Jonathots … December 11th, 2018

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Jonathots Daily Blog

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The light of the body is the eye

If the eye is evil, then the whole body is filled with darkness. But if the eye is clear, then the whole being can be illuminated.

Honestly, these words can sound like a bunch of gibberish if they’re not understood. This is the trouble with a lot of deep philosophy and passages that insist they are “spiritual.”

Let me phrase it this way:

Your eyes belong to you, but what you see was programmed by others.

Even though you may insist that you are the master of your own thinking and the manipulator of your vision, there is so much programming that’s gone into you–from childhood, schooling, experiences, defeats, failures and pain–which clouds your vision and only presents the images that memory will offer.

We are very critical of prejudice, but the fact of the matter is, nearly all of our preconceived ideas are deeply ingrained within our consciousness long before we have a chance to vote on whether to accept them or not.

This affects our touch.

If we don’t like what we see, we don’t want to get near it. If we don’t want to get near it, we avoid it and fear it. And once we’ve decided that someone or some group is foreign, then it becomes necessary for us to rationalize our choice by attempting to prove that the forbidden topic, race, religion, gender or sexual orientation is hampered by evil.

Thus, white people who grow up in a bigoted environment really do think the black race looks a bit like monkeys. That’s how they were taught to see them. Therefore, that’s how they view them. The end result is, they decide not to be around them and the unity brought on by touch is forsaken.

Likewise, black parents who teach their children that Latinos are lazy and not to be trusted raise children that purposely avoid anyone with light brown skin, unless there’s enough pigment to welcome them as black brothers and sisters.

Also, the Latinos do it with the Asians, and within their own culture, assuming that Cubans are better than Dominicans, and Asians assuming that Chinese are superior to Japanese.

Once our eyes have been fitted with a pair of glasses by our upbringing, making us see the world in a certain way, then our bigotry becomes a spectacle.

Because once we’re afraid–once our “eyeballing” of other human beings promotes darkness in our minds, we are certainly not going to want to be near them, to shop with them, to go to church with them or to ever risk touching them.

Without touch there is no fellowship. Without fellowship there is no commonality, and without commonality, there is alienation.

Take some time during this Christmas season to consider the vision you have of life–the way you see those around you.

Are you controlling your own perception? Or do you have people you were taught were “untouchables?”

Because if you’re not willing to touch people with the tenderness of your hands, you will certainly end up fighting them with your fists.

 

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Jesonian … December 2nd, 2017

 Jonathots Daily Blog

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Whenever you’ve done it to the least of these, my brethren, you’ve done it to me.

This seems to be one of those idealistic, philosophical utterances of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount. Most people nod their heads in agreement, while secretly pre-repenting over not doing it.

But it is not a statement.

It’s a puzzle–a riddle.

It’s an intertwining ball of confusion leading us to a universal realization.

First of all, let us understand that Jesus, who walked with equality among Jew, Greek, Roman and Samaritan, did not believe that anyone was “the least.” So him phrasing the word “least” was ironic rather than iconic.

Since he didn’t believe anybody was the least, we are given a bit of misdirection. Jesus was suggesting that we, as humans, are obsessed with subjectively examining those around us, with the goal of finding our level of superiority.

Because we don’t want to hunger and thirst for righteousness, we live off the fat of our own arrogance. In other words, “I am better than you because I say that I’m better than you–and everyone in our clan believes we are better.”

Nowadays we pass this prejudice off as culture, or loving our family, or appreciating our home town. It’s the Red States saying they are more righteous than the Blue States, and the Blue States claiming the Red States are imbeciles.

There are no least.

So Jesus traps us in the maze: “Since you think these people are least, then you need to realize they are me, and the only place you will find me is in them. I will not be available to you in your favored few. You will only be able to discover me in those you deem least.”

So if you think black people look like monkeys, if you want to find Jesus you’d better show up with some bananas–because he will situate himself right in the middle of the black race and evaluate you on how you treat them.

If you think women are weaker vessels and stupid, Jesus will grow a vagina. Yes, Christ will only be accessible to you through the female.

If you think gay people are destroying America, then be prepared to find Jesus as a flaming queen with a thick lisp.

And then, based upon how you handle this information–how genteel and kind you are–your true spirituality will be rewarded.

For Jesus told us that if we love those who love us, we are no better than the heathen. Anybody can do that.

