The Cleansing Power of Destruction

Not only in the Bible, but in many mythologies, there comes a time when the only way to renew the Earth and wipe away evil is through absolute destruction. In the Bible it's the Flood, the Deluge. In Norse mythology it is Ragnarök: the complete destruction and regeneration of the world. In both cases, complete destruction is followed by rebirth. While the Torah itself says nothing about an end-times destruction, the implication of the Flood is clear. G-d promised not to destroy the Earth with WATER again. He did not promise NOT to destroy the Earth. Nor did He promise that WE wouldn't destroy the Earth. Christian eschatology would become far more explicit, practically a blow-by-blow description of the destruction of the world.

In the New Testament, the focus is on forgiveness and redemption. In the Tanakh, the Old Testament, the focus is on resistance and destruction. In the New Testament, we are told not to resist an evil person, and to turn the other cheek. In the Tanakh we are told to violently oppose and destroy evil. These are reasons, among others, why I came to the conclusion that the religion of the New Testament and the religion of the Tanakh, the Old Testament, can in no way be described as the same religion, the beliefs of Christians notwithstanding. While I once embraced the teaching of the New Testament, the peace, tolerance and forgiveness in it, G-d with a human face, I equally disliked the teaching of the Old.

I compelled myself to read the Old Testament to try to resolve these contradictions, and found that the contradictions all existed in the New Testament. Man as god. Non-resistance. Violation of commandments like dietary laws and the Sabbath. These were not renovations of the Tanakh, they were flat denials of it. The Tanakh was consistent with itself, the New Testament was not consistent with it, or even sometimes with simple logic.

And I fell in love with the Commandments and the fierce clarity of the Tanakh. The Tanakh tears you, burns you. It is supposed to hurt. What it does to you is a gentler version of what the Flood did to the world. You are purified like silver in a furnace. I grew to love this fiercely and uncompromisingly holy Lord, next to whom there are no others. Neither son nor ghost. Adonai eloheinu, adonai Echad. The Lord is One.

Getting back to the topic of destruction - Armageddon as conceived in Ragnarök or as conceived as the Christian or Jewish Last Day is actually a deeply hopeful conception. Evil can be fixed, sin can be fixed, the corruption of the Earth can be fixed. Fixed drastically, horribly, but fixed. Evil doesn't get the last word. The alternative to this is a living nightmare: an eternal twilight of ignorance and evil.

Hell on Earth.

With the riots in the streets these days, with the brazen lies of the corporations through the news media, people turning on each other, hatred, this hell on Earth seems very close to me. It is easy to wish for the cleansing fire of destruction to delete, to "cancel" this world and bring a new one into being. However, the prophet Amos warns us that things will get very very bad before anything gets better:

"Woe to you who long
for the day of the Lord!
Why do you long for the day of the Lord?
That day will be darkness, not light.
It will be as though a man fled from a lion
only to meet a bear,
as though he entered his house
and rested his hand on the wall
only to have a snake bite him.

Will not the day of the Lord be darkness, not light—
pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness?"

~Amos 5:18-20

So we can deduce two things: one, that hell on Earth WILL come. At least for a season, it will come. And two, that it HAS to come is fundamentally a failure. We failed. Humanity failed. Armageddon didn't hinge on G-d's will but our action. We've got nothing to be happy about. We should hang our heads. It's gonna be BAD.

It's not dissimilar to being optimistic about death. We are not supposed to love death but LIFE. Death is a punishment or rather a correction. If atonement comes after, if the Kingdom comes after, it doesn't make the correction less of a correction or any less terrible. For every person who makes it into the Kingdom, how many won't? For the others, death is just death. We aren't supposed to be happy about death or Armageddon either one. It is because of our failure that it comes.

However one hopeful thing is, Evil doesn't win. In the end, Evil is destroyed utterly. That is one reason why I don't believe in hell. As long as there are souls in hell, Evil still exists. Eternal hell would be a slight to G-d's ultimate victory and ultimate justice. Evil is wiped from existence, completely.

