations. Your sites will not be coming up.

Here's a list of the Senators who hold the fate of the Internet - and your ability to make good decisions - in their hands:

Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)
Phone: 202-224-3004

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
Phone: 202 -224-2235

Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.)
Phone: 202-224-2353

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.)
Phone: 202-224-5274

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.)
Phone: 202 224 3224

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.)
Phone: 202 224-4623

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.)
Phone: 202-224-6253

Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.)
Phone: 202-224-2644

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.)
Phone: 202-224-6551

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.)
Phone: 202-224-6244

Sen. John E. Sununu (R-N.H.)
Phone: 202-224-2841

Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.)
Phone: 202-224-3753

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.)
Phone: 202 224-6121

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas)
Phone: 202-224-5922

Sen. George Allen (R-Va.)
Phone: 202-224-4024

Sen. John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.)
Phone: 202-224-6472

Your phone calls actually make a difference. Please call now and urge your senators to support the bipartisan Snowe-Dorgan Internet Freedom amendment in the Commerce Committee. The free and open Internet as we know it is on the line.

Make the call today.




Go now ye that are men, and serve the Lord. Exodus 10:11

The Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed. 1 Samuel 2:3

Arise therefore, and be doing, and the Lord be with thee. 1 Chronicals 22:16

Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only. James 1:22

Sadism Does Not Equal Security

I am proud to join Bloggers Against Torture for Torture Awareness Month.

It is 2006 and the United States of America, once a liberator of the tortured, has turned to torture as easily as a person changes his clothes.

As Jumah al-Dossari who was kidnapped on the Pakistani border, sold to American troops for $5000 and deported to Guantánamo, Cuba where he has been imprisoned and tortured writes:

"What I will write here is not a flight of fancy or a moment of madness...I have suffered ..."

An excerpt:

The soldiers then started beating us and walking on us and we were lying face down. The beating and kicking was so severe that the sackcloth bag fell one of the brother’s eyes. He saw the soldiers pointing their weapons at us so he shouted, "they’re going to kill us, brothers"; one of the soldiers hit him on the head with the butt of his weapon and he lost consciousness…

After several hours of this beating and the severe cold, they made us stand in one line. They started to wrap a very strong wire around our right arms; each of us was tied at a distance of about two metres from the person in front of him.

After they pulled this wire, they started making us run towards the unknown. When we approached the tents...they started to insult us savagely.

The prisoners started shouting and crying because of their severe pain – there were many young people with us – and the soldiers increased their insults and beatings and those of us who fell started to drag themselves on the grounds on the asphalt of the airfield and the others continued to jog.

As I have already mentioned, I still had the Pakistani shackle which made it hard for me to walk, so I was one of those who fell and was dragging himself along on the asphalt. I tried to stand and walk but I could not.

After that, we entered the tents and they started beating us extremely violently; I fainted several times because of the severity of the beating. Once I fell when I fainted and found my head under the boot of a soldier who started beating me severely.

I fainted again and woke only to find the soldier urinating on my head and back; he was roaring with laughter.

I was still lying on my stomach; he raised my head by the hair and started kicking me in my face with his boot and put it inside my mouth until my face and my lips were cut, my face was swollen and my blood was flowing copiously. Then he started hitting me on my eye; I almost went blind, were it not for the grace and mercy of Allah.

All this would sound very familiar to Victor Frankl, the author of Man's Search For Meaning. He knew well what those men are going through today, having spent three years in concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

Subjected to similar treatment by the Nazis, Frankl told about what happens to a person who has everything ripped from him, is taken from his family and placed, both unjustly and indefinitely, in prison without any hope of reprieve. He wrote and spoke of the tortures endured and the psychological effects of being treated like something unhuman and disposable.

He also addressed what must cross every compassionate person's mind: Who tortures? What kind of person tortures another?

Here is an except on that topic:

"...we shall consider a question which the psychologist is asked frequently, especially when he has personal knowledge of these matters:

What can you tell us about the psychological make-up of the camp guards? How is it possible that men of flesh and blood could treat others as so many prisoners say they have been treated? Having once heard these accounts and having come to believe that these things did happen, one is bound to ask how, psychologically, they could happen.

