Let's Hope 2019 is a Better Year

I guess it's not really the new year till Stephanie Miller comes back on Monday but Frangela is live the past two days.  Let's hope 2019 is a better year.  If the LORD wills, it will be.  On Wednesday, the last day of the old congress President Trump met with leaders and lectured them on the need for border security.  President Trump says now that he never gave up on a concrete wall.  With steel slats you could easily pass through drugs and other contraband such as small weapons through the slats.  That seems self defeating.  President Trump is ready to continue to blow up the government if he doesn't get his full 5.6 Billion for the wall.  Yesterday we watched Nancy Pelosi and her grandchildren and all the other grandchildren in the chamber while she was being sworn in to "protect and defend the constitution against all enemies" and presumably that means the sitting president.  Of course this special ABC network production was preempted by one of our classic southern California car chases including for failed "pit" manuveres.   It took two and a half hours and went through three counties.  Of course the new Republican Congress features over a hundred women and 89 of these women are democrats.  Back in 1989 (thirty years ago) there were 26 women in congress and nearly half of them were Republicans.  Today there aren't any more "republican" women.  There are more minority women than ever including lezbians and Islamic women and maybe even a trans-sexual.  This congress doesn't look like any other.  Already a congressman has issued a bill of impeachment.  Nancy Pelosi doesn't want impeachment to be "political" but of course the Republicans translate that as just "a pretence of propriety" and that really she's all gung ho for impeachment.   Frangela doesn't like the term "non essential workers" because it's a way of degrading the work that they do.  Just like the term "unskilled workers".  That's demeaning because they do all those essential jobs none of us want to do.  Senator Mc Connell is a first rate asshole because he won't even allow a bill to the floor for discussion unless- - - not whether there is a majority for the bill - - but now the bar is "If the President hasn't already said he would sign it then I won't waste the Senate's time".  Of course it's the Senate's job to put forth and debate bills.  That's kind of what they do. 

The stock market went down another six hundred points yesterday because Apple had a bad financial report.  Sales of their I phones are lacking because everyone already HAS an I Phone that wants one and they aren't going to buy a new one every year.  Personally I've had the phone I'm using since October of 2013.  I think that's the month Chuck Smith died.  It's silly to junk an appliance just because there is a new model with maybe not that much difference.  The labor department issued a rosey jobs report with 312,000 new jobs were added last month.  That's about as high as we've ever seen it.  But yesterday the markets were worried about lagging sales figures. 

.  I looked up “Church attendance figures” but got almost nothing in terms of tables and figures.  I got these spectacular sites touting the decline of church attendance and overall religiosity.  Then I looked up Marcion.  I didn’t know Marcion was a guy who was that rich.  He was the son of a priest but his own father disowned him for an immoral life.  He made his money as a ship builder.  In July of 144 AD Macion tried to bribe the Bishop of Rome into accepting his religious views and they turned him down so started his own successful movement.  But he was born in 85 AD and died in 160 so he livedto be 75 apparently and as a young man didn’t have any religion at all.   St Paul quoted scripture to highlight that Jesus was the Messiah.  I had forgotten this.  This means that whoever the Apostle Paul is he bought into the whole Jewish prophecy bit about Jesus.  Therefore he didn’t believe that Jesus was the offspring of an entirely different god.

My postings on early Christianity have gotten better ratings than I've gotten in at least six months.  You people obviously like reading about that stuff.  Of course some may wonder what the so called "Jerusalem Church" believed.  If I'm right- - this church worshipped the crucification of Judas and not Jesus and they to one degree or another still believed in the priestly system of sacrifice.  The corner stone of Catholicism is the premise that some blood sacrifice on an altar will atone for sin.  This is something that Jesus didn't teach.  He taught karmic reciprocity.  If you forgive than you will be forgiven.  "Whatever you meet out to others will be dealt back to you" and this goes in all areas including stoning a woman on charges of adultry.  This raise the question of whether Jerusalem and the Jews had the power to impose the Death Penalty.  History suggests that it still had the power.  And in Genisis there is a scripture that the "Power of imposing law" or whatever, would not depart from the tribe of Judah untill the Messiah was on the throne ruling in the milenial age.  Clearly this has not come to pass so that the "secpter" is still in force.  If the Jews had the power to impose the Death Penalty this changes the whole conplexion of the crucifixion story.  There is other precident for my case.  "Yeshuah" was stoned in the recounting of a Jewish source after forty days.  The Apostle James in 62 AD and head of the "Jerusalem Church" was put to death by stoning.  St Stephan in the Bible was put to death by stoning.  And the woman taken in Adultry in the Gospels was going to be stoned and Jesus never once said "This is an illegal act under Roman law". 

Let's talk about the Apostle Paul.  I think we have caught the Book of Acts in a lie.  In one place it says that Paul was the "son of a pharicee" and yet elsewhere it says St Paul was a natural born Roman citizen, and he even bragged about it.  This would mean that Paul's father was Roman.  And it's unlikely that a Roman would be a member of any strict Jewish organization.   I believe that St Paul's ministry was "back dated".   "I look bloody young but I'm just back-dated".  Let's add about sixty years or perhaps a bit more to the years both of the start of Paul's conversion in AD 41 and the conclusion of his ministry to the churches in AD 58.   Here is a different kind of "Me, too" movement.  Apalonius of Tyannus died just after the turn of the second century and he had a whole school of worshippers in the early second century.  This "school of Tyannus " is even referred to in the book of acts.  So there was kind of a "savior fever" that took place in Asia Minor or western Turkey and the east coast of Greece in the early second century.  St Paul sought to cash in on it, in my oppinion.  Christianity as we know it today hence got its start not in 37 AD when Stephan was martyered but rather in the early second century.   But I don't want to destroy people's belief in the Catholic Church.  I don't want to be like Howard Beale in "Network" who was "Meddling with the cosmic forces".  He got himself killed for the effort.  Maybe we NEED the Church as kind of a moral guidepost and since it's already here, we should look to it rather than our President for moral guidance.  Pope Francis is a good guy and I agree with him on a majority of moral issues.