The Real Saint George, Soldier and Martyr

Why do we admire Saint George? Who is he and how did he get famous? These questions are used to write off the celebration of the martyrdom of one of the greatest witnesses for Christ the world has ever seen. His witness was so impressive that most of the kingdoms of Europe pay him homage in some way. The United Kingdom has labeled its governing sessions before the monarch as the Court of Saint James. But the Scottish monarchy ruled in the Court of Saint George. The Union Jack, the national standard of the United Kingdom, combines the crosses attributed to Saint Andrew, who was crucified on an X-shaped cross, and Saint George, who bore a Roman cross as part of his military panoply.

George was a soldier, an officer cadet and small unit commander in the famous Praetorian Guard that protected Roman government in all of the empire. He belonged to the personal retinue of the infamous Emperor Diocletian, a notorious persecutor of Christianity who loved torture to change the allegiance of a Christian to his own idolatry. George was one of the most trusted of the guard because his Christian virtue was evident to all who met him. But when Diocletian discovered on a trip through the province of Asia Minor that one of his own bodyguards was flaunting the law, “Non legit Christianus,” he turned George over to one of the most brutal magistrates in the empire with instructions to break George of the Christian faith.

The horrendous tortures lasted for months, and George became famous for holding out so long. On a tour of the area, the empress decided to see for herself what the fuss over George was all about. She watched several torture sessions where George refused to yield to idolatry and refused to revile his tormentors. She was so impressed that she became a Christian too. Her enraged husband had her beheaded for the affront and ordered the magistrate to quite playing nice with George. The evil judge knew that if he didn’t break George soon, he would be executed as well.

Finally losing patience with the whole affair, Diocletian ordered George to be executed and the magistrate tried for negligence. George was beheaded in the Praetorium of the city where this all took place that same day. Two weeks later the magistrate was also executed in grizzly fashion. While I cannot recall the name of the magistrate, I do know he was nicknamed “The Dragon” by those who faced him for the brutality of his mind. By holding to his faith in Christ, George directly led to the execution of this Dracus.

That may be the source of the legend of George slaying the dragon, although there are some large crocodiles in the region that may have been called a dragon, and George may have saved a village of poor folks by killing a menacing lizard. Either way, the courage and tenacity of George in the face of adversity and torture has inspired soldiers of Christian lands ever since.

To read more article on the Christian faith and experience go to .Ol' Fuzzy's Cave.

Ol’ Fuzzy is not employable and was denied for disability benefits. The only thing I have is the blogs. But I don’t qualify for ads on the blogs until September. If you like the scribbles I post, please help me keep it going. You can leave me a gratuity by dropping a buck or two in Ol' Fuzzy's Tip Jar. This is a PayPal account I opened on Wednesday, April 5, 2017.

Lying to Twist the Emotions, Slander

While listening to National Public Radio yesterday, I heard something that just struck me as evil. A person being interviewed attributed the outcome he feared would result from an action he opposes to be the intent of the people who support the action. I have serious doubts that the speaker could read the minds of his opponents. Yet this is a common tactic used to drum up hate in the supporters of the one speaking. I have many liberal friends, and I know them to be genuinely concerned about the plight of the poor and downtrodden. I know only a few who are actively advocating the confiscation of wealth from those who worked hard to build it. Likewise, I know many conservatives who are genuinely wary of people who say they want to use the money earned by the conservatives to give to those who will not work to better themselves. I know only a few who are interested in abusing their financial power to take an unfair advantage of the poor and downtrodden.

The problem is that the agitators on both sides are lumping all who oppose them into the same pile and labeling them as evil in intention. No one can know the mind of another unless that one tells him what he thinks. Only God sees into the hearts of humans and knows what their intentions are without asking. I don’t hear any of these agitators asking their opponents’ opinions. Nor do they limit their accusations to the ones who have stated their intent. To slander the whole of your opposition with an interpretation of intent based upon your fears is lying. I don’t see any of these agitators with holes in their hands and feet. None of them have divine knowledge of their opponents’ minds. Yet people buy the hog they are selling without opening the poke to see it’s just a dog.

