Being a Lover of Trees

Being a lover of trees, I naturally want to do what I can for them as they do for me. First, they give me oxygen which I breathe in and I give them carbon dioxide which they breathe in. I'm a little concerned for the trees with the limiting of their needed 'air' just as I'm sure they would be if we started being concerned about limiting oxygen in the atmosphere. I sure hope part of the UN resolutions isn't that forests must be cut down and trees taxed.

Climate Change Summit

Climate Change Summit. Boy, I certainly feel much safer that all the enlightened countries will solve our climate. And I keep going out to the mailbox eager for the UN surcharge that surely will be arriving because of the excess CO2 that I have been exhaling. Perhaps it will be called a 'gas tax' or an 'earth temperature adjustment' or 'climate charge'...Needless to say, no price will be too much in order that the world again is climatically controlled. And finally, I am quite encouraged that the UN has the whole world in its hands.

Spoonfed Terms

Why have we automatically assumed 'refugees' is the right term when we are served it by Obama and his minion media? Does anything think ISIS would be wearing their little hoodies with bombs strapped to their legs when they come in to settle? Maybe we should ask Paris before we let our President put out the red carpet.

The 'Phobia' Suffix

If only the Nazi propaganists were on the ball they would've invented the 'phobia' suffix and got people afraid of being called a Naziaphobe. Or they could've made use of the term 'refugee' in exporting themselves here. They really could've learned much from our present wordsmiths here in the West.

The Greeks Bearing Gifts

Even if one state allows it the Trojan Horse enters.

A Trick of Language

Again the whole trick of the thing is our use of language. The media has given us the term 'refugees' for the mostly young male Moslems that will be arriving from Syria. In other more astute and less 'tolerant' and 'guilt ridden' and 'less compassionate' times the news would have called them perhaps 'invaders'? Do we really think that the Greeks invading Troy by hanging the word "INVADERS" around the gift-horse's neck? I do believe that the Trojans were led to believe this was a gift.

Lamenting Paris with a Neighbor

In talking with a neighbor we each were lamenting Paris, but what struck me as he then said that all fundamentalism was bad and then singled out Christian born-again fundamentalism as if a Southern Baptist from Georgia or a Calvinist from the Carolinas or a conservative Catholic from Louisiana should be guarded against as much as any hooded ISIS devotee. Have we really been that well catechized by our media and universities?

The New Trojan Horse

We call it ludicrous, ridiculous, foolhardy, but as of yet I have not heard the proper word for the current administration's 'proposal'. It seems to me that 'treachery' 'treasonous' are a bit more accurate. This is like the Trojans requesting the Trojan Horse. "Oh, but the Greeks are refugees." (Ah, yes, but I guess the Chaldean Christians did not qualify.) And the statistic that made me wonder was that 77 percent of the Moslem 'refugees' happened to be young men to which the commentator said that struck him as noteworthy. Yes, I would say, noteworthy as well. Hopefully someone will make a note of that.

Lewis's Letters to Children

In reading "Letters to Children" I am reminded why C.S. Lewis was such a success with his children's writings. You see it in his letters to the Lucys, Peters, Susans, Edmunds that wrote to him principally about Narnia. It is quite astonishing how this great intellect and famous Oxford don treats even the littlest reader as if he were his primary friend and correspondent. I see that after reading these letters that I can actually like Mr. Lewis even better than I already had.

Faith in Mankind?

Can it be that even after the events in Paris that one can still say, "I put my faith in mankind."?Mankind seems the last place anyone would place such a trust. As C.S. Lewis once remarked man suffers from a kind of curvature of soul. With the events that we are witnessing it seems on a daily basis whether school shootings or coordinated bombings, unconstitutional leaders who continually divide us as a people with their subtle inuendos as if they really did wish to unite, innocents losing their innocence not in institutions of higher learning but as early as kindergarten, when the sacred sanctuary of motherhood would become one of the most dangerous habitats for a newly formed human, when we have come to change our own ordained biologies and that this becomes the new herosim---well I have to wonder at the reasoning process in one who seeks to place his faith in the kind of being that is man

The Alarm Clock is Ringing

Is there going to be a point in time when the alarm goes off and we actually wake up and understand that when God is exiled from our land that we are at the mercy of our godless modernity? Will we wake and realize that our hedonism will not heal, our feminism will not frame a family, our socialism will not solve our cynicism, our stolid statism will not be an adequate nanny, our faithlessness will not be strong enough to withstand even the false faiths that seek to overtake us?