But if we insist there is an inferior race, an abominable people or just folks that are “no damn good,” then we will need to go to the prisons, the hospital wards and the whore houses to really find the Master.

It is a nasty trap.

Perhaps it would just be easier to cease believing that anyone is least–smarter to drop the arrogance that keeps us in ignorance, where God has no tolerance.

The least of these my brethren is not actually a group of people. It is a gathering place for all of our bigotry–where Jesus is waiting for us so that we can find him and be blessed.

As soon as the church starts teaching a progressive message–that no matter how unique our fellow-humans may turn out to be, none of them are least–we will be at the mercy of cozying up to those we deem intolerable.

There are no third world countries.

There are no human abominations.

There are no inferior races.

There are no least.

If you believe there are “least” in the world, be prepared to journey to them to find your Master.

He will be sitting there–right in the middle of the people you hate, waiting for you to repent and find Him.

 

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G-Poppers … May 5th, 2017

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Old people don’t like to change.

Perhaps better stated, older folks think they’ve done all the changing they need to do.

It fascinates G-Pop that we spend so much time trying to appease the tastes, mentality and standards of individuals who have basically retired their dispositions, and use much of their gray matter considering longevity.

Perhaps it’s the fact that once we’re given our first prescription for high blood pressure and cholesterol, we are forever lost to discussing our treatments. Is it because older folks accumulated all the savings bonds and property, and seem to be in power?

The wealth of our nation actually lies in the elasticity of young minds–the flexibility of those who have not yet determined what color they would like their den to be painted.

It’s why Jesus said that the message of the Gospel is geared to the child-like mind, and only those who are willing to acquire such thinking can truly comprehend it. It is also why Jesus said you can’t put new wine into old wineskins. When the fermentation produces expansion, the old skins literally explode.

Yet children are relegated to a status of property, propaganda and proof of our prowess and parenting. So we ask:

• What are your grades?
• What do you like about school?
• What do you want to be when you grow up?
• What do you think of your teachers?

We trap our offspring into a prison of education and tell them not to contact us until they’ve graduated reformed. So they mimic us. It’s what they’re taught to do.

So rather than having a cultural and social revolution with every generation, causing us to grow in intelligence and openness to one another, we implant the prejudice and bigotry of the former generation firmly into the minds of those who are haplessly controlled by us because they live in our homes and feast at our tables.

We’re missing an opportunity. And because we’re ignoring it, we are condemning ourselves to more wars in the same areas of the world–just with new names.

Teach your children. Teach them well.

Otherwise they’ll end up with their father’s hell.

And here’s what G-Pop thinks we should teach them:

1. Love people.

There is no better species due to arrive. You can live with the monkeys or dine with the lions, but you will eventually find that their habits are even worse than your brothers and sisters living next door. People are the best that God offers us. If you’re upset about it, contact the Creator. He has not made a more magnificent contraption, and there is no sign that He’s upgrading the model. Love people or die complaining.

2. Respect people.

Get rid of your color charts. Get rid of your expectations. Keep your moral code to yourself. If you have a plan of salvation, enjoy it, but don’t force feed it to anyone else. Every human being is given three square feet of influence, and once you step out of your own, realize you are trespassing. Don’t be surprised if you get shot.

3. Work with people.

Working with people is easy. You listen, then you try. Just make sure that the trying is a test and not selling out completely. In other words, if you’re going to dye a piece of cloth, it’s a good idea to cut off a small unit and try the dye on it first, to see how it takes. As long as we’re willing to be wrong, working with people can be quite fun. But when we insist that we “have to be right” because we’re invested in the project and therefore need to make excuses for the failure–then we become obnoxious paper clip counters.

It’s rather doubtful that you can take anyone over the age of forty-five on a journey to love people, respect people and work with people.

Pick your target market. It will be the children of the Earth who still don’t have enough assets to sit on their asses.

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PoHymn: A Rustling in the Stagnant … December 21st, 2016

 Jonathots Daily Blog

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Just Jim Dandy

It is just Jim Dandy with me

If you hunt deer, rabbit, bear and flea

As long as you teach your children

That brothers and sisters with black skin

Are not niggers, jungle bunnies or monkeys.

 

Share your heart about your anger over abortion

As you visit the fatherless and the widows

 

Chat away about climate change and the melting of the polar ice caps

But please cease to refer to hard-working people who do not share your concern as “deplorable.”