In a conversation I once had a year or two ago, I said that I was not afraid that cataclysmic destruction would come to the world. I said I was afraid that it wouldn't. Because if America is not punished, if the world is not punished, G-d is not just. This would mean that eternal twilight, eternal ignorance and evil, eternal hell on Earth would come. Absolutely, with certainty, it would come. No destruction actually means no hope.

But G-d IS, and G-d IS just.

The End

Take a wild guess how many unarmed black people were shot by cops in 2019. Just take a shot in the dark.

500?

100?

50?

No.

TEN

Of these ten, several were in the act of violently assaulting the officer in question. Ten, out of 350 MILLION PEOPLE.

Now any unnecessary death is bad, but not all these deaths were unnecessary. If someone is beating you to death, and you have a gun, you kinda have to shoot them.

NOW, how many blacks were murdered by other blacks?

I can't find statistics for 2019, but in 2015 nearly 6000 blacks were murdered by other blacks.

You won't find Black Lives Matter protesting that shit. Lying leftist scumbags.

For the sake of these statistically insignificant numbers of blacks killed by cops, we are prepared to dismantle our whole democracy. People are seriously proposing defunding police departments. Who will patrol the streets then? You guessed it: looters and thugs. Rioters are burning down buildings and police cars in the streets, and leftist politicians and media personalities are endorsing the righteousness of their violence.

This is not even remotely about oppressed black people.

What this (and the extreme examples of the coronavirus lockdown) actually is, is a left-wing coup attempt.

Now to say "left wing" is actually kind of shorthand. The people actually behind it are corporations and the very rich. Why would corporations and the very rich want what appears like a left-wing coup?

Well back in the day, when large corporations actually paid taxes, and when very rich people also paid taxes, they might have been superficially conservative. Now none of them pay shit, under Democrat OR Republican control. Their ownership in Washington was virtually complete, until Trump came along. They still mostly control Congress.

Wanna see a freakout really happen? If Trump proposes a 10% tax on sales by corporations that have more than 10 million in annual sales, expect the media and politicians to go through the fucking roof. I mean, there will be heart attacks in Washington. They may just shoot him.

The liberal actors in Hollywood, who have been egging on the riots and paying bail for vandals and probably shipping pallets of bricks to the streets, are paid by media companies who finance their movies. The mainstream media is owned by media companies, sometimes the same ones. Mainstream media that wouldn't know truthful unbiased reporting if it bit them like a rattlesnake. They are the propaganda mouthpiece for the elite few dozen corporations that functionally run the world. Congress is mostly filled with their lackeys.

So why would major corporations want socialism? They really don't. Duh. What they want is control. A de-facto totalitarian state run by a corporate oligarchy. Today they get their way more often than not, but that's not good enough. They want to get their way all the time. They want you as their slaves. And they are prepared to steamroll right over you and right over your rights and right over the American Republic to get their way. They want their man in the Oval Office, and they will fuck over the economy and burn down our cities to get what they want. Because they control Biden. Nobody but Trump controls Trump.

So they arranged, with their lackeys in States and Cities, to really crack down on the quarantine knowing that would wreck the hell out of the economy. George Floyd was just a gift, really. He handed them Riot Time on a silver platter. And so the riots and looting, to frighten the citizens and force everyone into lockstep. Violence to enforce obedience. Otherwise, you're just a racist aren't you? You believe All Cops Are Bastards, or you're just a racist. You believe that the looting is a justified and natural outbreak of rage, or else you're a racist. Follow us -

KNEEL DOWN TO US,

in echo of Kaepernick, or you are evil incarnate. You are unclean. There is no choice. No other alternative, unless you want to be the outcast scum of the earth. Unless you are a racist.

I find it interesting that to a godless lot, kneeling has become the symbol. If I did not have faith in my Lord, I would find it scary.

No, I will NEVER kneel to you. Satan.

And this is absolutely the power of Satan behind it all. Satan hates what America was supposed to be. Satan wants to be the only god here. Satan will be god and the State will be his prophet. You will bow down, you will kneel. Or we'll get you.

I live in an affluent area, and you would think that here if anywhere would be a conservative bastion. It's not. I have been speaking truth on Nextdoor to my neighbors. They have been apoplectic in their desire to bend over to the new social norm. Cops are bad, cops are racist, the system must be destroyed.

