The Okcitykid - A Peaceful Vet

I get a lot of email (not just junk mail - we all get that, gmail is very good about filtering that out).  I spend hours daily going thru my mail and am never able to read it all.  Most recently I have started to receive email from people wishing to convert me to Christian (once they discover I am not) and Muslim.  I even get email from one individual who wants us all to believe that the Catholic Church is really evil.  While he does offer a lot of factual news articles, well, I’m sorry.  While it may be true that one church might be better or worse than others, or one religion worse or better than others, it is not my place to judge this and I won’t go there, I find such things a waste of my productive time and because he has no option to unsubscribe from his list, I will have to add him to my spam list.

To you who are religious like myself but might belong to a religion unlike me, feel free to share, it’s ok, I’m curious, I like to learn, and even to evangelize may be apart of your religion and that’s ok too, I don’t mind, but be careful not to try to convince me that you have the corner on truth, I assure you, YOU DON’T.

****

I have read the bible, I have also read all the Gnostic scriptures, the teachings of Confucius, the Hopi legends, Jewish Apocrypha not included in the bible and about half of the Koran.  Next I plan to tackle the book of the dead, Egyptian scriptures. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof , for correction, and for training in righteousness,”

**** - You should not say that my testimony or beliefs cannot be found in the bible.  I can remember being told that the Catholic’s teaching about purgatory was not scriptural and that’s what I told a Catholic Priest one day who was happy to show it to me in the bible.

The KKK uses scriptures to justify their actions and the early settlers actually quoted scriptures as they were throwing Indians into the fire.  Hitler was scriptural too and so was Bush in his decision in attacking Iraq.

You see, you can make that bible say almost anything you want, you just have to find the right scriptures.

But I’m not going to waste my time or yours throwing scriptures back and forth trying to prove something.  Because the real word of God is in the heart not on a piece of paper.

You ask your heart, was we all born on this earth to die and go to hell unless we are saved?  If you tell me that your heart agrees with that, then I think you’re lying to me or you have manipulated you’re own heart to accept beliefs that it could not.

With all due respect, that usually
happens when a person follows hearsay, what was heard
in church rather than what was read in God’s word.

****, you didn’t read my testimony.  But I’ll tell you what, I’ll shorten it for you.

For the longest time I searched for salvation, I joined several churches, been baptized a couple times. I was looking for truth or true salvation.  I spent many years, Pentecostal, Bible Churches, Catholic and the last was Mormon.  One day I woke up and asked myself, who condemned me?  Who made me believe that if I wasn’t saved I would go to hell, that’s nuts. What kind of God would create something just to send it to hell?  So I discarded all of my beliefs and started over and I studied all the major religions and decided that Gnosticism was the most true and it was then that I had this dream:

THE DREAM

With out question, thought or prayer
For no reason what-so-ever I had this dream one night
I saw nothing, but only heard a voice
A voice that was both male and female.
“It is true that the body is made by the false god
But the false god also creates the soul
This continues to happen
But God takes you and makes you unto himself
As if you were a ball of clay
And makes you His own
This process takes time.”
I woke up

**** - To understand this dream a little more you’d have to have an understanding of Gnosticism.  But no matter, because this dream is actually saying that Gnosticism is wrong.  And you know what, I don’t know a single religion that believes what’s in that dream, and you know something else, I don’t know of any religion that teaches that we came from heaven (that’s in my testimony) except Mormonism.  But they teach that you can’t remember, but I do remember.

So I have my beliefs that I didn’t just make up nor did anybody teach them to me and I’m all alone without a church or religion, but you know what, I don’t care.  And I’m not going to try to prove to you or anybody else my beliefs, because I don’t have to, I don’t doubt what I believe.

Like you, my father believed I was being deceived and I disowned him because of it and he died shortly after and I felt a little bad about it.  But you know my dad did a lot of bad things in his lifetime.  You know what, he never said he was sorry.  Two words “I’m sorry.”  would have fixed a whole lot of hurt, but he believed he didn’t have to because conveniently Jesus died for his sins so he didn’t have to.  I think he will discover that he was mistaken.  I figure he will be sent down here again to try it again to see if he gets it right, and that don’t mean to live a perfect life, but say “I’m sorry.”

So now that you know a little bit more about what I believe, you can believe it to or disbelieve it, that’s up to you.  But you are not going to make me disbelieve what I believe even if I’m the only person in the world who believes it.

Sincerely,

Roger

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So what do I know. I know that salvation is a process and that I’m not going to hell and that’s all I know.

So what is the true God and the false god and does the life and death of Jesus have anything to do with this process, I DON’T KNOW!

So I don’t know a lot and have lots of questions, I do have some ideas and let me explain here and now, religion is faith in things unseen, things that cannot be proven, or unproven, so all you people who spend your days trying to disprove or prove religion, it disappoints me that I live in a world that is so ignorant - but good luck with that, you who have so little faith that you must defend it and you who have no faith and must justify it.  You both have much to learn.  Learn to be confident in your own beliefs rather than steal your confidence from the destruction of others, this is disappointing.