 

Salute the flag, stand for the Star Spangled Banner and support the troops

Struggling with all of us to bring freedom and justice to every American

 

Choose to deny the existence of God and develop your own moral code

While honoring your neighbor nearby and the sanctuary where others gather to worship

 

Express your dismay over illegal immigration

While making sure your laments have nothing to do with race, religion or sexual orientation

 

Yearn for simpler times by keeping things simple

Joke about women and comically complain about men

Remembering that God in His Kingdom has neither male or female.

 

Make sure your belief is grounded in love

Your opinion has a little elastic on the edges

And decisions are merciful instead of final

 

Welcome to America!

Be yourself just short of being an asshole.

It’s just Jim Dandy to have you here.

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Ask Jonathots… September 15th, 2016

 Jonathots Daily Blog

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I truly don’t understand what the big deal is about sex. I haven’t figured out why people think your sex related decisions define you. Is it just because a) you’re naked, and b) it’s how babies are created?

There is a simple problem in our country:

Those who believe in God fail to honor science, and those who revere science find it necessary to turn their backs on God.

There seem to be relatively few people who understand that a Creative Father felt the need to establish an order through Mother Nature.

With that in mind, let’s address your question.

• When do people mature sexually? Somewhere between the age of 13 and 15.
• When do we think people should get married? Late twenties, or some folks even think early 30’s.

So in our culture there are fifteen years of sexual viability which is supposed to be stuffed away in a closet in preparation for marriage, or stumbled into through carnal experimentation made dangerous through immaturity and disease.

We really have to make up our minds. Are we going to continue to believe that people are children until they’re thirty, or are we going to establish an earlier emotional awareness to match the sexual awakening?

Sex is a big deal because people either pretend it’s sacred or just “a physical experience.” Since human beings may be the only species in which both male and female have the capacity for pleasure outside of procreation, we should probably emphasize the pleasure side of sexuality instead of insisting that God has belabored the girl with birth and the boy with “killing the game and dragging it back to the fire.”

What is sex? It is a physical experience producing a burst of pleasure which is also used by our species for procreation.

So if you have no intention of procreating, then you should be looking for ways to tap the pleasure without becoming irresponsible.

If your intention is to procreate, then you probably need to do what all the animals on Earth do–find a way to nest with your mate to take care of your baby birds.

You have to make up your mind:

Are we just animals or is there more to us than that?

Are we just spiritual or do we possess a bit of animal?

Sexuality can never be casual because we’re not just tigers. It can also never be considered completely spiritual–it’s too easy to do and we really don’t do it any different from the monkeys.

So what’s the best answer for you?

Get a mature look at both your physical evolution and your emotional responsibility. You will never be able to have sex without having some inclination toward an emotional union.

Avoid the stupidity of the religious, who make the joining of the penis and the vagina some sort of holy oracle.

And also escape the worldly, who view it as a common crossroads of human interaction.

In the long run we will have to teach our children to mature more quickly–or else not be so concerned that they start “probing the parts.”

For after all, even the Pope knows that nobody’s going to arrive at twenty-nine years of age a virgin.

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Confessing… June 20th, 2015

 Jonathots Daily Blog

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VII.

I confess so I can heal.

If I deny, I remain sick.

I was eleven years old, sitting in the back seat of a car, thrilled out of my mind, leaving the state of Ohio for the first time.

I was so excited that I was jabbering like a drunken parrot–so much so that the adults in the front seat finally had to tell me to hush up and take a nap.

I was heading off for four days in the mountains of Oklahoma to enjoy a camp. When we arrived, I was surrounded by men of all ages expressing goodwill to one another, hugging and laughing with freedom and delight.

It felt like heaven–at least my eleven-year-old perception.

We gathered for meetings, discussions, speeches and songs. A theme soon creeped to the forefront:

“America is in trouble because of its sin, liberal ideas and the races beginning to mingle.”

Around the fire, the men who had been so generous in their love for one another told jokes about black people looking like monkeys and how stupid “the coloreds” were.

One word kept coming to the forefront–“nigger.”

I had heard it before in Ohio, but here it was commonspeak, and was usually accentuated with some “Amens,” giggles and grunts of approval.

I was surrounded.

I was outnumbered.

I looked to the men who had brought me on this journey for guidance. They, too, found themselves in the minority so they joined the mob.

Who was I to object?

So I laughed, I criticized, I mocked and for those four days, I became a racist. Hating black people made complete sense to me.

