The B. S. M. G. Report

Jonathots Daily Blog

(4266)

Life does not come from strife

But love is from above

BAD

Hellhole.

Nazareth, Galilee, was a community constricted by the domination of the Roman Empire, superstitious and afflicted, impoverished by a belief in a God requiring homage instead of offering compassion.

From this environment, two humans emerged, who found themselves in the unenviable position of having to reject all their training and lose most of their friends, to follow what they believed was divine guidance.

Mary of Nazareth and Joseph of Nazareth

What does a young peasant girl do when she’s suddenly found pregnant and she contends it was at the beckoning of Jehovah?

What does a man do when he’s betrothed to be married and his girlfriend is suddenly impregnated, offering the lamest excuse possible: “The Holy Spirit did it.”

SAD

Joseph was an honorable man, so even though he loved Mary, his training, support system and sense of culture told him that she was a sinful woman, and he must cast her away. He was considering doing it privately so nobody else would know, sending her far away from the Nazareth community, where she certainly would be condemned for being a whore (even though short days earlier she was considered a favored lass).

Mary was given a choice.

God did not intrude or demand that she birth a baby. Yet she replied, “Behold, I am the handmaiden of the Lord.”

But Nazareth commenced to gossip.

She was labeled a sinner. But worse than that—she was blasphemous by proclaiming that she had divine “hookups.”

Yes, it is so sad that religion offers little relief for those who suffer. When there’s a need for mercy, religion falls back on statutes and interpretations. If it had not been for Joseph deciding to let his love for Mary stay strong when the angel told him that she was telling the truth, our story would have been forever altered.

MAD

Then comes the intervention of those motivated by politics and greedy for power. The Romans wanted taxes, forcing Joseph to return to Bethlehem, with his wife in her third trimester. And Herod, who called himself “the Great,” was so worried about losing his title of “King of the Jews” that when Wise Men from the East came inquiring about a star in the sky, he made preparation to kill whatever was being born in that light.

It is important to know this:

There is no such thing as a politician who is spiritual.

There are no Presidents, Kings or Chancellors who have found a redeeming way to combine their faith with their function.

Beware any man or woman who seeks votes by quoting Holy Word.

Herod believed himself to be a righteous man, given responsibility by the Roman government to protect his people from annihilation. It is maddening that even today, we trust powerful pundits in palaces to provide inspiration to our lives.

GLAD

And then there were the Wise Ones.

They possessed that beautiful balance between personal innocence and professional cynicism.

Even though they were willing to trek across the desert, following a Star with no guarantee of a payoff in the end, when they encountered Herod the Great and they realized he was full of chicanery and lies, they avoided any further contact with him.

They took a different way home.

It says they were warned in a dream. But what made them wise was that they already had an inkling that they were talking to a devil with angelic manners.

The Christmas Story is a tale of Bad, Sad, Mad and Glad.

God does not wait until everyone is perfect to set in motion perfection.

There was no other time in history when the world was united in one spot of Mesopotamia. The Roman Empire had extended its influence from India all the way to what we know as England.

So when the Prince of Peace was born, and later was accepted by the Roman Empire as the true message, the Gospel was able to go from the dreariness of the Middle East throughout the whole world.

It eventually crossed the Atlantic to the New World.

It is amazing.

It is always astounding how Bad and Sad, and even that which could make us Mad, by the simple anointing of wisdom, can change the whole story to something Glad.

 

 

 

Ask Jonathots … May 5th, 2016

 Jonathots Daily Blog

(2925)

What causes some siblings to grow up to be friends and others not? I’m forty and I’m not close to my sister at all. I have two teenage daughters, and I’m wondering what I could do to help them grow up to be friends. Your thoughts?

Perhaps one of the more egregious errors in our culture is the notion that the nuclear family is meant to remain intact.

It causes more stress, misgivings, grudges, insecurity, mishap and even murder than any other predicament facing our species.

If I were a coal miner in West Virginia, was unfortunately involved in a cave-in and spent nine days under the earth with eight other people, we would become very close. Matter of fact, we would share dreams, aspirations, prayers and any food and water available to sustain one another.

