Cooking Hints of Dubious Value

Another Thanksgiving dinner is behind me. I learned some things.

For the first time, I did exactly what I wanted to do, instead of making the cranberry sauce and gross oyster dressing my dad used to insist on. It was the right idea. The food was phenomenal, and he didn’t complain once.

When you listen to other people, your food will generally suffer badly. My big talent is not the ability to cook anything you throw at me and make it taste good; it’s the ability to write recipes. People who can’t cook have no idea how that works. It means this: if you ask me to cook for you, don’t tell me what to do, and don’t ask me to change my recipes. There is absolutely no point in letting me cook if you’re going to add your really bad ideas. You can cook your own bad food without my help. If I listen to you, you’ll moan about how bad the food is, and then you’ll tell people I can’t cook.

“Oh, can you use margarine instead of butter? Oh, have you tried turkey instead of pork?”

No; I can’t. If you want Weight Watchers food, go buy it in a Weight Watchers box like everyone else.

I made a pizza for a vegan friend once. It’s surprising she was willing to eat the cheese, since some poor cow’s teats had to suffer multiple microaggressions in the name of capitalism. I bought the plastic sausage my friend requested. It tasted like formaldehyde. And I am not using the word “formaldehyde” in order to be funny. That’s really what it tasted like.

Thank God she was used to the taste, so she didn’t run around afterward telling everyone my pizza tasted like formaldehyde.

I’ll tell you how most people approach cooking. They decide they want to cook something. They open a book or go to the web and pick a recipe. They assume the recipe is good without really knowing. They cook. They feel like their work is done. Most people have no palate, so they don’t know whether their food is good or not. They figure it must be good if they followed a recipe.

That’s not how a good cook does things. A good cook always creates his own recipes. He may start with someone else’s recipe, but that’s just a way to get the project going. He will always make changes later. A good cook isn’t satisfied with a recipe until he, himself, is stunned by the result.

If you’ve put in the time creating a great recipe, and then someone who can’t cook asks you to take out the cream and use skim milk, the correct response is, “Let’s go to Burger King instead.” If you don’t want the recipe, you don’t want the cook, even if you don’t realize it.

This year, I learned fresh turkey is the way to go when you bone your birds. If you thaw a turkey, you’ll probably run into ice when you bone it, and that makes your hands numb and causes problems. I used a fresh turkey this time, and I had no difficulties.

I sewed up the bird with dental floss, and it worked fine, but I should have used dental tape. It’s easier to work with, and it seems to be easier to pull out when the bird is done.

It’s pretty hard to over-salt a turkey. I boned my turkey, opened it up, salted it hard on the inside and outside, and then applied a seasoning mix that contained salt. In all likelihood, it had already been injected with salt at the turkey factory or whatever. It was great. Most turkeys don’t get enough salt.

Seasoning a turkey is really simple. I crushed 9 beef bouillon cubes and mixed them with melted butter, sage, Korbel brut, salt, and pepper. I could also have added garlic, but I forgot. I made around 8 ounces of this stuff, and I slathered it on the inside of the bird before I sewed it up. When the bird was stuffed and ready to go in the oven, I covered the outside with the seasoning mix. When you use what I use, the turkey will taste exactly the way a classic roasted turkey should taste but usually does not.

The stuffing was magnificent. I made cornbread with bacon grease, and I used it as the foundation. I sauteed 4 Aidell’s andouille sausages in butter and stirred them in, along with the sage, butter, eggs, beef broth, Korbel, and so on. I thought my dad would blow a gasket because of the sausage chunks, but he threw it right down and said it was excellent.

The turkey was fantastic, but I think it would have been even better had I cooked it at 200 instead of 275. Low temperature cooking makes a turkey juicier. I like to pray in the morning, so I didn’t get the turkey in the oven until almost noon. I had to jack up the temperature a little in order to have dinner in the afternoon.

There is nothing unsafe about cooking a turkey at 200. As long as you get the stuffing up to 165 at the end, you’re fine. I turned the heat up to 400 when I was getting close, to brown the skin.

I think people worry about turkey germs too much. Have you ever known anyone to get sick from Thanksgiving dinner? I haven’t. The government (famous for making great food) used to tell people to bring turkey to 185. Ridiculous. That’s at least 20 degrees past done, and it turns the turkey into rubber.

The government says to cook beef to an internal temperature of 145. Come on! That ruins it. I go 120 and call it done.

I came up with a good way to get the right amount of potato jacket in your mashed potatoes without choking your potato ricer. I peeled stripes off the potatoes before I boiled them. The remaining skin wasn’t enough to bother the ricer. After every potato chunk went through, I knocked the peel off the perforated plate and into my potatoes. Very easy.

I think potato ricers are overrated. I’ve used mine for a number of years, and it’s not noticeably better than a masher. The potatoes look really fluffy when they come out of it, but then you have to stir butter, milk or cream, salt, pepper, and garlic into them. After that, the result is a lot like what a masher provides.

I’ve had very good mashed potatoes at expensive restaurants, and they never looked like they were prepared with a ricer. Maybe I should dump that thing.

The beans were intoxicating. I found big green beans at the store. I broke them and simmered them for several hours yesterday. I seasoned them with a smoked ham hock, salt, pepper, a tiny bit of sugar, and some butter. The hock meat fell apart into the beans. I left the beans in the fridge overnight to let the flavors mingle. Today they were superb.

To get any flavor out of green beans or greens, you have to boil them until the texture starts to give way. It would be nice if you could have firm beans AND flavor, but you can forget it, because it doesn’t happen. If you’ve always eaten your green beans firm, you have no idea how good beans can taste.

Yankees criticize southerners for boiling vegetables until they turn into mush. I think they get the idea that we can’t cook from going to restaurants in the south where the food is bad. If you go to a Morrison’s cafeteria (a southern chain), and the beans are mushy and flavorless, the problem is this: you went to Morrison’s, where nearly everything is bad. If you ever tried my beans, you would understand why I cook them for three hours.

My gravy came out really well this year. I made it a little thinner and browner this time. I saved grease from the bottom of the turkey pan so I can make more later.

I learned pecan pie tastes even better if you screw up and triple the vanilla. I also added a little sorghum, because I was afraid I had left too much Karo in the bottle. I wanted to make up the difference. The sorghum improved the flavor. I also added a little whiskey, as always. I usually use Jack Daniel’s, which is a poor drinking whiskey that makes an excellent seasoning. This year, I did something awful. I had a nearly empty Knob Creek bottle, and I used it. Knob Creek is very good whiskey. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but JD would have cost me $19, and who knows when I would have used it again.

I think things worked out well. My dad was happy, the workload was not too bad, and I got a decent meal.

I still have a lot of food. I plan to get rid of it no later than Saturday. I don’t want this stuff sitting around tempting me. Thanksgiving is over. Time to move on. I could have a debauched weekend of reheated turkey and stuffing with gravy. All of these things get better after a day in the fridge. I’m not going to do it. It’s a sick American tradition that needs to go.

It’s kind of sad, seeing food this good go to the dump. I have never had holiday food that comes anywhere close to what I can cook for myself. I don’t care. It has to go, go, GO.

Christmas will be a lean operation. Prime rib, potatoes, salad, and maybe cheesecake. Much easier than what I just did. Then I’ll throw the leftovers out again.

I rarely cook anything good these days. It’s no longer a hobby. I try to make things that are quick and reasonably healthy. Holiday foods are aberrations.

This may be my dad’s last Thanksgiving, so I’m glad he enjoyed it. A friend congratulated me on my dad’s “first” Thanksgiving, meaning his first since he asked God for salvation. That was nice, but I’m not sure my dad is saved at the moment.

I don’t know if he understood what he was doing when he asked for salvation. I’m not even sure why he agreed to do it. Since then, he has said things indicating he doesn’t really believe.

I don’t believe in the doctrine of “eternal security.” I just learned the proper name for it a few days ago. I used to believe it. It means you can never lose your salvation. I’ve seen all sorts of testimonies from Christians who believe they went to hell, and I read a convincing book by a lady who said she was taken to hell and saw Christians there. I think at least some of these people are telling the truth.

Some people will point to verses like, “whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Here’s a problem:

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’

It certainly appears that Jesus was describing Christians who had called on him.

If calling on the Lord, all by itself, will bring salvation, why can’t renouncing God later, through words or actions, remove it?

Revelation 14 says people who renounce Jesus during the tribulation will go to hell. I don’t see why things should be any different now. I believe fear of hell is one of the main reasons the martyrs of the past were willing to be tortured and killed rather than repent.

Here’s what Revelation 14 says:

And the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever; and they have no rest day or night, who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.

You have to be careful about focusing on one verse and forgetting the rest. Peter said this:

For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning.

Did the disciples receive salvation when they believed in Jesus before he was crucified? Many would say yes, but if that’s true, what about Judas? The Bible describes him as “lost,” and he committed suicide in a place that symbolizes hell. It sure looks like he went to hell, but if he believed before he died, and he could not lose his salvation, what’s going on?

If my dad can’t lose his salvation, then I should never have bothered talking to him about God, because he went to Sunday school when he was a kid, before becoming an atheist. If calling on God in 1938 solved all of his problems, then I have been spinning my wheels over nothing.

I hope I’m mistaken, because it would mean most people I care about would be in heaven or on their way there, but I think salvation can be lost pretty easily.

Am I worried about my dad? No, because God keeps telling me he will be saved. My expectation has always been that my dad will give up for real when death looks him in the face. That can still happen. Maybe what happened in September, when he asked for salvation the last time, was just a rehearsal.

I want to get this right. My own salvation, I mean. I don’t want to die and find out I’m on the wrong path.

Tomorrow I plan to eat normal food again. I almost dread Christmas dinner. I do not understand why I have a talent for cooking, since it causes more trouble than it’s worth. Today I wondered if it might have come from Satan instead of God. Maybe when I cook, demons are telling me how much butter to use and which spice to add. I hope not.

Derek Prince cautioned people to avoid the martial arts, because they tend to be entangled with eastern religion. He said he cast demons out of a karate expert, and afterward, the man couldn’t do a kick he used to do. Supposedly, demons had been helping him kick.

Maybe the stories about Robert Johnson are true. Maybe you really can sell your soul to Satan in exchange for the ability to play the guitar.

I would hate to get in trouble with God just so I could make coconut flan.

Anyway, Thanksgiving is over. Now I can relax.

Icebergs Ahead

I am working on Thanksgiving dinner for two.

I have a great tip for anyone who drinks eggnog. I’m too lazy to make my own, so I buy the store stuff and doctor it if necessary. Adding more vanilla and nutmeg can help. That’s not the tip.

I have put several different spirits in eggnog. Bourbon. Brandy. Probably rum. This week I tried something new, and it turned out to be better than anything else I had tried. I had to pick up some Grand Marnier for my cranberry relish, and it was sitting on the counter while I poured myself an eggnog. The wheels turned.

It’s excellent. I filled a mug halfway, added Grand Marnier, and filled it the rest of the way. I dusted the top with nutmeg. I can’t recommend it highly enough. My guess is that an XO brandy would be even better, but to spend $200 per bottle for something you put in eggnog is to meddle with the primal forces of nature.

Grand Marnier is one of those things that doesn’t fit in just everywhere. You certainly wouldn’t want to drink it straight. It’s good for things like injecting orange sections or strawberries you intend to dip in chocolate. It’s also an ingredient of crepes Suzette. Now I know of one more use for it.

I hope the relish comes out good, because I had a little incident with the pecan pies. I misread the list on the Karo bottle, and I put in three times as much vanilla as I was supposed to. I have a feeling it will be better this way, but I’m still kicking myself [Note: it was wonderful.].

In other news, I called my dad’s doctor today and said I wanted information about hospice evaluations. I also called a hospice that was recommended. My friend Mike is a hospice exec, and he told me I needed to get on this now, before things really get crazy. He kept pushing me to do it. I think he’s used to hearing about people who were in denial and kept putting it off. That’s not me. Half of my family is dead, and I accept death as part of life, so I don’t shy away from death-related responsibilities.

When you get old and need a lot of assistance, you eventually become eligible for hospice care. They have a bunch of criteria. Can you walk? Can you communicate? They look you over and make a decision. If you fail, you get hospice care, and Medicare pays for it. That’s the test I’m trying to get for my dad.

I have always thought of hospice care as something you receive in a hospice, but there is more to it than that. You can receive hospice care in your own home. That’s what I’m shooting for right now. They’ll move equipment in and send people to help you bathe and so on.

Mike thinks my dad is ready. I’m not so sure. Some sources say you can get hospice care if there is a good possibility you will die during the next 6 months. Others say you get it if you’re expected to die during that time. My dad could die during the next 6 months. I have a feeling he will. But he could make it another 5 years, and no physician has flatly stated he is likely to go within 6 months.

I called the hospice Mike recommended, and they told me they wanted a referral from my dad’s doctor, so I left a message at the doctor’s office. Maybe we can get an appointment or phone consultation next week.

Mike says doctors hate to recommend hospice care. He says they hate to talk about death. I think that’s true. I don’t think any doctor ever told my mother she was terminal.

I don’t know why they won’t talk about death. I hate to think it’s because they make so much money on futile efforts to prolong life. Maybe they just don’t want to be involved in the discussion, because they don’t want responsibility. If that’s the case, they should man up. When you get a medical license, you agree to deal with every aspect of your job.

Maybe they don’t talk about death because they’re afraid of it, and they assume everyone else is, too. Solid Christians tend to have little fear of death. Most people scared and repelled by it. Most doctors aren’t solid Christians.

It would be nice to have people come every day and deal with my dad. He doesn’t have the kind of respect for me that he has for strangers, so they would be able to get a lot more done than I can.

His mobility is not what it was two months ago. At some point within the next three months or so, I expect him to start requiring so much help getting around, sitting, and standing, that we have to come up with a new solution. Will it be new devices? Assisted living? A move to a hospice? I don’t know. I know I can’t carry him around, and I’m not going to start helping him in the shower or on the toilet. That’s too much. You do those things if you live in India or Sudan, on ten dollars a month. Here, you look for professional help.

Some people seem to think changing a parent’s diapers or washing their private parts is a beautiful bonding experience. Not me. I think an ordeal like that is an insult from Satan. I’ve already seen way more than I want to.

My friend Amanda has offered to stay with him if I need to travel to Miami. Today I realized that’s off the table. He is starting to have problems that go beyond what you can allow a friend to deal with. The next time I travel, it will have to be Visiting Angels or some other business.

The more I think about it, the more I think physical illness is better than dementia.

When a relative dies from cancer, at least you can still interact with him. You can still have conversations. The patient can help you plan and react. He can understand what’s happening to him. He can grow. He can atone.

With dementia, it’s like half of the person has departed for good, and you’re left with the other half. It’s like the executives have left the building, and you get to talk to the janitors and the answering service. Once it really sets in, you can’t discuss the problem with him in any meaningful way. That’s especially true when the patient is a master of denial, like my dad. He sees a dementia diagnosis as a slander to be vigorously refuted.

