Abortion is Murder, November, 2009 7-9

Formerly Stop the Killing of Young People (skyp) and soon, perhaps, Stop Killing Preemies

November, 2009 Vol. 7 No. 9
PO Box 7424, Reading, PA 19603
Phone – cell—484-706-4375, machine -- 610-396-0332
Email – johndunk@ptd.net
Web – skyp1.blogspot.com
Circulation – 55`
John Dunkle, Editor

Abortion is Murder, a weak, pathetic response to baby murder, is sent out at least once a month. If the gestapo hasn’t jailed you for defending the innocent realistically, you either have to tell me you want it or go the website. Faxes and emails are free but snail-mail is free only for POC’s, $100 for others.
Because I believe we should use every legitimate means, including force, in our attempt to protect those being tortured to death, I want to hear from people who’ve been forceful. I’d also like to hear from those who disagree with me.

Prisoners of Christ:
1. Evans, Paul Ross 83230-180, USP McCreary, P.O. Box 3000, Pine Knot, KY 42635
2. Gibbons, Linda - Vanier WDC, 655 Martin St., P.O. Box 1040, Milton, ON, Canada L9T 5E6
3. Griffin, Michael 310249, Okaloosa Correctional Institution, Crestview FL 32539-6708 9/11
4. Howard, Peter Andrew 57760-097, FCI, Box 900, Safford, AZ 85546
5. Jordi, Stephen 70309-004, FCI P.O. Box 33, Terre Haute IN 47802 6/30
6 Knight, Peter CRN 158589, Port Philip Prison, P.O. Box 376, Laverton, Victoria, Australia
7. Kopp, James 11761-055, USP Canaan, 3057 Easton Tpk., Waymart, PA 18472
8. McMenemy, David Robert 08168-030, FCI Elkton, P.O. Box 10, Lisbon OH 44432
9. Richardson, Alonzo Lee 12898-021, PO Box 474701, Des Moines, IA 5094
10. Roeder, Scott, Sedgewick county Jail, 141 West Elm, Wichita, KS 67203
11. Rudolph, Eric 18282-058 US Pen. Max, Box 8500, Florence CO 81226-8500
12. Shannon, Rachelle 59755-065, FCI Waseca, Unit A, P.O. Box 1731, Waseca, MN 56093 3/31
13. Waagner, Clayton Lee 17258-039, United States Penitentiary, P.O. Box 1000, Lewisburg PA 17837 8/25
14. Weiler Jr., Robert F. 39385-037, FCC - Delaware Hall, Box 1000, Petersburg VA 23804 (new)
15. Whitaker, Vincent , FCI, Box 699, Estill SC 29918

The Lord has asked people to make sacrifices related to opposing abortion which all but a handful have had too weak a heart to make. And they’ve looked for any pretense they could conjure up to claim that the sacrifice wasn’t required. They even deluded themselves, as people often do, into “believing” the pretense was real . . . When they get what they’ll get, they’ll fully deserve it. Peter Knight

Here is the conclusion and endnotes of Eric’s Chapter 2:

On the surface the Partial Birth Abortion Ban and Gonzales look like significant steps toward overturning Roe v. Wade; but underneath they are hollow meaningless bones that the Republican establishment has thrown to their social conservative supporters. Pro-lifers are mistaken if they believe the Ban and Gonzales signal a serious shift in the Court, one that will eventually lead to overturning Roe v. Wade. Gonzales makes it clear that Roe is safe in front of the Roberts Court. This is not because conservatives are still lacking one more vote. No, they are lacking the same number of votes as before. Alito and Roberts added nothing to the Roe equation. In their confirmation hearings, they held their abortion card close to their vest. Nevertheless, the smart money was betting that neither Alito nor Roberts would vote to overturn Roe. They were right.
Now that they sit on the bench for life, Alito and Roberts have nothing to fear in expressing their opinions on Roe. If they truly wanted Roe v Wade gone, the best way to effect that is to signal to the states to bring abortion cases before them. Scalia and Thomas have been doing that for years. In every major abortion case that has come before the Court, they have expressed their opinion that Roe should go. Gonzales v Carhart was no different. Thomas and Scalia concurred in part and dissented in part. Although concurring with the majority in upholding the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, they dissented, saying “The Court’s abortion jurisprudence, including Casey and Roe v Wade, has no basis in the Constitution.”45 Here was an opportunity for Alito and Roberts to sign onto Thomas and Scalia’s dissent and tell the country, especially the states, that they would overturn Roe if the issue came before the Court again. But they didn’t sign the dissent. So much for George W’s appointees.
This was a great disappointment for conservatives because Roe is the real target they've hunted for thirty-five years. But Roe is safe, unless Bush or the next President appoints three more Justices like Thomas and Scalia. With the election of Barack Obama and huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, it's almost certain that no conservative judges will be confirmed for the next decade. Even on the off chance that a Republican president is elected in 2012, he or she will be a decidedly more liberal Republican. The Republican Party establishment has tried for twenty years to cut its ties with social conservatives. They will most certainly redouble their efforts before the next presidential election. And what about the states? For Roe to go down, a state must first pass a law that explicitly proscribes abortions anytime after conception, health exception not included. Last year South Dakota attempted this very thing. But the egalitarians forced the law before a state referendum, where it went down in defeat. Believing the reason for the defeat was the law's lack of an exception for cases of rape and incest, prolifers in South Dakota prepared a new Initiative for the 2008 election. This one allowed abortions in cases of rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother. But the Initiative was voted down 55 percent to 45 percent. As South Dakota is one of the more conservative states, the defeat is a bad omen.
But let us imagine that Roberts and Alito vote against Roe. What then? Most Americans believe that abortion would then be completely outlawed. Not even close. Roe v. Wade prevented the states from deciding on the issue. If Roe was overturned tomorrow, abortion would return to the state legislatures. Based upon what happened in South Dakota, only a few states would move to outlaw abortion completely. Without Roe, abortion-on-demand would remain legal in most of the states. All these years, conservatives have been pleading with the Marxists to let them have one pocket of territory where abortions are not allowed—just one. That is the only thing Roe’s demise would accomplish.

In order to outlaw abortion nationwide, using constitutional methods, one of three things would need to happen: the Supreme Court would have to recognize a pre-natal right to life under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment; or Congress would have to pass a law banning all abortions; or the Constitution would have to be amended to protect unborn human life. Even under the most Republican of Congresses, the chances of one of these scenarios happening are remote.
This was shown clearly in the 2008 elections, when 72 percent of Coloradans voted against an initiative that would have defined the unborn child as a person. The initiative encapsulated the stated objective of the prolife movement, which is to eventually outlaw abortion nationwide by enacting an Amendment to the U. S. Constitution that affords pre-natal life the full protections of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. But the major prolife organizations did not line up behind the Colorado initiative. They thought it was asking for too much too soon. We must first use the "soft-sell" to promote a "culture of life," they said. And eventually, after fifty years, the American people will come to support a personhood Amendment to the Constitution. But all the demographic-political trends are moving in the opposite direction. In fifty years, prolifers, if there are any left, won't even be able to get enough signatures to put a personhood initiative on a state ballot, let alone enact an Amendment to the U. S. Constitution.
Given all this, the Partial Birth Abortion Ban is best seen as the high water mark of the pro-life movement. Constitutional efforts to outlaw or limit abortion have come to an end. Unless a different strategy is devised, conservatives will gradually lose ground, until eventually they are pushed out of the political process entirely. But a new strategy requires a new perspective.
Strategically, conservatives have failed over the decades because they do not truly understand their opponents. And tactically, they have lost every conflict because they have allowed their opponents to set the agenda, thus placing themselves on the defensive. As any lawyer or general knows, he who sets the agenda and takes the initiative almost always wins. The reason conservatives don’t understand their opponents is because they have made a conscious choice not to. Retreat a little farther out, has been their strategy. The egalitarians are liars but they have never been shy about discussing their ideas or plans. The Court’s majority in Casey, for instance, were emphatic as to what was at stake. Roe, they said, was an essential pillar of America’s egalitarian society. An attack upon it was an attack upon their America: To eliminate the issue of reliance that easily, however, one would need to limit cognizable reliance to specific instances of sexual activity. But to do this would simply be to refuse to face the fact that for two decades of economic and social development, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.46
If conservatives took this position to heart, they would understand that this is not just about abortion, or the constitutional process. They are up against an ideology, one that in the case of abortion, justifies this heinous practice so that women can achieve equality in society. But this twisted thinking affects every other aspect of society, as well, not just abortion. Going on and on with the personhood argument is not going to work. For years conservatives have fooled themselves into believing that the abortion debate is really just about whether or not the unborn child is a person. For years they have sought to convince the egalitarians to respect unborn life because life begins at conception. This will not work. Why? Because the true egalitarians already know that life begins at conception. They don’t care. Equality for women is more important to them than the lives of unborn children. To them 50 million deaths is a small price to pay in order to level the playing field. Laurence Tribe, probably the leading leftwing legal scholar in the country, put it this way:

Perhaps the Supreme Court’s opinion in Roe, by gratuitously insisting that the fetus cannot be deemed a “person,” needlessly insulted and alienated those for whom the view that the fetus is a person represents a fundamental article of faith or bedrock personal commitment. The Court could instead have said: even if the fetus is a person, our Constitution forbids compelling a woman to carry it for nine months and become a mother.”47

Chapter 2 References

1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Infanticide and Prostitution,” Revolution, I, No. 5 (Feb. 5, 1868) p. 65
2. Revolution, I, No. 14 (April 9, 1868) pp. 215-216
3. Dorothy Kelly, “Prevention and the Laws,” Women Rebel, (April 1914) p. 10
4. Victor Meric, “The First Right,” Women Rebel, (April 1914) p. 10
5. Ibid, p. 11
6. Ben B.Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Companionate Marriage, (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927) p. 338
7. Marian Morton, “Seduced and Abandoned in an American City,” Journal of Urban History, vol. II (Aug. 1985) pp. 464-465
8. Henry Marcy, “Education as a Factor in the Prevention of Criminal Abortion and Illegitimacy,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 47 (1906) p. 1889
9. Dorothy Kelly, “Prevention and the Law,” Women Rebel, (April 1914), p. 10
10. “Ten Years of Legalized Abortion in the Soviet Union,” American Journal of Public Health, (Sept. 1931) p. 1043
11. Olasky, Abortion Rites, p. 262
12. Time (March 16, 1936) p. 52
13. The Abortion Problem: Proceedings of the Conference Held Under the Auspices of the National Committee on Maternal Health, Inc., (Baltimore, Williams and Wilkins, 1944) pp.100-101
14. Ibid, pp. 50-52, 104
15. Arizona Republic, (Aug. 21, 1962) p. 1
16. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935-1971 (New York: Random House, 1972) p. 1984
17. Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 74 (1905)
18. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 1(1973)
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid
21. Ibid.
22. Richard Epstein, “Substantive Due Process by Any Other Name,” in Supreme Court Review, 1973 n.t. 31 at 182
23. Elliot Silverstein, “From Comstockery Through Population Control,” North Carolina Law Journal, 39-40 (1974)
24. Roe v. Wade
25. Archibald Cox, The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government, p. 113-114
26. Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179, 191-193 (1973)
27. Roe v. Wade
28. Doe v. Bolton
29. H.R. Rep No. 108-158, p. 3 (2003)
30. Roe v. Wade
31. John Ely, “The Wages of Crying Wolf: A Comment on Roe v. Wade,” in 82 Yale Law Review, 921 n. 19 (1973)
32. Richard Posner, “The Uncertain Protection of Privacy by the Supreme Court,” in Supreme Court Review, p.173, 199
33. Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 511 (1989)
34. Ibid.
35. Harris v. McRae, 448 U.S. 438 (1980)
36. Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 852 (1992)
37. Ibid.
38. Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U.S. 922 (2000)
39. Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. (2007)
40. 18 U.S.C. 1531 (2000 ed. Supp.IV)
41. Gonzales v. Carhart
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Planned Parenthood v. Casey
47. Lawrence Tribe, Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes, (New York: Norton, 1990) p. 135

Next: Chapter 3 The Debate

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 History of Abortion

Chapter 2 Roe v. Wade

Chapter 3 The Debate

Chapter 4 Mass Man

Chapter 5 The Media

Chapter 6 Hour of Decision
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Neal Horsley responds to the latest section of Peter Knight’s long letter:

John, I've been thinking about Peter Knight's letter in the last issue of your "Abortion Is Murder" newsletter. He said, "Even if the Supreme Court didn’t override a decision by the states to criminalize abortion, how stupid would you have to be to think that you could get every state to criminalize it?"
Of course he's right. It is inconceivable at this point in time that every State would overturn legalized abortion in the USA. But Peter Knight misses the point--(in his defense he does say he knows "little about American politics" because he is an Australian).
Here's the point: One of the powerful facts of the American political system centered on the matter of States Rights. The creation of State Sovereignty in the USA resolved one of the central dilemmas of all government throughout all history: what happens to the world when one State goes insane and becomes a murderous beastly parent?
The American system originally resolved this question by admitting that each State was sovereign under God. This solved the central problem of government by realizing that real culpability cannot be ascribed to everyone when one family goes insane. If one father kills his own children, every father is not deemed guilty by God: only the murderous father. So, too, is it with different States. If one State can be established as a Free From Murder Zone, then people who want to avoid legal culpability for murder in murderous beastly States can move there and avoid the culpability earned by the murderous States. Having established a murder-free zone in that State, then the whole world would wait to see how God resolved the matter of the murderous beastly State.
And that seems to be the underlying problem that Peter Knight was focusing on. As we see in our example, the murderous father remains murderous even if a Free From Murder family (State) is established.
As news reports seem to indicate, Peter Knight's solution was to kill all those supporting the murderous father. And based on his letter, it appears that is still his "solution" even though he now is facing life in prison.
I understand the logic Peter Knight brings to this discussion and recognize he has earned his place at the discussion table. But I don't think Peter Knight understands that individual action is only rarely the way God goes about settling matters of government on earth. Jewish Phineus is not God's ordinary model for government, but rather the exception that proves the rule, the model.
I think Reason clearly understands that no murderous father can be allowed to go unchecked in his murderous ways without endangering every family around him eventually. And when we see that the father in this example stands for each individual State, then every State would eventually have to become involved in restraining the murderous father.
World War II, at some level, was a paradigm of how God resolves the matter of a world where some States are murderous and others attempt to outlaw murder. So, too, when we look at ancient Israel, we see other instances of one State (Israel) taking on the nature and behavior of pagan, murderous States by sacrificing their sons and daughters to idols, thereby becoming a murderous State itself--and reaping the wrathful fruit thereby cultivated.
And that is also the point: God has ways of bringing a whole world into harmony with His Law.
But those ways seem to begin with each State either accepting or rejecting God's Law.
In the United States of America today, the Supreme Court has usurped each State's Right to establish a murder free zone. That usurpation must be resolved before we will have the opportunity to see how God will resolve the remainder of the murderous government problem on earth.
To resolve the Supreme Court's ungodly and unconstitutional usurpation of God's Law by nullifying evil federal law that contradicts God's Law, I'm running for Governor of Georgia. This is the way God ordained to resolve fundamental problems here in the USA: He raises up Governors to establish His Law somewhere, then expands His Law from there.
Presently the people of Georgia--even most who call themselves God's people--reject me and make it clear they are thinking--in that secret place where corporate thinking occurs among members of the same tribe--of killing me for rocking their prosperous, and apparently powerful, federal boat.
But I want Peter Knight to know it ain't over till it's over. I know how frustrating prison can be, but I also want Peter Knight to know that God is using him anyway, even in his Australian prison, to move this matter of legalized murder toward completion in God's own time.
It's all way over my head, I admit that. But this much I understand: establishing a return to State's Rights in the USA is what comes next. And I covet Peter Knight's prayers in that regard. Neal
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And here Peter’s letter continues. I am not yet half-way through:

At what point will the people who have waited and waited and waited decide that they’ve wasted enough time and enough lives? Obviously, since they condemn the use of the only means they have that can stop the problem, obviously, the answer is never. No amount of savagery from the abortionists would be too much for them to willingly accept. Jesus said, MT 25: 34-35, that the way you have responded to people in need of your help is the way He considers you have responded to Him. So the people who decided it was right to wait and wait and wait decided it was right to wait until the Baby Jesus had been brutally slain millions of times.
Abortion murder, worldwide, over the past four decades, has cost over five hundred million of defenseless children their lives. Greg Cunningham, in his paragraph 8, says there is a comparison between that and black civil rights. Something which by comparison cost virtually no lives.
------
Many of the few who do not condemn Paul Hill’s methods have said that to demand that people use his methods and to condemn them when they don’t is wrong. Those who say this suggest that some people’s duty lies elsewhere. When millions were being torn to pieces, they suggest that some people’s duty was to leave the battle field, abandon the children, so they could go off, get married, and raise a family. They suggest that some people had a duty to abandon the children so they could go off and be a farmer or lawyer or nurse.
Your duty, and everyone’s duty, is to do what will bring about the most good. Since some people are slow to accept that, I’ll repeat it. It is the duty of everyone, there are no exceptions, to do what will bring about the most good. Deciding to take a course that will bring about the 2nd most, or 3rd most, because that is easier, or for any other reason, is not a lesser success, that’s total and absolute failure in doing your duty.
Abortionists are sitting ducks, as was shown by the rank amateur assassin Paul Hill. And no amount of protection they are capable of hiring or could ever be given would make them anything other than sitting ducks. If even just two hundred people in the USA and Canada, that’s less than .000001 of one percent of the population, had given Paul Hill’s response to abortionists, there shouldn’t be anyone who would need to be told the result.
No, there wouldn’t have been dead abortionists everywhere, there just aren’t that many abortionists around. There aren’t millions of them like there are mechanics or truck drivers or plumbers. The last figure I saw mentioned said there were 840 in the USA and Canada. And by the time 100 had met a violent end, probably even before, the only abortionists willing to remain in the practice would be those with a totally insane death wish. There’s only a handful of those and there would be more than enough of the two hundred Paul Hills remaining to give them their wish.
Name the arena where two hundred people could have brought about greater good than by putting a stop to the abortionists in North America. Of course not many would need to be told that there were not two hundred Paul Hills in North America. But does that give anyone an excuse for not taking his actions? The fact that without support of others, the one or two abortionists one individual might reasonably expect to put a stop to by Paul Hill’s methods would be an ineffective measure, as regards saving unborn babies, because the dead abortionists’ clientele would have little trouble transferring to one of the many nearby remaining abortionists.
That fact wouldn’t do anything to explain to me why any of those who refuse to use Paul Hill’s methods haven’t gone to Hawaii and taken such actions there. (tbc)
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I sent this letter to the New Oxford Review:

In the September, 2009, issue of the New Oxford Review, erstwhile prolife tough gal, Judie Brown, has shown herself to be as cowardly as I. Brown responds to this powerful quote of pro-abort Nancy Gibbs in Time magazine by calling it a “caricature of the prolife movement”:

If someone truly believes that abortion is the same as murder, then is not bombing abortion clinics or killing the doctors comparable to bombing concentration camps or killing their commandants?...If abortion providers are mass child killers and the law refuses to act, the (prolifer) may see himself as the lone defender of justice....

Notice that Brown does the same thing as the abortion apologist when faced with a fact that might shatter her glass cage – she resorts to name-calling -- no careful analysis, no indication of subtle difference – just name-calling. And the rest of the article follows suit. The New Oxford Review will lose one subscriber, me, but you can see the pickle they would be in if they had
printed a serious examination of Gibbs’s quote: they’d lose more than one.

I also sent it to Brown and she answered: Dear Mr. Dunkle, The logical response to your personal attack on me is to explain a simple fact of life. You wrote: If someone truly believes that abortion is the same as murder, then is not bombing abortion clinics or killing the doctors comparable to bombing concentration camps or killing their commandants?...Your statement presumes that one act of evil demands an evil response. You are wrong. You are not God. And we are called to imitate Christ, not the evil one.

I answered her: It is not evil, Mrs. Brown, to defend forcefully someone whose life is being threatened.
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Here’s the rest of Jimbo’s latest “Stacey & Hutch” episode, “The Case of the Disappearing Switch.” Peruse these at once.

The beauty of this road trip is that it gave S some time to fill in H on the whole P.O. thing (see previous episodes)
But Stacey was still kafuffled. "What do I put as the address on the top of the P.O.? I can't put my work address. They'd kill me. I can't put my home address. Frank would divorce me, they’d drag the children off to jail."
Hutch got a twinkle in her eye. "Did you see the flick with the Titanic kid in it?"
“DiCaprio? My daughters are all in love with him"
"That's the one. So he's in this other flick, ‘Catch Me if You Can’, about a guy who impersonates a pilot, a doctor and a lawyer and stuff like that.”
“Now I know the flick you mean.”
“It turns out it’s all from a book with the same name by a guy named Frank Abignale. He started out as a check kiter, and got into other stuff.”
“Well, what does this have to do with P.O.'s?”
“Check kiting is all about fake IDs, fake addresses and one way to get a fakey address is those post box places, not like the official USPS mailboxes, but. . .”
“mail boxes etc? like that?”
“There you go. That's one. There's bunches of 'em. the seedier the better. Listen: I got a friend back home, she’s got a friend, and her friend's husband ran out with all the money, and so she hired a detective to go and find him, and it turned out he was getting a paycheck sent to this funny mailbox to hide the money.”
“So?”
“So, silly, that's the address you put on the top of the P.0.”
“But how do you get an ID to rent the fakey po box in the first place?”
“It’s all in the book, and it’s not rocket science. Those people make money from deadbeat hubbies showing up to get a box, and they don't look too carefully at stuff like that. A million guys standing on the street corner in Orange County, CA, or, heck, the guys in high school who make fake drivers’ licenses to get their girlfriends into bars, they can't be all scholar-geniuses. It don't take much. And then my friend found out that bartenders all have this book under the bar that tells them how to tell fake ids. But in the book are pictures of every type of driver's license.”
“You're joking.”
"Now, the way the high school kids do it, is, they get a hold of the bartender book, and photo shop, and they go. A little typesetting, a little paste-up, and away we go.”
“So I've got an address for my PO. What's next?”
“Payment.”
“Payment?”
“Payment, you gotta pay the guy for the barrel of paint. You Can’t just write a check, right?
“I give up. Spill.”
“USPS MO, paid for at an old post office that don’t have cameras, or, one of those wells fargo places, the places guys cash seedy checks and like that. but you pay so far in advance, that the bean counter at the wholesale place has got you ready to go by the time you show up with a pickup at the loading dock at the warehouse.”
“You are a sleaze!”
“You ain't seen nothin. You should talk to my friend, but this is all in the Catch Me book."

