Where can we cut federal programs in the USA?

Oh man, where to begin?

“Fraud & waste” covers just about 90 percent of the federal government, which would cut the size of state and local governments by at least half with the oppressive weight of federal micro-dictating gone.

This includes some of these suggestion:

The “czars”,

the Education Department,

NPR

All moneys given to any religious or para-religious organizations for any purported federal or clerical purpose whatsoever..

The military? Bring home all the soldiers now stationed in over 100 countries around the world not counting embassies…

Infrastructure: The bridge to nowhere, the airport in the middle of nowhere, interstate spy cam systems…

Corporate welfare addiction

Personal welfare addiction.

Foreign aid: This only corrupts the people in the governments of these poor countries it is supposedly intended to benefit. The free money grants more often than not just enhances the lives of people in government, and they also foster a dependency in which the recipients just count it as part of the budget instead of developing their own economies…

TSA…

SSN can be privatized. In Chile pensions are as much as 100 percent higher than before it was privatized and the government removed from the middle:
EMPOWERING WORKERS: THE PRIVATIZATION OF SOCIAL SECURITY IN CHILE
http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj15n2-3-1.html

“…The success of the Chilean private pension system has led three other South American countries to follow suit. In recent years, Argentina (1994), Peru (1993), and Colombia (1994) undertook a similar reform. In the four South American countries, around 11 million workers have a personal retirement account….”

There are at least 12 –twelve!– federal agencies that each have their own armies of armed agents.

Eliminating many of the unconstitutional federal criminal laws and those with major unconstitutional parts and provisions. (Like seizing assets, required reporting of bank transactions of a certain size..

The entire Patriot Act…

Rewrite immigration laws to eliminate the fraudulent scheme now making money for the immigration and customs bureaucracy and for all of the worst of corporate America, in which even the big ones that are illegal-proof benefit from downward pay pressure.

If two million come across illegally, then the government can increase tax revenues with rules legally admitting the same two million while actually and truly closing the borders.

Hey let’s get started!

–trutherator

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Electronic voting (and early voting) is a theft of the right to a secret ballot

This is NOT a “partisan” issue. The Republican Party (so-called) Establishment is in cahoots with the people in cahoots on the Democratic Party (so-called) Establishment.

See here the “Brad Blog”, scathingly anti-Republican web page, who exposes (only) the electronic dirty tricks that favor the Republican Party:

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5778

I like one turn of phrases he uses: This e-voting stuff is “faith-based voting”.

So listen to this Democrat Party candidate supporter:

> Sharron Angle should start filing the lawsuits right now. Then again, so should Harry Reid. However, it might be a bit more difficult politically for the Senate majority leader, given the undeserved support Reid has shown in the past for Nevada’s 100 percent unverifiable, error-prone, hackable, illegally-certified, electronic voting systems the state forces all voters to use at the polling place.
>
> Given that the Angle/Reid contest in Nevada is likely to be among the closest – and most closely-watched – races for the US Senate this November 2, both parties would be wise to get to court and file for an order to ensure all of the hard drives, flash memory chips and memory cartridges to be used in their electronic voting machines during both early voting and on Election Day are securely retained for 22 months after the election.
>
> The federal law requiring as much, Retention of Voting Documentation (42 USC. 1974 through 1974e), has, however, never been followed in any state to my knowledge, at least in regard to the sensitive memory cards and hard drives from electronic voting systems. Those devices hold both ballot programming and the way the computers have recorded – accurately or not – the way voters have voted. They might also hold the only evidence of any system malfunction or malfeasance. Nonetheless, officials routinely scrub those materials not long after the polls have closed. Key evidence – perhaps the only actual evidence – of how voters had hoped to vote and of any obstruction to that intent, is thereby lost forever.

—
This obviously political regressive (probably calls himself “progressive”) also exposes a scandal involving AK elections officials who violated state law by providing a list of write-in candidates to polling stations (to “assist” the voters). Both Dem and Rep Party officials sued and a judge ruled for them.