Whenever I hear someone making such a dishonest claim of the intent of his opponents, I automatically tune out any other message he may have to say. How can I trust someone who is playing on my emotions to win me to his opinion? I cannot. Nor should any of you trust such dishonest emotional ploys. If we stopped giving credence to these agitators, they would stop making these claims. Try it for a while and see if it doesn’t work.

Ol’ Fuzzy is not employable and was denied for disability benefits. The only thing I have is the blogs. But I don’t qualify for ads on the blogs until September. If you like the scribbles I post, please help me keep it going. You can leave me a gratuity by dropping a buck or two in Ol' Fuzzy's Tip Jar. This is a PayPal account I opened on Wednesday, April 5, 2017.

War of the Sexes

Here’s an example of how my scattered mind works. Listening to NPR this morning, there is an interview of Father Richard Roehr. Fr. Richard was talking about the systemic rejection of religion by men all over the Earth. The question of why men reject religion came to my mind and shortly thereafter I had an answer. I have little bits of trivia collected over the years cluttering up my memory. And from these little bits my mind synthesizes concepts and conclusions that I don’t consciously think about. So what is the answer to why men rejected religion?

It actually begins at the time of the flood of Noah. The Nephalim are destroyed in the flood waters and their souls are denied access to heaven. They were abandoned by their angelic parents and hated by their human mothers. Therefore, they developed a deep hatred for humanity in their souls. They hatched a plot to destroy the human race by dividing us along sexual lines.

The men in the days after the waters subsided were tempted with thoughts of their physical superiority. Might makes right was the driving thought of this movement. Men took over the entire culture of the Middle East and most of the Mediterranean.

As the message of God’s revelation to humanity spread into other parts of the human occupied world, the culture of male supremacy also spread, and half of the human race was systematically oppressed. Slowly resentment of this oppression built up until it exploded in the 1960s in the United States and washed like a tsunami across the entire world. Women declared war on masculinity, and many men, driven by their desires for sexual gratification, conformed to the demands of the more militant of the feminists to emasculate themselves.

Meanwhile men became so enamored with their power that they rejected the equality advocated by Christ, Moses, Mohammad and all the other great teachers of religious life in the world. Once part of the message was removed, the rest became ignore-able. Men stayed away from religion in droves. The churches in America and all over the world became the place for women. Out of frustration that men weren’t fulfilling their roles as leaders of the church, evangelist Billy Sunday told the women to take the leadership role that men had abdicated. As the women began to lose respect for the men in their lives, they fell victim to the divisive misandrony becoming popular in America.

As the women also began to reject religion as another male-domination plot, the war against masculinity ramped up, and maleness became politically incorrect. The Nephalim have effectively divided the majority of the human race with this plot by taking the long view. Remember, in eternity there is no time. As disembodied hybrid human-angel beings, these Nephalim have the viewpoint of eternity from which to make their plans for the destruction of the human race that God has blessed, and they are excluded from.

Historical misogyny and modern misandrony are merely tools in the hand of the spirits of darkness that hate us. And the people who follow the philosophies that are destroying our society are not the originators, but merely the victims of them. Once we understand that it is a spiritual war for the survival of humanity, it becomes possible to combat the cause and quit attacking the wounded. Jesus admonition to love your enemies was given with this in mind. The people who hate you are not to blame for their hate. They are victims who need your help to rescue them from the grip of darkness.

It is equally evil to hate women for their femaleness as it is to hate men for their maleness. The fact that these evils are common in the world is a testament to the persistence of the spirits of darkness who hate us. The fact that humanity is still in existence is a testament to the love and providence of God. Keep these things in mind the next time you are frustrated by some sexist attitude of someone you encounter. It becomes easier to forgive a victim than a perpetrator.

Ol’ Fuzzy is not employable and was denied for disability benefits. The only thing I have is the blogs. But I don’t qualify for ads on the blogs until September. If you like the scribbles I post, please help me keep it going. You can leave me a gratuity by dropping a buck or two in Ol' Fuzzy's Tip Jar. This is a PayPal account I opened on Wednesday, April 5, 2017.

