the moment

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jesus promoted science

That time Jesus, who could do anything with a word or a wave of his hand, gave that up to cure someone using chemicals.

According to St, John the Evangelist who was Jesus’s favored disciple, as Jesus was walking along toward Jericho, where Joshua fit the battle of, He saw a man blind from birth, and rather than deal with the old superstitious belief that the man was blind because one of his parents sinned, the whole Original Sin concept, He explained to his disciples who asked Him about this that,

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned.” 

So much for holding that belief in His name, and he went further to explain,

This happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

They had already seen him cure the blind, get lame people up and walking, and even bring a dead guy back to life using merely words and hand gestures, so, one has to ask what was this going to show them that they had not already seen?

He began by spitting on the ground to make some mud, and then put it on the guy’s eyes telling him to go wash it off, and when he did, he could see.

That spit-mud thing was new.

When his neighbors saw that he could see and asked what happened, the formerly blind guy told them,

 “The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So, I went and washed, and then I could see.”

Why these added steps, making a chemical compound, physically applying it to the guy’s eyes, and then telling him to walk away and wash up?

Some lame people were just told to stand up.

The lepers just got a wave of the hand. He simply told dead Lazarus to come out of his tomb. One old lady just had to touch his clothes. There was even that time He cured that Roman’s servant from miles away.

Why in this one case the spit and mud then, especially when, in spite of what they had already seen, after clearly stating that this whole thing was so that “the works of God might be displayed in him”?

Could it possibly be that he wanted people to see that sometimes there was a need for chemicals to get the job done?

The Bible’s biggest group, of right-wing conservatives, the Pharisees, seemed to have a bigger concern about the blind guy’s sight being restored on the sabbath than the actual healing.

It wasn’t what was done, or even curiosity as to how spittle and dirt cured his blindness, they were concerned when it was done and who did it, not that it was done, and effectively at that.

They called in the guy’s parents who admitted to not know anything, and when the Pharisees pointed out that the person who cured him was a sinner for doing this on the Sabbath, the guy himself honestly answered,

 “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”

When they then tried the tactic that the healer might be from somewhere else especially since the formerly blind guy and the Pharisees did not know where Jesus had come from, and as if the healer’s nationality was something that made the curing a bad thing, his response was a pragmatic,

“Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes.We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

They didn’t like this, so, they yelled at him for what he just said because to them he was merely some poor Schlep who had been poor and blind, his opinions or factual accounts assumed to be dismissible, so they pushed him out the door.

The question then comes back to why this time, after claiming the whole thing was so His disciples could see something really fantastic, He used spit and mud that He never used before, and considering He cured a couple of blind people with just the wave of his hand as he left Jericho, did not use again.

Perhaps He was showing us that, yes, sometimes things happen in magical, miraculous ways, yet, sometimes more physical things were needed.

While religious conservatives pray for healing miracles instead of using what science and medicine have devised, it appears that they just want Jesus to wave his hand and make it so, while ignoring that He used a combination of chemical-based materials, the contents of which no one questioned, and may have made sure through Operation Warp Speed we had something as useful as spit and dirt.

Perhaps, what these religious conservatives need to accept is that the Covid vaccine is the modern-day spit and dirt.

Even Jesus exercised options.

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the gop blockhead

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Mitch’s year in review

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irony at the school board meeting.

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tucker’s desires

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for the children

The child is father to the man, and sometimes the child acts more informed than the man.

Older people with few years left on earth are making decisions that will affect the lives of children who will be here much further into the future and should have some say in what that will be like.

California would allow children ages 12 and up to be vaccinated without their parents’ consent under a new proposal introduced late Thursday by a state senator.

Alabama allows children as low as age 14, Oregon at 15, Rhode Island and South Carolina at 16 to get the Covid vaccination without parental permission freeing many from being victimized by parental and community political beliefs.

Apparently, kids do not want to die to own the libs like the older generations are willing to do and, apparently, want the kids to do also.

The balance between the red and blue states with low age limits has been tilted by California that has lowered the age to 12, one year older than Washington DC at age 11.

The problem in DC is that, in spite of the GOP claim that this is just another example of the Democrats overreach, this decision was made by the D.C. Council, not the Democratic Party and, something easily overlooked, this decision was made 2 years ago to deal with a measles outbreak in 2019, so the present use of Dr. Fauci in postings about this are obviously extremely uninformed as this was two years ago and done by a Council on which Fauci is not a member.

In none of these states are minors required to get vaccinated. They are simply allowed to decide whether they want to be vaccinated or not regardless of parental viewpoints.

Considering that of the four states that already allow younger children to choose a vaccine, two are red and two are blue. This would appear to be a bipartisan thing and not a one party overreach.

California already allows 12-year-olds to consent to the Hepatitis B and Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines and, also, to treatment for sexually transmitted infections, substance abuse, and mental health disorders all without political or religious restrictions that do not in any way benefit kids, just promote political ideologies often based on comfortable misinformation or deliberate lies to produce a desired end regardless how it affects the kids.

Currently in California, unless the vaccine deals with STDs, minors ages 12 to 17 cannot be vaccinated without permission from their parents or guardian. The proposed California bill would lift the parental requirement for that age group for any FDA approved vaccine.

