Skip to content

This Isn’t Rome

November 6, 2017

In the past 48 hours or so since the attack on the Sutherland Springs church two things have become overwhelmingly clear;  gun laws do not work to stop crazy people from doing violent things and that the only people we can count on to protect us are ourselves.

I’m going to ignore the first bit here mostly other than to say that laws don’t stop bad people from doing things, this guy broke a stack of laws deeper than his grave when he purchased those guns, the ammo to go in them, kept them, transported them, entered the church, and opened fire on innocent people.

The only thing that stopped this scumbag was an armed citizen with his own rifle. But this was after the gunman had been able to do whatever he wanted inside that church! From what I can tell, no one inside the church was able to return fire, certainly not effective fire if anyone there was armed at all!

Here’s the deal folks, you’re the only first responder you can count on to be in any situation you’re going to personally encounter, not your friends, not the EMTs, not me, and not the cops. You and you alone determine the outcome of any violent or emergency medical situation you might encounter! That responsibility is yours its part of living in a free society and it’s part of being an adult.

So carry your gun! I’m specifically talking to my fellow Christians here: If you are legally able to carry your gun to Church DO IT! And I’m talking to everyone here men and women guns are the great equalizer and women can defend their lives with a firearm as well as men can. Always every time no exceptions carry your freaking gun to Church! I don’t care if you’re not sure if Christian’s should fight back or whatever hang-up you might have with using violence to defend yourself and those around you, get off the cross use the wood to build a bridge and get over it, this isn’t Rome, you aren’t a martyr, no one will benefit if you give up, and there is no virtue to dying on your knees instead of fighting today! Decide today if you can fight, if you can’t talk to someone and work on it until you can. And get some training for the love of Pete! Guns aren’t magic, it takes skill and practice to be able to shoot a gun, especially a handgun with proficiency under pressure!

You should also carry a IFAC near or on you wherever you go, bleeding sucks and you should be able to fix it if it happens to you! Carry a spare cause sometimes more than one person starts bleeding. You’re going to need training here too and make sure it’s good because it’s more likely you’re going to need your IFAC than your gun.

Prepare yourself and your church to fight to defend yourselves from whatever threats may come. This isn’t Rome and we’re not under persecution these people who will attack churches in America today are simply crazy and aren’t even close to the same thing as what the Christians in the early church faced as martyrs. And just as the threat is totally different the response should also be totally different. You have a duty and responsibility to yourself and to your brothers and sisters in Christ around you at church to be ready to be the first responder to any event that may arise.


Get your gun, get your license, get your training, and carry the dang thing!


Balance of Powers – Infographic

October 26, 2016

This infographic shows the federal agencies under control of each branch of the government. Information was taken from Wikipedia, we have added a color code that shows the number of elected positions in that branch.

Maybe there should be more elected positions, less government agencies, or both.



Election Conspiracy Theory of The Day

October 19, 2016

Here’s the deal, and this is something I theorize every election cycle since they rolled out the electronic voting machines. We don’t know how the electronic voting machines are programed.


Random voting machine pic from the web

I don’t mean the screens that show the names and check boxes.

I mean there is programing in the chips on the PCB that we don’t know. It would not take many lines of code to create an algorithm that would take a random number of votes and then switch a random vote to the other side.

Totally doable at the component programing level. The algorithm could even query if the machine was in a test mode or wouldn’t activate till a certain number of votes are cast, that way it would avoid detection.

Israel programed the Stuxnet to destroy Iranian centrifuges only when they were configured in a particular way, voting machines could be the same.  The folks that complain that when they touch the screen and it doesn’t mark the location they want, or that the voting machines are deleting votes, they are just ignorant.

Poll locations keep accurate counts of voters but the votes are anonymous so moving a few votes from column “A” to column “B” before anyone sees them would work, probably not enough to swing local elections except in the closest of races, but senators and president the shift could be significant. It’s the most plausible election conspiracy theory I’ve thought of, and could be continually run for years.

Sermon on Psalm 23

August 6, 2015

This is my sermon from last Sunday on Psalm 23.

War in Syria

September 6, 2013

There are generally two options when looking at the war in Syria and determining whether or not we should be involved. I would like to take a moment and examine what I consider to be the good arguments from both sides. The phrase “good” arguments as there are a LOT of really, REALLY bad arguments from both sides. So let’s begin.


