Blogger Pal Rivals Hedda Hopper

First off, Agent Bedhead is now famous. In a recent interview with Esquire magazine, John Malkovich mentioned her blog. I won’t spoil it by quoting him here; go read. And because this is a crummy Sunday link, I will mention it again tomorrow.

I’ll bet Orson Bean is jealous.

In other news, George Moneo of Babalublog had a car accident yesterday. You may want to do him a favor and pray that things will work out with minimal conflict, and that everyone involved will be physically healed. As of yesterday, George and a person from the other car were having neck pains.

Mish Weiss is still recovering from her bone marrow transplant, so don’t forget her, either. If you’re wondering how Leah Friedman is doing, she is apparently strong enough to deal with a home full of kids. That’s more than can be said of me at my best.

It’s funny; prayer is like tending a garden. Every day you get up and you tend to this person or that one, just as you would go from tree to tree in your yard.

I am making a determined effort to find a decent church. I’ve really enjoyed Perry Stone’s work, so I looked up his denomination. Turns out it’s the Church of God. Hard to argue with a name like that.

Made an interesting score at Costco yesterday. I bought a bag of pummelos. These are like grapefruit, except a small one weighs maybe four pounds. The big ones are like volleyballs. I can’t remember the last time I had one, but I believe they are dryer and less bitter than grapefruit. Guess I’ll find out this morning.

I remember these because when I was picking grapefruit on a kibbutz, there was talk of switching over to pummelos. Europeans were excited about having pummelos for breakfast, so Israelis were eager to grow them. Not sure how to pronounce it. On the kibbutz, they said “puh MELL oh.” But wouldn’t that imply “tan JELL oh,” which is wrong? Tangelo rhymes with Angelo.

I am thinking I need to keep putting in fruit trees. I like the idea of having them all around the place. Some people down here don’t like putting fruit trees in their front yards; that seems silly to me. They look just as good as ornamental trees, plus–hey–fruit! I’d love to have a pummelo tree, if I could find one.

The neighbors would steal all the fruit, I suppose. That’s Miami for you.

Time for a pummelo.

“Banana” has to be Code for SOMETHING

I hope everyone is having as good a day as I am. I’m a fat, healthy American with a roof over my head, good food, good clothing, tons of tools, and a blog. How can life get any better than that?

I am having a hard time concentrating, because a conversation is going on.

Marv: Can I rub your snout?

Me: No.

Marv: What do you think of that?

Me: I don’t know…I think it’s a travesty.

I am cheerful in spite of the hideous weather. Once again, the sky is the color of dirty gym socks. It was like this all day yesterday, but it refused to rain. Today the chance of precipitation is 90%, but I haven’t seen any action yet. Oh, wait. The forecast has changed. Now the figure is 80%. We’re saved.

I attribute my frame of mind to my spiritual improvements. One nice thing about Christianity is that it relieves a lot of your anxiety. For example, I am not eating my liver over the possibility that we may elect Barack Obama President. I trust God to protect me when the country falls apart and goes communist. Maybe there is a reason I’ve been buying guns and learning how to grow food!

It’s good that the election is not driving me crazy, because it will keep me out of trouble. As we all know, all criticism (and even some types of praise) directed at Obama is vile and racist. So the less the race (AHA! “RACE!”) disturbs me, the less likely I am to write about it and expose my horrific bigotry.

Last night I learned that “socialist” is a “code word” for “black.” I had no idea. I thought it was a code word for “Democrat.” And there’s more. It turns out “Ayers” means “watermelon,” and “McCain” is actually secret code for the mighty N-word itself. So now the networks will have to quit running McCain ads, especially if they refer to terrorist nutcase Bill Ayers.

I think the Democrats should have gone even further, in squashing debate. They should have told us “Obama” was a black word. You know. “That’s our word. You can’t say that word.” Then conservative and moderate commentators would have had to sit out the whole campaign. And we could call this the Blackness Doctrine. Or something.

When I think of socialists, I don’t think of black people. I think of spoiled white people who hate their parents and want other people’s money. I’m fairly sure the “code word” thing was invented this month. Correct me if I’m wrong.

I guess I can’t fix the soffit today. That is tragic.

I checked the yard this morning. I have this peculiar feeling that it’s a good thing to walk around your property early every day. It looks like my newest banana tree is doing great. I can’t figure that out. It was a pup at the base of one of my Orinocos. I hacked it off with a shovel, and when I was done, it had no roots. I jammed it in a place formerly occupied by a papaya tree, and I kept the ground wet, and that was days ago, and it looks great. One day my bananas and plantains will start coming in again, and I’ll have to harvest them with a bulldozer.

I think I may give up on my fatalii pepper plant. It looks awful, and the peppers aren’t worth the effort. They’re about like white habaneros, which means they are incredibly hot and have a flavor reminiscent of the smell of sulfuric acid.

Everything else either looks good or appears to be improving.

Maybe I’ll put in a couple more citrus trees. You can’t have too many eating oranges or Key limes.

Be Awake Before Your Enemies Get Set Up

Life continues to improve here.

As mentioned in an earlier post, my sister told me about an evangelist named Perry Stone, and she said one of his teachings was that Communion was something that could, and should, be celebrated privately as well as publicly. I read his book, The Meal That Heals, and I heard my sister’s testimony about the transforming effects, so I decided to give it a shot. I have kept it up ever since. I have also started getting up at 6:30 to spend the first hour or ninety minutes of the day with God. I’ve tried to do that in the past, but until now, I found it impossible.

For some reason, evil things are most active at night. So it’s probably smart to get to bed early and to get up and start preparing your defense (and offense) while it is still dark. To undo whatever traps have been set for you.

I have been using grape juice. The thought of drinking wine in the morning is just too much for me. And from what I’ve read, I’m satisfied that grape juice will get the job done. I started out with Streit’s lightly salted matzos, but I have since switched to Manischewitz whole wheat. It’s probably more like the stuff they used 2,000 years ago, and it’s not a big dose of refined carbs.

I don’t use a tiny amount of these things; I pour a 12-ounce glass of juice, and I use a whole matzo. I would feel funny playing around with tiny slivers of matzo and a glass the size of a thimble. The first Communion was part of a meal; I figure I might as well do what people do at meals and consume normal amounts. One problem: I really like grape juice. I have to be careful not to drink it during the day, because then I won’t have it when I need it.

When I take Communion, I make a serious effort to search my heart for things that will invalidate the effort. I try to remember whether I’ve wronged anyone and whether there is anyone I haven’t forgiven. And I pray about those things.

When it’s over, I have time for study and prayer, and after that, I fix up the birds and go outside and look over my trees and plants. That right there is a great reward. Although the climate here is not quite like the climate in Israel, the foliage is very similar. Walking around in the dew with the citrus around me, I feel as though I have been transported back to the Jezreel. I remember hopping off the wagon after my ride to the grapefruit fields and finding my ladder and the three wooden boxes that had been placed there by IDF General Eli, who managed the grove when he wasn’t commanding tanks. I remember climbing out of the Jeep and stepping onto the rich brown dirt of the almond fields and waiting for Zev and Avshi and Kalman to tell me what we would be doing.

Fortunately, the yard doesn’t remind me of the day I spent working in the chicken house. Don’t get me started.

Because of the way my schedule has changed, the day seem longer, and I get more done, and when bedtime comes, I am ready to sleep. It’s just a better way to live. If it happens after ten p.m., odds are, you are better off missing out on it. Seems like that principle applies to a lot of things. If it’s on a pay channel, you are better off not watching it. If it’s network-TV entertainment, you are better off not seeing it.

Here’s a funny example. Now that I carry a gun all the time, I can’t go into bars. It’s the law. Hmm…isn’t that a win-win situation? Seriously, is there anything that happens in a bar that makes the visit worth the down side?

Life is changing. I am discarding the objects and practices that invite attack and corruption. It’s like debriding a wound and removing the dead, infected crud the bacteria use as a base. I didn’t realize it until this morning, but Communion is part of that. You can’t just do it. You have to prepare yourself and clean up your soul. Holding hatred and vengeance and other bad things in your heart is about like keeping a Ouija board in your closet.

It’s all about t’shuvah; turning back to God. That’s where the power comes from. Think of God as the sun and yourself as a solar panel.

According to the Talmud (says Aaron), Jewish tradition teaches that today (beginning last night) is the Yom Kippur of the Gentiles. Fine with me. Two days of atonement have to be better than one. One day for the olive tree, and another day for the grafted branches. Can’t complain about that.

This morning, I will be driving my sister to Fort Lauderdale, to some sort of a garden center. How about that? I couldn’t have predicted that two months ago.

I have to thank everyone who offered guidance. Of course, I have to thank all the readers who quietly kept me in their prayers. And above all, God.

Time for breakfast.

Not all Junk Mail is Junk

Today I looked over an annual report from one of my favorite charities, World Relief. Ordinarily I am tempted to throw this stuff out because I can’t imagine how the contents could be information I don’t already have, and I can’t see how it would change my mind about anything. But I felt I should take a look.

It’s remarkable. Two things struck me. First, the abject misery of many of the people they help. Second, the amazing things very small amounts of money are doing for these people.

As an example, let me point to their loan program in Burundi. They call the program Turame. The average first loan is $47, and subsequent loans range from $80 to $160. The report says 1% of these loans are considered at risk of default. Maybe they should be running Fannie Mae.

Loan recipients sometimes use the money to bulk up their small businesses, such as shops. One lady mentioned in the report added flour and soft drinks to her inventory, so now her earnings are up. And she supports five kids. That’s a great return on such a small investment. And it’s not even a donation; the money is going to come back to World Relief.

They have another program in Rwanda, where many of the men have been killed by genocide. World Relief has rounded up 200 widows, and they’re growing flowers for the essential-oil market. Being a widow is tough anywhere. In Rwanda, it must be a hellish existence. But these ladies are getting help.

In Mozambique, World Relief is improving irrigation and teaching people to grow things like papayas and mangoes. And they’re learning how to manage the soil so they have a future.

The report says 89% of their assistance goes to women. They cite several reasons. Women are more likely to be exploited in prostitution or human trafficking. Women have less access to banks and so on. But there’s another reason at which the report only hints. Many African families are fatherless. Fathers die in war and from AIDS, and there is also a serious problem with African fathers abandoning their families. It’s not PC to say it, but it’s true; Africans themselves complain about it.

Fathers are important. To people who say you can raise fine children without a father present, let me respond: you can also lead a long, fulfilling life with no legs. That doesn’t mean it’s how people should live. Some people grow up and prosper in spite of absent or inadequate fathers. On the other hand, many do very poorly.

Reading the stories and looking at the photos, you can see how little hope these people have when left to their own devices, and how much it means to them when someone shows up and enables them to help themselves.

The world is a peculiar place. One of the worst kinds of evil is to do someone else great harm in order to reap a small benefit. To pull an example out of thin air, think of a wealthy man who drives a family off of a small property in order to take the land and add a tiny percentage to his own income. On the other hand, sometimes you can do someone else a great deal of good by doing something that has a trivial cost to you. Forty-eight bucks? That’s dinner for two at Outback.

The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is also doing great work. They put $2 million into the restoration of 32 bomb shelters in rocket-plagued Sderot. They’re flying Jews to Israel from all sorts of miserable places. They send workers to help poor Jews in the former USSR, including elderly Jews who are alone and live in utter squalor. They’re helping West Bank settlers who apparently have more faith in God’s promises than in their government’s hopes of appeasing Israel’s hostile neighbors.

I had no idea how big their budget was. They took in around $78 million last year! And almost all of it came from American Christians who were thrilled to donate. It’s too bad the IFCJ can’t attract more money from Jews. Even the Israeli government acknowledges the IFCJ’s gigantic impact. They’ve made Rabbi Eckstein (the IFCJ’s leader) their goodwill ambassador to evangelicals in Latin America, which has traditionally been a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Now Christians down there can hear him on the radio, and they are sending support.

Here’s something weird: Rabbi Eckstein has a bona fide ministry…to Christians! He puts out DVDs explaining Christianity’s Jewish roots. They’re very good. What a strange time we live in.

Socialism, with its oppression, totalitarianism, and hatred of God, comes to those who deserve it. These days, when I criticize the government for taking our money and using it to addict the undeserving poor to vote-buying handouts, I am careful to remember that unless private charity steps up to the plate, Americans will look very bad, complaining about entitlements. In the past I haven’t done what I should. I’m glad there are so many opportunities to correct that.

What a Deal!

Isn’t there something fundamentally wrong with buying excrement?

Think about it. Money is a reward for time spent working. So whatever your money is worth is also what your time is worth. What does it mean if you take your money and buy excrement for it and consider it a good deal?

I just bought 150 pounds of excrement. My grandfather, who raised cattle, would be turning over in his grave.

The guy I bought my plantain and banana trees from said compost was important for plantains. He said horse manure was the way to go. Darn the luck. My horse is constipated. No, it’s even worse than that. I don’t even have a horse. Unless you count my motorcycle apparel, cordovan shoes, and A-2 jacket. I checked Marv’s and Maynard’s cages. They do what they can, but I just don’t have that kind of time.

The guy said cow manure was okay, too, so today I went and bought three bags, and I just distributed them under my trees. Not just the plantains. Bananas, too. They’re nearly the same thing, so I figured it could not hurt.

I wore my Israeli commando boots. I was looking sharp out there. I didn’t want to experience the all-too-familiar sensation of noxious gardening substances falling in the gaps between my socks and tennis shoes.

While I was at the store, I noticed they had MAGNESIUM SULFATE! It’s supposed to cure yellowing leaves, which can be a problem here. I thought I might try it. Only eight bucks for about a pint and a half! Wow!

Wait. Isn’t magnesium sulfate epsom salt?

I’m fairly sure you can get a half gallon of epsom salt for about a dollar. Good for your plants, and I guess it could also help with the situation I mentioned above. If you’re not shy. Maybe the drugstore is the better option.

I guess I could get tons of free manure for nothing, if I knew where to find it. We have race tracks, but they’re not close by.

I continue to be fiercely envious of the banana guy’s life. Not just the room and the greenery and the peace. I envy him, having a business which is so morally neutral. It’s tough to practice law without damaging society, and writing has its temptations. It would be fantastic to grow plants, put up a website, and sell them. You would never have to ask yourself, “Gee, was it right to sell that guy the musella lasiocarpa?” I suppose every person who works has moral issues to worry about, but some jobs are less troubling than others. I’d sleep better growing alfalfa or running a hardware store than doing plastic surgery or practicing tort law.

I hope this work pays off. My plants have many problems, and I am tired of watching them languish.

I still want to kill those squirrels.

Rough Night

Mish Weiss had her bone marrow “mini transplant” yesterday, and the radiation and chemo have made her very sick. Please keep her in your prayers. They specifically asked people to pray for strength.

As I understand it, a mini transplant is a limited transplant suitable for a person who is not well enough for the real deal. She explains it on her blog. The hope is that the new stuff will defeat the old stuff, more or less.

Not Sure I Care

I have been working on my new site. What a mess.

I had a huge number of posts before I moved. Not all have been republished. The last six months are up, and there is some 2003 stuff. That’s about it.

I don’t know when, if ever, I’ll get the other stuff working. It’s a tremendous amount of work, and to be honest, there are a lot of old posts I just don’t care enough about to republish. And there are old posts that seem inappropriate in view of the changes in my life and outlook.

Sorry the Haloscan comments are gone. I don’t think they’re necessary any more. I needed them because of spam problems on the old site, and I’m hoping the same issues won’t arise here.

Phin graciously volunteered to send me a new theme to make the site look better. It will have three columns, a lot like the old site. I don’t know when it will arrive. The nice thing about WordPress is that it will go up instantly, once I upload it.

Aaron says there are ways to make WP more secure, so I’ll be implementing those. When he tells me what they are.

I appreciate all the comments on Communion. Based on what I’ve read, I’m inclined to think there is no reason it can only be done in a church.

I saw something interesting in a video last night. One of the items my sister brought me was a Perry Stone DVD about cleansing your house. As you probably know, in Christianity, “house” can refer to your home, or to your body. Some Christians believe that the presence of certain objects in your home can prevent you from having peace and prosperity and safety. I agree with that. I suppose everyone is familiar with the story of Joshua’s army losing the battle because of stolen treasures.

Oddly, I had been thinking about this idea the day before I watched the video.

Stone mentioned an interesting story. I can’t recall whether it was in the DVD or not. I also watched a couple of his Youtubes. He said he toured Jericho. They’ve been doing a lot of excavating there. His guide showed him a part of the wall, and in the wall, there was an embedded clay jar that had been cut open. The guide told him a baby’s remains had been found in it. He said the early inhabitants of Jericho used to sacrifice their children, and–if I recall correctly–this one had been placed in the wall to make the pagan gods bless the wall and keep it strong. Something like that.

Preachers lie a lot, I am sorry to say. They make things up, to make their sermons and teachings more entertaining. I decided to check this story out, because it sounded a little too neat.

It turns out Stone was right. You can Google “jar-burial” and find out. The ancient Canaanites used to kill their children and put them in jars. I’m sure you can guess which children were most often victimized. The eldest sons. And one item I found suggested that at least one excavated victim died at about ten years of age. Most were newborns, but that was not a hard and fast rule.

Think of that.

These days, we sacrifice the unborn to the god of pleasure and irresponsibility. But we kill them while they’re out of the parents’ sight, and we kill them as young as possible. That makes it easier, not just medically, but psychologically. If women had to see their unborn babies killed in front of them, abortion would be much rarer (and less lucrative). At least I hope it would.

The Canaanites were apparently more “advanced” and “progressive.” They were so cold, they could raise their children and name them and get to know them. And THEN slaughter them and have their bodies sealed up in their homes or other structures.

I think Stone was claiming that the walls of Jericho were, themselves, cursed by the presence of accursed objects, and that that’s why they were destroyed.

We don’t build walls or houses on the corpses of babies any more. But we do build careers and marriages on them. Have an abortion so you can go to school and get a good job. Have an abortion so you’ll have a better chance of landing a husband. That’s the thinking. You have to wonder how safe a life is, when it’s built on a foundation of abortion.

It’s peculiar; the near-sacrifice of Isaac and the actual sacrifice it presaged seem to be righteous parodies of the actions of the ancient pagans. God wanted a servant as devoted to him as the pagans were to their idols, but he didn’t want to permit the sacrifice. Instead, he intended to sacrifice his own eldest son. This underscores the difference between false gods and the real thing. False gods take, but the real God gives. You can give to God, but you can’t outgive him.

A number of times in my life, I have gotten rid of things that I thought were obstacles. I threw out the book Naked Lunch because it was so vile and disgusting I didn’t want it near me. I bought a Koran and started reading it, but after I learned that the Muslims considered it a physical embodiment of God, it seemed like an idol to me, so I dumped that, too. Last night I tossed some DVDs that made me uncomfortable. And a big pile of drawings from art classes I had taken. Maybe forty pounds.

I had been wanting to get rid of the drawings for a long time. I created them back in the days when I hoped to get a comic strip published or to become an animator. I took classes to sharpen my skills. The vast majority were quick, vague sketches of nude models; you couldn’t make anything out, because they were just a few strokes of charcoal. A few were more detailed. I got rid of everything, except for some items that were clearly harmless. Copies of masterpieces and so on.

The art world is seriously screwed up. I took a class from a guy at Florida International University, and I remember two things about him. First, he often gushed about total crap, but he sometimes insulted people with real talent. Second, he seemed completely consumed with lust. You could feel it when he came in the room. I think some people become artists largely because it makes it easier to get other people’s clothes off. Maybe this is how this guy got started. I don’t know. Generally, he was a good instructor. But something there was not right.

I took some classes at Parsons, in New York, and I remember a creepy incident. A nude model failed to show up, so the instructor in charge of rounding up models took her place. He stripped from the waist down, and then the model showed up, and there was some kind of confusion, and he had to do some paperwork. He stood at the front of the room for maybe five minutes, working on his papers and talking to students, wearing only a golf shirt. It was obvious he was reluctant to pull his pants back on. So odd.

I’ll tell you something which ought to be obvious. You can learn to draw very well, without studying naked models. In fact, the way cloth stretches and folds and drapes over the human form teaches you a lot about how figures should be drawn. But I don’t run the schools.

I also tossed some Kevin Smith DVDs. He has gotten so gross, and he was so offensive in Dogma, I prefer not to have that material displayed in my living room. In what appears to be desperation, he just made a revolting, nudity-filled comedy about the filming of a low-budget porno. I don’t think that was a smart move. He says he’s a serious Christian, and I have no reason to doubt him, but I think he’s way off track with his strange conviction that filth and blasphemy mesh smoothly into a valid Christian lifestyle.

When I was getting my last book ready for publication, I worked to remove things that I considered problematic, but I didn’t do a great job. I hope I’ll get a chance to revise it.

It occurred to me today that losing so many old blog entries might be a therapeutic purge. I try not to worry about losing old material; holding onto the old is crippling for a creative person. More often than not, the best way to improve an essay is to delete it and start over. Maybe a life is the same way. Strip down and rebuild.

One more interesting thing before I go.

I’m not big on eschatology, because it’s a mistake to try to predict the end of time. It’s better to try to live right and not worry about the tribulation and the rapture and so on. I remember 1984, when a whole bunch of people were convinced the world was about to end. Didn’t happen. Still, I can’t help getting drawn into the subject, and last night, I succumbed.

Perry Stone was talking about signs and wonders. He thinks we have been living in an age ruled by Gentiles, and that it’s the last age before the end of the world. He’s convinced that living believers will be raptured, and that there will then be a seven-year tribulation here on earth. And he says we are seeing signs. For example, he talked about roaring waves and so on. And here we are, in the post-tsunami, post-Katrina era. Post-Nargis.

Do you know what “Katrina” means? He said it meant “cleansing,” but that’s a little misleading. It’s a form of “Catherine,” which comes from the same Greek word that gives us “catharsis.” It means “pure.” Spooky.

He also referred to the passage that says that at the end of time, it will be as it was at the time of Noah. Well, Noah lived before the extermination of a human race absorbed by evil. Aaron says the Jews believe that one of the last straws, before the flood, was the creation of marriage contracts between humans and animals. I had never really thought about the passage relating Noah to the end of the world, but it has to be a reference to evil, because that is what distinguished Noah’s era.