If my dad had cancer, we could still talk. He could help me with his care. Spending time with him wouldn’t be work. I wouldn’t have to get away every day and be alone in order to get over dealing with him. At the end, we would be able to say important things to each other. Vascular dementia may leave him with the mind of an infant, so when he dies, he may not be able to communicate or understand at all. That’s how his sister went.

If I get any useful results from my hospice inquiries, I’ll write about it. Maybe I can help other people prepare better than I did.

Everybody Else Gets Tested

One of the neatest things God has taught me is that there is no substitute…for God.

I turned back to God for real in about 2007. I joined a church in Miami. Eventually, I learned that the pastors were wrong about many things. I learned that they were liars; they taught things they knew were not true, because their false doctrine moved people to give them money. I learned that they were ignorant about many things; they couldn’t even get themselves blessed, but they were teaching other people.

These things are true, but I got a lot of benefit from the church at first. Some things they or their guest speakers taught were true and useful.

I joined another church, and the same thing happened. The church disappeared in a puff of pride and anger, but I learned a lot of good things there. The pastor was an active pedophile, but he still managed to teach me things that were worth holding onto.

What’s the big lesson here? It’s this: don’t trust people to teach you about God; not forever, anyway. Learn to hear from the Holy Spirit himself. This is how Christianity is supposed to work.

In all likelihood, if you turn to God right now and accept Jesus, and you tell God you only want to learn from him, you will have problems. I don’t know of anyone who instantly developed a reliable channel of communication with God. You will probably have to find teachers. Nonetheless, you have to go beyond them eventually, because every Christian makes mistakes.

My last two pastors taught me some good things, and they also taught me some toxic garbage. Human beings didn’t expose the errors to me; they defended and reinforced them. Human beings could not be trusted to refute false doctrine for me. The Holy Spirit himself woke me up and showed me what was wrong with the churches. No one else is reliable.

You have to rely on men a little bit, but if you’re still breastfeeding from your pastor 5 years into your walk, you’re doing Christianity wrong. God didn’t save you and fill you with the Holy Spirit so you could hang on every word from Andrew Wommack or Jentezen Franklin. He did it so you could know him personally and receive his instruction directly.

Teachers are like human parents. It’s fine if your mom changes your diapers when you’re 6 months old. If she’s still doing it when you’re 40, something is amiss.

Lately I’ve been listening to Derek Prince a lot. He has done some wonderful teaching. I’ve benefited a great deal from listening to him. These things are true, but I’m already spotting his errors, and some of them are pretty bad. Derek Prince is not Jesus. He made mistakes.

I’ll tell you about the first error I noticed. Prince has a long history of casting out demons. He has teachings in which he discusses things demons told him. For example, a woman he helped had a demon that claimed it had followed Prince from Africa. Prince asked it a lot of questions, and it answered him. Prince was pleased to get the information and pass it on.

Problem: demons are liars. The demon didn’t tell him the truth. It told him things that would hurt his ministry and the people who listened to his teachings. Do I know which things it said were lies? No. I don’t have to. I have common sense, so I know it lied.

What do you think a demon is going to do when you ask it questions? Do you seriously think it’s going to be truthful and try to help you? The Bible doesn’t say that. It says Satan is a liar and the father of lies. Most of Satan’s power comes from lying. MOST.

Lying is much easier than working. It makes your enemies do your work for you.

Satan is like a woman. He is very feminine, which is why he chooses to manifest as “goddesses.” A man will try to destroy you by beating you to death. A woman will simply lie about you until you dry up and die.

Prince himself says Jesus told demons, “Be muzzled,” when he cast them out. Jesus didn’t have long conversations with demons. The longest interaction we know of consisted of Jesus agreeing to let some demons go into a herd of pigs. He didn’t ask for their life stories. When he spoke with Satan himself, he kept it brief.

Think about it: why should we go to demons for instruction? The very idea is insane. How is it different from idolatry? It’s an effort to get, from another spirit, what God himself isn’t giving us.

The Bible says they who trust in God will lack no good thing. If God won’t give you something, it’s not a good thing, and you shouldn’t have it.

There are a lot of preachers on Youtube, shooting the breeze with people who are supposedly letting demons speak through them. How can anyone think the demons aren’t using these conversations as opportunities to spread poison? It’s their job! If I were a demon, it’s exactly what I’d do. Am I smarter than Satan? Have I come up with a strategy he never heard of until today? Bet I haven’t.

Here is the second error: Prince endorses the law of tithing, for Christians.

I can’t say it enough: we are not under the Jewish law. We can eat rabbits and oysters. We can wear poly/cotton shirts. We can eat toast during Passover. Tithing, as a required practice, comes from the Jewish law.

Preachers love to claim Abraham’s tithe to Melchizedek proves we have to tithe, and Prince is no exception. Yes, Abraham tithed before the law existed, but he only did it once as far as we know, and we have no record of him requiring other believers to do it, as he forced them to be circumcised.

There is no record of Christians tithing in the New Testament. There is absolutely no record of the prosperity gospel.

If you have to tithe, you have to obey all of the laws of ritual giving. If you grow crops, you can’t harvest the corners of the fields; you have to invite the poor to come and glean. If you have a pear tree, you have to take 10% of the pears to church (tithes went to the temple, not the church, but still). You’re not allowed to tithe until you pay all your bills. The Jewish law is very complex, and Prince didn’t know much about it. He taught people to obey a law, but he taught a very incomplete and, therefore, invalid version of the law.

Here’s what Paul said about legalism in Galatians:

For everyone who depends on legalistic observance of Torah commands lives under a curse, since it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not keep on doing everything written in the Scroll of the Torah.”

Now it is evident that no one comes to be declared righteous by God through legalism, since “The person who is righteous will attain life by trusting and being faithful.”

Furthermore, legalism is not based on trusting and being faithful, but on the text that says, “Anyone who does these things will attain life through them.”

The Messiah redeemed us from the curse pronounced in the Torah by becoming cursed on our behalf; for the Tanakh says, “Everyone who hangs from a stake comes under a curse.”

Yeshua the Messiah did this so that in union with him the Gentiles might receive the blessing announced to Avraham, so that through trusting and being faithful, we might receive what was promised, namely, the Spirit.

Paul began Galatians 3, addressing their legalism, this way:

You stupid Galatians! Who has put you under a spell?

Don’t dismiss the word “spell” as though a modern American had said it without sincerity. Paul meant what he said. He knew witchcraft and demons were real. He was being literal. He used a Greek word which referred to witchcraft. He knew legalism sometimes resulted from spells cast by witches, and he believed the Galatians should be aware that they might be under such a spell.

Prince himself cast out a religious demon that told people not to eat pork.

I’m not going to count my grapes and take 10% to a church. Forget it. I have a huge rosemary bush. Do you seriously think I’m going to drive to the property where it grows, cut 10% off, and take it to a preacher? Come on! The law requires those things.

The law is very hard. One of its purposes was to show people they could not be righteous through their own efforts. Jesus freed us from the burden of the law by fulfilling it on the cross. If you pick the burden up again, you’re making a mistake, and you can’t expect God to back you up.

I went to Middlebrook Church here in Ocala about 4 times. Maybe 5. I didn’t give them a cent. I’m glad I didn’t, because during the last service I attended, the pastor taught New Age idolatry. If the Holy Spirit had wanted me to give, I would have given. I’m not going to support idolatry just because Abraham gave a bunch of sheep and chickens to Melchizedek. I believe God would hold me responsible if I gave stupidly. I believe he has done it in the past.

It’s strange that idolaters use the term “New Age.” All of what they teach is very old. There is nothing new about it.

You can’t serve two masters. Jesus made that clear. The law is one master, and the Holy Spirit is another.

You really have to get to know the Holy Spirit. You can’t trust human beings all your life. You can’t trust Derek Prince, the pope, me, or anyone else. Try to pick out the things that are true, get yourself baptized with the Holy Spirit, pray in tongues a great deal every day, and listen to God. He is the only truly trustworthy being there is. Everyone else, without exception, can fail. There are people in hell who gave some good teaching as pastors while they were alive.

By the way, I will mention this again: I heard a teaching that said the ability to pray in tongues could be blocked by unforgiveness and unconfessed sin, so if you’re still stuck, think about it. From personal experience, I can tell you that even when you think you’ve confessed everything, you will probably turn out to be wrong. Ask God to show you what you still have to get out of yourself.

Don’t think of confession, repentance, sanctification, and having demons cast out as one-time things. It’s like taking out the garbage. You have to keep it up. You wouldn’t take your garbage out in January and forget about it for the rest of the year because it was already done.

God told me this: “I am a living thing.” He also said, “Things get better, or they get worse.” We are always improving or deteriorating. Demons, sicknesses, and iniquities can come back, so keep doing what you’re supposed to do. Improve or deteriorate. There is no third choice.

I won’t let myself get frustrated with Prince. He’s not a failure, as far as I can tell. He’s just imperfect, like the rest of us. He did a lot of great work, and I will still listen to him sometimes. If I get disgusted because of his little errors, I’m condemning and discarding every preacher who ever lived, and I’m certainly condemning myself.

Then Just Keep Running

Yesterday I went shopping for Thanksgiving food. I’m afraid I was not as thankful as I should have been.

When I was a kid, Thanksgiving was not my problem. My mother cooked everything, or we ate at my grandparents’ house, and that meant the cooking was divided up among a bunch of relatives. Now, it’s all me. Shopping. Cleaning up before the meal. Cooking. Running around frantically during the meal to make sure my dad doesn’t defile anything and ruin it for everyone else. Dishes. Cleaning up after the meal. It’s a drag.

I was reluctant to cook at all this year. I don’t know if my dad would care. By Friday, he will be thinking of other things. In the past, he has suggested going out for Thanksgiving, but that’s depressing. I feel like I have to do something here at the house.

I decided to cut the menu down. My dad likes oyster dressing, which I find disgusting. I don’t know how to make oyster dressing, so I make cornbread dressing and shove oysters into it. It’s probably wrong, but he eats it. I’m all done with it. It won’t hurt him to eat normal dressing like everyone else. I’m thinking of stuffing the turkey with cornbread stuffing containing chunks of sauteed andouille.

He can’t smell anything, and that means his sense of taste is very limited. He doesn’t really taste oysters. He will enjoy my stuffing as much as he would the nasty oyster mess. He just wants oysters because his mother used to use them. Some traditions are well worth killing.

No yams this year. I used to make a dish which was basically yams mashed up with pineapples, brown sugar and spices, topped with pecans fried in brown sugar and butter. Forget that. Takes too much time.

There will be no pumpkin pies. I don’t particularly care for pumpkin pie. I don’t think anyone really likes it. Try comparing it to apple, cherry, or peach pie, and you have to admit, it comes in second every time. I’m making two pecan pies, using crusts from the store. Good enough.

Pecan prices have gone nuts, to use an appropriate adjective. I paid $18 for my pecans. There must be a blight.

My dad insists on cranberry sauce, which is a very weak dish. It’s cranberries, sugar, and water. I’m all done with it. This year, it will be relish alone. Everyone gets relish, and they will danged well like it. I’m tired of making sauce AND relish.

I won’t make fruit salad (or any type of salad), and there will be no rolls. No snacks. No cookies. It will be turkey, beans, potatoes, cranberry relish, and pecan pie. I think I cut four hours of work out of my life.

I have learned to love small turkeys. The store was full of birds the size of toddlers, but I dug out a 12-pounder. I am going to bone it and stuff it. It’s a lot of work, but once you’ve had a boned turkey, all other turkeys are disgusting.

You know the big, dried-out turkey cadaver you end up with every year? You struggle to fit it on a platter, and then you try to cover it with foil, but people never put the foil back correctly, so everything turns into leather? You don’t get that with a boned turkey. You get a solid loaf of pure food you can slice and put in Tupperware. The bones go in the trash on Thursday, not Monday, or you can use them for gravy.

If you don’t know how big your turkey should be, you can find the information on the web. If the raw weight in pounds is 1.5 times the number of diners, you’re good. If you want a lot of leftovers, maybe you need to go bigger. I do not want leftovers. Sharing leftover food with a dementia patient is a bad experience. You go to the fridge hoping to make a turkey sandwich, and then you see that someone else has handled the meat with his fingers. That kind of thing happens.

My dad was never a great person to share leftovers with. He would eat the best stuff right away, and the more there was, the more he ate. No one else got very much. He’s an unusual person. I take him to restaurants for big lunches, and then when he gets home, he eats ice cream out of the carton.

I’ll be throwing out any remaining leftovers on Saturday. My dad hates that, but I hate dealing with the mess. Turkey bits on the counter. Cranberry sauce on the floor. As long as I’m the sole member of the cleaning crew, I make the rules. On Saturday, out it goes.

When I finally gritted my teeth and decided to cook, I invited my friend Amanda over. She has three sons and an elderly parent (not demented). Like me, she has no help whatsoever. None. Nada. I figured things would be easier on both of us if we teamed up. Also, if she wants, she can fill in with items I refuse to cook. I am hoping both of us will do a lot less work than we would have had to do with two separate operations.

My attitude toward the whole affair is not all that positive. I suppose I should think of Amanda’s sons. Thanksgiving was a big deal to me when I was a kid. Maybe if I think of this as a chance to help patch up their childhoods, I’ll feel more motivated. I should focus on that, because feeding my dad is not all that rewarding.

I don’t see the holiday as an opportunity to give thanks. I give thanks like crazy every day. I’m not sure jamming yourself full of food is a good way to express gratitude. I’m also unexcited about the idea of going somewhere and feeding the poor. If you’re only good to other people on holidays, I suppose working at a homeless shelter two days a year is better than nothing, but I want no part of it. I’m not sure how people who do it manage to put any food on their own tables. I expect to be cooking from 9 a.m. until at least 2 p.m., not including the things I’ll do tomorrow and Wednesday. There is no conceivable way I could produce edible food AND spend three hours virtue signaling and posting selfies of myself hugging the poor while trying not to get too dirty.

If you want to freak the poor out, go feed them two weeks after Thanksgiving, and stay all day. Or feed them in March, giving up a vacation day. That will make an impression. Much better than hopping out of your Range Rover and slapping instant mashed potatoes on trays for 45 minutes.

If I cook anything at all for Christmas, it will be rib roast, baked potatoes, and cheesecake. Maybe a Caesar salad. I would fix these things on Thursday if I could get away with it. The cheesecake takes a little effort, but the other things are as easy to prepare as toast. It’s also a much better meal than turkey and dressing.

It looks like the best strategy is to think of the kids. That gives me a little enthusiasm, or at least it makes me feel some obligation. My dad and Amanda’s mom–I think Amanda will forgive me–are not the sort of seniors who make you want to cook special stuff for them in order to thank them for being so wonderful.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll get amped up and cook yams.