What they are truly saying is this: don't take my house, don't take my car, don't get me fired at my job, don't make me a social pariah and I'll say anything you want me to say. Cowards.

They are not worthy of America as it was intended to be. And so it will be taken away from them.

There are a few possible endgames here. One is that Trump wins 2020 anyway, that enough people see through the bullshit. At the end of 2019 I would have regarded Trump's re-election as virtually a certainty. Not now. The news media have really ramped up their lies. The pressure is on.

Economic pressure - you want the State to protect you when you can't find a job, don't you? You don't want to get fired at your job for your political incorrectness, do you?

Social pressure - you don't want everyone to think you are a racist, do you? You don't want to be a pariah on social media, do you?

Physical security pressure - your business might be next. Your house might be next to burn.

Ideological pressure - everything you see and hear says you need to follow this. Who are you, to doubt CNN?

Spiritual pressure - TaKe ThE kNeE. BoW dOwN tO sAtAn YoUr LoRd.

Aaaand... America's response to this so far as been underwhelming.  Everyone is drinking the kool-aid. They are selling their product. May G-d protect Tucker Carlson, he's the only person on a major network who is actually speaking the truth.

So, if Trump does not win, what then? Domination. They are going to push and push as hard as they can. Their true enemy is not black or white, it's traditional American conservatives. They are going to hit us with everything they can. And there are not enough of us, I don't think, to mount a successful resistance. It's possible that if they arrange a nationwide gun grab, or start demanding we all bow down to Beelzebub instead of going to church, that American conservatives are going to mount an armed resistance. The coming months and years are really going to shake out the men from the boys, and I am not sure we have enough men to keep our freedom. Who knows - may G-d grant us heroes.

So this may well be the end of America as we have known it. OR we may be laughing in January 2021 saying, well, they sucked at winning again. But right now is the pivot.

If Trump wins, then 2024 will more likely be the pivot but expect unholy hell to break out in the meantime. They may just attempt a flat-out physical violent coup.

We live in interesting times, boys and girls. ;) Now is the time for G-d's own to be separated from the chaff. If you bend the knee to Satan, if you allow fear to dominate your actions, you're done.  

Turning Their Backs

The more the people of this country turn their backs on the principles that made this country great, and blessed by G-d, the worse things will get.

And yet, our news media and many of our politicians and public figures, embrace values that are antithetical to the values that made America what it is. America is embracing the suicide of America. There are Americans cheering on the suicide of America.

If that is not the definition of f***ed up, I don't know what is.

Now for a lot of people, their response to my previous sentences might be that America isn't too great. We had slavery, we have income and other inequalities, capitalism has mutated into a rapacious monster, and yes sometimes when people's bad actions put police in a tough situation, those police aren't always as careful to preserve life (even the lives of criminals) as they should be. Hence our current situation with the death of George Floyd.

Let us set aside for the moment that the Left's solution to all that is more centralized State control, which invariably leads to stagnation at best if not outright tyranny at worst. How bad do things have to be when communism is your answer? Pretty damn bad, I guess. I thought we sorted out the issue of whether communism works when the Soviet Union fell.

However, just because your answers are terrible, doesn't mean your questions are always illegitimate. America is a place where innovation is at its best, where hard work and intelligence are frequently rewarded, but ALSO a hot mess constantly flirting with the prospect of civil war. America is a chaotic place.

Perhaps unexpectedly. the closest thing we've yet seen to "boogaloo" (civil war) wasn't right-wing militants waving guns, but left-wing militants waving Molotov cocktails. Who will drop the next shoe, remains to be seen. And at the same time that all this shit is going down, the first ever humans were launched aboard a commercially-made and partially reusable rocket. A great leap forward in manned spaceflight, created by a South African immigrant to America who had a dream about a place where anything was possible. A dream about the most forward-looking, scientifically advanced, and greatest spacefaring nation ever: America.

I am not saying that a return to the fundamental values of America will solve all our problems. The only thing that solves all problems is death. I AM saying that if we do not return to the core fundamental values of America, things will continually get worse and worse. What are these values?

1. Individual moral principles based on the Bible and the Ten Commandments. G-d is at the core of all these other values.

2. Limited government and individual responsibility. If the citizens are responsible, the government doesn't have to be. If the government is made responsible for everything, the citizens eventually lose their freedom. Humans are habitually morally corrupt and have limited insight into the truth: make sure you do not make any man or men too powerful or you will invariably regret it.

3. In line with #1, HONESTY. It used to be a value in America that people be forthright and frank in a helpful spirit. The corrosion of this value also leads to the corrosion of all others.

4. Duty. This value was abused in the various wars America got into that were often not justified and were for geopolitical reasons and empire building, and so it got a bad name. The devil loves to corrupt good principles to bad ends. You have a duty to country, to others, to self and most importantly to G-d. These are the guide-rails that keep our lives from going off-track.

5. Honor. This value was also frequently abused, often by the same people. Honor ideally means that you have a code of conduct for yourself and you stick to it, and you don't violate it for personal gain or to avoid the disapproval of others or because of peer pressure.

6. Preparedness and self-reliance. If some of these values sound like they come from the Boy Scout Handbook, well a lot of them are in common. Be Prepared. Be prepared in mind by anticipating problems that may arise. Be prepared in body by being strong and fit. Be morally prepared by studying wisdom (#8). Be capable of taking care of yourself and looking out for others in adverse situations. Connected to this is...

7. Be Thrifty. Money doesn't exist as a means to your pleasure, it exists as a means to your survival. Before you spend money on wants, make sure your needs are prepared for adequately. Save money against adverse conditions in the future.

8. Wisdom. This is actually not so much a traditional American value as a value I would like to see adopted as American.

As a Gentile raised in a fairly liberal family, what seems most remarkable to me about Judaism is their emphasis on studying wisdom. This is a value that is repeated throughout the Tanach. Part of moral preparedness is studying wisdom: read the Bible, contemplate the situations presented therein. Think about potential situations of moral conflict and how to resolve them. One of my criticisms of Judaism though is that they tend to take the opinions of their beloved dead rabbis as being more than what they are: opinions of men. Opinions of good men, I am sure, and probably worthy of study, but they were just men. Everyone must think these things through for themselves. If our society had a greater emphasis on teaching and exploring wisdom and ethics, we would be in a far better condition than we are.

9. Freedom. Part of our problem in a sense is that we are a country that has insisted on freedom from our earliest days. We are rebels by nature. However when freedom belongs not to intelligent disciplined responsible citizens but lawless deviant degenerate rabble, that's a real problem. And that problem has also existed from the beginning. The mobs in Boston prior to 1776 weren't all exemplars of American virtue. They too were often lawless rabble not opposed to a little looting.

Nevertheless, free men must insist: I belong to no government, I am nobody's chattel or slave, I am a free man and if need be I will die one rather than submit to slavery.

10. Service and charity. Now, just like duty and honor, charity has been abused of late by evil people. That is why I no longer give money to large charities or virtually any charities, because they are essentially pirates making money off of peoples' consciences. Which is pretty much the scummiest thing a human can do short of violence.

However the duty to serve the community and help the less fortunate remains. The more people shirk this duty, the greater will be the call for fathermothergovernment to step in, which they are just an even larger version of these corrupt charities that fatten themselves in the name of the less fortunate.

11. Justice. Justice both means freedom for the innocent and consequences for the guilty. In personal life, do not act such that innocent people will be affected unfairly. On a government level, rule of law. Judge people according to fair process and according to evidence.

12. Clean life. Drunkenness, drug use, sexual immorality and decadent levels of self-indulgence have never made anyone's life better. And don't give me that shit about pot being different: pot makes you stupid. It's a drug like the rest. If you need drugs as medicine (if you have glaucoma, or cancer,) that can be a legitimate use. Otherwise you're just a druggie, not different in kind from the heroin addict or the nymphomaniac or the alcoholic.

***

I challenge anyone to tell me how these values will somehow make America worse. Why then do large sectors of society (honestly, mostly the atheistic cynical sectors) not embrace them and sometimes openly deride them? Media reporting on the riots going on lately will mention social justice and racism, and not what is actually going on which is looting and pillaging. That is dishonest and immoral. The event of actual importance going on is violence and wanton destruction of property, and I am hard pressed to figure out a situation outside of total war where that is ever justified. But lies (#3) fall like rain these days.

The widespread embrace of these (old and new) American values truly would Make America Great Again.

The Neutralizers

In any society there exists people and organizations whose real function (whatever they may tell you) is to allay annoying anxieties or lull peoples' annoying conscience to sleep. They give outlet to your real concerns or bury annoying truths so as to make you feel better without actually changing anything.

These are the Neutralizers.

Neutralizers keep you from the dangerous tendency to actually do or change anything. They are priests and pastors, doctors and psychiatrists, political activists and charities.

You go to the doctor and tell him you feel that life is pointless. He gives you a pill, and the pill does indeed remove some of that, but whatever caused you to feel that way is unchanged. But hey, the pain is gone, that's what you care about.

You are really worried that humans may be damaging the natural world in terrible ways, and so you give money to a charity, like the World Wildlife Fund or (ugh) the Nature Conservancy and then you feel better, but the money mostly goes to the well-stuffed salaries of their leaders and sometimes even helps petroleum companies. The Nature Conservancy for instance quite often sells land that is donated to them or which they buy with donated land to people who will frack it for natural gas. But you feel better because in your ignorance you imagined that your money was actually going to help heal the natural world.

You go to church hoping that you will encounter the kind of Christianity of the early disciples or the Book of Acts, even though you certainly won't. What you will encounter are some soothing rituals and some nice conversation and coffee, and that's great, but you might be able to do that at your local Starbucks too (with better coffee.) You could achieve that at Starbucks more honestly perhaps, because you won't be lying to yourself (which virtually all us believers of whatever stripe do) that you are doing adequate service to G-d.

Go re-read the book of Amos, and then read it some more. You think this is just talking about the ancient Israelites?

Really?

I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and

grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.

But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!

~Amos 5:21-24

But I would not have you believe that the Neutralizers are just a sinister plot to keep us from changing anything. An evil conspiracy to maintain the status quo. Not at all. We WANT the Neutralizers around. We positively demand that they exist. If they didn't exist, we would create them. Because if we actually took responsibility for what is, we couldn't bear it. And if we acted on that responsibility, well, that could have very poor consequences for our standard of life, the respect of our peers, or even our physical well-being. If Jesus took responsibility, his reward was getting nailed to a tree. If Gandhi took responsibility, his reward was getting shot and killed. Taking responsibility can be very bad for our health.

Here's an example of some Neutralizers. You think abortion is wrong, so you go stand on a street corner in front of an abortion clinic with a sign. This saves approximately ZERO POINT ZERO lives.  But hey, you're doing something, right?

Some liberal one time (I don't have the exact quote on hand) said that pro-lifers cannot really believe that fetuses are human lives, or else they'd storm the place in a mob and tear down the doors and break the equipment with sledgehammers. If this really was the modern Auschwitz, the modern Dachau, more clinics would have burned to the ground in the 46 years that abortion has been legal.

This of course ignores the fact that nobody stopped Auschwitz or Dachau either.

And the minute a pro-lifer actually does something, actually burns down an abortion clinic or shoots an abortion doctor, who is the first to denounce him as a terrorist?


Pro-life groups like Operation Rescue.


Even the name, "pro-life," gives them an out. They don't take violent action because they are Pro-Life! They are pro- everyone's life, and pro- everyone's property, and now everyone kiss nice and they will sit on the corner and pretend they are doing something!


Imagine we were back in slavery times, and someone set up a protest at a slave auction. And they said, "We are pro-freedom! We want more freedom! Voluntarily free your slaves, you slave owners, that would be very nice of you!" If that was the extent of the movement to free the slaves, we would still have slavery to this day.

No, they weren't called Pro-Free. They were called  ABOLITIONISTS.  John Brown wasn't Pro-Free.

The truth about most Pro-Lifers is not exactly that they don't believe the unborn are people. They may think that the unborn are less-than, but thinking that people other than yourself and your own are less-than is pretty common anyway. People care about themselves, their family, and their own circle. Everyone else is really less-than. Lots of Germans who stood by as Dachau burned corpses probably thought that Jews were really people. They were just less-than.

If the average Pro-Lifer is guilty of anything in his ineffectual defense of the unborn, he is guilty of breaking this commandment:

LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.

Of course, aren't we all guilty of that?

"What Are You Doing Here?"

In the book of Kings, when Elijah starts heading for Mt. Horeb, he lies down and asks to die. Basically as far as he can see, the entire covenant of G-d with the Jewish people, the entire centuries-long project of Israel being G-d's chosen, has completely collapsed.

Both the northern Kingdom of Israel and even the southern Kingdom of Judah has fallen to worshiping false gods, spearheaded by the King of Israel, Ahab, and his wife Jezebel. Jezebel was a Canaanite princess from Sidon who was very much in favor of pagan gods and very much against the G-d of Israel. Jezebel commanded that the priests and prophets of YHWH be slain, to the point where Elijah thought he was the only one remaining.

Consider: the whole Exodus from Egypt, the miraculous plagues that caused Pharaoh to release them, parting the Sea of Reeds, G-d slaying their enemies, water from stone, and G-d himself speaking from Sinai (Horeb) to give His people His commandments. Now all for absolutely nothing? Israel was irrevocably apostate. Judah was irrevocably apostate. No wonder he laid down and wanted to die.

But he managed to make it to Horeb and he hid in a cave, the very same cave from which Moses pleaded with G-d not to strike down the Israelite people. Elijah though, he was having none of this mercy business. If anything he WANTED Israel to be struck down. He was beyond disgusted. Aside from all the pagan idolatry, King Ahab through his wife actually had a dude murdered so he could steal his vineyard. They were both continually doing evil, and everyone seemed pretty okay with it or even participating in it themselves. Israel had been cursed with a three year famine because of its evil, but that seemed to accomplish nothing. Moses had begged G-d not to obliterate Israel: in that same cave on that same mountain Elijah would have begged G-d TO obliterate Israel.

I find Elijah a very sympathetic character. I feel I can relate to him more than any other figure in the Bible. Nevertheless, it was G-d's will that Elijah intercede FOR Israel, not ACCUSE Israel. G-d wanted to be merciful. Elijah did not.

G-d called Elijah to the mouth of the cave. A terrible wind passes, but G-d is not in the wind. A great earthquake strikes, but G-d is not in the earthquake. A great fire swept over the mountain, but G-d was not in the fire. Then a still small voice.

These four things: wind quakes fire and the voice, are a parable of the nature of the world and the journey of Man in the world, and of its end. The world passes away like the wind. The prospect of death shakes like a quake. Judgment burns like fire. But all these things pass away. This world passes away like a dream. What is left is the voice, the Last Day, the Kingdom of G-d.

Elijah because he could not intercede for Israel any more, could not be Israel's main prophet anymore. So G-d commanded that he go to anoint new kings for Aram and Israel and then anoint Elisha as his replacement.

I can totally sympathize with Elijah. I would definitely want to take the first regularly scheduled chariot of fire out of that whole dog-and-pony-show. I very often feel that way myself in the modern world. If the chariot pulled up out front and an angel in the driver's seat asked, "want a ride out of here?" I might well say yes. But the important part of the story is G-d saying none of this lasts. This is just a blink in eternity.

So today there are so many horrible things going on, and the people seem completely godless, and so much seems lost. But none of that matters in the long run. It will all pass away forever one day.

Are Americans Canaanites or Israelites?

In the Tanakh, when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, children were also killed. When Jericho was destroyed, children were also killed, except the family of Rahab. When other cities were condemned to be destroyed, they were destroyed utterly and even their livestock along with the bodies and all their possessions were to be burned as a holocaust to G-d. Whether you regard such events as historical is irrelevant: we are peering into the theology of such a thing, not the history.

Now many if not most people who hear such stories would say that such things are horrendous and that's another reason for regarding the Tanakh as the product of a barbaric Bronze-Age people with no regard for human life. We have gone beyond such things now in our civilized age (as we abort our babies and drop bombs on children in other countries.)

However it is of a whole cloth with a pattern in the Torah and the Tanakh which I would like to call "the medicinal application of death." The Flood in Genesis (again, whether you believe it happened or not, we are talking theology not history) is the prime example of this. In that case, the whole world had gotten so rotten that the whole of humanity had to be destroyed, except for one righteous family. Obviously many children, almost all children on Earth, also died.

Evil is depicted in the Torah as a kind of infection, an infection that can be communicated down through families. This latter part is easy to see: men whose fathers were abusive or whose fathers were criminals are far more likely to be violent or criminal themselves. This is the actual meaning of the saying, "the sins of the fathers are on the sons." There are of course exceptions and this statement is not literally true (no one can actually inherit sins that are not their own,) but rather you are more likely to be evil yourself if you come from an evil line. Wicked families teach their children wickedness.

Deuteronomy is very clear about this "medicinal application of death," applied both outside the Israelite tribes and within it. Within the tribes, for those who are convicted of capital crimes including such things as pagan idolatry, it repeatedly says "wipe out the evil from among you." Jesus may have said "do not resist an evil person," but the Torah states differently. Kill them, with extreme prejudice, but through the scrupulous application of a process of justice. The penalty for falsely accusing someone of a capital crime is the same as for a capital crime: death. The idea being expressed here is clearly that, like a disease, if you do not expunge evil it will multiply. The sons and daughters of the unpunished wicked will likely go on to being wicked also. The image of evil being here described is like gangrene: chop off the finger to save the hand. Chop off the hand to save the arm. The sooner and more vigorously evil is opposed by force, including lethal force, the less damage will be done in the long run.

Outside the people of Israel itself, to the Canaanites, only the medicine of the Flood can apply. Evil has taken too deep a root:

"When the Lord your God brings you to the land

you are about to enter and possess, and He
dislodges many nations before you...
(list of Canaanite and other kingdoms) ...and the Lord

your God delivers them to you and you defeat

them, you must doom them to destruction:
grant them no terms and give them no quarter.

You shall not intermarry with them: do not give your

daughters to their sons or take their daughters

for your sons. For they will turn your children
away from Me to worship other gods, and the
Lord's anger will blaze against you and He
will promptly wipe you out. Instead, this is
what you shall do to them: you shall tear

down their altars, smash their pillars, cut

down their sacred posts, and consign their

images to the fire."

~Deuteronomy 7:1-5

To the children of Sodom, the children of Gomorrah, the children of Jericho, the children of these Canaanite kingdoms, how do you justify their deaths? They were presumably innocent. But children cannot live without their parents, and if they were old enough to live without their parents they were old enough to have assimilated the ambient evil of their environment. Their deaths not only meant being spared a life of wickedness themselves, but that future generations might be spared the curse of that evil. The evil nipped in the bud, the future clean and righteous. That's what they died for.

Of course Israel started breaking all these commandments almost immediately upon entering Canaan. They took Canaanites for their wives and adopted their gods, they spared their kings and even King Solomon married foreign and pagan wives. But that is a story for another time.

***

So lets turn it around on ourselves now.

I have been against abortion for decades, though not always as strongly as I now wish I had been. I actually don't remember a time when I was FOR abortion, even though I was raised liberal. But if those who are visiting the abortuaries are functionally just like the Canaanites or the residents of Sodom, should I be? They are sparing those children and future generations the inheritance of their evil ways. Is America a holy nation, or is it Sodom? Is America Israelite or Canaanite?

I expect like Sodom, it is a little of both, though perhaps a little better off than Sodom. When G-d told Abraham he was going to judge Sodom, Abraham asked that if there were any righteous there, would He spare it? He answered yes, but ultimately there was only one family of righteous there, Lot's family, relatives of Abraham.

America has an inheritance as a godly nation, but even that inheritance was mixed from the beginning. There were the devout Pilgrims and Puritans, and the lawless mercenary rabble in Jamestown and New Amsterdam (later New York.) In the time of the Revolutionary War, Boston which was founded by Puritans is depicted by most sources as a lawless and drunken town, prone to violence and rioting (even unrelated to conflict with the British) and as being controlled by street gangs with corruption rife. If the more religious immigrants to the New World were blessed by G-d, well, other immigrants were busy wearing that blessing thin.

