Miami’s Grinch Successfully Dumps his Load

I never go online and talk about trips, because I want it to be harder than that for burglars to find out I’m not home. Last Friday, I drove to Miami to work on the last home I’m selling (hooray). I have to get it cleared out reasonably well for the buyers.

I ended up paying a king’s ransom to move my machine tools up here. They were put where they are by Miami Transfer, a big crane and rigging company my dad and I used to represent. They very kindly received my lathe and delivered it in Miami for nothing, so I wanted to use them again so they would finally make some money from me. Months ago, they said they could move everything here for $4000. I called again a month or so ago, and they quoted me nearly $8000. They said the job was harder than they originally thought.

I have no doubt that they’re telling the truth, but naturally, when the price jumped, I felt motivated to look around for better deals. I’m grateful for what they did for me, but…$8000.

Several companies looked at the job, and they always said the same thing: $8000 was WAY out of line. Then they came back with estimates that were not a whole lot better. In the end, I picked a major outfit that has an office in town. I call them at least twice a week to make sure they haven’t forgotten.

I should have bought a trailer and moved the machines myself, but it’s too late to be learning a new skill. I don’t have time. If I had done that last year, I would be a lot better off now. Caring for my dad had absorbed my life, however, so I kept putting the machine move off.

If the machines were here, I would have been willing to play around with a trailer and rented forklift. I can’t do that when they’re 300 miles away. Every day of experimentation would be a day away from my responsibilities here. It seemed better to bite the bullet and get it over with.

“First world problems.” That’s what they call challenges like this one. Some people are in Bangladesh, wondering if there will be anything fit to eat in the local dumpsters tonight, and I’m in America, concerned about the trials of moving expensive hobby machines to my expensive home.

In order to get this sale over with, I threw out and gave away a lot of stuff. I had a fighting chair for a fishing boat. They probably cost $10,000 new. Mine was in pieces and needed some work. I took $75. I could not get anyone to take it for more than that. I threw out all sorts of electronics and cables. I put a good Sony receiver and remote in the trash. I’m selling 5-gallon beer kegs for $10 each. I’m giving away all the patio furniture.

I must have put half a ton of stuff out for the waste people, and I took half a ton to the landfill, known as Mount Trashmore. The view from up there is wonderful. It was also a little disturbing. I saw so many places I had been. I saw areas in the bay and ocean I was familiar with, from years of fishing. It was like having my life unfolded before me, so I could view it from atop a mountain of garbage.

There were some family photos in the house. I haven’t retrieved them yet. I decided to break my visit into two trips, so I’ll be going again when the machine movers are ready, and I’ll grab more things then. I found a framed photo my sister loved. It was a picture of her, of course. She would have been about three years old. I thought she already had it. She came for it a long time ago. She looked at it and said, “I was so beautiful.” Not normal.

In the photo, her eyes are ice-cold, in spite of her age. When you look at it, you can tell something is very wrong. She looks like a future serial killer. I kept asking God if I should keep the picture. I am inclined to throw it out. It will disturb me every time I see it.

My friend Travis wanted to help me with everything, but it seems like there are some things God wants me to do by myself. I had to clean up the house and load everything (but for one item) myself, and I will be unloading alone today. Travis was busy with important things. There was nothing he could do.

I feel much better about throwing out my dad’s golf clubs now. I threw them out with a lot of stuff several years ago, and I was a little uneasy about it. I almost wish I had left the house unlocked and let strangers steal everything.

In situations like this, you can keep everything you think is valuable, move it at great expense and with great effort, and then sell it for pennies on the dollar, or you can dump it early and be free. You can also pay a fortune to move it, only to end up dumping it afterward. That’s the hard truth.

Miami is an interesting town. If you list something for ten dollars on Craigslist, it will take days to get a response, but if you list it for nothing, people will trample each other to come get it. I listed a $170 wheelbarrow that has barely been used for $50, and people are trying to get it for less.

While I was there, I got a great revelation: I needed to forgive Miami.

I always think of forgiveness as something that applies to individuals, but it appears that it can apply to cities, organizations, countries, and so on. That was news to me.

I do not like Miami. The traffic is bad. The people are unpleasant. It’s full of voodoo and sexual defilement. Non-Hispanics are not treated well. People refuse to learn English. There is little to recommend the place. It’s okay to say these things, because they’re true, but I should not harbor hostility toward the people. That harms me and makes me a less effective Christian.

I realized this the morning after I arrived. I was lying on an air mattress in a dusty, nearly empty house, and I could not sleep. God made me understand that I had to forgive, so I did, and I asked him for help in getting his love to flow. I also thought of other big groups to forgive. Churches, cities, and so on. I worked on those. I cast out spirits of anger and vengefulness.

I felt much, much better afterward. I knew this was major progress.

Something strange happened later. Ordinarily, I feel terrible in Miami. It’s as though slimy, stinking worms are crawling on me. I feel unclean. I want out. This is actually normal for people who move away and then have to return. Come to think of it, I used to feel the same way even when I was in college. I felt it when I flew home for breaks. After I forgave, I felt much more comfortable. I still want nothing to do with Miami, but now I can visit and not be as miserable.

I know there is a connection between physical problems and sin. Sin brings iniquity and demons, and then you get things like cancer and arthritis. Yesterday, on the trip home, I heard something which I believe to be revelation: sin doesn’t CAUSE disease; it IS disease. What we see as disease is really just the symptoms. If you smoke cigarettes, which is a sin, you already have COPD, strokes, heart attacks, and cancer. The diseases are in you. They just have not been able to manifest yet. If you have chronic anger, you already have high blood pressure and strokes, even if you haven’t seen proof. The doors are open, and the entities that cause disease can come in when they choose.

Unforgiveness is obviously related to disease. Anger and stress harm your circulatory system.

Here’s something interesting: the Bible says envy rots the bones. That’s pretty clear.

I want to keep moving into deliverance. I don’t care about the cost, which is an illusion. Anything inquity allows me to keep is actually a liability.

In other news, I saw a really wacky video today. Youtube recommended a Zev Porat video about a rabbi who is incredibly angry. I don’t know the man’s name. I’ve seen him before, and I wrote about him. Porat pronounces his name “Vinestein,” but the Internet says his name is Eitan Bagdadi. I assume he’s a fringe nut no one takes seriously, because he is WAY out there.

Porat showed a clip of this man’s teaching. His eyes were wide. He was waving his hands. He was yelling in a high-pitched voice. He said something about God coming in the future to make churches explode. He was looking forward to it.

If he had been wearing a different hat, I would have thought he was a Muslim cleric teaching about jihad. He was completely enraged. Look at the video and see.

The thing I find interesting is that he said the Talmud says Jesus is boiling in excrement. He calls him “the cursed one,” and he says he’s in hell right now. For some reason, he decided to tell us about the composition of the feces. He said it was from people, cats, dogs, lions, and tigers. I don’t know where that information came from. Why these particular animals?

This quotation has been the subject of a lot of argument. If you Google, you will see rabbis denying that it applies to Jesus, but here Bagdadi is, asserting that it does. It would make sense for anti-Semitic Christians to say this, but it’s remarkable to see it coming from a rabbi. Is he hoping speaking in Hebrew will prevent people from finding out? Jews who speak Hebrew put English subtitles on his video. I wonder if that surprised him.

Notice I am not angry about the quotation. I am not saying synagogues will explode. I never get mad when people attack God. It just does not bother me much. I sometimes get annoyed when people lie about Christians or what we believe. Even then, I don’t go off like this guy. He has full-blown conniptions.

He’s extremely angry at Jewish believers who talk to other Jews. He thinks they destroy Jewish souls.

I’m not sure I understand the whole thing. I can understand why rabbis would want the number of Jews to increase instead of decreasing, and I know they see conversion as a threat, but this man’s consuming rage doesn’t seem to make sense. If you cease to be a Jew (as rabbis claim) when you accept Yeshua, is it a catastrophe or just a misfortune? They believe Jews have to be much better in order to make it to paradise, while gentiles only have to obey a few laws. In reality, you would think Porat would be helping people who can’t make it as Jews.

Maybe he thinks converts are damned for some reason.

Porat got his video clip from a messianic ministry called One for Israel. They used it first.

Some pretty weird quotations are attributed to this man. Here’s one: “Do you have an animal? Don’t leave it with a Gentile, he will come and rape your animal, according to the Talmud.”

Is that really in there? Actually, animal rape is considered acceptable in some Latin American countries, and several countries in Europe permit it. There are now animal bordellos in Europe. Maybe Bagdadi is onto something! He’s overgeneralizing, however. It’s actually very unlikely that a gentile will rape an animal entrusted to his care. We don’t see news stories about perverted things taking place when people board their pets.

It turns out Bagdadi isn’t making his rape claim up. Here it is, from a Talmud site:

Said Mar ‘Ukba b. Hama: Because heathens frequent their neighbours’ wives, and should one by chance not find her in, and find the cattle there, he might use it immorally. You may also say that even if he should find her in he might use the animal, as a Master has said: Heathens prefer the cattle of Israelites to their own wives. . .

I would hope that most modern Orthodox rabbis are aware that this is not really true. For all I know, it was true of the gentiles Jews knew when it was written. After all, you can imagine the things a rabbi might write today if he lived in San Francisco. Ancient Babylon was a weird place, too. But gentiles generally are not interested in sex with animals.

There is a lot of rough stuff in literature like the Talmud. Things a smart person would never say publicly, even if he believed them. One for Israel exposes it, on the theory that such secondary sources are inferior to scripture and distance people from God. They have quoted things like this, from 14th-century rabbi and kabbalist Isaac “Ha’ari” Luria: “The Gentiles have neither spirit nor soul and are not even equal to animals considered clean, but rather lower than them.”

Lower than animals? Where did that come from? Did he get mugged by gentiles or what? That’s some pretty impressive bigotry.

Maimonides, who is revered more than anyone except Moses, said this:

“As for Gentiles with whom we are not at war…their death must not be caused, but it is forbidden to save them if they are at the point of death; if, for example, one of them is seen falling into the sea, he should not be rescued, for it is written: ‘neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy fellow’–but [a Gentile] is not thy fellow”

How many Orthodox Jews would live by that? Very few, I would imagine. There are Orthodox paramedics and doctors, and they help Gentiles all the time.

I can’t imagine a world in which Jews tell their kids not to become doctors.

Sometimes you have to look at things you have accepted and ask yourself if you made the right choice. You can invest your life in a religion and then find out the people who teach you are looking in the wrong direction; it has happened to me.

Scripture itself holds up very well; there is nothing in it anyone should be embarrassed to believe, regardless of when it was written. Dubious secondary sources, not so much.

The Mormon “prophets” have taught that dark-skinned people were cursed with dark skin because they were immoral, and they have said that such people will turn white when they become righteous. The Mormons banned blacks from the priesthood until the Nixon era. The Jehovah’s Witnesses taught that Jesus, whose divinity they deny, was coming back on a certain day. Then he failed to appear, so they said he had appeared invisibly. Catholics…don’t get me started. As I always say, the Catholic church was once the most powerful terrorist organization on earth; they burned people or threatened to burn people for crimes like saying the earth orbited the sun. They still teach people to pray to other people, and they say only Catholics go to heaven. Prosperity preachers–right now–make up garbage about God giving people a hundred-to-one returns on monetary donations. There are Christian kooks teaching that Jews run the world and that they aren’t really Jews.

When you get away from the source, you hear a lot of nonsense, and you lose all connection to authority, so you, yourself, lose authority.

I suppose the likely fallout, as information becomes more widely dispersed, is that Jewish nuts like Bagdadi will provoke Muslim and Christian nuts, and then all the nuts will go at it, and everyone else will conclude that all religious people are violent, hate-filled nuts.

You should not have to hide what your religion teaches. God told prophets to speak boldly. Jesus said not to try to prepare when we were called in front of authorities to answer them; he said God would tell us what to say. He said that if we denied him before men, he would deny us before the Father. You shouldn’t provoke people pointlessly, but if you have to conceal your doctrine and claim it doesn’t exist, you must be doing something wrong.

Wild Things Happening in Israel

Over the last day or so, I have seen some interesting videos from a man named Zev Porat. He’s a messianic rabbi who lives in Israel. I have probably written about him before.

His story is remarkable. He comes from a family of rabbis, and he was set to become one himself. He was guaranteed a huge inheritance. Somewhere along the way, he realized Yeshua was the Messiah. He adored his grandfather, but when he told him about his belief, the old man immediately began grabbing plates and throwing them at his head, cutting him so badly he had to get stitches. His grandfather yelled, “Goy! Traitor! Get out of here!”

That was the end of his cushy life and multi-million-dollar inheritance.

When his grandfather died, his family hired guards for the funeral, and they physically removed Porat from the premises. His grandfather left him an inheritance worth over $40 million, but to get it, he had to sign a paper saying he didn’t believe in Yeshua. He refused to sign, so he was disinherited.

He was fired from his job simply because he believed in Yeshua; he was not discussing his beliefs at work. He and his wife ended up living on a beach in a tent. One night, a group of rabbis entered the tent and offered Porat money in exchange for recanting. Porat refused, and the rabbis spat on him and his wife and left. It’s an amazing story. Intelligent clergymen, spitting on people!

Now he does exactly what the rabbis and his boss were afraid he would do. He tells religious Jews about Yeshua. He even does it at the Western Wall, which is Judaism’s most holy site. The place is always packed with Orthodox Jews who are not exactly open to the gospel.

There are a couple of things that surprise me about his story.

First, he successfully reaches religious Jews, including rabbis, who study in yeshivas. The conventional wisdom is that they are hard to get through to. The Christian explanation is that they have been filled with false ideas that make them resistant, and that God has put a veil in front of their eyes. The Jewish explanation is that they are too knowledgeable to be fooled by “missionaries.”

He has had wild success with a number of knowledgeable Jews, and he does it by showing them the Bible. Apparently, they spend a tremendous amount of time looking at secondary sources like the Talmud and the Gemara, but they know very little about the scriptures. That’s incredible. You would think they would know them better than anyone.

He shows them verses like Micah 5:2 and Isaiah 7:14, and they are surprised to learn the verses exist. He shows them Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53, too. If they knew the scriptures well, they could not possibly be surprised like this.

One of the funny things that happens is that he will quote a verse, and the person he’s talking to will say, “That’s from the Christian Bible. Don’t read to me from that.” Then he shows them he’s reading from the Tanakh; the Old Testament. That blows their minds.

There is actually an Old Testament scripture that says the Lord will walk on water. That surprised even me. We all know Jesus walked on water.

I digress, but I’m surprised he gets anywhere with Isaiah 7:14. This is a messianic prophecy that says an alma will give birth to the Messiah. It says it will be “a sign.” The traditional anti-missionary argument is that “alma” means “young woman,” not virgin. I haven’t seen anyone throw that back at him, so maybe the anti-missionaries aren’t as thorough as they could be.

Question: how is it “a sign” if an ordinary young woman conceives? It’s obviously not. In the Bible, signs are miraculous things only God can do. If “alma” doesn’t mean “virgin,” then Isaiah 7:14 is wrong, because it calls ordinary conception a sign. It’s like saying, “There will be a sign. A man will walk on dry ground.”

He accosted a prominent rabbi in Ashkelon and showed him some verses, and the man was so shaken, he accepted Yeshua on the spot. That almost defies belief.

It shows that the rabbi was very humble in spite of his exalted status. When you think you know everything, you cease to learn. Learning is impossible without humility.

The second thing that startles me about Porat’s videos is that he shows that one of Israel’s most revered rabbis, who was venerated even by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, believed that Yeshua was the Messiah. He taught his students to accept Yeshua. I did not know this.

The rabbi in question was named Kaduri. He died a few years back. He was over a hundred years old. Before he died, he wrote a note suggesting the Messiah’s name was “Yehoshua,” which is the same name as “Yeshua.” If “Yehoshua” is like “Thomas,” “Yeshua” (which means “salvation”) is like “Tom.”

Kaduri’s son claims the note was forged and that Kaduri was not well enough to write it, but his students say the handwriting is Kaduri’s. I don’t know if it’s possible to determine the truth and prove it conclusively.

Porat has a video in which he interviews one of Kaduri’s students, and the man confirms that Kaduri accepted Yeshua and told his students Yeshua was the Messiah. He says Kaduri was afraid to go public, and this is why he kept it private. That was news to me. It looks like not all Jews with religious educations are immune to Yeshua.

I knew that Kaduri had written the note, but I didn’t know he had accepted THE Yeshua, or that he had taught others they should do the same thing. “Yehoshua” is a common name, so saying the Messiah is named Yehoshua is not the same thing as identifying him with Jesus Christ.

I’m not all that enthusiastic about Kaduri, because he said some things that don’t make sense. For example, he said the spirit of the Messiah had attached itself to a person living in Israel, who would eventually be revealed. Yeshua said he would return in the clouds, and that the whole world would see it. There is no mention of reincarnation. Still, Kaduri’s change of heart is extraordinary.

Something similar happened a long time ago in Bulgaria. Daniel Zion, a man who served for a time as the nation’s chief rabbi, had a vision in which Yeshua appeared to him. He never became a Christian, preferring to hold onto his Orthodox beliefs and practices while accepting Yeshua as savior and Messiah. His colleagues declared him insane based on his new faith and experiences. One wonders what they would have thought of Moses, wandering around in a veil, claiming he had seen God’s back.

He emigrated to Israel. In the 1950’s, he was offered a seat on the Beit Din (rabbinical court), but he was told he would have to keep his beliefs silent. He refused, so that was the end of that.

People try to discredit Zion. They claim, for example, that he was never the chief rabbi of Bulgaria. If you search for lists of Bulgaria’s chief rabbis, you will see they don’t include him, perhaps because of his “illness.” Some lists have gaps during the time when he served. A Jewish reference book written in America in the Fifties says he was, in fact, the chief rabbi. It’s available online. Strange, how his name is so hard to find now. Maybe someone needs to remove that book from the Internet!

Why is it that a seemingly innocuous fact is so hard to prove? Why is so much evidence gone? Surely no one who cares about the truth would try to hide it.

