Know Jack #358 Numbers Don’t Lie

 “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Mark Twain

Twain’s observation makes me wonder where today’s world is headed. From pitch counts to pandemic infections, statistics are the new scripture, the gospel laid out for daily consumption on every “news” broadcast and talk show. In my experience, statistics exist for no other reason than to prove the point of the person citing them. Perhaps that’s why one statistic I read on the way to writing this post cited that over 73% of lies employ statistics in their telling.

Numbers really don’t lie. 2 always equals 2, πr2 always equals the area of a circle, numbers are objective truth. They neither change nor alter in meaning. The problem is that numbers are like guns. If you do not employ them, they won’t get up on their own and attack you. The evil they are capable of doing rests in the hands of the person(s) employing them.

One of the lines in Paul Simon’s song Kodachrome says, “My lack of education hasn’t hurt me none, I can read the writing on the wall. Now, I may not be good at math, but most of the time I can tell when things don’t add up.

Some of my Facebook friends and fellow “conspiracy theorists” are often heard to say things haven’t added up since March of 2020. I will agree the words and numbers official cite don’t agree with what eyesight and reasoning tell us. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t add up. It only means that the purveyors of those statistics have a different problem they are trying to solve.

Human beings are the wild card in reality and have the ability to bend the perception of it to suit personal desire. So powerful is this ability, they can make numbers lie and do so on a regular basis.

In my case, living as I do in make believe worlds, I have grown used to the fact that the narrative is meant to fit the author’s design. As a part-time editor anticipating where the author is taking me and spotting superfluous scripts is part of what I do.

As a result, I have come to the conclusion that many of those I know would take serious issue with. First, we are indeed being led down the garden path to the place where the van with the guy who lost his puppy and has free candy awaits. Since I also believe that God is the sovereign of all, I believe where we are traveling meets with divine approval.

In biblical history, when the masses have reached the point where only disaster will bring them to their senses, God obliges them. God didn’t just allow Nebuchadnezzar to raze Jerusalem; he sent the Babylonian king there for that purpose.

Numbers don’t lie, but the desired outcome generally determines how people go about working the problem.

Maranatha

Lost Crusader #145 The Faith Less Traveled

 “And when he (Elijah) saw that, he arose and ran for his life…and came and sat under a broom tree. And prayed that he might die, and said ‘It is enough! Now, Lord, take my life, for I am not better than my fathers!’”

1 Kings 19

If you’ve been in Sunday School or church much, you’ve probably heard the story. Queen Jezebel swore to kill Elijah in retaliation for his defeat and destruction of the prophets of Baal. So, Elijah takes it on the lam. Exhausted and out of Jezebel’s reach, he drops down in the shade of a juniper tree. This is the place where two paths of faith diverge in a wood.

The traditional rendering depicts Elijah, as a dejected, and depressed coward filled with self-pity sitting in the shade boo-hooing to God. Then, there’s the view of the situation less taken.

In this version, Elijah, in response to a message from God, challenged and beat the prophets of Ahab and Jezebel in a public showdown. The audience was amazed, crying out that God was great, then they promptly hung Elijah out to dry.

He’s left alone to face the wrath of the queen and her army. Having no word from God on how to handle this, he runs for his life. (Would teachers and preachers prefer he died?) Out of her reach, he sits in the shade wondering what the heck just happened.

He gave it his best shot, a miracle happened, and no one cares. He’s ready to call it quits—not because he lacks faith, but everyone else does. He takes a nap and when he wakes up an angel is there with food and drink. This happened twice.

Then, the angel chastises him and sends him back to face the music—wrong! The angel says for him to keep going further into the wilderness. He travels forty days without eating and arrives in the vicinity of the place where Moses saw the burning bush.

While he’s there, God sends a wind, an earthquake, and a fire across the front of the cave Elijah is calling home. But God is not in any of those things—this time. However, he has certainly deployed Elijah with similar signs before.

This time God shows up and whispers. Seems odd God would get so close to a despondent failure, doesn’t it?

It seems God still has 7,000 faithful people in Israel. At this point, Sunday School lessons ask how Elijah missed them. Perhaps the real question is how did they miss Elijah and where were they when his life was on the line?

Here’s the great part. Those same lessons say God still had work for Elijah to do. They are correct, but only in a sense. God sent Elijah to sort of whisper in the ear of three men who, each in his own way, would contribute to the death of Ahab, Jezebel and the unfaithful who left Elijah high and dry. Elijah, far from being the coward, accepts and carries out the assignment.

Elijah, however, was not granted his request to die. Instead, God sent a whirlwind to pick him up and transport him directly into heaven. James would say of Elijah later that he was a man of like passions as we are. He was very passionate about God and disappointed when others were not, but he always did what he was asked to do. He did not get out there on his own and do what he felt ought to be done. When he had a word from God, he acted. When he didn’t, he wasn’t foolish or brash enough to think he had the answer.

At first glance, victory doesn’t always look like it to our peers. To the masses, following the word of God doesn’t always look like the path to success. Thank God, we aren’t playing to the masses on this path less traveled.