Yet to think that after I left that cave of impending death I should continue those relationships with my fellow-prisoners outside the mishap would be ridiculous, forced and disappointing.

For a season we share common goals and aspirations with our family. That experience can range from survival to ecstasy.

But humans are meant to come out of this cocoon and bloom in our individual lives, to start our own families, sustaining our species with new possibilities.

Some sisters have memories of the time when they grew up in the same house, but their journey takes them in completely different directions, with new friends, causing the old encounters to bring fond memories but not needful continuation.

Other sisters stay in the same communities, and it’s like their new families are extensions of the older rendition.

One thing is certain–it evolves naturally and cannot be manipulated through false emotion or guilt.

We must understand that for some people, the memory of their birthing family is pleasant but irrelevant, pleasant but valuable, pleasant but in the past.

For others such recollections are unpleasant and degrading, unpleasant and unnecessary, and unpleasant and harmful.

It is always better to look at the family of our youth as the ship that brought us to the New World. Sometimes that ship can sit out in the harbor of our environment as a memory of great times. And sometimes the ship is so full of holes that it needs to be sunk.

You can’t help people to be friends. Friendship is always based upon mutual concerns.

But what you can do is maintain the better parts of every experience as you launch out into newness of life.

The producers of Jonathots would humbly request a yearly subscription donation of $10 for this wonderful, inspirational opportunity

 

Untotaled: Stepping 42 (August 27th, 1967) Driven… November 29, 2014

 Jonathots Daily Blog

(2428)

(Transcript)

I woke up in one of those adolescent grumpy moods, staring at the ceiling, disgusted with my life.

It was nearly time for school to start again and I felt like I had squandered my entire summer, worrying about how little summer I had left.

Even the things I had done which seemed enjoyable had passed too quickly, and now it was time to go back to school–to pretend to be a student and memorize a bunch of information which would give me a good grade on a test, knowing in my heart that I would soon forget the knowledge, yet knowing that somewhere in the future, I would be expected to remember it.

I had acquired three dollars yesterday by finally mowing the lawn, which had grown so high that one of the neighbors had complained to my parents, fearing that varmaints or snakes might dwell within. I reluctantly did the job and was rewarded with the remuneration.

So I woke up with a scratch I needed to itch. That’s the way it is when you’re a teenager–it’s not really an itch you need to scratch, but rather, an ongoing scratching sensation and needing an itch to justify it.

I got in my car and headed over to Katie’s house. She was the highlight of my summer. We had come together to search for pop bottles we could turn in for deposit to get gas money so we could drive around, talk and be silly.

There was nothing romantic involved, though candidly, I would have jumped her at the slightest invitation. She just thought I was funny.

When I picked her up that day, she had two dollars she had earned by picking blackberries on her grandma’s farm. Between us we had five dollars, three candy bars and some leftover tuna sandwiches her mother had foisted on her as she departed.

Katie explained that she needed to be home by three o’clock in the afternoon, and since it was already ten-thirty, our time would be shortened.

I told her that since we had enough money to buy fifteen gallons of gasoline, that we should drive three hours somewhere, talk, laugh and turn around to drive three hours back.

She was cool with it so we took off for Columbus.

Driving on I-71, we reached the south end of Columbus. Then that scratch that needed an itch suddenly raised its head. So I said, “Let’s keep going.”

She was nervous but agreed–and before too long we passed through Washington Court House, Wilmington and suddenly found ourselves on the outskirts of Cincinnati. It was deliciously naughty, filled with wild abandon and irresponsibility.

A sign read that the Ohio River was four miles ahead. I had never seen the Ohio River, and Katie had only passed over it in a car with her parents while being sound asleep in the back seat. So I said, let’s do it.

We crossed the river into Kentucky.

We felt like fugitives. It was similar to trying to make our way into the Soviet Union through the Iron Curtain (they had that back then).

Everything on the other side of the river, including a town named Covington, looked so different. We felt like Christopher Columbus eyeballing the New World.