First, among the guards there were some sadists, sadists in the purest clinical sense.

Second, these sadists were always selected when a really severe detachment of guards was needed.

There was great joy at our work site when we had permission to warm ourselves for a few minutes (after two hours of work in the bitter frost) in front of a little stove which was fed with twigs and scraps of wood. But there was always some foremen wo found a great pleasure in taking this comfort from us.

How clearly their faces reflected this pleasure when they not only forbade us to stand there but turned over the stove and dumped its lovely fire into the snow. When the SS took a dislike to a person, there was always some special man in their ranks known to have a passion for, and to be highly specialized in, sadistic torture, to whom the unfortunate prisoner was sent."

Torture exists because 1) those who order it lack sufficient empathy and 2) there are people who enjoy doing it.

Normally we consider sadists to be a detriment to society. Normally we become aware of them when they get in the headlines through plying their delight in sadism as serial killers, child molesters, animal torturers.

But the U.S. military now employs them. And we give them jobs overseas.

Only now we don't call it sadism. We call it "necessary for national security."

But what is it really? It is a giving in to the sadism within our species and within our national character.

John Donne said it better than anyone else ever has:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

For whom does the bell toll when someone is tortured or driven out of his mind by unjust imprisonment and abuse?

It tolls for you and it tolls for me.

Say no to sadism, say no to torture.

No exceptions.

No excuses.

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Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed? Jeremiah 15:18

Today if ye hear his voice, Harden not your heart. Psalms 95:7,8

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for dakness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Isaiah 5:20

They all with one consent began to make excuse. Luke 14:18

The fruit of the Spirit is...gentleness. Galatians 5:22

Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another. Ephesians 4:32

Millionaire Sickness

Paul Krugman's column today is Class War Politics.

An excerpt:

"Before the 1940's, the Republican Party relied financially on the support of a wealthy elite, and most Republican politicians firmly defended that elite's privileges. But the rich became a lot poorer during and after World War II, while the middle class prospered. And many Republicans accommodated themselves to the new situation, accepting the legitimacy and desirability of institutions that helped limit economic inequality, such as a strongly progressive tax system. (The top rate during the Eisenhower years was 91 percent.)

When the elite once again pulled away from the middle class, however, Republicans turned their back on the legacy of Dwight Eisenhower and returned to a focus on the interests of the wealthy. Tax cuts at the top — including repeal of the estate tax — became the party's highest priority.

But if the real source of today's bitter partisanship is a Republican move to the right on economic issues, why have the last three elections been dominated by talk of terrorism, with a bit of religion on the side? Because a party whose economic policies favor a narrow elite needs to focus the public's attention elsewhere. And there's no better way to do that than accusing the other party of being unpatriotic and godless.

Thus in 2004, President Bush basically ran as America's defender against gay married terrorists. He waited until after the election to reveal that what he really wanted to do was privatize Social Security."

The point of Krugman's article is to say that those who are looking for a centrist position will not find it, because we no longer have a center in the United States. Our middle-class is shrinking and our society is being split into two distinct and sharp camps: those who own the country and those who do not.

Realistically, based upon the following statistics, that split is about 20-80. In other words, 20% of Americans are wealthy and flourishing. The remainder of Americans are experiencing - or facing - ever diminishing wealth and prospects.

Over the past two decades the mean income of the top 5 percent of households grew more than four times as fast as the mean income of the bottom 80 percent.

The increase in "mean income" of the top 5 percent ($115,416 which brought the total mean income to around $260,000) was more than three times as great as the mean 2001 income level of the bottom 80 percent of households.

But a yearly mean income (for one year's worth of earnings) doesn't tell the real story. That comes with looking at mean wealth.

In 2001 the mean wealth for the top 1% of our population was $13,009.577.00

The mean wealth for the next 9% of our population was $1,643,745.

The mean wealth for the next 40% of our population was $272,378.00

The bottom 50% of our U.S. population had a mean wealth of $22,079.