No pumpkin pie. No way. I hate fads, and for the last couple of years, we’ve been seeing way too much “pumpkin spice.” Pumpkin spice cookies. Pumpkin spice cappuccino. Pumpkin spice pork rinds. Pumpkin spice Preparation H. No; someone must rage against the machine, and as Dean Vernon Wormer said, that foot is me.

Try that boned turkey. You don’t know what you’re missing.

If I Want Buddhism, I’ll go to a Temple

I am not going to church today.

I can’t do it. I would like to go, for my dad’s sake, but after watching Tim Gilligan preach “mindfulness” (the new Buddhist/Hindu fad) to Christians, I can’t make myself go.

Here’s what happens when I take my dad to Meadowbrook Church. He sits through the service without saying much. Then as we drive home, he criticizes. “They just want to get your money.” He doesn’t encounter God at the church. He can tell the pastor doesn’t have much to say. He knows the message is empty.

The apostles preached with power and authority. They didn’t crib from Oprah and Dr. Phil. They didn’t plagiarize from Gwyneth Paltrow. They healed people. They raised the dead. They prophesied. They told people things only God could have revealed to them. In short, it was pretty much the opposite of what happens at Meadowbrook.

Nothing is going to happen to my dad at Meadowbrook. It’s a church that can only reach people who already want to believe.

I’m looking at other churches online. I don’t know what else to do.

I’m checking out a place called Kingdom Revival Church. They have a live Youtube feed. Right now the music team is going at it. The music is much better than the music at Meadowbrook, which features Hillsong-y stuff so bland it’s impossible to discern the melodies. Meadowbrook has better musicians, but listening to them is like having white bread with “lite” mayonnaise shoved into your ears.

Kingdom Revival appears to be what I call an “ethnic church,” which means it looks like it’s minority-heavy. I am reluctant to go to another ethnic church. As a veteran of ethnic churches, I am used to services where people get so emotional, they mistake emotion for the Holy Spirit. It wears you down. Meadowbrook Church is a lifeless, dried-up caricature of real church, but ethnic churches tend to be places where people work harder at pretending to be full of the Spirit than they do at getting to know him. If you want to see a pregnant single woman on a stage, singing on the music team with full approval and speaking in tongues, or if you want to see an active car thief playing the piano in a position of authority, your best bet is an ethnic church.

I generalize, of course. If I were not aware that there were exceptions to generalizations, I wouldn’t be watching the service.

It’s frustrating to see how churches go to extremes. They smother the Holy Spirit, or they work themselves into a frenzy, pretending he’s in charge. Satan likes extremism, so I suppose it makes sense.

The music people are speaking in tongues, so I guess I don’t have to ask whether the church is charismatic. It doesn’t look bad so far. Now they’re praying for a friend who is in the hospital. I haven’t seen anything like that at Meadowbrook.

I’ll watch for a while and see if it looks like this place is worth visiting. Hopefully no one will mention yoga or BLM.

Wow. He just said, “They can’t place hope in Buddha, because Buddha can’t move. Buddha is a statue that sits on a shelf and collects dust.”

Hmm. That was timely.

I just realized I’m watching last week’s service. I’ll switch to the current service.

BTW, the wife of the pastor of my last church died this week, and her husband, who has pleaded guilty to felonies, is scheduled to go into custody two weeks after Thanksgiving. You can see why I’m reluctant to listen to preachers without testing them.

You Can’t Get Rid of God With Science

This week I received a copy of Testament, which is a video series created by a historian named John Romer. It aired in the late 1980’s. I enjoyed it the first time around, so I wanted to see it again.

Romer has a very engaging way of speaking. Every word and gesture are planned. He makes you feel as if everything he said were a staggering revelation of enormous importance. I know I’m not the only one who enjoys watching him, because dinosaur expert Robert Bakker has done a series of his own, and he imitates Romer with extraordinary faithfulness. It’s almost as if he’s making fun of him, but he’s very serious.

I’ll post two videos so you can see what I mean. First, Romer.

Now, Bakker.

Now that I think about it, it’s funny that Bakker would model his manner of presentation after Romer’s, because they’re in the same basic line of work. They look at old objects and present their opinions on them, in ways that appear intended to refute the Bible.

When I was a kid, I sometimes misused the word “archaeologist.” Somehow I got the idea that “archaeologist”–the name for a person who studies distant human history–was also the right name for paleontologists, who study distant plant and animal history. The fields have a lot of similarity.

When I was in college (the first time), I studied vertebrate anatomy as part of my ill-fated effort to be come a doctor. The professor who taught the class was one Walter Bock. He was wonderful. He talked about bones and joints and weird characteristics of animals. Each of us got a box of cat bones, a dead cat, and a dead shark to dissect. I loved it.

One of my lab T.A.’s was a guy named Neil Shubin. Years later, I saw him on TV, telling people about dinosaurs. I guess he went full-throttle paleontologist. It’s kind of a neat career. I don’t think paleontologists have to be as smart as biologists who work with plasmids and pipettes, and I doubt they get as much respect from scientists, but they get to go on digs and build cool museum displays kids love.

Well, I’m wrong. He’s an evolutionary biologist. Apparently, he has become somewhat famous. He wrote a bestseller. Here he is on Youtube.

We had a fascinating textbook, which, coincidentally, was written by a man named Romer. I don’t know if it was great science, but it was interesting. I recall reading that spiders use blood pressure to extend their legs.

I wish I still had that book. Somehow it vanished. Maybe I’ll get a new copy.

Real, hard core science is all calculus. Kids don’t know that. They grow up thinking it’s all like the Discovery Channel. The neat thing about vertebrate anatomy (and similar topics) is that it really is like the Discovery Channel. You don’t have to be Johnny von Neumann to study it and enjoy it. You don’t even need to be a high school graduate. The lectures Professor Bock gave were not much harder to understand than TV shows.

I did a terrible thing with the cat. We didn’t need the whole cat for our work, so I took the tail from mine and inserted it in a hole in the button panel in one of my dorm’s elevators. For some reason, a button was missing. When my work was done, it looked as if a cat had been sucked into the panel, but for its tail.

I was a real idiot back then.

He was an orange tabby, if anyone cares. No; she. We had to become familiar with our cats’ entire bodies, and I recall examing the parts that established her gender.

Wow; Professor Bock is still working. He must be a thousand years old. He still has a page on Columbia’s site.

He was an ornithologist. Sometimes he would show up for lectures fresh from the field, with his pants pulled up over his boots. He worked in Schermerhorn, one of Columbia’s neatest buildings. It was a perfect picture of an early 20th-Century science building. It was full of jars containing pickled snakes and other creatures. They had an extinct Tasmanian tiger in a jar.

These days, the antique jars themselves would probably be worth more than the contents. I can see hipsters buying them to hold their homemade, locally sourced, non-GMO pemmican. Or whatever it is they eat.

Unfortunately, my parents drove me nuts while I was in college, so I did not complete the course. I tried twice, but I was a basket case.

Romer (not the book guy) starts his series with Abraham, and he devotes a lot of time to “debunking” the Bible. For example, he says Abraham could not have had camels, because they didn’t show up in the Middle East until 500 BC. He goes on like this throughout the series.

He loves saying there is no evidence of the Hebrews or God until pretty late in the archaeological record. What he doesn’t say is that archaeologists don’t have a perfect record. He draws a lot of definite conclusions about what does and does not exist, based on excavations covering what surely has to be less than a hundredth of a percent of the relevant landscape.

He finally admits evidence of the Hebrews exists when he gets to the palace of Omri, father of Ahab. Here’s the question he doesn’t ask himself: if Omri was a Hebrew, did he come from nowhere? If Omri was a Hebrew, then his father was a Hebrew, and his grandfather was a Hebrew, and they came from a people who were Hebrews. Omri didn’t just wake up one morning and say, “I suddenly feel Jewish. Let’s start an ethnic group and a religion. Someone start smoking salmon!”

Omri was a descendant of Jeroboam I, who stole half of the kingdom of David when Solomon died. He is believed to have been born somewhere around 900 BC. David is believed to have ruled during an era somewhere around 1000 BC. Moses is thought to have left Egypt around 300 years earlier.

Moses to Omri…~400 years. That’s not a terribly long gestation period for a people. It stands to reason that Omri’s people existed in the time of Moses.

Aside from that, Moses himself seems legitimate. His name is believed to be Egyptian, not Hebrew. Joseph, who established the Jewish connection with Egypt, seems legitimate. Romer himself says the Bible’s description of him is consistent with what we know of Egyptian officials of his time, right down to his wardrobe.

Romer’s series devotes time to the City of David, which is a well-known archaeological site in Jerusalem. Romer claims there is no evidence David existed. Well, his series was released in 1988. Since then, archaeologists have found evidence of David in other countries. An ancient king claimed he had defeated kings from David’s line. There is also strong evidence of a Jewish outpost on Elephantine Island in Egypt, dating back to about 500 BC. There is a temple there with two stars of David carved on it.

One wonders what evidence Romer was looking for when he visited the City of David. Did he hope to find a bronze plaque in English, reading, “This is the City of David, second king of the Hebrews,” along with a vial of blood for DNA testing?

Romer also talks about the compilation of the Hebrew Bible, and he uses a very deceptive word: “versions.” He says the people who hid the Dead Sea Scrolls in order to preserve the Bible wrote many “versions.” That’s incorrect. They wrote many “copies” or “editions.” “Version” implies a difference in the text, and the Hebrew Bible is famous for its consistency throughout history. Look at it this way: if I own two King James Bibles from different publishers, I own two editions but only one version.

Romer’s slander is a lot like the one we hear from some Jews, concerning the New Testament. I was told that over 20,000 “versions” of the New Testament had been found. I looked into the story, and what I actually saw was that they were copies, not versions. They were consistent. The story didn’t debunk the New Testament; it supported its legitimacy.

Here’s how I feel about historical and scientific arguments about the veracity of the Bible: they will be resolved in time, in favor of the text. Maybe the word translated “camels” in Abraham’s story was a general term meaning “beasts of burden.” Maybe Abraham had camels, and historians are wrong about the time camels arrived in the area; they are proven wrong every month, about similar issues. Sooner or later, scripture will be vindicated, and people will regret obsessing on the matter to their own detriment.

I’ve seen spirits. I’ve had many miraculous healings. Jesus visited me twice. The Bible is obviously true. When you know God personally, it makes no sense to pore over the Bible and look for flaws. If a guest were staying in your house, you wouldn’t go to the Internet and Google him relentlessly to find out whether he existed or not.

If you don’t know God personally, your problem isn’t the Bible. You need to get in touch with him and ask him to show himself to you. He does this all the time.

Remember; as important as the Bible is, it is no substitute for God himself. Abraham had no Bible, and he did just fine. Isaac, Jacob, Jacob’s sons, and Moses (writer of the Pentateuch) had no Bible. Enoch, Methuselah, and Noah had no Bible. When God proves himself to you, quit worrying about how many animals will fit in an ark. You’re making things harder than they have to be.

I don’t know if people should watch Romer’s series. If you aren’t grounded, it could sow doubt in your mind. Maybe I should quit watching. I enjoy it, and some of the material is valid and educational. I have asked God about it, and I don’t think there’s a problem, but I will not make a firm decision to keep watching. I make mistakes.

If you like Romer, remember: you’ll also like Robert Bakker. His impression of Romer is so good, if either of them dies, the other can continue his work.

More

I got nostalgic, thinking about my brief time as a biology major, so I looked around to see if my old textbook was available. While I did that, I learned that Columbia University has stopped teaching vertebrate anatomy. They taught it in 2008, but the class listing is gone now.

Here’s something interesting: you can buy your own specimens for dissection online, and they’re cheap. For under a hundred bucks, you can have your own dogfish and dead cat, complete with dissection tools and lab guide. Now you know what happens to Fluffy and Snowball when you get tired of them. The companies that sell them fix them with formaldehyde and shoot their blood vessels full of red and blue rubber.

You can get a cleaned up cat skeleton for $125. Exciting. Educational and decorative.

When I was at Columbia, cutting up dead cats with a friend who went on to become a very unhappy radiologist, my friend told me biologists didn’t respect the kind of work Professor Bock and his students did. Biology had gone molecular and so on, so memorizing cat bones was not considered important. I have to wonder if that was a smart position to take, since doctors have to know how bodies are put together. I guess now students don’t see real bodies until they get their cadavers.

Good news for the guy who cleans the elevators in the East Campus dormitory. Still, it’s kind of sad to see da Vinci’s type of science disappear.

Failure is Victory

I watch a lot of Christian videos on Youtube. One of Youtube’s prominent features is video recommendation. Their computers make wild guesses based on things you’ve already seen, and probably based on other types of Internet surveillance, and they show you videos they think you’ll want to watch. They also show you targeted ads.

For a long time, I was bombarded with ads for Mormonism, which is not, not, NOT Christianity. Mormons believe Jesus and Satan are brothers. They believe works will get you into heaven. One of their “prophets” denounced the “heresy” of salvation by faith, which is THE central belief of Christianity.

The only way for a Mormon to get into heaven is to do Mormonism wrong and accidentally accept enough true Christian doctrine to get him in the door.

The original Book of Mormon says black people will turn white and “delightsome” when they become righteous. Look it up if you don’t believe me. They didn’t allow black men to become priests (or allow black men and women into their temples) until 1978. They think American Indians are really descendants of Jews, which is not what DNA or common sense tells us. They believe God has a sort of wife, and that other beings were created through their union. They think God has a physical body, right now, in heaven (which is supposedly a planet).

They don’t believe Jesus is really the eternal, always-existing God, in the sense that Christians do. They think he started out imperfect and became God through obedience. Mormons also think they can put dead people in heaven by baptizing them by proxy.

It’s pretty strange.

If you look at the history of Mormonism, you will see a lot of proven fraud. I don’t mean individual Mormons defrauded people in their personal affairs. I mean Mormons committed fraud in creating doctrine and sacred writings and so on. It’s fundamental fraud that indicts the faith as much as the participants.

Look up The Book of Abraham. Joseph Smith took some Egyptian material concerning embalming and tried to pass it off as the story of Abraham’s life. Apparently, he did not realize that scholars who were familiar with hieroglyphics would eventually decode the Egyptian material and tell the world its true meaning.

As for Joseph Smith, the founding false prophet of Mormonism, he was arrested and tried in 1826. The crime was “glass-looking” or “money-digging,” which means he pretended to use magical stones in order to find buried treasure. It was a con game, and Smith admitted his guilt. The court records still exist.

I’ve had a number of commenters and email correspondents try to tell me Mormonisn is Christianity. Of course, they were all Mormons. Mormons are the only non-Jews who seriously believe Mormonism is Christianity. Jews can’t tell the difference. They probably think Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists are Christians.