Suddenly, Katie looked down at her watch and it was two o’clock in the afternoon, and she realized there was no way she would be able to get back in time. There also were no cell phones or texting, and pay phones were out of the question because we had used all of our money for petrol.

So knowing we were going to get in trouble, we turned the car around and headed back the way we came. It was the strangest combination of fear, jubilance, independence, anxiety and nervous bowel twinges that I’ve ever experienced in my life.

Strangely enough, when we arrived home, people really didn’t say much about us being late–just that we should never do it again.

Katie and I knew that was impossible.

Something changed that day.

I no longer felt bound to a small home on a tiny street in a little village. I realized there was a big world out there–and the only way I would ever get to it and be myself was to survive a couple more years of provincial schooling … to finally be able to point my life in my own direction.

The producers of jonathots would humbly request a yearly subscription donation of $10 for this wonderful, inspirational opportunity

Please contact Jonathan’s agent, Jackie Barnett, at (615) 481-1474, for information about scheduling.

*****

Check out Mr. Kringle’s Tales…26 Stories’Til Christmas

The Best Christmas Stories You’ll Ever Read!

Click on Santa to browse “Mr. Kringle’s Tales … 26 Stories Til Christmas”

Populie: There Is No Hell … March 26, 2014

Jonathots Daily Blog  

(2186)

Once again, politics, religion and entertainment have joined together to agree upon a message to massage the masses:

1. No personal responsibility.
2. No challenge.
3. No questioning.
4. No evolution.
5. No real difference between evil and good.

The difficulty with this particular popular lie (thus POPULIE) is that when they seek a poster boy to represent their cause, they are shocked to discover that Jesus was actually a great proponent of hell. Now, maybe “proponent” isn’t the correct word, but since he was a common sense teacher, he realized there’s no yin without a yang, no heads without a tails, no day without a night–and no heaven without a hell.

The reason this “hell-free” populie is catching on so quickly is that it removes guilt, covers everything with some sort of universal blanket of grace, and makes everybody feel good about themselves.

The difficulty is that most of the time we are not attending pep rallies which encourage us in self-esteem, but rather, lying in the dark on our beds, trying to go to sleep and realizing who we really are, face-to-face.

Let me give you some simple points:

A. Effort without consequences eventually eliminates reward. Reward is a consequence.

B. Pursuit without a second mile leads to easily falling short of the first mile marker.

C. Salvation without responsibility generates lazy, self-righteous, yet unfulfilled disciples.

D. Entertainment glorifying the darker side of humanity discourages anyone from trying to be “the light of the world.”

E. Politics without progress fosters a ruling class of self-satisfied statesmen.

F. Parenting minus correction is the care-taking of animals which could have become human.

F. Romance without surprise is the doldrums of predictability.

And finally, heaven without hell is just a common bus stop for all travelers…instead of a new world for true explorers.

The producers of jonathots would humbly request a yearly subscription donation of $10 for this wonderful, inspirational opportunity

Click here to get info on the “Gospel According to Common Sense” Tour

Please contact Jonathan’s agent, Jackie Barnett, at (615) 481-1474, for information about scheduling SpiriTed in 2014.

emPATHy … June 1, 2012

(1,532)

Slavery.

For two hundred and fifty years in the United States of America, owning another person for your own profit and gain was considered acceptable. It may be difficult for some people to believe that such a mindset existed in our country–but trying to project shame on the event will not help us to understand what caused the phenomenon, and why even a hundred and fifty years later, this country wrestles with the issue of racial equality.

You see, a funny thing happened to Christianity after the resurrection of Jesus. After several different jaunts and jiggles, it ended up in the hands of the Roman Empire, which was completely conquered by individuals collectively known as Barbarians. Perhaps we should take offense–because they are our ancestors. They are the Visigoths, Huns, Angles, Vikings and Saxons.

