Return to Blackhawk Down

This has been making the rounds for about a week now, so you may have already seen it. In case you don't know, Jeff Struecker became a Chaplain sometime after the battle, and was my friend M4 Guru's Chaplain in the 82nd. Keni Thomas went into music after leaving the service. If you like country, check out his stuff. He's pretty dang good.

This is a piece of the story of Keni and Jeff heading back to Mogadishu 20 years after The Battle of the Black Sea (Battle of Mogadishu). Its pretty awesome.

Thou Shalt Not Kill: missed the translation on that one!

I've been trying to read through the Bible about once a year, but it usually ends up taking me a little longer than a year, or has so far. I'm on my third reading right now...and behind schedule, I think. Its the journey, not the destination, so I'll be OK no matter how long it takes.

For some reason, I seem to be seeing references to the 10 Commandments quite a bit lately. I think they've been there anyway; its not something new where its all of a sudden in front of me more often. However, I am seeing more reference to it around me. I believe that God does that for me to get me thinking. I don't always know exactly why, but it shows up somewhere, every time.

So I'm reading the Old Testament now, and have just completed reading the exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. They've been settled for a little while now; ballpark they've been there 150 years total. The whole history of the 40 years in the desert and the events of that time are all in there. Its not been a terribly long time that Moses brought the 10 Commandments off the mountain.

And here's what strikes me about them: the 6th Commandment can't possibly be translated correctly. In both of my Bibles, a New American Standard and a Revised Standard Edition, both use the word "kill": Exodus 2:13, "You shall not kill". But read the rest of the Old Testament and that word can't be right...unless its a word being used that has multiple definitions. If it was simply killing that was prohibited, then God would be going against his word, which does not happen. Killing can't be wrong in and of itself. A couple of examples: as Israel is being set up, God commands them to set up "safe cities", where a man who causes the death of his neighbor by accident can go until a trail can be held; sort of protective custody where he's sequestered away from the family of the deceased. This only applies in accidental deaths, which I think we call manslaughter now. Then there's the entire peoples that were "delivered into your [Israel's] hand." What's that mean? It means God not only sanctioned, but ordered Israel to kill off an entire people. That's what "put to the edge of the sword" means: quite literally putting the edge of the sword with force and extreme prejudice on a body and taking it's life. So "kill" can't be the right word.

Replace "kill" with "murder". Now it makes a lot more sense. Dictionary.com says "murder" is defined as "Law. the killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder)  and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)." It also says that the word's origins come from between 1300-1350, which means that "kill" would be the only word available at the time, and that's why its translated that way. 

It's clear to me, though, that there is such a thing as righteous killing, and that "some people just need killin'" is also true. I don't think I need to go into a big explanation of how murder and killing are different; both the readers of my blog should already get that, and it'd make this post a lot, lot longer. Suffice it to say, not all killing is murder, and while murder is against God's law, killing isn't. As distasteful as it is, sometimes it's the right thing to do, is righteous, and needs to be done.  

Reincarnation? Are you serious about that?

For whatever reason, the grandmothers I work with seem to universally believe in reincarnation. They buy into it wholesale, and in addition, they believe in ghosts, too. Now, we're talking about working females who are between 40 and 60 years old, and are as previously mentioned, are all grandmothers. They're totally serious about believing in reincarnation.

This all started with the comment (don't ask me how; I don't recall) that if you get a child relaxed enough and ask them who they were before, they'll tell you. I don't recall ever once believing that I was someone other than who I am right now. They say its because of cultural conditioning, but if its true, why wouldn't it be culturally accepted? I know the answer to that, but I'm gonna drop some thoughts for you to ponder before the answer becomes exceedingly clear. This could get outrageously long; I'm going to try to restrain myself from throwing it all out there and losing you two minutes in by giving the highlights.

It would appear that everyone that believes in reincarnation believes that they were famous in a previous life. That makes sense; why would you not want to be someone famous or important if you're going to believe in past lives? How many people could have been Hannibal? Napoleon? The Mayor of York? A queen in ancient Egypt? If more than one person claims this simultaneously, then we have proof that this is a spurious belief. If we take the population of Los Angeles, for example, and figure the per capita numbers of celebrities in that town, we'll still have too many of the population of the city that would have claimed to be famous in past lives. There simply aren't enough famous or important people, as a percentage of the available population, for reincarnation to be viable.

As a corollary to the previous thought, some people believe that their previous lives occured very, very long ago. One of my coworkers claimed to have been an important or wealthy Egyptian from the time of the Pharoahs. Since lives were shorter then, what happened between the 40 years of life then and the life being lived now? Once you died, your soul or escence or whatever makes someone a person must have been doing something. Something becoming nothing doesn't happen much in nature. If someone is reincarnated, clearly there are rules. There are laws that govern what happens. Do you become a lesser life form for some reason? Do you become an ameoba for a while before you become a person again? Where's the reason in that? If you're taking up a certain amount of energy now, why would you take up less after a life? You'd have to to be something less than you are now. By the same token, if you were more, say, a 300 year old tree hundreds of feet tall, why would you come back as less energy? It just doesn't make sense. Your soul would have to be somewhere in the meantime, and there's no explanation of that.

Here's another incongruity: the number of people on the planet is increasing. In a July 2006 estimate, the CIA figures that there are 6,525,170,264 people in the world. That's more people than have ever been here before, and the number is rising. If people are being recycled through reincarnation, why are there more now than there were at the beginning of recorded time? The world hasn't gotten bigger or smaller. Its the same size planet as its always been. So where did all these n00bs come from? Other planets that they've been hanging out on while waiting to get back in the game here on Earth? That can't be, either, and that's my last point.

OK, consider this idea for a moment: you die, you're reincarnated as someone else, somewhere else. You're Phil, the new guy who accidentally turned cows inside out in South Park. You used to be Pharaoh Seti the First, and now you're Phil. Never mind that you went from being human to E.T. for a minute. Riddle me this, Batman: how'd you get there? Are you seeing where I'm going with this yet? Clearly, if this were the case, there would be laws that govern the logisitics of how this happens. It couldn't happen randomly. How much of what happens in nature is truely random? Not very much; remember cause and effect from your biology classes? So there's laws set forth to determine how all this happens. If you believe in reincarnation, you're probably about to be really upset with what must be the truth of all this.

In order for there to be laws, even laws that govern the rules of reincarnation that is total hooey, there must be an authority to set forth those laws. As stated previously, you can't just pop around and reincarnate as Tom Cruise (clearly he's an alien). Something determines who or what you become, so you don't end up with 50 people being Tom at once. As there are laws that govern nature, there is conspicuous evidence that all this has been managed and ordered to make it work. How did that happen? Couldn't just be a Big Bang that set this complicated system in motion. I don't buy that stupid theory anyway; its beyond rediculous. Its even more rediculous in terms of reincarnation. So here it is: for this to work at all, there has to be a supreme being. Even the goofy theory of reincarnation would require God to work. Reconsider your belief system, and get right with God.

That popping sound in your ears just now? That was your mind being blown.