Wir sind bettler. Hoc est verum.

To understand the destructive, dreary, and dismal side of Government jobs we must first condescend to the origins of Government. Why do we have Government in the first place and why does this Government have jobs? The answer is extremely complex; allow me to state it simply. Government is nothing more than the people working together for the common good, and it is nothing less than the common good working for the people. It is the will of the people, created by the people, to rule the people by people. Laws define it and it defines the laws. It is circular, it is organic, and it is a machine.

We the people create the Government and in return the Government creates us. After we gifted some of our freedom, our humanity, our responsibility, and our creativity to it, it thanked us by redefining humanity and the boundaries in which we can act it out.  It is necessary and it is tyrannical. It saves lives while destroying them, and it abolishes freedom to protect freedom. It is the giving of lesser things, to protect the greater things. It is a necessary evil, to control and protect humans, but it was not always so.

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I am going to deviate from my typical topics to address a more political, cultural topic, so bear with me.

As many of you know, in California the people voted to keep the definition of marriage (what it has always been) as between only a man and a woman; the courts (one judge in particular) has overturned it.

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John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”

This verse is one of the most popular and frequently quoted verses of the entire Bible, and rightly so. It gives us an intimate look into God and His love. God’s love is a powerful subject, and a most important one, however it is not in the scope of my writing today.

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There seems to still be a debate as to whether Christianity is a religion or not. Personally I don’t understand what the big deal is, and why some people fight to say that it is not a religion. They give reasons like: “religion is man trying to reach God” and thus “Christianity is God reaching man” so they affirm that it cannot be a religion. But is this how God sees it? Is this how God defines religion and does He see Christianity as a religion?

James 1:26-27 “²⁶If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless. ²⁷Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

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I am at lunch with a good friend, my phone rings, I instinctively pick it up to see who is calling, oh it’s my wife. I ask for permission to pick it up, knowing he wouldn’t say no. A professor is sitting in his office talking with a student, the student’s phone rings, he picks it up, it’s his wife. Another professor is talking with a student in his office, his phone rings, he doesn’t pick up, the student is confused. I call a good friend who is out to dinner with his family, he picks up.

These are all true stories, and they all have something in common. In each of these stories, there is a battle going on, a hidden, unspoken battle. It is the battle between the face and the phone.

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There are many people out there who call themselves 4 point Calvinists. Calvinism has often, and wrongly, been simplified to the 5 points of Calvinism, or TULIP. I say wrongly because Calvinism does hold to TULIP, but it holds to much, much more, and to say that Calvinism is basically TULIP is to over simplify the teaching of Calvin, or what most people mean – reformation theology.

Most 4 point Calvinists reject the L in TULIP usually because they believe that it removes people’s “free will” or responsibility, and it destroys the idea that God’s offer of salvation is real and not pretend. But before I craft my response allow me to quickly explain TULIP for those who do not know what it means:

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So I have been thinking and this is my theory about what level’s of male maturity there are out there. My theory is that males (and probably females too) have experience certain life events, in order to mature into the next stage of maturity. Now this doesn’t mean that every male who hits that stage is going to be as mature as he possibly could, it just means that his potential to mature has increased.

Let me explain it this way. Let’s say that maturity is a scale from 0-100, 100 being as mature as one could ever get, and 0 being an infant. So when a man get’s married lets say he now has unlocked the potential to mature to 80 on the scale, although he may only be scoring 50. Does this mean he will hit 80? Nope, it just means that before getting married, he couldn’t hit 80 if he wanted to.
You see the assumption is that I believe maturity is partially based on how accurately one sees the world especially themselves. The more you “mature” in life, the more you are aware of yourself, others, and the world, and the more realistic (how close to reality) your view becomes. I think there are probably 5 major maturity stages, although many smaller ones within these larger stages. Let me call them: Childhood, Adolescents, Underdeveloped Adult, Adult, and Well Developed Adult. If we use the 0-100 scale this would mean that one hits Childhood after a score of 20, Adolescents after 40, Adult after 60 and Mature Adult after 80. This even scale is just for simplicity, I would argue that certain stages actually are longer than others, but that would make this all too complicated. Note that I do not have infancy on the chart, infancy is basically a 0 level of maturity, when one moves from infancy to childhood they enter the number scale, again this is mainly for simplicity sake and keeping the scale nice round numbers.

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I have been thinking about marriage, and while talking with some people I have decided to put down a few things I think we all should look for in a spouse, but let look at it from the other direction: ourselves.

One of the more important things in life is the ability to introspect your own self. I think we all spend too much time thinking about and talking about how everyone else should improve themselves, and not ourselves. So allow me here to challenge us all to better think about and work on ourselves, so that we can be the better spouse, and if we can be better, we will be in a better position to know and look for the right qualities in the other person.

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The following is my attempt to help people think a little more clearly on the issues around marriage, and how it should be understood.

What is marriage?

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Have you ever thought about beauty? I mean really sat down and thought about what it is, where it comes from, and why it matters? I never really did until recently, so you are let of the hook, but now let us reason together.

You most likely have heard it said: “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, a sentiment that I ultimately reject. Now I do not rule out people’s preferences, but what it ultimately boils down to is, the intrinsic beauty of something, is not dependent on what people feel or think about it.

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