It really doesn’t matter whether that he was the chief rabbi. It’s a big deal when any Orthodox rabbi sees Yeshua and believes in him.

Zion helped save a Bulgaria’s Jews from the Nazis, so it is not possible to erase his name completely. Anyone who might want his name “blotted out,” as the curse goes, will have a hard time.

Here is the uncomfortable part of the story: Zion saved the Jews by mentioning a vision of Yeshua. Bulgaria had a king named Boris. Zion got a letter to him, saying that Yeshua had told him that if he gave in to the Nazis and started sending Jews to death camps in Germany and Poland, God would punish Bulgaria. Boris, though willing to support anti-Semitic laws and internal exile to labor camps, chose not to deport the Jews.

So Bulgaria’s Jews were spared through the efforts of a person their leaders determined to be insane, and the basis of his efforts was the supposed insanity itself!

The Nazis were not fond of Zion. He was flogged repeatedly in front of the community.

It’s not a shock to see that Zion was considered insane. This is not unusual. A friend of mine has a Jewish wife, and she forced him to see a psychiatrist because she believed Christianity was a mental illness. The psychiatrist agrees! Also, Zev Porat’s family tried to make him see a shrink. If you check One for Israel’s Youtube channel, you can find the testimony of a man who says his family had him locked up in an asylum.

He’s a Messianic rabbi now.

It’s strange that modern, educated people act like his family, but it happens.

I suppose we underestimate the power of God and his willingness to move people. We see individuals who seem impervious to persuasion, but when God touches their hearts, our feeble words do amazing things. We just have to know whom to talk to. People are like fruit. You can’t pick them until they’re ripe. We can’t tell which ones are ripe unless we ask God, and often he sends us people we thought were hopeless.

If elderly rabbis who have been soaking in anti-Yeshua teaching since birth can believe, then what group of people is beyond reach? We should even be able to reach many of the Muslims who torture and murder Christians every day. We just need God to put the ripe fruit in front of us so we can avoid casting pearls before swine who will turn and rend us.

Fascinating stuff. I hope Porat’s efforts spread throughout Israel.

MORE

This is remarkable. I watched another one of Porat’s videos, and I saw that the Holy Spirit has told him the same thing he told me.

Isaiah 7:14 says this:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

Christians who preach to Jews have used this verse a lot. It says a virgin shall give birth, and that points to Jesus. Jews have resisted, saying the Hebrew word “alma,” which is translated “virgin,” really just means “young woman.” Today I was writing about this. I saw that Zev Porat was using Isaiah 7:14 in his conversations with Jews, and I wondered why they were not reciting the anti-missionary claim that “alma” does not mean “virgin.”

I got the answer today.

I saw another of his videos. He was talking to a rabbi. He mentioned Isaiah 7:14, and the rabbi said “alma” meant “young woman.” Porat, an Israeli from an Orthodox family, who had trained to become a rabbi, asked if “alma” meant “virgin” in the Tanakh (Old Testament).

The rabbi told him it did.

Now I see why Porat is able to use this verse successfully.

Apparently, “alma” is like “maiden.” The word “maiden” actually means “virgin,” but because modern women are what they are, we now use it to mean “young woman.” “Alma” seems to work the same way. In Old Testament times, it was assumed that a young, unmarried woman was a virgin, because it was almost always true. Now, women are more debased, so it makes sense that modern Israelis would use the world “alma” differently.

Earlier today, I wondered why anyone would think a young woman giving birth would be a sign from God, because many, many young women give birth, and no one considers it miraculous. In the same video in which Porat got the rabbi to admit that “alma” means “virgin,” he asked the same question I did! He knew the verse made no sense unless “alma” meant “virgin.”

God tells everyone the same things, all the time.

Rich Preachers Low on Supernatural Horsepower

I’ve been thinking about Kenneth Copeland, the toxic preacher who joined a bizarre effort to undo the Protestant Reformation a few years back.

Copeland is an unpleasant guy. I’ll say that at the start. His ministry consists mostly of teaching, and I’ve seen a lot of it. He sneers at his followers, sometimes imitating them in silly voices. He speaks in anger. The Bible says God is love, so Copeland’s hostile demeanor is not a good thing to see in a Christian.

Christianity isn’t about being nice, but a Spirit-filled Christian who is mature will generally be nice anyway because God fills his children with love and patience. God is generally a nice person, and we are supposed to be like him. God has killed a lot of people, and the flames of hell are his anger, but you can’t judge his prevailing personality by the unpleasant things justice requires him to do. If Jesus appeared and taught in a human body, and he was not coming to exact justice, people would be overwhelmed by the love that radiates from him. No danger of that with Copeland.

Copeland’s broadcasts helped me to find God. Copeland is not wrong about everything; that isn’t possible. Back in the early Eighties, I used to watch him, and he taught, correctly, that God helps people. He taught that God heals us and helps us. I got my first miracle healing by applying something Copeland taught. Unfortunately, that gave me the idea that his teachings were generally sound, which is not correct. I was under the spell of the prosperity preachers for a number of years. It seemed that I had a choice: I could listen to preachers from churches which rejected the Holy Spirit, or I could attach myself to preachers who accepted all the fruit and gifts of the Spirit yet who taught evil, ineffective promises about money.

Churches that reject the Holy Spirit are awful. Their teachings aren’t even close to right. People who belong to such churches rarely get help from God. They don’t prophesy. They don’t cast demons out. Their services are worse than jury duty. Unbearable.

The prosperity churches were much livelier, but they pushed the miraculous and the holy aside and talked about money all the time. They assured people that giving them money would motivate God to make them rich. They still do it. They even charge for prophecies. A thousand-dollar prophecy is touted as much better than a hundred-dollar prophecy.

I knew I was supposed to be praying in tongues for long periods every day, but I didn’t do it, so I was easily fooled. When you pray in tongues a lot, God guides you and tells you things. I shut off the flow of information, so I listened to some very sick people, many of whom are probably in hell or headed there.

This shows the danger of charismatic churches that push the money gospel and don’t teach people to pray in tongues daily. People become convinced the money gospel is correct, and once they think they’ve got the real thing, they stop looking for the truth. Because they don’t pray in tongues, they don’t hear God telling them the prosperity pastors are wrong.

It’s bad to lack knowledge of God and know it, but it’s worse to be full of false knowledge you’re sure is correct. If you know you lack knowledge, you’ll look for it. If you think you already have it, you’ll keep digging yourself deeper into the hole of heresy. When people tell you the truth, you’ll drive them off. Or martyr them.

If Copeland does anything for people, I have not heard about it, but he certainly takes. My sister used to give money to Copeland’s ministry. When her life fell apart, she stopped giving. Then they started calling, asking if she was all right. No preacher ever offered to give money back or to give out of his own pockets.

The thing that struck me about Copeland today is that he does so little for people. I’m sure he has some charity operations, but I’ve seen him work many times, and I’ve only seen him lay hands on one person. He told her she was healed of a back problem, but she continued to walk like a person with cerebral palsy. I’ve never seen him cast out a demon or give a true prophesy. I’ve seen him make wrong prophesies, however. I remember him telling a crowd the world was about to hear about people being raised from the dead in Mexico. That never happened.

If all you do is stand far away from people and lecture them, why should anyone take you seriously as a minister?

The Bible clearly says we are supposed to help people one on one. We are supposed to heal the sick, prophesy, raise the dead, work various miracles, and cast demons out. We’re supposed to raise up disciples who do the same things. This does not happen in the money ministries. Not generally. If you watch a money preacher, you’ll see that he stands on the stage and tells other people what they should do. Benny Hinn has been known to bring people up for healing, but does he then have them heal others? I’ve never seen it.

I’ve been watching interesting preachers for the last year or so. They go to malls, accost strangers, and heal them on the spot. Some of them have the people they healed heal others. They try to create disciples. They cast out demons. They use the word of knowledge to tell people things about themselves. They don’t accept money; in fact, they are more likely to give it away. Many of the people they claim to heal really are healed. Some come back with medical reports.

The people who love preachers like Copeland and Joyce Meyer and T.D. Jakes worship them. They think they’re special apostles the rest of us can never match. You can’t tell such people they’re being flim-flammed. They get angry. They’ll say your advice is an attack of the devil. This shows how dangerous these preachers are. They delude people who have good intentions and stunt their growth. They turn them into attack dogs for Satan.

It’s very sad, because if the celebrity-preacher model were correct, it would mean the rest of us had very little hope of being healed or hearing from God except in the presence of a few oily TV stars. It would mean TV preachers were like angels. It would mean they were better than we are.

An angel is an extremely powerful being without human failings, and when they appear to people, they don’t try to teach them to be like angels. They do their amazing feats, and then they leave. That’s not how human beings are supposed to do things. We’re supposed to help others become like God.

If you have to get to a certain human being in order to be healed or helped, you are an undeveloped Christian. You should be able to get God’s help when you’re alone, and you should certainly be able to get it at your local church. You shouldn’t have to hang a calendar and circle the date on which Kathryn Kuhlman will be in your town.

Think of all the famous preachers who don’t do what disciples do. How many times has the pope healed someone or cast out a demon? How many times has John MacArthur done these things? Does Rick Warren ever prophesy? Do any of these men have proteges who do these things? Jesus certainly did, and so did his disciples. How can you represent Jesus if you can’t do anything he did?

Imagine a paramedic who couldn’t put a bandage on you. Imagine him standing there, saying, “If Dr. Chakrabarty was here, he could stop your bleeding! Dr. Chakrabarty is amazing! He can do anything! Give me an offering, and Dr. Chakrabarty will make you rich!” This is Kenneth Copeland, in a nutshell, except that he might also make fun of you.

Even the Old Testament prophets worked miracles. Are we supposed to believe the New Testament is a step backward?

It’s particularly telling when a charismatic preacher like Copeland or Jakes can’t do anything. These are the people who teach that miracles are for today, yet they appear to be powerless. ll they can do is talk, but obscure individuals all over the world are doing what Jesus did, every day.

Jesus said this: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” If the TV stars are so special, why aren’t these things happening? If they know more than the obscure people who are doing these things, how can they be doing less?

It’s a very interesting question.

Copeland and another prosperity preacher named James Robison joined an Episcopal priest named Tony Palmer in an effort to convince charismatics they were really Catholics. It was highly disturbing. The Catholic church teaches some very dangerous things. The Protestant Reformation happened for very good reasons, and those reasons still exist. The church had become the most powerful terrorist organization on earth, burning and torturing people on a colossal scale as matters of ordinary business. It teaches the worship of Mary, who was just a woman and who did not die a virgin. It teaches the worship of saints, which is necromancy. It teaches infant baptism, which does not work. The list of corruptions is very long, as Martin Luther proved. It’s not okay to join the Catholic Church. The problems are too great. Copeland should know that, but he wouldn’t know the truth if he saw it. He is blinded by pride and money.

Palmer, a genuinely disturbing individual who was killed in a motorcycle accident at the height of his efforts, was really a Catholic. He was married to a Catholic, and he believed their doctrine. He wanted to convert, but the pope convinced him not to because he served as a bridge between Protestants and Catholics. Palmer stood in front of a room full of charismatics and said, “You’re all Catholic.” That was not pleasant to hear. I felt like a runaway slave who just got caught by the patrollers. I’ve never been a Catholic, but I’m very glad I never had to be.

Jesus prayed his people would be united, and the ecumenicals–the people who want to drop the Catholic net on all of us–cite this as justification. The thing is, Jesus wanted us to be unified under the Holy Spirit, not a pope. The Spirit-led are already unified, which means the followers of Jesus are unified. The people who listen to the traditions of men are AWOL. To join the Catholics would be to join lost sheep instead of rounding them up.

Jesus was a divider. No one likes to talk about that. He said he was a divider. He predicted that Christians would be driven out of synagogues and persecuted by their families. It’s true. Right now, there are Jews who have been disinherited, spat on, beaten, and put in mental wards because their families and rabbis were against Jesus. You can go online and see them talk about what happened to them. Muslims kill converts. People who hear Jesus’ voice are driven out of churches, and the things they say can’t be reconciled with dead-church doctrine.

Division is not the optimal state, but it’s necessary at the moment because hundreds of millions of self-described Christians reject very important truths.

The unification movement is just a way to take the salt out of the church. If they can put us under authorities that discourage obedience to the Spirit of Holiness, while convincing us we’re still good Christians, they can pretty much kill the body of Christ on earth.

Unification was one of the big problems in Rome. The problem Christians had wasn’t so much that they worshiped Jesus; it was that they taught that worshiping other Gods was sin. Instead of accepting unification with pantheists, which would have destroyed the church and nullified the crucifixion, they chose to die in separation, and they were right, just like many of the people the pope’s servants burned over the centuries.

I wish I had never listened to Copeland or any of the Mammon preachers, and I wish I had prayed in tongues more when I was young. I hope the things I write will help others avoid these pitfalls.

Rats are not Pets

My Uncle John had a car dealership.

In 1957, my aunt Mary (not her real name) married John. He lived near Detroit. He owned property used for parking cars. Detroit was booming, so it was not hard to make money selling parking spaces to car-company employees.

John was a very hard worker, and he did well. His business was very simple, so he didn’t have to be a great businessman to make it work.

He saved his money and bought the dealership, which was located in Kentucky, not far from my aunt’s parents. The dealership remained open for several years, and then it closed down. John was not capable of running it.

The dealership was located in Breathitt County, Kentucky, which is a very backward area. John’s employees stole from him. He actually lost money on parts and service. In those days, car dealers made most of their money from parts and service. Parts were disappearing via the back door, and John did not keep an eye on things, so the employees had no reason to stop stealing.

John also had a severe drinking problem. When he was in his seventies, his son said that if he needed to talk to him, he had to call him by 9 a.m., or else he would be too drunk.

John was an extremely carnal person. I doubt he ever had a spiritual thought in his life. Whenever I think of him, the phrase “black-hearted” comes to mind. He was an extreme racist; he even hated Catholics. He stole, and he taught his kids to steal. He threw scary tantrums when he didn’t get his way. I don’t know if he ever hit my aunt, but he always seemed to be on the verge of hitting someone. As far as I know, all he cared about were money, golf, and alcohol.

I can tell you one of the more amazing John stories I heard. His youngest son admired him greatly and tried to be like him. One day John was in the car with his son, and while they were on the road, John saw a ladder beside a house. John said something like, “I see a ladder. No one using the ladder. Must not want it!” He got out and took it. I don’t know how he got a ladder in the car. Maybe it was a pickup. My cousin thought what he did was hilarious. He also did things like stealing sauce bottles from Arby’s instead of asking for packets.

He really disliked me. I was my grandfather’s second-oldest grandson, and the oldest was his son. My mother always thought he hated me because I was the favorite. My grandfather had money, so it would make sense that his sons-in-law would vie for his approval.

As the business failed, my grandfather loaned money to John to keep it alive. He did this more than once. Eventually, he contacted his other children and asked them what he should do. He pointed out that the money was coming from their inheritance.

John used to sweep the dealership and keep it clean, but he didn’t know how to run it, and because of his drinking, he probably couldn’t have done it anyway. GM’s accounting division, GMAC, had a system for dealers to use, but John didn’t use it. He started selling cars cheap to raise cash. He would take a new car to an auction, sell it for a few dollars over cost, and think he had made money.

Eventually, my grandfather came to own the dealership. John and Mary divorced, and John went on to distinguish himself as a divorced dad by teaching his son to curse his mother and ridicule the trailer she and the boys lived in. He was really something.

Last night I dreamed I owned his dealership.

I was in the dealership with a bunch of friends from college. They were young. I felt young. I don’t know how I looked. They were my college friends, but they weren’t real people I actually knew when I was in college. For some reason, they had come to help me clean the dealership up.

There were no cars there. The place was empty. It was going to be repurposed, but I don’t know what the plan was.

There were rats everywhere, or at least there had been. There was rat excrement everywhere.

I saw a steel cabinet on the wall, like an electrical panel cabinet. There were shelves inside it. There were shelves on the floor under it. On top of the shelves, there were a bunch of tight springs maybe 30 inches long. They had been disconnected from something. I kicked at the shelves to see if any rats were still there, and I saw a dark shape scurry away down by the baseboard.

I found a push broom and opened one of the garage-style doors to sweep poop out. One of the girls took the broom, so I had to go find another one.

There was an apple tree growing into the garage through a door. The leaves were shiny and dark. They were very full of life. There was a pile of old brown leaves on the floor. There were no apples because it was too late in the year, but the smell of dried apples was everywhere, as though there were old apples under the leaves.

There was a piece of agricultural equipment out front. It was a long piece of steel with some sort of disks on it. The disks were some kind of reinforced plastic, and they were just about gone. A guy picked it up and asked me if he should throw it out, and I told him to leave it until I figured out what it was. Maybe it was valuable.

I went to John’s office, which was now my office. An older man with a southern accent was going through things, trying to put them in order. He reminded me of many southerners I’ve known. Back in the Sixties, it seemed like the world was full of southern men in their forties and fifties who were building America. They were pilots and engineers. They were military people. They got things done. They were people you could rely on.

Seems like they were always tall, thin white guys with angular features. They spoke with exactly the kind of accent you would expect to hear when a pilot speaks reassuring words over a jet’s intercom.

The office was just a tiny room on the side of the garage. It should have been a closet. The closet-sized office had its own closet, with a little sink where people could wash their hands. I went in and used it. The whole building was filthy. I was worried about getting a disease from the rat dung.

I felt indebted to the young people who were helping me. I had an urge to pull a fifty out of my pocket, put it down on the desk, and say, “BEER,” but I didn’t.

Does the dream mean anything?

In dreams, buildings are people or their offices. I dreamed about Donald Trump and a vacant building, and the building was his new presidency. Maybe the building represented my functions in this life.

Car dealerships are extremely filthy places. They run on fraud and theft. Maybe this is how God sees the person I was.

What are springs? An iniquity is an inner spring. A word the Bible translates as “iniquity” really means “crookedness.” When you take a crooked stick and straighten it, it becomes crooked again when you stop exerting effort. It’s a type of spring. The discarded springs in the dreams may have been the inner springs that used to push me to be a sinful person.

