Okra and stuff

I was reading my FB home page this morning, and my oldest daughter, who lives up in Arlington (a suburb of Dallas), had posted this: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/08/a_swat_team_raided_arlingtons.php

A ....communal living place - had been raided by a SWAT team. Why? because of the name on their website.  A cop "felt" that their wording was suspect.  So they send a helicopter over, and "see marijuana growing".  And a 'tipster' said there were guns on the place.  Imagine this, they actually had the gall to have a fence around their place, with only one exit. Funny, there are a lot of houses around this area that have the same style of fence - the opening only at the driveway.  When we had a fenced backyard (before the black lab knocked it down), there was only one opening. How suspicious!

But back to this SWAT raid...they get up, handcuff everyone, and find.. nothing.  So what do they do? make them mow the grass (in case there's pot growing amid the blades of grass!) and rip out their okra, blackberries, lambs ear, and other garden stuff.  I guess there were no Aggies in the SWAT team, as they evidently couldn't tell the difference between pot and okra.

OH MY GOSH! I GROW OKRA! WILL I BE NEXT!

And no guns were found.

This is just rank stupidity.

To go with this, I was reading an email I get, Godfather Politics, an article about whether Christians are obligated to support marijuana prohibition (and the war on drugs).  The full article is here: http://godfatherpolitics.com/12014/dea-crackdown-christians-are-not-obligated-to-support-marijuana-prohibition/

I learned about a preacher back in Prohibition days, J. Gresham Machen, who was against Prohibition...also jaywalking laws, and other stuff (rise of the police state basically).

He wrote several books, including the book "Christianity and Liberalism", which can be had at Amazon, in several formats, including Kindle. It's on my wish list.

Here is the book description:

This classic defense of orthodox Christianity, written to counter the liberalism that arose in the early 1900s, establishes the importance of scriptural doctrine and contrasts the teachings of liberalism and orthodoxy on God and man, the Bible, Christ, salvation, and the church. J. Gresham Machens Christianity and Liberalism has remained relevant through the years ever since its original publication in 1923. It was named one of the top 100 books of the millennium by World magazine and one of the top 100 books of the twentieth century by Christianity Today. / An admirable book. For its acumen, for its saliency, and for its wit, this cool and stringent defense of orthodox Protestantism is, I think, the best popular argument produced [in the controversy between Christianity and liberalism]. / Walter Lippmann in A Preface to Morals / It is my conviction that Machens book can still speak today. . . . Even for those who do not agree with his central thesis, Christianity and Liberalism can still be understood as representing one of the literary artifacts of a generation that had come to see liberalism as leading inexorably to a sentimentalized religion that had nothing to do with the God of the Bible or, indeed, with real life. / Carl R. Trueman (from the foreword) / Westminster Theological Seminary

Some books seem timeless, like Frederick Bastiat's The Law, which was written around 1848, but is still appropriate for today.  http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html   It's a fairly short read - it was a pamphlet put out.  I highly recommend reading it.  Okra