Oh yeah the Republican Party Machine in the state now colluding in that one no doubt, they came late to the lawsuit. Checkered-pants Country Club Republicans are painfully torn between supporting insiders and true mavericks. (RINOs and Blue Dogs don’t count).

Apparently governor favors the gal who lost the Rep Party primary to Joe Miller.
Commandeering state resources for primaries has apparently started backfiring on the Entrenched Power Brokers. But they will not go down without a fight. Or vitriol. Or fraud.

One of the first villains exposed by Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.org was the Republican-Party owner of Diebold Election Systems. All the guys crying “paranoia” at Dem-Party e-vote cheating reports here, they are the same ones who cried foul at Diebold founder-owner’s promise to “deliver” his state’s votes to Bush.

The blackboxvoting.org web site, if you had followed them early on after 2000, were exposing mostly Republican cheating, in part because the Dems were the –ahem– “paranoid” ones over the Bush-Gore court fight.

Beverly Harris of that site had to even remind the commenters on their forums that it was not just Republicans doing dirty voting tricks.

(On a side note, that (ahem) “paranoid” blogger complains about a “secret rightwing” conference with right-wing billionaires and media figures, but says nothing about (1) the CFR, (2) Trilateral Commission, (3) the Bildebergers, (4) the “World Economic Forum”, (5) the Masons, (6) the Ill*minati, or (7) that dangerous faith-based pow-wow of Congresspersons the “Sojourners”, or (8) George Soros, or (9) the Red-shields (Roth schilds), or (10) the suppression of truly cheap-energy technology research by the very environmentalist movements that claim they want it.)

–aec

Electronic voting cannot be trusted period!

This programmer was shocked at the mad rush to electronic voting machines, touch-pad voting, after the United States 2000 presidential election battle in the courts. The Congress gave away all kinds of money (our money) to the states and put stipulations on it that almost made it obligatory to use it for these machines.

Best guesses: (1) they bought into some slick salesman pitch that it would be more secure, (2) they figured it would eliminate the spectacle of actual citizens doing some real observing of the counting like happened in Miami that year, or (3) somebody whispered in their ear that if they were “smart” they could find a way to augment the power of the McCain-Feingold Incumbency Protection Act.

The fraudsters and the ignorant have collaborated with the clueless to give us computers to register our votes. And to make sure the integrity of the citizen’s vote is respected, they made sure they used Microsoft Windows-based operating systems and some of them were so concerned about security they used the Access data base for compiling the figures.

I had a conversation with the chief of the Elections Board of Miami-Dade County because our little town got the curse of seeing the first roll-out of the touch-pad voting machines. When he saw I knew what I was talking about, he actually gave me a listen. Or at least pretended to, no defensive act..

And of course Doublespeak Media told us about the party affiliation of the Republicans who own some of the e-voting companies, but after many shrill cries about Republicans, the non-partisan Black Box Voting reminded its members that many of the frauds it uncovered were also occurring in favor of Democrat Party politicians.

Doublespeak Media never once mentioned that I know of that Hugo Chavez’s own Venezuelan fiefdom made many of those machines in Venezuela and owned voting machine vendors in the United States, and was associated with those same companies.

Thanks a lot! Jimmy Carter, true defender of democracy, approved the elections won by Hugo’s use of these tools of tyrants, but on the other hand had his stupid Anti-Democracy Institute deny delegates to observe the free elections in Honduras, justifying it on the basis of lies and spin. Thus he continued this human rights farce that he began as president when he wrapped up Zimbabwe like a Christmas gift and gave it to Mugabe and Gang, just because they kept whining.

Honduras exposed all the “people of the prince that shall come”, also known as the power cliques who are busy confiscating our pocketbooks to build the New World Order by any other name.

Any electronic voting is a theft, by virtue of the fact that it cannot be trusted and makes a real-world recount impossible.