The law would allow religious, medical, and personal beliefs to have control, but do we really want to subject young children to live whatever time is left with their lives influenced by someone else’s decision especially when the ones objecting to vaccinations like to carry signs insisting “My Body. My Choice”.

Of course, this autonomy ends when it comes to “Choice” and Gender Dysphoria.

Objections to vaccines have resulted in an increase of contagious diseases, like measles, that can spread among kids whose parents want to own the libs.

In California there were demonstrations before Covid against mandatory school vaccines, Polio, Measles etc., so a school-wide mandate for vaccines is not going well with those who just do not accept reality.

Republicans object to this lower age limit because they see it as one more example of removing parents from the equation. Regardless what is best for the kids, the Republicans insist that parents should have the final say in the choices made about someone else’s body.

No one is trying to remove parental control over a parent’s involvement in their kids’ health care decisions. People are acknowledging that some kids may be victims of the political agendas of others.

Because of the nature of the activities that largely involve large groups in close quarters often with prolonged physical contact, children who may want to join in these activities and will want to get vaccinated because they can’t participate in sports, band or other similar activities without proper vaccinations to safeguard the health of all participants and want all vaccinations covered. However, parental politics and vaccination ignorance could affect many kids the rest of their lives because of lost potential opportunities that they could not train themselves to develop because of lack of participation.

For every light on Broadway there might be a broken heart, but some hearts are broken while Broadway is still a distant dream because the potential star could not be in the play that would have begun the process.

“I coulda been a contender.”

And, as we all know, all parents are perfect, accept everything about their children without question, and always, always have the welfare 0f their kids protected from politics.

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talking points

Ask a Republican a question about anything and you will get a talking point.

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Pro-life?

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he isn’t

When I began my teaching career as a Special Education teacher, my first group of students were those labelled “Emotionally Disturbed”. Special Ed was a new field in the mid-1970s, and few people in administrative positions who had to be in charge, had any training in Special Ed and saw children other than those with observable traits like blindness, deafness, and Down’s Syndrome, but they just could not wrap their heads around those instances of students whose needs and limitations were more subtle.

The assumption was that any sociopathic kid must be emotionally disturbed as they behaved outside the norm as a matter of course and just needed to be controlled somehow since the days of just kicking a problem kid out of school were over.

Actually, what they needed was behavior modification so they would be better able to handle the situations they had them acting out because of some deep, emotional wound.

It was not so much what the students did, as that was a given, but why they did it so that it could be more effectively addressed. Even today in retirement, I still am not so much interested in what someone does, but why they do it.

Beyond the obvious observable behavior that is clear and unmistakable, it was necessary to determine why that moment, why that action. It took longer than a swift kick to observe, assess, and address as it is harder to see and takes longer to assess, but it usually bore fruit

The Why often explained the What, and it was from that point that positive change could be mad.

A certain local elected official has a problem with immigrants. He sees them as “Criminal Illegal Aliens” who should have come here like others did, like his father had.

As a Gay man I am very familiar with the overcompensation of certain closeted Gays who, keep people from seeing their truth by being the strongest anti-Gay person around. This often explains the many conservative, anti-Gay politicians who, in spite of their constant condemnations of Gay people, are found attempting to solicit sex in mens restrooms.

So, I got to thinking that because of the often cartoonish way this politician addresses immigration and because of how vehemently he does so, and how often, like the Anti-Gay politicians and the kids in my Special Ed classes, there is a why to it.

During World War II Sir John, a title bestowed on him by Pius XII (pope of a church that does not have a history of respecting knights if you go by the Templars and accept the Knights of Columbus is just a fraternal organization), worked for British Intelligence.

Sir John was posted in Middle East during the war where he adopted a young man and eventually, using his connections, had the youth’s birth certificate changed from what it was at birth to what would get him into the United States easier when Sir John moved here having himself been granted a number of exemptions to the requirements of a foreign national because he had been useful in the war. He came in by special arrangement not standard procedure.

Sir John did not come to this country the standard way but used whatever was at his disposal to get around the restrictions placed on others even if that meant he got special treatment and had used deception in the process.

So, when his son condemns immigrants, lumping them all as “criminal illegal aliens”, claiming they should come into the country the established way without exceptions or modifications of existing rules and laws the way the good immigrants do “Me thinks he doth protest too much.”

Those who seek to hide realities because they do not favor them generally do so by distraction and projection. Their crimes either disappear because of lack of attention, or they over exaggerate an alleged threat so that while people work to defend against that, they are unaware that their leader is guilty of the same thing and can avoid accountability because people are too distracted to notice his actions.

Rather than telling the public that immigrants are most likely criminal illegal aliens who should only gain entry by following the rules, he needs to start telling people how his father got here, so that if they can’t enter the standard way, they can find the loopholes to get in like his father did.

And that DACA kid his father brought to this country from Palestine with false documents?

He got the benefits this politician’s political party wants to take from other DACA kids whose fathers haven’t been knighted by a pope.

If we are busy looking at the “criminal illegal aliens” this politician constantly points out, it is because he does not want us to see the criminal illegal alien in his background that he is hiding.

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