Stone also mentioned Comet Hale-Bopp, which appeared recently, and which last appeared at about the time Noah was commanded to build the ark. I looked it up, and it’s true. And he noted that Comet Shoemaker-Levy, which broke in pieces, began hitting the planet Jupiter on Tisha B’Av, 1994. The most ominous day in the Jewish calendar. The day both temples fell.

Jupiter is the same person as Zeus. People who worshipped Zeus use to sacrifice pigs. A couple of centuries before Christ, a Roman emperor put a statue of Zeus in the temple and used the altar to sacrifice pigs. This was part of the struggle between Jewish ways and Hellenism, which continues today. Only today, the world fights to absorb and defuse Christianity as well as Judaism.

Non sequitur, I guess. Also, Stone claims the reason a herd of pigs was present when Jesus expelled the demons from the Gadarene demoniac was that pigs were raised so Zeus-worshipers could sacrifice them. Zeus was worshiped in the Middle East as Ba’al-Shamayim, the Babylonian sun god.

Fascinating stuff. But like I said, I am not going to waste time trying to pinpoint the end of history, so I can have my credit cards maxed out on that day.

That’s it. I got things to do.

Book Says Yes

Hope everyone is having a fine Sabbath. If you’re Jewish, pardon me for being a day late. It’s a magnificent day here. Sunny and bright, even though we have a high chance of rain. The best sunlight comes from inside, but the regular kind isn’t bad, either, especially during an unusually rainy October. Usually, June and September are the rainiest months here, and we get some relief in the fall. You wouldn’t know it from the way it has been coming down all month.

As mentioned in an earlier post, my sister surprised me by giving me a book and some sort of home Communion kit. I know how weird this is, given the the bitter nature of our relationship over the last decade; I don’t want to go back over that. I’m just glad to see the burden of our estrangement lifting, and I hope things continue to improve.

Anyway, she also gave me a book by a minister named Perry Stone. The book is called The Meal that Heals. I haven’t finished it, but I know enough to tell you that the premise of the book is that communion is something Christians are supposed to experience privately as well as in church. I know many of my readers are Christians, and I thought I’d throw it out for discussion, to see if anyone knows anything about it.

Stone is a Charismatic. That can be good or bad, in my opinion. The Holy Spirit has been systematically excluded from Christians’ lives over the centuries, and I am fairly sure private prayer in tongues is legitimate, and that it builds a believer’s strength. I’m a hundred percent positive the fruit and gifts of the Spirit are real, regardless of whether I’m right about each one of them. On the other hand, Charismatics and other Protestants are subject to horrendous doctrinal deviations and excesses, and sometimes we swallow utter nonsense, to our great detriment. I have been there.

I am also confident that I am right when I say the traditional churches, for all their strengths, have done a wonderful job of putting God behind a wall of glass, as though lay people were not qualified to approach him. For example, they have provided scriptures and services in languages believers can’t understand. They have also put clergymen in charge of actions ordinary believers should be performing for themselves. We should all pray every day. We should all share our knowledge with other believers. We should read the Bible for ourselves. And so on. You can’t expect to know God when you rely on middlemen to perform your religious obligations. That should be obvious. The ancient Jews relied on priests to do a lot of the work for them, but the Temple no longer exists, and Christianity is not ancient Judaism, as the events in the Upper Room demonstrate. The New Testament is full of believers who approached and worked with God one-on-one, in addition to the activities they performed at gatherings.

I think what I said in the last paragraph is true, but that doesn’t mean we should be taking Communion on our own. But I can’t dismiss the possibility.

Look at the way churches have gotten away from the truth. Take baptism. It began as a Jewish purification ritual. Jews immersed themselves in ritual baths (“mikvahs”), or in running streams. Somehow, some churches ended up replacing immersion with a few drops of water on the forehead. Does that make sense? How is that equivalent to sitting in a mikvah or being dunked in a river? It’s not even remotely similar. Some churches did away with baptism altogether, which is even stranger. The importance of baptism is indisputable. If it’s meaningless, how can you explain the career of John the Baptist, or the continued emphasis of baptism after Christ’s assumption into heaven? Remember the eunuch who insisted on being baptized? That wasn’t in the Gospels. It came later. And the eunuch was traveling in a dry country; surely he had a container of water with him. Yet he did not ask to be baptized until he saw a substantial body of water in which he could be immersed. He didn’t try to get by with a sprinkle. And Peter pointed out that the Genesis flood was symbolic of baptism. The flood was more than a few drops.

If baptism is messed up, and it definitely is, maybe Communion is messed up, too.

Stone believes private Communion somehow increases the power of God in your life, and that it may bring benefits such as healing.

We get the Communion concept from the Gospels. I just looked it over. The descriptions are not identical, but it’s clear that the Last Supper was a Passover seder, and that what we now call Communion occurred during the course of the meal. And the 11th chapter of 1 Corinthians tells more, suggesting that early Christians celebrated Communion as a meal, as well as a ritual. So the tiny crackers and the sip of wine we see today seem inadequate to me. It seems clear that it wasn’t a typical meal, because Paul cautioned people who were truly hungry to eat at home. But the sense I get is that these people “broke bread” together in the usual sense of the term, which means they sat down and shared some food and drink.

If that is true, is it something you would only do at church? That would be a little odd. I wouldn’t want people eating and drinking while a pastor tried to teach. It would be chaos. Is it possible that Jesus was just telling the disciples, who were Jews and therefore obligated to observe Passover, to think of him during future seders and understand the significance of the wine and matzah?