All programmers should yell foul at the very idea of trusting computer systems with a vote. We want a voting system that can be verified by our computer-illiterate cousins and grandmothers.

In one New Jersey county, once upon a time, a client of a former employer, we observed a vote count in process, wherein the votes were cast on paper ballots, they were counted at each precinct by the volunteers with observers from the various parties, the totals noted on tabulation sheets, and rushed into the county seat offices according to their strict security procedures.

The numbers on those sheets were entered into the computer systems and verified by a second pass by a different clerk.

Everything was done between polls closing between 7 PM and 8 PM, by midnight.

Another thing with ballots you hold in your hand. We need a system like the nation saw in Miami-Dade County in the year 2000, where the Elections Board clerks went over each one, with citizens off the street observing through glass windows!

–aec

Counterpoints to Global Warming Fraud

When their scare word “global warming” began to make them look ridiculous, they changed their banner to “global climate change”. Now especially with Climategate exposing the fraud behind the politics, they want to change their Newspeak (#1) dictionary entry to “climate disruption”. That way they can blame any weather they want to on it, and keep Chicken Little rushing toward giving up their pocketbooks.

>>The science seems sound, that there is a problem.

There are quite a few climate scientists who even question that as stated. The honest ones will simply say they don’t know.

>>It is appears that CO2 is part of the problem.

Ah, and many geophysicists and biophysicists say that it is also part of the solution. Many plant fossils exhibit evidence of much higher amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere during earlier times in Earth’s history. They also exhibit evidence that plant life was in great abundance and abundant ecology extended to latitudes closer to the poles.

And abundance of such vegetation is one the major good things that the environmental industry says it wants to protect.

The truth is that until you actually apply computer models to the real world, there’s no way you can measure its validity, because real-world comparisons are precisely the appropriate test.

That’s why any business of any size has an army of people testing programming code long before they allow it to go into the bottom line.

Note also that the powerful forces of movers and shakers behind the takeover of the economy by means of the central controls demanded by these Politicized Science shills, started with real pollutants, then went on to the ozone layer, but they finally hit on a more permanent “danger”, carbon dioxide. After all, everything in the world that burns –including the slow burn we know as us breathing– produces varying quantities of carbon dioxide. So they got a bad guy that doesn’t go away.

>>It is appears that a significant amount of human induced pollutants are part of the problem.

Like Michael Crichton said when he exposed this racket, pollution has been reduced drastically in the last half of the 20th century and no longer has the significant place that it did.

One can also balance the trillions of dollars of cost projected by the most conservative estimates for the actions demanded by the enviro activist-industrial partnership, against the health benefits of the same moneys.

>>It is appears that a significant amount of deforestation is part of the problem.

Increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere result in re-forestation, such as has been demonstrated in some areas of what is called sub-Saharan Africa.

>>It also appears that human over-population is a significant factor.

And this is one of the most deceitful frauds perpetrated upon us and is no longer a concern except for the political mandates of entrenches bureaucracies, useful only for political control and to justify this “enviro-wacky” attack on the world’s economies.

Population growth rates have gone down drastically following WWII, and many western nations would be producing an explosion of ghost towns if not for immigration. In developing countries, either the rates of growth has been declining, or the rate of acceleration of growth has been declining, in some cases quite rapidly.

>>There appears to be a serious reduction in a number of food sources.

Now I haven’t seen this one in this context. That’s probably because when you find out where this is happening, it is most often because of the loss of topsoil from loss of tree cover. This can be fixed locally, as it has happened in other occasions historically, without the need for the demands over all aspects of our lives. That’s exactly what Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, that to fix the environment they would have to control all aspects of our lives.