As we made our way home, the men who were driving the car dissipated their foul language and horrible attitudes. They were trying to go back to who they were without acknowledging who they had become.

I was troubled.

Even though I didn’t know any black people, I saw no reason to judge them from a distance.

As I aged I became more and more infuriated with the racism thrust upon me by men of seeming goodwill, surrounding me with their verbal piss and swill.

I was reminded of the Psalm that says, “Do not dwell in the council of the ungodly.”

I thought about that for a long time.

I realized that to be against racism, bigotry and alienation of my fellow-man, I would have to be willing to be outnumbered and still heard.

I would have to escape those who thought it was funny to devastate others as a joke.

I would have to be different.

When I received the news this week that nine of my brothers and sisters were slain in Charleston, I looked at the young boy who was the perpetrator.

He was me.

If I had continued to hang around the vile bigotry that was spoken to me during those four days, and persisted in coexisting with supremacists, perhaps a logical conclusion to my warped mind would be to strike my own blow.

For you see, if I had dwelt with the “council of the ungodly” I could have just as easily tried to make my point with a gun.

Charleston is not about what a confused, debilitated and ignorant boy did in a church. It’s about how each one of us is occasionally outnumbered by stupidity–and we need to learn to find it within ourselves…to speak out.

 

 

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G-14: Jungle or Garden?… March 7, 2014

Jonathots Daily Blog  

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I think most people have found themselves in the embarrassing situation of arriving late to an appointment, being held up by traffic, and requiring an ice-breaker to share when entering the room of awaiting friends.

One of the favorites quips is the gasping exclamation, “It’s a jungle out there!”

It usually evokes some laughter–partly due to its corniness–but mostly because we have all become a bit convinced by society, entertainment and even religion that human beings are depraved animals.

So rather than looking at life and our potentials with optimism, we find ourselves desperately trying to avoid the human representations of silly monkeys, ravenous lions and venomous snakes.

Somewhere along the line we have forgotten the beautiful explanation that man and woman were spawned in a garden. Maybe it’s too idealistic. Perhaps the world around us will not permit us to believe that such beauty is attainable and such blessing within our grasp.

I just don’t know what we ever gain by allowing the underbrush of weeds and human mediocrity to surround us, causing us to retreat to our caves in fear. Yes, I think there’s a choice. Am I going to continue to live in a jungle or am I going to do my best, before I leave here, to turn the earth–or at least my portion of it–into a garden?

Two things are necessary to transform a jungle into a garden:

1. You’ve got to cool things down.

Jungles are steamy and hot, breeding all sorts of creeping, crawling vermin which welcome such a searing climate. Sometimes the greatest thing we can do in any situation is to refuse to participate in frenetic energy and heated debate, find a quiet place, sit down and wait for things to cool off. I do think it’s what Jesus meant when he suggested that the “meek inherit the earth.” As long as you’re struggling, punching and fighting with everyone for the dead carcass in the middle of the Serengeti, you are exhausting yourself–not to mention casting your lot with the more unseemly actions of the beasts.

Cool things down.

Occasionally I find myself in an argument and realize that the flame is rising and the intelligence is leaving. The situation requires that somebody shut up. When I actually am wise enough to do so, things cool down.

2. Clear things out.

I have been focusing this year on eliminating the scrub brush that suffocates my life, making me feel paranoid and claustrophobic. There are things I just don’t need, require or even desire anymore. Maybe they were once status symbols or security blankets, but now they’ve just become all-encompassing. If you’re going to grow something, you often have to remove what is occupying space but is useless.

Clear things out.

When you cool things down, all the hot-headed animals and the plant life that is tropical disappear. When you clear things out, you find soil underneath the tangled mess of weeds. Then you’re prepared to plant a garden.

And what is a garden? A glorious three-step process. A garden give me the chance to:

A. Seed what I need.

Yes, to actually get specific instead of hoping for the best or praying for miracles because I failed to do my job.

B.  Grow what I know.

I realized last week that I don’t lack wisdom. I lack frequent flyer miles using it. There is so much I can do, say, share, perform and be that I squander in pursuit of things unknown or beyond my capability.

C. And finally, receive what I believe.

Having come to peace with myself and my own gifts in the garden I have cleared off, and knowing that things have cooled down, I can be a good farmer. Yes:

• Seed what you need.
• Grow what you know.
• Receive what you believe.

You can think whatever you want–I believe we were born in a garden … and have settled for a jungle.

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