James Thomas Rook Jr.

AllenSmith: Just because someone is EXTREMELY critical of someone else's performance, competence, or motives ... does NOT necessarily make them an opposer. It's like "God LOVES you, he just hates the bad things you do ..." which we hear quite often. I can be a great fan of the New York Yankees baseball team but when someone fouls up ... player, coach or manager, etc., I might completely excoriate them, and "rip them a new one" .. AND STILL BE A LOYAL FAN! Loyalty being "My Country, right or wrong ... but MY COUNTRY" ( Nathan Hale), only works with politics, by those not claiming a special relationship with God. The German Army once had belt buckles with the inscription "Got Mit Uns", or "God is with us". Their mission to spread German Culture and Civilization to the World was opposed, and with blood, fire and steel, they had to be destroyed .... TWICE!

Not to worry .... One of the reasons Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, resigned as Pope, was that he was involved in the Great Pedophile Priest Cover Up .... ( a German in the Hitler Youth as an artilleryman, that looked EXACTLY like the Star wars Emperor ... what could go wrong ? ... ), it is rumored that he tried to redeem himself by forgiving all those despicable, lustful children that seduced his priests.

The following cartoon has been around the world MANY times, and SAYS IT ALL ... a TRAGIC comedy of errors.

As I go thorough the house, I shuffle my feet to plow the ould newspapers up from the bottom to get some air ... you know, if it gets more than several feet deep, it COULD become a fire hazard! ... and of course , there is always the problem with fermentation.

That is SO CRUEL ... and not even a Giant Hamster Exercise Wheel ....

I think the thing that is being overlooked here, is the unwritten rule that pervades the entire Society, from top to bottom ... EVERYTHING NOT SPECIFICALLY PERMITTED .. IS FORBIDDEN! Unless of course, like Michael Jackson, and recently the entertainer known as Prince, you give $30,000 a month to the Society, and in Prince's case stood to leave 183 MILLION DOLLARS to the Society. Then, the "rules" are bent into a pretzel .... without breaking them. This has not changed since ancient times when tribal witch doctors were the local governing bodies.

b4ucuhear: I find your logic and reasoning irrefutable . The "stoplight" analogy applies to many things. Thank you for another arrow in my quiver!

Sounds fishy to me, but hey ... it's YOUR head !

TTH: Well, I am big .. 290 pounds, and tall, also .. 6'-6" tall ... and I have over the past five years or so posted about 7,000 comments on the archive ... but I do not care if anyone likes my posts or not, but I do smile when they do. That is to say, I do not write for anyones' approval. As far as a reward goes .. even when tied to a stake, and they stack brush and firewood around your legs, the reward for telling it like I see it ... is self respect. We are all, to the best of available information, going to die anyway .. so why fret about it. Years ago (1969) while driving from Virginia to California, I stopped in Georgia at a random Piggly Wiggly convenience store to buy some milk and Hostess pies for breakfast, and some guy said to me "Hi Tom!, Howareya doing! Still taking photographs?" ( I used to be a professional photographer at that time.). It so startled me I mumbled something I do not remember. I remember the store but I do not remember anything about the person except he was male, and about my age. In 1977 Warren Publications put out a fictionalized version of my life's adventures, ( The Rook ) but other than getting the working clothing correct, not much else had any relationship to this spacetime continuum. I still have the black vest and pants and hat, but nothing fits anymore except the hat. I lament that if someone does visit parallel universes, that aging does not stop, and is cumulative. Bummer! Back when I had a beard, and looked quite a bit like former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, during the Reagan Presidency, I was in a Home Depot in North Carolina, and I saw a black couple staring at me and talking to each other, and I grinned, knowing they were going to come up and ask if I was C. Everett Koop. Sure enough, they came up to and asked "Are you Tom Rook?" . That disoriented me. I replied I was, but had NO IDEA who they were. They told me, but I forgot ... but they said they had met me ten years before at a Kingdom Hall at "somebodys" wedding .. who I also forgot. I guess I am just not a "people person". JTR . . Oh .... and thanks for letting me live rent free in your head. .

For awhile, I tried to learn Klingon .... even bought audio cassettes and considered taking classes at the KLI (Klingon Language Institute), but alas ... I could not get my throat to make those hard guttural sounds, and yell and spit at the same time.

OK ... I gave it my best shot already .... but I have been known to beat a dead horse .. which of course is NOT torture. I just got back from Golden Corral where I chewed parts of a dead cow into mush.

I was speaking ONLY to the specific legal and moral culpability for torture .... When the Americans incinerated the Japanese, on the battlefields or in their cities... the intent was NOT to torture ... but to kill. (And as an aside, because the Americans were attacked first, the RESPONSE was self-defense, NOT murder.... The responsibility for all the deaths on BOTH sides of the conflict rests with the Japanese Military High Command, and with all those that gave their allegiance and support to that Empire.) OF COURSE they were tortured to death .... but the persons killing them had no INTENT to torture them ... just to destroy their ability to wage war, in justifiable self-defense. No legal culpability. This is why today, it is recognized under the Geneva Convention, that napalming someone from aerial bombardment is legal (in warfare), but dousing them with gasoline and setting them on fire is a war crime ... IF the intent is to cause them pain. Legal and moral CULPABILITY for torture is ONLY torture, if the INTENT is to torture .... I strongly suspect that bullets tearing pieces out of someone and punching big bloody holes in flesh is no picnic. If I tortured someone to save lives, my INTENT would be to torture them ... OF COURSE. .

Rather than dissect a million words whose source is ambiguous, or accuracy lost or obscured by the sands of time ... I have found that plain old common sense (... which apparently is not all that common...), will clarify many things ... in everyday life, and in Theology. 1.) Can a God of Love, and who loves Justice, torture someone forever? NO. 2.) Would a Sovereign God allow his disobedient children to be tormented forever by his Arch Enemy, forever? NO. You can fill in items 3.) through 20+.) yourself .... what would a rational, thinking being do? I have no problems torturing someone to extract information to save lives, etc. but if some terrorist exploded an atom bomb in Charlotte, NC, as an example, torture would serve no purpose. ... AFTER THE FACT. Torture is ONLY torture, if the INTENT is to torture .... just as first degree murder is completely different than an accidental homicide. In both instances someone died. That fine point may be, however, lost on the recipient, such as the Japanese soldiers that were incinerated to death on Iwo Jima with flame throwers, or the children who were burned to death in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, August 1945. Intent makes ALL the difference! (..although perhaps not to the person(s) who died.). You can have a God who is an insane, sadistic, petulant monster .... or you can have one that personifies Love and Justice, and righteousness ...... but NOT the same one. That is why there CANNOT be a hell of torment ... and in a Universe where individual mankind will eventually live forever, for those that understand that .... .. simple death is the Ultimate Torment.

Is Tartarus like Limbo?

Why? .... because "Guardians of the Doctrine" ALWAYS forget that the acronym G.O.D. does not make them ..... GOD.