Fear and the invisible dog fence

     My wife and I were on a walk one day about a year ago and as we walked by a house a large dog came running over barking loudly at us.  He stopped just short of the road and scared the crap out of us.   The lady of the house was outside and yelled "Don't worry he won't go out of the yard! He thinks he will get shocked!"   And of course he dog did stay in the yard.  She came over and talked to us and told us that they had used an invisible dog fence with a shock collar for several months and now they don't need to use it at all because he has been conditioned to stay in the yard.

     Humans are not much different from dogs when it comes to fear.  All be it, we are a little more sophisticated than our canine counterparts but still we fear pain just as much as they do.  Maybe even a little bit more.  Anybody who has either been an older brother or had an older brother knows the sheer terror that younger brothers live under.   They are told, "Don't go in the basement there's a monster down there!"  or "Don't go into the creepy barn!" or  Don't wander in the back woods there's a man with an ax out there!" etc..   For me, I had a fear of clowns (something about that creepy clown on Captain Kangaroo that I hated).  My brother found this out and he would hide this picture we had of a clown in various conspicuous places like: my bed, or my closet  and wait for the fireworks to go off.   Big brothers love doing that.  It's part of the pecking order and keeping little brothers in their place.

    But even as adults, people still use fear as invisible dog fences to keep us under their control.   Take for example, the lefts use of racism.  Racism has been cried out as the reason for everything wrong in this country from law enforcement, to the deficit, to why ISIS rose to power, to why Trump got elected President (last I saw Hillary and Trump are both white so I just don't get that last one).   Now liberals on college campuses are asking for Safe-Spaces for black students to live in separate from whites.   Uh.... isn't that segregation all over again?   Oddly enough that is exactly how segregation started in the US back in the early 1900's.   President Wilson segregated the military (they were not before him) and also all government agencies including the Post Office.  When asked why he did this he told a reporter that "It's for their own safety and also for efficiency as they work better among their own kind".   Sound familiar?   Sounds to me Wilson (a democrat) was arguing for Safe-Spaces in government as well.  Today there is less racism than ever before.   We no longer have segregated schools, businesses or sports.  We no longer see signs for "Whites Only",  We have black judges, black generals, black actors and actresses.  We have even elected a black person to the highest position in the land.   But still the call of RACISM! RACISM! is heard regularly on the news.    To me, this is done for 2 purpose.  The first is to keep blacks from leaving the Democrat Party.   Telling them constantly that the others in the world hate them and are out to get them can be a very powerful tool.   The other reason is that it has the power to control those outside the fence as well.  Like a fence that reads "DANGER: ELECTRIFIED FENCE"  we stay clear and don't go near.  In the past when Republicans have tried to engage the black communities out come the racism rants telling them that they are bigots and racists and to stay away.

    Fear can also be used by those on the right as well.  The GOP uses the fear of having our drug laws or social-morality weakened to keep it's members in line.   Those who think about leaving the GOP to become Libertarians are mocked and made fun of (Just watch how John Stossel is treated on "The O'Reilly Factor").   The drug war is a favorite fear monger issue often used to keep the GOP sheep from straying into Libertarian pastures.  "Do you want heroin sold at Walmart?  That's what you are going to get if you vote Libertarian!".   Fear can also be leveraged by religiously inclined political people in the GOP.   If gay marriage is allowed, to many of them, God will smite the US and take away our good economy and let us be destroyed (trust me God has enough on us already to take us down without gay-marriage on the list).   Fear drives people that listen to them to run to their phones and computers to contact their representatives in Washington DC to prevent such a calamity from occurring (and also send a nice $100 check to the group asking them to "Stand up for God!").

    Like that dog that never tests to see if the fence is still ON, we never risk seeing if what we are being told is factual or not.   I have written before that the PC (political correctness) police have toy guns for weapons.   They are not real, but so few people stand up to them and make them defend their positions that they get away with it constantly.   Politicians for years have done nothing to address the error in political correctness and by not doing so have surrendered to these idiots and let them control the language and ideas that can be discussed.

    That was until Donald Trump came around.  Many have said his campaign was "unconventional".  That is just the medias way of saying "He took on the PC police".  He showed that he could say whatever he wanted and however he wanted and people would still vote for him.   All the other politicians were convinced that your messaging must be filtered through a think-tank of like-minded politically correct 21 year-old women first before you could speak it.   Trump proved them wrong.  He showed them that many in America hate Political Correctness.   We wanted REAL, not FAKE, speeches.   We wanted Political Correctness ended.  It has been the Apartheid of the human psyche in our country of most of the last 30 years and Trump showed us that the fence no longer worked.   It was dead.

    I think it's going to be a long 4 years for liberals.   I hope Trump takes a blow-torch their "Temple of Political Correctness" and leaves nothing but a pile ash behind.   Maybe then we can go back to talking plainly to each other once again and stop living in constant fear of each other.

God's Economy

   If you think this is a blog about Capitalism (or any other ism for that matter) then think again.   Instead I wrote this blog in response to something I have heard various people over the years use as a reason to hold them back from faith in Jesus.  It is the idea of God punishing people who from a worldly vantage point seem pretty decent and do a lot of good in the world.  To them, these people should not be damned.  God should make some allowances for them, given their "good lives and good works".  After all, why should God damn them and not others, just because they believe in Jesus.

    This is really nothing new.   King David lamented about a similar issue as well but from a different point of view.  He lamented that he knew he had sinned (he had committed adultery and killer her husband to boot!), and that NOTHING he could give back to God was adequate. In his words, "all the bulls on a thousand hills are all yours!".   Meaning, even if I sacrifice 1000 bulls to you, those bulls were all created by God and therefore worthless in payment.   It's like being in debt to a bank and then taking out a loan from said bank to pay back the same bank.  It's totally futile.

    But what about those "good people" and their "good works" ?  Surely that must account of something! Right?

    To explain how good works don't matter, imagine you work for a company and you as an employee make a vital mistake that costs the company $100,000.   You fear losing your job and so you go to the boss and tell him you want to make up for the loss any way you can.  He looks at you and says, "Okay! Here is what you are going to do!".  He points over to the sign near the entryway that reads "All Employees must work from 8am-5pm Mon-Friday" and tells you "Instead of working from 8-5 you will work from 6am to 6pm every day for 1 year with NO extra pay for those extra 20 hours per week you put in".  You thank him profusely for not firing you and allowing you to work off the lost money.

    But in God's world things are different. God created us to be perfect.  He says, "Be Holy for I the Lord your God am Holy!".   His employment sign simply reads: "Be Perfect".  Now the problem becomes that there is absolutely no way to go beyond PERFECT.  It's absolute.  So even if I do SOME good works, those are things I am supposed to do anyway, and I am supposed to do them ALL the time as well.   So how can I put in any extra "overtime" good works?   The simple answer is this: I can't!

    So if everything thing in the world is God's in the first place and I am required to be perfect, clearly this debt cannot be paid from a worldly point of view.  It must therefore be paid from out of GOD's OWN POCKET.

   That is what God did.  As we celebrate Christmas this year let's remember that Jesus came to pay that debt I created and had no way to pay back.