Sunday, October 28, 2012

A Slight Change of Direction

I'm obviously making some changes to this particular blog site.  A "current events" blog is fine, but there are plenty of those.  A "history" blog can also be valuable, but a multitude of those exist as well.  But a "current events" blog rooted in "history", while it might not be totally unique, does, I believe, present a little more opportunity for depth and quality.  I hope I can produce that.

A simple current events "opinion" blog is just not what I want.  That makes me nothing more than a commentator or, in effect, a newspaper columnist.  Again, there are a countless number of those floating around the Internet.  One man's opinion is as good as another, and confusion reigns.  America is a horribly divided country right now because too many people listen to men rather than God and history.  But a blog rooted in the facts of history can provide a little more support and intelligence as a foundation, and thus greater weight for its analysis.  That is what I hope to do here.  You will see more history here, though this blog will NOT be just a recounting of boring facts and dates.  I want to provide relevance for the world's current occupants.  "The Lessons of History" is what the subtitle says, and that is the aim of what I will post here.

There are those who argue that we cannot really "know" anything in history.  I do not believe that.  What I just wrote is now history.  I know I wrote it.  YOU know I wrote it because you are now reading it.  Do you know what you did yesterday?  That's history.  If you told someone what you did yesterday, can they know what you did yesterday?  And if that person denies you did it, they are, in effect, calling you a liar.  At what point can we no longer know what happened in the past?  People certainly do lie, and not everything recorded in the history books is accurate.  But, for example, for someone to say, "Well, we cannot really know, for sure, that George Washington was the first President of the United States," or that we cannot know that four Americans were killed in Libya on September 11 of this year (that's history now, too) is, I believe, at best, intellectually disingenuous.  People who make such arguments, more often than not, are trying to avoid the obvious lessons from certain historical data, and just as often, are happy to use history when they feel it will buttress their beliefs.  Folks, in one sense, everything is history, because the present lasts only a moment, and the future also is always at least one moment away.  Interpretations of history can vary, and certain events can be disputed.  But that does not mean I cannot know anything from history.  The fact that I do not know the exact minute I was born does not mean I cannot know that I was born on September 29, 1954.  The "can we really know anything from history?" is simply a dodge to avoid the powerful force of the lessons of historical truth. 

Since it is my blog, I also reserve the liberty to include whatever I want to include, such as personal information that might be of interest to friends or family.  But, in the main, I want this to be an educational blog:  the lessons of history as applied to current events.  As I posted, repeatedly, on my former, "Current Events" blog, if Mr. Obama knew--or cared--about history, and had learned from it, he would not have done many of the things which he has done, and his administration would not have been such a failure.  Four years ago I knew, and said, that if Mr. Obama follows his left-wing, liberal, ideological beliefs, he will not have success as President of the United States; I knew that for two reasons:  I know history and I know the Bible, which is the inerrant, infallible Word of God, is not and cannot be wrong, and is, by far, the greatest interpreter of human events in existence.  Mr. Obama did exactly what I expected him to do, and the country is in far worse shape now than it was when he became President--economically, morally, spiritually, yea, by almost any measurement a person wishes to make, when comparing with economic, moral, and spiritual law.  Over the course of my posts on this blog, I hope to show why.  One ignores history, and the God of all history, at one's own peril.  Unfortunately, when ignorance of God and history are in power, many people suffer.

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The first lesson I'd like to suggest isn't a terribly important one, but I'm a baseball fan and it's my blog, so I'm going to write briefly about it.  That lesson is:  pitching wins championships.  The San Francisco Giants are on the verge of winning their second World Series in three years, and the main reason is pitching.  Oh, they've got a couple of decent hitters, but they win because they can get people out.  Good pitching and defense will beat good hitting every time.  I hope the Astros learn this lesson, and this year, with the first pick again in the baseball draft, go after pitching and not a shortstop.  Pitching wins, not hitting.  If you only score one run, but the other team doesn't score any, you win the game.  It's actually in the first verse of the Bible:  "In the big inning...." har har har.

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I've got a little work to do on this new blogsite, obviously, in getting all the links to my other sites up.  I'll get that done soon.