–trutherator

Chile’s rescued miners: ‘We were not 33 we were 34 because Jesus Christ was with us down there”

Found at http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/2010/s10100051.htm:

Chile’s president praises faith of rescued miners
http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/2010/s10100051.htm

By Peter Wooding
Europe Bureau Chief for ASSIST News Service

CHILE (ANS)

Lewis resigned from the APA! Climategate scandal fallout exposes APA

(1) “I don’t know much about the GW issue or science involved.”

A: You don’t need to know much about the AGW issue or the science involved to see what is happening with it, because the political control freaks have made it a political issue –meaning an excuse to control the lives of us peasants.

You can get a clue in the current boss-in-chief’s FIRST choice for Environmental Jobs czar. Remember Van Jones? He founded a Communist movement called STORM, and you can find their official manifesto, “Reclaiming Revolution”, on the Internet by clicking here. He whined about China and Soviet Russia turning to capitalism.

Van Jones’ STORM manifesto includes statements of “commitment to the fundamental ideas of Marxism-Leninism.” This was the administration’s pick for czar. Do you think the Marxist-Leninist regimes of the 20th century cared one little bit about the environment?!

His history was so bad and his agenda was so blatant, they had to replace him with someone without so much cyberspace exposure. He preached eliminating free enterprise altogether to replace it with a Soviet-era Communist economic structure, as you can read yourself in the manifesto.

(2) I do know there is still a lot of ‘stuff’ in the air here and I don’t mean pollen! 🙂

That might explain the dopey stuff that oozes out of the West Coast! The Los Angeles air was dirty from too much pollution when I lived there in the late 1960s, and I’m sure there is still a problem.

The Los Angeles area, more so in some sub-regions, have a geographic configuration that makes the smog problem worse. Between that and the prequel reminders of The Big One Coming, I again plead with my loved ones and all readers of this comment to find safer ground.

If you think that problem is solved with more top-down controls by government, consider that the biggest polluters of the 20th century, with the absolutely worst record of all organizations, were governments!

That’s right, governments!

Desk jockeys writing environmental marching orders from Washington desk jockeys to industry often show they don’t even know what they’re talking about, and do not one thing to scrub pollutants from smokestacks!

Dow Chemical once invited the EPA “experts” that wrote one such directive to a factory tour. They walked them through each step of the process, and taught them that it did absolutely nothing –zero– to eliminate any pollutant whatsoever, and was a waste of a million dollars each factory.

That million dollars, multiplied by all the tens of thousands of such EPA and OSHA micro-controls over industry, billions upon billions, would be better applied to help improve the actual health of human beings?!

But Soviet Russia, with NO CORPORATIONS AT ALL, has killed off at least one of its own land-locked lakes!

Question (3) Besides, it seems like some of the attempts to find better ways of doing things – like alternative/renewable energy sources have potentially much more positive benefits than negative impacts – so, why not?

I’ve often found it amusing that many of the good things we hear about from environmental missives are really just applications of good old Christian Puritan ethics, that the same academic crowd used to sneer at when I was in college.

The Puritans, like the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, made it almost a religious doctrine to eliminate all waste and recycle everything possible. like Benjamin Franklin’s “Waste not, want not”.

Question (4) Mainly, the oil guys are against it and other countries are on their way to winning this particular technology race.”

Actually, the government-media-industrial complex trade secret is that the oil guys are not against it at all. It looks more like the rabbit pleading with the fox to “Please, Please, Don’t throw me into the briar patch!”. British Petroleum brags about its “green” investments. They will not be left behind in government subsidies.

The wackos that complain about government subsidies for the oil industry are the same ones demanding government subsidies for their own investments! That’s right, investments! Al Gore demands the government “do more” for the environment, and the Obama administration has obliged by granting a loan to the dancing tune of half a billion dollars! to a company to build a new hybrid auto –in Finland! That’s right, Finland!

Gore-Backed Car Firm Gets Large U.S. Loan – WSJ.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125383160812639013.html

Some companies complained that their loans were rejected, and from some corners came complaints about subsidies for jobs overseas.

