Does Any of This Make Any Sense? June 18, 2019
Posted by Dr. Robert Owens in Religion, Uncategorized.Tags: Dr. Robert Owens, fallen man, gospel of Jesus Christ, Meaning of life, Salvation, sin
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Looking at the world around us it’s easy to find ourselves asking this question. When we see the suffering, the depression, the poverty, and the horror of everyday life for so many it’s hard not to see the nightmare reality of this world as a curse.
That’s a good place to start searching for the meaning in it all because it is a curse.
You see when God created the world He created it as a good thing, a wondrous, and beautiful thing. Here’s the rub; actions have consequences.
I’ve always thought if I ever found a perfect church I’d spoil it by joining because I’m not perfect. Most of us mature enough in life to realize we aren’t quite what we could or should be. Some people never attain this level of self-awareness and we judge them to suffer from a type of psychological problem known as narcissism. A central aspect of narcissism is grandiosity. That is, narcissists tend to think highly of themselves. In particular, they tend to have a positive view of themselves compared to other people.
Most of us don’t suffer from this malady. It is more often some form of feeling we aren’t good enough that plagues us. Those who stumble out of a dysfunctional family are all too often familiar with this one.
Whatever brand of psychobabble seeps through our lives working itself out in hubris and braggadocio or anxiety and self-doubt it doesn’t take a genius to figure out this world is messed up. Neither is it too complicated for the least perceptive among us to discern. All too often what the world calls good is bad and what the world calls bad is good. This alone is enough to make us see the fractured carnival mirror reflection of justice that permeates our reality. Add to this our personal experiences and anyone who thinks we’ve found ourselves in a bed of roses may be fooling themselves but they aren’t fooling anyone else.
Anyone who can walk through this vale of tears with no faith is a better man then I Gunga Din.
I wasn’t able to do it. I made it till I was thirty years old and the meaninglessness of it all was on the verge of driving me to suicide. I kept coming back to if that’s all there is, my friends then let’s keep dancing let’s break out the booze and have a ball if that’s all there is. However, I found living at the perpetual party at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe was not very uplifting and after a while I couldn’t even pretend it was fun. How anyone can stagger through all this with no hope of anything beyond this is beyond me.
I can only pray that if they ever come to the end of themselves they will look to God. That’s what I did and I was surprised to find that God was looking at me.
‘Why is the world so messed up? Because God made man His viceroy in this creation and instead of listening to God and doing things His way we listened to Satan and gave the whole shooting match away. The story is there for us in Genesis and because of that decision God laid a curse on the whole deal.
But He also gave us a promise at the same time that He would send a Savior. Jesus is that Savior. The penalty for disobeying God is eternal separation from God. The only way back is to live a perfect life which no one can do. So God became a human, lived a perfect life, and then died for the sins He never committed as a substitute for us.
In doing this He defeated sin, death, and the Devil. He also opened the way for all of us to get in on the action. All we have to do is accept Jesus as our leader in life and believe that God raised Him from the dead and that’s it. The whole deal is reversed and we are once welcomed home. So let’s run like the prodigal to greet the Father who has waited for us, who greets us like the like lost child we are.
So does any of this make any sense? It does. As a matter of fact it makes perfect sense.
You see no matter how messed up it is if we will accept God’s offer, if we will step past the end of ourselves and into His waiting arms the veil will fall from our eyes and we will see this world for what it is: an incubator for the children of God.
It’s not a matter of seeing and then believing instead it’s a case of believing so you can see.
The Bible lays all this out in great detail. Anyone who’s interested can contact me for a guided tour.
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2019 Contact Dr. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens or visit Dr. Owens Amazon Page / Edited by Dr. Rosalie Owens
An Arrow Aimed at America’s Heartland June 4, 2019
Posted by Dr. Robert Owens in Politics, Politiocal Philosophy, Uncategorized.Tags: Dr. Robert Owens, Electoral College, Majority rule, minority rights, National Popular Vote
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Are you ready to get down into the weeds and look at a current attack on our Federal System through the lenses of American Constitutional History to gain an understanding of something which is nothing less than an arrow aimed at America’s Heartland?
This is a wakeup call to citizens of Middle America of a plot to strip us of our electoral importance by the entrenched elites of the Deep State.
