A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said . . . would either be a lunatic . . . or the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, or is, the son of God; or else a madman or something worse. . . But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great Human Teacher.  He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

I must say that when I first learned of the series of Books and assorted Chachkis that evolved around the concept of trying to determine “What would Jesus Do” in any given situation, I had to think that no good could come of this.

Leaving aside the danger of falling into the Jesus as Philosopher trap that C.S. Lewis so eloquently decried in his book “Mere Christianity” and which is quoted above, at best you are trying to put yourself inside the mind of the son of GOD; at worst, you risk twisting the words and teachings of Jesus in a pathetic attempt to pander to your own political ideology.

If you truly want to know what Jesus would do, try reading the Bible.

That said, let’s look at some of the problems facing the world today that Jesus didn’t have to live with in his day.

Today we have unmarried women getting pregnant. In some cases, they know who the father is, but not always. Likewise, sometimes the father is still around, but not always, and there is also no guarantee that her current man will stick around once he does find out she is pregnant, whether or not he is even the father of the child.

So what does she do?

Without a good Christian upbringing to counter the insidious “me first” influences of this Liberal Utopia in which we live, she takes the easy way out. She has an abortion and gets on with her life, and lest some of you think; “If she had a good Christian upbringing, she would not have gotten pregnant in the first place”, the reality is that we all make mistakes regardless of our best intentions or upbringing. What defines us, however, is what we do after we have made a mistake.

Do we take the easy way out and compound a mistake with a sin, or do we choose life despite the inconvenience?

So in this situation, truly what would Jesus do?

Unfortunately, Nothing

Before he could do anything, he would have been just another Abortion Statistic.

Joseph would have kicked Mary out; just another pregnant teenager left to fend for herself and ultimately she would have chosen the easy way out - chosen to have an abortion and get on with her life, and the Liberals would have applauded her “choice”

And here we would find ourselves two thousand years later with no Christianity, no America and no Hope.

I was watching Bill O’Reilly the other day, and I found myself shouting at the TV as he cut off one of his guests who was explaining that “Christianity wasn’t a Salad Bar where you could pick and choose what you wanted.” Bill went on in his usual condescending manner to lecture her about being judgmental.

I had to think about it for some time, wondering if maybe he could be right. After all, didn’t Jesus teach us to “let he who is without sin cast the first stone?”

In thinking about this, however, I have to wonder if there is an equal danger in interpreting the Bible too figuratively, as there is in being too literal. I don’t think that Jesus was saying that we should not judge anybody about anything. By that logic, we would find ourselves unable to judge people for even the most evil and outrageous offenses, such as incest or pedophilia – certainly something that Mr. O’Reilly himself has gone to great pains to judge.

I think rather, Jesus was teaching us that we should be temperate in our judgments, knowing that we ourselves will ultimately be judged when it is our time.

Based on this, however, aren’t we back to square one in that we should tend to our own faith and not judge that of another.

I was pondering this in Church this past weekend, and I think that I found my answer in one of the lessons for the day. It was a reading that is probably one of the most commonly known lessons in the Bible, because of its almost obligatory inclusion in any wedding ceremony.

In First Corinthians 13, we read, “If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I have become as sounding brass or a tinkling symbol. And if I have prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And if I dole out all my goods, and if I deliver my body that I may boast but have not love, nothing I am profited.”

Many of you may be wondering where I could possibly be going with this. For those of you, however, who have children, you probably already know.

There was a time, when our first son was very young that I fell into a logical trap of the type that Mr. O’Reilly would expound. I felt that if I chastened my child for his bad behavior, I was not being a good parent. After all, weren’t we all taught that it is wrong to discipline children but that rather if you are only their friends, then they will grow up to be just fine.

This simply doesn’t work.

It may seem contradictory, but if you truly love your children, your judgment will seem harsh. You will correct them when they are wrong and you will punish them when they are not behaving properly, but you will do it with love. If you do not, they will know no discipline and you will merely leave them to the mercy of others who will never love them as much as you do; be it their friends, co-workers, or in the worst case, the Penal System.

As Christians, much like Parents, we cannot help but judge others because we love them and we want them to be saved. We don’t judge others instead of judging ourselves, but rather, we do both. Children don’t like it when their Parents judge or discipline them, but ultimately, they know that their Parents love them. Alternately, as adults, we are much more reluctant to believe that people who are critiquing us are doing it out of love; especially when they happen to be across the proverbial political divide.