Rats are demons. Rats don’t show up on their own. We leave doors open. We leave garbage in cans. We drop food and don’t pick it up. We choose not to put traps out. We get angry at our demons, and we think we’re their victims, but we’re really just angry at our partners. The Bible says we’re supposed to be partners with God.

Rat dung is what demons spread inside us. They make us unclean. They make us ill. They make us disgusting for righteous beings, like the Holy Spirit, to inhabit.

I’m not sure who the older man was. Maybe he was the Holy Spirit, come with authority to rearrange and cleanse things. I believe the younger people were Christian friends I’m going to make.

Psalm 23 says, “You make me to lie down in green pastures.” In the Bible, green grass symbolizes the wicked. They grow for a season and then wither or are cut down. They are temporary. Most of the people you know now will disappear from your life forever when they die. Often, wicked people are allowed to waste their lives building up wealth so God’s children can have it when they lose it.

The verse says we lie down in green pastures. It doesn’t say we plant them or even that we have to stand and cut the grass for ourselves. This is a picture of inheritance. The Bible calls us heirs too many times to count. We’re not supposed to work hard at carnal tasks. That’s for the damned. We’re supposed to receive good things they’ve worked to build. Eventually, we will receive the whole earth.

I received a big building in the dream, ready to be cleaned up and made useful. Maybe it shows how Spirit-led Christians are taking ministries over from prosperity preachers and feel-good preachers who filled their churches with rats and dung. I don’t mean we’ll get the churches. We don’t need those. God is operating outside of churches now, through people without titles.

I used to be a member of Trinity Church in Miami, and their building was full of rodent dung. They had a big room beside the kitchen, and it had a cabinet along a wall. The cabinet was waist-high, and the drawers were full of thousands of pieces of unused flatware. Trinity always took anything anyone offered, so I guess someone gave them flatware.

They never cleaned the room. The drawers were packed with mouse dung.

For a while, I made pizza for Trinity, to be sold in their cafe. I had to set a table up in the storage room. Before I got to work, I insisted on getting rid of the dung. I got some kids, and we emptied all the drawers and cleaned everything with bleach. The pastors knew about the filth, and they should have been aware that it was very dangerous, but they didn’t care. As long as no one could see it, they were fine with it. If I hadn’t taken a stand, people would have made pizzas on a counter just above drawers full of moldering excrement.

Trinity had a kitchen volunteer named Kervin. He had a young son who kept getting sick. He kept getting high fevers. No one knew why. He used to play in the storage room. I told people the mouse excrement might be his problem. No one cared.

We were expected to pray for this kid, but anyone who talked about cleaning up the excrement was being “negative.”

I hope he’s okay.

I would be astounded to learn that the drawers were not full of dung right now. The Wilkersons and their cronies never learn. Their pride makes them stupid.

When my sister succumbed fully to addiction and hate, her house filled up with dung. She had a dog she never housetrained, and she didn’t mop after him. Her floors were coated with a varnish of urine and feces which accumulated, undisturbed, over a period of years. Rats came in, and she left things like big bags of beans in her pantry. Eventually, rat exrement was everywhere, and when you walked into the house in the daytime, I could hear panicked rats running around in the pantry, looking for places to hide. When I opened the door, I saw opened packages gnawed by rats. Meanwhile, my sister lived in the master bedroom, on a tiny bare place on a filthy mattress with no sheets. The rest of the house belonged to bugs and rodents.

Pests were given to us for a reason. They teach us what we become when we let demons live in us. They show us why repentance and casting out demons are necessary. But many of our big churches teach us to feed the demons instead. They say demons don’t exist. They give people the idea they can sin all they want, because they have Eternal Security. They say fornication is not a problem, as long as you’re a nice person. They say homosexuality is part of God’s plan. They don’t warn people about idolatry. They even teach meditation and yoga.

When a prostitute loses her looks, she has to come up with a new bait, and she has to lower her price.

What is it the new hipster churches DO warn about? “Judgment.” That’s the only sin left, as far as they’re concerned. Anyone who tells you the ship is sinking is a divider and a pharisee.

I suppose the Great Whore of Babylon in the Revelation must be the modern church. The prophet Hosea was told to marry a whore, and she kept running off with other men. She was still his wife, but this is how she behaved. The whore of the Revelation must be a group of people who are supposed to belong to God. If she were not supposed to belong to God, she would be something else, like an armed soldier on a horse. A whore is someone who betrays and sells out.

The modern church is filling itself up with idolatry. Pastors teach mindfulness, which comes from Hinduism. They teach yoga. They teach positive thinking divorced from scripture. They teach self-worship. There is a bride of Christ, and there is the great whore which persecutes God’s children.

People say Kenneth Copeland, possibly the most poisonous prosperity preacher, is trying to start a new religion combining Catholicism, Islam, and charismatic Christianity. If that’s true, it makes perfect sense. The Antichrist will be a religious leader, and he will be someone who comes from Christianity. John said the antichrists of his time “went out from us but were not of us.”

The prefix “anti” doesn’t just mean “against.” It means “instead of.” The Antichrist will try to give us a different way. The world is looking for a form of Christianity that incorporates homosexuality and ends the tension between Bible-believers and those who endorse sexual sin. The Antichrist will probably lure people by “solving” that problem.

I saw Mark Hemans say something very interesting. He was looking at a stained glass window in a cathedral. It showed two men in a bed. He said the Holy Spirit told him this would be the world’s new religion.

I hope God is cleaning me out. I hope he is preparing me to do useful things. I don’t want to be a disgusting environment for the Holy Spirit any more.

What Else is on the Menu?

For maybe 10 years, I’ve been telling other Christians it was crucial for us to get rid of demons and iniquities. One of the best pieces of evidence that I’m right is that I have been persecuted for it. If your pastor doesn’t think you’re a problem, there’s a good chance you’re doing something wrong!

In around 2008, after a long period of backsliding, I turned back to God and started attending Trinity Church in Miami. It’s a feel-good/prosperity gospel church. The pastors are obsessed with increasing membership and getting people to give them money. They live in fear. They’re afraid that if they tell the truth, membership will plummet, and their incomes will be reduced.

At Trinity, the only Bible verse that matters is, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” That’s Matthew 7:1. They use this verse incorrectly so they can forgive themselves for tolerating and encouraging sin. They say they don’t want to drive people out of the church with legalism, but the truth is that they just want money. They teach people to tithe, which is, of course, legalism. They can’t see or don’t care about their hypocrisy.

Now that I think about it, there are some other verses they like. I mean the ones about tithing and giving offerings. They make very sure everyone is familiar with those.

Trinity is located in a particularly sinful part of a very sinful city. The people who go to Trinity are generally unsuccessful and irresponsible. There is lots of fornication, even in the church’s stairwells. The kids smoke dope. Many sell drugs. Many are thieves. Unwed mothers are all over the church. The pastors don’t think they can change anyone, so they don’t try very hard. They hush things up and let people continue on the way to hell as long as the seats and offering buckets are full.

Here’s an interesting Trinity story. A young man named Alex Nicolas was prominent in the music ministry. People say he was extremely gifted. Trinity promoted him. Alex was also a car thief, and it’s extremely unlikely that this was unknown to the people around him. His Facebook page featured a photo of him in the embrace of another Trinity kid who worked at King of Diamonds, a notorious ghetto strip club. Alex lived in sin, and he probably was not saved.

One day Alex was pulled over in a stolen Mercedes. The police handcuffed him, and then he tried to run. He jumped into a canal and drowned.

Rich Wilkerson had a big memorial service at the church. During the service, he asked people for money. He has a charity called Peacemakers, and he took an offering on its behalf. People were appalled.

Did he say he regretted letting Alex down? I don’t know. People talk a lot about the offering. I don’t recall anyone saying Rich expressed concern over the boy’s soul.

That’s Trinity for you. It shows where the intentional abuse of Matthew 7 leads.

There’s a good chance Alex is in hell. Maybe he could have been corrected, had someone confronted him.

Of course, Christians have to judge. Jesus was just telling us to judge ourselves first and to be cleansed so we can help others to identify and rid themselves of their faults.

The Bible uses language in strange ways. It does not always mean what it seems to mean. For example, when a Biblical figure tells people, “Don’t do this; do that,” he may not really mean you’re never supposed to do the first thing. He may actually mean the second thing is much more important. When a Biblical figure says you should hate one thing and love another, it may not actually mean you have to hate the first thing. It may mean you should greatly prefer the second thing.

When Jesus said, “judge not,” he didn’t mean we should never judge the sins and iniquities of others. He just meant we should judge ourselves first. The Bible actually requires us to tell people about their wickedness. It says that if we do not, their blood will be required of us.

I used to tell people they needed to pray in tongues a lot, and I said people needed to get free of demons and iniquities. Over time, I became an irritant to the pastors. What I was saying was completely obvious, but it was a threat to their operation.

I suppose they thought they had everyone fooled, and that people like me were likely to wake them up and ruin everything. We did wake a few people up, but the pastors didn’t understand that many people at Trinity already knew they were teaching nonsense. People talked about the corruption all the time. One compared the Wilkersons to the mafia. Many people went to Trinity for the social life, so they didn’t care much about doctrine. Many knew what was going on, but they liked the music and the events. They came from corrupt cultures, so I doubt it bothered them to see corruption in their church.

I’ve been to a couple of Last Reformation events. I’ve seen Christians delivered from demons. I have been delivered, myself. I’ve watched Mark Hemans videos in which he cast demons out of church elders.

I was right. Deliverance isn’t just for crazy, homeless unbelievers who live in cemeteries. It’s not just for seemingly autistic or epileptic kids who cut themselves or fall down and foam at the mouth. It’s for all of us, all the time.

Jesus showed me something the other day. In the Bible, he said he stood at the door and knocked. Without deliverance, human beings are full of demons (“dead men’s ones,” as he called them), and the Spirit of Holiness is outside, asking to be let in. Once you’re delivered, the tables are turned. The Spirit of Holiness enters and dominates, and what do the demons do?

They stand outside and knock.

They don’t stop just because you threw them out. They just lose a lot of their power. A demon who is cast out doesn’t hurt you much, and if you keep Jesus out, he doesn’t help you much.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural.

Right now, you are probably dominated and inhabited by a number of demons. You tolerate it because you don’t know they’re there, or because they don’t make you miserable enough to try to get rid of them. You probably enjoy sin and the worldly lifestyle, and you may think it’s okay to go on as you are, because God forgives you. Eventually, though, there may come a time when your demons no longer seem cute, and you will be desperate to get rid of them. By then, they will have done immeasurable damage.

You may be harming yourself physically by tolerating sin and demons. A demon that helps you enjoy anger and greed, for example, may also give you heart attacks or cancer or some other physical problem. The Bible says envy “rots the bones.” Old Testament figures developed skin lesions when they slandered other people. Greed caused Gehazi to develop leprosy instantly. A spirit that helps you enjoy some particular sin may drive the person you’re supposed to marry away. Demons can work against your financial prosperity. They’re like squatters in a rental house. They don’t just live there; they wreck things.

Demons have not changed. They are the same today as they were when Elijah was on the earth, and they do the same things.

For a long time, I’ve known I needed to have a lifestyle of holiness in order to be free from demons and curses, but I didn’t know how far I had to go. Eventually, I got more serious. I threw out my blues and jazz CD’s. I threw out a lot of movies. I even quit drinking caffeine. Until I watched Mark Hemans, however, I didn’t realize just how deep I had to cut to get all the cancer.

Hemans cast a martial arts demon out of a church elder. The man had been studying karate for decades. He said his teacher took a sword and cut him from his chin to his waist, as a sort of dedication. He was a hardcore Christian, but he had to be delivered. Until Hemans talked to him, he didn’t know karate was a problem. The martial arts are full of spiritual mumbo jumbo. They’re not safe.

I saw Hemans cast demons related to rock music out of a woman. How many times have you listened to rock? We should know better. Look how rock musicians live. Many celebrate Satan overtly! They make Satanic hand signs at their concerts. They sing songs like, “Highway to Hell.” Still, I didn’t know I had to get rid of my rock albums. It’s remarkable that I missed something so obvious.

Nearly every American loves evil entertainment. We love occult movies and shows. How many Disney movies do NOT feature the occult? Almost none. All Marvel movies are based on the occult, whether they say so or not. Filling people with gamma rays doesn’t turn them into the Hulk; only spirits could do that. A radioactive spider can’t turn you into Spider-man and give you abilities that defy the laws of physics. Only spirits could. Think about Dr. Strange and the Scarlet Witch. They’re actual witches.

When you participate in the occult, demons try to get inside you, and often, they succeed. Then we wonder why we have illnesses and mental problems.

Drugs and alcohol can bring demons in. I’m not saying you can’t have one beer. I’m talking about abuse. Marijuana has caused many people to turn schizophrenic. They hear voices and hallucinate. LSD and ecstasy are even worse. Opioids make people hear music. PCP makes people think the police are devils. How obvious do things have to be?

Tobacco is a weed that was originally used (still is) in American Indian demon worship. We smoke it, have strokes and heart attacks, get COPD, and turn up with lung cancer. How can anyone think demons don’t work through tobacco?

I saw Hemans cast a tattoo demon out of a lady. It came in while she was getting her tattoo. God hates tattoos. There is a reason why tattoo shops used to be banned. God was watching out for us.

If I said demons entered people who committed rape or murder, most Christians would be willing to consider it, but how many are willing to say their “Jesus Saves” tattoos let demons in?

Some say Satan’s best trick was convincing the world he didn’t exist. A corollary is that he has convinced the world that evil is good or harmless. We pump our toddlers full of occult entertainment, and we think it’s cute. We get tattoos to honor the God who hates them. We sing in church, go home with sex partners we have not married, and pick up bongs. We read horoscopes over breakfast, looking to them instead of God to predict our futures. We insist that God is okay with homosexuality simply because the homosexuals we know don’t seem to be violent or malicious. We insist on celebrating Halloween. That’s a big one.

The Bible says, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” This isn’t just a warning. It’s a curse! God has cursed those who call evil good and good evil. That’s us! Are you cursing yourself and your family right now?

The Bible says, “Ye that love the Lord, hate evil: he preserveth the souls of his saints; he delivereth them out of the hand of the wicked.” This is a blessing. It’s a promise. The crazy thing is that we hold onto evil while criticizing God for failing to give us this blessing. “Why did this happen to me? I’m such a good person.” Look around and see what you’re holding onto. You want to hold onto life preservers, not anchors.

I can tell I’ve been freed from some spirits lately. I had sexual drives that never seemed to be completely defeated. Now they appear to be gone. I was quick to get angry when certain types of things happened, and now I’m much better. I want to continue until every contrary spirit is gone.

A funny thing happens to me now. When I see an attractive woman, or an image of an attractive woman, a voice inside me says, “You want a demon?,” and I cut off my thoughts, right where they are. I do not want a demon.

This seems to happen automatically, so I assume it’s the Spirit of Holiness. I’m hoping it will extend to other things. If I see an entire pizza with garlic rolls sitting in front of me, after the second slice, I want to hear myself say, “You want a demon?” When I start to get angry at someone or wish them evil, I want to hear it. I want to hear it before I procastinate. The Bible says laziness is wicked.

I know I can’t perfect myself. It’s nice to try and be good, but I never get real success until a supernatural hand rises up and lifts me. That’s how life is. God gives us grace to succeed, and without it, we always fail. You can’t even breathe without God’s help.

Modern churches tell us demons don’t exist in our world. Many say hell doesn’t exist. They tell us we’re good people. They tell us to continue living in our sins. Preachers are terrified of not living well, so they will say just about anything to make us happy. Of course, they offend and drive out real Christians, so they end up with big flocks of people who are essentially unbelievers. Trinity Church is notorious for this. They have a pattern of running off everyone who can help them. God only lets his servants suffer at Trinity for so long, and then he moves them out.

Preachers like Rich Wilkerson are telling people they do not need repentance or the Spirit of Holiness. It’s like they’re selling counterfeit tickets to a show. A lot of people are going to be shocked when they show their Trinity tickets to the doorman.

I saw a guy talk about outer darkness. Jesus mentioned this several times. The man who talked about it said he had been there. He said he got a man to say the sinner’s prayer, which is not a very good prayer, but that the man continued in drunkenness and did not change. The alcoholic died, and the man who thought he had led him to Christ had his vision at about the same time. He found himself in a dark, empty place, and he was convinced he would be there forever. He believes God showed him this so he could see what happened to the man he had led.

He said outer darkness was mentioned in connection with believers. For example, believers who show up at the wedding of Christ unprepared will be sent to outer darkness. He said it was not for people who had not asked for salvation.

I don’t know if he told the truth or if his doctrine was completely right, but he seemed serious, and I am confident that hell is full of Christians, just as I am sure that the Biblical religious Jews who were against God and his prophets went to hell.

You are spirit-led right now. The only question is which spirit is leading you. You can’t be on the fence. If you think you’re on the fence, you serve Satan, and he owns you. It’s extremely important to seek deliverance and to hold onto it, yet only a tiny percentage of churches teach this.

I’ve seen pastors in supposedly Spirit-filled churches berate and cajole and manipulate people for hours, trying to get them to give money, but how many times have I seen services where Christians focus on casting demons out? Nearly none!

No one wants to talk about demons. We get furious if anyone says we have demons, as though they were saying we had syphilis. Our fear and pride put up walls to protect our demons.

Would you tell a doctor holding a syringe full of antibiotic you didn’t have syphilis? If you had syphilis, you would do anything to convince him you were infected, just to get the shot. But we deny we have demons!

Tom Loud told a Smith Wigglesworth story. Someone asked Wigglesworth if a Christian could have a demon, and he said, “A Christian can have anything he wants.” Ouch. That was God talking.

We’re like Hindus who feed rats. In India, there is a big grain warehouse full of rats. I’ve seen it on TV. The rats are not poisoned. The people who run the warehouse put water out for them. There is a temple dedicated to rats, and people put out big pans of milk for them.

