Apostate? and 60 years of Prodigal son behavior I am finally Home.

I am quite certain my loving daughter had something to do with this (Thank You Father  et.al) As well as the most incredibly loyal and hardworking Guardian Angel a person could be blessed with.

After two weeks of taking inventory trying to do 'witness' to my insults to God, the Church and my fellow man; I met the Priest who agreed to hear my confession.

Two and half hours later we concluded that we had all the 'Biggies' covered. 

After assigning a penance (which surprisingly) leaving enough time for a meal before bedtime.  I left feeling like I was in another time & place.

Following 60 years of pretty much running hard and putting myself away wet as bikers are apt to do, I find the Church and the culture has changed dramatically.

I feel like a migrant dropped into any LARGE Metropolitan City.  Lost in space?  Sort of adrift and rudderless? or up the creek with no paddle?

This is NOT the church I thoughtlessly abandoned.  I attended Parochial grade schools run by the Dominicans and on to High School run by theSalesians Of St John Bosco.  THAT is a tough crowd.  Those priests & brothers had rules.  Guess I figured if I was going to get rules I would get them from Uncle Sam.  So I enlisted and here I am.

AND I NEED ADVICE BIG TIME.

I need a mentor and a person well versed in the Church and well catechized.  A retired priest, brother or deacon would be great but that is not a likely find.

HOWEVER, anyone who is knowledgeable and up on the Church and a conservative I would really appreciate having a conversation with them.  I am conservative and this whole kerfuffle regarding the backlash from the Synod sickens me.  I really am not looking to defend or deny any part of that at this point, but although having an opinion I will not judge; especially as a newbie

 

So now having bored everyone to death, I would welcome any serious responses.  I know I ask a lot  But I have a lot at stake here.

Thank You for taking your time to read this

Houston D

 "Why I Ride" 

   There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with cold hammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds and condition. But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a motorcycle Summer is worth any price.

    A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us languidly from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time, entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.

    On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sunlight that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than Pana-Vision and higher than IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard. Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar.

   But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women’s voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed. At 30 miles per hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and flower-smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane.

   Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy. I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over half a dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride was one of the best things I've done.

   Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep." motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride.
   Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the Fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the Spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're changed forever. The letters "MC" are stamped on your driver's license right next to your sex and weight as if "motorcycle" was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition

 For thousands of years, the #1 cash crop of Africa has been human labor. African slavery was practiced by the Egyptian's, Greeks, Roman's, etc.

America had NOTHING to do with the establishment of slavery as an accepted form of economic practice.....NOTHING! In fact, America as a nation was founded with southern slavery being contentious issue and slavery was basically "put off" as an issue to be decided on another day. In its first 80 years of existence, America was a nation torn apart by the issue of slavery...culminating in one of the bloodiest wars in ALL of human history.

From ancient times until the American civil war, did people of African ancestry rise up and throw off their shackles? Did they consolidate their efforts in one another and create their own conditions as a unified people? The answer is NO! WHITE PEOPLE DID THAT FOR THEM! And SINCE the American civil war white people have continually gone to the slaughter in an effort to free oppressed and suffering people. As a unified people, did blacks?

No

Interesting historical insight. Most phenomenon may seem new but it has all happened before...

I have not vetted this word for word, but did read i completely; and most every major point I saw, I have seen in another venue of repute.  Also, this source has proven to be more than a little reliable in the past with an accuracy of WELL OVER 98% from my experience  

Summary
On Sept. 12, the CIA revised its official estimate of the total number of Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria upwards almost threefold to between 20,000 and 31,500 combatants. This new number brings the CIA assessment in line with Stratfor's longstanding estimate of 10,000 to 20,000 core Islamic State fighters in Syria alone. More important, fighters whose homelands are elsewhere have come to numerically dominate the Islamic State's ranks. Around 12,000 foreigners, according to the recent CIA assessment, have successfully joined the Islamic State and to a lesser degree other jihadist groups in the region. Of these, 2,000 are Europeans, according to EU estimates.

