SamKat Blog post 6/28/2018

This SamKat Blog, skegley.blogspot.com is named such because I am a UK Alumnus of 1961.  Surely, I am a young southern Ohioan who has enjoyed a lifetime of Entertainment for having caught the wonderful "IT" Disease of being a Ky Sports fan.  No sufferer of the disease desires a cure.  Wonderful coaches, such as Adolph Rupp, Joe B. Hall, and John Calipari have served my disease so well !  Coach Pitino contributed; however, he did not create the Kentucky basketball legend. Sadly, he deserted the program for the pros he always flirted with and later became a traitor to UK.

I tout Coach Cal above even our respected Coach Rupp, because Cal's "One and Done", mostly black, athletes have done so well in the NBA.  They have accumulated much more than a  $ billion in contracts in the league.

Moreso, I respect Coach Cal, a good Catholic gentleman,  who often arranges for these soon to be millionaires to visit a girls and boys organizations in many of the away cities of the schedule.  There, these players and coaching staff wash the feet of the kids.  Impressive?  To me it is!  This, in fact, is similar to the action of what the Son of God did for his apostles the night prior to Christ's crucifixion.

That action is known mostly only to the privileged UK Basketball fans.

Sam Kegley aka SamKat

A truth that hurts in the history of man ... Thx Paul C!

 

If We Erase Our History, Who Are We?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

 

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Tuesday - August 15, 2017

When the Dodge Charger of 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields Jr., plunged into that crowd of protesters Saturday, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, Fields put Charlottesville on the map of modernity alongside Ferguson.

Before Fields ran down the protesters, and then backed up, running down more, what was happening seemed but a bloody brawl between extremists on both sides of the issue of whether Robert E. Lee's statue should be removed from Emancipation Park, formerly Lee Park.

With Heyer's death, the brawl was elevated to a moral issue. And President Donald Trump's initial failure to denounce the neo-Nazi and Klan presence was declared a moral failure.

How did we get here, and where are we going?

In June of 2015, 21-year-old Dylann Roof gunned down nine Christians at an evening Bible study in Charleston's Emanuel AME Church. A review of Roof's selfies and website showed him posing with the Confederate battle flag.

Gov. Nikki Haley, five years in office, instantly pivoted and called for removal of the battle flag from the Confederate war memorial on the State House grounds, as a "deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past."

This ignited a national clamor to purge all statues that lionize Confederate soldiers and statesmen.

In Maryland, demands have come for removing statues and busts of Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision. Statues of Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson, President Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee have been pulled down in New Orleans.

After Charlottesville, pressure is building for removal of the statues of Lee, Jackson, Davis and Gen. "Jeb" Stuart from historic Monument Avenue in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy.

Many Southern towns, including Alexandria, Virginia, have statues of Confederate soldiers looking to the South. Shall we pull them all down? And once all the Southern Civil War monuments are gone, should we go after the statues of the slave owners whom we Americans have heroized?

Gen. George Washington and his subordinate, "Light Horse Harry" Lee, father of Robert E. Lee, were slave owners, as was Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and Andrew Jackson. Five of our first seven presidents owned slaves, as did James K. Polk, who invaded and annexed the northern half of Mexico, including California.

Jefferson, with his exploitation of Sally Hemings and neglect of their children, presents a particular problem. While he wrote in the Declaration of Independence of his belief that "all men are created equal," his life and his depiction of Indians in that document belie this.
 

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And Jefferson is both on the face of Mount Rushmore and has a memorial in the U.S. capital.

Another term applied to the "Unite the Right" gathering in Charlottesville is that they are "white supremacists," a mortal sin to modernity. But here we encounter an even greater problem.

Looking back over the history of a Western Civilization, which we call great, were not the explorers who came out of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England all white supremacists?

They conquered in the name of the mother countries all the lands they discovered, imposed their rule upon the indigenous peoples, and vanquished and eradicated the native-born who stood in their way.

Who, during the centuries-long discovery and conquest of the New World, really believed that the lives of the indigenous peoples were of equal worth with those of the colonizers?

They believed European Man had the right to rule the world.

Beginning in the 16th century, Western imperialists ruled much of what was called the civilized world. Was not the British Empire, one of the great civilizing forces in human history, a manifestation of British racial superiority?

And if being a segregationist disqualifies one from being venerated in our brave new world, what do we do with Woodrow Wilson, who thought "Birth of a Nation" a splendid film and who re-segregated the U.S. government?

In 1955, Prime Minister Churchill, imperialist to the core, urged his Cabinet to consider the slogan, "Keep England White."

Nor is a belief in the superiority of one's race, religion, tribe and culture unique to the West. What is unique, what is an experiment without precedent, is what we are about today.

We have condemned and renounced the scarlet sins of the men who made America and embraced diversity, inclusivity and equality.

Our new America is to be a land where all races, tribes, creeds and cultures congregate, all are treated equally, and all move ever closer to an equality of results through the regular redistribution of opportunity, wealth and power.

We are going to become "the first universal nation."

"All men are created equal" is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?

Nevertheless, on to Richmond!