I don’t know what the answer is, but it seems that we are now in the process of re-learning things about our Jewish past, and it only makes sense that some of our traditions are going to be shattered and corrected.

I Googled Stone to see what kind of person he is. I can’t find any scandal or any meaningful criticism. I see no record of private jets or mistresses or fur-lined Bentleys. Maybe he’s okay. There are some sites that criticize him, but they are…odd…to put it kindly.

Let me know what you think. It’s an interesting issue.

Make a Splash With the Rest of the Trash

I just realized Columbus Day is almost here. What an unfortunate coincidence. Right now, the financial markets are dissolving, it’s Yom Kippur, we have a pivotal election coming up, and–call me a religious nut–I think we ought to be on our best behavior. Instead, boatloads of Miamians are going to go out on the water this weekend, strip naked in open view, and have sex in front of crowds of gaping strangers. It’s part of our annual Columbus Day Regatta celebration. People go out in the bay, raft up their boats, and do whatever their animal instincts tell them to do. And most of them could never be made to understand that what they do is wrong and harmful. It would be like trying to explain calculus to a cockroach.

I’ve written about it before. Can you imagine a bigger disgrace? It makes Mardi Gras seem refined.

Yom Kippur is Upon Us

Today is Yom Kippur. The Jewish day of atonement. It is the last in a contiguous series of holidays, beginning with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. During these days, Jews are supposed to reflect and repent. They are to acknowledge their sins and resolve to do better. I wonder if this is where we get the New Year’s resolution concept.

I got up this morning, fully aware that it was Yom Kippur, and I looked at the TV (I use the Weather Channel as an alarm), and what did I see? A flood warning. For real. Don’t tell me God doesn’t have a sense of humor. For the atheists and the forgetful, let me point out that the Biblical flood was a punishment for an unrepentant world.

The sky isn’t the only place where clouds gather and storms threaten. Look at Wall Street. Look at Iran, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela. We are perched on the edge of a cliff.

The truth is, we’re always perched on the edge of a cliff. It’s just not obvious. We look at our possessions and our armies and our abilities, and we think our lives are completely secure. Of course, they’re not. You can be rich and powerful and die from a fall in your bathtub. The things you cling to for security can be taken away in an instant. You can be taken down overnight. Look at Kim Jong Il. Earlier this year, he was one of the most powerful and dangerous men alive. He’s probably wearing a diaper right now.

The Bible is full of examples of people who partied their way into the abyss. People who became powerful, misattributed their success to themselves or to pagan gods, and then suffered catastrophes.

I believe that if you want God to look out for you, you always have to be careful about giving Him credit for your success, and you have to be careful about how you get what you have. Americans are falling short. Pride is now considered a virtue. And we have become drunk on a steady flow of quick money. My sense of the moment is not that God is judging us. It seems to me that He’s just slapping us awake. This is not a Depression, and we have not been conquered, and there is no famine, and there is no plague. But we’re being reminded that we can lose what we have. To some, that is incentive to continue living it up, while the good times last. To the wise, it is incentive to shape up.

I’m reading up on Yom Kippur. Here’s something interesting. Jewish holidays are connected to Christian holidays. For example, Jesus was sacrificed during the week of Passover, and the disciples received the baptism of the Holy Spirit on Shavuot. Some Christians believe Yom Kippur foreshadows the final day of judgment. That sounds reasonable to me. It has to have some meaning to us; it would be unlike God to create a holiday as important as this, without giving it some significance to Christians.

Here is something else: Jews are expected to confess their sins, apologize for wrongs, and forgive others on this day. That makes sense. God generally expects us to treat others the way we hope He will treat us.

I don’t know how much hope there is for the US, but there is always hope for the individual. I am thinking about the significance of Yom Kippur today, and I am trying to take advantage. I hope you’ll consider doing the same. We may be about to endorse socialism (a substitute for God and righteousness) and humanism by putting a far-left liberal in the White House. Our country may be headed for a decline, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be dragged along in the current.

Yom Kippur is winding down in Jerusalem. Mish Weiss says she has forgiven everyone who did her wrong during the last year. I wonder if that means she forgave me for yammering at her to consume animal products! You might drop by her blog and say a prayer for her, and for Leah Friedman, who is still recovering from surgery.

The Sand is Deep Today

I just watched CNBC for a bit. Apparently the world really IS coming to an end. Thought you might want to know.

The Dow went down over 700 points earlier today. At the moment, it’s down about 500. And suddenly that looks pretty good.

They’re saying the Fed is going to cut at least half a point off the prime rate. Will it matter? I don’t know.

I can’t help wondering if deflation is headed our way. The dollar is pummeling foreign currencies, and a lot of things are getting cheaper here, and because people are jittery, things that used to sell very freely are going to have to be marketed aggressively. We’re looking at cheap oil and cheap metals, except for gold. Real estate continues to drop in value. Unemployment is increasing, so presumably, people will be willing to work for less, and wages will drop. If wages drop, things just plain have to cost less, don’t they? I’m no economist, but it seems to me that consumers can’t spend money they don’t have. Okay, I suppose they can, but won’t that be harder to do as credit tightens up?

I suspect that Jim Cramer helped cause this. He went on TV and told people to sell stocks. He said that if there was any money they thought they might need during the next five years, it was time to pull it out. Over the last few years, this man has become extremely popular. He’s like Obama; a “rock star.” Fate raised him to a very lofty place, and this weekend, he dropped a very big rock on us from up there. Maybe he was right to say what he did, but I’m sure he scared millions of people to death.

The Pope says obsessing on money is vain. Here’s a Reuters quote:

The pontiff, using a biblical metaphor, said people who ignored the word of God to pursue wealth had effectively built their homes on sand instead of on a solid foundation of faith.