(from tcf.org)

Most people in the bottom half of the U.S. income bracket, even if they are considered "middle-class" and are making 80,000 or $100,000 a year, have little or no savings.

With kids, mortgages, cars, and all the costs of modern life, if disaster strikes and they get sick, they can lose everything . Their "mean wealth" can be the value of their furniture, a couple thousand dollars and whatever they can get for their car(s).

Of course, with the new bankruptcy laws that only protect corporations - and the rich who own shares in them - they won't ever get out from under.

The poor and middle class have invested their lives and sweat into this country. Without them the rich would have had nothing, and certainly no country or populace to exploit.

We used to talk about honorable things, like sharing the wealth and waging a war on poverty; about paying as we went and investing in the future. Now we're waging war on the poor - and the future - while self-styled pundits who have never gone without a meal in their lives post smug little remarks about how the rich deserve all they can get.

This is because we have a sickness in this country. It's a sickness that says being middle-class isn't good enough. It's a sickness that's spread by marketing e-mails, seminars on becoming a millionaire and commercials to buy lotto tickets.

It's the millionaire sickness. It's a philosophy that says you are not good enough - you are aiming far too low - if you are not aiming to become a millionaire.

I believe that the reason so many people are politically uninvolved - or voted against their own economic well-being as well as against those oppressed by real poverty - is because of millionaire sickness. They think - any day now - they are going to buy that winning lottery ticket.

They think there will be no need to work then, no need to think about any responsibility, but only a running away from the growing class of Americans that is in debt up to its eyebrows with no way out.

Sorry, folks, that isn't what we're here for.

Whether we are millionaires or paupers, we are responsible to each other and for each other.

We are here to work together and make things better for everyone, not just ourselves.

If you use your money to do that, while living well, then fantastic. God certainly has no need for you to want. But if you use wealth simply to live a spoiled and pampered life - or dream of doing so - that is not the point of wealth.

We are given wealth so we may share with those who, for whatever reasons, are unable to accrue or acquire wealth. We are given wealth to alleviate the suffering of poverty.

Yet we see widespread callousness toward the poor and unprecedented spending on luxury.

A wealthy man has just paid $135,000,000.00 to acquire a single painting by Gustav Klimt.

Fine for him, fine for the seller who is now richer than before.

But is being able to acquire such possessions really more important than making sure everyone in this country gets fed, has a place to live, is paid a fair wage for a fair day's work and can go to the doctor when he or she - or their child - is ill?

Why are we so obsessed with possessions as opposed to alleviating suffering?

Yet, according to according to a 2003 Taco Bell survey, when given a choice, more than 180 million people (65 percent) would take a $30 million lottery jackpot over saving the entire U.S. economy.

Imagine. That's breathtaking.

What's sad is what it says about us.

We all sink or swim together, as a nation and a people, and right now this country is sinking in debt. If the rich don't go back to paying their fair share and corporations don't go back to creating jobs here, instead of exporting them, the future of our people will be grim.

Likewise, if we don't move toward sustainable lifestyles, the twenty-first century may be the last for our species. (Read the on-line article The Oil We Eat.)

Even if it does not affect us as individuals, is that what we really want for others?

I hope not.

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My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Hosea 4:6

Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? Isaiah 55:2

When he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want. Luke 15:14

Let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth. Ephesians 4:28

Man's Search For Meaning

Yesterday I finished reading Victor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning.

Frankl spent three years in concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

He writes, movingly, about his experiences and how those in the camps, including himself, learned to find meaning in their suffering or, if they did not, they gave up and died. Dying in the camps was easy as a result of physical breakdown due to illness, starvation, overwork and the brutality heaped upon them. And if one stepped out of line, there was always the bullet to the head.

In regard to cultivating a feeling that life is worth living, this is a quote of Frankl's that I find most profound:

"We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us."

"We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly."

"Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct."

"Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual."

In today's society, in which we are urged by our culture to be concerned only with our own survival and our own selfish desires, there is a distinct lack of meaning.