That’s the same administration that wanted the “green jobs czar” that said –that’s right, lied- “green jobs” would be good for the poor urban neighborhoods.

Can we believe these liars? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

The environmental industry, so-called, is already raking in billions, in two major ways.

One way the “green” industry rakes in billions is the flood of government mandates on the rest of the economy, written mostly by desk-riding “experts”.

Two, the flood of government money coming at them in false-label environment initiatives. Al Gore has already made a killing just brokering “carbon credits”, which are simply wealth transfers from developed countries to intermediate stand-ins for poor countries.

–Alan

Fake phony atheist religion quiz on NY Times

Seems there was recently a Pew Research Poll that made a few conclusions about who knows more about religions in general.

<a href=“http://pewforum.org/uploadedFiles/Topics/Belief_and_Practices/religious-knowledge-full-report.pdf”>Click

here for the Pew report.</a>

The NY Times reported on the poll, whereupon one of their opinionators decided to use it to show his ignorance of Christianity and religion in general, with his own question and answer list. While claiming he only wanted to show we should be “we should be wary of rushing to inflammatory conclusions about any faith, especially based on cherry-picking texts”, in fact his list could have come from one of the atheist web sites that do that very thing!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/opinion/10kristof.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage

Many of his questions and answers from the Bible and about religion show ignorance, getting it wrong in many cases. In one or two instances he makes the same mistake even Christians make, such as thinking that the Bible advocates slavery on principle, which it does not. As the Pew survey purportedly showed, and I have seen this anyway, ven many Christians don’t know their Bibles, or they rely on false teaching or bad “translations” often made by graduates of the same institutions that produces NY Times journalism.

I don’t know the Koran very well and never read it, but I also never rushed to judgment based on the selections of negative quote selections. The Bible is so often abused that way, such as this opinionator did again, but there are plenty of clues in the real world.

The testimony of Mosab Hassan Yousef, in his book the Son of Hamas, sheds a lot of light on the subject. Born into the Islamic family of an imam in Palestine, who was also the co-founder of Hamas, he grew up engaging in what we call terrorism.

Mr. Yousef said that while he was in prison he evolved through a process that began when he saw how brutal his fellow Muslims were with each other. The one major factor he talks about involves the Bible he had his first opportunity to read, and he was amazed that the Bible said “Love thine enemy”! He had never heard of such a thing!

Now to teach Mr. Nicholas Kristof a bit about the Christ that apparently became his family name, in a twist..

He asks:

1. Which holy book stipulates that a girl who does not bleed on her wedding night should be stoned to death?
a. Koran b. Old Testament c. (Hindu) Upanishads

I would more believe none of the above, but certainly the Old Testament does not. He says it is and points to Deuteronomy 22:21 as a reference! Maybe he didn’t even read it! It says if a man discovers on his wedding night that his wife is not a virgin, he has the option to bring her before the priests and the people and the woman should have a hearing before any determination is made.

Tthe old-timers knew a whole lot more about virginity than we do today, except for the subcategory of losing it. We know a lot about that nowadays, don’t we folks?

NOTE: There is almost no prescribed punishment in the Bible for letting such a transgression pass, the Old Testament included. The new husband that knew about it and married her anyway, or the one that discovered it and forgives her, nobody heard about it. In contrast there is also plenty of forgiveness in the Old Testament, not just the New. Bathsheba was never stoned. And you have the story of Joseph and Mary.

However, there are few countries around today that actually stone women for adultery, and guess what major religion they profess?

2. Which holy text declares: “Let there be no compulsion in religion”?
a. Koran b. Gospel of Matthew c. Letter of Paul to the Romans

He says this is in the Koran 2:256, but then he at least admits that the Koran DOES advocate coercion in other sections.

What he does not mention is that that Islam got its start through subterfuge and military conquest, beginning with Muhammed himself, and his earliest followers.

