Bible and Scripture Misunderstanding Leads to Support of Government of Israel in Modern Day

    There are at least one hundred different Christian theologies, ideologies, doctrines, and/or interpretations of the Holy Bible. There are actually more like millions, because as each of us believers have our own ways and thoughts of what things are meaning and how to apply them within the sayings, prophecies, narratives, principles, and doctrines of the Holy Bible, we each have our own understandings and interpretations of what the words and concepts mean.

    Take the word and name and understanding of Israel, for example.

    The meaning of it in Hebrew is "God prevails", from what I have learned.

    I think is safe to say that most of us can agree on that meaning.

    However, what is Israel in 2024? 

    There is the nation state of Israel, which is currently entrenched in a brutal war in the Gaza Strip, which also has resulted in the deaths of more than five hundred Palestinians in the West Bank. Some evangelical Christians and Eretz Israel (all Jewish Holy Land advocates) refer to the sides of the places in the main Holy Land as the Biblical names, Judea and Samaria. There is no Israel proper, as named and designated in 1947 by the United Nations. The original Jewish, or Tribe of Judah area is what is interpreted by Israel being named throughout the Bible, both in the past and into the current future. Now, and what will transpire in the next years, which is prophesied or documented within the verses and chapters of the Torah, or Jewish holy scripture, and the Christian Bible, which includes the New Testament, which is mostly anathema to most things of Judaism.

    Yet, evangelical Christians, of many various sects and denominations, ardently support and claim that the modern state of Israel is the Biblical fulfillment of what the Bible, in particular the book of Revelations or Apocalypses, predicts or foreshadows will happen in the Last Days or End Times, in the time of the Advent of Jesus Christ for the second time. 

    My way of understanding is that there are Twelve Tribes of Israel, one of them being Judah, and the others all have their promises and blessings as well. Ephraim and Manasseh, which are millions of us, if not billions, are highly favored and chosen groups of people of God, as much of the covenant of the Lord and his plans as those of Judah. Most Christians have no idea about the identity and purpose of all the tribes of Israel.

    Judah has its place, but the country of Israel, as currently constituted, is not necessarily the religious and spiritual embodiment of what is promised to Judah and Israel, as according to the Torah (which admittedly I know less about), and the Christian Holy Bible, both the Old and New Testaments.

    Incidentally, the Roman Catholics, which may be a billion or more adherents, also include the Apocrypha in the Bible, which is the time between the Old and New Testaments. Many other Christians believe that those are historical documents with little or no religious, spiritual, or doctrinal value.

    Hopefully this makes sense to many of us...

   There is little consensus as to how Israel really functions today, as an interpretation of the Bible or not.

    Many of us, or even all of us, have it wrong. Who is right?

The Quest for .400 batting - Will It Happen before I Die?

    Maybe not, the short and sweet. This is an achievement that perhaps has become harder with time. The last time it happened, there were no Blacks and effectively no Asians in the sport.

    The Triple Crown, similarly, was an elusive feat, until Miguel Cabrera did it with the Tigers in 2012. For those who do not know, that is being tops in the major leagues in batting, home runs, and RBIs. (Runs batted in). He batted excellently that year, as have so many batting champions before and since.

    But hitting .400? Not since Ted Williams from before World War II. That is like when my dad was three and my mom was being born. I think this was with the Red Sox, so they were not too far away. But in 2024, my dad is almost 87 and my mom has been gone for ten years.

    One guy flirted with hitting .400 when I was a kid, and my friend's older brother was freaking out around 1979, maybe 1980. George Brett! Are you kidding me? .390 or so in July? Wow! Brian Murray got my attention, and the magazine Boys Life, which I got as a kid because of Boy Scouting, or Cub Scouting, the authors touted and venerated baseball greats! Huh. Literature about a sports.

    Huh. Later I saw that Hemingway wrote about sports and sporting things.

    That is all right. Even baseball. A. Bartlett Giamatti, a poet laureate, loved baseball.

    So, we have to care about this sport in life, in art, in the scheme of things, right?

    .400 is a thing.

    In 1994, a bittersweet magical season, Tony Gwynn was coming up close to .400 when the season was ended with the money-grubbing strike. Curse them all, owners and players.

    So, now Luis Arraez has me excited 30 years later.

    Still a fan, a mere boy in the scheme of things.

    I hope that he does it. Make Ted Williams a thing again.

 The World is Ever More Complicated - Artificial Intelligence is Another Way for All of Us to be Further Confused

    The more things simplify the more complicated it gets.