Youtube can’t tell the difference between Christianity and Mormonism, so I got ads for a long time.

Lately, Youtube has been trying to get me to watch a video about David Goodall. He killed himself recently. He was a prominent botanist. He was still going to work at 102, when the university that employed him told him he would no longer be allowed to go to his office because it was unsafe. He became dissatisfied with life and traveled to Switzerland, where a doctor helped him commit suicide with Nembutal. He was 104.

I have watched a number of videos in which Christians testified about dying and coming back to life, so maybe that’s why Youtube thinks I’m interested in assisted suicide.

I have not watched the video. I have no interest in it. Goodall’s story is a tragic tale of utter defeat. This man had over 104 years to get to know God, and he didn’t make it. He thought he had the right to take his own life, and he died in sin.

Some people think every suicide goes to hell. Some think suicide is not a sin. I suppose there must be cases in which suicide is forgiven. What if you try to kill yourself, but while you’re in the process of dying, you repent sincerely? What if you throw yourself on a bomb to protect other people from a terrorist attack? As law professors say, every case is different. Generally, though, I would expect people who kill themselves deliberately to go to hell.

God gives us forgiveness for all our sins, but we’re supposed to repent in order to be forgiven. If you know you’re doing something sinful, you choose to do it anyway, and you die as a result, how can you hope to be forgiven?

Leftists want people to think Goodall’s experience is an indictment of England’s “backward” laws, which required a frail old man to travel hundreds of miles in order to end his suffering. That’s terrible. They want to make it easier for misinformed people to do things that will condemn themselves to hell. Their policies will help people die in unbelief.

Euthanasia is a wonderful thing…for lower animals. It’s great that we are allowed to spare animals pointless suffering. But animals are not human, and human beings are not animals. Animals can’t go to hell. They can’t sin, because sin requires the ability to distinguish good from evil.

The life of an animal is not sacred. You can kill an animal simply because you’re hungry or you need a piece of leather. You can kill an animal because it digs up your garden. Killing a person to end his suffering is like killing him for stealing your tomatoes.

People are very important. God told me this: no one is disposable. Euthanasia makes us out to be no more important than bugs and rats. Every one of us is here for a reason. We have assignments. We don’t have the right to quit before our time.

It’s too bad we can’t see Goodall as he is now. We can see him in a video, praising his uninformed decision…before receiving the consequences. We can’t see him in hell, in flames, crying and screaming in pain and regret.

The disinformation that surrounds us in this world is amazing. We swim in it every day. The enemy destroys people with lies, and then to make things worse, he persuades the rest of us to admire them after they’re placed in hell. The damned are still alive, suffering horrors beyond description, while we smugly celebrate them up here on hell’s roof.

I finally clicked the little links and told Youtube to quit showing me that video. I don’t know if it will listen, but I certainly hope so.

Signs Continue to Increase

I’ve been reading about the fires in California. Usually, I don’t pay any attention to these things. Fires come and go, and California is a long way off. The current crisis attracted my attention for some reason.

One of the interesting things about the fire is that it has destroyed or damaged a number of homes belonging to celebrities. I can’t help wondering if there is a message there. Look at some of the names.

1. Miley Cyrus. Promotes nudity, drug use, and every type of sexual sin.

2. Neil Young. Aging counterculture hero who seems to have no interest in changing.

3. Robin Thicke. Promoter of sexual sin. Notorious for a music video featuring nudity and a vulgar TV performance with Miley Cyrus.

4. Scott Derrickson. Director of Doctor Strange, a Marvel movie in which a witch helps save the world.

The fire also destroyed the Paramount Ranch, where M*A*S*H (the TV show) and a lot of westerns were filmed.

If the fire hurt these people and destroyed this property, there must be many showbiz people whose sad stories we haven’t heard yet.

Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but maybe it does. Satan owns Hollywood, and entertainers have gotten so crazy it’s hard to believe.

The Bible says God is not mocked. What it really means is he will not be mocked forever. You can mock him right now and not be struck by lightning. He shows patience, but eventually, someone has to pay the bill. If you won’t confess, repent, and let him pay it, it’s on you.

People from Hollywood are pulling together and supporting each other. You have to wonder if it was like that during the plagues of Egypt. What if they had had Twitter? Would they have praised each other for helping victims of the flies, frogs, and wild beasts? I suppose they would have. They thought worshiping idols was righteous, so they wouldn’t have understood the plagues.

Imagine the torrent of anguished tweets that would have poured out when God killed the firstborn of every house.

It just occurred to me: that’s what it will be like in the future. When God’s judgment really starts to rain on the earth, Twitter (if it still exists) will be full of selfies and shoutouts. There will be vigils and candles. There will be benefit concerts. Maybe Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke will perform.

I never thought of that before.

The children of darkness generally don’t embrace what they consider to be evil. They embrace an alternative righteousness, which looks shiny and promising. They preach acceptance and unconditional love (except for God’s children). They love holding banners and singing together. They think they’re doing the right thing. In that respect, they’re a lot like Christians who cling to dead churches and the prosperity gospel.

Leftists want a world where sin doesn’t exist because there are no longer any rules. They want a world without consequences, except for people who commit serious crimes such as wearing Chick-fil-A T-shirts. Those people have to be fired and impoverished, at the very least; mercy is not for them. Leftists want a Muppet/Pixar world, without God’s interference. It doesn’t work, because God is real, and he can’t be put off forever.

There is a scary video on Youtube right now. A Christian tried to help his friends escape a fire, and they didn’t make it. Their cars burned. He went back and filmed their corpses. I shouldn’t call them corpses. They are charred skeletons. One victim can be seen sitting in a front seat while a flame burns in the car behind him. Somehow his bare skull is still upright on his shoulders.

I don’t understand what happened. The Christian had to abandon his car, but when he returned, it wasn’t damaged very badly. It still ran, and the tires were intact. The other cars were shells with no paint.

One victim was a woman who refused to leave until she had applied makeup. He said she died because of that. That’s a metaphor. We hold onto things that can destroy us.

Sanctification is very, very important. We aren’t paying enough attention to it. We say a quick prayer, declare ourselves saved, and continue to live very much as we lived before. We think we can’t lose our salvation, and we think every bad thing that happens to us is unjustified. That’s not how it works. You can still go to hell, and holding onto sins will help you get there. It will allow demons to ruin your body and your life.

A young friend of mine tells his friends they’re going to arrive in heaven smelling like smoke. They say they’re Christians, but they do what they please. Their works will be burned, and if they are allowed into heaven, it will be as underachievers who didn’t accumulate much treasure. I think of that when I consider the video. Most of the people in the escape caravan died. The Christian who tried to save them made it, but the heat melted parts of his car.

It would be interesting to see God take a swing at Hollywood. I don’t know if that’s happening now, but it may be.

You won’t believe what’s happening in my own life. I have been hesitant to write about it, because it’s so strange. I passed several more kidney stones, in a single day. I have lost count.

As I wrote recently, I woke up with pressure on one side of my back, and I took a Roxicet because I was afraid it would turn into severe pain. I prayed and so on, and the pain left. I passed a big stone and went back to bed and slept soundly. I thought I was done. Then three more stones came out in one day.

I haven’t had any real pain. I don’t think I have a fever. I feel no pressure. I have had some symptoms I won’t describe because it would be TMI, but it’s not a big deal. Oddly, things down there are working better than they were before the first stone popped up. If you’re a middle-aged man, you may understand without further explanation.

I’m not worried at all. About anything. I was having a lot of problems with worry, and I mean general worry, not worry about kidney stones. I thought it was spirits that were allowed to get at me because of things I was holding onto, so I fought the spirits verbally and started cleansing my house. Yesterday or the day before, I realized I didn’t worry any more. I still have problems, but I don’t seem to be able to worry now. I almost feel irresponsible for not worrying.

I feel like the stones are connected to sanctification. It had to be a message. There must have been things I needed to confess and get rid of. I blocked God, so I was blocked. That’s how I see it. Our curses tend to have some resemblance to the evil things we do to God and other people.

The first time I had a stone, I was far from God. I paid about $7000 for unpleasant, humiliating medical treatment that amounted to nothing in terms of help, and I suffered for days while I waited to pass the stone. I just remembered that I went to a doctor for one other stone, but it wasn’t nearly as big a deal. The rest have come out with prayer, without a lot of misery.

When you have a problem, the first thing you should do is ask God what you’re doing wrong. Confess and repent, for real. After that, rely on prayer, fasting, casting out, and so on. Going to a doctor shouldn’t be your first move. Even if he helps you, you may be in for a repeat engagement because you haven’t pulled up the root. If you do things right with God, you should usually be able to get relief without medical help.

I’m so glad I didn’t have to go to a doctor. I hate dealing with people who offer primitive, superficial solutions that involve suffering and expense. I hate being misdiagnosed and given worthless treatments; that has happened a lot. It seems like I never have something simple which doctors understand correctly.

I mentioned blockage. One thing I have blocked is love. This has driven me crazy for years.

When I was young, I responded to abuse by making myself an angry person who ridiculed others. I also convinced myself I was an innocent victim, which is always a mistake. People who think they are victims are the cruelest people there are.

When Jesus visited me, I felt his overwhelming love, and I know I’m supposed to radiate love, too. On a few occasions, God has supernaturally allowed me to feel and give off love for everyone around me, so I know what it’s like. Nonetheless, I haven’t had consistent victory. For years, I didn’t know what was blocking it. I knew I had to get rid of demons and iniquities, but I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know much about sanctification.

When I pray in tongues now, I feel God’s love, and I’m trying to focus on it and open the passage wider. God is supposed to pour a lot of things through us; love, faith, prophecy, and so on. I constricted the pipe by embracing cruelty, so now it’s like a blocked artery. I am hoping homing in on God’s love while praying in tongues will wash away the accumulated crud and open up the channel.

The Bible says completed love casts out fear, and fear and worry are virtually the same thing. If love flows through me, fear and worry won’t be able to compete with it.

The world is being wound up to a state of enmity which will force a confrontation and resolution before long. Every time I think I’ve seen it all, I look at the news and see something that surprises me and makes me think we will see things fall apart even sooner.

If we want to see any improvement in the people around us, we will have to focus on internal improvement. I hope God raises up teachers who will tell us things that are useful instead of leading us in circles and amplifying our foolishness.

Educated American Chooses Witch Doctor Over Pastors

I just got a very strange email.

Back when I thought I was going to be a humorist (i.e. a person who refuses to grow up and uses his shortcomings to amuse others for money), I was part of a group of Internet writers who got books published. If you don’t remember any of that, good for you. It was a silly time. Publishers got the mistaken idea that the ability to generate web traffic correlated strongly with the ability to sell books, and generally, it wasn’t true. They published books by people like Wonkette (Ana Marie Cox), Maddox (no idea what his real name is), Tucker Max, and Glenn Reynolds. A publisher cranked out three of my own books.

As far as I know, the only one of us who made any real money from books was Tucker. He wrote a book about his adventures as a drunken lothario. It was called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. It made him look like a real jerk, but I communicated with him a little, and it seemed to me that he was not really the character in his book. He was always polite and helpful. Same goes for Maddox.

Hmm…the Wikipedia entry on Tucker Max says Maddox’s real name is George Ouzounian.

Tucker wrote several more books. I didn’t keep up with him, because while he was succeeding at a game I no longer wanted to play, I was trying to reform and get right with God. I was added to his email list, however, so from time to time, I received news of his adventures.

Today I got a mass email from Tucker, and it was about a surprising subject. He is trying to repair himself using MDMA. He provided a link to his website, where I read an account of his experiences taking MDMA under the supervision of a Peruvian who claims to be a shaman.

MDMA, also known as ecstasy and molly, is related to a drug known as MDA. When I was in college, people said MDA was like LSD, only stronger and more dangerous. I wouldn’t know. I used a number of drugs when I was in college, but I never went near LSD or MDA. I knew people who used LSD had bad trips, and they had a tendency to jump out of windows. One of my freshman roommates used it. Music was playing, and he said he wanted to go outside, via an 8th-floor window, and grab the notes and bring them back inside.

MDMA is supposed to be warmer and fuzzier than MDA. Don’t ask me. I have never tried either, and I haven’t touched an illegal drug in over 34 years. The legal ones are bad enough.

What’s the Christian description of Tucker’s new adventure? “Witchcraft.” That’s what we would call it. In the Bible, the Greek word translated “witchcraft” is “pharmakeia,” which is the word from which we get “pharmaceutical.” It refers to the use of drugs.

If you want more proof that what he’s doing is witchcraft, consider the fact that a self-described witch (“shaman”) is overseeing the process.

That pretty much clinches it.

Tucker’s description of one of his MDMA experiences says that while the drug was working, he became love. That has to be a moving experience for a guy who has tried hard to convince the world he’s a jerk.

It makes me think of the times Jesus visited me. I didn’t become love. Wish I had, because I want to be like God, and God is love. I did feel love, however. I felt it physically, as though love were heat and Jesus were a heat lamp. Jesus radiates love, joy, peace, and protection. This is what we thirst for. We were created to crave it. When drugs give us a phony sensation that feels like God’s love, we think we’re really onto something.

We use drugs and alcohol to simulate the presence and help of God. If you’re a drug user, or you’re mentally ill and you find your prescriptions unsatisfying, the presence of God is what you really want. Drugs make empty promises, but God delivers, and there is no charge on the back end.

When you get into God’s presence, there is no crash. When he departs, you don’t crawl around looking at the rug, hoping to find another crumb you can snort.

Tucker is experiencing the presence of a counterfeit god, and he will have problems because of it. Satan is letting him swallow the tasty bait. The hook will come later. There is always a balloon payment.

Demons will give you nearly anything in order to convince you you’re on the right track. They’re like drug pushers. They do nice things to get you addicted and dependent.

One man who claims he visited hell said he saw cubicles which were made up to resemble heaven. According to him, you can go to one of these boxes during a near-death experience and be surrounded by fake peace and love. You won’t realize you’re in a small box. You’ll think you’re outdoors, in a beautiful place full of trees and flowers. Spirits that look like dead relatives will come up and hug you, and then when you return to earth, you’ll tell people Jesus doesn’t matter. You’ll say love is all that counts and that everyone will go to heaven.

The next time you die, you go to hell for good, and you find out what’s really in the box.

Satan gave Tucker a platform, and now he’s using it to promote witchcraft. It’s really something. It started out as a flippant effort to have fun and avoid growing up, and now suddenly, it’s a very serious place where people are supposed to go for supernatural assistance. How weird is that? It’s as if Pee Wee Herman or Andy Dick opened a church.

I think Tucker wants to help humanity; I don’t think he’s rubbing his hands together like the Wicked Witch of the West over her crystal ball. He’s trying to help people escape inner torment. Unfortunately, he looked for help in the wrong place.

God is love, but not everything that seems like love is God.