That’s us. We suckle rats while driving off the Spirit of Holiness, and we wonder why the Bible’s promises don’t seem to work for us.

We are incredibly jaded. We can’t see how we destroy ourselves. We need God to throw us into icy ponds to wake us up. We sleep while spirits chew off our limbs.

I don’t want Jesus to stand outside and knock. I want him inside with me, and if someone has to stand outside, let it be the damned spirits that hate us. I’m hoping I’m still young enough for repentance and deliverance to work for me.

I hope getting cleaned out doesn’t take as long as it took for me to fill myself with filth. I worked at it assiduously for decades.

I hope people will read about this and look at themselves and their homes and businesses. I hate to imagine the filthy supernatural vermin we would see and hear if our eyes and ears were opened.

Buy Yourself some Nice Jewelry Instead

Thanksgiving dinner is over.

My Texas trash recipe is excellent. Much better than last year. If you can find it in the post I wrote yesterday, you might as well save it, because it works.

Most Texas trash recipes are underseasoned, and they don’t contain nearly enough peanuts. My recipe has lots of Worcestershire sauce and other stuff. I used a cup of cocktail peanuts per family-size bag of cheddar Chex Mix, and I could have used three and gotten away with it.

My turkey came out great, as always. I think using Aidell’s andouille in the stuffing was not the best choice. Plain old Hillshire Farms beef sausage would have been better. Still, I have never had stuffing anywhere that compares to mine, so I guess it’s okay.

Here’s the big bombshell: everyone agreed that my Honeybaked ham clone blew the real thing away. Not even close. That’s a wrap for Honeybaked. I will never buy one of their hams again.

The recipe I posted works. Just be careful not to burn the crust when you torch it. You want it to harden but not blacken. You’re welcome.

You may not believe my recipe is better, but it is, and it costs 20% as much as the real thing. You may think people all over America wouldn’t be paying Honeybaked prices if they could do better at a small fraction of the price, with a few minutes’ work, but it’s a fact. Here’s something else that’s weird: the Smithfield ham I started with is better, regardless of crust or seasoning, than the meat inside the Honeybaked crust. It’s not as dry, and it’s more tender. You would think Honeybaked would at least try to provide the best meat available.

Spiral-sliced ham crusted with sugar, cloves, and spices is now cheap. You just have to be willing to work for 10 minutes instead of spending 30 minutes buying a ham at a store.

My guests were friends I made at Trinity Church. Their youngest is my goddaughter Gabby. She is really something. Totally fearless. A real firecracker. Runs up to people and grabs them. The thought of rejection is not part of her programming. They have four other kids, and they’re all a pleasure to be around.

We went through a lot at Trinity. We were treated badly by the pastors, of course. When my friends’ son was very young, he got burned while in the care of Trinity’s nursery staff. The burn was on his face, and it was large. The leadership clammed up and refused to talk to my friends. There was no admission of fault, and there was no offer of help.

Of course, when my friends took the boy to the ER, they were treated with suspicion. There were insinuations that they had burned him. It would have been nice if someone at Trinity had had a spine and a heart and could have backed them up.

They left the church. Later on, another child was burned in the nursery. That’s how Trinity is. Nothing changes. Everyone lives with blinders and a muzzle on. The leaders feel that if they pretend everything is fine long enough, eventually the people they hurt will go away and not sue them or otherwise inconvenience them.

My friend was an armorbearer at Trinity, as I was. He remembers spectacularly shabby behavior the Wilkerson family displayed toward me. For example, I put in a long day working for nothing, and then I made the mistake of driving home with Rich Wilkerson’s car keys. I lived 20 minutes away, and that’s in optimal traffic. Instead of showing a little class and gratitude and offering to send someone, like one of his two oldest sons, who did not have real jobs, for the keys, Wilkerson insisted I bring them back the same day.

You would think a grown man would have at least one copy of the key to his main vehicle.

Today we joked about Trinity. I said I wondered who had cooked Thanksgiving dinner for the Wilkersons. We had a good laugh about that. My friend speculated it was some black family still under the Wilkerson spell.

We left Trinity at about the same time, and we ended up in a church run by a man who was an active pedophile. One day that pastor came to church with a Christmas ornament he had bought for my friends’ second-oldest daughter, who would have been maybe eight. My friends thought it was a creepy thing for a middle-aged man to do. When the mother of the pastor’s victim blew the lid off things, my friends were glad they had left the church before anything happened to their daughter.

Being abused by the same preachers can really help people bond.

We cooperated today. I provided the turkey and a couple of pies, and my friends brought sides and soft drinks, plus two unexpected pies. This is how normal Christians do it. They don’t manipulate other people into cooking their food and then stroll in after someone else does all the work.

We had a lot of fun, even though my friends’ rescue dog, Pumpkin, pooped on my carpet. I can pretty much count on Pumpkin leaving me a present on every visit. I have a fair amount of equipment for taking care of a dementia patient, so I was well prepared for any type of spill.

Their eldest daughter stayed in the kitchen most of the afternoon, working on her studies. She had a scholarship to one of Florida’s best private colleges, but she had to turn it down because they don’t offer a pharmacy program. She wants to do the 6-year program at FAMU. Her mother complained that all she did was study. What a terrible problem for a parent to have!

She’s a tremendous young lady. Really restores my faith in young people.

The boy who was burned will be starting baseball next year. His dad had him out in my hard today with a tee-ball set.

When we were done eating, my friends and their kids did most of the clean-up work. The reward for the kids was pie, plus being allowed to shoot coconut-flavored Reddi-wip directly into their mouths.

The conclusion today was that if I’m still here next year, we will do it again, and they will spend the night. Everyone was paralyzed after dinner. They did not want to climb in the car and drive home.

I made them take most of the leftovers. It’s not safe for me to be around that stuff. They made the mistake of leaving an entire pecan pie. I will probably throw it out. That will hurt.

I’m expecting my aunt and cousin for Christmas. We somehow ended up outside the circle of relatives who were invited to family get-togethers, so we will gather here and have better food and weather than everyone else.

I hope your Thanksgiving has gone well. I have to go downstairs now and talk to a couple of birds.

Let’s Bust up the Honeybaked Cartel

I wrote a long post yesterday, but I deleted it because it seemed too negative. I complained about the cost of holiday food. I have a lot going for me, and I have good friends who are coming to share a meal with me, so I should not be crabby. I should never be crabby, really. Crabbiness is not a fruit of the Spirit.

That being said, I have to confirm the primary thesis of the post I deleted, to wit: Honeybaked hams cost way too much!

This year, I’m sharing food expenses. My friends are bringing sides. I’m on the hook for a turkey, a ham, and two pies. I figured the meal would be cheaper than usual, but then I went shopping yesterday and spent over $130.

There were four reasons the food cost so much.

1. I could not get a normal-sized turkey because people who fry turkeys snap them up early. I had to get an 18-pounder, so I paid for three extra pounds.

2. I bought Korbel brut to flavor the turkey and dressing. Poultry without white wine is wrong. We should probably be marinating fried chicken in it.

3. I bought pecans for pies. Nuts are crazy expensive. I don’t know if there was a nut blight or what, but the only cheap nuts now are peanuts. I spent $11 on 16 ounces of pecan halves.

4. I bought a Honeybaked ham. It seems pretty well established that all the other brands are inferior, so I paid the price for the real thing. For a tiny 4.5-pound ham, I paid about $50.

This is a lot of money for a tiny ham. Even Omaha Steaks, which is basically a scam operation that preys on people who have no sales resistance, sells hams cheaper.

Omaha Steaks and other food truck scams have an annoying and insulting Jedi trick they play on people. The guy parks his freezer truck in your driveway, and then he comes to your door and says, “Come see what I’ve got in the truck.” He starts walking backward while looking at you to motivate you to follow. It’s definitely something they teach in their training. The natural response is to follow. The countermove is to shut the door while they’re backing away, and if you want to keep it civil, say, “No thanks! Have a great day!” They will not come back to your door. It’s too awkward. Walking away is supposed to compel you to follow, like the motion of a fishing lure, but it also establishes their motion toward the truck, and once you shut the door, they pretty much have to continue.

I feel for the truck people. I know exactly what happened to them. Someone from Omaha Steaks convinced them to finance a truck and a bunch of substandard food, on the assurance that their methods can’t fail. They work up their courage and go out and try it, and people like me shut the door on them. Ouch.

No one likes to be treated like a cat chasing a laser pointer. If I don’t cooperate, it’s on you, buddy. Welcome to sales.

I’ve actually had their steaks. Thin frozen cuts of what appeared to be plain old supermarket-grade beef. Not good at all.

Of course, I’m assuming all the truck salespeople who pestered me were real Omaha Steaks affiliates. Maybe they were not. But if you Google around, you will find some pretty sad-looking photos of real Omaha Steaks frozen wonders. They look just like the ones I tried.

To get back to the Honeybaked story, my local grocery is selling similar hams right now for under $20, or $4 per pound. They sell bone-in spiral hams for $2 per pound, which is a monumental discount over Honeybaked. I can buy sliced, packaged country ham shipped to me for something like $7 per pound. Clearly, $11 per pound is too much for a Honeybaked ham.

I thought about it yesterday, and it occurred to me that a smart person should be able to duplicate (and improve upon) the taste of a Honeybaked ham at home. I went to my kitchen and mixed up some ingredients.

My efforts were based on the way I remember Honeybaked hams tasting in the distant past. I haven’t had one in years, and I can’t break into the one I just bought. The ones I’ve had tasted like sugar and cloves. That’s about all.

There are clone recipes on the web, but they don’t look good. Some include onion powder, and I don’t see that working at all. At least one includes cinnamon. Honeybaked hams do not taste like cinnamon.

I fiddled around for a while, and I think I can tell you what was in the glaze on the hams I remember: white or light brown sugar, light honey, cloves, nutmeg, mustard, and caramel. Allspice may also be in there somewhere.

For mustard, you can use whatever you have. I used French’s yellow mustard, which is as unpretentious as mustard gets. I would not use mustard powder, because the acidity of prepared mustard is helpful.

You may be wondering how to get caramel to put in your glaze. I learned some new things about caramel.

It’s always possible to burn sugar in a pan to get caramel. The problem is that you end up with a hard piece of sugar glass. It’s not easy to break up so you can apply it to things. Also, it will have some bitterness, which you may not want.

What if you want caramel-flavored granules with no bitterness? You just bake granulated sugar at 300° until it turns brown. It stays in grain form, and it doesn’t get as bitter as burned sugar.

I’m thinking you could use this in your glaze as an addition to plain sugar, or, by controlling how dark it gets, you could replace the plain sugar entirely.

It’s supposed to be an excellent cookie ingredient. Look it up.

Do NOT put cinnamon in your glaze. I tried it, and it makes the glaze smell funky, like something that has been sitting at the bottom of a laundry hamper for a month. It’s a very bad idea.

I looked at some copycat recipes, and while I reject their ingredients, I think their cooking methods aren’t bad. It appears that you just smear the ham with honey, bake it until it’s warm, apply the rest of the glaze ingredients, and then broil it or use a torch to set the crust.

One lady suggests applying butter with the honey. I don’t think the Honeybaked people do that, but it sounds like a good way to one-up them. Nearly everything needs butter.

I can’t tell you how much of each ingredient to use, but you should be able to figure that out by trial and error. I would say maybe 1/4 teaspoon of cloves per ounce of sugar, to start. You don’t want much mustard at all. You want it to be a subtle background ingredient. You don’t want much nutmeg, either.

I would use prepared mustard and mix it with the honey.

If I were doing this, I would use orange blossom or sourwood honey. You don’t want a dark honey with a strong flavor. The honey is mainly there to hold the sugar mix in place.

Don’t put salt in the glaze. It makes it taste worse.

I feel like trying this just to stick it to the man, even though it will cost me more money and I don’t want another ham.

If Honeybaked charged half as much as they do, they would still make a killing, and people like me would not be scheming to outwit them.

I may try this. It’s bugging me.

Bring on the Styrofoam Containers

Last night I was in prayer, and I spent some time thinking about the negative effects popular culture has on me. I thought about the things I still need to clean out of my life.

I thought about the nazirites. I don’t know much about the concept, but in the Old Testament, a nazirite was a person who was dedicated to God. They had to obey conditions going beyond the Jewish law. Samson was a nazirite from birth. He was not allowed to drink wine, let a razor touch his head, or touch a dead body.

It seems like Spirit-led Christians have to be a lot like nazirites. You can’t listen to rock or let your kids have a Pirates of the Caribbean DVD like everyone else, but on the other hand, you get to know God personally, and he gives you things like the ability to heal, prophecy, and the ability to work miracles. He warns you about things that take other people by surprise.

I thought about the verse in the 91st psalm, which says, “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.”

When I think about this verse, I am glad to know I’m protected, but I also think about the other people–the vast majority of the earth’s inhabitants–who are not.

In God’s eyes, “the wicked” can be defined this way: “those who have rejected Jesus Christ.” That’s all it takes. You can feed the sick. You can give a stranger a kidney. You can give to the poor. That’s not what God looks at. It doesn’t help. What matters is whether you accepted the sacrifice. It’s not about what you’ve done, because the evil you do is expunged from your record when you receive salvation.

There are reformed pedophiles in heaven, but Mother Teresa, who spoke against faith, may be in hell.

I am not a mushy person who cries at movies, but last night it disturbed me to think of the problems unbelievers are headed for. I felt the sorrow of the Holy Spirit. For a minute, I held my head in my hands and thought about the future of those who won’t listen.

It can’t be repeated often enough: hell is not for “bad” people. It’s for people who don’t listen.

Heaven is for bad people. Jesus was crucified for bad people. If people had been good, he would have had no reason to be crucified, so he would not have done it.

Heaven is for bad people because there is no other kind of person.

If it weren’t for bad people, heaven would be empty except for God, the angels, and people who either died before they could sin or had some issue that made it unreasonable to require them to accept Jesus. It would be full of aborted children, the retarded, and people who lived on secluded islands or in rain forests.

There are a lot of Christians out there who are in danger of hell. I’ve known plenty of Christians who lived in fornication even while serving at church. They thought it was okay to live with people they weren’t married to. I’ve known Christians who used drugs. The world is full of Christians who participate in other religions, such as astrology, fortune-telling, and yoga. I wonder what will happen to them.

I saw a testimony from a Christian who claimed she had visited hell. She said God had told her she was going there because she lived with her boyfriend. How many Christians would believe that today?

There was a young lady who used to sing at my last church. She was single. She had a baby. Okay; I could accept that. People who choose to fornicate repent, as I did. Sometimes people have children in marriage, and then they end up single. No problem. And it was good that she didn’t have her baby killed.

Then another baby popped up. I thought maybe she had slipped. Then she came in with a third one. I was only there for three years, so she was maintaining a high level of production. I can’t even guess how many kids she has now.

The pastor had no problem with putting her on the stage as a corrupting example, because he liked her voice. She must have thought she was doing fine, but she was continuing in a major sin, knowingly and without coercion, without repentance.

God forgives just about anything, but you’re supposed to repent. You can’t go to Jesus and say, “I plan to visit a prostitute this evening, so could you go ahead and forgive me now?”

We’re so terrified of “judging” that many of us have decided anything goes. That’s not how it works. For example, you can be a homosexual and be forgiven, but you can’t get saved, marry another homosexual, and then expect God to tolerate it.

Wrong is still wrong.

I keep seeing people on Youtube, talking about their recent rapture dreams. It’s shocking how many people are dreaming of the rapture. It happened to me in 2016, and now there is a wave of others who have had the same experience.

When I think of the way technology is destroying free will, the astounding filthiness of modern culture, and the tide of rapture dreams, I feel that time is very, very short, and only a small percentage of Christians are ready.

Missing the rapture is a big deal. You will have to live on a planet that isn’t protected by the prayers and presence of God’s children. The terrible things God keeps away from the world today will be released. Plagues that used to go away will rage without hindrance. Meteors that used to miss the earth will land here. Storms that would have missed major cities will strike them and rest over them. And if you profess faith in God, you will be executed.

This is all bad, but there is more to think about. If you’re not fit for the rapture, how can you think you’re fit to be saved when you die? It doesn’t make sense.

Many preachers teach people that all you have to do to be saved is to raise your hand and ask, and Christians like to believe it, because it means they can go on enjoying sin. It’s a very dangerous teaching. You’re supposed to change. The word says you’re supposed to become the righteousness of God. Should you really expect God to reach down into your bedroom and lift you off the earth while you’re lying in bed with your girlfriend, smoking a joint, and playing a violent video game?

We should be looking for ways to do a lot for God, but instead, we keep trying to find out how little we can do and still avoid hell.

Jesus said very clearly that we would not see him coming. He said he would return at a time when we did not expect it. That means we will not know when it’s coming. Any human being who tries to pin down the date will be wrong. But he did tell us there would be signs to tell us when the end was near. We keep seeing those signs.

What does “near” mean to God? To me, it would mean a year or less, but I’m just a man. For all I know, to God, “near” means a century from now. But with the end of free will approaching quickly, it’s hard to believe we will be waiting that long.

We shouldn’t be trying to guess the date so we can sin until the previous week. We should live as though he were coming this afternoon. Living for God is always the right thing to do. You shouldn’t have to be motivated by a crisis.

It’s a weird time to be alive. One way or the other, it will be a relief to see things reach a resolution.

I have to go get a turkey and a ham now. Friends are coming for Thanksgiving. I don’t want to cook at all, but I can’t stand the thought of a lame turkey with bones in it, so I’m going to bone and stuff a bird. My friends have agreed to supply the rest of the food. They’re planning to go to Cracker Barrel for it. I’m all for that.

There was a time when I would have rebelled at the thought of eating restaurant food on a holiday, but those days are done. I am somewhat tempted to abandon the turkey project, if the truth be told. Even without side dishes, the turkey will be a two-day effort.

I’m so tired of cooking and cleaning, I don’t look forward to the food.

I think we make too much of holidays. I know I’ve written about that before. People go into debt on Christmas. That’s ridiculous. We celebrate the birth of the one who told us not to borrow…by borrowing. Holiday meals are also over the top.

