Sunday, March 26, 2006

crazy

It appears the charges against the Christian in Afghanistan I discussed a couple of days ago have been dropped. I consider this to be a victory for democracy everywhere, but it sounds as if the charges were dropped because the court decided the guy was crazy, rather than dropping them because it was the correct and just thing to do. I would like to believe that the Afghans read my recent blog and it helped to sway their opinion, but, in truth, I don’t think that many people in the Afghan government read this blog. And my blog was not aimed at them, anyway.

In the story I read about this today, Condoleezza Rice was quoted as saying that “we need to be respectful of Afghan sovereignty.”

Wait a minute! Didn’t we go into Afghanistan and put into place the mechanisms for them to “elect” the sitting government? Didn’t the Afghans “choose” to put into place the government that is willing to kill this brother because he believes differently than the religious right in his country? Isn’t Afghan “sovereignty” something we put there in the first place?

Many of you are probably asking, “Jimbo, how many questions can you ask in one paragraph?” And then almost as many of you realize, “Oops. I just did it, too.”

Please cut yourselves some slack. It was Socrates who said, “Unexamined life is not worth living.”

It was the Socratic method to question everything. I’ve always thought you guys were a lot like Socrates, in that regard.

But, let’s get back to the subject at hand. I think it would have been better if the Afghans had said it was okay for this guy to be a Christian and worship his own God, instead of slipping out the back door by saying he was crazy. Perhaps this guy was just “crazy” about his God, and for any Christian that may be a good defense.

I contend that we would be crazy to assume that an Afghan theocracy would have the same separation of church and state that our own democracy enjoys and our constitution requires. We should celebrate the fact that we have that separation and pray we never allow ourselves to sink back to level of the Afghans. We’d be crazy to let that continue to happen here.

Are you with me on this one, or am I just crazy?

At least that is what we believe here in Jimbo’s world.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

the trials of life

“Where have you been, Jimbo?” many of you are asking.

It seems like forever since I wrote something on this blogsite, but I just haven’t had anything important to say until today. What I have to say is that President Bush and I seem to be in complete agreement on something today.

In Afghanistan, there is a man on trial for converting to Christianity. Apparently, in Afghanistan, that is the most heinous thing one can do. If the man is convicted, he will be executed, as converting from Islam to Christianity in Afghanistan is punishable by death. I say it is wrong; Bush says it is wrong. It appears that we are in agreement on something.

Many of you are probably saying that something is wrong here. If Bush says something is right, I’m usually going to say it is wrong. If he says something is black, I’ll usually be saying it is white. So, when both of us seem to be on the same side, it has to be confusing to many of you. Don’t be concerned, however. By the time this is over, I’ll be suggesting our President has spit for brains.

We have been moving steadily for a number of years toward the acceptance of Christianity as our national religion. I don’t have a particular problem with Christianity. If the truth were known, if they divided us all up into individual groups, you’d probably find me in with the Christians. The problem I have is making Christianity our national religion. You may recall that many of the early settlers of this country came here for the purpose of worship as they chose and to escape a nationalized religion. The founding fathers wrote into our bylaws the freedom to worship as we please. They were willing to fight for what they believed in and were willing to do violence to those who would take away those religious freedoms. I would like to believe that if those founding fathers were around today, they would take offense with those who would try to amend the constitution to include their religious beliefs. I would expect that they would willingly slaughter those of the religious right who would mix their religion with governance, just as they slaughtered those who proposed the same course back in their time.

Anyway, what we have in Afghanistan is mixing religion and government. We like to brag here in the United States that we are conservative and we believe in God. In places like Afghanistan they are really conservative and they really believe in their God. They have thoroughly integrated their religion into their government and if one commits a sin, they break the law. They are the model of what our religious right tries to be, except they make the religious right here look like a bunch of pussies.

The truth is, we want to be a democracy or a republic, but we don’t want to be theocracy. We want to worship our God on the Sabbath and carry him (or her) with us during the week if we wish, but we don’t want to integrate him into our government and let our government play God. Otherwise, we might become another Afghanistan.

As for our President, let him worship all he wants, but Lord, grant him the wisdom to see that an American theocracy in no better than an Afghan theocracy. When the Afghans put a man on trial for converting to Christianity under the threat of execution, it makes them look really stupid. It provides evidence to back the argument that we are better than they are and our country, our rules of law and our way of life is better than theirs. I agree with our President that what they are doing in Afghanistan is wrong. I just hope he agrees with my side of the argument that we never, ever want to be like them.

