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Where Australia's electricity comes from
Trump Republicans and understanding their God thing.
My latest post, that I think worth sharing. I leave off the beginning though here is a link to the song in question, it really is a beautiful profound things.
Eagles "Last Resort"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdx6oyBOVj0
If after reading the following anyone had anything to add or subtract or play with, please do. 
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The post itself starts with “The Last Resort” and focuses on the challenge of getting Merrick Garland his Supreme Court nomination vote on January 3rd {For info http://citizenschallenge.blogspot.com/2016/12/demand-jan3-vote-merrick-garland.html}
http://citizenschallenge.blogspot.com/2016/12/trumps-theme-song-and-god.html
...We The People can not hope for President Obama and the cowering Democratic Senators to do this on their own! We as American individuals need to make the personal effort to demand they stand united and insistent on voting Merrick Garland into the Supreme Court.This is for keeps! January 3rd is the last change to get a little check and balance back into our government > Something the absolutist, faith-based crowd are loath to do since these people have actually convinced themselves, they are on God’s holy mission.
Think about that.Speaking of “God”
Realize and consider that these self-certain absolutist Republican emotional children don’t appreciate the profound difference between Personal Truths and Universal Truths. They refuse to grapple with the spiritual reality that although we can know God in our hearts, we (that is petty self-serving humans) will never know more than a vague shadow play of the real God of Time and Creation, Life and Love. The Bible even warns people that God is beyond human understanding, Philippians 4:7 but the children refuse to grow up and see. 1 Corinthians 13:11
What’s sad is that I know it’s not hard for an honest spiritual seeker to grasp that God is beyond petty self-serving human’s ability to comprehend, we can only know shadow plays and through those shadow plays better understand ourselves and our lives.
When I was young I can remember that in America a person’s Faith was reflected in how they lived their life and how they interacted with others and their communities. Heck it was my Southern Baptist grandma and her old Encyclopedia Britannica who taught me about dinosaurs, mastodons, evolution and helped spark my life long desire to learn about all aspects of Earth’s life story, then she’d say prayers with me at night. She lived her faith in God, she didn’t have to beat other people over the head with it!
Then came the 70s Jesus Freaks with their egomania and absolutism pretending that they had actually tapped into the real “God.” All the while perverting Jesus’ Passion into something it wasn’t. It’s ludicrous, but everyone let them get away with it and the brainwashing has been relentless ever since. Now this Trump comes along and played that scared, desperate-for-power tribe, like a fiddle. They are united and everyone’s future will be impacted mightily.
The thing that makes our future so frightening is that “Truth” and “Objective Facts” and “Constructive Learning” means nothing to these people - their mindscape sees nothing but their own self-interest, enemies and playing to win. They believe that fabricating fiction to replace objective facts is their Free Speech Right - in other words, to them fraud in the name of their personal God is okay. ... and the rest of us go along with their fantasy. Why?
Mind you, no enlightened self-interest is to be found in this crowd. They can’t fathom our planet Earth and it’s inhabitants as anything other than a bunch of commodities to be extracted and exploited as much as possible, as fast as possible and as cheaply as possible, no exceptions. (I’ve often wondered where the hell was everyone running to in such a hurry.)
Not to mention their difficulties with accepting the multiculturalism they forced on themselves. Plus their inability to grasp the simple facts of life and flow of years. (You know what I mean, more people, less room, accommodations must be made - Wanting to return to an imaginary yesteryear is an insane option. But that is Trump’s promise and their expectation. What will they do when he can’t deliver? What will they do when they learn they been played for fools? Or will Trump’s relentless rallies, create something else and much uglier altogether? Who will become the scapegoat for the failure to come?).
The general willful ignorance and arrogant disregard is appalling and all that stands between them and achieving their short-sighted dreams and We The People’s worst nightmares - is an overwhelmingly uninformed and apathetic public. Who’s going to wake them up?
Comments
This is a great article, but I think you may be giving Republicans too much credit. Yes, they have the absolutism of believing only they have access to God's wishes, but a lot of them are more crass, venal and duplicitous than that.
They met the evening of 2009 Jan 20th, Obama's inauguration day, and decided, en masse, to oppose EVERYTHING he did. The bail-outs had already started, as had the Dodd-Frank regulation process, but beginning with Obamacare, they decided that partisan advantage was ALWAYS (always, always, always, always, ALWAYS) more important than what was good for the country. If something would damage the US (and/or the world) AND damage Obama, that was ALWAYS preferable to something that would help the US (world) and help Obama. Partisan advantage always predominated over the good of the country (and the world). Once they gained control of Congress, they could stop many of the things he wanted.
When it was clear that there were cost-related problems for some with Obamacare, he offered to negotiate some sort of compromise to improve it, but they refused. They just wanted to repeal it. They now claim they want to "replace" it, but the only ideas they've had so far are to allow insurance companies to sell policies across state lines, plus medical savings accounts. If they think those things will make up for the ~20 M people who'll lose their medical insurance, they need their tin foil hats adjusted.