That is true. I have known a lot of prosperous people, and the impression I have formed is that things go badly for them unless God is in their lives. Their families fall apart. They get caught up in spirals of senseless self-destruction. Sometimes they lose everything. Sometimes they get richer, and it somehow leaves them even worse off.

Godless people with money remind me of socialists in places like China and the old USSR. A few things go right, and they become convinced it’s all coming together. If they just keep headed in the same direction. If you have money, you have power, and if you have power, you can fix your problems. Right? But the horizon keeps receding. They never catch up with the mirage.

I’m with the Pope on this one. I’m saying that publicly, because I’m sure he worries about my opinion. God really is up there, and if you turn toward Him sincerely and persistently, and if you submit, He’ll get you through your problems. Maybe He’ll fix them, and maybe He won’t, but you’ll come out on the other side in one piece, and you’ll be able to bear the journey.

I’m not suffering the way a lot of people are right now; the exposure isn’t there. But I feel very low anyway, knowing what hundreds of millions of people are going through. I’m so grateful that God woke me up and prepared me for this kind of thing.

Thursday is Yom Kippur. This is a great week to try to turn things around.

Luntz has Spoken

I know I should try not to be so obnoxious to swing voters. I am working on it. I need to stop making references to animals like monkeys and flatworms.

These individuals may not be giant brains, but I’m sure that many, many of them are fine people. You don’t have to be brilliant to be a good person. People sometimes criticize Christianity because you don’t have to be very smart to be a Christian. Judaism, for example, is much more cerebral. For a long time, I’ve believed that the accessibility of Christianity is part of its design and one of its great virtues. I think it bolsters the argument that Christianity is God’s creation.

Surely, there are a lot of people out there who don’t understand debates, yet who are morally superior to me. I am going to try to keep that in mind. Really.

I’m not saying it will be easy.

With those prefatory remarks, let me direct you to Frank Luntz’s swing voter focus group.

You know what this proves? It proves Sarah Palin won the debate. Overwhelmingly. The debate wasn’t a test to see who knew the facts better, or whose reasoning skills were better. It was a test to see who could make people want to vote for them. By that standard, there can be no doubt. Sarah Palin won.

I see Sarah Palin as a champion provided by God. Sort of like David. She’s not merely religious; she is part of a very sincere Christian movement. We’re not talking about a Catholic who goes to mass twice a year, or a Baptist who has forgotten the way to the church. Sarah Palin appears to be about as devout as politicians get. I see Obama as a huge threat to Christian values, and I think his judges and executive appointees will be hostile to the church. I think God brought us Sarah Palin as an antidote to Obama. As I have said before, and as others have said, Sarah Palin truly is what Barack Obama only pretends to be. A fresh-faced, sincere Washington outsider who will govern with a conscience and try to bring reform.

The Bible says God chooses our leaders. So when I see a candidate I can approve of, I pray for that candidate to succeed. And I prayed before the debate. When it was over, I thought things had gone badly, and I reminded myself that sometimes we get the leader we deserve, instead of a leader who will be a blessing to us. We are becoming a nation of perverts, self-worshipers, and pagans. We celebrate greed and selfish ambition and empty fame. I can’t say we deserve a good President or Vice President. Many of us would simply turn on a person like that, the way the BDS crowd turned on George Bush. The way the PDS crowd has already turned on Sarah Palin, her husband, and her children.

Oddly, I now find that my prayers were answered. I am sure tens of millions of Americans were praying for Sarah Palin last night, and clearly, we were heard. Never criticize God’s patience to my face. It’s not that you’ll make me angry. I just don’t want to be standing near a person when he says something that ungrateful and offensive. I don’t want people to think we agree. Hundreds of thousands of convenience abortions every year, an official policy of slicing Israel up and selling her to her enemies, a judiciary which seems bent on eradicating all public mention of God, churches which tell us Jesus was just a philosopher, churches which tell us the Jews are no longer God’s people…there are plenty of reasons to abandon us and let us rot. But we have not been scrapped yet.

It’s funny that this happened during the Days of Awe, which include Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the days between them. At this time of the Jewish year, Jews are supposed to reflect and repent. These things still matter, regardless of whether Christians are required to observe the Jewish holidays. They still have significance. The Jewish holidays were never abolished. We ought to be thinking about the way we act, at this sensitive, pivotal moment. It may not be mandatory, but it certainly can’t hurt.

I wish Governor Palin hadn’t agreed that the “two-state solution” is the answer to Israel’s problems. I don’t like the use of the word “solution” in the context of Jewish issues; see if you can guess why. And it isn’t a solution; it’s a concession to the Arab strategy of whittling Israel down until there is nothing left. But unless she is a very strange or superficial representative of modern, Bible-believing Christians, Sarah Palin is not happy about giving away Jewish land, and she will work hard to minimize the damage. Contrast this with Obama, who favors dividing Jerusalem. One day he said Jerusalem should be undivided. The very next day, he said he didn’t mean it wouldn’t be portioned out and governed by different authorities. I.e., that it wouldn’t be…divided. And remember, Palin belongs to a movement known for its unwavering, fanatical support of Jewish Israel, while Obama spent twenty years in an openly anti-Semitic church, becoming so close to the pastor that he chose the pastor to officiate at his wedding.

I think she answered that way because there was no way to avoid it. And “two-state solution” is pretty vague. It leaves her a lot of wiggle room to exploit. In any case, she’s a better choice than a close associate of a prominent anti-Semite.

Increasingly, conservatives dismiss religious issues as inconsequential and tangential. That’s wrong, and it will hinder us in the long run. In fact, the things that happen in the natural world are just reflections of what goes on in the spiritual world. The natural is like a tree, and the supernatural is like the roots. Bad things that happen there eventually produce bad consequences here.