Contrast that with the fact that Jesus Christ offered himself up in death a living sacrifice, without spot or blemish, to free us from the burden of sin, with the Resurrection providing the proof that we are also thereby freed from death. Life and sacrifice was the fuel for the earliest spread of Christianity.

Note also that even in the laws of Moses, Israel was to treat “the stranger” with the same respect they expected for themselves, admonishing them to remember that they were also “strangers” in Egypt. Yes, that’s right, The Old Testament was where the idea of religious tolerance got started. The exceptions were for the vilest and most brutal practices of the pagan tribes of the Promised Land, their live infant sacrifices to “the fire”, the burning bellies of Molech, and the rampant violence throughout.

3. The terrorists who pioneered the suicide vest in modern times, and the use of women in terror attacks, were affiliated with which major religion?
a. Islam b. Christianity c. Hinduism

He’s right to say Hinduism, although the Tamil Tigers were as likely socialists and Communists, as he admits (“secular” he says).

4. “Every child is touched by the devil as soon as he is born and this contact makes him cry. Excepted are Mary and her Son.” This verse is from:
a. Letters of Paul to the Corinthians b. The Book of Revelation c. An Islamic hadith, or religious tale

The Koran has better things than that to say about Mary.

The Hadith (Muslim) might say that –it’s not the Koran– but that passage helps lead to the big difference between true salvation in Jesus Christ from all other religions, including the Christian religious beliefs based on works. The author shows the same misunderstanding many Chrstians share by his manner of posing this question.

Contrast this: Jesus said you had to become like a little child before you got a chance to get to heaven:

Matthew 18:3 And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

And here, he repeats a myth often believed even by many Christians:

5. Which holy text is sympathetic to slavery? a. Old Testament b. New Testament c. Koran

He says all of them, but that’s baloney. Even modern “Christian” Bible “translations” get it wrong. The King James Bible correctly translates the word as “servant”, not slavery, because there is a vast gulf of difference between what we think of as “slaves” today, from the rules for “servants” in the Bible.

There was only one exception in the laws of Moses that is close to comparable, and that is the case where strangers were traveling with slaves that had been slaves all their life in the first place, then an Israelite could purchase one.

But the treatment prescribed for them, the list of rules for that small fraction, were so favorable to them that the only use of the word “slave” in the Old Testament is a disdainful reference to a spoiled “homeborn slave”. “Why is he spoiled?” it says.

Here’s another one:

6. In the New Testament, Jesus’ views of homosexuality are:
a. strongly condemnatory b. forgiving c. never mentioned

He says it’s never mentioned, and admits other parts of the Bible “object to homosexuality”. ]

What he does NOT mention is that Jesus pointed to Sodom at least SIX TIMES in the gospels in his warnings to the house of Israel as the ultimate examples of deserving of God’s wrath upon the wicked.

7. Which holy text urges responding to evil with kindness, saying: “repel the evil deed with one which is better.”
a. Gospel of Luke b. Book of Isaiah c. Koran

Maybe that wording is the Koran, but that’s a lot of wiggle room. What he thinks Jesus said is “much the same thing”, is way, way much NOT the same thing:

Try finding something like Matthew 5:44 in the Koran. This is the scripture that sent Mossab fleeing Islam into the arms of Christianity:

Matthew 5:44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

8. Which religious figure preaches tolerance by suggesting that God looks after all peoples and leads them all to their promised lands?
a. Muhammad b. Amos c. Jesus

He points to Amos 9:7, but he’s indulging himself a fictional moment by saying “all” peoples, and another one by saying “their promised lands”. God led them from one place to another, but if you read the whole chapter, you will wonder about whether it means “promised land”.

9. Which of these religious leaders was a polygamist?
a. Jacob b. King David c. Muhammad

Well, call them polygamist but all three had multiple wives. Jacob had two wives, David had a few more than that.