Maranatha

Know Jack #357 The Modern American Cult

 “And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they might all be damned who believed not the truth...”

St. Paul to the Thessalonians

I’m going to step into the Crusader’s territory for a moment. It’s okay because we share a strand or two of DNA, and because what I am going to talk about here not only has a stranglehold on society but on many churches as well.

I was not raised in church. On the contrary, fellowship of any kind with churches was forbidden. How I ended up as a Christian and a member of one church or another for the last forty-seven years is another story. You can read that in my book, Experimental Christianity, or email me if you want to know. I’m not shy about relating the experience.

I mention my conversion to introduce the fact that I am not opposed to radical change. More recently, I dropped eighty pounds by changing my eating habits. However, I am persuaded that the modern Cult of Change—the adoration of change for the sake of change—is a deadly cancer growing on our culture, and our very thinking.

This laptop and the application I am using to write this blog is a case in point. Back in the dark ages, when companies like Hp and Microsoft were trying to sell us all on personal computing, their designers employed something called “ease of use”. That is, they set out to make their products easy to use in hopes of attracting reluctant buyers (like me). They were very successful, to say the least.

When did the last update you installed make things easier to use? I think possibly that was when dial-up ended. Now that we have bought into the need for the latest and greatest, change and innovation are no longer user-centered. Design has shifted to how it functions for the seller.

The Microsoft Word program I’m using right now just changed the process I use to make editorial comments on documents from one simple step into a two-step process with a block on further action until you obey. Change for the better, right? Sounds more to me like change or else.

When I worked for the Navy, each newly assigned officer in charge of our unit in the hospital had to introduce changes or they were likely to get passed over for promotion. It didn’t matter if the change made things operate more smoothly or increased productivity. Changes were made to return to ideas proven not to work. It didn’t matter. The important thing was a change was implemented and accepted.

We are told not only that change is inevitable, but that all change is good and embracing it proves we are proactive, progressive, and productive. This is the path to delusion. We are walking this path because we are being led down it. The Truth is unchanging. The only thing that changes is our willingness to see it.

Maranatha

Lost Crusader #144 Beginning at the End

 “Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned…”

St Paul

I’m going to let a bit of my bias show here. I first copied the verse above from the New King James. I then ditched it for the King James. (I became a Christian reading King James, and the language has stuck with me.) There’s no difference in the message, but I think there is a difference in the tone, and I like the word choices.

Paul in another place (Romans) said that Christianity should transform the lives of its disciples. In the verse cited above, he gives the short answer to what the transformation should look like.

The end—that is, the goal or the purpose, of God’s word is to produce actions of love that flow from a pure heart. That’s the destination; it is not the present state of affairs. So, it is to be expected that the typical Christian, if there is such a thing, is not yet perfect.

The world criticizes because they expect instant results. They expect the Christian, like Athena in mythology, to spring fully formed from the Father’s forehead. That this expectation is totally unrealistic is irrelevant.

Christian discipleship is a journey. It is begun in desperate sorrow and traveled by the weak along a road of challenges—sometimes painful challenges. It is not a question of if we have arrived, but whether we are going the right way. The trip will require course corrections along the way because the easy way and the fast lane are not always the best way to where we are going.

There is one immediate reward here though. Undertaking the journey and going in the right direction will produce a good conscience that will help steer us as we continue onward.

Unfeigned is not a word you hear much these days, newer versions use “sincere faith”. When you get right down to it the meaning is the same. The verb to feign means to pretend or to fake something. Christians are not to deal in faith for show or in comparisons with others.

If being the genuine person you are while being transformed seems to be contradictory, there is something you must understand. You are not being transformed into someone that you are not. You are being transformed into your true self—the you that will live a unique eternal life with God. There is no need to fake or pretend and neither is there any shame in being at our present, particular point on the journey. We are following Jesus and He alone defines the direction, sets the pace, and determines when we have arrived.

Knowing where you’re going makes the trip more pleasurable.

Maranatha

Know Jack #356 Light Reading

 “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”

Ray Bradbury

Long ago in an America far, far away, there was a public service campaign that claimed, “Reading is Fundamental”. This took place in my children’s youth rather than mine, so it’s not quite ancient history.

I was raised to be a reader, by example. When Reading is Fundamental began to appear on television screens around the country, I jumped right in. (This was one of the few times I ever supported government sponsorship of anything.) The program died an inglorious death as reading and comprehension scores nationwide plummeted even further.

Deplorable clinger that I am, I still read. What is more, I still believe it is fundamental. In my thinking, there are two types of people. Those who wish to know things rather than look things up and those who wish to employ imagination and thought rather than be spoon-fed.

To read to know things is to value learning for learning’s sake. Reading to use your imagination, well that’s just fun. Both are purely subjective. How much you learn and how much enjoyment you receive is equal to how much you invest and your personal preferences. Some people run marathons, I read Don Quixote or the four-volume biography of R.E. Lee.

This brings me to a fundamental question. What are you reading?