When my dad was alive, I had to cook a ton of stuff. He insisted on cranberry sauce, which is sad and inferior compared to relish, and he demanded oyster dressing, which is, quite simply, disgusting. I always made sauce, relish, oyster dressing, and normal dressing. Then there were the other dishes. Yams, potatoes, beans, two kinds of pie…it’s just too much.

I can’t understand why anyone would put nasty canned oysters in dressing. Why not toss a few slugs in there while you’re at it?

Maybe it tastes great, but I can’t get past the smell.

I have been asked to fix a sweet potato pie. I have no idea how to do that. I figure it’s a pumpkin pie made with yams. I think I’ll just crank out two pecan pies instead. They’re much better, and the preparation time is only a few minutes.

Someone asked me to make a sweet potato pie a few years back. They had invited me and my dad to Thanksgiving dinner, so I was happy to do it. I told them I didn’t know how to do it, but they were okay with that. I substituted yams in a pumpkin pie recipe, and everyone was happy.

Here’s something you need to know, if you can’t cook. When you know a good cook, and you want them to fix something for you, you do NOT ask for something they’ve never cooked. They’ll just open a cookbook and use someone else’s bad recipe. Being a good cook doesn’t mean you can cook anything anyone wants, on demand. It means you can cook certain things you’re familiar with.

I knew a professional chef who collected cookbooks. She was willing to cook anything on a one-off basis. It generally did not work well. It all depended on which recipe she used. She didn’t write recipes, so when she needed a dish, she just cracked a book. Most cookbooks are bad. When she happened, by chance, to find a good recipe, she did okay, but she couldn’t hit the gong consistently.

Make me work out of cookbooks, and you will get similar results.

The sweet potato pie I made was not good. It was sort of okay.

A good cook isn’t someone who can take a cookbook, follow it precisely, and make good food. A good cook writes or improves recipes. You can also fake being a good cook by collecting proven recipes.

I look forward to seeing my friends. That will be great. The food, I could not care less about. When I think of big meals, I think of dirty dishes and trips to the dump. I picture myself in the kitchen, alone, at 10 p.m., with a pot in one hand and a brush in the other.

The best holiday meal, to avoid hard work, is prime rib. You only use two things: a roasting pan and a serving platter. You salt and season the meat, roast it at 200° until it’s around 95° inside, remove the foil, crank the heat to 500°, and brown it. Done. Cleaning up after prime rib is easy. Of course, many people I know will not eat properly cooked beef, so prime rib can be a problem.

Women, especially, tend to reject beef unless you ruin it by serving it well done. When I used to give my dad prime rib, I had to put his perfectly prepared serving in the microwave and ruin it first. If you only eat beef well done, you might as well buy the cheap stuff, because you have the palate of a terrier.

I don’t care much about food any more. I don’t know anyone who can cook well enough to make me happy. I don’t know of any restaurant that prepares food that compares to my own. I am tired of doing dishes and cleaning the stove. It’s hard to get excited about a turkey.

Today I’m roasting a chicken because I could not think of anything else I wanted badly enough to work on. Throw it in the oven with seasonings and vegetables, take it out three hours later…done. Good enough.

We should really abolish mandatory holiday meals. It’s so much better when you can share a meal whenever you want, just because you want to. Making giant holiday meals and splurging on Christmas gifts is like going to homeless shelters to feed people on Thanksgiving and Christmas. If you’ve been a jerk all year, go ahead and ruin your holiday, because you deserve it, but we should be charitable all year long.

I wonder how people who run homeless shelters feel about folks who drop by to hand out food on holidays. I can guess. They resent them for not showing up the other 364 days of the year. It’s like going to church on Easter and Christmas to make up for backsliding. You just make the volunteers mad and jam up the parking lot. And those awful hats. No one can see around them.

Okay, okay. I will be grateful. I have wonderful friends. I have a beautiful house in which to host the meal. I can afford good food. I will work on my attitude. I really will.

I have to get up. The turkey and ham aren’t going to buy themselves.

We Worship People our Ancestors Would not have Permitted in Their Homes

Note: I wrote this a couple of days ago. Something kept telling me not to publish it. Today I felt that I was released.

I am disturbed today.

This morning during my prayer time, I picked up my phone for a minute, and somehow I ended up Googling Stanley Kubrick. From there, I went on to read up on Dr. Strangelove, Terry Southern, the beat generation, William S. Burroughs, Rip Torn, Saturday Night Live, and a number of popular movies.

I have never liked Stanley Kubrick movies. The only exception is Dr. Strangelove, which was a pretty fair picture of the way human organizations work. It was like Dilbert’s view of the Cold War.

I just realized I liked another Kubrick movie. I don’t like it now, however. When I was a kid, I watched A Clockwork Orange, and I got caught up in the way it made extreme cruelty and rape funny. I think most people who like the movie like it for its humor, and that’s unfortunate, because it shows how our consciences have been seared. I should never have found it funny. I should have left the room in shock.

I never thought much of 2001. It was an extremely boring movie. The plot could have been summed up in less than 10 seconds. It was not clever. It was not funny. It was not moving. It was like something a high school student could have written.

Full Metal Jacket was somewhat like A Clockwork Orange. Thanks to R. Lee Ermey, Kubrick again succeeded in making depravity amusing. The rest of the film was just sensationalism, pessimism, and hatred of humanity. There was no plot. It’s not clear if Kubrick had any type of structure in mind when he made the film.

He obviously hated the military. That much is clear. Of course, his freedom to make his films was built on the corpses of dead soldiers.

Terry Southern rewrote Dr. Strangelove, which means he made a small contribution to the film, but many people think he wrote the whole thing. He was a Texan. He was a pal of beatniks and counterculture apostles. He ran around with William S. Burroughs, who is the very face of depravity and damnation. You haven’t debased yourself with literature until you’ve read his book Naked Lunch.

Terry Southern wrote Easy Rider, which was an exceptionally poisonous movie. He also wrote The Magic Christian, a cult film in which Peter Sellers convinces people to humiliate themselves in exchange for money. I don’t think Southern ever turned down money, but he seems to have been pretty disgusted with other people who thought about things like paying bills.

There is a scene in The Magic Christian in which Sellers’ character fills a tank with excrement and slaughterhouse waste and then adds a huge amount of British currency. People walking by start trying to pick notes out from outside the tank, and they end up swimming in it in order to maximize their success.

I read that Mike O’Donoghue tried to get Southern to write for The National Lampoon, which spawned P.J. O’Rourke, John Hughes, and Doug Kenney, who would probably have become famous, too, had he not fallen off a cliff.

I could say the Lampoon spawned me, too. A lot of the humor I’ve written was influenced by the Lampoon. Many of the self-destructive things I did in college were inspired by the spirit of Animal House.

As I read about various people and movies, God showed me that our secular culture is generated by a club, or, more accurately, a family. Directors know actors and screenwriters. Actors and screenwriters know musicians. The whole crew is in bed with leftist journalists and politicians; in fact, Southern, not Hunter Thompson, is said to have been the father of “the New Journalism.” It’s a big, sprawling guild, spreading infectious pus over America from a thousand points of darkness.

I’m so sorry I ever had an interest in popular culture. I see how poisonous it is now.

I used to fantasize about working for the Lampoon. I once sent submissions to a show SNL spun off, hoping to be hired as a writer. I’ve written a gigantic amount of sick humor on the Internet. I got three books published. I knew I could write humor as well as anyone. I thought it was only a matter of time until I was recognized.

I have to thank God my career didn’t go anywhere. What would have happened to me? I would have become convinced I was on the right track. I would have had no incentive to turn to God.

When I think of popular culture, I think of carnies. A carny is a person who works for a carnival. Carnies are typically moral nullities. They have been rejected by decent people for centuries.

Carnies have a reputation for coming to town, conning people out of their money, stealing things that aren’t locked up, seducing women, and enticing men with sex. Their reputation is well-deserved. They do all these things. A carnival is like a traveling apparatus for spreading disease. You could say carnies are like reverse evangelists.

The other day I saw an episode of American Pickers. This show is about two men, Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, who roam around buying collectible items from people. They have a female assistant named Danielle. She’s a stripper. She is covered with tattoos.

In the episode I saw, Danielle and Mike visited an artist who collects flash art. You may be wondering what that is. It’s wall art used in tattoo shops. Tattooists create posters of their designs, and they hang them on their shop walls. You look at the flash art and choose the tattoo you want.

Danielle was beside herself with awe as she looked at the tacky, sleazy, artistically feeble posters of filthy drawings. It was as though someone had given her a private viewing of Michelangelo’s statues. She was looking at garbage, mind you. She knew the names of the “artists.” She spoke of them the way a pianist might speak of Art Tatum. She spoke with true reverence.

Imagine speaking of a pornography dealer or a pimp with reverence. That was how it sounded to me. Actually, many Americans do revere a pornography dealer. In his last decades, Hugh Hefner–a giant among degenerates–was treated like an elder statesman.

She talked about the connection between carnivals and tattoos. She said she was a carny at heart.

The posters featured things like nude, whorish women with exaggerated physiques. Very tasteless.

As I watched her, I thought about what America had become.

America is in love with evil, and the people who lead us in our love are bound together surprisingly tightly. Look at one prominent exponent of sin, and you will be presented with links to others. It’s like a game of six degrees of Satan.

We have many celebrities who are open about loving evil. Consider rock music. On the other hand, we have a lot of evil-loving celebrities who appear squeaky clean or at least morally neutral. Look how Disney kids turn out. Britney Spears. Christina Aguilera. Shia Laboeuf. Lindsey Lohan. Miley Cyrus.

In order to become prominent in the arts or journalism, you almost have to be in the club. I didn’t know that when I was trying to get in. I was running from God, but I had enough of the smell of Christianity on me to make me an impossible fit. The vast bulk of the arts are harmful. The arts have been instrumental in promoting our decline as a civilization.

The arts promote leftism, sexual sin, hatred of authority, emasculation, cruelty, narcissism, drug abuse, pride, anger, the rejection of logic, and selfishness. It’s amazing we’ve done as well as we have, under the influence of the arts.

I feel bad about trying to get into the club, and I also feel bad about holding onto certain things too long. I feel bad about amassing a big blues and jazz collection, which I discarded not long ago. I feel bad about owning literature that poisoned me.

When I was young, I owned a lot of books by Henry Miller and Anais Nin. That could never have happened, had I known anything about God. I was ignorant. I had no one to tell me I was hurting myself. My own mother introduced me to Henry Miller!

I admired Hunter Thompson, who was one of the biggest failures in modern history. I watched other people destroy themselves, and I wanted to take my turn.

I have a friend who loves Harry Potter. I could not convince her to give it up. The books brought her comfort while she was growing up with abusive parents. I don’t think she understands that she brought demons into her life, and that they are connected to her current problems. It’s bad that I lived in ignorance for so long. I wish I were better able to help other people get out of it, but human beings tend to wait for their own self-generated disasters instead of learning from the bad choices of others. My own experience is an example.

I’ve been watching a lot of Mark Hemans lately. He’s an Australian healer who goes around casting out demons and teaching. He sometimes tells people they collected demons via one-off experiences. For example, getting one tattoo or talking to one “psychic” can invite a demon that never leaves and nearly destroys your life.

How many times have I opened doors? I can’t count the dirty movies, books, magazines, and websites I’ve seen. My uncle took me and my cousin to a dirty movie, which wasn’t even very good, when we were 8 and 7, and I watched Deadpool when I was deep into middle age. I watched many things in between. I’m not even mentioning the non-mainstream things I’ve seen.

My uncle also took us to see Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex. I don’t know what he was thinking.

I consulted a psychic once. I let my mother have my astrological chart done. I used various drugs. I said all sorts of careless things.

Christians tend to think that as long as they go to church and reject the worst sinful activities, it’s okay to be part of mainstream culture. That’s not true. Things we think are harmless can be very damaging. I saw Hemans tell a lady to go home and throw out her daughter’s fairy tale books. He said they were a reason demons were afflicting her daughter. How many Christians have shelves full of Pixar and Disney films about supernatural creatures?

There is no significant difference between watching fetish pornography and watching John Wick or a Harry Potter film. A demon is a demon, no matter what vehicle it arrives in.

I can’t believe I let myself watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I must have been insane.

When I think about the things I’ve ingested, the sensation I have is a wish that I could vomit everything out and be clean. I have been praying for hours every day for years, I have been baptized with the Holy Spirit, I am very sincere about serving God, and still, this is where I am. What must life be like for Christians who are not even trying?

Maybe Satan doesn’t mind it all that much if you get baptized with the Holy Spirit, as long as you hold onto your culture. If you go home and wallow in worldly filth and defend it to other people, you aren’t a big threat, and you are likely to return to him. You are also likely to serve him very powerfully even while you think you’re on God’s side. Christian TV is full of preachers who do tremendous work for Satan and almost nothing for God.

Understanding all this, I believe I know what’s happening with Kanye West. He is not a sound Christian. He is very dangerous. He has let worldly Christians and his own flesh convince him that he’s supposed to help God out with his fame and money. He wants to show the world a rich, famous Christian can do powerful works for God, and that Christians are the ones who are supposed to have the TV cameras and big venues.

West is under the spell of Richie Wilkerson, who is as toxic as preachers get, short of starting cults in the Amazon basin. Richie has no interest in God. He believes in money and fame. Richie’s mom and dad run a cult church where money is god, and the apple fell right next to the trees. Richie thinks earthly promotion is proof of God’s presence, even if you have to debase yourself to get it.

If you look at things Richie says in public, you’ll see he’s very defensive. He’s always defending what he’s doing. He knows he’s in the wrong.

Paul made it clear we are not supposed to associate with Christians who continue in willful sin, yet Richie has no problem using his closeness to Kim Kardashian to promote his ministry. After years of connecting with Richie, Kim Kardashian still works for the devil. She is a powerful promoter of sexual sin. She has not repented. Kanye West, if he has changed at all, is an embryonic Christian who should not be leading anyone. When Richie hangs out with them and endorses what they do, he is not being loving and inclusive. He is just whoring out and being a follower. This is exactly what his dad does, with less success.

I think there is hope for West, but I think his breakthrough won’t come until he gets free of the Wilkerson curse. Until you see him abandon and denounce his secular works–completely–don’t be fooled. He’s still deceived.

I was there when people who actually cared about God fled the Wilkerson church. I know what I’m talking about. The Wilkersons had secret meetings about me, and Richie actually preached publicly against what I was saying in private. They are not nice people. They grin and smile and talk about love when they’re really just trying to seduce people so they can take their money. Then if you tell people what they’re up to, the Wilkersons call you a hater.

It’s a wonderful pose. You smile and forgive in front of the crowd, and you claim you love everyone who is against you. The idea is to make yourself look holy, and to make people who speak for God look wicked, while you pick people’s pockets.

Satan appears as an angel of light. Why? Because people like to be kissed and coddled and told they don’t have to change. They prefer flatterers who destroy them to honest people who love them and want to help them.

People like the Wilkersons defend themselves with numbers. “Look how many people came to church today.” They don’t know how few of those people belong to God. They use the wrong bait, so they attract the wrong people. The Bible says, “Better a little the righteous man has than the riches of many wicked.”

When Jesus becomes popular, he ceases to be Jesus. He said the world would hate his children, and it does. You can’t have a glamorous, worldwide movement everyone approves of and expect God to be part of it.

The best that can be said for Richie and Kanye is that some people may go to their events and get to know God in spite of the errors of the organizers. How well such new Christians would do would depend largely on their willingness to ignore everything Richie says and find better teaching. I improved a great deal at Trinity Church, but the better I got, the more I disagreed with the management. Had God not given me a prodigious habit of praying in tongues, which brings revelation, I might still be at Trinity, drinking the Kool Aid.

Leaving Trinity was wonderful. It was like a graduation. I felt like a runaway slave. The rapture will feel the same way.

Even the pharisees who rejected Jesus and are now in hell taught some useful things, as Jesus himself said. That’s how it will be with Kanye’s new project.

I will keep looking at my life and trying to rid myself of anything toxic.

Coercion Results in Welding Table Purchase

It seems like the exciting news never stops. I have made a decision regarding buying a welding table.

Why am I buying a table at all? I still haven’t finished painting the grinder pedestal I welded together. A fine fabricator I turned out to be. I keep putting things off.

The finish on the top is going to have to be sanded and repainted at least one more time. I also need to enlarge or replace a couple of holes for the bolts that hold the grinder on. I put them in the wrong places.

I really will finish the pedestal. I could use it right now (after using the drill twice). I just want it to look a little better.

Anyway, I had a couple of table ideas in mind. One was to build my own table, which would be somewhat challenging…without a welding table. Another was to buy a Fabblock table from Weldtables.com and assemble it myself. The Fabblock I wanted, plus legs, runs $800 plus shipping. Ow.

There was a third alternative, but my opportunity to try it was temporary, and I let it slip by. Now I have another opportunity, so I’m pouncing.

Northern Tool sells Klutch tools. I think it’s their house brand. They have a welding table that usually sells for almost $400. For some inexplicable reason, they put it on sale for $179. I noticed it a while back. Then, while I was fighting temptation, they took it away! Fiends!

This is a very nice table. The top is 4mm thick, which means it’s around 1/6 of an inch. It has 16mm holes all over it. It comes with a bunch of clamps and fixturing tools. You can open the box, put it together, and start welding without buying a single clamp.

People say the top is generally very flat, but you may get a lemon with a 1/16″ crown or dip. I think it’s worth the risk. It might be possible to improve a warped table, and in any case, it shouldn’t be hard to shim workpieces and get them flat. A 1/16″ bend is not hard to compensate for.

Is it the table of my dreams? No, but it’s very cheap and very good, and if I move to Tennessee, it will be a lot easier to move than a Fabblock. If Northern Tool kills the sale price again, I should actually be able to sell it locally for more than I paid. Then I can buy a Fabblock when I’m firmly situated.

I can use this table to build a bigger table, if I want. That may actually be the best move. My milling machine is about to be returned to me, so preparing slats for a shopmade table will be easy.