 

Ideology - My personal ideology is supported well by Jesus Christ, the Son of God - SamKat aka Sam Kegley

Ideology (from Greek ιδεολογία) is a collection of beliefs held by an individual, group or society. It can be described as a set of conscious and unconscious ideas which make up one's beliefs, goals, expectations, and motivations. 



I find the above definition to be consistent in my own lifetime.

I chose to be a Christian early in life, but I have not always displayed Christian actions throughout my life. though He knows I have tried.Now I am eighty-four years old.  

I have been blessed in spite of my own inconsistencies as any Christian can be although we must strive for consistency.  

I don't enjoy the ways of this divided America today.  Even close families split as in the pre-Civil War era.I so enjoyed Ronald Reagan's statement about the "City on a Hill" when he spoke about my country, the United States of America.  

I love Tea Party people, whether official members or not, as I am not.  I follow the ideology of integrity as I believe the 'salt of the earth' Americans Tea Party people do.

All Americans have enjoyed the finer things of life at times, just too few of us have at all times as our very rich American politicians or actors or actresses do today.

I have great admiration for courageous President Donald Trump and his  family.  He has the riches; however, he wants more for America and the world.I believe he honestly sees the good a strong America can do fothe world. 

Is Donald Trump a strong Christian?  On the sermon on the mount, Christ admonished us "Judge not ye that be not judged".  Then Christ went to his cruel crucifixion to accept judgement for the sins of His Father's collective human beings.

Love is certainly a type of ideology and Jeanie and I have that for our family.  Each of the family have their own ideology which we cannot dictate.  We just want each to believe that we truly love them.

We, of Forest and Mary Kegley's family remembers the love shown us ten kids by our two wonderful parents.

I say for my ideology of Christianity:  Thank You precious Father!

Sam Kegley

Perception and perspective ... Thx Pat W!

It’s all a matter of perception –

The Rich Family in Church

By Eddie Ogan

I'll never forget Easter 1946. I was 14, my little sister Ocy was 12, and my older sister Darlene 16. We lived at home with our mother, and the four of us knew what it was to do without many things. My dad had died five years before, leaving Mom with seven school kids to raise and no money.

By 1946 my older sisters were married and my brothers had left home. A month before Easter the pastor of our church announced that a special Easter offering would be taken to help a poor family. He asked everyone to save and give sacrificially.

When we got home, we talked about what we could do. We decided to buy 50 pounds of potatoes and live on them for a month. This would allow us to save $20 of our grocery money for the offering. When we thought that if we kept our electric lights turned out as much as possible and didn't listen to the radio, we'd save money on that month's electric bill. Darlene got as many house and yard cleaning jobs as possible, and both of us babysat for everyone we could. For 15 cents we could buy enough cotton loops to make three pot holders to sell for $1.

We made $20 on pot holders. That month was one of the best of our lives.

Every day we counted the money to see how much we had saved. At night we'd sit in the dark and talk about how the poor family was going to enjoy having the money the church would give them. We had about 80 people in church, so figured that whatever amount of money we had to give, the offering would surely be 20 times that much. After all, every Sundaythe pastor had reminded everyone to save for the sacrificial offering.

The day before Easter, Ocy and I walked to the grocery store and got the manager to give us three crisp $20 bills and one $10 bill for all our change.

We ran all the way home to show Mom and Darlene. We had never had so much money before.

That night we were so excited we could hardly sleep. We didn't care that we wouldn't have new clothes for Easter; we had $70 for the sacrificial offering.

We could hardly wait to get to church! On Sunday morning, rain was pouring. We didn't own an umbrella, and the church was over a mile from our home, but it didn't seem to matter how wet we got. Darlene had cardboard in her shoes to fill the holes. The cardboard came apart, and her feet got wet.

But we sat in church proudly. I heard some teenagers talking about the Smith girls having on their old dresses. I looked at them in their new clothes, and I felt rich.

When the sacrificial offering was taken, we were sitting on the second row from the front. Mom put in the $10 bill, and each of us kids put in a $20.

As we walked home after church, we sang all the way. At lunch Mom had a surprise for us. She had bought a dozen eggs, and we had boiled Easter eggs with our fried potatoes! Late that afternoon the minister drove up in his car. Mom went to the door, talked with him for a moment, and then came back with an envelope in her hand. We asked what it was, but she didn't say a word. She opened the envelope and out fell a bunch of money. There were three crisp $20 bills, one $10, and seventeen $1 bills.

Mom put the money back in the envelope. We didn't talk, just sat and stared at the floor. We had gone from feeling like millionaires to feeling like poor white trash. We kids had such a happy life that we felt sorry for anyone who didn't have our Mom and Dad for parents and a house full of brothers and sisters and other kids visiting constantly. We thought it was fun to share silverware and see whether we got the spoon or the fork that night.

We had two knifes that we passed around to whoever needed them. I knew we didn't have a lot of things that other people had, but I'd never thought we were poor.