Few even think to ask what life is asking of them in the moment and whether they are responding with integrity.

Take away the television, games, movies and all the distractions and what would people have to fill their lives? I imagine many of us would fall into panic attacks, having nothing to give us the illusion that our lives are full.

We fill them with opinions, arguing, buying, selling, driving, drinking, drugs, sex, being clever and being entertained.

How many of us fill our moments with deliberately choosing love over fear and doing the right thing over doing the expedient thing? How many of us will stoop to pick up a piece of garbage that we have not thrown upon the ground, much less refrain from dropping our own garbage upon the world?

Americans, as a whole, want nothing to do with unpleasantness. We have been gladly sold the bill of goods that there should be no unpleasantness, no suffering, no hard choices in our lives.

Certainly we should not wallow in what is negative. It is Universal Law that whatever you place your attention on - positive or negative - that will expand in your life.

Yet we cannot be blind to the suffering of others. We cannot throw off the suffering - the empathy - we feel for the suffering of others, or cultivate numbness. When we lose empathy - which the Bible refers to as charity - we lose our humanity. For empathy is the only thing that separates us from the reptiles.

Frankl writes about suffering. He was a firm believer that suffering is inevitable for humans, but that we can - and should strive - to give it meaning.

For instance, if your spouse dies and you are heartbroken and feel life is meaningless, Frankl would ask you: What if you had died first and your spouse was left behind?

If your answer is that it would have been just as agonizing - or worse - for your spouse to have lost you, then your suffering has meaning. For you have spared your spouse that suffering by taking it on yourself, instead. This is what makes suffering heroic.

Yet, suffering that is avoidable is not dignified nor heroic, but masochistic, for it is not necessary to suffer to find meaning. Only suffering that is unavoidable and endured with dignity, especially if to migigate the suffering of another, is heroic.

Ultimately the individual is the one who determines, in his heart, whether his suffering was avoidable or necessary and meaningful.

Frankl recommends that each person imagine him or herself to be eighty years old and on his deathbed.

From that perspective, look at your life and see if it has had meaning.

Frankl's imperative is: Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now."

Then do what you know is right. Act from the heart, act from empathy, act out of courage and fearlessness.

His last advice is:

"...For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

So, let us be alert - alert in a twofold sense:

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.

And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake."

Truly a book worth reading!

I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men. Acts 24:16

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. Corinthians 13:1

Modern Evil: Terminator Seeds & The White List

There are two evils that farmers and people who pay attention have been fighting:

Sterile Seed and The White List.

Terminator seed, pushed by these corporations - Abbott Laboratories, AgrEvo, BASF, Bayer, Cheminova, Cyanimid, Degesch America Inc., Dow Agrosciences, Dupont, Engage Agro, Gustafson, Hedley Technologies, IPCO, Monsanto, Norac Concepts, Novartis, Nufarm, Peacock Industries, Rhone Poulenc, Rohm & Haas, Untited Agri Products, Van Waters & Rogers and Zeneca Agro - is sterile. The goal in producing crops that produce only sterile seed is so that farmers around the world to have to buy seeds every year.

The traditional practice (tried and tested for thousands of years) of saving seeds for the next harvest has come under threat due to a US patent on technology to prevent "unauthorized seed-saving" by farmers.

This perverse technology's function is to take what was give to us freely by God - seed - and make it the sole possession of those corporations who own it.

The twin goals are power over the world's people and increased profit, based upon greed for both.

The result must be increased poverty, misery and starvation in a world in which 3 Billion people already are wretchedly poor and nearly a billion are starving to death.

By making all food - and the right to grow food - the property of one corporation or another, corporations can tell all of us: pay or die.

Such a move in no way honors life. It is counter to Christian principles of sharing.

In fact, such a move is evil in its purest form, for good always enhances life, creates joy and alleviates suffering. Good does not shut off the world's food supply.

I've been reading Victor Frankls' Man's Search For Meaning in which he wrote of his experience in a Nazi concentration camp and how starvation affects the whole person and makes life unbearable.

Most people in the United States have no idea about what starvation does to a person.