These foreign fighters possess a degree of fanaticism and, in many cases, combat experience that provide the Islamic State with a powerful weapon, allowing them a major role on the battlefield. The flow of these foreign fighters into Syria and the broader Middle East has been the largest and most important influx into any region since the end of the Cold War. This phenomenon, however, is not new, and in fact has roots stretching back to the earliest recorded history. Islamic State foreign combatants are only the most recent in a long line of individuals with motivations to fight ranging from the religious to the merely economic.


Analysis
Local combat forces have taken on men and women from abroad for thousands of years. These foreign fighters are distinguished from invading foreign armies in that they often travel individually or in small bands with origins in a variety of countries, regions and tribes and are generally outnumbered by both allied and enemy forces. It is only in rare cases, such as that of the Islamic State, that these fighters manage to take a dominant position on the battlefield. Even in the Islamic State, however, local Iraqis still retain most top leadership positions because the group originated and developed in Iraq and among Iraqis.

Foreign fighters throughout history have been driven by a number of factors ranging from material motivations of payment and plunder to ideological motivations that include religious and political conviction. Some simply desire adventure and a sense of purpose, camaraderie and belonging.


Material Motivations
Some of the oldest forms of motivation for foreign fighter have been extrinsic. The term "mercenary" describes anyone specially recruited for combat and motivated primarily by monetary compensation. Often these are foreigners, providing some of the earliest historical examples of foreign fighters. As far back as the 13th century B.C., Egyptian Pharaohs employed mercenary forces recruited from the surrounding region. Persian Emperor Darius III hired Greek mercenaries in the fourth century B.C., while Carthage recruited sling shooters from the Balearic Islands as well as "barbarian" cavalry of various origins to assist against its rival, Rome. The Byzantine Greek military later relied partly on the Scandinavian Varangian Guard. And in 1346, the allied French cavalry hacked and trampled their own Genoese mercenary crossbowmen at the Battle of Crecy. In modern times, mercenary fighters continue to figure prominently in combat, especially in African nations, where both governments and warlords often employ foreign-trained pilots, specialists and soldiers of fortune.

Compensation for foreign fighters, however, can go beyond money, equipment or land. Foreign soldiers have just as often been granted citizenship, rank or higher social standing for their service. The Roman army enticed auxiliary forces from across the empire with offers of coveted Roman citizenship.


Intrinsic Motivations
Throughout history, fighters have also traveled to distant theaters of war for intrinsic rewards - those that fulfilled a need for greater meaning or reinforced their values. With the worldwide spread of major monotheistic religions the role of the foreign combatant motivated by religion expanded dramatically. Emblematic of this phenomenon are large and diverse bands of Muslim fighters that flocked to the Holy Land in the 12th century to fight alongside the forces of Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria, against the Crusader states established by European Christians. Saladin's Ayyubid army consisted of locally recruited Arabs, Bedouins, Egyptians, Turkmen and Kurds but were augmented by Nubian spearmen from further up the Nile River, archers from Ethiopia, North African sailors as well as Berber and Persian cavalry. Religiously motivated Muslim volunteers, known as muttawi'ah, also joined Saladin's forces from places as far away as Iberia. Unsurprisingly, the diverse national origins and native languages in the Ayyubid army led to significant battlefield communication difficulties.

There have also been multiple cases of small bands of non-Islamic foreign fighters that have traveled to distant lands to bolster local forces in religious conflicts. England's Henry Bolingbroke, who later became King Henry IV, made a number of forays into the Baltic region to fight alongside Christian Teutonic forces against Pagan Lithuania in the late 14th century.

Some foreign fighters have set out from their homelands for ideological reasons other than religion. Political conviction motivated foreign fighters from all over the world, including novelist George Orwell, Albanian writer Petro Marko and former Prime Minister of Iran Shapour Bakhtiar, to flock to the International Brigades in the late 1930s to assist the Republicans against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Ernest Hemingway also went to Spain to report on the war. As World War II raged across Europe, foreign communist, anti-communist, fascist and anti-fascist fighters figured prominently in the Winter War, the Battle of Britain and the Eastern Front.


