In Theory, there is no Practice.

(I optimisitically think I’m an optimist?)

This belief has been taking a beating lately. I get terribly agitated and depressed about the seeming madness of this world. A young girl is abducted and murdered, a mob kills two men after a traffic accident, a Senator gets a free pass on ethical lapses, both Senate leaders complain about the effort to locate the person respinsible for leaking classified material, and the radical Islamists against the World.

Today at lunch, I saw two kittens sleeping in a pet store window, and for the first time in days, I smiled and thought how beautiful life is. A smile as I think of Opus on a Dandelion Break (obscure Bloom County reference). The weather is, for the first time in seemingly weeks, not opressively hot. The sky is blue, the breeze is nice. My wife is beautiful, and she loves me (even though I am a constant challenge to her sanity and good humor).

Christ reminded us of God’s law to love God with all our heart and all our soul and too love our neighbors as ourselves. All his laws are derived from these to precepts. All sadness in this World is because we are unable or unwilling to do these simple things.

I believe that 
• that all people may be redeemed
• point of view does not matter
• there is absolute truth
• for any situation, for any event, there is one right way of responding
• we must defend the lives of the unsaved, wherever they may be
• we must nurture all lives that they may be redeemed in God’s love
• we must take righteous action against the minions spreading evil (a corollary to the previous two beliefs)

But moreover,

I reject 
• moral equivalence
  Evil exists. It helps no-one to pretend it does not. Or that there is a reason, a justification, a principle, that it is okay to nurture or even accept evil.
• the concept that it is okay to terrorize anyone, guilty or innocent
• the idea that it is okay to kill in the name of religion
• that government action is the answer to most any problem