Pastor Po's Midwinter Message to America

Imagine for a moment how sick it would seem if African-Americans and others still striving for equal rights in the USA wore nooses fashioned in precious metal on fine chains around their necks and decorated their meeting places with gruesome sculptures of the lynchings of their forebears.

It is no less sick that as "Christians" so many desperate and oppressed people still badge themselves with and kneel before crosses representing those upon which thousands of rebels were killed and left on public display to dissuade others from contemplating revolt against Roman authority and against the enslavement of native populations across their ancient Empire.

______

The Romans proudly documented that their wealth was the spoils of war, that their home economy was reliant on slavery, and that the physical magnificence of their cities was hewn from rock by people who had no choice. Even today, for twelve euros a tourist head, you can still visit the Colosseum built by tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners of war after the failed tax revolt that saw them driven out of Jerusalem.

It is no surprise to the educated outside observer that in the USA, where the 21st century population is still encouraged to look to the rulebook of the Romans' church for guidance, the average employee is struggling to get by while their employers live in relative luxury, a citizen's health is directly related to their wealth, and the highest office in the land was bought by a man with no relevant experience and no respect for humanity, truth or the law.

Neither is it a surprise to find in a Europe that has properly embraced secular democracy and where, outside of Rome and the Vatican, churches no longer hold sway over public opinion, that universal healthcare is the norm, that employees have protected rights, and that populations protest and readily hold their elected leaders to account when their actions do not serve the majority.

______

If you believe the self-appointed apostle Paul's letters of instruction echo even remotely the words of the man who so famously died for telling people to trust the god in their conscience to guide them you are a fool.

Quite simply, no 1st century Jew expecting a messiah to lead them to freedom at any moment would ever have been tempted away from their temple by someone preaching that their god intended them to be contented to live and to die as slaves to Rome.

______

Had slaves kidnapped from Africa been brought to any land where Jesus was in charge they would have been released immediately, fed properly, had any ailments or injuries sorted out straight away and been free to live as equals in that land if they chose to, or they would have been helped to return home as comfortably as Jesus himself would have been carried on the same journey.

Sadly the lands to which they were taken were those where Paul’s instruction held sway and they were fucked. 

______

In today's America you have the choice, according to your Constitution, to either 

a) Follow the human Jesus' example and let your conscience guide you to stand up, speak out and to vote to improve the lives of all your fellow citizens, regardless of race, gender or consensual sexual preference, because all are equal before god or 

b) Follow Paul's instructions, many of which were written as part of his deal with the Romans to save his own life when he was arrested for promoting equality, to do exactly the opposite and to suffer gratefully as if a perfect Roman slave, accepting abuse of yourself and of your peers as if your god intended you to be an underclass.

Team Jesus has no need of clubhouses, no need of books of instruction, there's nothing to worship, no hierarchy of officers, no fees to pay and no badges to wear. Every member is equal to every other and trusts their own conscience to guide them.

Team Paul is the multiplicity of rival Christian worship-clubs whose officers make a good living from teaching anyone daft enough to believe Jesus was magic that they, as mere mortals, are powerless to improve their lot in this life and will burn in hell for eternity if they so much as try. These are the worship-clubs whose members have prayed uselessly before Roman crosses for 1700 years and who adorn their clubhouses with often graphic representations of Jesus' execution to dissuade their members from following his example. 

______

I can think of no groups other than Team Paul Christians whose members are twisted enough to celebrate a man's birth in buildings so clearly dedicated to the celebration of his death. 

Come to think of it, I can think of no one but Team Paul Christians who endure a life of poverty because hypocrites who live in palaces tell them to.

It is to these Team Paul Christians I would like to point out that their god existed long before their Roman church and long before the Jewish temple that preceded it, and it will exist long after, too. The god in their bible has always been the conscience inside each of us and the organisers of religion have always dedicated themselves to distracting people from it. 

______

Happiness is for life, not just for Christmas.