Arguments for the war

Chemical Weapons Use.

Someone used a “WMD” which is apparently a bad thing. This is probably the single strongest point in the argument for the war; the definition of a moral war as defined by the post-world war 2 global society precludes the use of WMDs. Therefore we need to address the use of these tools against people in Syria.


The Bashar al-Assad is bad and does bad things in general.

This one is a little more sketch. We know Assad isn’t our friend, and probably an enemy of our ally Israel, but he isn’t the worst possible leader of Syria, an Al-Qaida run Syria would be a much worse thing for us and our allies in the region than an Assad Syria. This point comes down to basically that since we are the ultimate good guys we gotta go stomp on the bad guys and give them a savage kicking.

That’s kind of all I’ve got for good arguments for the war.


Arguments against the war

We won’t fight it to win it.

Since the 1950s America has been incapable of fighting a war to actually win said war. We want to make everyone love us and our way of life! Which isn’t why or how you fight a war, it isn’t even how you treat a conquered people for crying out loud! Americans simply don’t seem to want to watch us go beat the living daylights out of an enemy and then come home, or as an equal alternative, beat the living daylights out of an enemy and then rule their country.  Unless you’re going to fight a war to dominate it, you shouldn’t fight it.  And Obama has made it clear that this isn’t a fight to win its to show Assad how big we are.


We don’t know who we should be fighting for or against.

Having known enemies and allies is vital to a successful military operation.  We have no idea what is going on in Syria, at least not that we’ve been able to articulate. The rebels seem to be just ate up with the Al-Qaida, and have been making a habit out of shooting, raping, burning and otherwise expressing general unpleasantry towards Christians in the country, people whom Assad had been protecting. On the other hand Assad may have used chemical weapons against his people, but that could have been the rebels too, Russia seems to think so anyway.


Everyone else thinks it’s a bad idea.

Now, I’m not one to care what exactly the rest of the world thinks about what the USA does. But when the entire premise of your attack is “what you’ve done violated international morality you must be pummeled” and the rest of the international group says a pretty collective “meh!”  Maybe it’s time to re-think our plans.


All things considered, while I’m usually totally in favor of going somewhere and blowing America’s enemies to kingdom come, it looks like they are doing a pretty good job of beating themselves to me. I think we should let them continue unmolested.

I don’t want this to sound like I think we might lose, or that we should be worried because Russia and Iran are talking tough. We could easily win a war with either or both of those nations, our military budget cuts notwithstanding. The question is not CAN we fight and win a war in Syria, but SHOULD we. And I would say unless there is some rather outstanding information that is being withheld, I think the answer is no.

The Church and the “Millenial” generation

August 6, 2013

A friend of mine on facebook posted this article on the generation of Americans known as “millennials” (roughly those born between 1980 and the year 2000 as I understand it) and their souring relationship with the “Church” which church that is the author wasn’t clear but I believe she means the protestant evangelical church, though again how she would define that isn’t clear.

Why millennials are leaving the church” By Rachel Held Evans

Here are my thoughts:

I think within most of what she intends to say she is wrong, or at least she is wrong from a biblical / spiritual point of view, she may be right about what the millenials are looking for but her conclusion of “lets give it to them” is far, far from on target but a few of the things she says in passing are quite true.

Now I’m going to cut directly to the heart of the issue and while she says a lot of things that are quite wrong and should probably be addressed, towards the end of her article she says this “we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there“ and I want to talk about that for just a second.

Because she gives us quite a list of things we aren’t supposed to talk about and then tells us to show her Jesus. Which truly is fair, no one will get into heaven because they waited until marriage to have sex or voted republican or went to church for that matter, getting into heaven is based solely and wholly upon simple faith in Jesus Christ to give you eternal life. To talk about any other aspect of the Christian life to an unbeliever is static and noise above the signal and should be debrided from your gospel message like an abscess.