Obama wanted to pass an infrastructure repair bill, but congressional Repubs claimed they "couldn't find the money" and refused. Now that Trumpelthinskin also wants an infrastructure bill, what are the chances they'll SUDDENLY "find" the money? Three guesses, and the first two don't count. And that's despite the fact that tax cuts that will ultimately reduce revenues over time.
Obama offered them a 2:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases to reduce the deficit. In the past, they would have accepted a 1:1 ratio. Not this time. He would have compromised on an immigration bill. Of course the Party of No refused en masse, even though many of them had publicly supported reform in the past.
Obama even signaled that he'd accept corporate tax reform as part of a comprehensive compromise. The R's said "no!"
Obama may have have benefited from these things, so OF COURSE they refused. This happened over and over and over again. I call it evil and treasonous, but of course it's just the Repubs' modus operandi. The Democrats aren't evil and treasonous, so they'll probably work with Trumpelthinskin on points of agreement like infrastructure spending.
You're of course right about Trumpelthinskin's inability to deliver on his absurd promises. Not only is he not draining the swamp, he's putting the alligators in charge. His cabinet is the wealthiest in history, government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires. And of course fossil fuel funded climate change denial.
Startlingly, even Paul Ryan mentioned Trumpelthinskin's absurd hallucinations about coal miners getting their jobs back. A great many Repubs evidently hallucinate that "Obama's War on Coal" had something to do with the decline of the industry!!!!! Amazing!!
No, the coal industry collapsed because of the market. The M.A.R.K.E.T. Even the most rabid deniers in the world can't repeal those laws.
Opposed to that is a people who are filled up with Hollywood dreams and promises of endless stuff, folks who have lost all connection to the fundamentals of living life on this physical planet Earth, hell or even the point of living their own lives within their families. Plenty of expectations but no appreciation. Bricks in the wall. So many of them, I'd have never believed it. But after the past decades, nothing else makes sense to help explain it.
as in other parts of the world where fundamentalism takes a hold
we saw in the fawning response from the religious right to Trump's sexual proclivities
That ultimately power trumps religion
further to my previous post you highlight the binary choices we increasingly get presented with, I sort of trace it back through Bush's (and by association Blair's) assertion that
"you are either with us or against us"
even further to a quote from the Vietnam war
'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bến_Tre
they (fundamentalists) crave simple certainties - built around "belief" (a concept that requires no evidence)
Obama = wrong, simple
In the UK we saw it in our Brexit debate - the "right" framed the argument around the EU being "good/bad"
a binary choice, they brooked no real debate, a rational discussion around the pros and cons of membership
the climate deniers use this binary strategy to create FUD in the "agw debate"
the fact that like all science, climate science is not perfect, sometimes gets things "wrong" and they say
"the science is broken"
and in a funny way this is analogous to the digital age we are in - when it is stripped away it comes down to 1's and 0's
although as we know correlation is not causation
Oh, yeah. Here you can learn about some of the details.
and no one has the cohones to confront them with the reality of their self contrived delusion.
And unfortunately, no one seems to think it's topic worth tackling, though we are now being run by faith-based absolutism who have disconnected themselves from the physical realities of our planet.
Religion and faith is that something that whispers into our mind'n soul and drives us to yearn to understand god and what's beyond us. It is a beautiful thing, I do understand the spiritual journey from the inside so feel I can say that. (Hell I dare say I know about the truth of and message behind Jesus's Passion better than the whole lot of superficial babies who preach for bucks.)
Where the love of religion and search for god or Jesus turns into a hideous poisonous monstrosity is when people convince themselves that they've found Universal Truth. In truth, it's a Personal Truth. We petty self-centered, often frightened and jealous, humans are absolutely incapable of encompassing all the understanding needed for any serious appreciation of God. We do the best with what we got - but we should be clear that's what we as individuals understand is tailor made (by virtue our unique life experience) for each - and not some universal truth.
{humm, 'overgrown' or 'over bloated'}
But whenever being challenged, they always say, "God works in mysterious way".
is nothing so much as a reflection of ones own over bloated ego.
Believing in a god no matter how passionately is a PERSONAL TRUTH valid as far as it goes
but not to be confused with a UNIVERSAL TRUTH.
It get's back to the fatal progressives tactical mistake of humoring Reagan's Creationist and Jesus Freak
Absolutism, rather than confronting 'em as the abomination of Earthly reality that it is.
Here's another place to drive home the point that RELIGIOUS BELIEFS ARE PERSONAL TRUTHS - THEY ARE NOT UNIVERSAL TRUTHS !!!!!!!!!!!!
After all, we are all self-centered always scrambling critters concerned with survival and getting ahead - please
try to considering the flow of time and generations and all of creation, that simply can't be grasped with our human mind.
Beautiful Shadow Plays perhaps, but that's as close to a "true god" any human in any generation can hope to achieve.
Oh the other thing about Christians and Republicans that needs way more spotlighting than it has received
is the GOPs unhinged ABSOLUTISM it really is too much, but seems to have been thoroughly mainstreamed.
Just as is the acceptance of lying and creating fictional alternative facts, when the down to Earth science interferes with self-interested economic interests.
Here's another one: WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST?