Tag Archives: Mormons

Why the Jews used to be God’s Chosen People but aren’t any more

Posted on August 21, 2013 by | 22 comments

Hi Readers.   Thanks for coming by for a read.

After we prayed Old Sol up this morning I was explaining to the cats about how and why God picked the Jews for his Chosen People and didn’t give a hoot in hell for any of the rest of humanity.

He did it out of hunger, I explained patiently.  God looked around and, while nobody down there was any great shakes, there were a lot of them.  Trying to make human beings as a species Chosen instead of a single pocket of them was just not worth the effort.  The Jews would do okay for a while until something else came along.

Things began to look up after 1492, and after 1776, God could see he finally had some worthwhile raw material to work with down there on earth.  And the more He looked at the situation the better He liked it.

Today God couldn’t care less about any Jews besides the ones living in America.  He’s completely indifferent about Roman Catholics living all over the place except America.  Same with Zen Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims.  Same with Latter Day Saints, and the various Native American religions.  Americans are Gods Chosen People today.  All of them.  God cares more about an American atheist than He does about a Roman Pope, because at least that atheist is an American.  Chosen.

Just like before, when it was only Jews, God doesn’t give a hoot in hell about anyone else on the planet.

God loves American Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Christians, Taoists, you name it.  And He has perfectly good reasons for doing it, same as he had originally when he made regular Jews His Chosen People, and they blew it. 

The competition back then was just no great shakes.  It still isn’t.

If you don’t believe me look at all those shale oil deposits they’re suddenly finding under the United States every time they poke a hole in the ground.   If that doesn’t convince you look around a bit more.  Americans have Chinamen working three shifts to build their toasters.  They’ve got Japanese designing and manufacturing their cars instead of worrying about having two-headed offspring.  They’ve got Middle Easterners giving them excuses to keep a military establishment big enough to fight the USSR in the golden days of the Cold War.  They’ve got Israel keeping things stirred up so’s there’s no danger anyone much will survive what’s going to happen there.

If Americans aren’t God’s Chosen People why are they building that big fence on the US Border with Mexico?  Do you think all that starving and killing going on everywhere, say in South America and Africa happened by accident?  Hell no it didn’t.    You don’t see that kind of crap happening to God’s Chosen People.

God bless America.

Old Jules

22 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, History, Human Behavior, Spirituality

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Self-Doubt and Sincere Soul Searching [Eh?]

Posted on August 7, 2012 by | 15 comments

So what the hell was that all about?

I can see how Warren [or anyone else] might justifiably refer to me as an SOB.  I’ve no argument on that score.

But why a BIGOTED SOB? [The Mormon post comments]

Everything I said about Mormons was positive, and I could have said a lot of other positive things about them.  For instance, Howard Hughs trusted them, always hired Mormon bodyguards, caretakers and administrators.  Because they were honest, dedicated, hard working.

For that matter, Mormons also have legions of people researching and identifying their dead ancestors, baptizing them ex-post-facto to Mormonism so they won’t be doomed to hell.  PHDs in history could learn a lot from those uncredentialed Mormon researchers because they’re better and more accurate doing it than most PHDs I’ve ever come across.  When I’ve run up against a brick wall doing historical research I’ve frequently found help among Mormons doing genealogy.

Is that cool, or what?  When those researchers run out of relatives to be unknowingly baptized, likely someday one of them will find my name and make a Latter Day Saint of me without me having to do anything, even know it.  If they happen to be right, which I personally doubt, it’s still a win/win.  Cheap insurance. 

So Warren couldn’t possibly be calling me a bigot on behalf of Latter Day Saints.

Okay.  Maybe he was damning me because I said I didn’t trust Christians.  Or that I’d trust a Mormon more readily than I’d trust a Christian.  But the truth is, that opinion is just based on my personal experience. 

Some of my best friends have been Christians.  Sure, I dropped a lot of them off the list because they pestered me to death with their evangelizing, but I still thought of them as best friends.  And as such, I was able to recognize the human flaws they carried around with them, including a weakness for falsehood, many of them.  Along with a weakness for personal betrayal, abstractions over personal loyalty.  Doing things involving me ‘for my own good’. 

Maybe trusting members of one religion over another is lousy judgement, but I can’t see it as bigotry.

The only other thing in that post that might be construed as bigotry was my saying this king is a black white man.  But hell, that’s being said all over the web by black folks.  They’re calling him an ‘Oreo’ [black on the outside, white on the inside], an Uncle Tom.  All manner of things suggesting they don’t consider his decisions, demeanor, perspectives to be similar to their own.  Their self-stereotyping of their ethnic attitudes and opinions exclude his.  They believe he matches their stereotype of whites, more nearly.

So how can me calling him a black white man be a sign of bigotry?

Brings to mind the Hispanic wife of an Anglo friend of mine during the nineties.  They’d built a new house and were showing signs of affluence and the other Hispanic women of Socorro, New Mexico, whispered, shouted, sneered, snarled, “She’s trying to be white!”  “She’s pretending she’s white!”  Boycotted her beauty-shop business.

Crazy world we’re living in. 

I ain’t ‘trying to pretend to be black’, ain’t trying to ‘pretend to be a Mormon’, ain’t trying to ‘pretend to be a Christian’. 

Maybe that’s the problem.  I wonder which one Warren was trying to pretend to be.

Old Jules

15 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Relationships, Spirituality

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If I Voted I’d Vote Mormon

Posted on August 6, 2012 by | 14 comments

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by. I’ve told you before I don’t vote and never intend to vote, would rather not even know who’s king.