Northern Tool made it impossible to say no. They brought the low price back, and then they sent me an email saying they would give me a $10 gift card for ordering online (code 268178). That brings the price to $169 plus tax. The other day I spent $180 on a lame restaurant meal. How can I say no to a welding table that costs $11 less?

Strong Hand Tools makes wonderful [Chinese] stuff, and their version of the Klutch table costs about $430. Strong Hand is actually kind of disturbing, because it’s one of those companies that show us the future. Their products are Chinese, but the quality is really good. I have their version of the famous Bessey clamp, and it looks like an improvement to me.

I can’t wait to abandon my Harbor Freight table. For the money, it is a stellar tool, but when you consider what they cost, that’s faint praise. It’s wobbly, it’s not flat, and it’s small. I may keep it for use as a portable, which is the purpose it’s made for. I do not plan to weld on it in my shop unless I have no choice.

Now I need to get wheels for the new table. Once that’s done, I’ll be sitting pretty.

Speaking of Chinese, I finally have a good source of Chinese food. The only local place I have tried was a disaster. It was hot and dirty, and the proprietress kept screaming at the cook in Chinese. Their kung pao chicken was pretty bad, and instead of cooking the peanuts in sauce, they just dumped dry raw peanuts on top of the food.

Small towns are known for terrible Chinese, as is Miami. My area had only one decent place, and they tore it down to build something or other.

I know good Chinese food. When I was a student at Columbia University, I had access to very good Szechuan places. For example, I used to eat at the Hunan Balcony on upper Broadway. I also know bad Chinese food. The oil smells rancid. The meat always seems to be nearly spoiled. The smell when the kitchen door opens is scary. All the sauce is basically duck sauce. The seasonings are off.

I found myself a recipe for kung pao chicken, over at Epicurious. It’s from a book by a lady named Kuan. I used Epicurious because I’m not a Cook’s Illustrated subscriber any more, and I hate Cooks.com and the Food Network’s revolting recipes. When I think about the Food Network, I always think about Bobby Flay’s inept 325° prime rib recipe. Don’t buy a rib roast and cook it at 325°. Just buy some liquid rubber, pour it in a roast-shaped mold, and let it cure for several days. Same result.

The recipe called for a couple of weird items. It called for black vinegar and hoisin sauce. I went to an Asian grocery to pick up the vinegar. I told the girl there the local Chinese food was heinous. She said it wasn’t Americanized. I can understand why she would stand up for her pals, but no, it has nothing to do with being Americanized. Bad food which is authentic is still bad food.

I can’t tell you what authentic Chinese food tastes like, and I’m not sure I want to find out, because authentic Mexican food is garbage compared to American Mexican food. I can tell when a person is a bad cook, however, regardless of the cuisine.

She sold me a big bottle of black vinegar for $4. I would say it tastes like malt vinegar that has been strained through dirt. I don’t like it. I suspect her brand is really cheap.

I got my hoisin sauce at a supermarket. They had several brands. I don’t like buying prepackaged sauces, but in order to make hoisin sauce, you have to ferment soybeans. Not going to happen. Also, let’s face it: Chinese cuisine standards are pretty weak. I have zero doubt that I have never had a Chinese meal that wasn’t made with stuff from bottles and cans.

Making the dish was not easy. It did not require skill, but there were a lot of ingredients, and the recipe was confusing. Basically, you marinate chicken, prepare sauce ingredients in another bowl, fry the chicken, throw the sauce in, throw in a few more ingredients, and call it good.

The recipe said to put corn starch in the chicken marinade. I am not a Chinese chef, but I’m not an idiot, either, and I don’t see how this can work. If you put starch on meat and then throw it in a hot pan, what happens? The starch burns instantly and sticks to the pan. This is what happened to me, and it was not a surprise. I ended up with a layer of burned stuff on my skillet.

I don’t have a wok. I don’t even have a burner that will work with a wok. I used a 14″ stainless skillet. I don’t think the food really fried all that much, because I don’t have a way to provide that much heat, but here’s the thing: the texture and so on were exactly like what I’ve experienced at good Chinese restaurants, so if I’m doing it wrong with my skillet, they’re also doing it wrong with their fancy woks, and it doesn’t matter at all.

The recipe had virtually no vegetables in it, so I added diced bell peppers, both red and green. So much for authenticity.

I also tripled the sauce recipe. People who commented over at Epicurious said the recipe was extremely dry, so I took their advice and multiplied by three.

The result was very nice, but there was a dirt aftertaste I did not like. I considered the hoisin sauce and the dirt-tasting black vinegar, and I chose the most likely culprit.

Yesterday I made the dish again. I made a lot of changes. No corn starch in the marinade. I halved the black vinegar and made up the difference with balsamic. I cut the number of chiles in half. I also added a can of baby corn, because I like baby corn.

I figure I can add whatever I want to the dish. Here’s a known fact: all spice Chinese chicken dishes taste nearly alike. Kung pao has peanuts. Ta chien has baby corn. Orange chicken has citrus peels. Other than little differences like these, they’re pretty similar. I like baby corn, and I think it belongs in kung pao chicken, along with tasty bell peppers. So there. I would have put little Asian mushrooms in it if I had been able to find them. I think water chestnuts would also be good.

How was the food? Amazing. Best “Chinese” food I’ve ever had, hands-down. There was still a slight dirt taste from the awful black vinegar, which I plan to eliminate next time by blending malt and cider vinegars, but other than that, it could not have been better. I especially liked the way the tiny bits of fresh ginger exploded in citrusy flavors when I bit down on them.

There was too much starch in the sauce. The recipe called for an obscene amount, which I knew was wrong, but I gave the author the benefit of the doubt. The sauce was clumpy and didn’t flow well. Next time, I’ll use half as much, if that.

The recipe calls for one pound of chicken and supposedly feeds 4 people. I am totally serious. I used two pounds, and I plan to get a total of three dinners out of it.

Here is what I learned: professional Chinese chefs are not very good. They must not be putting their hearts into what they do. No surprise. Anyone who has smelled the rear of a typical Chinese joint knows they’re not doing everything they should.

I can’t cook any Chinese dish except this one, and I’ve only cooked it twice, and my recipe still needs work, yet my version blows the real thing away. That’s a scathing indictment of restaurant chefs.

If I decide to learn how to cook anything else, it will be pan-fried dumplings. I can’t think of any other Chinese dishes I like enough to learn how to cook.

I can’t understand why professional cooks are so bad. It’s not just Chinese cooks. It’s nearly universal. It’s like cooking school fundamentally does not work.

I don’t feel like buying a wok or a propane burner, because my food comes out nearly the same as wok-cooked food. I don’t know if stir-frying is really frying, except when there are only a few little things in the wok. Adding a lot of food pretty much moves you into the simmering arena.

What a beautiful future I see stretching out before me. Myself, seated at a wonderful welding table, consuming the best Chinese food in North America. It’s hard to imagine how things could get better, unless I moved a couch into the shop.

Now there’s an idea.

More

I went and got the table. The box was very difficult to get in the car. The weight is only 73 pounds, but it hangs way out there when you’re trying to wrestle with it, and the Northern Tool cart kept trying to scoot around the parking lot while I maneuvered the box.

I thought I felt something going funny in my back, so I slowed down and tried to use common sense. I hate that. Prayed in the car on the way home, and my back seems okay.

I can’t tell you whether it’s a good table until I use it, but things look okay right now.

The top is not far from 3/16″ steel, which is very good for a cheap table. It’s also nearly flat. It looks like it has a 1/32″ crown in the middle. It’s hard to get upset about that. I doubt I’ve ever welded anything that warped less than 1/32″.

The legs have a funny rectangular brace that goes around them. It’s held on by friction, which is not good. The frame has little hooks which fit in holes on the legs and pinch them. I figure I can stabilize it by drilling holes and adding some screws.

The legs have M10x1.5 threaded holes for the feet. I am looking around for casters that will screw into those holes. The table is light enough to pick up and move, but casters would be better.

I can tell it’s going to fit well in my shop, because I’m already using it to hold things I should put away instead.

The square inchage is 864, which is considerably better than the Harbor Freight table, which comes in at just under 600. Also, because the table has round holes instead of long slots, I should not have any problems with objects falling through it. That was always a concern with the other table.

If you follow the directions, the table takes an hour to assemble. If you just guess, you can do it in about 15 minutes.

I have not tried the clamps yet, but they must work, because people are not howling about them all over the web.

I sprayed it down with lanolin and mineral spirits. I want to keep the top shiny and silvery for as long as I can.

Not much to complain about here. I finally have enough tools to weld relatively well. Now all I need is skill.

Libertarians Will be Disarmed Wholesale

I saw an interesting story on the web. I found out what happened to the host of FPSRussia.

If you don’t know what FPSRussia is, you must be a woman or a liberal. FPSRussia is a Youtube channel featuring automatic weapons and explosives. The star, who no longer produces videos for the site, called himself “Dmitri Potapoff.” He spoke with a Russian accent and fooled a lot of people, although smart viewers realized it wasn’t all that likely that a Russian was able to get ahold of machine guns and make videos without being imprisoned immediately.

Here’s a video. Language alert.

The host’s real name is Kyle Lamar, and he’s from Georgia. Our Georgia. He has had some trouble with the law.

In 2013, his house was raided by the ATF and the state of Georgia. The justification was that he was making money using explosives on Youtube. He continued making videos after that raid, so I suppose it didn’t amount to anything. In 2015, he was raided again, and he had to take a plea and spend a short time in what he calls “federal prison.” Other sources call it a halfway house, but I guess he knows where he was.

It’s a weird story. He had a pal who had a gun business, and one day, his pal turned up dead. He was in his office, and his surveillance equipment was gone. Someone had shot him in the back of the head. Some people thought Lamar did it. Conspiracy theories abounded. I suppose it makes sense that when a person gets shot in the head from behind, in his own secure office with a surveillance system, you would assume he was murdered by someone he knew, but I think that’s about all the theorists have.

It was not long after the murder that the 2013 raid took place.

The 2015 raid involved drug trafficking, if you believe the prosecution. They were monitoring his mail, and they found a small package of hash oil in a mailbox he rented. The total amount was 25 grams, which is just under one ounce.

He says the Georgia side of the 2015 case was dismissed because the warrant was bad. The feds, however, had a better case. They based their search on the fact that he appeared to be a marijuana user and owned guns.

To me, this is what’s interesting about the story.

When you fill out a 4473 form during a background check, you have to say you don’t use illegal drugs. You can probably guess how many people lie on the form. Maybe 40%? Weed is really popular.

Even if weed is legal under the laws of your state, it’s still illegal to the feds, so yes, if you smoke a doobie once a week while floating in your pool, you are a federal criminal. If you didn’t mention it when you bought your guns, you are a felon.

How about that?

I’ve filled out more than one of these forms. I have never admitted that I use weed. I haven’t admitted it because I don’t use weed. I never liked it, and by the time I bought my first gun under the background check law, I was years past my last effort to try to like it. I have no interest whatsoever in drugs.

Lamar says he was charged with possession with intent to distribute. In other words, he is a convicted drug dealer as far as the feds are concerned. When you have certain amounts of certain drugs on hand, the law presumes you’re a dealer.

I have no idea how much hash oil you need to get high, but it’s hard for me to believe that a person who buys less than an ounce online is planning to sell any of it.

The other day, I saw a photo of Billy Ray Cyrus’s wife standing in front of their open weed safe. There were bags and bags of weed in it. I don’t know if they’re insane or what. I can’t see any reason to own that much dope. How much can two people smoke? Here’s the thing to think about: why haven’t the Cyruses been arrested? I don’t know how much weed a weed store keeps on hand, but I’ll bet you could run one for a month on what the Cyruses have in their safe.

Another question: why haven’t the feds closed down all the “legal” marijuana stores in states that have changed their laws? What could be easier? You don’t have to tap phones. You don’t have to get warrants. You just go in during business hours and arrest everyone.

There must be a reason. I see something online about the Supreme Court making it illegal for the feds to shut down medical marijuana stores, but what about stores that don’t hide behind medicine? I’m too lazy to look it up.

I looked around online (welcome to the federal list, me), and there are sites advertising weed extracts for sale. I guess Lamar didn’t have a hard time finding what he wanted. Did the feds shut down the company that sold him the dope? I don’t know.

Here’s what I wonder: how many Americans who own guns have set themselves up for drug-based searches and confiscation? The number must be in the tens of millions.

It’s a dream scenario for someone like Elizabeth Warren. When the political timing seems right, you tell the DOJ you want the drug laws enforced, and they send the FBI around, knocking on doors. First thing you know, tens of millions of guns are behind locked doors and slated for destruction, and millions of Americans are felony defendants who are likely to take pleas and give up their gun rights.

Lamar thinks he had around $400,000 worth of guns. Now they’re scrap metal. He can’t have a gun again, under federal law, until the laws of Georgia say he can.

I am suspicious of the federal claim that Lamar was believed to be using illegal explosives. These days, anyone can go to a gun store and buy explosives legally. You can get exploding targets made with a composition called Tannerite. One target won’t hurt anyone, but you can buy a lot of Tannerite, concentrate it, and create an explosion strong enough to throw a refrigerator the length of an NFL pass. Youtube is full of Tannerite videos. The fact that you blew something up doesn’t mean you made explosives.

Maybe misusing Tannerite is a crime, but if so, why would you need to search someone’s house? Finding boxes of Tannerite wouldn’t prove anything. The videos would be the proof.

Message for the DOJ: I do not use Tannerite.

I get it. It’s neat to blow things up. It’s just not my bag. I like to shoot for accuracy. You can’t really tell how well you’re shooting when every shot blows a target up.

I guess there are people in power who think I’m part of a dangerous movement because I pray in tongues and enjoy shooting. I’m also the proprietor of a DoD-banned “hate site,” although I have never been told what the basis for that strange honor is. My guess is that a heavyset female soldier with a short haircut and no makeup read my site one day, saw that I was a Christian, and put me on the ban list with a couple of mouse clicks. I don’t think they have educated people or highly ranked officers looking at blogs. They probably farm the work out to privates or civilian hipsters. I’m sure no one over the rank of private has any idea my site is banned, except for military people who used to visit.

I’m not thrilled with the way our rights have been destroyed, but I don’t want anything to do with insurrection or any type of armed resistance. When they find a way to take my guns legally, my plan is to stack the guns by the front door, invite the feds in, offer them donuts, and help them carry my guns to their van. I have more important things to think about. If a Christian is going to give up his life and go to prison, it should be because he did something like smuggling a Bible or casting a demon out of a sick kid. You shouldn’t go out shooting because you want to keep two Glocks and a Taurus .38.

I don’t think Lamar was making illegal explosives. He wasn’t convicted of that. I have to doubt that Obama’s FBI suspected it. My hunch is that they saw all those guns, as well as his wild videos, and wanted to shut him down. Maybe they were also trying to get information on the murder of his friend. The drug thing was incidental. It was just the key that opened the door for them. They would never have gone after him just for buying hash oil. Think how many Democrats would in federal prison today if they routinely went after people who bought hash oil.

Speaking of our rights, it’s remarkable how the noose is tightening. On Sunday, I drove to Sanford, Florida, as the government already knows from recording my toll payments, credit card transactions, and cell phone locations. I drove to the same area several months ago to buy a buffer. This time, there were new cell towers everywhere. There were so many, the landscape was defaced. They looked positively sinister. It was as if they were looking down on us and monitoring us, like giant concentration camp guards. And, of course, they were!

I visited Sanford in June and then again in November. During the short interim, telephone/surveillance towers sprang up like ragweed. Things are changing much more quickly than I expected, even though I’m one of the people who keep saying things are going to change more quickly than we expect.

I used to worry about creeping totalitarianism, but now I don’t, because I know we can’t stop it. I pay for everything electronically, leaving a digital trail. I don’t use a VPN service. I don’t keep a hundred pounds of gold under the floor. I can’t grow my own food. I don’t even have a decent generator, which would be useless anyway if I couldn’t get gas. I trust God to protect me as well as possible, and I accept the fact that Christians are going to lose. Americans are going to lose all of their rights, except for those relating to things like sexual perversion, obscenity, and drug use, and America will be just as scary as Cambodia used to be. Hoarding guns, buying Bitcoin and shooting FBI agents will not change that. The important thing is to get aligned with God and prepare for the rapture.

The other day God told me the rapture was going to be a hypocrite filter.

I know someone who lives in total denial. This person always pretends everything is going fine in his walk. He even teaches others and holds himself out to be a man of God. When you try to give him useful information, he says he already knows about it. He wants people to think he’s doing great. In reality, he needs to get real and stop bluffing. He needs prayer in tongues. He needs deliverance and confession. He needs to quit trying to tell people his carnal efforts at ministry were ordained by God.

Christians who are living that way will be able to pull it off for a time, but what will they say when solid Christians are taken and they’re still here? “Jesus lost my boarding pass”?

I used to wonder if the rapture would actually be a wave of executions, but I have looked at the Bible, and it makes it clear that people will literally vanish. When Jesus “meets us in the air,” it won’t be because our bodies have been shot in the head. It will be a supernatural event. If it happens and you’re still here, you will be in real trouble, and you will have no possible defense for the decisions you’ve made. You will be exposed. I hope to avoid that.

Fighting the government in the streets is pointless. Jesus isn’t for it, and it will not do anyone any good. People who know Jesus won’t be involved. If a war takes place, it will be between various factions, all of which belong to Satan.

Jesus will have a political reign, but it won’t happen during this age.

What an interesting time to be alive. Me, I would have preferred to be born in 1930.

If Spiritual Gifts are Biscuits, Love is the Gravy

I had an exciting morning. Maybe it’s strange to type that at 10:15 a.m., but I will stick with it.

Around 8 months ago, I dreamed about a woman I know. She was on a university campus, trying to get students onto a bus for some kind of outing she thought was related to serving God. I never saw her or the bus, but I knew they were nearby.

The university was dedicated to show business, which is ironic, considering how little education you need in order to be a performer. It was as thought Disney had built a college.