This is the ultimate irony in that, for example, when many people listen to someone like Ann Coulter, their first inclination is to think that she is a hateful person, not just because of what she says, but also because of how she says it, rather than realizing that if, as she says, she is first and foremost a Christian, then all the things that she says and how she tries to change people’s minds is a reflection of her Christian Love, rather than a contradiction of it.

Go figure.

I have been blessed to have the unique honor of personally knowing some Great Americans, and I cannot help but be reminded right now of one in particular, a Retired Major General from the Ohio National Guard who, when we were in the throes of executing upon a long contemplated plan, would announce that he was “going on radio silence.” The time for talking and planning was over and now it was time to get the job done. No more input was required or accepted.

Many of you will no doubt know where I am going with this, and clearly I raise this point to talk about what it means to “stay the course.” The Democrats and their allies in the media have tried to conjure up an image of the vast might of the United States Army sitting on their backsides day after day receiving no new orders and doing nothing more or less than exactly what they did the day before.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Just like “Mission Accomplished” did not refer to the struggle as a whole, but rather one significant portion of it, likewise, “Stay the Course” refers to the overall mission of creating a stable democracy in Iraq. The daily tactics, however, are constantly changing to meet the needs of the situation. After all, as has been famously said; “no plan survives contact with the enemy.”

To me, the height of irresponsibility is when a hundred spineless, gutless excuses for politicians sitting in the U.S. Senate - men and women who rather than aspiring to the founding ideals of this Country, espoused by men with names like Richard Henry Lee, Robert Morris, Philip John Schuyler, and Charles Carroll; men who signed the Declaration of Independence, served in the Revolutionary Army and all of whom were themselves Senators - debate conflicting, scurrilous and pointless resolutions from the safety of the U.S. Capital, while each meaningless and cowardly word is like a dagger into the heart of all the brave men and woman who are risking their lives to defend this Great Nation, and the families that they have left behind.

Fast forward 200 plus years as we find ourselves at the beginning of the 2008 Presidential campaign and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Junior Senator from New York, a woman who was once (and may still be) the presumptive nominee of the Democrat Party for the President of the United States, in referring to the War in Iraq, said “The President has said this is going to be left to his successor. I think it’s the height of irresponsibility and I really resent it. This was his decision to go to war . . . and we should expect him to extricate our Country from this before he leaves office.”

As if Wars can be fought on timetables, and fit themselves neatly into 4 and 8 year Presidential Terms.

First of all, let us not forget that it was the Democrats, who in the last war that they insisted on labeling a quagmire, blissfully and without remorse, left that war to their successors - Kennedy to Johnson and Johnson to Nixon. Only when Nixon actually tried to win the war, did the Democrat controlled Congress cut off funding for the war. For the eight years of the Kennedy/Johnson Presidencies, despite also having control of the House and Senate, the war blundered on.

Secondly, Bush believes in the mission and knows that we have to win this war. He is not passing it on for others to fix, and is most likely not relishing the possibility of passing it on to a rival administration to screw up. Unlike some others, President Bush knows that Wars don’t happen on schedule, and he has rightly indicated that this is a struggle that will go beyond his tenure as President.

Finally, as regards Ms. Clinton, I would conjecture that her resentment is not all that it seems. After all, logically, if she really believes that the war is wrong and that the best solution would be to bring all the troops home, then logically one would have to conclude that nothing would please her more than for her first official act as President of the United States to be to pull the plug on Iraq.

Why then would she insist that President Bush do it before the end of his term?

Because she is a calculating pragmatist and she wants to avoid the possibility that doing so, as is most likely, would make the situation far worse, forcing her to take the heat. She would much prefer to force President Bush to bring the troops home before victory is achieved. That way she can blame him both for losing the War, and for what everybody knows would immediately ensue; A Sectarian Bloodbath played out on the evening news. For her, it is not about winning or losing in Iraq. It is simply about making George Bush look bad and making sure that she doesn’t.

That is the ultimate cowardice

Now amongst other unseemly sights, we have this same Senate of which Ms. Clinton is a member, voting overwhelmingly to send Lt. General David Petraeus, by all accounts an intelligent, decent and honorable man, to take over the U.S. command in Iraq, all the while denouncing the troop surge that he, himself recommended as being the key to victory.