A Look at Today's World Through the Lense of History

Ninety years ago, the Russian government spent huge efforts to destabilize all the governments in the world. The backlash against communist agitation in Germany brought the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and its Feurer Adolph Hitler to power in five years. The mess in France caused by communist agitation reduced the political climate to chaos, such that when war with Germany came the war effort was sabotaged from within. In the United Kingdom, appeasement became the primary foreign policy, allowing the Nazis to gain enough advantage to bring the world to the brink of destruction. In the United States, the isolationist movement became all powerful with the phrase, “America first!” All this came about in part as a result of the machinations of the Russian propaganda machine, and this without access to the internet.

Today, we not only have the destabilizing effect of Russian propaganda disguised as “fake news,” we have various other factions who push their own misinformation to undermine our society. The end result of this rot is going to be what it has always led to in the past: American withdrawal from the world stage and the world starting a war that will drag us back into it. The idea that history repeats itself is not exactly accurate. History runs in cycles. The period of the cycle is not exact, but every century it leads the world to the brink of destruction. The last two times this happened, WWI and WWII, the only thing that saved the whole world from death and oppression was the intervention of the United States of America, first with our industry, then with our blood.

This time there are many potential combatants with nuclear weapons and little moral or ethical compunction to forbear their use. There is only one nation on Earth that has used atomic weapons in war, and never denied a willingness to do so again if necessary, the United States of America. But no one in the world actually believes that the U. S. will use them again in the future. These people, like the Nazis and the Japanese militarist in the 1940s, tell themselves that the resolve of the American people is weak, Americans won’t fight. Then they get into a fight with us and make us angry. That’s when they crystallize the resolve of the very people they called weak.

The only way to avoid the world conflagration is to avoid the perception that America is weak. How to do that without compromising our values is the debate thinking people in the military and diplomatic services have chewed over for the past hundred years. We had better solve this puzzle soon. The end is fast approaching.

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Human Survival

I fear for the survival of the human race, and even life on Earth, because of the rampant expansion of conflict in the world. It isn’t just the faraway wars in failed republics that I am worried about. The very fabric of society is unraveling in ways that were unthoughtof in my childhood. When I was a child, everyone worried that the Russians or the Chinese would push the nuclear button. Now we have to worry about some home grown terrorist pushing the button in our own country.

Don’t bet me wrong. I am firmly Christian and I am aware of all the scriptural predictions about the end of the world. I am also aware of the caveats in Scripture against both complacency and trying to predict to day and the time of the end. So I have a stake in trying to maintain human existence until the Lord returns.

What are the solutions? I am so fed up with the people who want to fight about anything and everything that I have begun to think the best hope for humanity is to get as many people who don’t hate as possible into some off-world colony. We already have one billionaire preparing to send a colony to Mars and commercial consortia that are preparing to do industrial and mining operations in space. There are other things being built by private business to support space travel by private persons, such as Bigelow Aerospace’s hotel in orbit, sort of an extra-terrestrial Budget Suites.

President Reagan said he wanted a base on the moon to act as a stepping stone to Mars exploration. President Clinton wanted to scrap the way stop and go strait to Mars. President Obama practically gave up on government-sponsored human exploration of space. Now President Trump is putting forth a budget plan that includes money for more human exploration. Is that the answer?

We can do this without government intervention and inefficiency. If enough people pitch in there is enough money wasted every month to fund an orbital habitat or a space based factory. Business operates for profit. We need a non-profit foundation to move humanity into space. This is the final migration of humanity. Our entire history has lead up to it. Would you support a private space colony, even if you couldn't go?

Funding Through Gratuities

Ol’ Fuzzy is in a quandary. I am absolutely destitute, but I don’t want to beg. The strain on my sister’s retirement account incurred by paying my rent and power bill is driving us apart. And I still don’t have internet in my apartment after six months. There is simply no job in Macon County, North Carolina that I can do and is willing to hire me. All I have is my blogs, but I don’t qualify for ads until September. What to do?