Recently, Nevada became the 15th state to pass a measure granting its Electoral College votes to the candidate winning the nationwide popular vote regardless of how the citizens of their own State voted.
This movement is being led by an organization called National Popular Vote. The founders of the 501(c)(4) Are election law expert and attorney Barry Fadem and John Kaza (co-inventor of the scratch off lottery ticket).
Fadem and Kaza both have impressive careers filled with professional achievement. However, it’s easy for anyone with even a smattering of knowledge of civics to discount their efforts by assuming though they may be intelligent and accomplished they don’t know much about how our government is designed to work.
In reality the exact opposite might be the case. These two and their organization aim to disrupt the balance between the States and have intentionally launched this arrow aimed at America’s Heartland.
Their objective is to influence a group of States whose electoral votes total 270, which is the number needed to win the presidency, into an alliance binding them to follow a majority vote attainable by a combination of New York, New England, and the Left Coast without regard to how the citizens of the States voted.
During the Constitutional Convention the Framers vigorously debated how the government they were designing should operate. When looking at the election of the chief executive they rejected direct democracy because they believed it was too prone to result in a majority that would act as a tyrant.
Looking back across time this collection of largely homeschooled patriots drew upon their knowledge of history and philosophy. Specifically they looked to the writings of Plato who wrote in the Republic that the people or the demos, as they were called in Greek could not be trusted because they would inevitably vote for whoever promised to meet their desires of the moment even if that meant taking from others or from the national treasury. In other words they would vote for a Santa Clause over a Washington or a Jefferson. A lesson well learned and applied by the pitiful politicians promising paradise who make up the best Congress money can buy.
Plato thought the majority would lack the knowledge and wisdom to make sound choices. Of course he didn’t know about our enlightened American education system that spends more time indoctrinating the young skulls full of mush about Al Gore’s Climate hoax religion than it does about the founding of this country. A federally controlled union infected system spends more energy turning our children into good little socialist than teaching them that capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than any other system ever devised.
Instead of echoing the platitudes of Comrade Sanders and AOC as if they had any chance of working in the real world our government indoctrinators could teach about how the Connecticut Compromise led to the structure of our bicameral legislature and the executive branch. They could teach that the electoral college was created to prevent the United States from becoming a place where the majority subjugated the minority.
Hamilton and Madison, two of the key strategists in devising our government focused on factions or combinations of likeminded people who work together to advance their own interests. Mainly they spoke of majorities and minorities. Madison especially thought that government must be structured in such a way as to fragment the power of the majority so that it could not become tyrannical.
When you read Federalist 9 (Hamilton), Federalist10, and Federalist 51 (Madison), these deep thinking political theorists identified three key elements they felt existed to help give the new United States a chance for success: its population size, geographic size, and the differing interests of the independent States. Back in those days before smartphones, the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, and 24-hour cable news, these factors made it difficult if not impossible for minority factions to combine into a coalition large enough to do any real damage to our system. But today with near instantaneous communication people can be rallied quickly which means emotions can easily out run reflection
In America today intolerant minority factions can be whipped up into tyrannical majorities in a way the Framers never imagined. At the very time in our history when we are more vulnerable than ever to manipulated majority rule the National Popular Vote movement wants us to embrace direct democracy at the presidential level.
The Framers designed a system of government limited in scope and shackled by the Constitution. A system designed to do little as opposed to doing too much. They attempted to build a system based on the nature of man. A system of divided power able to control humanity’s less desirable tendencies.
As Madison said in Federalist #51, “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
This identifies the basic problem perfectly. We aren’t angels.
Because of this we need controls designed to prevent unfettered majority dominance. The Electoral College is the tool given to us by the Framers to make sure all of the States have a voice that is heard. However, if enough States adopt the National Popular Vote this safeguard will be neutralized, not through amending the Constitution but instead by doing an end-run around it. If this happens we’ll take a long step towards the dystopian vision our Framers sought to avoid: the tyranny of the majority.
One question I have is, “How do these political manipulators convince people to vote to make their future votes irrelevant?” To paraphrase Lincoln, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. But you can probably fool enough people to convince a majority to vote themselves onto the sidelines of History.” If this arrow finds its mark a bicoastal electoral juggernaut will trample the voice of the Heartland into the dust of History.
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2019 Contact Dr. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens or visit Dr. Owens Amazon Page / Edited by Dr. Rosalie Owens