Even if America was originally a godly nation, that horse has bolted the corral and fled to Alaska by now. We have to accept that the current condition of most of America is that of Canaan, of Egypt, of Sodom. Wickedness has triumphed over what godly inheritance we had.

So should we still be against abortion? For believers, absolutely and unequivocally, and we should teach that it is wrong in hopes that others will come to their senses. As perhaps the leaders in some States have: in Texas if abortion is not utterly banished it is the next best thing. We should still agitate for the abolition of abortion, in the hopes that the people will come to their senses about that and many other things.

But should we resist the Canaanites of this country killing their own to the point of force? Should we march into Canaanite territory and blow up their clinics? I was once sympathetic to such an idea, I am not sure I am anymore. If that Sodom of the East, New York City, kills ALL their babies, well that is fewer babies to be raised to be godless men and women. Which with a tiny number of exceptions they all would be. As much as it may hurt our more tender feelings, G-d's prescription for the godless and wicked is death.

Death, that saves future generations of humanity from the curse of evil. Death, that cleanses the world to be inherited by future generations of the righteous. It may hurt our hearts to say that, but that is clearly the prescription of the Tanakh, what Christians call the Old Testament. From that point of view, the more babies that die in New York City, the fewer babies grow up to be wicked and to spread the disease of wickedness.

It's not their fault, it's their parents fault, and far be it from me to say that they SHOULD die. The thought of it hurts my heart. I am saying we should not prevent them to the point of force from doing it. Up until recently, I was of the opinion that terrorism against abortion clinics and abortion providers was absolutely justified.

Now I believe that if the Canaanites insist on murdering their own, we should tell them the truth, try to save what few we might, but not resist them to the death if they don't listen.

What about places like Texas, where abortion is on the verge of being abolished? We should fight tooth and nail, through political means, to make sure that it IS abolished. What is called for here is vigorous and if need be ruthless political action to make these few states the first states in which abortion is legally or de-facto ABOLISHED. Here, we don't need violence: we're winning.

It is far too late to make America a godly nation. We can still save some godly States though.

Lies

If I know that someone lies or deceives, that instantly puts them on the "do not associate" list. Even white lies are wrong and dishonorable.

Now, there may be cases where a person is so bad with language and with limited skill and maybe intelligence, that they lie because they cannot figure out the appropriate response. Kids do this all the time, through no particularly malign spirit, just because they are bad at language or want to avoid making you mad at them or others. They have not yet developed the character to be principled truth-tellers, and that's not really their fault. Other adult people, because of not being good with words or being of limited intelligence, might be in the same boat. Just as violence may be more common with people with low verbal skills who cannot voice their feelings well, lying may also be more common because they literally can't figure out what the right thing to say would be. So they lie.

More commonly, people lie because they are bad at processing interpersonal conflict or have a problem accepting blame or responsibility.

"Where's your homework Billy?" "The dog ate it."

This can indeed be a moral failing, but at least Billy didn't start his day intending to lie to his teacher. He was confronted with a shortcoming of his, and he lied in reaction to that. It was a reactive lie, not a proactive lie.

But if you lie when you truly don't have to, because lying has become just another tool in the toolkit, or you lie for personal advantage, then you have started walking down a dark road that leads to spiritual destruction. Just as bad is deception, even when it is not a technical lie but intended to mislead. We see both lies and deception constantly in advertising, business brochures, news, other media, and sales pitches of all kinds. Intentional lying and deception has become normalized, deception even more so because if you lie in a business deal, you could get sued. If you deceive cleverly, you can be safe even though you twisted reality all around. The functional problem with lying is that you can be caught in a lie. If you just deceive, you cover your ass better.

Our society just in general has zero cultural commitment to not lying or deceiving. "Everyone does it." If people were taught how to respond morally to difficult situations in childhood, even people who are not that bright with language could respond correctly to the temptation to lie. In addition, lying is a sign of bad character. It means you aren't adult enough and your coping skills are too poor to handle truth-telling. You are socially and morally retarded, a child not a man or woman.

Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. We hardly ever lie for the benefit of others, almost always for the benefit of ourselves at the expense of others. A lie is an assault, against the person lied to, and also against G-d.

G-d hates lies.