No candidate is perfect, but McCain and Palin are clearly the least offensive choice, by a wide measure. I hope we are not so far gone that we will not be permitted to put them in the White House.

Funny how Obama is still running against McCain’s Vice Presidential pick. But then Goliath was killed by David, not Saul.

What’s Next? Romulans?

I am horrified by what I’m hearing on the radio. I have Rush Limbaugh on. The market dropped almost 700 points earlier today. One reason? Nancy Pelosi spoke on the House floor, and she made a number of partisan remarks that offended Republican Congressmen. Very nice. What kind of person has priorities like that? When will the public make a connection between a 9 percent approval rating and the party of the House and Senate leadership?

More disgusting news: Obama sought a rape victim to appear in a TV ad. Rush credited Politico. Here is the story.

Remind me again why people are voting for Obama and the other Democrats. Oh, that’s right. Because they get their political education from Jon Stewart and Michael Moore and P. Diddy.

Here is more fun: a tornado has been spotted a few miles from me.

I’ll let you know when the Miami River turns to blood.

It’s Inevitable

I have that peculiar sensation again. I wrote about it last week. I feel as though I’m winning my battles. As though I have broken through some sort of threshold. When I had this feeling last Monday, I hoped it would never go away. It waned to some degree, which worried me. But it seems to return. I wish I knew another Christian who had experienced the same thing, so I could ask about it.

I am so glad my life has changed. It could not have happened at a better time. Well, that’s wrong. It would have been better if it had happened when I was two. But I believe the human race is headed in the direction of trial and difficulty, and it would have been very bad had I not come around before we reached this precipice.

I suppose it’s provincial of me to say the human race is headed for problems. In most countries, misery and failure are normal. Take a look at a world map, pick a location at random, and ask yourself what life is like there. South and Central America? Poverty, crime, endemic corruption, extreme politics, and a stifling caste system. China? Oppression, brutality, and low wages. Africa? Don’t get me started. India? The only nice thing you can say about it is that a lot of Africans wish they lived as well as Indians. It may be that we’re moving toward a global crisis, but in most places, it’s hard to tell a crisis from the usual run of luck. What’s unusual is that America is getting sucked into it. Usually, this country is an oasis.

America-bashers don’t get it. They squirm and seethe when patriots praise this abundantly blessed nation, and when we claim God is the source of our affluence. But we’re right. This country is a preview of heaven; it was raised up to serve God. For as long as any of us can remember, we’ve had stability, peace on our own soil, unparalleled freedom, and a level of prosperity very few nations could approach. God has gone beyond mere generosity and patience. He has spoiled us. And we are responding not with gratitude, but by becoming a nation of tattooed and pierced self-worshipers.

We did it all ourselves! Thanks, but no thanks, God. We obviously don’t need your help. Things are going swell, so we’d rather do our own thing. We’re so powerful and so in charge of our own destinies, we can take drugs and sleep around and experiment with humanism and atheism and weird, chic religions, while remaining prosperous and strong. We can have socialism as well as wealth and freedom, even though no other nation has ever managed it. We’re EMPOWERED. We can do anything. We don’t need your help, because we have something way better: self-esteem. Who needs Moses or Jesus when you have Anthony Robbins and Eckhart Tolle?

That’s not how life works. The universe has a ruler, and it has laws. God and believers contribute to the supply of power and harmony in the universe, and everyone else depletes it. It’s a spiritual welfare state, and when things get bad enough, the rolls get purged. I am very grateful that my thick skull is absorbing that, so I can set myself aside and get out of the current, before our country hits the rapids. I wish I could say I figured it out on my own, but it had to be beaten into me. I don’t know if believers will be spared the turmoil that looms, but I do know that God makes problems easier to bear.

I feel like I’m accumulating spiritual tools, and I have to wonder what purpose this armament is supposed to serve. Is it intended to be used in the course of ordinary life, or is there an especially tough job ahead? Given a choice between fighting or facing peace in an overarmed state, I’d choose the latter. I would hate to see this country descend into a three-dimensional remake of East of Eden, complete with the false hope of the simplistic God-hater Marx as messiah.

In the past, our problems seemed to take care of themselves. Pretty well, anyway. Now they seem to be unwilling to go away and unresponsive to our best efforts to tame them. My explanation: God has always limited our misfortunes and ordered our lives for us, and when He chooses to stop, the result is entropy. The humanist explanation is just like the party line of the socialist apologists: we can fix it; we just need another try.

I don’t think we’re smart enough to fix or even understand really big social problems. I think the orderly, peaceful way life usually proceeds in the US is due to divine supervision, period. I think God co-wrote the Constitution. I believe He quietly prevents catastrophe after catastrophe. And we are inviting Him to stop. If we’re ever truly on our own, our best efforts will yield nothing but grief. And without God, even apparent success is eventually revealed to be failure.

I am thinking about these things because it’s Rosh Hashanah, and our financial institutions are in big trouble, and we are contemplating electing a socialist whose advisors caused the problems we are having now. Christians like to say they don’t live under the law of the Old Testament, but the Jewish holidays are eternal. They still mean something. And Rosh Hashanah is about choices. Sometimes people are supernaturally compelled to make choices that will lead to misery. I hope that’s not the situation in this election. I hope we still have a chance to put John McCain and Sarah Palin in the White House and move farther from, not closer to, godless, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian Europe.

They’re Counting on You

Leah Friedman just had surgery, and they had trouble reviving her. They expect her to be in the hospital for five more days.

Mish Weiss is (I hope I read this right) scheduled for the beginning of her bone marrow procedures on Tuesday.

Pray! They really appreciate it.

Wish I had checked Mish’s blog sooner.