But I will share this one idea I do have, as I believe it does have the backing of logic. I believe that the God that created the earth, the birds, trees, flowers, the fish and the bees and all other living things on this earth is not the same god who created us. And this is why I believe this. All other life is a part of a natural order that sustains each other on this earth maintaining this earth for a very long time. However, we are different. We go against the natural order on this earth and may very well be someday it’s destruction. We create great things like no other animal on this earth and some scriptures actually refer to us as gods. Some have argued with me that we are just like all the other animals on this earth and while I think that is a very nice idea, they miss the obvious and do not recognize how we are so much different than all the other animals on this earth. That being said, that’s what I believe and if you wish to discuss this with me further, you are more than welcome.

Reuters

Bush team rushes environment policy changes
Mon Nov 3, 2008 5:02am EST
By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As the U.S. presidential candidates sprint toward the finish line, the Bush administration is also sprinting to enact environmental policy changes before leaving power.

Whether it’s getting wolves off the Endangered Species List, allowing power plants to operate near national parks, loosening regulations for factory farm waste or making it easier for mountaintop coal-mining operations, these proposed changes have found little favor with environmental groups.

The one change most environmentalists want, a mandatory program to cut climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions, is not among these so-called “midnight regulations.”

Bureaucratic calendars make it virtually impossible that any U.S. across-the-board action will be taken to curb global warming in this administration, though both Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama have promised to address it if they win Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election.

Even some free-market organizations have joined conservation groups to urge a moratorium on last-minute rules proposed by the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others.

“The Bush administration has had eight years in office and has issued more regulations than any administration in history,” said Eli Lehrer of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “At this point, in the current economic climate, it would be especially harmful to push through ill-considered regulations in the final days of the administration.”

John Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation, which joined Lehrer’s group to call for a ban on these last-minute rules, said citizens are cut out of the process, allowing changes in U.S. law that the public opposes, such as rolling back protections under the Endangered Species Act.

WHAT’S THE RUSH?

The Bush team has urged that these regulations be issued no later than Saturday, so they can be put in effect by the time President George W. Bush leaves office on January 20.

If they are in effect then, it will be hard for the next administration to undo them, and in any case, this may not be the top priority for a new president, said Matt Madia of OMB Watch, which monitors the White House Office of Management and Budget, through which these proposed regulations must pass.

“This is typical,” Madia said of the administration’s welter of eleventh-hour rules. “It’s a natural reaction to knowing that you’re almost out of power.”

Industry is likely to benefit if Bush’s rules on the environment become effective, Madia said.

“Whether it’s the electricity industry or the mining industry or the agriculture industry, this is going to remove government restrictions on their activity and in turn they’re going to be allowed to pollute more and that ends up harming the public,” Madia said in a telephone interview.

What is unusual is the speedy trip some of these environmental measures are taking through the process.

For example, one Interior Department rule that would erode protections for endangered species in favor of mining interests drew more than 300,000 comments from the public, which officials said they planned to review in a week, a pace that Madia called “pretty ludicrous.”

Why the rush? Because rules only go into effect 30 to 60 days after they are finalized, and if they are not in effect when the next president takes office, that chief executive can decline to put them into practice — as Bush did with many rules finalized at the end of the Clinton administration.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto denied the Bush team was cramming these regulations through in a hasty push.

Fratto discounted reports “that we’re trying to weaken regulations that have a business interest,” telling White House reporters last week the goal was to avoid the flood of last-minute rules left over from the Clinton team.

There is at least one Bush administration environmental proposal that conservation groups welcome: a plan to create what would be the world’s largest marine wildlife sanctuary in the Pacific Ocean. That could go into effect January 20.

(Editing by Alan Elsner)

Are they like working for big oil and not the general public. I bet you big oil pays a big chunk of their advertising. That’s the way it works folks and that’s why you can’t believe everything you see on TV or hear on the radio. They portray the world the way they want us to see it.

But should you object, you can sign this petition. I signed it, don’t really know if it does any good or not, but it is certainly better than doing nothing.

While we’re on the subject of energy, don’t believe this bull sh*t about clean coal. That’s like clean dirt, there is no such thing. When you burn coal, you get pollution, and the only way to stop it is to stop burning it. All the money they’re going to spend on pollution control equipment will be passed onto the customer and a percentage of that will be for profit for them. So they’re not doing us any favors, they are just making money, and more of it as we become less wealthy. That’s the way it works folks. Their success is our failure.

All this money they want us to spend on “clean coal” could be saved if we invest in wind and solar. There is enough wind alone to power this country. But here is the deal. Who owns the wind? Who owns the solar rays? Who gets the profit off of it’s use, nobody! So there you go, if they can’t make money off of it, they don’t want it and so they work hard to convince you that it is a bad idea. Yes and even convince ABC not to air this commercial.

From Flyby News

The Methane Time Bomb
Tuesday 23 September 2008
by: Steve Conner, The Independent UK

In the past few days, researchers believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age. (Photo: Getty Images) 

Arctic scientists discover new global warming threat as melting permafrost releases millions of tons of a gas 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide.

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.

Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia’s northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane - sometimes at up to 100 times background levels - over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through “methane chimneys” rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a “lid” to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.

Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.

The amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is calculated to be greater than the total amount of carbon locked up in global coal reserves so there is intense interest in the stability of these deposits as the region warms at a faster rate than other places on earth.

Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University in Sweden, one of the leaders of the expedition, described the scale of the methane emissions in an email exchange sent from the Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi.

“We had a hectic finishing of the sampling programme yesterday and this past night,” said Dr Gustafsson. “An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. These ‘methane chimneys’ were documented on echo sounder and with seismic [instruments].”

At some locations, methane concentrations reached 100 times background levels. These anomalies have been seen in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, covering several tens of thousands of square kilometres, amounting to millions of tons of methane, said Dr Gustafsson. “This may be of the same magnitude as presently estimated from the global ocean,” he said. “Nobody knows how many more such areas exist on the extensive East Siberian continental shelves.

“The conventional thought has been that the permafrost ‘lid’ on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place. The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leak methane… The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed.”

The preliminary findings of the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008, being prepared for publication by the American Geophysical Union, are being overseen by Igor Semiletov of the Far-Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1994, he has led about 10 expeditions in the Laptev Sea but during the 1990s he did not detect any elevated levels of methane. However, since 2003 he reported a rising number of methane “hotspots”, which have now been confirmed using more sensitive instruments on board the Jacob Smirnitskyi.

Dr Semiletov has suggested several possible reasons why methane is now being released from the Arctic, including the rising volume of relatively warmer water being discharged from Siberia’s rivers due to the melting of the permafrost on the land.

The Arctic region as a whole has seen a 4C rise in average temperatures over recent decades and a dramatic decline in the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by summer sea ice. Many scientists fear that the loss of sea ice could accelerate the warming trend because open ocean soaks up more heat from the sun than the reflective surface of an ice-covered sea.

www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclusive-the-methane-time-bomb-938932.html

For FN’s resource page on this issue, see:
Mounting Evidence of Extreme Global Warming

My two cents: The Mini Ice Age will be here the end of 2012

Dear Roger

In September of 1921, 13,000 union workers marched to Logan County, West Virginia. More than 2,000 armed deputies met them at Blair Mountain.

The battle that followed represented the biggest armed revolt in America since the Civil War, and it prompted the passage of labor laws currently in effect in the USA.

To this day, Blair Mountain, West Virginia is steeped in the cultural and political history of Appalachia. Historic markers tell the story of the confrontation, and on the battlefield the artifacts from both sides of the armed standoff still lie where they fell.

Yet all of that history is under threat — as are the beautiful hardwood forests and the mountain itself — because Big Coal has plans to blow up Blair Mountain as part of a massive mountaintop removal coal mining operation.

That’s why Blair Mountain is the latest addition to the list of America’s Most Endangered Mountains.

Learn more about Blair Mountain by watching this short video:

http://www.iLoveMountains.org/Endangered

Oklahoma City University Distinguished Speakers Series
Wangari Maathai (of Kenya), Recipient of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize
SPEAKING:
7:30 p.m: Wednesday, October 1, 2008
NW 27th Street and Florida Avenue
(Freede Wellness and Activity Center)

“Environment, Democracy and Peace: A Critical Link”

Wangari Muta Maathai, recipient of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, is recognized worldwide for her work for democracy, human rights, and the environment. The daughter of farmers from Mount Kenya, Maathai is the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctoral degree. She has taught at universities throughout the world and founded Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, through which women’s groups have helped to conserve the environment and improve quality of life by planting more than 30 million trees. At least half a dozen African countries have started similar programs.

Maathai has chaired the National Council of Women of Kenya, served on the U.N. Commission for Global Governance and the Commission on the Future, was elected to Kenya’s Parliament, and was appointed as Assistant Minister for the Environment. She has been named a Top 100 Eco-Hero, one of the 100 Heroines of the World, and one of the 100 people who made an environmental difference. Time magazine named her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and Forbes named her one of the 100 most powerful women in the world. In 2006, she received the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor. She has received honorary degrees from many institutions, including Yale University and Williams College.

She has written two books: her autobiography, Unbowed, 2006), and The Greenbelt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (2002).

Prepare yourself for Maathai’s lecture. Don’t miss the screening of Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai, the 2008 documentary film by Lisa Merton and Alan Dater. The film will be shown in Kerr- McGee Auditorium at the Meinders School of Business, NW 27th and McKinley, 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, September 30.

From 3dartspace.com

CRIES OF MOTHER EARTH

I sat there and heard her crying bitterly
“Lord how much longer do I put up with them”
Was it selfish, yearning or greed
Did we really need
Is there still time to stop what has been done
If her wrath comes tumbling down
Will there be any left to stand
She cried bitterly
“Lord how much longer do I put up with them”
The Lord did not answer

By: Roger Harkness

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I attended a meditation service at the Church of Religious Science about 1988. We were to meditate about world peace and the leader of this service was attempting to plant ideas in our head of a world without war, well, I just couldn’t believe it, so I drifted off elsewhere in a sort of a daydream state I heard the voice of mother earth call out to God and I wrote it down in this poem.