Modern Foreign Fighters
Established nation-states in the 20th century have also deliberately leveraged the often-powerful force of foreign fighters to serve their own interests - a practice that continues to the present. The French Foreign Legion is undoubtedly the most famous example of this and it continues to attract adherents from as far away as Mongolia and the United States. Others have existed or been established over the last century. These include the Spanish Foreigners Regiment, the plethora of colonial units that served primarily under the Allies during World War II, the numerous foreign volunteer units established under the German Waffen SS, the Israeli Lone Soldiers program and even former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi's Islamic Legion.

Modern state-organized foreign units have proven quite effective in battle, due in part to the motivations of the fighters. Many former French Legionnaires say that they did not join for the pay or food but for adventure, camaraderie or simply a cause to fight for. Esprit de corps and unit cohesion are the backbone forces ranging from the Nepalese Gurkhas to the Moroccan Goumiers.

The recent flow of foreign fighters into the Middle East, with a particular focus on the civil war in Syria, has upended the regional balance of power and presents a considerable cause for concern. The actual phenomenon of fighters leaving their homelands to fight abroad, however, is not without precedent. Indeed, as long as mankind wages war, foreign fighters will continue to play a prominent role on the world's battlefields

U.S. Nets Joins British Authorities in Hushing Muslim Sex Abuse Scandal

Imagine a sex scandal centered on a small area, involving decades of abuse, with hundreds of children raped, assaulted and prostituted. Authorities suspected or knew of the crimes but did nothing, preferring to protect the abusers than aid their victims or see justice done. 

If that city were in, say, Ireland, and the abusers Catholic priests, the U.S. networks would report it immediately and continuously. And rightly so. But move that city to northern England, and make the perpetrators Muslim men? Don’t look to ABC, NBC or CBS for details. 

In Rotherham, England, the widespread, systematic sexual abuse of young girls has finally been brought to light. A report published Aug.21, by Professor Alexis Jay, a former Chief Inspector of Social Work in Scotland, found that between 1997 and 2013, more than 1400 young English girls were raped, threatened, and tortured by men in a sex trafficking scandal which is making waves online and in British media but hasn’t made a blip on American news shows.The report shows that Rotherham officials and Council members knew about the abuse for years but did nothing. You see, all but one of these men were Pakistani and Muslim; the girls were white. Britain is even more paralyzed by political correctness and fear of charges of “Islamo-phobia” than the U.S. is. One Rotherham official even admitted he didn’t want to “rock the multicultural boat.” As reward for bringing to light such a heinous scandal, a researcher involved in the case was intimidated, harassed and punished for reporting her findings to the local Council.

U.S. networks face no such consequences. Yet in the two weeks since the story broke in the British media, ABC, NBC and CBS haven’t uttered a word about it on their morning or evening broadcasts.

Could silence be because the networks, like the powers that be in Rotherham, don’t want to touch a story in which the villains are Pakistani and Muslim? Would that be too politically incorrect?

After all, journalists love to cover sex scandals – the more shocking the better. You would think ABC, NBC, and CBS would jump at the opportunity to discuss the horrible details, like they did with the Catholic clergy sex scandal of the last dozen years. According the liberal-leaning Pew Research Forum the U.S. media produced more than 1,500 Church abuse stories in 2010 alone.

 So what was more important than this scandal? Well NBC had time to talk about Tom Hanks being an honoree at the upcoming Kennedy Center Awards in December. NBC Nightly News also talked about a dog who ate 43 ½ socks, and reiterated testosterone drugs don’t work. Why any of these stories were considered “news” but Rotherham was not, is baffling. ABC similarly found time on World News Sep. 2 to discuss Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s wedding attire and the celebrity nude photo leak. On Good Morning America Aug.31,  one of the more pressing questions posed, “Does Matthew McConaughey really mow his own lawn?” Yes, that’s really considered “news” on ABC.