Trees

At the end of World War II in 1945 Oak Road, where I would later be born and would grow up, did not exist. A decade later would see it did exist, that my father had bought the indicated plot along it, and that he had designed and was in the process of building there what would become our family home, a safe distance from the pea-soup fogs that he had grown up with and that still persisted twenty miles away in London.

Without warranting photography in the area in the meanwhile, this next image is from the late 1990s and shows the houses along the road at their original as-built sizes. Though already forty to fifty years old, these substantial four and five bed homes were still deemed generous family accommodation in what was by then firmly established as the Stockbroker Belt.

Across the 2000s, hastened by the establishment in the village of Chelsea Football Club's training ground and the associated influx of the super-rich, predatory developers began out-bidding anyone who might like to live in a house as it stood. Character homes with space in their gardens were being bought up and routinely doubled in size, many addresses returning to market with their price tag doubled or more and thus permanently changing the demographic of the area.

By 2010, our family house that had sat comfortably among its neighbours for almost half a century had become dwarfed by them and we were surrounded by people with attitudes very different from our own, necessarily so to have achieved the wherewithal to buy the bloated residences the developers created.

Don't imagine I was jealous of the new neighbours' houses, nor of their lives, though I did become irritated when our lack of liquid cash and our tendency not to waste what we had drew disapproving glances from them at our scruffy cars and weathered, once-white Critall windows. After all, we were no less conveniently located than them, didn't have so far to walk from room to room as they did, and, most important of all, we had trees.

All the trees that were on my father's building plot before he built our house still stood in its garden when he had need of houses no more and it came to us to sell. A few huge oaks, sixty years bigger than when he first saw them, were surrounded by their offsprung generations and interspersed with beech and birch, sweet chestnut and holly, and myriad others the names of which I never knew. If nature brought its seed, there it grew. And there I grew, too.

Thus it was only the changes to neighbouring properties, not to our own, that saw the value of my father's plot having risen come his death to more than we could afford to pay to keep it in our family.

Yet, saddest for me was not that our house would be lost to us come its sale, nor even that it would be demolished and no trace remain of it.

My upset was that the trees would go, that every next child to grow up where I had been born would be poorer than I had been, never mind how much money their parents had.

______

[Images are from Google Earth except for the overlay of the new house which came from Wego as GE have not updated yet.  An image exists on GE of the plot taken after the developers had demolished our house, cleared the plot of trees and not yet begun the replacement build but it is of poor quality and looks especially sad.]

Evolution Explained (in 403 words)

No creature is an exact copy of its parent. Any part of it might be slightly bigger or smaller or differently shaped. As the creature breeds it passes traits on to its offspring. As various traits combine they become exaggerated, such as two tall parents having taller children and two smaller parents having smaller children.

If all the most nutritious food in a supermarket was moved to the highest shelf and the shelves were impossible to climb it would be the tallest children in the next generation who would be the best fed, those with the tallest parents.

If the lower shelves were emptied and the unit toppled over scattering the little remaining nutritious food onto the floor it would be the smallest who would be most satisfied, their needs being the least, and only the most flexible of the tall would eat at all.

If the supermarket were to run out completely it would be those with the stamina to reach the next and the speed to get there before the crowds who would eat.

It can be misleading to say a creature evolved to have a long neck to eat the highest fruit to survive. This wrongly implies a purposeful advance.

It is clearer to say that of the range of neck lengths that had existed it was the shorter ones that died out because they could no longer reach the fruit. Which is just a natural filtering out of the least efficient when times get tough.

It will generally have been a significant environmental change causing a scarcity of food that will have brought about the natural extinction of any one version of a species if it cannot compete with any other version or species sharing the food resource.

Mankind has also brought about the extinction of many species though its own action and through the accidental or intentional contamination of separate balanced ecosystems with species or diseases from elsewhere.

The deepest areas of the ocean are the places where changes to the climate on the surface of our planet has had least effect and where the environment still supports creatures that have remained successful in very early versions.

On the surface of the earth the swamp seems to have been the most consistent environment, always existing somewhere as the perfect home for crocodiles and alligators, they being among the oldest versions of any creatures we can see easily today.