It is in God that the universe begins to blaze with light and glow with warmth. It is in God that we first see man in the blaze of possible glory. But the word “God” must have a certain meaning. And we must meet God in actual experience. The God in whom we find the meaning of existence must be conscious intelligence, perfect in goodness, and radiant with love. A God who cannot be conscious of every individual in the world would be no God at all. A God who cannot consciously hear prayer and perfectly apprehend the moral and spiritual longing back of it is not even a false God. To use the word “God” for an abstract principle or an unconscious tendency or an ideal only conscious in human thought is to put spiritual vacuum at the heart of religion and to baptize it with the name most sacred in all the centuries of experience of personal religion. A God who cannot consciously conceive and hold to a purpose for the individual, for the group, and for the race is a mere figure of speech, the empty echo of unrequited hopes. A God who is not the Creator and Maintainer of all that exists leaves the universe a body without a soul, leaves existence a succession of sensations with no rational meaning, and serves no purpose for the clarification of thought, the creation of noble purpose or the justification of temporal or immortal hopes. If you successfully deny the sovereignty of God, you can never have anything important or significant to say about man.
Lynn Harold Hough, Free Men, The Abingdon Press, New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, 1939, pgs.184-185
“The man who supposes the Church exists simply to serve the interests of some social formula mistakes its nature. It does not exist to pull particular social chestnuts out of the fire. It is the genius of the Church to make free minds committed to the loftiest principles and then to release their force upon the world.”
Lynn Harold Hough, Free Minds, The Abingdon Press, New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, 1939, pg.94
In the world of business, non-value added is basically defined as a process which has been developed to enhance a product’s value to a customer but fails to produce any results in increased customer use or loyalty.
Two entities which consistently fail to produce any valuable results, yet which are trumpeted as defenders of conservative values and marketed as exposers of secrets, and thus are non-value added entities, are Q Anon, which after two years of silence is once again posting cryptic nothings, and Project Veritas, whose videos have high production values and expose nefarious doings, but lead to nothing.
“But it is essential to an understanding of the classical interpretation of the Christian religion to realize that while the pattern is the construction of keen Christian thinkers, the materials for the pattern are believed by Chrisitians in the central tradition to be the gift of God and not the achievement of man. In other words Christianity is a religion of revelation. Essentially it represents God’s movement manward and not merely man’s wistful search for God. There is a conception of religion which sees the religious history of mankind as man’s march Godward and nothing more. That there is a human march Godward and that aspects of this movement are reflected in many if not all of the ethnic religions no one would care to deny. But definitively Christianity is the religion of God’s advance upon mankind. It is the saga of God’s search for man far more than it is the saga of man’s search for God. It has two great preliminary assertions: God has spoken, God has come. It is based upon the words of God and the acts of God.”
Lynn Harold Hough, Patterns of the Mind, Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York and London, 1942, pgs. 111 & 112
“The peace of life is found not in a man’s own achievement. The way of trust is the way of content. The attempt to achieve peace is doomed to everlasting failure. The willingness to receive peace as a gift from the One we trust opens the door to inner serenity.”
Lynn Harold Hough, The Man of Power, The Abingdon Press, New York – Cincinnati, 1916, pg. 45
Francis Berger has written a post titled Let’s Practice System Distancing: The Abortion Edition, which delves into how the trumpeting of the possibility of overturning of Roe v Wade is sucking you into continuing to support The System, rather than turning your back on The System and denying The System the support it needs to continue to function. Well worth your time (takes maybe 3 minutes to read). From the post:
“The first thing to keep in mind is this — the System issued the communication and made sure news of it was widespread. This implies that the Establishment very much wants everyone to be acutely aware of the “issue” and to participate in the issue via the System in some way by thinking about it, writing about it, arguing about it, raising hopes about it, fighting about it, etc. Moreover, the Establishment wants everyone to “have a position” on the issue. They want people to become personally invested in this latest communication on terms the System dictates. This applies especially to Christians, for whom abortion is a big concern.
Secondly, this newest current thing is a clear example of the System wanting people to listen to what it is saying about this issue here and now and to forget about what it is not saying here and now. And there are many things the System is not talking about these days — the very same things it could not stop talking about mere weeks or months ago.”
I’ll be heading north to my trout camp, Two Arrows, tomorrow bright and early in the a.m. This is the 28th year in a row. A grand tradition with my sons and brothers. For these past 15 years, my dog Elsa has been streamside with me, but alas no more. I told my Lovely Melis that my heart just is not quite in it this year with having to say goodbye to Elsa this past Monday. None-the-less I will go to the water to soothe my soul.
Early Spring fishing is always hit or miss. The fishing report always holds out promise, though. It’ll be good to be in the woods, the stream, and by the fire at night with sons and brothers.
Yesterday, I had to say goodbye to my dog, Elsa. She’d been with me for 15 years. I’d known her time with me was coming to a close and had been in contact with a local organization that comes right to your home so that death is approached not in a vet’s examining room, but in familiar and loving surroundings. It was a good death. Peaceful. I recommend saying goodbye to your pet at home. The individuals I had dealt with prior to yesterday had been gracious and truly empathetic, for which I am grateful.
The slightly marred aspect of Elsa’s good death occurred immediately at the arrival of the veterinarian who came to administer the drugs that ease a pet’s journey from life into death. When I greeted her at the door, she had a mask hanging from her right ear. I invited her into our home. She stepped inside, set down her bag, and began to reach for her mask, so I said, “You don’t need to wear a mask in our home.” She immediately went into the canned spiel, the great lies, surrounding the use of masks as a preventive measure against the manmade gain of function flu known as COVID-19, and said my wife and I would also have to don masks. I said, “No! We will not wear masks in this house.”
My response in regards to her masking request brought out from her a regurgitation of the many lies fed to the world since this manmade pathogen known as COVID-19 was let loose. I responded to this, first, by attempting to address the uselessness of masks scientifically, to no avail, as she continued to spew the well propagandized lies which have tyrannized the world since early 2020. My anger began to rise.
I then began to attempt to reason with her, rather forcefully, coming close to the point of berating her unmercifully, causing both the veterinarian and my wife to come to tears. During all this time, my Elsa, who truly needed to be compassionately released from this world, lay tired and alone on her bed by my chair. The only time I’ve been thankful that she was mostly deaf.
At this point, I was ready to send the veterinarian packing and pursue other compassionate means of providing Elsa a good death. I was angry and sad to the point of despair. Angry because my Elsa was not receiving the end she needed, and sad that I was dealing with a veterinarian who was so subsumed by the lies associated with COVID-19 she was actually living the lie in my home, which to me is a despairing point.
We ended up compromising. The veterinarian wore her mask, and my Lovely Melis and I remained six feet away from her during the administration of the drugs which ease a pet’s death. Though this was a bit awkward, and an inconvenience, Elsa’s pressing need for release was accomplished.
In fairness to the veterinarian, she was indeed compassionate and caring with Elsa. I find no fault with her in this regard. She gave my Elsa a most peaceful and good death, though I am mourning her deeply even while I type these words. My mourning is compounded, and more deeply disturbs me, because of the fact that there are individuals so terrorized by the propaganda surrounding COVID-19 they are unable to live in reality. They are living in the lie, the lies of men.
Elsa is gone, and I will miss her dearly. She did everything with me. She always watched me like a hawk. Elsa had a good death. Slightly marred. She was a great dog!
“Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. Let me pry loose old walls. Let me lift and loosen old foundations.”
“Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike. Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together. Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders. Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars”
Free Men Free Minds