The Democrats seem to have no qualms about sending mixed messages to our own Generals with whom they task the mission at hand and then wonder why they are accused of not supporting the troops. We send mixed messages to our Allies; we send mixed messages to our Enemies; and we send mixed messages to our own troops.

Truly that is the height of Irresponsibility

I spent last night working overnight as a volunteer at the local homeless shelter. Our church is one of five who take turns hosting the shelter in their basements or church halls for one or two weeks at a time during the coldest part of each winter. I live in a relatively small city (population approximately 27,000) and while we are slightly south of the Mason Dixon line, and winters are generally mild, when the temperatures drop into the 30’s, as they invariable do during the month of January, I certainly wouldn’t want to sleep outdoors.

I don’t mention this to impress anyone, nor is that the reason that I do it. I do it because it is too easy not to. I do it because it is one of the few ways that I have found to continually remind myself of the central reality of our lives, that being, “There but for the Grace of GOD go I.”

Most of all, however, I do it because it is all to easy to sit at home, warm and comfortable, thinking myself the master of my own universe, while I debate the best ways to throw money at the problem of Homelessness – either by taxing people to fund big government solutions, or by funding Faith Based Initiatives; an action that some see as a bigger threat to America and the First Amendment to the Constitution than the winter cold is to the homeless.

I do it because it is easy to throw money at a problem, but what is truly difficult is to get out of your comfortable lifestyle and see how your fellow man truly lives.

Try it some time. These are not animals. They are men just like you and I. You can talk to them like you would your friends; you can play chess or cards with them like you would your family; you can show them respect like you would any other community elder, but for many of us that can be a disquieting realization. Why do I have a good job and a nice home? Why are these men sleeping in a Shelter? As Christians, we believe that we are all made in GOD’s image, and sometimes it is useful to remind ourselves of that fact by spending time with those who have seen misfortune, knowing how easily this could be us or a friend or a family member. The greatest gift that we have is our humility, and as Christ himself said, “He who would be greatest among you must be servant of all.”

I can say one thing for sure, and that is that after listening to men talk about how much they wanted to get their lives back, anyone who can intellectually rationalize legalizing drugs has never personally spent any time in a Homeless Shelter. Likewise, anyone who thinks of drug use as victimless crimes has never spent any time in a Homeless Shelter.

No one wants to be a drug addict, and it both breaks your heart and steels your resolve to see people who have been brought low by addiction, who are clearly trying their hardest to fight their way back to the world of the living, and know how close they are to sinking back into complete oblivion.

There are obviously many different causes of homelessness and no simple solutions, but if we look to Six Sigma problem solving techniques, you don’t try to fix every problem simultaneously. Instead, you look for small gains coupled with continuous improvement, apply leadership to attack one aspect of the overall problem, fix it and then re-evaluate.

Based on my personal observations, a good first step would be to attack the flow of illegal drugs.

Not by legalizing drugs, and certainly not by punishing the victims, but rather by adopting a zero tolerance policy for Drug Dealers with stiff fines and jail time, and by enforcing the borders.

Isn’t it amazing how many problems we could help solve if we could only find the political will to control our borders. There are so many things that should not be coming over the border, whether terrorists, illegal immigrants, or illegal drugs, and each poses its own unique threat to our safety, security, and the fabric of our society. Just as no sane person would legalize terrorism, we should not legalize drugs, and we should also not legalize (either directly or through amnesty) uncontrolled immigration.

There is no one who would argue that a house without exterior walls is in fact a house, and if the United States does not control its borders, eventually we will all be homeless.

Welcome to my Blog on Tonwhall.com

While this post is merely introductory and will not specifically relate to any topic, I have selected the topic of Faith and Family for this first post, because of all the allowable choices, that sums up what is most important to me.

As anyone who spends much time in community and political activities can certainly attest, there is only so much time in the day, and you have to pick and choose how much time you can devote to any given community or political activity while still holding down a job and being both a good spouse and parent.

That said, I have found myself needing an outlet for my views, so I have chosen both to set up my own website at www.we2view.net and a blog here at Townhall.com.  The only difference between the two will not be one of content as much as format, with the website covering issues that I want to delve into in greater detail, such as heroism in America throughout history and how the government is spending your money, amongst others.


As this blog progresses, I will likely cover a broad range of topics, and there may not seem to be any consistency in topic from one week to the next, but I hope that the common thread will be Social and Political Conservatism, coupled with a hopeful Christian outlook.

Best Regards