Paris

Just this morning I heard about the terrorism of Paris. The shocking thing was that I was not shocked. It was like it was expected. I suppose it was a similiar feeling when Poland was taken after Czeckoslovakia. Some people were not shocked or surprised because they could see what Hitler was up to. Chamberlin couldn't. Churchill could. May we today have more the mind of Churchill than of Chamberlin.

White Privilege at the Library

Just had a good long discussion with the director at the library here concerning the 'Mirroring Ourselves: Seeing White Privilege" and one of the people running it was on the Task Force for Racial Justice. I asked her, "Doesn't that tell you something?" Since we are inclusivist would we have a series with different ethnic groups featured? I went on to explain that this is divisive and increasing the narrative where all we do is talk about race and victimhood all day long. Le...t us do what MLK suggested and look to the content of character rather than the color of skin? I then relayed how such a characterization paints with a broad brush and does it include my Uncle Henry that got killed in the war who was, one could say, privileged to die for his country over the Pacific, or my grandmother who was a widow and lived without government assistance in a cold water flat and raised two boys on pennies?

What Are Libraries For?

Walked into my local library and saw a sign advertizing an upcoming library event: "Mirroring Yourselves. Understanding White Privilege". The event wasn't about what I had one time thought that libraries were about: Literature. You know, maybe an event that discussed Homeric poetry, or the plays of Shakespeare, or the novels of Dickens. No. Now in our enlightened times division and victimhood are the order of business. Thus we are made to be constantly thinking about things like race rather than the content of one's character. Our libraries have not become so much a bastion of books but laboratories for social engineering. So, if the common public library has taken on this role think for a moment what might be happening in the schools to the young minds that you send there.

Liam

Saw Liam today, my neighbor's grandson and though his 'good' leg was now splinted he had a smile telling me how he was enjoying "The Horse and His Boy". You would think from the smile that was in every aspect of his face that the world was glorious and he was the picture of health and was about to set out for a favorite hike in the Andes. It occurred that such 'unfairness' is without explanation in a godless universe. How can you explain such a thing as a boy that wishes to r...un and climb trees and instead is just getting to hobble around on crutches? Can a deterministic impersonal universe explain this to us satisfactorily? I for one can only imagine a great Artist, Sculptor, Chemist, Anthropologist, would be able to suggest to me the why of such suffering; and that because this Person also is one who redeems, fixes, fuses, makes, heals, paints, chisels, creates, makes all things new, that there is where the explanation can only reside.

The Things Visibly Seen

For some reason I've had a few interchanges with those who hold that God does not exist in the past few days. And often I hear people of this persuasion say that many believe for want of comfort. But I with Lewis would respond that a glass of port wine would serve that purpose very well. For me anyway, I would answer that my belief hinges on a few things. Perhaps the most pressing bit of evidence for me is the exquisite design of the universe. It is the design in a blade of grass, in the massive quantity of wood that is within an acorn that is smaller than a golf ball; the form of the magnificent elm, the scent of the pepper bush, the exquisite perimeter of a Japanese maple leaf, the flexibility of a willow switch, the durability of a cast iron skillet, the aroma that wafts off the same skillet when bacon and eggs are cooking of a morning, a morning itself that brings with it the sun and a lighted sky after a prolonged night. These just a few things that I can't conceive just happened through cosmic coincidence. These just a few things that I must consider at least were from design done by a Designer who must leave us with a continual astonishment that will not go away.