I was a Jewish man, and I didn’t look like myself. I appeared to be about 65. I was wearing a sportcoat and nice pants. I was walking briskly to a place where I was expected to speak.

A warm wind arose and started blowing toward me from the front. It lifted me like a kite. It felt wonderful. Very comforting. Although it was a headwind, I was propelled forward, as though I were falling in that direction. I was moving higher, however.

Eventually I came to a cluster of water oak trees with thick, shiny foliage. I reached out and grabbed the branches to steady myself.

I wasn’t upset or scared. I was enjoying myself.

The wind felt great against the front of my body. It was like a loving, supportive caress.

I woke up, and I was lying on my stomach. My hands were up as though I were holding onto branches. I still felt the love and warmth. It was as though the mattress loved me.

Ever since I turned back to God and started thinking about the two visits Jesus paid me in the Eighties, I have been trying to get a good grip on the sensation of supernatural love. During his visits, I physically felt his love radiating toward me and through me. Sometimes I get that feeling these days. I felt it this morning. I believe we’re supposed to feel that way most of the time. Love is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, like joy and peace. If we’re supposed to feel peace and joy that come from God and flow through us to others, surely we’re supposed to feel love, too.

It’s not morning now. A friend of mine came into town, so I interrupted my writing. I’ll continue.

This morning I woke up before the alarm went off. While I was lying in bed, I felt the same sensation I felt in the flying dream. It felt as if God was somehow caressing me with the mattress. I felt the sensation on and off through breakfast. I tried to focus on it and hold onto it.

My friend showed up, and we spent a few hours together. During that time, the feeling decreased somewhat.

You would think that love would increase when you’re around human beings, but it appears that that’s not always true. There is something about the presence of other people that pushes love into the background. We have other things to talk about. We aren’t known for putting our affairs on hold so we can sit and talk about how much we love each other. Also, if you’re with someone who is not used to a warm, fuzzy version of you, it can be hard to let that version appear in front of them.

People tend to pull you backward. Their presence can pressure you to behave as they’re used to seeing you behave. The longer you’ve known them, the more likely this is to be true. I suppose this is why Jesus surrounded himself with new people instead of starting a ministry with his mother and brothers.

I can see why Jesus spent so much time alone. The purpose of love is to be shared with human beings, but human beings themselves, by their very nature, tend to make it hard for your love to flow. After you’ve been around them for a while, it makes sense that you would want to go off into the desert and recover. I guess you need to sit with God and remind yourself why you love them!

Funny, but true.

I keep getting the impression that there is going to be a love revolution in the church. We have the Holy Spirit back. We use his gifts. Lots of knowledge is being restored. It seems like supernatural love is the component which is obviously missing.

In my flying dream, God showed me that his love lifts us up to do good works. Doing good works out of obligation is not what makes him happy, and it’s tiresome, too. Yesterday I saw Mark Hemans quote a passage in which the Bible said something about faith and love working together. I just found it. Galatians 5:6: ” For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love.”

There are a lot of relatively cold and even cranky people out there displaying (or pretending to display) the gifts of the Spirit. There are certainly a lot of greedy and narcissistic people doing these things. We don’t see love pouring out of many self-styled prophets and apostles, unless the love of cameras and money counts.

I think something big is happening. I certainly hope so. The church has to be cleaned up before the rapture, and it seems obvious to me that the restoration of supernatural love is a necessary part of the process.

Don’t be too Quick to Approve of Glamorous Conversions

It looks like Kanye West is promoting Christianity now, and he is holding church services. People are trying to decide what to think about it.

West is interesting to me, because Richie Wilkerson, the son of my former pastor, married him to Kim Kardashian. Richie is all about money and fame. He is in very deep trouble. He is toxic, just like his dad. There is no possibility that he gave the Wests good advice while he was counseling them. When you see Kanye West claiming to belong to Jesus, you can’t just swallow it at face value. You have to ask God what’s happening, and you have to use common sense.

West supposedly turned to God several years ago, and Richie was his mentor. Kim Kardashian visited Trinity Church, and the armorbearers were forced to treat her like a VIP and give her a special seat. Rich Wilkerson made himself look ridiculous on Twitter, calling West, whom he barely knew, “a special friend.”

He always treated famous and wealthy people like that. They would show up briefly, and he would take them into the green room behind the stage and try to buddy up to them. It didn’t have anything to do with God. Famous people can help you raise your own profile, and if a millionaire comes to your church and tithes, you will receive a tremendous amount of money.

It was disgusting when the armorbearers had to honor Kardashian. She had a sex tape out, and she posed in Playboy. She is America’s leading proponent of sexual sin. She teaches girls to be sluts, plain and simple. She has never stopped. When Wilkerson kowtowed to her, it was as though he were bowing to the Whore of Babylon.

He also made the team honor Luther Campbell, AKA Luke Skyywalker, one of the filthiest rappers of the last century.

God is not a respecter of persons. This means he does not like it when you give special treatment to someone who is socially prominent. God wants you to honor everyone who can receive it, and he is especially concerned about the way we treat people who are on the bottom. At Wilkerson’s church, those people were pretty much kept away from the pastors, who had no interest in them at all.

Preachers who want to justify whoring out to the world and associating with prominent sinners like to point out that Jesus spent time with tax collectors and drunks. The difference is that Jesus was a leader, not a follower. He showed up to change sinners. Rich Wilkerson chases unrepentant sinners and lets them mold him.

The words says a believer is to be the head and not the tail. Shallow Christians think that means we get to be on top all the time and push other people around. It’s true that it implies dominance, but it also implies obligation. We are required to lead, even when it means giving up popularity. Wilkerson and his crew are not leaders. They look to see what sinners want them to be and do, and they obey.

As pastors, his bunch doesn’t have an inch of guts among them. They can’t bear to say anything that might drive a person to leave the church and take his money with him. They are incapable of leading.

If you can’t say no, you are a follower.

Jesus reached out to sinners, obviously, but he did it so they could repent, not so they could invade churches, take over, and turn them into nightclubs.

People used to make fun of Trinity and call it “Club Trinity” because the leaders worked so hard at putting on a great show. They spent $72,000 on four spinning lights for the band, and they used smoke machines.

These things are on my mind when I think about the Kanye West story.

I don’t know what famous preachers are saying about Kanye, but here is my guess: they’re shaming Christians who are skeptical, saying, “Don’t judge!” In fact, one of my Youtube favorites has put out a video to that effect. I have been worrying about his ministry, because it seemed to be declining, and now I see confirmation that there are problems.

He also changed the name of his channel. It used to be called Cardboard Box Church, after the little box structure he puts up in public to draw people. Now it’s named after him: Thomas Fischer. I am always leery of ministries named after the people who run them. It’s a way of honoring yourself.

Preachers love, love, love money, and they love virtue-signaling as well as accusing others falsely in order to make themselves look good. Most of them know nearly nothing about God and do not hear from him, so they say whatever benefits their bottom lines. It should not shock anyone if they try to shame Holy-Spirit-led Christians who speak wisdom. They’re led by Satan, not the Holy Spirit, and they say what he tells them to say.

The phrase “don’t judge” has caused the charismatic church more trouble than anything over the last 20 years or so. Jesus never said, “Don’t judge,” all by itself. He spoke a longer message which contained the phrase. Preachers and sin-loving Christians don’t quote the whole message because it shows they’re wrong.

We are supposed to warn other people about sin. We’re not supposed to be self-righteous about it, but we have to do it. It’s in the same passage as the bit about not judging hypocritically.

Think of all the people Jesus criticized. John the Baptist did the same thing. So did Paul. So did Jude. Come on. Think.

Judging isn’t just permissible; it’s mandatory. What matters is why you judge and whether you judge correctly.

I think Kanye West is sincere. I think he is a tormented person because he hears from spirits, and while he has listened to evil spirits for most of his life, he also hears from God, and God is waking him up. That being said, he appears to be a long way from anything resembling powerful, correct Christianity.

The shows West puts on are very much like the kid-pleasing shows Trinity relies on. Lots of flash. Lots of good music. The problem is that there seems to be no substance. I haven’t watched an entire show, but what I’ve seen so far has been very shallow.

People may hear the excellent music and see the spectacular presentation and say, “The Holy Spirit has to be in this.” Come on. Wake up. Liberace put on a better show than Billy Graham ever thought about putting on. If you think a good show proves God is behind things, you should pick up your Bible and go see Beyonce, who is corrupting people like a typhoon of sin.

Are people repenting at West’s services? Are speakers telling people they have to stop sinning? Is there prophecy? Are they casting out demons? Are their healings? Are people being baptized properly and speaking in tongues? I haven’t seen any of this yet. If these things aren’t happening, then Kanye’s services are just man-glorifying backslapping sessions.

It’s not enough to cry and sing and yell that you love Jesus, in front of a crowd, so people will be impressed. The word says that if you love Jesus, you obey him.

It’s disturbing that West is trying to make Jesus hip. Jesus is not, and never will be, hip. The world hates Jesus, as he said, and it always will. The world hates his children, as he said it would. That will never change. Whenever someone preaches a “cool” Jesus, he preaches a lie. He is telling people they can stay in the world of the flesh and still please God. The Bible makes it very clear that the flesh can’t please God.

People may say God is using West and his big services to reach a lot of people, because God “needs” famous people and their ability to reach millions. That’s a complete lie. The age of famous preachers and huge churches is ending, not beginning. That whole business was a failure. Satan ran it. The real church is going to be driven underground, and God is preparing us for that. We won’t be able to have big fancy churches. Christianity will spread from person to person, in small groups. That’s how it has always spread. The successes of the big churches were illusions.

Satan has never needed famous people or big gatherings to work effectively. Sin and iniquity spread like the flu, from one individual to another. It works just fine, and Satan got the idea from God, who thought the idea up first.

I think there is a lot of hope for Kanye West, but he is a baby right now. No one should be following him. He doesn’t know anything.

If you see his secular career flop, and famous people start shunning him, then you should be aware that God may really be working in him. If God gets anywhere with Kanye West, his associates will flee, and his wife is likely to follow.

Popularity is a mark of a failed Christian. Jesus assured us that the world would hate and persecute us. You can be popular within a limited circle, but that’s about it.

The other day I told someone I saw more hope for Kanye West than for his wife and Richie Wilkerson. West is a strange guy, but he is willing to go against the crowd, and that may save him.

In other news, God has emphasized something he told me long ago.

The other day I saw a Mark Hemans video, and he told someone demons had entered her when she got tattooed. He says demons like to enter with tattoos, and he is against tattooing. In that respect, he is aligned with God, who forbade the Jews to do body modification, other than circumcision.

In ancient times, body modifications were used to glorify false gods and to honor the dead. In fact, the dead were often worshiped as gods. For a long, long time, tattoos were rightly considered disgraceful among Christians. A tattoo was something you got when you were 18, in the navy, and very drunk. It was something you later regretted. Now many Christians are obsessed with tattoos. You go to churches and see them covered up with them.

The “judge not” obsessives have a field day with people who are against tattooing. They love to point to tattooed people who are supposedly leading wonderful lives. They used to circulate memes featuring a very prominent young man who was highly successful and covered with tattoos.

His name was Aaron Hernandez.

The murderer. Who killed himself in prison.

The memes dried up after he was arrested.

Some people actually claim God told them to get tattooed. I’m not saying it could not happen, but it probably does not. God hates tattoos. A tattoo is a mockery of the Torah, which was made by marking animal skin. It also defaces the body, which was created in God’s image.

There are Christians who say tattoos are fine because we’re not under the law. Here’s something people need to know: we are still under a law. We are not under the law of the written word, but we are under the law of the Holy Spirit. I know this is terrible news to many people. What the Holy Spirit commands, we must do, just as the Jews had to obey the dietary laws and keep the sabbath. The Holy Spirit is still against tattooing, and by the way, he doesn’t like marijuana, either. He doesn’t like a lot of things that are suddenly permissible in our declining culture.

People still use tattoos to honor false gods and the dead, in case you have not noticed. I don’t just mean Maoris and Africans. I mean your American neighbors.

I’ve been against tattooing for a long time. The fad came to us not just from idolaters but from criminals, just like chin beards, head-shaving, and sagging pants. Prison is an earthly picture of hell. It’s a foretaste of hell, and it mainly traps people who are hellbound.

Prisoners are the biggest losers in society. They are the tail, not the head. They have no rights. They receive no honor. They have no liberty. They can’t even control their persons. When you’re a prisoner, your handlers, who may be of the opposite sex, can strip you naked and look up your rear end pretty much whenever they feel like it. Then can put you in restraints. They can blast you with hoses.

At some point around 1990, Americans began changing their appearance so they would look like convicts. That was a very bad thing. You become what you imitate. By imitating convicts, we prove we love evil, and if we love evil, we hate good.

Why does Satan love body modification? Because it allows the demons that control you to turn you into a replica of themselves.

God killed the physical bodies of demons in the flood. Now they want bodies very badly. We supply those bodies by inviting them in. When a demon makes a home in you, it wants to redecorate. It’s like taking over a church and turning it into a mosque. It marks territory. It allows demons to express themselves through us.

Does this remind you of anyone else?

What does the Holy Spirit do when he comes to live in you?

He cleans you up. He will tell you to get rid of offensive clothing. He is likely to tell you to get your tattoos lasered. He changes your speech. He changes your posture and your facial expressions.

I started thinking about tattooing while I watched Mark Hemans deliver people, and God put things into words for me. God told me demons want to create man in their image.

That’s the essence of body modification.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. To learn about God, look at Satan. To learn about Satan, look at God. God creates people in his image, and evil spirits want the same power. They want nice filthy vessels to live in. Vessels whose very appearance, without words, thoughts, or actions added to it, is an insult to God.

I know there are lots of preachers out there who have gaudy, trashy tattoo “sleeves,” and maybe these people do some very good things. I don’t care. God never changes, and I’m not here to make excuses for people who don’t want to admit fault. Accept it, or go ahead and be angry with me. Doesn’t matter to me, because I will still say the truth.

I assure you, there are a lot of tattooed preachers who hate their tattoos and would back up everything I’m saying. The fact that a person has a tattoo doesn’t mean he likes it or approves of it.

The body-modification craze has gone off the rails, which proves it has a supernatural foundation. When things don’t make sense in the natural, they make sense in the supernatural, because there is always a supernatural cause for things that do not make sense.

People are cutting their noses off. They are cutting fingers off. They are castrating themselves. That’s not self-expression. It’s self-destruction and the expression of the selves of demons that live in us.

Sex-change surgery is body modification. Giving anti-puberty hormones to demon-controlled kids is body modification. Huge, creepy, breast implants, which are extremely popular, are body modifications.

This is fascinating stuff, but anyone who gets it and talks about it will be dismissed as crazy. Satan always attacks and falsely accuses anyone who turns the light on and exposes the roaches.

On the positive side, God gave me a more pleasant revelation. He thinks we’re cute.

The other day, I found out what agape, the Greek word used to describe God’s love, means. It means warm, affectionate love. It doesn’t mean a sense of duty that makes you so determined to help people that you become a permanent doormat and punching bag. It doesn’t mean you have to give both of your kidneys away to strangers. It doesn’t mean you levitate and glow, or that you always have a silly, pretentious grin on your face.

I learned about love from my mother. She adored me. When I was a little kid and my sister was at school, she used to take me places and spend time with me. We used to make paper boats and put them in the waters of Tampa Bay. We used to go to the zoo at Lowry Park. Sometimes she would put me on a bed and just lie next to me and look at me.

I think a lot of kids don’t have experiences like that. Many mothers don’t love their kids, and many who do can’t show it.

It’s natural to love small, helpless things that need your care, especially if they’re your children. This is why abortion is so sick. We attack and murder the smallest, most defenseless, and most in need of our love.

Parents don’t love their kids out of duty. They love them because they’re cute. Something about the smallness of children and their dependence on parents touches the heart in a special way. It’s not rational, and it doesn’t take work. You don’t have to struggle to love your kids. Not unless something very odd is going on.

Today, I felt that I could see myself as my mother did. I thought about the little things she bought me and the things she did for me. I took those things for granted, but she did them out of unstoppable love, and I’m sure she wished I understood that. She wanted me to understand the love she felt as she was doing things for me. I really didn’t.

I can’t go back and be good to my late mother, and my dad is also dead, but I still have one parent I can appreciate, and I can let his love for others flow through me.

Compared to God we are very small and defenseless. When he sees a person struggling alone with problems, it’s like seeing a lonely kid no one wants to adopt and help.

When God saves you, it’s not unlike stopping to pick up a puppy you see sitting beside a busy road. That’s what motivates him.

We can’t be controlled by love all the time, because there is also justice. We can’t always be nice. God doesn’t want us all to be weepy vegetarians who run animal shelters. Not during this age. The age of total peace and love won’t arrive until after the tribulation, and trying to force it to come now is sin. In this age, sometimes we have to be very hard. The world can’t receive perfect peace yet. But when we restrain ourselves and hold back, it should be for a good reason.

Very interesting.

I am not an exemplary Christian, but he certainly tells me a lot of things. That’s because of prayer in tongues. If you want to hear things yourself, instead of just imagining that what you already believe and want to hear came from God, you can go to the same source.

You Aren’t Called to Drag People into the Kingdom

I’ve been watching more Mark Hemans videos. Hemans is a healer and teacher from Australia. He travels the world doing speaking engagements.

So far, I’m favorably impressed. I think God does heal people through him. I believe his teaching is generally sound. I do see some issues, though. He seems proud, he doesn’t seem to teach anyone else to do what he does, and I don’t sense a lot of love coming from him.

If you heal people and don’t teach them to be like Jesus, you accomplish nearly nothing. Everyone dies, so all physical healings are temporary and relatively unimportant. God created the world so he could reproduce, and our primary purpose here is to be instruments of reproduction. If you exhibit all sorts of godlike characteristics, but you don’t have disciples, you are a failure.

For all I know, he has hundreds of disciples who are just as powerful as he is, but I doubt it, because if they existed, they would be in his videos. Tom Loud, an American healer I follow, creates all sorts of disciples, and he films them. If Tom Loud heals you, he is very likely to make you heal the next person who needs help. Loud gets it. I don’t think Mark Hemans is doing what Tom does, and if that’s true, when he dies, people who depend on him instead of God will be left without help.