But Muhammad was more than “just” a polygamist. He married one of his wives when she was nine years old. That’s right, nine, no typo. One of his wives was in fact Jewish, but as it turns out a spoil of conquest. Other wives had been married to other men, and another one was a step-daughter.

10. What characterizes Muhammad’s behavior toward the Jews of his time?
a. He killed them. b. He married one. c. He praised them as a chosen people.

He says: “All of these. Muhammad’s Jewish wife was seized in battle, which undermines the spirit of the gesture. By some accounts he had a second Jewish wife as well.” I once heard that the other Jewish wife I believe was before the conquests, and told him that his seizures and strange utterings were really prophetic utterances.

But what he does NOT also mention is that he grew in his hostility toward the Jews of his time in the later passages of the Koran. There are some startling quotes from his Koran about them.

But then the Jews were pretty bad in the Old Testament too.

11. Which holy scripture urges that the “little ones” of the enemy be dashed against the stones?
a. Book of Psalms b. Koran c. Leviticus

There is a blatant lie, and another exhibit of the writer’s own hostility. That passage is a prophecy of the judgment of God that would fall upon Babylon for much worse brutality inflicted upon God’s people, and does not even say that it would be them. It only says that their own sins would come back in the person of enemies just as brutal as themselves!

12. Which holy scripture suggests beating wives who misbehave?
a. Koran b. Letters of Paul to the Corinthians c. Book of Judges

Okay so I guess he got one right, looks like the Koran indeed does.. a. Koran 4:34

13. Which religious leader is quoted as commanding women to be silent during services?
a. The first Dalai Lama b. St. Paul c. Muhammad

Yep, for sure that was St. Paul, no doubt about it. But then the guy throws away his correct answer with another famous myth, believed by the smarter-than-thou crowd that likes to berate others for not believing them, saying they doubt Paul wrote neither of those scriptures.

His name is on them, and the very earliest Christian leaders and writers all had them and passed them on to us as we can still find them today, and we have their own writings corroborating almost everything we know. In fact the entire New Testament could probably be reconstructed just from their writings.

He says maybe what matters is what is in our hearts rather than our scriptures, another example of his disconnect from serious consideration of his chosen topic.

Throughout the ages even the most skeptical have admired the scriptures. Napoleon declared that it was no mere book, that it was alive. “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy”. (Revelation 19:10) About two thirds of the entire Bible is pure prophecy, prediction of events either future at the time or awaiting fulfillment in their turn.

The mutineers from the Bounty, we are told, sunk into jealousy, strife, killings, all kinds of evil, until one of the crew discovered a Bible in a trunk of supplies and began to read it. It is said that when the British found them, they were living such godly lives that they left them be.

The Bible transformed Mosab Hassan Yousef from warrior engineering death for his enemies to preacher of love, from reading the word of God.

Throughout our history there are hundreds, thousands of such examples.

Through passages of scripture Martin Luther was liberated from the torture of guilt, liberated by the simple verse “The righteous shall live by faith”. By faith! He went on to catalyze the movement that helped even the Roman Catholic church free itself from its own worst practices.

The translation of the word of God into the vernacular helped liberate the nations from their servitude to the hierarchy of nations and began movements of independent thinking —“one God, and one mediator between God and men”– that unleashed rulers and vassals alike to the truth that “All men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights”.

Despite the tendency of self-delusion by such men as this author and power-hungry charlatans, this is the Bible with the words that have inspired men through thousands of years to become neighbor to the Samaritan in need in the way, condemn slavery, promote peace, visit the widows and the orphans.

This is not the religion, certainly not the organized religion, but the faith that found its fulcrum in the sacrifice by God himself for the sins of the world, setting them free to love each other if only they would.

For us, it is the “love of Christ that constraineth us”.

This is so central to faith in Jesus Christ, that the epistles of John state explicitly that if you say you love God and you hate your brother, you are a liar. And if you do not help your brother in need, how can you say that the love of God dwelleth in you?

–trutherator