However, my buddy Rich tells me one of the wannabe king-guys is a Mormon.  Which I find cool and exciting.  If I were going to vote, I’d vote for him, same as I’d have voted for this guy now because he’s black.  No way I could have predicted he’d turn out to be some white guy wearing dark makeup.

So, why would I vote Mormon?

  • I’ve known a good many Mormons and had a lot of respect for them.  Good, solid folks.  Tidy.  You can spot a Mormon ranch because the fences are mended, the paint is fresh and there’ll be no loose shingles anywhere.
  • I’d trust any Mormon I’m ever likely to meet a long while before I’d trust almost any Christian I’ve ever met.
  • Mormons don’t care about anyone but other Mormons.  They’d peel these rich Christians like onions if they didn’t convert, which they would.  We’d end up with a Mormon Nation.  The first in history.  Bound to do things weird, different, exciting.  For that matter, they’d peel back everyone else who doesn’t convert, too.  Which everyone would.  I sure as hell would, if it protected my Social Security check from the Wall Street bankers and Washington vultures.
  • I’ve always thought there was something fascinating about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, thought it was an event not repeated often enough in the history of this country.  Everything’s been entirely one-sided.  Seems to me the best prospects for seeing US citizens turning the guns on one another, instead of pointing them at some overseas, non-English speaking villager somewhere, is to get some diversity here.
  • I had a couple of ‘jack’-Mormon lady-friends in my life I still have fond memories of.  I’d vote for either of them if they were running for something.
  • Finally, at least this guy isn’t just a black white man.  Or if he is, Rich didn’t mention it.

Old Jules

14 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Government, Politics

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Concerning Zealotry

Posted on April 9, 2012 by | 4 comments

Originally posted on another blog site Tuesday, September 26, 2006

What’s wrong with zealotry?

Probably no human trait has caused more misery, bloodshed, pain and general deviltry in history than political or religious zealotry.

Political or religious zealotry.  The deadly twins.  They aren’t two separate traits.  Political, or religious zealotry are just one trait following two different paths to create ugly.

Think about it.  One of the reasons political and religious zealots tend to be found in the same human being lies in the fact that religious zealots have already graduated with honors from the school of blind faith.

Communism?  3/4 century of human misery caused by political zealotry.  Cambodia?  The Inquisition?  The Mormons having to flee to Utah?  The 3rd Reich?  Jim Jones?  Wossname Christian/Patriot bossman wanting to assassinate wossnamisimo prez of Venezuela?  The Kennedy bros. ordering the assassination of Prez Diem, was it, our ally, South Vietnam?  The Kennedy bros., themselves getting assassinated?

Political, or religious zealotry.

Today it isn’t getting better, as a person might have expected, because of the collapse of Communism world-wide.  It’s gotten a lot worse.  We’ve got Muslim zealots, Christian zealots, Prez step-two Bush Dynasty and ex-prez BlowJob wives all in the game of zealous one-upsmanship.  Zionist zealots wanting to snag every piece of real estate in the Middle East they can drum up an excuse to play for US support, which doesn’t take much.  Hispanic zealots in the US southwest wanting to take it away from the white zealots who took it away from them.  Environmentalist zealots trying to spike trees to injure the workmen cutting down trees while they listen to Joseph Rush Goebbels on the radio to help them remember what to think about rad-libs, Arabs, and whomever it is we’re bombing the bejesus out of this week.

This ain’t cutting it.  It’s not making your lives happier, and it’s sure as hell not making them better.

One of the things I like best about the teachings of the Buddha is the emphasis on moderation, the cautions against zealotry.

Religious moderates have never burned one another at the stake.  Political moderates have never dragged out the guillotine to punish the opposition.  They never built any gas chambers and ovens.  No political or religious moderate ever pulled the trigger on anyone, ever dropped a bomb on anyone except in self-defense.

Political, or religious zealotry.  Human traits worth hating, but they usually only hate one another.  Moderates never bother to hate anyone.

Moderates.  Nice, easy living sort of term.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in Adventure

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An Addendum About My Personal View of Mormons

Posted on January 31, 2012 by | 9 comments

I didn’t say this in the post because I didn’t think it needed saying, but I think it might.

I’ve got nothing bad to say about Mormons.  I’ve never been ill-treated by them, cheated by them, lied to by them so far as I know.  The ones I’ve met have generally been solid, hard-working, honest people.  Seemingly more so compared to the impression I’ve been left with in my seven decades of experience with the remainder of the population.  Christians, Gentile, Jew, atheist, Muslim and agnostic.  Even Buddhists, Taoists, Hindu, and the herd of New Age Gurus.  Even Hopi Elders and Ambiguous Native American Shamans.

My interest in Mormons came to being with the gradual realization that the parties involved in the lost gold mine I searched for so many years were predominantly Mormons.  It was a factor left entirely out of the legend as it came out of the 19th Century and it required years of research to uncover that fact.  The cousin of one of the central characters was evidently the second wife of Brigham Young.  Family names of the lost gold mine participants also show up among people involved in Mountain Meadows.

The timing on the lost gold mine incident and that of the Mountain Meadows massacre originally drew my interest.

What Mormons believe about polygamy, same-sex marriages, almost anything at all has no bearing on my impression and generally benevolent attitude toward them as a whole.  In areas where we disagree I’m willing to forgive them for being wrongheaded, same as I try to forgive everyone else who disagrees with me.  Otherwise I’d be forever having to keep score of who was right in this world, and who is wrong.  It just ain’t worth the effort even those relatively few areas where I can’t restrain myself from having an opinion.

Old Jules

9 Comments

Posted in America, Book Reviews, History, Native American, Native Americans

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