On Jul 16, 2024, at 7:00 AM, Marc Batko <marc1seed@yahoo.com> wrote:



Challenging Truths

by Marc Batko  (marc1seed@yahoo.com, www.freetranslations.foundation)

1. Man is born free and is everywhere in chains. (Rousseau)

2. Prejudices, stereotypes, lies and myths are real, invisible chains.

3, Self-righteousness, the rat race, the ladder of success, and normalized war are like leaf-blowing music.

4. Pharisees, experts in laws, often miss the weightier matters of social justice, laws of nature, and future sustainability.

5. For Soren Kierkegaard, Christianity is a matter of decisions and risks.  Faith is personal, not private and more interruption than custom.

6. Racists, Zionists, and fundamentalists see specks in the eyes of others but not the log in their own eyes, clean the outside of the cup

    while leaving the inside filthy and dismiss ethical conversion and world responsibility.

7. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, New Testament Christianity is passion for social justice, intervention for victims and scapegoats.  The church

    exists for the other and the world. Life is fragmentary, responsibility is always unfinished.  Costly grace is demanded; cheap grace makes

    like a charade.

8, The child is our teacher of humility and obedience, not corrupted by endless competition and grasping.  Imagination, vision, and creativity

    are not sacrificed to the Leviathan of passivity. conformity, and materialism.

9. Germany fell to National Socialism because of group pressure. (Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom)

10, Late-state financial capitalism is in permanent intensive care, kept alive by monthly FED injections of hundreds of billions of dollars.

      Its strength is deceptive like the pictures of laughing children and untouched nature in advertisements.

11. Mathematical truth is different from ecstatic truth or truths of nature. (Werner Herzog)

12. Healthy cynicism is worlds away from corrosive nihilism.

13. Nature has rights that limit and restrain human desires for power and wealth.

14. The US must accept the higher law of the UN.  Peace and reconciliation are priorities.  Peace is a risk and a venture and cannot be

      found on the way of security. (Dietrich Bonhoeffeer)

15. Trust in the Everlasting God!  Sparrows don't build larger and larger barns but trust in their Creator. The eternal God is above the four

      world empires.  Jesus laughs at the kings of the world!

16. Religion often becomes an authority above God. (Karl Barth)  God kills to make alive. (Martin Luther) The church is often provincial,

      racist, and materialistic, an idol demanding conformity and the sacrifice of human freedom.

17. Who you are is more important than what you do. (Eugen Drewermann)

18. Only the suffering God can help. (D Bonhoeffer)  We must be wounded to be healed. (Dorothee Soelle). The infinite God will heal us

      of our prejudices and stereotypes if we come to him with hearts and minds open for transformation.

19. No wounded candidate was ever elected president in the US (e.g. Garfield, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt).

20. The media can kill democracy. (Robert McChesney)

21. Vancouver BC has a computer-operated light rail Sky Train built in 1986 and 26 community centers.  Community centers could be a

       third way beyond the state and the market.  In SF, LA, Berkeley,and Portland, stores are closed.

22.  Covid 19 ended travel and housing relocation and intensified human anxiety and mistrust.

23. New meaningful jobs should be created every year for the rising generation as millions of new affordable apartments must built every

      year since humans are not clams with built-in housing. Reducing working hours gives workers better long-term health, more time

      sovereignty and allows nature to breath again.

24. In Christ, we are changed and enlivened with new goals and priorities.  Change is not an evil as fundamentalist, racists, and Zionists assume.

25. Change and resistance are part of our nature as antibodies are part of our bodies.

26. Christian nationalism imagines wrongly that Christians are to rule the state.  In truth, domination and authoritarianism are perversions.

      Reagan, GW Bush, Clinton and Trump represent elite democracy or democracy for the rich.

27. Christians are called to world responsibility (D Bonhoeffer) so peace can be everywhere and justice can flow like a raging stream.

28. Ethiopia creates sturdy tents for its poor while homelessness in the US spreads.  PalletShelter.com in Everett, WA can build 60 lockable

      transitional shelters in 10 days for $5500 each.  $2.1 million could build 200 shelters.  In 2023. Portland spent $531 million for the homeless.

      Neither punishing laws nor $200K salaries can solve the moral, economic, social, and political emergency. Massive state investments are

      absolutely necessary to create affordable apartments, not ignoring and making the homeless invisible.

29. The economy is a part of life, not a steamroller crushing creativity and self-determination.

30. The people are ahead of the government and are too big to fail, not the greedy, speculative Wall Street banks.  The best government is no

       government. (Henry David Thoreau)

31. Security is  bound up with selflessness and dying to the self.  The ego must die for the self to be born, Christians, Jews, and Buddhists agree.  

32. The arms race kills even without war. (Dorothee Soelle)

33. Manufactured consent (Noam Chomsky) means narrowing perspectives to elite interests and framing issues and discussions to hide the real

      causes of inequality.

34. Man does not live by bread alone.  Nonstop consumerism is a lie against the truths of physics and faith.  Beware the tongue, the little tool

      plunged educated Germany into total darkness for twelve years.

35. God is "total help for total need." (Karl Barth)  Anything helps should be Trump's campaign slogan!

36. The world is dominated by science and technology and marginalizes or ignores other world views.  Liberate yourselves from mental slavery!

      (Bob Marley)  Decolonize your minds!

37. Jesus calls us to the creation of a new language and a new mathematics.  Black is a new revolutionary consciousness, not a pigmentation of the

      skin. (Steve Biko)

38. The punishing state is a failure like credit default swaps.  The punishing state is sustained by the ghetto-prison principle. (Lois Wacquant)

39. Julian Assange is our hero and martyr.  His freedom is our freedom.  All people should be reporters. 

40. Democracy stands or falls with critical, independent journalism.

41. People can live on the level of frogs and cattle.  The rich are blind and cannot tell their left hand from their right and sell the poor for a pair of

      sandals. (Amos)

42. Self-righteousness is like worshiping your navel or your stomach.  Be enlightened post-materialists enthralled with life beyond the work religion!

43. Jesus' enemies are the dogs of war who don't capitulate or negotiate. You die so they may live! (Pink Floyd)

 

44. The whore of Babylon is like leaf-blowing music!  Nothing is higher than profit or wage slavery in the huckster world singing "Three little piggies."

45. Opposites attract.  The church is the community of the unlike. Hope sets us apart from all creation and from everything past and present. (Jurgen Moltmann)

46. Life over fear should mark conscious, active Christians.  Late-stage financial capitalism relies on fear in advertising barrages and endless wars.

47. Enemy occludes or removes introspection. (Fabio Vighi, on www.thephilosophicalsalon.com)

48. Trump predicts a bloodbath and talks of insurrections and riots, never of housing, taxation, bank stability, or policy issues.  On 7/15/2024, the NY Times

      declared Trump "completely unfit for office."

49. The elected are not the deciders.  The power elite rule in an elite democracy. (Michael Hudson)

50. The state serves capital.  One emergency follows another in emergency capitalism. (Fabio Vighi)

51. Politics should restrain, limit and guide the economy but economic power becomes political power when the media and politics are wedded.

52. The Roberts court is preparing for a Trump dictatorship by expanding executive power, limiting agency or regulatory authority, and ignoring or

      marginalizing the Bill of Rights and procedural justice.  In a constitutional state, citizens are protected from the police state and overreach.

      Beware the security or emergency state that discards or dismisses individual rights and freedoms.

34.