On the contrary, we are overfed and most of us are constantly concerned about losing weight even as billions around the world starve.

Yet, with global climate changes on the horizon, all we need is a few crop failures to make us lose those extra pounds pretty fast. This administration - generally asleep on every issue while it works to misinform Americans - is pro-corporation in every way and now has even allowed our national grain stores to diminish.

Shall we, on top of this, allow development of this obscene technology which could result in widespread famine and the death of billions?

Canada - infiltrated by American corporations who are striving for deep integration with the U.S. which strives to privatize Canadian health care and get rid of the social services that make Canada such a great place to live - has, thanks to its farmers, failed to end Canada's ban on terminator seeds.

But the threat isn't over. Corporations intend to own everything and control everyone. They are doing a very good job of it and have a good friend in George Bush.

As the Bush administration flogs Canada for brilliantly stopping a terrorist attack, ignorant, opportunistic politicians such as John Hostettler misinform the public about Canada's being a "haven" for terrorists.

Make no mistake, this laughable charge - countered by Michael Chertoff - has really one political goal in mind: to slip the noose tighter around Canada, force her to abandon her independent foreign policy and force an end to her socially progressive domestic policies which make Canadians better paid and healthier than Americans - in order to engineer privatization of her medical system, water and anything everything American corporations can get their hands on.

Canada is a good friend to the U.S. Yet Americans are abysmally ignorant about her and her people. Rick Mercer has lampooned this ignorance - which is appalling - in his "Talking To Americans" comedy specials.

But Americans are not just ignorant about Canada. We are ignorant of what is happening in our own country and how the noose is being tightened around our own throats.

Another example of modern evil is The White List, a proposed law to ban the import, movement and cultivation of over 99 percent of the world’s plant species.

As J.L. Hudson of The Fruit Gardener writes:

"Backed by corporate herbicide manufacturers and the Exotic Pest Plant Councils, the new law will ban any plant not on the government-approved "White List."

All species will be considered guilty until proven innocent. Expensive safety testing will be required by law for all new plants before they are approved for possession and propagation. Thus, only major corporations will be able to afford to introduce new plants into cultivation.

We already have adequate weed prevention laws--it makes no sense to ban virtually the entire plant kingdom "just in case." This is equivalent to the government announcing that only 'pre-approved' books, magazine articles, etc., would be allowed, and all new writings would have to pass through government censors before publication. The world’s biological diversity has been likened to a great library and now government book-burners will be in charge."

While current law 'blacklists known harmful plants'; everything else is permitted.

Under the White List - recommended by a government organization formed to promote it, the National Invasive Species Council (NISC)- 'everything is prohibited except what is on the list.'

This law will extend government and corporate control over the possession, importation and movement of anything that is alive - plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, everything.

Once in place, only the limited "white list" of government-approved species will be permitted - all other species will be considered contraband, with penalties for possession and mandated extermination.

To add a species to the White List, expensive "safety testing" and "risk assessment" will be required for approval. Randy Westbrooks, of the USDA, stated that the testing should be similar to the 30 to 40 million-dollar safety testing required to market a new toxic chemical.

To offset the cost of testing, it has been proposed that a new form of life patent be granted, giving sole rights to the entire species and its genome to the corporation paying for the testing (it being unlikely that individuals will be able to afford such testing), and granting complete immunity to the patent holder of the species becomes a pest.

This will place over 99% of the natural world off-limits - it is the greatest "theft of the commons" from humanity, and the greatest extension of government and corporate control over the natural world in history."

Write to your Senators and Representatives, for what God gave you and your brothers and sisters across the globe is about to be taken away by corporations.

For more information on this pernicious law, visit No White List.

Thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord? Acts 13:10

In the day shalt thou make thy plant to grow, and in the morning shalt thou make thy seed to flourish; but the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief. Isaiah 17:11

Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? Wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously? Jeremiah 12:1

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil. Isaiah 5:20

Take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day. Ephesians 6:13

The Lord God made every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew. Genesis 2:4,5

Joy and gladness is taken from the plentiful field. Jeremiah 48:33

Benedict: Shameful And Out of Touch

The more Pope Benedict opens his mouth, the more he demonstrates just how out of touch the Vatican is with twenty-first century spiritual realities.

