What's a libertarian?

I'm pretty sick of bipartisan politics.

The Left wants to tax business owners and wealthy people, and then give money and aid to poor people.
The Right only contains those people who are wealthy and business owners, so they naturally oppose this.

The only problem with the Left's ideals is that they aren't fair, and they essentially amount to Robin Hood and certainly close in on socialism.
The Left will stand there and yell at you all day about how the Right isn't fair.
Look, if you were wealthy, you wouldn't want to have a 30% tax, either. That's just plain ridiculous, and it discourages anyone from actually wanting to succeed.
The Left then turns around and tries to convince you that you can make life better for millions of people by giving them jobs in the government doing literally nothing for a paycheck. Funded by the Right, those people who were blessed enough to make it to your higher tax brackets.

I'm sorry that you don't like capitalism. I hear that China is nice. Go move there and enjoy the good life.

Now, are corporations greedy? Absolutely. That's the whole reason they exist. Public companies exist for the sole purpose of making money.
The problem is that we've built society around a lie, the idea that stocks go up and jobs are added every year. That's simply false. The stock market isn't supposed to go up every year. It's supposed to go up and down. We've built companies, markets, jobs, families, and government on the assumption that bear markets are a terrible, rare catastrophe. Then we try to force reality into that lie, creating bubbles and then crying when they burst.

Stop electing politicians that promise to make you richer. For the love, can we just find someone who wants to have a sustainable government? I don't even care if its big or small or in between. I just want it to be sustainable. Like, on a balanced budget. After we fix that, we can worry about greedy people and lazy people. Or we can forget about them, because its the people in between who have been hurt the most.

Or maybe Apple can build an assembly plant in the USA. that would literally solve 1/2 of the problems we have, and it would prevent the government from spending billions on an ambiguous "jobs" act that claims to give americans jobs by spending america's money. Preposterous.

Zelda

Remember the bosses in the Zelda games? Like the baddies in those caves. They swung stuff or shot stuff at you, and you hopefully made it through the dungeon with full hearts so you could shoot your sword of power or whatever at them. You would have to wait for them to be done with their routine of deathly killing, and for just a moment, you could take a break from running away, shoot at them, and then go back to playing defense. Invariably you would get hit, and then you would have to either use special whatnots or just melee attack the thing, swinging your sword with no regard to how much you got hurt back.
But mostly, you avoided the boss's attacks.

That's the closest simile I can make to being an EE student.
At the end, I've been told, there is a princess. 

This isn't my english homework.

I don't talk much about things that go on in my life, mostly because I don't think much about things that go on in my life. But I'm starting to grow weary of just taking life as it comes. I want to accomplish something, and in order to do that, I have to figure out how to organize my thoughts, organize what I stand for, organize who I am.

I'm listening to Rob Bell right now. He's almost as funny as Francis Chan and Judah Smith. Why do so many people have issues with him? Also as far as I can tell, he's the among the most thoughtful speakers in the christian community.

But that's unrelated.

Over NNED Summer Camp this year, I sketched out a word in my notebook.
Parable.

I remembered a note in the ESV study bible for Psalm 78:2 (I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark saying from of old, things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us.)
The note says, "Parable and dark sayings are the tools of wisdom teachers, and require imagination to unlock their meaning."

If you've ever read the Gospels, you know that Jesus taught in Parables a few times. He pretty much never just went out and told people (crowds) something. He always did it with a story.
I've heard sermons preached about parables before.
Almost all the time, the pastor will talk about a parable like a story with a one-to-one correspondence to something about Jesus. But that's not the impression I get from the term "dark saying". In fact, I have never ever seen the word Parable described as a "Dark Saying". I think that's an awesome perspective of them.

These things that Jesus taught about weren't just a nursery rhyme like we reduce them to in sunday school or a trite lyric from a christian song. The words Jesus spoke in parables contain the absolute truth about reality. Nothing underscores this better than a dark saying. Like this is important stuff, the very fabric of the universe. That verse in Psalms and the ESV note imply that the truth in Jesus' words is locked up in meaning. I don't think that Jesus' parables were just a metaphor for the afterlife. I think that they contain truth that can't be expressed any other way.  Like how you can only store hydrofluoric acid in a plastic container, some truths need to be contained in a dark saying.

I think that's one area that the modern Church has neglected.
Evangelism has been a booming business since the 200s.
We talk a whole lot about Jesus, and that's great.
But I don't think we spend enough time saying what Jesus said.
Obviously it was important enough for him to say it. We probably should, too.

I think that Movies are the modern-day parable.
Sadly, so many of them are created for the sole purpose of consumption.
People pay for movies, so people make movies to make money.
They are selling a story. The best ones make the moviegoer think. Usually they leave a happy cathartic feeling at the end. But few movies successfully tell a parable of truth, a dark saying of old, something that really, truly introduces people to reality as it really is.


For some reason, christian subculture hasn't embraced the idea that you can't tell someone something that they don't want to know. They will just ignore it or reject it or explain it away. Even if its true. Even if its the gospel. The vast majority of people I know do not want to hear someone talk about the bible. That is boring and sober. In order to get truth inside of someone, it has to go in sideways, through a dark saying, a parable, a movie, a carefully constructed discography, anything that isn't direct. It has to dwell in them unnoticed in order to survive.
If we diverted any small percent of the resources that the church spends on ineffective ministry strategies into getting truth inside of people without them rejecting it, we wouldn't have to spend billions of dollars sending food to starving people, because starving people wouldn't exist.
But I don't want to talk about food, food is one of the most broken, messed up things in America.