Politics vs. Faith.

 

 Politics vs. Faith.

Some people just say hi, and look as if they know me. Others ask me if I am the guy from the paper and say they like what I write. One mailed me a pleasant letter. It is all welcome since I write for them. One last week voiced a concern. He said he doesn’t believe in God and he doesn’t believe that the world is in trouble. He looks at things statistically and true enough: less than one percent of homes in BC burnt last summer. I felt like saying, yes, let’s do nothing until over 50% of homes are burnt. We will solve the problem later. Let us think positively.

I am being sarcastic here. I have strong feelings about beliefs and thinking, much based on primitive knowledge that is not popular in the Western world. It takes a lot of research to find out about the old knowledge that is not written down. With all of our outstanding medical technology, not many are interested in jungle spirituality.

I don’t follow any guru or shaman for my faith. I don’t go telling people that every word in my Christian bible is the word of God either. People should do the work and figure it out for themselves. Because I can read Hebrew, I know that there are variations in translations.

We live in times where the truth is the hardest thing to come by. Confusion is built into our nature. In the Bible, the humans were trying to be like God, so they built a tower to Heaven. God didn’t want the competition, so he made them/us speak in different languages. Soon we/they were at each other’s throats. Go forward in history to the time in which the resurrected son of God was forming a new religion and read on.

Jesus was sending twelve simple, probably illiterate fishermen, out to change the world. He gave them a gift of tongues that sounded much like a new version of Google Translate. They used it and today his religion is the largest in the world. The secret is to remove confusion and work towards one goal. We can do it, but we don’t. Our nature is to set ourselves apart and try to get ahead of each other. Presently, we do it by following political ideologies.

Private interests play a role in politics, making everything politicized and lacking genuine action. The politics are played with private interest in mind. As I am watching, my province is busy trying to break away from the Canada Pension Plan. It is one of the best pension systems in the world and it works because we all are in it. One province had its own before the rest started, so they are keeping theirs. Now Alberta wants out since we have a younger population. If we do that, the rest of Canada will have to cover our share and possibly ruin the Canada Pension Plan. People will be forced to purchase insurance and the poor who need it the most will be left out in the cold.

One of the first stories in the Bible, which so many of us claim to believe in, is about Cain and Abel. That comes from the beginning of our civilization. Cain killed his brother out of jealousy. God asked him where his brother was and he answered with a question. Am I my brother’s keeper? He was not. God punished him by marking him for everyone to see. That is not much. However, it was clear to the ancient people who wrote the story down that we can’t survive if we look only after ourselves. We are social animals and need each other.

Alberta now is becoming much like Cain from the Bible. The whole world is realizing that continuing to use the energy that we became addicted to is harmful, even if we insist it is most ethical against all the signs. We are trying to break the Health Care system by privatizing small portions and are harming the Canada Pension Plan. How long is it going to be before we will not dare to tell people where we are from?

Our government wants to determine our actions with referendums. They know that this is the easiest way to cheat. You can see what Brexit did to Great Britain. Referendum questions can be misleading. I look at what is happening to our insurance and worry. We have been hit with extreme weather events less than BC, but much of our personal wealth is uninsurable or very expensive to insure. Year after year is warmer than the one before. Believing in Global Warming is not determining if it happens or not.

My goal is to survive and not be ashamed to show my face as a Canadian from Alberta. I want politicians to represent me, not try to shape me.

Here is a link to my blog: https://thesimpleravenspost.blogspot.ca/  Feel free to check other articles and comment.