Catholic Comparison 

And it isn’t as though the networks don’t think sex abuse scandals from across the pond aren’t worth reporting on. When allegations broke in 2012 that the late BBC radio and TV personality Jimmy Savile had serially abused young girls during his career, both NBC and CBS found space in their newscasts. And the 2010 feeding frenzy on Church abuse centered mainly on Germany. 

In fact, there was so much media attention paid to the Catholic clergy sex scandal, that the left-leaning Pew Research Center did a study on the media’s fascination with it in 2010. The analysis, from 2010 alone, showed the following: 

• From mid-March (when Pope Benedict XVI’s role in a decades-old abuse case in Germany came under scrutiny) through late April, clergy sexual abuse was the eighth biggest story in the mainstream media, beating out coverage of nuclear weapons policy and the Tea Party movement. The biggest week of coverage was March 22-28, when news organizations reported on the failure of Vatican officials years ago, including the possibly the future pope, to defrock an American priest who had abused nearly 200 deaf boys. The church scandal was the fourth biggest topic in the mainstream news that week.
• The level of coverage this year came very close to that of 2002, when the news erupted that Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston and other bishops across the United States had shuffled accused abusers from parish to parish without informing the police or public. A Nexis keyword search of 90 media outlets found 1,559 stories mentioning the scandal in the first four months of 2010, just 77 fewer articles than in a similar four-month period in mid-2002 (May 1-Aug. 31). No other developments in the scandal during the intervening eight years even came close to generating that level of coverage.

Pew also found that from Jan. to April 2010, 1559 stories were published in the media on the Catholic clergy sex scandal, just 4.7 percent less than there were in 2002 when the major scandal broke.

Obviously research has shown, the news media will give plenty of time to sex scandals, so why are they turning a blind eye to this one in Rotherham?

It’s apparent that the liberal media has an apparent interest in protecting one class of people and doing everything in their power to demonize another. In this case, the media was only mirroring the politically correct cover-up that occurred at the hands of the Rotherham local government and law enforcement.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kristine-marsh/2014/09/09/us-nets-joins-british-authorities-hushing-muslim-sex-abuse-scandal?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Marketing&utm_term=Facebook&utm_content=Facebook&utm_campaign=Rotherham-Scandal

I cannot vouch for the credibility of 'PJ Media'...after all, it is a known quantity in terms of having a conservative political agenda...I suspect this pathetic story is not entirely untrue.   

Take a look at this:  http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/10/14/child-marriage-comes-to-australia/  

and decide for yourself it's legitimacy and whether or not our hell-bent affinity for 'political correctness' would...insane as I personally consider it to be...tolerate this kind of circumstance in America.  Think it over; be honest.  They are on their way sports fans: press '3' for Arabic. 

BOB and JIM!!!

BOB and JIM  

 

Bob: “Did you hear about the Obama administration scandal?”
Jim: "You mean about the setting up of Seal Team 6?"
Bob: "No, the other one.
Jim: “You mean the Mexican gun running?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “The State Dept. lying about Benghazi?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “The IRS targeting conservatives?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “The DOJ spying on the press?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Sebelius shaking down health insurance executives?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “The NSA monitoring our phone calls, e-mails and everything else?”
Bob: “No, the other one”
Jim: “The State Dept. interfering with an IG investigation on dept. sexual misconduct?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “HHS employees being given insider information on Medicare Advantage?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Clinton, the IRS, Clapper, Rice & Holder all lying to Congress?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: "The one about Obama secretively telling the Russian President that he'll have more flexibility after the election?"Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: "The one about the White House intentionally releasing a completely fraudulent birth certificate?"
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: "The one about the President of the United States bowing to a despotic Saudi Arabian monarch?Bob: “No, the other one.”Jim: “I give up! … Oh wait, I think I got it! You mean the one about 65 million uninformed ignorant liberal voters sticking us with the most corrupt and destructive administration in American history...AGAIN?!?”
Bob: “THAT’S THE ONE!!!