The Good, the Bad, and the Baleful

Starting in reverse with the baleful and the bad, saving the best, the Good until after: We’ve already discussed how humans (men are the focus since I am a man) use their Brains, Beliefs, Brawn, and Boasting to enlarge their own ethnocentric lives, destroy other nation’s men, women, and children, and how they see women as booty either in the sense of possession or sexual conquest and subservience.

“Equal but subservient” isn’t equal, as we learned during the past era of Segregation and the Civil Right Movement in the United States.

And anyone can understand this--except orthodox Muslims--by observing Sharia Law and how it is implemented in Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

Whenever men, whether for secular or religious reasons subjugate women, no matter how much they claim they are honoring women, we know otherwise and can see the discrimination and the harm and the cruelty.

A very bad example is 1 Timothy 2:9-15. Think of the millions of women over 2,000 years who have suffered from the infliction of these verses.


Here's one horrific example from conservative Christianity:
"Alford draws our attention to the fact that in Genesis 3:16, after the Fall, when God was appointing the devil and woman and man to their distinctive experiences of the curse, “bearing children” was the very point where God’s curse lands on the woman. “To the woman he said, ‘I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.’”

"Pause and feel the weight of this for women in the centuries before modern medicine. No hygiene, no spinal blocks, no episiotomies, no sutures, no caesarians, no antibiotics, no pain killers, and often, no recovery. Untold numbers of women died in childbirth and countless more suffered the rest of their lives from wounds that prevented childbirth, or any kind of normal sexual life."
from Christian Theologian John Piper

So according to such conservative Christian leaders, millions of women through the ages had to suffer and die excruciating deaths because of a curse by God against one woman, Eve, in the Garden!

Again, one can see why so many humans rightly reject this abusive version of Christianity which follows the literal and worst verses in Scripture. Very baleful!

Next on the bad list comes Betting.

But since this is an unethical action I’ve not been tempted with, my comments will be short and to the point. Only once, many years ago when I was about 10, was I ever attracted to the “quick money” grasping of betting. And that occasion was more likely peer pressure, since I don’t remember really wanting to take marbles from my friends. It was they who wanted me to bet my own marbles. Somehow my parent found out and showed me betting wasn’t the way to follow Jesus.

As an adult, I've stopped a number of times in Las Vegas and other gambling towns. Once for about an hour I watched men and women gambling.

What's strange is that they didn't look happy at all, not like the advertisements showing young people laughing and rejoicing--not at all. These were older individuals, smoking constantly, and drinking, were hunched over with worry or tension or depression etched in their faces.

So here’s it plain and simple: Betting is wrong because if one wins one takes money or valuables from others—those who ought to be using their funds for their family or the lost and hurting and malnourished of the world.

If one loses, there is the temptation to keep gambling to win, but everyone else in your family loses.

If one simply can’t really enjoy gaming without the costly risk of valuables being exchanged, maybe, consider some form of charity gambling where no one loses except to benefit the needy and the lost and the suffering.

All bets are on, on that kind of betting. It’s like taking all of your money to buy the field where the buried treasure (the Realm of God) is.

Bet-gambling's the bad of it.

--


Now for the baleful—the Boozing: “Wine is a mocker and strong drink is a brawler, and whoever is led astray by it is not wise.”
Proverbs 20:1 ESV

Scripture doesn’t say you can’t have a glass of wine with supper or a beer with your buddies. Jesus even made gallons of wine for a wedding celebration at Cana, after many at the festival had already had plenty to drink!

What is unwise, what leads one astray is when wine is a mocker and strong drink is a brawler—i.e. when one’s drinking leads to wrong-doing, to fighting, to abusing, to carousing, to immoral actions. And we know when that happens, unless our conscience has been seared.

In my time I have seen in my own extended family, and in some friends, and in the families of students much destruction come from the use and abuse of alcohol.
How tragic and destructive alcohol, nicotine, and other drugs are.

Besides, think of all the men who have harmed their bodies and been caught in the endless cycle of alcoholism. Of famous humans, the list seems very long--Earnest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, etc.

Better is the way of praise in the Spirit of holiness, not the spirit of intoxication. “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit.”
Ephesians 5:18 ESV

I am of the opinion (though more devout followers of Jesus than me disagree) that followers of the Good, disciples of the Way, seekers of the Truth should not use controlled substances.

Instead live filled up in the Ocean of Light.