Here’s an obvious question: how badly have we failed, to cause intelligent people raised in a Christian country to turn to witch doctors instead of Christians when they need help? If we were doing a good job, wouldn’t most people come to us first and receive deliverance? We don’t have a good reputation, and that’s partly because we let people down.

Who has the biggest platform for spreading the word about God? Televangelists. What do you hear when you tune them in? Intelligence-insulting lies about God’s plans to make you rich for sending in money. Here and there, you’ll hear a useful word about salvation or sanctification, but it’s all buried in fetid, watery, moldy feces. It’s as if preachers had hatched a plan to drive intelligent people away from God.

The righteousness of the church has failed, so Satan is offering people his alternative righteousness, which is actually rebellion. Don’t be a Christian; just be really nice. Unfortunately, being nice won’t keep you out of hell. It’s full of nice people. It’s full of charity workers, philanthropists, foster parents, and kidney donors. No matter how nice you are, you can’t get in without the blood of Jesus.

Being nice won’t free you from demons. It may rearrange them. It may bring you different demons that pump up your pride and make you feel you’ve done the right thing. It won’t set you free.

I’m sorry to see this happen. It’s a deflection. A man tried to move toward righteousness and love, and spirits shunted him off to the side, onto a different path that leads to destruction. It’s a very common thing. I’ll use this as an opportunity to pray. I hope no one listens to the preaching and decides to use MDMA. Drugs open the doors to demons, and getting rid of them is harder than letting them in.

Another Stone Rejected by the Builder

I found another Derek Prince video this morning, and it’s very nice. I will embed it here.

Early this morning I woke up, thinking I had to use the bathroom. I thought I had cramps. Sometimes I eat interesting things. It turned out I was mistaken. I had a pain in my lower back on the right. Kidney stones. Again!

The last time this happened, I had no real pain, but this time I felt considerable pressure. It started to feel like a broken bone. I thought it might get worse before it got better, so IN ADDITION to praying, and AFTER praying, I reluctantly took a scrounged Roxicet.

I don’t know how bad kidney stone pain can be, so I don’t like to take chances. For me, it has always been about like a broken arm, which is bad, but tolerable. It has never been worse than that. Other people collapse and scream, which is not a pleasant prospect. I give them the benefit of the doubt. I assume their pain is very severe instead of writing them off as hysterical sissies. I don’t want severe pain.

After taking the pill, I sat in my man room and watched Youtube. I looked through Derek Prince’s material to see if he had anything relevant, and I found the video I mention above.

Appropriately, it’s about healing. More specifically, it’s about barriers to healing. Now that’s a good topic. Most charismatics have seen God do all sorts of things, so we know he heals, provides prophecy, enables us to speak in tongues, and so on. We don’t need to be told that God still does miraculous things. We need to know why he doesn’t ALWAYS do miraculous things, so we can get better results.

Jesus never told anyone, “This one is above my pay grade.” He never said, “Wow; maybe you should see a doctor about this.” His success rate was 100%.

People who actually read the Bible will recall that it says that when he went to Nazareth, he could do no “mighty work,” so you might think he was unable to do miracles there, but the Bible also says he laid hands on people during his visit and healed them. It’s not clear what “mighty work” means, but he did heal people. It may be that the Holy Spirit refused to permit him to do anything else.

Nazareth was a hostile place, which makes sense, because Jesus grew up there. Think of the people you grew up with and the ways they try to diminish and stunt you. Nazarenes (small town people who knew Jesus quite well) were the first people who tried to kill Jesus to please God. They took him to a cliff and tried to throw him off. God probably withheld considerable favor when Jesus went back to Nazareth, because they were impossible to reach.

Prince says some remarkable things in his videos, and most of it is confirmation of things I’ve been hearing from God for years.

First of all, yes, unrepented, unconfessed sin and iniquity will cause disease and prevent you from getting healed.

Christians hate to hear that, even while they’re receiving chemotherapy. We love to think that because we raised our hands 20 years ago and said the sinner’s prayer, God expects absolutely nothing from us and will solve all our problems without requiring us to change, but it’s not true. Sin causes problems for us, and those problems may be physical. God killed Ananias and Sapphira for sin, and that was in Acts, not Judges, so how can you say he won’t allow you to get cancer? He allowed my mother to get cancer, even though she sought him sincerely. She committed the sin of tobacco use for 50 years, and then she died with multiple tumors. The connection isn’t just plausible; it’s obvious and undeniable.

Yesterday I went to Middlebrook Church again, and they had apple juice communion. I do not understand their use of apple juice. I suppose you can do communion with root beer if you understand communion and have a good reason for refusing wine, but the pastor of Middlebrook Church doesn’t understand communion.

Yesterday he complained about a church he attended when he was young. He said they taught that you could die if you took communion and there was any evil in your life. He thought it was funny. He didn’t point out that Paul taught the same doctrine. He said many people got sick and died because they didn’t take communion correctly.

Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. For this reason many are weak and sick among you, and many sleep.

In the Bible, a cup of wine can symbolize an ordeal a person has to go through. Jesus called crucifixion a cup. The Bible calls punishment from God a cup of wrath. When you drink the cup during communion, you agree to join Jesus in his campaign and share in his experience. This makes you part of the Lord’s body. If you want to be part of the body, you should want to be holy, like Jesus. “Holy” means “belonging to God alone.” How can you belong to God alone if you also belong to sin?

Smoking causes strokes, heart attacks, COPD, impotence, and cancer. Excessive drinking causes cancer, cirrhosis, psychosis, impotence, and dementia. Gluttony causes strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, impotence, amputations, and the inability to walk. Drugs cause insanity and character destruction. Fornication causes all sorts of venereal diseases: AIDS, hepatitis, cervical cancer, warts, oral and throat cancer, syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, herpes, and so on. Anger causes strokes and heart attacks. All of these things happen to Christians, but when someone gets sick, and another person says the sick person should examine himself and confess, we practically tar and feather the person who is trying to help. We still want to crucify the prophets.

I know an unrepentant glutton who prays for help with diabetes. That doesn’t make sense. At least acknowledge your role in your problem.

Quite literally, many of us would rather die than admit responsibility for our illnesses. I have seen people who angrily rejected confession and accountability die from cancer.

I cause my illnesses. You better believe I do. If I say otherwise, I shut off God’s help, and I deny myself the power to get healing.

I said, “First of all,” when I said Prince blamed sin and inquity for healing, as though I were going to list other things he said, but in reality, the other things he said were generally different versions of the same truth.

He said unforgiveness blocks healing. Well, that’s an iniquity. We owe God more than we can understand, and we expect him to forgive us, but we don’t forgive trivial offenses other people commit against us. Jesus coupled forgiveness and healing. He said, “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Rise up and walk’?” Sin causes disease, and confession, repentance, and forgiveness bring healing, but the Bible says God will deliver us to “the tormentors” if we don’t forgive.

He said something that really woke me up. He said that if you don’t receive a completed healing instantly, you have to keep thanking God until you see the end of it. I wrote about that a long time ago.

I had a funny experience. I was driving home, and suddenly, I really had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t know if I was going to make it. I commanded my body to hold on, and I asked God for help, and I kept thanking him. Whenever I stopped thanking him, I felt the problem starting up again, so I resumed thanking him, and it went away. That’s how I made it to the house.

It’s a funny story, but think of the implications. If it works for one thing, it will work for another. It’s not a tragedy if I have to pull over and beg to use a filthy gas station toilet with a seat and floor crusted with other people’s urine, but what if I have peritonitis or AIDS or Ebola? I can use the same tactic to win, if I’ve been trained through dealing with lesser crises. Might as well use small problems to train for big ones.

Prince was confirming something I had already been shown. He is the only preacher I have ever known to say this. I’ve seen preachers say we need to be persistent in claiming our healing, but they didn’t say to thank God nonstop.

I’ll add to it. I believe you have to examine yourself, repent, cast out whatever spirits are relevant, pray to God for correction and healing, claim your healing, and then thank God over and over, in the name of Jesus, for forgiveness, for exposing and destroying your iniquity, and for healing your problem.

Physical problems are just the head of the pimple. Sins and iniquities are the infectious, congealed, stubborn pus that has to be squeezed out from below the surface.

Think about it. Sins and iniquities are worse than sickness. Sin can take you to hell, and iniquity prevents you from living in God’s kingdom on earth. Illness can’t do those things to you. Damnation and separation from God are much worse than death and sickness, yet we treat them as though they were trivial problems, and we act as though our physical issues were catastrophes that pounced on innocent Jesus clones for no reason.

Prince mentioned the occult. If you’ve fooled with it, you may have cursed yourself and your family. Astrology, psychics, Ouija boards, a magic 8 ball, crystals, yoga, drugs, any type of fortune telling, automatic writing, telekinesis, out of body experiences, transcendental or other types of meditation, and even acupuncture can open doors.

I have a cousin who got into transcendental meditation when he was young. He’s a nice guy. Smart. Successful. Everyone likes him. Good looking. He started having problems later. He developed a big calcified chest tumor and had to be opened up. He developed bipolar disorder and abandoned his wife and son. He had episodes during which he ran amok and displayed demonic behaviors which were nothing like him. He became obese.

A couple of years ago, I learned that he had become a yoga instructor.

I know what the problem is, but I can’t do anything about it.

Prince talked about hidden idolatry. He mentioned the freemasons. My dad is a freemason. He joined in Kentucky, probably before I was born. I don’t think he was ever active. After we moved to northern Florida, I found his freemason garbage and took it to the dump.

Freemasonry is a religion that competes with Christianity. Applicants have to take part in religious rites. They worship a being called “Jahbulon.” Some claim it’s God, but others say it’s a combination of Jehovah, Baal, and On, which is an Egyptian deity.

If you worship God and any other being, here’s the correct term for you: “idolater.” God is 100% exclusive.

As long as I’m writing about freemasonry, let me say that fraternities and sororities are evil. They degrade their participants and demand extreme loyalty. They require oaths, which Jesus disapproved of. No Christian should belong to one.

Any organization that has bizarre initiation rituals and lots of secrets is idolatrous and evil. Make all the excuses you want.

Incidentally, praying to “saints” is idolatry. It’s an occult practice that comes from the pagans. Mary is not God, any more than you are. She sinned like everyone else, and she had to be saved through the blood of Jesus.

Prince mentions a woman who had a baby that wouldn’t feed. It turned out her father was a freemason. People prayed for her, and she and the baby screamed and were delivered. After that, the baby started eating normally.

He also wrote about a Virginia Supreme Court judge who was delivered from demons. A long time after she was delivered, she tried to kill herself. It turned out she had gone to Mexico, and she had bought an idol to use as a decoration. It was a representation of a “sun god.” She destroyed it in order to bring back her sanity. The presence of cursed objects in your home can open you to serious supernatural attacks, even if you only think of them as collectibles or investments. You can’t get rid of them by selling them, either. You have to destroy them, or you’re just trying to make someone else bear your curse.

Watch the video yourself. It’s excellent.

What is Prince getting at, if you boil it down? God showed me. It’s just holiness. Modern American Christians are repelled by holiness. The very word sounds like scary fanaticism.

We want to be saved, but we also want to be cool, which is another way of saying we want the approval and acceptance of the children of darkness. We want to listen to Beyonce or the Beatles on the way to church. We want to watch movies made by people who literally hate Christianity. We want all our lost friends to know we don’t “judge,” which really means we don’t care enough about them to warn them. We want to use them. We want them to give us friendship and promotion, but we withhold the best gift we can give them, which is information about God.

I’m amazed by the stupid things I’ve done, even recently. Why would I have a box set of Big Joe Turner songs, if I’m a Christian? His songs are smutty and depraved, even if they seem innocent by 2018 standards. Why would I listen to Aerosmith while I work out? Why would I watch Marvel movies which feature witches and other occult practitioners? Psalm 101 says, “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes.”

Why would I play the blues, which came from a sick, depraved culture? Why would I engage in mockery of other people? Why would I own DVD’s of movies based in cruelty?

Being born again is like having veils between you and God and having them removed one by one. Most of us don’t want our veils touched. We’ll give up drugs and crime, maybe, and some of us will quit fornicating, but that’s about it.

God wants children who look like him, not cold, stillborn babies.

I’m doing communion every day now. I would like to be water baptized again. It’s very important. Sometimes demons come out of people during baptism. It’s a way of signaling your holiness.

I want to be rid of anger, permanently. I want to be rid of self-righteousness and covetousness (same thing as idolatry, according to the Bible). When I pray, I want God to look down and say, “That one actually belongs to me, so I’ll listen.”

Psalm 4 says God sets the godly apart for himself. That’s another way of saying they’re holy. It says, “the Lord has set apart for Himself him who is godly; The Lord will hear when I call to Him.” Holiness and answers to prayer are connected.

God has gotten rid of every kidney stone I’ve ever had without medical help of any kind, so I am not planning to go to the doctor. Today my pain went away while I was watching Derek Prince. It’s true, I took a Roxicet, but opioids don’t really make pain go away. They just dull it and put it somewhere else. I don’t have pain now, and the pill wore off a while ago. I had some pain about an hour ago, but it left.

I went back to bed after watching the video. I slept beautifully. I wasn’t in pain, I had confessed a bunch of things and prayed for help, and the Roxicet didn’t hurt either.

I am trying to find the doors I need to close. I don’t want this thing coming back again, and I want to be what I’m supposed to be.

Here’s something funny: God doesn’t mind my guns at all. Leftists, who always seem willing to provide religious instruction in spite of their rejection of God, like to tell us Jesus hates guns, but that isn’t true. God hated my cigars and my expensive collection of blues CD’s, but he likes the guns. I keep getting the feeling that he wants us to have weapons we can lay down when they come to martyr us. Anyone can surrender from a position of weakness. Jesus surrendered from a position of total power, and he also had armed men with him.

I can’t say it enough: I am amazed at the uselessness and toxicity of preachers and churches. They should have been teaching me powerful things my entire life, but I had to wait for God himself to teach me. They weren’t able to give me real help, but they were always eager to fill me with lies and gossip that made things worse. How can that be? I had no one to turn to, even when I wanted to change.

I have to forgive them. I’m sure some of them were trying to do right, and God says I have to forgive them even if they knew they were doing evil.

What are people supposed to do if God himself doesn’t provide a special service and visit them? They have to survive on food mingled with garbage. It’s very important to push the baptism with the Holy Spirit and prayer in tongues, so people have a source of good information.

Think where I would be, had I not been shown things by God. I would think Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn were prophets. I would be in bad financial shape, because I would be giving money to thieves in exchange for riches from God. I would have serious health problems, because I wouldn’t know how to get healed. I would live in defeat. I would think my horrendous character flaws were blessings, and I would have no chance of getting rid of them. I would be doubling down on all my curses.

The world has always hated me a great deal. That was true even before I turned back to God. I never had any chance in this place without him. Satan gives favor to many of his children, but he was determined to make me suffer even while I served him, and things went wrong for me consistently.

