I am not going to say that people who enter the military are doing anything wrong. As I often jokingly tell my students, "Many of my best of friends are in the military!" But it's true. Perhaps not in the Aristotelian sense of the word "friendship" but on so many other levels that matter, we are truly friends.

The bureaucratic nature of both capitalism and our government assures us that there are no checks and balances when it comes to justifying any and all behavior that either makes money and secures the supposed peace of the nation-state.

When you use God as a means to procure public office, which almost all public officials do, to enact the things you want to enact, and tag God along for the ride, then you're breaking the third commandment. You're not just breaking it, you're openly flaunting your complete disregard for it and, yet, somehow, it keeps getting people elected.

The church is the cross that Christ was crucified on.

Basically, you know, write the book you want to read, be the band you want to hear, grow the food you want to eat, create the world you want to live in, and so on and so on. I think this translates well for how Christians should approach their present-day situation where the current goal of most everyone, Christian or not, seems to be to procure power.

Look for a church that might ask that you become poor. A church that is more concerned with showing love to those in need rather than a terrified little church who thinks they "won" because their favorite politician became president.

God doesn't want to give Israel a king, because God knows, being the rather observant deity God is, that the Israelites will become like all other nations: they will worship their king and not God.