Jasper Jottings —————————————- The achievement journal of my fellow alums

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PROVISION #588 (10/26/08): PROBABLY NO GOD?

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Did that title get your attention? If so then the campaign to put secularist posters on the sides of British buses may achieve its intended result. But I think the posters miss the mark. The problem is not with God; the problem is with parochial ideas of God. That’s what Abraham Lincoln had to say in his Second Inaugural Address (reprinted below). It is also what I understand to be the true nature of here, now, and forever. God is no Judge; God is Understanding.

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People love to find someone or something to blame. It’s called scapegoating, and we do it to God just as much as we do it to other people and things. But I stand with Lincoln. There are no simple answers as to who or what is to blame. There are no good guys or bad guys; there are only people who are seeking to meet their needs as best they know how. We can respect each other for that and, if we choose to do so, we can learn to understand the Understanding that what would make life more wonderful for us all.

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I like the “Provisions” as thought-provoking. Unfortunately, citing Lincoln, throws me into a tizzy. I am from the school of thought that the Second American Revolution, aka what the winners call the “Civil War”, aka what the losers call the “War of Northern Aggression”, was about taxes. Not slavery. The Industrial North wanted to prosper at the expense of the Agrarian South. Lincoln was not the heroic figure portrayed by the media as “freeing the slaves”. He was a venial politician that was in the pockets of the railroads. He had no interest in slavery, except as it appealed to his base.

The world, for the most part, eliminated slavery peacefully.

He waged war on the civilian population, which up to that point was unheard of. The vaunted Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the areas he didn’t control. What happened to the ones in areas he did control.

No, a poor example distracts me from the point of the Provision, i.e., our mistaken notion of God.

AND, Lincoln converted the “United States of America” into the empire of the USA. The States forever were lost in terms of a check on the power of the Federal Government.

In the pantheon of Presidents, Lincoln has to rank at the bottom, or close to it. His competition for the bottom might be FDR for removing us from the Gold Standard, or Truman for Hiroshima / Nagasaki.

Upon reflection, Lincoln gets nudged out by Wilson. He campaigned on “Peace” and immediately got us into WW1. WW1’s “peace settlement” led to WW2. And, Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act which created the exact thing that Andrew Jackson killed. An engine of debt and inflation.

Sigh, please give us more ineffective and merely corrupt politicians. The “idealists” kill us and Liberty.

Be careful what you vote for, you may get it!

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