I almost feel I should thank him for his poor management skills. Where would I be if he knew anything about mentoring? He would have rewarded me and kept me on his side.

Some people can have pleasant lives without God. Not me. I get attacked every day. I have to stay close if I don’t want to be miserable. I am one of Satan’s favorites, for no clear reason. It’s not because I’m a good person; I’m not, and he treated me just as badly when I was on his team.

I have victory now, but what about the Christians who are caught up in fatal pride and disinformation? They’re living for Satan, and they’re going to find themselves in hell along with the preachers who fooled them.

It may be time for me to visit other churches. Meadowbrook is a wasteland. It’s also boring. I’m glad they time the sermons and keep them short, but I still have to put up with over 20 minutes of boredom while the pastor teaches worldly solutions that don’t work.

Yesterday he continued his series on anxiety. He shocked me. He taught about “mindfulness.” This is the left’s new term for things like meditation and aided relaxation. It opens doors to demons; that’s the whole point. Satan loves to create a problem, convince people God won’t help, and then sell them poisonous snake oil that increases their bondage. That’s why we’re hearing about mindfulness.

If you pray in tongues every day (a lot), confess, repent, do communion, and study the word, you will end up with good mental health sooner or later. The Bible says that God will keep in “perfect peace” (literally “shalom shalom”) such persons as rely on him to support their minds. That’s Isaiah 26. Either it’s true, or God is a liar.

By the way, Prince says unconfessed sin can prevent you from praying in tongues. That was news to me.

“Mindfulness” is a sick, trendy New Age concept. It was terrible to see it mentioned approvingly in church. People lapped it up. They didn’t hear God telling them it was wrong.

Take a look at the opening lines of the “mindfulness” entry at Wikipedia, if you want to feel sick:

Mindfulness is the psychological process of bringing one’s attention to experiences occurring in the present moment, which one can develop through the practice of meditation and through other training. The term “mindfulness” is derived from the Pali term sati, “memory,” “retention,” “mindfulness, alertness, self-possession,” which is a significant element of Buddhist traditions, while the concept is related to Zen, Vipassana, and Tibetan meditation techniques.

I didn’t know the precise origin of the term until just now, but as you can see, the Holy Spirit gave me the right information.

Blessed people are the head, not the tail. The Bible says so. The head leads. The tail follows. Right now, the pastor of Meadowbrook Church is the tail. He is following the world instead of leading it to God. This is very common in dead churches. They prefer Dr. Phil, Oprah, and Dale Carnegie to the Holy Spirit. When you can’t find the tools God made for you, you reach for the same weak, carnal tools heathens use.

It’s funny, but women have a huge role in idolatry. It started when Eve listened to Satan’s theology. The idolatrous Mormonism cult adopted polygamy because it attracted more women than men. Women push things like yoga, mindfulness, and accompanying eccentricities like veganism. It’s sad to see a male pastor adopt what has traditionally been a feminine role.

In a healthy family, God leads the husband, the husband leads the wife, and the wife leads the kids. American men are less interested in the supernatural than women, so they abandon their roles as priests of their houses. Then women take over, and the first thing you know, the kids are doing yoga at church.

Female rebellion is the reason why we have leftist politicians in office. If men were allowed to cast votes for their entire households, it would be very hard for a leftist to get elected in most places. Men refuse to do their duty toward God and their families, so now we live in a nation overwhelmed by impudence and rebellion.

I’m not a fan of feminized pastors who parrot the ideals one finds in women’s magazines. If you can find all the doctrine you need in Cosmopolitan (which does, in fact, teach mindfulness, along with tantric sex), you don’t need God or church.

Women’s magazines are supposedly about liberation from old, oppressive ideas like religion, but they push eastern religion like crazy, and the people who write and read them can’t see the glaring hypocrisy. They’re not really against “gods” or even male “gods.” They’re only against THE God. They’re actually religious publications.

Anyway, Meadowbrook is a terrible mess.

Just blew out a whopper of a stone, so maybe today’s lesson is over. I hope I’m learning the right things, and once again, I am very grateful not to be in the hands of primitive earth doctors.

Thank God I Still Have Great Hair

I’ll tell you what. You should never go to Facebook and look up people you went to high school with.

I don’t have a Facebook account, but my father does. He can’t use it because he’s demented. I haven’t deleted it; I thought it might be useful if someone he knew needed to reach me. When I want to check something out on Facebook, I use his account.

I’m very glad I don’t have a Facebook account. Social media sites are tools people use to destroy their privacy and give power to stalkers and other enemies. I do enough of that right here. I don’t need to put my education and work history, my place of residence, a list of all of my friends, my birthday, and photos of the inside of my house on the web.

When Facebook first showed up, I tried it, and I thought it was really stupid. There wasn’t much communication. It seemed like it was a bunch of no-life nerds “poking” each other and “sending each other lattes.” I didn’t get it at all. When I went back years later, it made more sense. I guess they changed it. It had become useful for posting blog-type entries and so on.

I enjoyed communicating with people I knew, and once in a while, it was fun to hear from someone from my past. Eventually, though, I got tired of it. Mainly, I got tired of watching my Christian friends get nowhere in their walks. I’m afraid I used the term “boneheads” when I discussed it with people. I meant that they were too hard-headed to learn anything.

I don’t recall when I quit for good, but I wrote about it here. I dropped my first account and went back. Then I dropped my second account. Then I created a third account which I rarely used, in case people wanted to find me. Then I decided I didn’t want to be found any more.

Today, for some reason, I started thinking about Tiffany Sessions. She was a young lady who vanished. She was from South Florida. She took me to Facebook.

Back when the story of her disappearance broke, I thought about the only Sessions I knew: J.E. Sessions. He went to my prep school. I think he was one year ahead of me; maybe it was two. A long time ago, I asked a friend if Tiffany was J.E.’s sister, and he said she was. I didn’t know if it was true, though, and tonight, out of boredom, I Googled around to find out.

I couldn’t find out much about her. I learned that her dad was named Patrick. I went to Facebook to look at his friends list, to see what I could learn. Sure enough, he had a friend who was the right age to be his son, and his first name started with J. I looked at the son’s friends, and I saw people I went to high school with. Match.

I never knew her, and I didn’t know J.E. well. He was one of the cool kids. My school wasn’t very stratified. The cool kids were not much cooler than the non-cool kids. You could be non-cool and sit with the cool kids at lunch. Still, he was cooler than I was, and he was older, so he belonged to a group of people who had to be careful how much respect they gave people in my class.

He had a van. I remember that.

I saw a photo of one of his Facebook friends. It was a girl I had known pretty well. She was very sweet back then. She was also very pretty. I was shocked when I looked at her Facebook photo. I knew I had made a mistake. I shouldn’t have put myself in a position to see it.

Never, ever do what I did. If you knew someone attractive when you were young, do not look that person up on Facebook if you are over 40. You will regret it. The girls I went to high school with look so bad, it depresses me. I feel young most of the time, but when I looked at those women, I felt like I was about to roll into the casket.

One of them was very, very thin, and she had a large number of mysterious dark spots on her skin. I don’t know if she was a cancer survivor or what. She was a great-looking girl way back when. She used to flirt with me, but I didn’t know what to do with her. I liked her a lot. It’s terrible to see what the years have done.

I also looked at my class’s sex symbol. I don’t know what else to call her. She was a cheerleader. There were all sorts of rumors. On Fridays, seniors were allowed to dress casually instead of wearing uniforms, and I remember her showing up in what was essentially lingerie. I was not very mature, but even then, it struck me as creepy. It seemed like she had given up on respect.

She was a very intimidating girl, but now…oh, boy. Maybe fifty pounds overweight. Lots of features that seemed cute when she was young, stretched and exaggerated into major flaws. She should have posed in a T-shirt that said “Steve’s Mortality.”

I saw some photos of men I went to school with. I was surprised how many had captions indicating they were doctors. You have to understand, I knew these guys before they got their MD’s, and they were not particularly bright. In fact, I know quite a few people who were not bright teenagers, yet who somehow became physicians. It’s eye-opening.

If you’re not terribly smart when you’re 16, you’re not going to be terribly smart when you’re 50.

When I was in high school and college, I thought of doctors as very smart people. In college at Columbia, I was a pre-med, and I was intimidated. I was deluded. Doctors have to be significantly smarter than random people off the street, but to be quite honest, most are not on my level. When I was a physics T.A., I ended up teaching future doctors who were the cream of the undergrad crop, and only one came close to impressing me.

I sold myself short when I was young, but that makes sense, because at home, I was regularly made to feel that I would never succeed at anything.

I can’t help feeling somewhat embarrassed when I look at old acquaintances on Facebook. Many of them did very well with the mental equipment they were given. I did not. I had all sorts of academic problems the first time I went to college, and I didn’t go back until the majority of my high school friends were established in respectable jobs. I did extremely well in physics until I got burned out, and then I quit, which is another embarrassment.

I tell people I “washed out,” but that’s not true. I had some big setbacks because I was on ADD drugs that drove me up the wall, but I worked things out with the department, and I was allowed to enroll for classes. I left so I could try stock trading, which didn’t work out. Then I hit rock bottom and went to law school.

I put it that way on purpose. For me, law school wasn’t really “rock bottom,” but it was a parachute. My application to law school was an admission of failure. I was looking for something lucrative and less demanding than going back to physics.

A lot of people break their backs trying to get into law school, and when they get there, they’re thrilled and proud. I was ashamed of myself. I went to law school because I had given up on something ten times as challenging.

Law school was easy. That’s why I chose it. I wanted something easy that would guarantee me a paycheck.

Law was not very interesting. It was sufficiently interesting to allow me to work at it without being painfully bored, but it wasn’t physics or math. I don’t think law is for the extremely bright. Once you get past “very bright,” you want a field other than law. I don’t believe the great legal thinkers of history had top-notch minds. The work they did just was not that hard.

Any intelligent person can understand any concept in the law. Not true in math or physics.

When I was in law school, I didn’t meet anyone who seemed truly smart (nor did I read any legal works that seemed to indicate genius). I met people who had a lot on the ball, but compared to the company of physicists, it was Romper Room.

It’s embarrassing to think about these things while looking at my successful classmates, but nonetheless, I have to acknowledge something. Physics would have made me miserable in the end. Physicists tend to end up with stressful jobs, and the work gets very dry up at the high end. Also, you can’t be a physicist and work for yourself. Generally, you have to be an academic, or you end up doing boring work in industry. You may end up testing the tensile strength of garbage can liners every day. Physicists are not valued highly. The pay isn’t great, and you always have to be an obedient herd creature, just like a fungible sociology professor.

Here’s another thing: physicists work with maladjusted people all day. Some physicists are great people, but in my experience, most have serious personality problems. You really don’t want to go to a party thrown by physicists. It would be like a party at a psychiatric facility. “Very good, Achmed. Now you throw the ball to Li Feng.”

They had an orientation get-together when I started grad school. Everyone walked in, stood around nervously, and then left.

I was in grad school for a year and a half, and I didn’t make a single friend. When I was in law school, I made loads of friends. I made friends at both of the churches I attended after law school. I made friends from blogging. I’m eccentric, but I don’t have problems making friends. When I don’t have friends, it usually means I’m rejecting people. Grad school was another story. You just could not connect with these people. Some were snotty. Many were painfully shy. Some were socially infantile. Some had absolutely no personality.

I failed to live my dream, but my dream would have made me more unhappy than law. Go figure.

I felt somewhat envious when I looked at Facebook. That’s normal, of course. I was looking at propaganda. Not many people tell the truth on Facebook. They post photos of their beautiful families on vacation, but they generally don’t write much about their failures. You don’t see them writing about the children who commit suicide, their desperation to get out of sick marriages, or their problems with mental illness.

I used to know a couple who attended a church I belonged to. They both had Facebook accounts. They posted pictures of their smiling kids. The father created a page promoting his architecture and engineering firm. The wife gushed about her blessed family and her wonderful husband. One day a friend of hers was having lunch at my house, and she looked at her phone. The wife had just texted her, telling her her marriage was killing her and that she had to find a way out. Also, the husband never went to college, and his “firm” was him. He had no training in architecture or engineering, and he was working without a license. I would have been terrified to walk inside any structure he built. Sooner or later, he will be charged with a crime. What he’s doing is illegal.

They divorced.

That’s Facebook for you.

Sometimes I wonder if I amounted to anything in this world, but then I have to ask myself: what would I have amounted to had I stayed in law and made a fortune? Even when I was practicing, I knew that what I did was utterly insignificant. “What did you do for humanity?” “I helped community colleges fire instructors they didn’t like.” “I helped a company stop infringement of their patent on a product that stabilizes brick facades.” Wow. The stuff of greatness. Start a Gofundme page and build a statue of me.

What if I had succeeded in physics? I would not have been the next Einstein. I would have done boring experiments and taught repetitious classes to college students. What if I had made it as a pre-med? I could have frozen people’s warts! Okay, let’s shoot higher. I could have performed heart transplants. So what? Lots of people can perform heart transplants. Take one surgeon out of the picture, and another one will take up the slack. Fungible.

Doctors have miserable lives. They suffer like hell until they’re in their thirties, and after that, their lives are not their own. Most of them don’t like their jobs. They kill themselves right and left.

I got three books published. That was a waste. The books were silly and counterproductive. Embarrassing things for a Christian to have on his record. What if I had made it as an author? I would be like Dice Clay or Judd Apatow. The public would be my enablers. They would be paying me to stay immature and to continue disgracing myself. They would be paying me to be a terrible influence on other people; especially younger people considering becoming professional humorists.

I guess that if they could look me up, my classmates would think I was a disturbed fringe nut, but then they are not like me. They are generally liberal. They are suburbanites to the core. They come from families that have zero interest in God.

I sold out to God, so that’s my lot. As a Christian, I’m not supposed to be ambitious. I’m not supposed to strive to get a ski house in Vail and a hospital wing named after me. Those things are for people who ride Satan’s hamster wheel. They spin and spin and go nowhere.

To a Christian, the only permanent gain is helping people survive death. You can do a thousand heart transplants and accomplish nothing if all the recipients go to hell. A Christian can bring people closer to God, and if those people make it, the person who helped them will have them with him forever, in an atmosphere of total love and peace.

I have removed myself from the mainstream. I have not had a distinguished legal career, because I ended it. I chose all this. People will not understand it, but then most people are doomed. I shouldn’t consider their opinions, given the darkness they live in.

In spite of my character problems, I’ve managed to help a few people. It would be nice if God put me in a position to help more. Still, what I have is good enough. It beats having a condo on Maui and having no relationship with the best, most powerful being there is. How many of my high school classmates (I avoid using the term “friends”) know what it is to have Jesus visit them and pour love, peace, and joy over them?

Really, though, don’t look up your high school classmates on Facebook. You will feel like you’re ready for assisted living.