That Easter day I found out we were. The minister had brought us the money for the poor family, so we must be poor. I didn't like being poor. I looked at my dress and worn-out shoes and felt so ashamed — I didn't even want to go back to church. Everyone there probably already knew we were poor!

I thought about school. I was in the ninth grade and at the top of my class of over 100 students. I wondered if the kids at school knew that we were poor. I decided that I could quit school since I had finished the eighth grade. That was all the law required at that time. We sat in silence for a long time. Then it got dark, and we went to bed. All that week, we girls went to school and came home, and no one talked much. Finally on Saturday, Mom asked us what we wanted to do with the money. What did poor people do with money? We didn't know. We'd never known we were poor. We didn't want to go to church on Sunday, but Mom said we had to. Although it was a sunny day, we didn't talk on the way.

Mom started to sing, but no one joined in and she only sang one verse. At church we had a missionary speaker. He talked about how churches in Africa made buildings out of sun dried bricks, but they needed money to buy roofs. He said $100 would put a roof on a church. The minister said, "Can't we all sacrifice to help these poor people?" We looked at each other and smiled for the first time in a week.

Mom reached into her purse and pulled out the envelope. She passed it to Darlene. Darlene gave it to me, and I handed it to Ocy. Ocy put it in the offering.

When the offering was counted, the minister announced that it was a little over $100. The missionary was excited. He hadn't expected such a large offering from our small church. He said, "You must have some rich people in this church." Suddenly it struck us! We had given $87 of that "little over $100."

We were the rich family in the church! Hadn't the missionary said so? From that day on I've never been poor again. I've always remembered how rich I am because I have Jesus!

Jesus had no servants, yet they called Him Master.

Had no degree, yet they called Him Teacher.

Had no medicines, yet they called Him Healer.

Had no army, yet kings feared Him.

He won no military battles, yet He conquered the world.

He committed no crime, yet they crucified Him.

He was buried in a tomb, yet He lives today.

Liberal vs. Conservative Christians ... Crosswalk.com

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Conservative vs. Liberal Christianity: Which is Better?

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  John Shore
• 2010Jan 26
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I know a lot of Christians, and they're split pretty evenly between conservative and liberal.

I like the conservative Christians, mainly because they're so clear about what they believe. They know what the Bible says; they know who they are; they know what they're doing in life; boom---they're solid. The whole "backbone of America" thing is no joke; the strongest trees, after all, have the deepest roots. Not a lot of wafflers in the conservative camp. Plus, they're super dedicated. Conservative Christians don't wonder if they're in the mood; they go to church. They go to Bible study. They show up for the church functions. They actually do stuff. Conservative Christians also tend to be, in practice, extremely loving. Liberal Christians think conservative Christians are harshly judgmental, and sort of fundamentally (ha, ha) hardhearted. They think that if, in the middle of the night, a clearly gay guy showed up at the home of a Christian conservative in need of help, he'd summarily get a door slammed in his face. But he wouldn't. All the conservative Christians I've ever known are serious about putting God's love into practice. The fact that they're so sure of what they believe makes them more open to new thoughts, ideas, and experiences. If you're sure of who you are, you're a lot more open to discovering who others are. When things get rough, it's good to know a conservative.

On the other hand, conservative Christians can be too sure they're right about everything. It's too easy, when you're a conservative, to boil down what you believe into a really simple set of assertions, and to then never again question or allow those assertions to evolve (har, har). Then it just becomes about rules; then it's too easy to make everything about who is and isn't on the right side of right. When it comes to something as complex as God and history, it's too easy for "keeping it simple" to become "keeping it stupid"---which too easily becomes "keeping it mean-spirited." Conservatives have a troubling propensity for closing their minds.

I like liberal Christians because they're so generous with their love and respect. They're seriously focused on God's love, and they're not afraid to insist that anything that hinders that love must be suspect. They love Jesus; Jesus preached love; they're all about loving as Jesus did, period. Also, I like the way liberal Christians are so thoughtful. They listen. They reflect. They refine. They search. They question. They study. They understand that part of their job as Christians is to actively try to access the mind and heart of God, and they're disinclined to let anything interfere with that goal. They're not afraid to get inspired. They live with the confidence that God will never fault them for loving too much.

On the other hand, liberal Christians can waffle like IHOP on a Sunday morning. They too often fall prey to thinking that the emotions of their loving feelings is really allthey need to guide them, with the result that they never feel a need to be clear on what they actually believe at all. Maybe Jesus was mainly a social activist. Maybe the cross is a metaphor. Maybe Jesus walking on water was an optical illusion. And so on, until they may as well be astrologers. Yet for all their comfortable ambiguity, liberal Christians can also be altogether too smug, too sure, too condescending toward those who take the Gospel as gospel. They tend to think they're smarter than they are. In the main, the problem with liberal Christians is that they can stay so busy remaining lofty and above it all that their rubber never hits the road. Many of them are better with compassion as a theory than a practice.

Decck of Cardstrick - Beautifully done Judi!

An old, old card trick done in a completely new way. Watch it till the end.


http://stg.do/91qb 

Ske

Mathematical ... Catholic Memes from my good young softball friend, Katlyn W!

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