It was a little frustrating, to have made an outing that could have gotten three or four switches, and to come away only with one, but the upside of it was that by mistakes like this, and long talks on the over-the-road drives, that S and H optimized their work, which made for more results for less money, and also for more confidence and less energy spent worrying. It started to feel like a normal job, only more relaxing because they made their own hours, and had fun on the way. And now, they had basically a zero liability-footprint when it came to buying paint, and stuff.
Slowly but surely they got more and more below the horizon until, grace of God, they rarely had to darken the door of Home Depot, and they never seemed to bring any attention in the middle of the night, or even daylight, when most of America, sad to say, was busy glued to their electronics anyway, or exhausted from same, or drunk, etc. *Selah*
( Next up: What S & H Told the Paint wholesale salesman. . . .)
--------------------------
(verse 3 of “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem":

How silently how silently the wondrous gift is given
So God imparts to human hearts the wonders of His heaven
No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin
Where meek hearts will receive Him still, the Dear Christ enters in.
---------------------------
Have you had your Quiet Quiet Time today, marine? the Lord waits for you. He's the One we should be talking to, not computers and over the back fence. The time He has set apart to talk to you today will be lost forever if we miss it, today. Just a thot.
-------------------------
Bless me Lord, Bless me Lord, you know that's all I ever hear
No one aches, no one weeps, & no one even sheds one tear
But He cries, He weeps, He bleeds, and He cares for our needs
But we just lay back and keep soaking it in
Can 't you see it’s such sin?
For He comes knocking at our door and we smile and say,
"God bless you, be at peace, and all heaven just weeps
For Jesus rose from the dead
and you, you can't even get out of bed.
Oh, come on, get out of your bed!

Survivors: this is No Compromise by Keith Green. Run, don't walk to your local Christian book store and get it, OK?
---------

Quiet
By Billy Collins (former poet laureate)

It occurred to me around dusk
after I had lit three candles
and was pouring myself a glass of wine
that I had not uttered a word to a soul all day.

Alone in the house,
I was busy pushing the wheel in a mill of paper
or staring down a dark well of ink –
no callers at the door., no ring of the telephone.

But as the path lights came on,
I did recall having words with a turtle
on my morning walk, a sudden greeting
that sent him off his log splashing into the lake.

I had also spoken to the goldfish
as I tossed a handful of pellets into their pond,
and I had a short chat with the dog,
who cocked her head this way and that

as I explained that dinner was hours away
and that she should lie down by the door.
I also talked to myself as I was typing
and later on while I looked around for my boots.

So I had barely set foot on the path
that leads to the great villa of silence
where men and women pace while counting beads.
In fact, I had only a single afternoon

of total silence to show for myself,
a spring day in a cell in Big Sur,
twenty or so monks also silent in their nearby cells --
a community of Cameldolites,

an order so stringent, my guide told me,
that they make the Benedictines,
whom they had broken away from in the 11th century,
look like a bunch of Hells Angels.

Out of a lifetime of running my mouth
and leaning on the horn of the ego,
only a single afternoon of being truly quiet
on a high cliff with the Pacific spread out below,

but as I listened to the birdsong
by the window that day, I could feel my droplet
of silence swelling on the faucet
then dropping into the zinc basin of their serenity.

Yet since then –
nothing but the racket of self-advertisement,
the clamor of noisy restaurants,
the classroom proclamations,

the little king of the voice having its say,
and today the pride of writing this down,
which must be the reason my pen
has turned its back on me to hide its face in its hands.
________________________________________