The belief in Jesus survived this barbarian takeover, but they were not comfortable with the message of the Messiah. They saw no future in “loving your enemies” or “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you,” so they transformed the lifestyle of Christianity into a religious practice which mainly focused on the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. Even when they became Protestants, they still maintained many of the relics, rituals and superstitions of the Mother Church. Basically they came up with a theology that was very Old Testament, in the sense that it was believed to be quite proper to club someone over the head to get his leg of lamb. But instead of using Moses as the deliverer of the people to the Promised Land, Jesus the Christ was inserted as the new law-giver and the King of Kings. They managed to extract his message from this religious transformation and leave behind the suffering savior who will one day become the conquering king. Yes, Jesus became the ultimate Viking. Although he was defeated at Calvary, he resurrected to one day return in vengeance, to judge the quick and the dead.

These barbarians–our ancestors–made the journey across the Atlantic and settled in the New World. They immediately had a problem. The terrain, the weather, the lack of funds and the nature of this new kingdom gave them a swift kick in the pants. So rather than referring back to the message of Jesus–to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”–they sought for more practical solutions. You might ask yourself how good Christian people ever resorted to slavery? We always make poor choices when we allow the bankers to control our conscience. It became a really easy three-step process once money became the issue.

1. “We need cheap labor or free workers so we can make money.”

2. “Those people down in Africa don’t look like us so they must not be as good as we are.”

3. “Therefore, we will go down, get them, and use them to create profit for ourselves.”

Gone was any thought of empathy. The definition of empathy is very simple. It literally means the action of understanding. Do you really think our ancestors sat down for even five minutes to try to understand what it was like for a black man or woman to be snatched from their homes, thrown on a ship for a long journey and then to arrive in a new country without freedom? Do you think they spent any time at all wondering if there was a way to improve the financial situation in their lives without destroying the lives of others? You see, long before a decision was made by the Dutch trade ships to bring black human cargo to this country as slaves, our ancestors had abandoned the true message of Jesus, true spirituality and therefore, any sense of a world view. They had turned Christianity into a religion of conquering and therefore, made it convenient to use it for their own campaign.

So since we haven’t had a major spiritual renewal in our world for a long time, and the blood and thoughts of our ancestors vibrate in our beings one hundred and fifty years later, we are therefore still under the curse of believing that there are some people who are not as good as we are. It makes us self-righteous, and after all, all decisions to be “holier than thou” end up with the participants looking ignorant.

This leads us to the second step oo the path of true spirituality and a world view–empathy. The action of understanding–which was exemplified in the philosophy of Jesus by the statement, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Was there any plantation owner in Georgia who would have allowed his son or daughter to be treated the way the slaves were in his county? Of course not. But once you believe that somebody is less than you, it is very easy to explain your abuse of him or her.

Somewhere along the line, as Rome was being pillaged by our ancestors, the message of true empathy and hope was abandoned in favor of force.  Because of that, we still are not sure what to do with the tainted history of our country’s involvement in slavery. There were people like Thomas Jefferson who knew it was wrong, and even wrote about it being a terrible necessity, but continued to own slaves, piously trying to overcome that shortcoming by freeing them at his death. Let’s be honest–if they needed to be freed at his death, they probably deserved to be free while he was alive.

I do not think we will ever get our footing in this country on the issue of racial equality until we abandon the Viking interpretation of Christianity and instead, adopt the universal message of Jesus, which is empathy: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” I’ve even simplified it down this year to a broader spectrum of application: “No one is better than anyone else.”

Whether people act deprived or depraved in our presence does not change the fact that God is no respecter of persons. But it is not very difficult to make the journey into bigotry when you are financially strapped and your religion has been stripped of all of its empathy. Even today we continue to withhold civil rights from some of our citizens because we don’t think they’re as good as we are.  It is our generation’s offshoot of slavery.

So we now have two parts of the path–and you can immediately see how they move in synchronicity.

• Apathy: “I don’t care what you do and what you are. I will not judge you. It’s not my business. “
• Empathy: “I have made a decision to do unto others as I would have them do unto me.  In other words, ‘no one is better than anyone else.'”

We cannot shame our nation into regretting slavery, but what we can do is realize that slavery was caused by greed overtaking our sense of understanding the true heart of Jesus–and whenever greed is at work, we are willing to do anything to anybody to get what we want.

 

The producers of jonathots would humbly request a yearly subscription donation of $10 for this wonderful, inspirational opportunity