I considered all the funding options I can find and nothing else seems to work except ask for gratuities to keep the blogs going. My needs are small. So I am researching a way to allow you, my readers, to send me a gratuity when you read my blogs to help me keep them going. I will call it, “Ol’ Fuzzy’s Tip Jar.”

Please don’t remain silent on this issue. Ol’ Fuzzy needs feedback, opinions and suggestions. Leave comments for me on my blogs as well as on Facebook.

My three blogs are:

Ol’ Fuzzy’s Cave, for spiritual articles (olfuzzyscave.blogspot.com);

Ol’ Fuzzy’s Soapbox, for political commentary from a neutral point of view (olfuzzyssoapbox.blogspot.com); and

Ol’ Fuzzy’s Hearth, for random musings and observations about life and science, etc. (olfuzzyshearth.blogspot.com).

Thank you for reading my blogs.

The Last Warrior Knight of England

I enjoy listening to the Moth on NPR on Sunday evenings. This evening a Londoner read his story about holding off a violent intruder who was breaking into his home. Now the United Kingdom is very strict on firearms ownership. Therefore, this man didn’t have recourse to firearms like we do in the United States for home defense. The guy wasn’t totally unarmed however. He had once collected historical swords. Although he divested himself of the majority of his cutlery, he still possessed a Napoleonic era cavalry saber.

The burglar had picked up a length of wood from a pile of timbers in his back garden. So it shaped up to be quite a fight. Fortunately, the drugged up burglar didn’t like the sound of the blade ringing as it was drawn from the scabbard, and turned about fleeing for the garden again. Worried that the burglar was doing damage in his garden, the householder took his sword outside. The burglar suddenly gathered his fortitude, returned with the length of wood, and proceeded to attack this man with a nineteenth century cavalry saber.

Now most collectors tend to learn how to use the items they collect, and this householder was no different. Even though the blade was a ceremonial parade sword with no edge, a meter and a half of Sheffield steel in the hands of a reasonably competent wielder can do enormous amounts of damage to the unarmored human body, and no burglar in Britain feels the need to wear body armor. So this man’s main worry was how to not do enormous damage to the burglar while all the while appearing to try to do just that, for the purpose of intimidation.

The incident was reported in an international magazine, the householder was severely criticized for holding back his lethal hand. The criticism came from the United States (the most bloodthirsty place West of the Jordan River). Some Americans questioned the man’s courage. Let me tell you from experience, it takes real courage to stand before a man bent on doing you serious bodily harm, knowing fully how to end his life with little effort, and not kill. Anyone can take a life. A real warrior can preserve it.

The United States Marine Corps is trying to teach this concept to the young men and women who enlist in the Corps through the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program (MCMAP). They are calling this the philosophy of the Ethical Warrior. It is a good philosophy to hold in all human conflict. Many, even most, Marines ignore it from day to day when bragging about the lethality or destructiveness of the Marine Corps to their civilian friends. But I want to brag about the fact that Marines are being trained to fight to preserve life, not end it.

My hat is off to this British man for his clearheaded courage in a stressful situation. He never said if he had any military training. But I see him as a true warrior after the tradition of the British knights of the Twelfth Century. In the words of my own warrior tradition, OORAH!

Hot News Flash

Today’s biggest news flash: The entire world has been infected with a new virus that causes terrible behavioral changes in the victims. Symptoms include tolerance, civility, acceptance and even (should we say it) love. Never fear, the few brave medical researchers at NIH’s Boulder, Colorado facility who have not yet succumbed to the virus are working on a vaccine and a cure. At least they would be if they could ever stop bickering and fighting with each other over the simple things that don’t really matter.

If you think you may have become infected, stay indoors, avoid contact with your neighbors, and drink plenty of fluids. Hopefully it will pass. Besides, if you are not running around spreading it, maybe it will play itself out and we can all go back to war over nothing like we love to do.

April Fools!