Tithe Your Way Out of God’s Blessings

For some reason, I keep running into Judaizers. These are people who try to convince Christians they should obey the Jewish law. It’s a dangerous heresy (or maybe apostasy), because it makes Christianity much harder than it should be, and it also tends to convince Christians they are the “real Jews.” It bolsters anti-Semitism and replacement theology, which is the dangerous belief that Christians are supposed to replace the Jews on earth.

I was watching Derek Prince videos, and he talked about a lady who was full of demons of false doctrine. I wrote about her a couple of days ago. She submitted to exorcism, and while he cast the demons out of her, they said things. One kept saying, “No pork! No bacon!” It was a false-doctrine demon that wanted to make Christians keep kosher. Another demon supported “eternal security,” which is the false belief that Christians can’t lose their salvation.

I came across a couple of videos by other Judaizers. One was a young man with a street ministry. He prays for people to be healed, and he also promotes prayer in tongues. Unfortunately, he also believes we are under the dietary laws. He says we have to keep the sabbath and observe the Jewish feasts.

The next video featured Bill Wiese. This is the man who wrote 23 Minutes in Hell, which is a fairly credible account of an experience in which Jesus sent him to hell so he could tell the rest of us what we were in for.

Wiese may have had a legitimate experience in hell, but does that mean he’s automatically right about all doctrine? Obviously not. One of the dangers of listening to people who say they’ve had extraordinary supernatural experiences is that you may assume they now know everything. Sometimes they seem to assume it themselves. It’s not true.

Wiese pointed to Matthew 23, where Jesus said the pharisees were right to tithe on the herbs and spices they grew in their gardens. Obviously, this has no application to us. These men were Jews still under the law. They were not allowed to eat pork. They couldn’t wear garments made from more than one fiber. They couldn’t cook on Saturdays. They were nothing like us. Furthermore, Wiese was not suggesting we should tithe on produce, like the pharisees. He was talking about money. If we have to tithe on money (something many Jews dispute), then we also have to go out in our yards, count the fruit on our trees, and bring 10% to church. No one does that.

Actually, I did it once, and then the tree died. It was a tangerine tree, and like most citrus trees in Florida, it caught citrus greening, which is incurable. So much for God favoring tithers.

Wiese said he tithed, and he said his bills were always paid. Well, guess what? I have had to lend money to people who believed in tithing, and they could not pay me back. Remember, I am the guy who criticizes tithing. God should be cursing me with lack, if the tithe-pushers are right.

Christians are supposed to give. That being said, we are not supposed to tithe. The law of the tithe has never applied to gentiles. Before Jesus came, gentile servants in Jewish homes were not required to tithe.

I’m not saying giving is bad. Giving is important, especially when it involves the poor. Psalm 41 says God will reward people for it here on the earth. Am I pushing Jewish law when I mention this pre-Christian writing? No; the psalm doesn’t establish a law. It doesn’t say, “Go into the streets and give 10 shekels to the poor every week.” It simply documents a principle.

We have to give, and sometimes we will be commanded to give to ministries, but that doesn’t mean we have to tithe. God may tell you to give more or less than 10%.

We are supposed to obey God’s commandments, but that doesn’t mean we observe the 613 Jewish laws, all of which are commandments. It means we obey the commands of the Holy Spirit. Often he will agree with the law, but often, he will not. He allowed the 12 disciples to pick grain on the sabbath. God fulfilled the law, so now our burden is lighter.

Satan choked Holy Spirit awareness out of the church, so most of us don’t hear from God. As a result, we rely on the law. It’s not a good substitute.

I saw an article from Christianity Today, in which the author tried to support tithing. In reality, he condemned it without realizing it.

The article said “nearly” a third of tithers are free of debt. If tithing works, they should all be free of debt. God doesn’t keep his promises to a third of his people; they apply to all of us.

Tithers rely on Malachi 3, which describes phenomenal prosperity, not just survival without crushing debt. It says tithers will be so blessed, there will not be room to contain the blessing. Clearly, this does not happen today. If it did, every Christian on earth would be storming his local church, shoving his tithes through the door in order to become a financial titan.

Christians who think they’re obeying the Jewish law make themselves somewhat ridiculous. They don’t know the first thing about the law. I know very little about it myself, but I know enough to tell you, for a fact, that the Jewish law is extremely complicated. There is a reason why brilliant Jews spend their entire lives studying it. Observant Jews have to have bona fide sages to go to for guidance. It’s not possible for a normal person of average intelligence to understand and apply the law without help.

If you’re not tithing on your garden, you’re not a tither. If you’re not giving 10% of the offspring of your livestock, you’re not a tither. And what about this: tithes were supposed to go to the Jewish temple. Where is the temple? How much have you sent there?

Judaizers teach a silly caricature of Jewish observance. They think that if you give up cheeseburgers and pork and stay home on Saturdays, you’re keeping the law. Not even close. This is the kind of observance knowledgeable Jews make fun of. Many Jews take the same route and then claim they keep kosher, and the Orthodox ridicule them.

Do you go through your house before Passover, make sure there is no leaven in it anywhere, and then perform an inspection? Are you and all your sons circumcised? Do you build a booth of branches and sleep in it on Sukkot? Do you only eat kosher meat inspected by rabbis? Do you practice ritual immersion on a regular basis? Do you drive on Saturdays? Do you have a mezuzah on your doorway? If you can’t give the right answers to these and many other questions, your observance is a joke. Remember, the New Testament itself says that if you break the law in one area, you violate all of it.

I saw an article which complained about the lack of tithing in the church, and God told me something: the tithe discourages people from giving.

It is believed that only something like 5% of Christians tithe. Preachers love to talk about the things they could do if all of us tithed. Bigger yachts, I would think. Think about this: what if everyone gave three or four percent? Churches would thrive. People who are giving too much could cut back and take better care of their families. Christians would be less burdened, and they wouldn’t be filled with guilt about withholding the tithe.

When you tell people they have to give 10%, the message many get is, “If I can’t give 10%, I might as well not give.” Then they give little or nothing.

The last church I went to had around 150 people in attendance every week. Maybe 75 of those people were adults. Maybe 40 of the adults were members. The pastor got mad and told us only 40% of the members tithed, so how many is that? Somewhere between 15 and 30 people? Less, because some members were married, and a married couple only produces one tithe.

This was a fanatical church, mind you. The situation is worse in lukewarm churches.

When I went to Trinity Church in Miami, I dreaded the offerings. They sometimes had several offerings during a single service. It was like we were olives in a press, being squeezed over and over.

A young man named Alex Nicolas drowned, and the memorial service was held at the church. The head pastor, Rich Wilkerson, collected an offering at the memorial!

It’s too bad preachers can’t see the people who stay home because of the constant milking.

I don’t tithe. Right now, I’m not giving to ministries at all. I eat pork. I don’t worry about the fibers in my clothes. I collect interest on my savings. I use electricity on Saturdays. I don’t observe a single Jewish feast. I don’t even know where the nearest mikveh is, and if I did, they wouldn’t let me use it. I am not a Jew. I don’t own a share of Israel. I will never replace a Jew. God still loves the Jews, and they are still his chosen people.

Jesus said his yoke was easy and his burden was light. One of two things has to be true. His yoke has to be easy and his burden has to be light, or Jesus must be a liar.

Paul told early Christians to eat whatever meat was sold in the markets, as long as it was drained of blood, hadn’t been strangled, and hadn’t been offered to idols. Jesus said we can’t be defiled by what we eat. God showed Peter unclean animals in a vision and told him, “Kill and eat.”

We are not Jews. We just aren’t.

Judaism is very complicated, and it requires a lot of sacrifice. Christianity is very simple. A person of below-average intelligence can be a very sound Christian teacher, as long as he hears from the Holy Spirit. We don’t need high-IQ scholars who pen themselves up in libraries. Paul said not many wise had been called. How can that be true if we have to understand the Jewish law?

I hate to see Christians run to take back the heavy yoke. Life is hard enough without it, and it tends to block God’s help. God doesn’t like false doctrine. He keeps trying to do things for us, and we keep telling him we’ll do it ourselves. He wants to carry our burdens for us, and we need to let him.

Your Turn is Coming

An interesting thing happened recently. Antifers showed up at Tucker Carlson’s house, blocked off his street at both ends, tried to break down his front door, and left signs on his vehicles. They painted a sign on his driveway. They chanted threats, telling the Carlsons they were not safe.

I suppose nearly everyone who follows the news knows about it.

Carlson has a wife and four children. His wife was home alone at the time. Imagine what the attack must have been like for her. Her yard was full of strangers. A criminal was hurling himself against the front door. No one was there to help her. She was so scared, she locked herself in a pantry. In her own home. In America. In a wealthy suburb of a major city. In 2018.

I hate to say, “Imagine what they might have done to her had they gotten in,” because it seems to imply that nothing was done to her. Mrs. Carlson is a crime victim. She is the victim of several felonies. What happened to her wasn’t a protest. It was an unsuccessful home invasion coupled with terroristic threats.

A woman in the gang of terrorists said she wished she had brought a pipe bomb, and her remark was captured in video posted by the gang itself. Now the Carlsons will have that on their minds every day.

Leftists have been known to send people real bombs that blow up. Barack Obama’s friend Bill Ayers hurt people with bombs, and he’s proud of it to this day. When a gang of leftist criminals talks about bombs, you can’t wave your hand and dismiss it.

Yes, a mentally ill conservative just sent fake bombs to liberal personalities. That doesn’t make the right as dangerous as the left. He was an outlier with no support from other conservatives. Antifa is a big organization, it starts political violence as a matter of policy, and the press supports it. I’m talking about the same MSM that has nearly ignored a violent attack on a major media figure’s home and wife.

We still haven’t seen a violent right-wing mob phenomenon that mirrors what’s happening on the left. One or two nuts may heckle or disrupt, but we don’t see buses of agitators surrounding the homes of people like Don Lemon or Anderson Cooper. We don’t see conservatives barging into restaurants and banging on tables belonging to liberal politicians. We don’t see mobs of conservative kids from Utah pouring into stores and stealing merchandise.

The problem is asymmetrical.

We only see mob violence coming from the left, just as we only see witches gather to curse conservative politicians.

In order to discourage future attacks, the people involved in this home invasion–all of them–need to do time. They probably won’t, because Antifers wear masks. Antifers are hard to identify, because they lack courage. They’re not like the activists of 60 years ago, who were willing to be stand up and be counted. They want to commit crimes on the weekends and then go home, put on their J. Crew and Banana Republic clothes, and go back to work in their cubicles.

Conservative politicians have started using the word “mob” to alert voters to the left’s dangerous new tactics, and liberals are fighting the label. They know their mob tactics are making them vulnerable in the court of public opinion. Unfortunately for the left, the label is completely accurate, and the warnings, even if motivated by the self-interest of politicians, are factual and important.

I hope conservatives don’t decide to adopt the mob strategy. I guarantee you, carnal conservatives are talking about it already. It would make things much worse. You can’t fight immorality by becoming immoral.

The spirit behind the mobs is the antichrist spirit. It’s the same spirit that spurred pogroms. It spurred persecution of Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe. The way it works now is the same way it worked then. It started small, and it made itself popular. Then it became dominant, and the scale of its atrocities increased until it took over nations and caused normal people to overlook and participate in acts that were abominable. It made the obscene mundane.

The antichrist spirit didn’t start by building death camps and herding Jews into gas chambers. It started by saying Jews–all of them–were “the problem.” Then it became acceptable to insult and falsely accuse. Then came laws that seemed only reasonable, given the “settled” fact that Jews were evil people who destroyed nations. Then came “relocation” to “work camps.” Then came the crematoriums and ovens.

Liberals and journalists are now telling us Christians, conservatives, and Israel are “the problem.” They are burying us with false accusations of racism, white supremacy, selfishness (we give more to charity than they do), and ignorance. They are encouraging people to mistreat us. They are censoring us on the Internet. They are working to make people ashamed of failing to join the persecution. The planned result is a nation in which we can’t win elections. After that come the new laws, and once the laws are in place, mistreating us and killing us will be things to be openly celebrated.

The Constitution won’t save us. It can be amended or even repealed, legally. An amendment only takes a 2/3 vote in Congress (or a convention called by 2/3 of our state legislatures), and look how united Democrats are when they vote against reason. Only one Democrat voted for Justice Kavanaugh. Look up the records for justices nominated by Republicans. The opposition, even to uncontroversial nominees, has generally been very solid, especially compared to Republican opposition to Democrat nominees.

It won’t be that hard to restructure our laws. We have had Congresses with over 70% Democrat control. Our only safety is God’s favor.

I wish Christians understood the importance of confession, repentance, and abundant prayer. We live in pride and denial, so God fights us instead of helping us. We created the mobs, but we see ourselves as innocent martyrs.

I assume we’re going to see a day when Antifers start showing up in rural areas, to attack armed conservatives. What a mess that will be. If a mob came to my house and tried to break in, and they chanted that I wasn’t safe, I wouldn’t sit in the pantry waiting for them to kill me, my dad, and my pets. I’d have more than one semi-automatic rifle by my side, with a great deal of ammunition ready to fire. I’d be wearing electronic earmuffs that magnify speech and muffle gunshots. If my phone weren’t jammed, I would also have the police on the line, but would I be strong enough to wait for them?

I can’t imagine shooting another person, but fear will make you do things you hate. I’m not unusual, either. There are millions of well-armed conservatives all over the country. It would be disastrous if Antifa started selecting targets from among us.

We’re used to seeing headlines that say someone has shot 10 or 12 people. We are not used to seeing those headlines followed by, “No Charges Filed.” Imagine the rage that would stoke on the left.

Maybe God will motivate us to give up our guns soon. It may be better to be murdered than to send ignorant people to hell.

We are all familiar with Holocaust stories about Jews who stayed in Europe until it was too late. I feel like one who left early. I know people who live in areas that will be swamped quickly. For a long time, God has been moving Christians out of cities, but most Christians don’t listen to God. Many are so confused, uninformed, and blind, they think Jesus was a socialist. Many think they can save their sin-wasted cities and neighborhoods if they just hold on. I expect to hear bad news about these people in the future. I’m very glad God moved me out.

People marveled when I moved to the country. They thought I’d be bored. I haven’t regretted it for a fraction of a second. I’m not bored at all. I miss nothing Miami has to offer. I’m glad to be away from the angry, ignorant people. If I had to leave here, I would move to another state, not Miami. I want to move to an even bigger property, farther in the woods.

Cities have some temptations, but Miami is a very coarse and unsophisticated city, so it isn’t alluring. There is no culture at all. Nationally recognized performers routinely skip Miami when they plan tours. There are no good museums. The people only educate themselves enough to make money, so they are shallow and unaccomplished apart from their vocations. There are no nice parks. The restaurants aren’t great. There is no history whatsoever; nothing important has ever happened in Miami. The weather is unpleasant for 8 months of the year. The beaches are mediocre and full of exhibitionists. The inhabitants refuse to speak the language of the country that saved them. It’s hard to think of a reason to miss the place, but it’s impossible not to think of reasons to flee.