But what is the Church and who is it for? The asking of that question can quite easily descend into an argument, but the only answer to be found in scripture is that Church is for those who have believed in Jesus for eternal life and seek to be more like him. Anyone else will naturally feel like an outsider, especially unbelievers, for they are at a family meeting of those to whom they are not related. The church is for the meat of the faith to be meditated upon by those who have believed, not to draw in the outsider for evangelical purposes. Evangelism should happen outside the walls of the church, fellowship and encouragement is what we meet for in the church. (This is not an argument against sharing the gospel during a church service, which is a very, very good thing! It is an argument against missing the point of what the church is for at a very fundamental level)

Any church that has as their primary goal to see those who attend come to faith is not a church; they are an evangelistic organization and should stop selling themselves as a church. The primary goal of the local church should be to see those within the body grow in discipleship, to help improve the standing of its members before the Bema of Christ in the last day!

So yes, find Jesus! And once you have believed on Him the church has not the right but the responsibility to talk about every single other item on that list of no-no topics she listed out there for us.

Speaking of which, let’s look at those topics for a moment shall we? Keeping in mind that a Church should be saying things directed at believers 95% of the time or more here is her list of things millennials want from their Church:

  1. We want an end to the culture wars.
  2. We want a truce between science and faith.
  4. We want to ask questions that don’t have predetermined answers.
  6. We want our LGBT friends to feel truly welcome in our faith communities.

Let’s walk through that list real quick and see if there is any truth to what she says;

1)      Culture war? Yeah man! ‘Cause helping Christians stand against an evil culture that is trying to destroy everything good and moral in the USA and to effectively stand up for a culture that is friendly to Christianity is CLEARLY outside the purview of the Church.

2)      Science and Faith? *sigh* really? Because standing up for and giving Christians the tools to defend biblical truths like creation against junk propaganda “science” is haaaard and our friends might think we are Jesus freaks or something.

3)      We want to stand for STUFF! But not stuff that anyone is against, or that might upset our friends, ‘cause that could get awkward.

4)      As far as I know, asking legit questions is always welcome in church, well maybe not in the middle of the service but you know what I mean. If your church gets cross at you for asking honest questions then you should definitely leave that sucker!

5)      Ahh politics! Lol for some reason you never hear complaints about politics from liberals in a liberal church. I think someone has an agenda speaking of which…

6)      Homosexuals! now, I have to kinda sorta agree with her, we should want any sinner, seeking life to feel welcome in our midst, however I don’t think people who define themselves as strongly by their sins as homosexuals do are ever going to feel welcome in a group of people seeking Christ-likeness however friendly we are to them. They define themselves so often by their sexual preference that it becomes their personality and who they are, rather than a thing they do that the only way to accomplish the goal is to preach permissiveness when it comes to sex, which is clearly unbiblical. And preaching biblical truth is what the church is there for! Now remember, this is totally 100% separate from your gospel message which should NEVER include any commentary about someone’s lifestyle, we are all equally unrighteous before God and all equally need to believe in Jesus!

7)      Right, holiness I can understand the frustration of these “millennials” if they don’t want anything divisive or absolute but want to know how to live a life of holiness. Now her point about most Christian communities being somewhat obsessed about sex as sort of the definition of purity and righteousness is well made, I’ve personally never been totally clear on how sexual sin is soooo much worse than gossip, stealing, lying or speeding on the highway but apparently it is. What I think, is that lots of Christians need to calm down lol.

Or, allow me to translate succinctly:
“We want the church to tell us stuff we can do that makes us feel good about ourselves, maybe even look good to our unbelieving hipster friends, but we don’t like moral or natural absolutes that contradict modern culture or thought because that might be awkward.”

Now don’t get me wrong, its super tough to preach about righteousness and maintain that mentality of God’s infinite grace and the total assurance we have of eternal life having believed in Jesus! The critical loss is the understanding of the Judgment seat of Christ (the bema) and what our call is.

“Go, therefore and make Disciples” is not the same as “go and make big-ass churches that have a great cross section demographic of age groups and nationality’s oh and you need to have a super active missions team and a popular youth group”. But to walk the road of discipleship, what 1st John calls being “in the light” and to teach others to walk that way as well, is to teach that truth that we are assured of our destination, but called to righteousness and greatness in the kingdom along the way and we should never shrink from that message to anyone for any reason!

Royally disinterested.

July 22, 2013


This concludes my commentary on the occurrences within the family that used to rule the country where Great Briton used to be.