I am not that thrilled with Loud’s approach to sanctification. He seems very content when strangers tell him they’ve met Jesus. I’m sure very few of them are doing well in their walks. Salvation is the most important thing in life, but you can’t stop there.

I like Hemans’ teaching. I like the way he receives words of knowledge. I like watching him heal and cast out demons. I like it when he flat-out tells people tattoos are not okay and that they need to get rid of their rock music. I just wish he would get other people involved.

There is a big danger for Christians who do great things with the gifts of the Spirit. If they go it alone, without peers or disciples, they can turn into celebrities, and it’s not a big step from there to receiving worship. Most famous healing preachers fall into this trap. They convince people they’re necessary, so people end up treating them the way they should treat Jesus.

When I think about this, I always think about something I heard about the Iraqi army. When an American unit gets a new piece of equipment, they hand out manuals and teach everyone how to use whatever it is they’ve been given. In the Iraqi army, an officer in charge of such a unit would confiscate the manuals so no one else could read them. This would assure that he, alone, knew how to keep the equipment working, and it assured his continued value to the army.

Christians have always been like the Iraqi army. Clergymen like to keep people dependent. The Catholic Church once banned the Bible in order to prevent lay people from reading it, interpreting it on their own, and introducing doctrine which conflicted with the church’s Satanic notions. At Trinity Church in Miami, Rich Wilkerson Sr. had a rule that only he could receive a message in tongues. At my last church, we were forbidden to lay hands on people until the pastor, an active pedophile and rapist, cleared us to be sure we were as qualified as he was.

We are called the children of God, and children are supposed to become adults. If you’re tying your son’s shoes when he’s 7, or he’s wearing a diaper when he’s 4, something is wrong. Most preachers don’t teach us how to tie our shoes. They want us to keep coming back to hear their nonsense and pay tithes every week.

Mark Hemans seems stronger on prophecy and the word of knowledge than Tom Loud, and I think he takes a better approach regarding cleaning up your life and becoming sanctified, but Loud (and The Last Reformation) generates disciples, and that’s crucial.

Hemans speaks very honestly, without fear of offending. That’s a wonderful thing to watch.

I saw Hemans warning people to cut certain individuals out of their lives. He said the Holy Spirit was behind it. I liked that. One of the strangest things God ever showed me was that cutting the toxic people out of my life was much more important than bringing beneficial people in. You can get by with only God for a companion, but you can’t thrive if you mulch yourself with parasites.

I call this revelation strange, but it isn’t. It’s exactly what Jesus and Paul taught. It seems strange because modern Christianity is so phobic of disapproval. Our man-pleasing, money-loving leaders teach us to be doormats who waste our lives praying for stubborn friends and relatives who are most assuredly going to hell no matter what we do. Jesus and Paul said to cut them loose, except in the case of marriage, and in that case, Paul said not to stop them if they left.

I’ve been thinking about this over the last day or two. Sometimes it surprises me to find out who turns out to be a good investment of my time and who doesn’t. Often, a person who seems very humble and receptive–even desperate–at the start turns all high and mighty later on, and once the wall is up, I can’t do anything for them. Sometimes people who seem totally useless at first end up very serious and committed later.

Maybe desperate people are more inclined to end up this way, because a desperate person will clutch at any lifeline, even if it’s something he or she would not ordinarily want. They say there are no atheists in foxholes.

This is something for men to think about when they marry. The last thing you want is a woman who pretends to be excited about God because she’s actually just excited about you and desperate to be taken care of.

Women are known for molding themselves to men in order to hook them. You like truck pulls? She loves them. Can’t get enough. You like riding motorcycles? She thinks it’s really sexy, and she totally supports it. You like eating meat? She’s all about steak. She wouldn’t dream of trying to make you a vegan. You want sex almost every day? Wow, so does she. She’s so glad she found a guy who doesn’t think it’s weird.

You marry a woman like that, and the first thing you know, your bikes are on Craigslist, you’re eating soy, you only get sex when you’re obedient, and her most absorbing hobby, apart from decorating the nursery and ridiculing you to her girlfriends, is throwing out things you love.

A lot of women convince themselves they’re not like this even though they are. A manipulative and dishonest person will lie to herself as much as anyone.

Feminism is a real problem. It has convinced most women they’re supposed to run their households and “correct” the males. They’re not. The New Testament makes it very clear. The burden of leading families falls on men. The other approach is evil. This is why matriarchal cultures are represented so well in prison.

I’m not going to cite scripture. If you don’t know the scriptures, you should read more often. There is a spirit in America that tells us masculinity is a bad thing, when in reality, it is part of the nature of God, and it’s essential to our protection and development. Prisons aren’t full of the children of single dads. There’s a reason for that.

Women are much more likely to be corrupted by the occult, and to spread the infection to their families. How many male fortune-tellers have you seen? How many male witches have you seen? The term “witch” is gender-neutral, but witchcraft is so full of women, we think it refers to a woman. We even use the term “male witch” because we know anyone who hears the word “witch” will assume it refers to a woman.

I saw this dynamic at work in my family. My own mother, a Christian, brought the occult into our home. She went to palm readers, and she tried to read my palm. She had my astrological chart done. My dad, whatever his faults were, never had the slightest interest in the occult.

The first practitioner of the occult in the Bible was a woman. Eve practiced witchcraft with Satan, because she thought she knew better than Adam and God. She was going to “correct” things. She took a dangerous, forbidden drug and then convinced her husband to take it. We all know where that led.

Statistics say over 80% of yoga practitioners are women. Most early Mormons were women; this is why they resorted to polygamy. More women than men believe in astrology. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are mostly women. The vast majority of American pagans are women.

All of the prophets and apostles were men. Moses was a man. Joshua was a man. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were men. The tribes of Israel were named for men. Israel itself is named for a man. Jesus was a man. All of the priests were men. Paul would not permit a woman to teach publicly. There is a reason for these things. Men were created to stand guard.

A husband and father is supposed to be the priest of his house. If you get stuck with someone who sits back and clucks her tongue and disagrees while you share Holy Spirit revelation with her, your house will be a mess. This is why the Bible says–twice–that it’s better to live in the corner of a rooftop than in a big house with a quarrelsome woman.

A lot of women resent the notion that God is masculine, but he is. The scriptures call him “Father” and “Son.” We never see “Mother” or “Daughter.” Mary was inseminated by the Holy Spirit, according to scripture. Females can’t inseminate. God did not appear as a woman and let Joseph inseminate her. The Bible calls the church “the bride of Christ,” not the husband. Jesus is called “the sower.” Sowing is a masculine activity. Males sow their seed in females.

Who was God’s big enemy in Israel? I don’t know which false god did the most damage, but I can tell you this: the only one that had a second altar in the synagogues was “the queen of heaven.” These altars still exist today.

It could not be more obvious.

The unfortunate thing is that Satan has convinced women that their position is degrading, that they are victims, and that they are naturally superior to men. This is why so many men have wives who act like mothers. I don’t know how men like that keep from killing themselves. Often they resort to adultery to make themselves feel whole again. I know a guy who is doing that right now; he is a prolific, committed, determined serial adulterer. His wife is like Chrissy Teigen, Hillary Clinton, and Angela Davis, rolled into one. She is completely unbearable. She’s like a little sun of compressed hate. I can’t even guess how many demons she carries around with her.

I can’t tell you how I pity him. He married her because she gave him extraordinary sexual pleasure. Ironic.

Sometimes I wish I had found a wife when I was young, and then I think about this guy. If God gave me the choice between dying right now and marrying his wife, I would beg for death.

Anyway, if you hook up with a woman who can’t listen, and you think it’s cute that she’s so spicy and spirited, or you think you “need” a hard-headed, “strong” woman because she’ll make you a better man, you’re going to suffer like you can’t imagine, and it’s all your fault. You will never please her, and she will never stop crushing your spirit.

Women who listen and who don’t have chips on their shoulders are very refreshing, and it’s always a shock to find out you know one. It’s not always the ones you think will turn out that way. If you find a wife like that, she will be a source of strength all your life.

To get back on track, I know some people who seem to be at, or past, the end of their teachability. If that’s the case, we will probably grow somewhat distant until and unless they get over it. I feel God is letting me know that. I’m fine with it, because dealing with such people is like trying to push a car in the mud while the driver stands on the brake. I am only too happy to quit pushing, and I love meeting new people who cooperate and provide me with some reward for my effort. There is nothing like seeing someone run with what you tell them and then come back to bless you.

There are some people who are never going to improve, but I’m sure there are also people who are simply ready to be allowed to ferment until they decide to listen to God, and it’s not necessary for me to pester them and cajole them until they do. Someone else can help them when they come around. I’m not God, and I’m not the whole church.

Listening to Hemans, I felt a lot better about excluding my biological sister from my life permanently. He told folks they needed to let certain people go. He didn’t say they should fast or beg God to fix them. There are some people you just can’t tolerate. I rarely wonder what’s happening to my sister. I have no desire to contact her. I consider every day without contact to be a beautiful gift, and I have prayed many times for God to keep her away from me.

I see why God won’t let me join a church. I find a teacher, learn a great deal, find out what his ministry is missing, and move on to someone who has something else to show me. If I stuck with one guy, I’d be held back. Almost all pastors are seriously stunted.

Don’t put any man on a pedestal, and don’t marry your mom. That’s my advice for today.

Prophesy, or Wishful Thinking Gone Overboard?

I may not be the best Christian on earth, but I always have a fresh testimony. Surely that’s worth something.

I wouldn’t be saying this if I weren’t leading up to an example. Here goes.

I believe God tells me things, and I have also stepped out in faith, based on some teaching from Derek Prince, and started prophesying. If you’re wondering how to prophesy, and you already speak in tongues, the best way I can explain what I do is this: do the same thing you do when you speak in tongues, but speak English.

That’s probably not much help.

When you speak in tongues, you open your mouth and start moving the necessary parts, and as long as you provide the motion, the Holy Spirit gives you things to say. You can do it as fast as you can move your mouth. You will never run out of new syllables. You probably won’t have any idea what you’re saying, and it may even sound like gibberish, but it works.

I had tried prophesying before listening to Derek Prince, and I had not managed to say anything that didn’t sound crazy, so I stopped. After listening to Prince, I figured I had to try again. He was not an idiot, so if he told people they could prophesy, he had to be right.

I prayed for God’s help, and I started doing it. Now I do it as much as I can bear. It’s somewhat stressful, because my carnal mind keeps saying, “Your mouth is going to write a check God won’t cash.” It says I’m making things up.

I can think of a few things I thought God told me (not prophesies) that didn’t pan out. VERY few. Generally, they come to pass. This is one reason (along with not having a giant ego and zero ability to perceive how others see me) I don’t call myself a prophet. The Old Testament says, “when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.” That’s not quite the same thing as saying such a person was a false prophet, but it’s not praise, either. You wouldn’t want to jump into the Red Sea and try to outrun the Egyptians based on advice from a prophet who made mistakes.

Maybe there is such a thing as a student prophet.

I can’t think of anything I have said in prophesy that hasn’t turned out to be right. Maybe I’ve forgotten something. Generally, though, the things I say are somewhat vague. “My heart is with you, and it can never be taken from you.” Things like that.

Prophesying and having God tell me things are not the same thing. When you prophesy, you, yourself, say things by God’s inspiration. When God tells you things, it may happen in other ways. You may ask God a question and feel you know his answer, for example.

Anyway, I had a spot on my hand. This is where the testimony starts. A few weeks back, I saw a little spot, and I froze it to get rid of it. I don’t want to get into details, but I have had many little things pop up on my skin over the years, and I have very solid medical reasons not to assume they’re cancerous, so I freeze them off in order to avoid the hassle of going to a dermatologist.

A few days back, it seemed like something was still going on in the area of the spot, and there was an area of discoloration about the size of a shirt button. It wasn’t a big black melanoma, if that’s what you’re thinking. Anyway, it disturbed me, and I was not sure what to do.

I believe God told me I could not have cancer. I can’t recall when I heard this. It was not in prophesy. I don’t worry much about spots for this reason. But here this thing was, on my hand. Little voices kept telling me it was very serious and that I was doomed.

If you’re wondering why I have concerns about skin blemishes, or why I don’t freak out and demand surgery every time I have one, it’s because I grew up in Florida. If you live in Iowa or some other place where people get limited sun, you probably know nothing at all about skin cancer. Floridians know skin cancer is a)100% curable, and b) extremely unlikely to cause serious harm unless left untreated for a very long time, unless it’s melanoma, which is not hard to distinguish from the other types. In Florida, skin cancers and precancerous lesions are about as exciting as warts. It’s hard to make people from up north understand that. They hear the word “cancer,” and they think it’s extremely serious. It’s not serious. Not at all. Unless you let it go until it takes over.

It’s very hard to make people from up north accept that, but it’s true.

I was about to call a dermatologist, but I really wanted to continue relying on God for healing. He has given me all sorts of little miracles, and his healing is perfect, free, and painless, unlike the kind of healing doctors give. I also thought about what I believed he had told me. I thought he had said I could not have cancer. Should I ignore that and treat it like a lie? Was I wrong to think he told it to me? If I was wrong, what about all the other little things I think he said, which I have been relying on every day? Had I been building a life inside a house of cards?

God’s word doesn’t say he may heal some of our diseases once in a while, when he feels like it. It very clearly says “all” our diseases. It’s not ambiguous. I don’t want to make God out to be a liar. On the other hand, is it wrong to question my own ability to get healed, or my ability to hear him?

You can imagine the things I was thinking. Little demons must have been flying in circles around my head, yelling at me through megaphones.

I decided to rely on God as long as I felt I safely could. I cursed the spot and the spirits behind it. I commanded my body to be healed. I fasted. I did all the things I knew to do. I’m still doing them.

I did take one carnal step. I put hot sauce on the spot. Skin cancers and precancerous lesions don’t like it. The capsaicin in hot peppers can make them dry up and peel off. I had a couple of big spots on my face around 12 years ago, and I used capsaicin, green tea, and curcumin powder to make them go away.

I believed God had given me the okay to use the sauce.

Last night, I was determined to keep prophesying, even if I felt I might be wrong. I kept telling God I needed to know the truth, though. I have had my strongest Christian friend pray twice for God to help me not to prophesy falsely.

While I was prophesying, I said the spot was going to go away. I said it would be smaller in the morning.

I really painted myself into a corner there. If God was speaking through me, the spot had to be smaller in the morning, so if it wasn’t smaller by noon, I was prophesying falsely.

I was stuck.

This morning, I woke up and started praying. I kept thinking about what I had said. The spot didn’t look any smaller than it had the night before. I figured “smaller” meant “smaller in diameter,” because it seemed that the spot had been getting smaller in diameter for several days. I told God I believed “morning” meant “no later than noon.”

Part of me felt I was telling God how long I felt I could honestly wait, but another part felt I was giving God extra time in order to help him, because the spot didn’t seem smaller yet. I was not happy about the feeling that I was assisting God so he would not fail. We should never make an excuse for God or try to help him in any way. That’s all carnality. If you’re expecting God to do something, and he doesn’t do it, don’t make up a reason or try to come up with an explanation that lets God off the hook. If it doesn’t happen, he didn’t actually say it would. Period. Just admit it and pray you don’t make similar mistakes in the future.

If God tells you to build an altar, get some rocks and build it. If he says he’s going to build it, don’t you dare lift a hand.

I got up to use the bathroom, and I washed my hands. I noticed the spot felt funny, like it had a little projection on it. I poked it with a fingernail, and a piece fell off. I got back in bed to continue my prayers, and I poked it again. Another piece fell off.

Then it occurred to me that the spot had gotten smaller. The diameter was the same, but two flakes of abnormal skin had come off, so the mass of the spot was significantly reduced.

The thing I prophesied had come true–completely–and God, being God, had managed to throw me a curve ball by giving me what he had promised, in a way I didn’t immediately recognize.

So…if this came true, what about the other things God seemingly said, which were also very good?

You see the position I’m in now. If one prophesy was true, the others must be true, and because they’re so positive, it’s hard to believe. Fortunately, you don’t have to have faith in a prophesy. It’s not like a prayer. Once God says something will happen, it will happen whether anyone believes it or not. I don’t have to have faith. I just have to sit here and find out whether I was really prophesying.

Prophesies are so unconnected to faith, their fulfillment often brings anguish and death to people who don’t believe them. God has a history of saying bad things were going to happen to the very people who did not believe what he said. They didn’t have faith, and the prophesies still came true.

God has actually used prophesy to foretell bad things that were sent to punish people for not believing prophesy.

I’m not going to scrape and pick at myself to make the prophesy come true. If it’s a prophesy, it does not require my involvement, and my involvement would merely obscure God’s activity and cast it into doubt. It would cost him his glory. He has to have the glory so other people can benefit from what happens to me. If it’s clear he did the work, it will build other people’s faith.

I’m walking by faith here. I’m writing about this before the story ends. I’ll have to follow up honestly no matter how things go.

In other news, I found another Youtube healer. His name is Mark Hemans. He appears to be Australian. Interesting guy. Very serious. He looks like the real thing. I don’t see him teaching other people to heal, though, and that’s a major concern. Judge for yourself.

Addendum

I’m amazed that I forgot to mention this. The night before the skin on my hand started flaking off, I felt a very mild stinging sensation in the area three times in succession. Then I felt something like pressure. I wasn’t touching my hand. There was no physical object making contact with it.

“Stinging” is the best way I can describe it, although it was so mild, it could not be called pain. “Tingling” might be a better word.

I was startled when it happened. Sometimes people feel tingling when God touches them to perform miracles. I felt God touching my knees 6 or 7 years ago when he healed them permanently during a church service. It felt sort of like a jacuzzi jet. If you’ve ever put your leg maybe a foot away from a jacuzzi jet in your bathtub, you know what I mean. It was a warm, soft, pulsating sensation.

Sorry I didn’t mention this yesterday.