Demonize with Dirty; We Allow Ourselves to Hate and Persecute

    Dirty [fill in the blank]. We have heard terms of hate spewed and exploited over the centuries.

    Dirty [racial epithet]. Dirty [religious minority]. Dirty [sexual reference]. 

    Can we fill in all the expletives and terms? No, not all. But we can imagine many.

    Who you deem dirty?

    I guess thugs, criminals, drug users.

    Certainly terrorists, which is implied in the label.

    Assassins and murderers are the ones that do killing in dirty ways. Illegal, wrong, dirty.

 Bill Walton! Amazing Life! We are Grateful, Yes

    No intention to make the pun about the Grateful Dead, but perhaps Bill himself would appreciate the humor. I had a college roommate, named Patrick, who was family friends with the Walton family in Del Mar, California. The Waltons are certainly a famous and successful, an admirable group of people. The parents of Bill were good and unique, did a great job. I saw a special about Bill's life a year or so ago.

    Bill was a good example of American and human victory and achievement. He was, as the news reports are now touting, "one of a kind". 

    He went to UCLA and triumphed there, with perhaps the best coach of all-time, John Wooden. That was the end of that era in the 1970s. Then he won with the Trailblazers in Portland, and eventually the Larry Bird-led Celtics.

    I write this as the Pacers lose the Eastern Conference Finals to the Celtics, jobbed by the so-called referees who could not make the flagrant foul call when TJ McConnell of the Pacers was clobbered in the face by Jaylen Brown. AWFUL, officials. You had the benefit of instant replay review? EGREGIOUS and DESPICABLE, for a game that is supposed to be regulated. Garbage. Anyway, sorry, I digress. 

    Bill Walton did some tremendous broadcasting as a sportscaster. He was funny, enlightening, off-the-wall, entertaining. You had to love the guy. I did. I appreciated his weirdness and his brilliance.

    His Conference of Champions Pac-12 is now on its last legs, ironically as he has succumbed to cancer.

    Rock on, Crazy Bill. We loved you; you were great in so many senses. You were part and parcel of the excellence of life and what we are as humans. Frail yet incredibly strong. Funny yet wise.

    Walton, a giant in stature, character, achievement, and energy.

    Oh, the cosmic karma is flowing hard, tonight my brother!

    Rock on; we will be eternally grateful in life and in death, and into all the universe.

    Shaka, bra. Gonna catch some waves in your name.

 Hemingway Did Amazing Work

    The stories, the language, the themes, the prose, the dialogs.

    He was a master, and he locked in young.

    Some of us cannot or have not done it the same way. Obviously, he is unique, we are all our own.

    But some of us want to try. Perhaps we can do this; we can write. We can think. We can express.

 Memorial Day Weekend 2024

    Thinking about 1864 today. The second to last year of the War between the States, known as the War of Northern Aggression, or the U.S. Civil War. What to think of it this many years later?

    It was hard, it was necessary. The Southern States could not abide by the fact that the North was going to fight the lifestyle of slavery so entrenched in the states that would become Confederate. The war was inevitable, it seems, and the thousands of lives lost were sad and unfortunate consequences of the differences that men and boys would fight to their ends for. A United States or a divided republic. Well over half a million soldiers died.

    In Clarke County today we visited the Battle of Cool Springs, where 140 souls from both sides met their final fates. The oldest for the north was a 52-year-old, father of three. The oldest Rebel was a 48-year-old, father of six. The youngest victim was a 15-year-old, trying to retreat across the river. He drowned, and his body was never found.

    We as a family hoped that he simply disappeared and never came back. Lots of terrible things happened to a lot of people in that conflict. Wars are rarely easy or full of hope and success.

    This war established the emancipation of four million African descended enslaved people. It was needed, it was right for the people to be freed.

    Many died to see it so.

    We remember their sacrifices; we can imagine the heartache and the sorrow. It was a minor moment in the overall war and campaigns. Forgotten by most. Not these people, not today, not this weekend.

   We remember the lost soldiers and the families that they left behind.

    We as citizens and patriots remember and venerate the fallen heroes, and the ones who lost them. Families, friends, compatriots, comrades.

    We will not forget them.

    We thank them for their ultimate sacrifice; for most of us it was not in vain.

    Honored to see the place where 140 of you gave your lives. Sometimes I believe many of us do not value or try to give enough understanding what it means, what it meant, why we are blessed because of these past tragedies and events.

    We definitively need to learn from the past, appreciate the past, and learn to improve in the present and future.

    And always remember: freedom has never been free. There always is a cost paid by someone.