At least that is our opinion here in Jimbo’s world.

Sunday, March 12, 2006

the big (or maybe not so big) blow

I was an odd morning here at chez Jimbo’s girlfriend. We were up early and were reading the paper and were hearing thunder off in the distance. I turned on the weather channel, but they were not showing anything to be concerned about in our area. I went outside a couple of times to look at the sky. It was breezy, cool and overcast, but nothing looked threatening, so we came back in and read the want ads and the Best Buy advertisement.

My girlfriend asked, “Do you hear that? It sounds like sirens.”

I heard it, so I went outside again. I could hear warning sirens in the distance. One of the neighbor’s was putting her car in her garage and told me she heard there had been a tornado just west of us. I came inside and called my son, whose domicile would have been near the path of the tornado and he told me they were having large hail at his place.

I went to the West side of the house and looked out the sliding glass doors in time to see a wall cloud coming in.

We frequently have severe storms in the springtime here in the Midwest, but usually the storms come in the afternoon of a warm day. The temperature this morning was only 45 degrees, Fahrenheit, and it is still winter—too early for spring storms.

As I watched, a couple of sheets of newspaper floated by overhead—Frisbee-style—and the trees in the back yard started to sway in the wind. Then, a large number of leaves on and under a pin oak next door began to spin into a small vortex and the vortex came up on to our deck. It rattled the charcoal grille and as it passed across the deck, one of the patio chairs moved six inches. It was as if some ghost at some surreal bar-b-cue had sat down in it and pushed his chair up to the table. The vortex dispersed, the leaves scattered and it was all over.

It looks as if winter may have passed us by this year, but I wonder what excitement spring has in store for us.

It may be a long tornado season here in Jimbo’s world.

Saturday, March 04, 2006

par for the course

Back in the day, when Jimbo was a young man, he did a little golfing. Despite putting some effort into learning the game, we were extremely unsuccessful and gave it up after a year or so, allowing our clubs to pass from our possession during a garage sale. The lesson with which I came away from the game was that the ball doesn’t always go where one envisions it will go. My putting was awful and the “strength” of my game was getting the ball on the green. The weakness of my game was the many times I hit the ball with my putter and it seemed to go places I hadn’t imagined.

All of which leads me to a story I read this morning. It seems that a Russian Cosmonaut at the International Space Station is going to hit a golf ball into orbit with a fairway iron, and the ball is going to have some kind of tracking device by which we can all watch it, on our computers, orbit the earth for years. It’s some kind of advertising promotion for a company that sells golf equipment, and their advertising dollars will infuse some needed cash into the Russian space program. Here is the story.

Golfing in space

One may recall the tagline from the 1979 movie Alien that was used in advertisements for the movie, “In space no one can hear you scream.”

When golf and outer space are brought together, the tagline would be something like, in space no one can hear you scream obscenities at your ball when it doesn’t go where you intend to hit it. And that is the concern some scientists have about this whole advertising gimmick. From what I read, there is some concern that our friendly cosmonaut, “Boris” Woods, may have difficulty getting the ball to go exactly where he wants it to go. The ball may obtain an orbit different than planned and join the other space junk out there, and it may become yet another collision in earth orbit just waiting to happen.

Let’s face it, many of us have at some time or other been sitting in front of a television set on a Sunday afternoon, living life as if every second counted, and seen a very talented professional golfer misplay a shot. I have a concern that Boris is apt to choke under the pressure and slice his six-iron shot into and orbit that will—after carrying a few million miles—bring it back into a collision course with the space station.

When Boris realizes he misplayed the ball he will say something in Russian that translates into, “&%$#!”

When the ball arrives back at the space station, Boris and his crewmembers will also swear Russian oaths. One of the space station crewmembers will tell Boris that he should have used the five-iron, and he will again swear oaths, in Russian.

Someone will suggest to Boris that he should have shouted, “Fore!”

And, at that suggestion, Boris will again swear oaths. Of course, there will be some money riding on the shot, as there always is in golf, and Boris will have to fork over a couple of rubles to one of his mates, who will smile and make a comment about the shot as he counts his money. Boris will swear oaths.

Many of you are probably wondering where I am going with this. I wonder, myself. I guess my point is that we should master the game here on terra firma before we try to take it to new and unexplored frontiers. And, if your golfing experiences are anything like my own, that means it will be many, many years before the little white ball should take a trip into outer space.

At least, that’s what we think here in Jimbo’s world.