The Wandering Heretic

This will make the second of the family to graduate from Baldwin-Wallace College (I was the first). It was a wonderful day.

Photos were taken with my brand new, purchased for the occasion, Panasonic FZ28. A great camera with amazing features.

And no, the good looking guy posing with my son in the freeze frame is not me. It is my brother in law. Not certain how that got to be the frame, but he is better looking than me anyway.

For those who are wondering, I have not given up posting or blogging.  Instead, I was hired to work for a new company in December of 2008.  It is a software house that services the same client base as that of my former employer; however, the package is completely different and complex.  They have been gracious enough to give me a whole month (and more) to learn the package and get certified.  I have found that it is taking much more than an eight hour/five workday week to meet this expectation.

Perhaps it is a sign of aging, but I don’t memorize as well as I used to do.  So blogging is taking a sabbatical (unfortunately, I am not) while I work at this task.

I thank you all for your patience.  Check back sometime in the middle of February, 2009 for new contributions or look over some of the past essays.  I think you will find them amusing.  I unlimited the sidebar so all of the blogs now are accessable.

I was shocked to find out that the Roman Catholic priest and writer, Andrew M. Greely, was seriously injured in a freak accident last Friday, November 7th. According to a report in the Chicago Sun Times, the priest had taken a cab to the L station in Chicago to return home after a lecture.

As the cab began to pull away, the 80-year-old priest fell to the ground and hit his head, fracturing his skull. He was taken to Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, where he was in critical condition, friends and family said Saturday afternoon.

“Right now he’s critical but stable, very stable,” niece Laura Durkin said. “Doctors are hopeful and pleased with his progress from [Friday] to [Saturday].” Greeley, who was wearing a Barack Obama baseball cap when he fell, suffered bleeding on the brain.

As of this writing, the priest remains in critical but stable condition. My prayers are with Father Greeley and the whole event saddens me more than I can say. You see, Father Greeley and I have an odd history together though we have never met. Perhaps he more than anyone else on this planet is responsible for my remaining a Christian. His influence touches almost everything I think and write. (This despite the fact the Greeley, especially in this election cycle, is a rabid—some take that literally—Liberal Democrat and I remain a conservative I don’t know what.)

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My last thoughts on the election; or at least my last published thoughts for awhile. I’m going to regroup and concentrate on what is really important: the Church as the Body of Jesus Christ and what that means in terms of perspective and daily life.

Still, the election brings up some curious results. First of all, I was wrong. The Evangelical Vote was not split nearly as much as I had assumed in a previous post. In fact, the white Evangelical vote was the only constant the Republicans had in 2008. According to the Washington Post:

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released this week found McCain collecting about 68 percent of the white evangelical vote, compared to Barack Obama’s 22 percent. That number is very similar to level of support President Bush received in June 2004, when he led then Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry 65 to 30 among white evangelicals.

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We, the United States citizens, have elected the first declared radically left wing President. It does not matter if the popular vote in favor of this change was 52% of the populace; this country works in terms of the electoral college and on those terms it was a mandate. Those in power will act on those terms. With the construction of the congress—potentially as of this writing, filibuster proof—and the soon to be Supreme Court, Nancy Pelosi and her kind are likely to control the direction of this country for at least the next two years and probably longer.

In opposition to  the neo-cons who switched to Obama while declaring their hopes that he “would not do what he says he is going to do,” I must make the assumption that Obama will not only do what he says; he will do what the ultra liberals tell him to do. After all, he did it 97% of the time in the past. It is not likely to change once he is in office.

Using Obama’s stated objectives over this election, one could easily develop the following scenario. When I use the words “they” or “them” unless the context says otherwise, I mean the Obama/Pelosi/Clinton/Reid cartel. When you get to the “results section” the numbers in parenthesis will refer to the previous actions by this cartel.

1. First they passed the Fairness Doctrine and I did not care as I have not listened to Rush Limbaugh in years and consider him an arrogant blowhard.

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This was my hardest election ever to vote. As I noted before, I do not think it is an option not to vote; however, this election was the first to temp me in that non-direction. I voted against rather than for a candidate. McCain ran a sloppy campaign because frankly even he didn’t believe the “right wing” jargon he was using. Neither did Obama, but he was a better liar than McCain. (Sorry, I don’t believe a candidate who consistently either voted “present” or voted for every tax increase he could suddenly espousing tax cuts.)

Both candidates voted for the “bailout” or “rescue” of the mismanaged banking industry. By so doing, they enabled the rich executives to escape the consequences of their borderline fraudulent activity and retain their jobs and perks. I do not begrudge them their rich salaries should they earn them; but normally if you make a decision that tanks your company—not to mention the entire economy of the country—you should have some negative consequences, like losing that job and those benefits.

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As I noted previously, just as Colin Powell called out the time of death for the McCain candidacy for President, his opponent’s V.P. candidate, Joseph Biden, got out the paddles and yelled “Clear.” In essence, though McCain is probably still going to lose, Biden’s statements gave some doubt that even Biden himself desires such an outcome. For fairness sake, I will repeat Biden’s words as reported to ABC News. The statements were given at a Democratic fundraiser—of all things—in Seattle (emphasis added).

Mark my words, it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.

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Updated: See below.

Now that Colin Powell has probably given the coup de grace to the McCain/Palin candidacy, I am going to take some time to review or give my postmortem on this year’s Presidential Election. (Though barely a day after Powell pulled the trigger, Joe Biden dove in front of the bullet—but I will discuss that issue in my next post.)

First, in terms of image projection this has to be the most surreal set of campaigns I have ever witnessed. John McCain, the political centrist, the darling Republican of the Democrats for the last 10 years, is vilified in Obama’s ads for his “extremist” views. Yet Obama, who has voted with his Party 97% of the time and whose tendencies hover with the radical left, is portrayed successfully as a moderate. This truly is a world that displays William Stringfellow’s assertion that “image” is a principality related to, but ultimately divorced from the actual person.

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My last post discussed some of the rather strong reasons against Christians voting in secular elections. It also discussed the alternative of Christians voting for a third party candidate who has no chance of winning but accords the most with their ideals. Though some of the reasons  given in that post may have seemed spurious, some were fairly strong. Almost all of them were by theologians and Christian writers I have grown to respect.

Yet I must disagree with most of them. In some cases, my opposition is a matter of logic. For example, Ellul’s argument that voting reinforces a hierarchical structure that places power into the hands of a few. Since power corrupts, Christians voting only feeds a system of corruption.

My response is that the hierarchy is in place. Not voting also feeds the hierarchical structure, in that it puts into power those we may have noted against. To misquote Gary North, it is not a question of hierarchy or no hierarchy but a question of which hierarchy.

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