Sage Lewis

Here are some of the sides of the trial:
God is on trial for murder, conspiring to murder and more murder.

• God had a covenant with the Jewish people… they are chosen.
• People have sins and are being punished.
• Good people are being punished.
• God is not punishing individuals but instead a whole group.
• If God is not a personal god then he is much like weather.
• You have to sacrifice something beautiful for it to be true punishment.
• We are purifying the people through our pain.
• Hitler will die and the Torah will live.
• God is demanding a Holocaust, a sacrifice of the best Jews.
• Hitler is working for God. He is the knife and God is the surgeon. Hate the knife, love the surgeon.
• To stand in the way of Hitler then means you are standing in God’s way?
• When this is over, perhaps the world will be a better place… perhaps the Messiah will come.
• If God can do all things then why can’t he purify his people without gassing them?
• Free will… Yes there is evil in the world because God gave man free will.
• The war will end, Hitler will die, the people in the Torah will survive.
• The fire that burns us is a refining fire that will create an age of Gold.
• Your children were taken as martyrs.
• Maybe God is here suffering with us.
• Maybe God is not all powerful. Maybe he needs us to be complete.
• Where does all this evil come from? Where does all this good come from? Good will win.
• I don’t know what God can do and cannot do.
• He gave us the law and to debate the law and discuss it is a kind of prayer. I felt he was with us during the debate.
• We cannot know the mind of God. God is too great. All we can do is pray, have faith. Hitler will die. The war will end.
• God guarantees the survival of the people. God is guilty because our survival is not likely.
• If one child dies of consumption it is a terrible thing. Is it worse if a million die?
• If we are the last, we must consider that we are holy men.
• He is saying we have something in common with the Nazis.
• There are 100,000 million stars just in our galaxy. God made these. And yet his whole attention is focused on one planet. And not the whole planet, just the Jews. And not all the Jews. If he loved the Jews so much why did he make anything else? Why didn’t he fill the universe with Jews and not stars. It’s mad. It’s simply incorrect. Baby’s think the world disappears when they close their eyes. In the middle ages people thought the sun revolved around the earth… it was an illusion. When the Jews came, they said there was one God. They had an idea that God loves them more than anyone else. They prosper. Then the Christians come along and say that God doesn’t just love the Jews he loves everyone. Then the Christians conquer everyone. There is one God and it is me.
• These educated boys say they saw a truth we did not see and yet they are here with us.
• There is a wasp that lays eggs in a caterpillar then eats its way outside of the caterpillar. What kind of God creates a wasp like that.
• Look at things not like babies but like men. Use your reason.
• What is the use of reason in a world that is run by madness?
• Don’t let them take your God. The covenant is yours. God is your God. Even if he doesn’t exist, keep him. They have taken everything else.
• God let us out of Egypt. We were in Egypt because there was a famine. So God put us in Egypt and then took us out of Egypt.
• God slay the first born of the pharaoh and the first born of the slaves of Egypt. And then God let the Jews out of Egypt. Then God drowned the soldiers that followed them.
• Who punishes a child? God does.
• Did the mothers of Egypt feel that God was just? If God did not make the Egyptians, who did? What was it like for the people of Egypt when God turned against them? It was like this (the holocaust).
• They [the malachites] faced extinction. They were afraid as we are afraid. They learned that God is not good. He was only on the Jew’s side. God is not good. When he asked Abraham to sacrifice his son he should have said no.
• On the belts of the Nazis, it reads, “God is with us.” Who says he is not.
• He is still God, but not our God. He has become our enemy. That is what has become of the covenant. He has made a new covenant with someone else.

They found God guilty of breaking his convenant.

Now that God is guilty what do we do now? Now we pray.

• The goal of the teachings of Buddhism is to become less ATTACHED to things that are IMPERMANENT.
• Move toward love, happiness and compassion. Move away from suffering.
• Everything that goes up comes down.
• Everything that lives dies.
• Everything that succeeds fails.
• You get what you give.
• The one desire you want to commit to is the desire to understand the things on this page.

Action without information is fanatical.
Information without action is frustration.

I don’t mind losing as much as I mind the other guy winning.

I couldn’t rip myself away from the screen as I watched T. Boone Pickens at the National Press Club.

Here are some quotes from that speech that stood out to me:

• I don’t care who you meet, you’ll never meet someone who’s drilled more dry holes than me.
• Anything is better than foreign oil for energy.
• Anything American, I’m for. I’m against foreign oil.
• America could be revitalized just by managing our energy properly.

Here are some facts he stated:

4 barrels of oil = 1 barrel of diesel.
4 barrels of oil = 2.5 barrels of gasoline.

85 million barrels of oil every day of world production. America uses 21 million barrels of that production every day. That’s 25% of all the oil used every day. America is 4% of the world population. America has 3% of the oil reserves in the world. Oil production peaked in 1970 in the U.S.

The Alaskan pipeline currently produces 1 million barrels a day. The pipe is capable of delivering 2 million barrels a day. There won’t be another oil pipeline built. There will, however, be a natural gas pipeline built. Drilling on the west and east coast will produce a maximum of another 1 million barrels a day.

Pain is weakness leaving the body.

Involvement in extra curriculars is a leading indicator of success after high school.

“Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your books and I’ll tell you what you value.”

“The measure of success is not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how quick you get up.”

This is from The Week (September 19, 2008):
Bacevich argues that a generation-plus of profligacy at home is feeding reckless U.S. militarism abroad, and that neither trend is sustainable. “Tacitly, at least, the American people are complicit” in the wreckage created by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he says, because preserving the “American way of ife” has been the consensus goal. “But nothing is going to change” in the thrust of our foreign policy, Bacevich says, unless we are willing to make substantive changes in the way that we live.”