I have just finished Machiavelli’s The Prince. I have beside me two books that I am reading, Kipling’s Just So Stories, and a book called The Longest Night about the bombing of London on May 10, 1941, which includes an extended description of London during The Blitz.

I also did do a quick read-through of Antigone by Sophocles and Medea by Euripides but both of those are in connection with a class I’m taking on ancient Greece and don’t fit this discussion since they were assigned.

Reading will take you anywhere in the multiverse, to any point in/beyond time, and introduce you to creatures great and small. Don’t talk to me about diversity and inclusion unless you read.

The Reading is Fundamental program was aimed at kids, but it was a shotgun blast. It’s never too late to discover reading, and in the words of C.S. Lewis, “One day you’ll be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

In a postscript, I found out that Reading is Fundamental still exists. What is being turned out by homes and schools suggests it’s still a failure.

Jack

Lost Crusader #143 Made on Purpose

 “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars…What is man that thou art mindful of him?”

Psalm 8

I suppose if you believe a mindless, random series of vibrational accidents occurred and our universe is the result, then there is no real purpose in thinking about humanity at all. We are but the natural outgrowth of one of the countless times in which stray amino acids combined themselves in chains. If this is so, then all is as it should be. We are what we are and could never be anything different. Therefore, the idea of right and wrong, or good and evil should never arise as they are irrelevant.

However, a philosophy professor at Oxford proposed that all human beings have a strange, uniquely human idea. We have a kind of law of right and wrong that we did not make up, yet cannot be rid of, and this law continually presses upon us. We know the law; still, we break the law. These two things, he says, are the key to all clear thinking in the universe.

It seems that humanity is either a random meaningless combination of vibrating energy arranged by chance, or we are a purposeful, unique creation. The middle ground smacks of muddled thinking, contorted compromise, and self-deception.

Needless to say, how the universe came about has occupied minds, great and small for all time. Science may, one day, answer the question of how—some say it already has—but science will never answer the question of why the universe exists. It is not equipped to answer it.

What is man? To answer that, is to answer why the universe exists.

Some Christians believe that the Creation happened for no other purpose than to act as a backdrop for divine-human interaction. Perhaps this is what Shakespeare meant when he wrote that all the world is a stage, and everyone has a part to play.

God, because He is love, is creative by nature. In love, He created beings, like Himself who are capable of freely returning His love. Being made free, they are also capable of denying love.

When you see the stars or hear the rolling thunder of God’s power throughout the universe, it is God’s calling us to a loving relationship. That God is mindful of us and calls to us is a wonder until you come to know God. Once you know Him, you come to realize that, while God will not always strive with man, it is not in Him to be without mercy and grace towards any who seek it.

People scoff at the term “religion”, without knowing it means to discipline your focus. Christianity has one object as its focus—God. It has two ways to demonstrate that focus.

“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind…Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Love God with all you’ve got and love your neighbor in the same manner as you love yourself. We are capable of this and that is why God cares about us.

Maranatha

Know Jack #355 Safe Democracy

 “Democracy must be made safe for the world.”

Gov. Samuel McCall

 

Playing on the idea put forth by America’s first socialist president, Woodrow Wilson, the governor of Massachusetts fired back with a saner ordering of priorities. Wilson sold America on war saying that it was our patriotic duty to make the world safe for democracy.

The governor had the strange idea that the world would not truly be safe until, in democracies, like the United States, the people rule in fact rather than in theory. Such thinking was diametrically opposed to that of the president.

President Wilson, in his speeches and his writings, equated democracy with socialism. In his thinking, the two were synonymous and operated best in the same manner—when they were run from the top down by “experts” and intellectuals insulated from the interference of the masses and their votes. This system, according to the 28^th president, was for the good of all, and the only means by which to make the world safe.

Of course, Wilson and his bunch won. Democracy became safe, experts reigned supreme, and annually expanded their autonomy. This week Brandon and our social betters in Congress, guided by the experts, have handed down new gun laws. Unlike past gun laws, these laws will make us all safe from tragedies involving guns, except, of course, those large-scale tragedies sponsored by the state we call war.

That is, until the next gun tragedy.

Make no mistake about it; there will be a next one. Ban guns altogether, someone willing to break the law will find one, and if that someone is willing to trade his life for the lives he takes, you cannot stop him. (President Kennedy once mentioned this to his Secret Service team.) Thus far in human history, there has always been that person willing to make the trade.

In the America of the near future, made safe by the waving of “red flags”, someone under 21 will find a gun and make the trade. Shock and awe will prevail. Politicians will signal their virtue and propose yet more laws. The media and its acolytes will be outraged and decry the humanity of those who wish to retain their rights. The NRA will be called a group of domestic terrorists. Gun owners will point out that guns, left to their own devices, never kill anyone. We have seen it all before and thinking legislation will end the cycle is insanity.

The quest for safety in an unsafe world will cycle again and end in yet further disappointment to the wearers of rose-colored glasses. The problem lies not in the goal, but in the thinking that people rely on while trying to achieve it. As long as we value My Truth above The Truth, we are doomed to failure.

“Never let any Government imagine that it can choose perfectly safe courses…”

Niccolo Machiavelli