Consider this true narrative in a poem from an actual experience:

The Last Libation

JimTown, across the county line
Where many a poor Cheyenne
Emptied his dim future
In the short, sotted glass;

Nothing new of this watery fire,
The forked-tongue libation
Passed from the pallid men
Down to generations of the lost,

To those hunched at the rail--
Descendants of red men who
Counted coup with shining valor--
But these instead pour out their ‘souled’

Lives to Chief Bacchus of the bottle;
Restricted to behind the dark bars,
They shuffle the time worn cards,
Then slump, no longer ruling the plains.

But the Rez's young girl, his cousin,
Only 12, copper-templed and kind,
With glorious raven hair, now
In the gathering Montana dusk

Tips on the dirt walk, sour breathed,
Staggers on the 'warn' path
Through Lame Deer town,
And passes down, then gone.

Says another tribe's brave,
A leader in translation,
My heart is sick…

I will drink no more forever.


In the Light of Divine Love,

Daniel Wilcox

Part 2: Back to the Future of Duty, Honor, Country

‘Just war’ is just violence, just killing, just suffering, just inequality, just wrong. (Quote from poster by Mennonite Central Committee, a mission agency of Anabaptists including the Brethren in Christ and the Mennonites)

On the way to Vicksburg in the American War of Secession (usually called the Civil War though it wasn’t civil by any definition), Yankees “burned Jackson..laying waste to the countryside…tore up railroad tracks, pulled down telegraph lines, burned cotton fields..killed poultry and livestock, emptied crocks of molasses and vinegar; and burned homes, smokehouses, barns, stores, and warehouses."

Other animals and wagons were confiscated. Some soldiers "stole jewelry, china, and silver, slashed feather mattresses; and took clothing..a Union soldier wrote home that he had seen forty or fifty plantations burn in a single day.”

During the bombardment of Vicksburg by Grant’s forces, 22,000 shells by Northern gunboats were launched into the town. The Lord’s house took a direct hit--“a bombshell burst into the very center of the dining room, blowing out the roof and one side, crushing the well-spread table like an eggshell, and making a great yawning hole in the floor...”

Like others, the Lords soon moved into caves. I suppose you get the irony. The Lords were the pastoral family of the Episcopal Church of Vicksburg. If you recall from Part 1 of this blog, Reverend Lord was a Yankee who had moved from New York 10 years before.

Soon the families and Confederate soldiers were down to eating corn, peas, weeds, and rats, and in one family even a child’s pet bird to stave off the beginnings of starvation. They finally surrendered.

Afterward, martial law was imposed by Grant. People could be jailed or banished from the city for even minor offenses. “In one incident, five women were banished after walking out of a church service rather than participate in a prayer…”

A “Vicksburg hospital took a direct hit from a shell [from a Union gunboat], killing eight and wounding fourteen. A surgeon saved himself from bleeding to death by tying off an artery. His leg was later amputated. Dr. Lord’s wife and youngest daughter almost got hit “when two large shells fell nearby and exploded simultaneously, filling the air with flames and smoke."

Mrs. Lord “tried to soothe her four-year-old daughter, saying, ‘Don’t cry, my darling. God will protect us.’ To which the girl replied that she was afraid that God had already been killed.” (From Under Siege by Andrea Warren)

Which he had! At least the god of each side, both of whom were declared to be leading, directing, and supporting the war like so many other horrific wars in history. Consider the words of Abraham Lincoln: “I am almost ready to say this is probably true--that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.“

And the South’s motto was Deo vindice (“God will vindicate us.”) And in the 20th century, German soldiers wore on their belt buckles “God With Us and British soldiers, “For God, King, and Country.”

And consider these stirring words from an American preacher in World War 1: “It is God who has summoned us to this war. It is his war we are fighting…This crusade is indeed a crusade. The greatest in history—the holiest…a Holy War."

"Yes, it is Christ, the King of Righteousness, who calls us to grapple in deadly strife with this unholy and blasphemous power."
(from For God and Country or the Christian Pulpit in War Time, 1918). ETC.

Yet James of the N.T. has it right when he says "Where do these wars and battles between yourselves first start? Isn't it precisely in the desires fighting inside your own selves...you fight to get your way by force." (JB James 4:1)

And now the gods are fighting again in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Nigeria, etc. And, again, humans because of duty, honor, country, and God deal out death... Speaking of Back to the Future…

Look instead into the Light of Jesus’ Way,

Daniel Wilcox