He knows a lot about Church politics, that I grant.

He knows about all the ponderous writings by Church clerics that reinforce his rusted, unhelpful world view.

But does he know about the discoveries physicists have made that prove we are in an energy Universe?

Can he explain how there is really is no reason for science and religion to quarrel because science is giving us a framework in which we can understand how God exists and manifests our thoughts?

Is he telling us that we really are all part of one being - God - and what we do to others - including persecute gays - we do to ourselves? [All these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will. I Corinthians 12:11]

No.

Instead, he reinforces fifteenth century ignorance in a twenty-first century world.

As a result of his ignorance and pre-science views, he's continuing to create the same old problems rather than helping us solve them.

For instance, he just chastised Canadians for not having more children. He said it is because they are "too secular."

Excuse me?

Canadians have fewer children because they have an aversion to poverty.

Canadians know that too many children plus not enough money to raise them equals misery and degradation and illness.

Now most of us probably think that living in poverty is a problem and should be avoided.

But to the Pope (and a few new non-Catholic extremists) not having as many children as you possibly can is the problem. In fact, it's a sin.

Think about that: being irresponsible isn't a sin, being responsible is the sin.

The logic is so twisted it is stunning.

The only conclusion any sane person can reach is that those in Rome must love poverty.

Of course they only love it when others are living in it, for they only encourage others to live in poverty. Certainly the high priests in Rome live like kings in that palace they call the Vatican.

I'm sorry, but like "religious" people who call for enemies of their religion to be killed, the Pope and his red-caped cabal are the ultimate hypocrites. They encourage indiscrimate breeding while they, themselves, never get married and never have children.

It makes sense, though. Think how children would cramp their lifestyle.

I suspect it is in order to AVOID pregnancies and AVOID having children that we've seen that priests' sexual practices tend to be homosexual in nature.

I admit I am taking an angry and unforgiving tone, for I think it is the height of irresponsibility for the Pope to condemn contraception and safe sexual practices that, if used, could protect people from poverty and deadly sexually transmitted diseases.

I am angry because this is a hypocritical double standard.

Church pedophiles always pick on boys, not girls. Girls as young as ten have, after all, have gotten pregnant.

By involving themselves only with men or boys they do not need to worry about getting anyone pregnant.

Yet Benedict insists on creating poverty for others through condemning contraception.

Benedict, the nearly one billion people who are starving to death on planet earth must make you very happy. The billions living below the poverty line must make your papal heart beat with joy. Imagine knowing that you are continuing the fine tradition of luring so many people to poverty through Christ.

Let's get one thing straight: God is real. But God is love, not punishment. And God is truth, not hypocrisy. God is "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

If you sincerely want others to plunge you into poverty, well, then I guess it's okay to do the same back. But the Pope hasn't worked all his life to live in the luxury of the Vatican to be a materially impoverished man.

God clearly tells us he can only do for us what He can do through us.

That means we are expected to use our God-given brains and use the gift he gave us through science - contraception - to eliminate poverty.

Yet Pope Benedict admonishes us for not having more children even as the world's population keeps doubling. This increase cannot continue indefinitely.

If you put two fruit flies in a bottle and close it, they will multiply happily until the day the entire population drowns in its own waste.

Likewise, at some point having a child will become a crime against all humanity because the earth is just a bigger bottle. But religious leaders, such as the Pope, seem blind to the obvious even as overpopulation, and the pollution caused by it, results in cancer, global warming and defilement of the earth.

Pope Benedict is doing the world a tremendous disservice with his double standards. He should be urging us all to concentrate on loving the people who are here, not making more.

Frankly, if Jesus Christ came to earth today, he would shake his head at these bogus teachings that urge collective irresponsibility.

Maybe that collective irresponsibility is the reason he hasn't been back.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. Matthew 23:27

My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. Matthew 23:27

They be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. Matthew 15:14