Miami is a city of boors and bullies.

It’s very nice to be where I am. It’s a gigantic blessing. The farther I am from people who are addicted to cities, the happier I will be, because those are the people who will do the Beast’s work. While they are digesting their conservative, Christian, and Jewish neighbors, I hope to be in the country, preparing for the end stages of our planet’s disease.

But You Still Have to Tune In

I have been listening to Derek Prince today. I can’t get over it. He died in 2003, but it’s as if he read my old blog entries and used them to make notes for his lectures. He is all about getting rid of demonic influence.

For years, I’ve been saying that any compulsion or feeling you can’t control has to be demonic. If you don’t want a compulsion or feeling, it can’t be coming from you. It must be foreign. Prince says the same thing.

In the movies, Catholic priests perform exorcisms on people who seem very happy to hold onto their demons. In real life, Prince performed exorcisms on people who desperately wanted to be free. It didn’t matter that the behaviors and attitudes brought them pleasure along with the pain. They wanted to be released.

I turned back to God over 11 years ago, and before I started backsliding in the first place, I listened to a lot of preachers. I have had my share of indoctrination. Nonetheless, I have only heard two preachers say gluttony is sinful, and only one of those preachers connected compulsive overeating to demons.

God told me gluttony was demonic in 2009. Preachers weren’t interested in learning the truth and passing it on to people in need of help, so God told me directly. How can that be? Jesus died on the cross 2,000 years ago, and preachers are still extremely ignorant and ineffective. It proves the human race is hopeless. We can’t succeed no matter what God does for us.

Wait and see. When Jesus returns and rules from a throne here on earth, and Satan and all demons are bound, sin and rebellion won’t go away. Many of us will still destroy ourselves. We are astounding.

Prince says addiction is demonic. Hello? How long have I been saying that? I’ve seen Christians defend cigarette smoking. It doesn’t get you high, they say, so it’s not a sin. How can deliberate submission to drug addiction not be a sin? How can it not be a sin, if you choose to take up an extremely addictive habit which causes heart attacks, strokes, COPD, and cancer? How can it not involve a foreign entity if you can’t stop even when you’re desperate?

Prince says something remarkable: he claims David Wilkerson’s policy was to refuse to help any addict who insisted on continuing to smoke cigarettes. The demon of nicotine addiction keeps the door open so the other demons of addiction can return.

My experience with Derek Prince underscores the importance of prolonged prayer in tongues. When you pray in tongues, God puts information in your mind. God tells everyone the exact same things. The reason we’re ignorant isn’t that God withholds knowledge. It’s that we don’t go after it his way. You can’t tell God how to do things. He decided prayer in tongues was an essential method of disseminating knowledge, and that’s that. You don’t get to vote on it.

It’s very important to realize we don’t get to vote on God’s methods. The kingdom of heaven isn’t a democracy. How can a kingdom be a democracy? The very idea is absurd. We can nudge God a little bit, but his ways are his ways, and his heart is harder than a diamond when we try to make him change.

Sound knowledge comes only with the help of the Holy Spirit. You can’t get it by sitting in a library. The history of Christianity is full of scholars who were wrong about everything. Bible study and book study are wonderful, but without the Holy Spirit, you will draw the wrong conclusions. God isn’t glorified by your brilliant, unaided deductions, and if you want him to help you, God has to have the glory.

Man, I get tired of feel-good prosperity preachers. Every time I get a revelation or hear from someone else who has one, I think about the stinking garbage I’ve heard from preachers who wanted my money and cared nothing about me. Why did they have to waste my time? They prolonged my suffering. They magnified my problems. They increased Satan’s power over me. They brought curses on themselves and their families.

I would have been better off giving them money and not listening to them.

Before Prince, no preacher gave me really good advice on getting free from spirits. Not one. Not…one. They didn’t give me good advice on defeating the flesh or becoming sanctified. They gave me little bits of table scraps here and there. After 2,000 years, every preacher ought to be able to lay out a banquet. If 2,000 years aren’t enough, how long do they need?

I can give you a ton of advice about tithes and offerings. It’s all wrong, but I can do it, because my ears have been pumped full of it for so long. You have to give God 10% of your GROSS INCOME, minimum! If you owe people and businesses money, don’t pay them until you’ve given large prosperity offerings to preachers! Make sure you give God a large monetary offering on Pentecost, Yom Kippur, and Passover, because God will open the windows of heaven and rain blessings down on you! If nothing happens, it means you didn’t give enough, or you didn’t give with a cheerful heart, so take the loss and start over by giving even more! Make sure you command thousands of financial angels to bring you money, because God is totally okay with human beings ordering angels around!

I heard some preacher–I think it was Kenneth Copeland–tell people God didn’t reward their offerings because they didn’t bring their offerings “into the temple.” The idea was that you are supposed to physically go to your church and hand them your offering, because church is the temple. I’m not making it up. He apparently could not tell the difference between the temple in Jerusalem and a local church.

One wonders why he didn’t tell people this BEFORE their offerings fizzled.

He probably got an earful from his fellow TV preachers when he talked about “the temple,” because obviously, if you live in Oregon, you can’t walk to Benny Hinn’s church in Orlando and give him your money in person. You might start giving your crazy offerings to your local church, and then Don Benny wouldn’t get to wet his beak.

Every once in a while, one of the prosperity-pumpers will get excited and say something that actually threatens his grift, and then they have to backtrack.

You have to “manage” your blessings. I heard that from Denny Duron, who is about as toxic as preachers get. When you receive money, run down to your church and give them a big chunk of it right away so God will know how grateful you are. And remember what Joyce Meyer says: don’t be afraid to demand financial help from God, because if you’re a tither and giver, he OWES you, and you have a supernatural RECEIPT you can show him.

You owe the one you flogged and nailed to a cross.

All of this ridiculous advice is Satanic excrement which will make you poorer and drive God away from you, but I know it very well because many preachers did their best to beat it into me. The stuff that works, I heard directly from God, except for little isolated pieces of information.

I can’t figure out who has done me more harm. People who absolutely hate God and do everything they can to tempt and discourage me, or preachers. Worldly people have exerted a terrible influence on me, but at least they didn’t put me to sleep and convince me I was on the right track with God while I was actually destroying myself.

Isn’t anyone on my side?

I don’t trust human beings to tell me anything any more. Not even Prince. Without confirmation, forget it.

Prince is not perfect. In one of his lectures, he talks about a conversation he had with a demon. If an exorcist goes to work on a person, and demons speak, the exorcist can’t help hearing them. Nothing wrong with that. There is also nothing wrong with asking a spirit to identify itself. You can exchange a few words with a demon without getting in trouble, but anything beyond that is dangerous. I heard Prince tell about a long conversation he had with a demon that claimed it had followed him from Africa.

He asked the demon to tell him things it couldn’t know unless it had been to certain places in Africa, and it gave him the right answers. He should not have asked or listened. Demons are liars, and they will use every opportunity to deceive and sow problems. If you start questioning a demon, you give it permission to mess with you. You’re inviting it to do what it does best.

I listened to Prince, and I started to feel discouraged. I thought, “If these things can follow you all over the planet, and they have unlimited information about you, what chance do we have?” Later I realized I was falling into a trap. The demon wanted to discourage people by making his organization seem invincible and all-knowing. Prince should not have talked about it. He was probably set up.

Demons are small and weak, and they don’t know everything. God is the one with all the power and knowledge, and he makes us winners and them losers.

He shouldn’t have conversed with a demon, but he did pick up some interesting information while demons spoke without prompting. He encountered demons of bad doctrine. One kept saying, “No pork! No bacon!” This explains the Seventh-Day Adventist error. The New Testament makes it abundantly clear, in more than one place, that Christians don’t have to obey dietary laws, but Seventh-Day Adventists are completely blind about it. Refer them to scripture, and they won’t even look. They’ll just quote Leviticus or whatever, as though Peter and Paul didn’t count. Irrationality is a hallmark of demonic influence.

The world is supposed to make sense. When it does not, look for a supernatural reason.

The prosperity-pumpers listen to religious demons that tell them we are under the law of tithing. I’d rather be wrong about pork than money. I can live without pork, but poverty caused by misguided tithing and giving is a disaster.

I have to continue with sanctification. I haven’t finished going through my books, and I still have some counterproductive music on devices I haven’t purged. I don’t know how clean I can get, but I want to get whatever is available.

I expect to go to church again this weekend. Not sure what will come of that. The pastor is doing a series on ending anxiety. Unfortunately, it’s useless. He is focusing on human effort. If you want to find out how unbelieving human beings fight anxiety, buy self-help books and get a shrink. They’ll do a much better job than a preacher.

A certain amount of worry and fear is unavoidable, but if it’s a real problem, look for disobedience in your life, repent, and go after the spirits that unsettle you. Getting rid of the disobedience will take the keys away from them, and then you can cast them out with a realistic expectation of lasting relief. The pastor at Meadowbrook Church didn’t say that, because he doesn’t know about it. His church is part of the Willow Creek movement, and the main focus of that movement is increasing the size of churches. They admit that. They don’t like to say anything that might bother people. In that regard, they are very different from Jesus. Of all the words in the Bible, the red ones are the most painful to read.

I don’t know how long the series will be. One thing to be happy about: the services are really short.

I haven’t met anyone new there. They shoot you through the place like poop through a goose, so not much sticks to you.

I’m going to get free, one way or the other. I won’t let the abysmal failure of contemporary clergy stop me. I can’t seem to exert any influence at all on churches, so I expect to continue watching people around me sink.

Pride Removes Hope

I watched a video today during breakfast, and it was disturbing. A group called Patriot Prayer showed up in a liberal area, and Antifa kooks came out of the woodwork to cause problems. One of the Antifers ran across a busy street and got walloped by a pickup truck. It hit him right in the knees. He had to lie down and wait for paramedics.

I think the point of the video was to celebrate the injury and suffering of an unhinged leftist. It was not intended to arouse people’s better natures.

It was shocking to see a person get slammed by a car, but the truly disturbing part of the video was what this person said. I’ll transcribe it.

You saw that flag, right? With the cross on it? That’s a known white supremacist symbol. So them, going around, pushing their Christianity on people who aren’t even necessarily Christian, their obsession with their holiday, their obsesson with freedom of speech, marks that they want to hurt people.

Then he said this:

Because they are more obsessed with their rights than they are the basic decencies that people deserve. These people have a disdain for human rights.

His friend said this:

Communism WILL win. That’s…that’s not a joke. That will happen. It will win, ’cause we must go down to single-class society. Now, after capitalism, in the late stages as it is right now, we will move down to a one-class system. Of communism. Democratic and anarchist communism will be the ideology of the future.

These were very young white men in a city which is only 16% black and Hispanic. I am not sure how they came to see themselves as oppressed, and it’s clear that capitalism has been pretty good to them, but that’s the situation.

Where to begin?

How about this: I don’t support Patriot Prayer, but…

Why don’t I support Patriot Prayer? How can I be against Jesus? I must be a filthy communist!

I don’t support Patriot Prayer because Christianity, unlike, say, Islam, is not a political religion. Spirit-led (“woke”?) Christians are invariably conservative, because leftism is incompatible with the Holy Spirit, but we’re not supposed to establish a Christian government and spread the love of Jesus through sound fiscal policy.

If you’re going to march and pray for Jesus, do not wave an American flag or make politics or nationalism primary topics of discussion. I’m all for America and the flag, and I’m a Republican, but again, Christianity is not a political movement, and when you make it about flags, you wander off-point.

Patriot Prayer may be made up of Christians, but if they are making politics central to their mission, it’s not a Christian organization, and the likelihood that God is behind it is vanishingly small. If God didn’t start it, I don’t want to fool with it, because it’s a rabbit trail that will cause problems in the end.

Would I go to a Patriot Prayer rally if I were asked? No. That’s all. No.

As for the flag with the cross on it (not sure what it looks like), I don’t think it’s a big deal. Hysterical people say Patriot Prayer is a white supremacist organization, but given the non-white status of the founder and leader, I don’t take that seriously. It appears that white racist wackos have shown up to support their rallies, but Patriot Prayer disavows them and wants them to go away. It may be that there is a well-known cross-adorned flag that belongs to a racist group, and maybe it was displayed at this rally, but that doesn’t mean Patriot Prayer is in favor of it.

Okay, enough about Patriot Prayer.

The things the first Antifer said are remarkable. They make no sense at all, and he’s fine with that. He has abandoned reason.

He points to the flag with the cross and uses it to insinuate that the whole group is a white supremacist organ and that they are there to hurt people.

No rational person thinks Patriot Prayer shows up to hurt people. They show up to provoke and annoy, but they don’t start trouble. The man making the claim, on the other hand, showed up in a mask to hide his identity, so he clearly expected to break the law. He brought protective goggles, so he expected to take part in violence.

His remarks about Christianity are telling. He’s upset about it. He’s not a Christian, and he seems to think celebrating Christmas at a rally injures non-Christians so badly that something must be done to stop it. How did we get here so fast? Imagine someone saying these things in 1950. They would have put him away for observation.

It’s okay to criticize Christianity itself now, openly. Leftists used to say they loved Christianity and Jesus, but that they were against conservatives who “perverted” Christianity. Now they’re opening up and admitting they’re against God.

He criticizes people for being obsessed with their rights. What? Leftists have always claimed they’re the defenders of rights. Never mind the gulags, killing fields, and political prisons. They love claiming they support people’s rights, yet here we see a leftist saying something he calls “decencies” are more important. What on earth does that mean?

Then he goes on to criticize the Patriot Prayer people…for disdaining HUMAN RIGHTS.

It’s really something. Here we see the baby Beast, taking his first shaky steps. In order to take over the world and get people to murder Christians, Satan has to get his minions to abandon reason. He has to blanket them in delusion. No reasonable person would take part in Kristallnacht or a BLM riot. Satan has to corrupt people through sin and blind them to logic first.

This young man is not citing real grievances. He wants to hurt conservatives and Christians, so he is grasping for excuses, aloud. “Conservatives and Christians deserve to be hurt” isn’t the conclusion. It’s the premise, and he is looking for “facts” to support it so he has an excuse to give license to his cruelty.

The other kid is also quite a spectacle. He says the world’s future is “democratic and anarchist communism.”

Communism is one of the least anarchist systems there is. In a communist nation, you can be arrested, tortured, imprisoned for life, and/or executed for saying you disagree with the government. You can’t buy or sell without the government’s permission. You have no right to privacy. You’re not allowed to travel inside the country without leave. You can’t travel abroad unless you clear it with the government.

As for “democratic,” the first thing communists do is ban elections.

There is no thought here. These kids are running on pure spleen.

What do we call people who are driven by emotion without thought? I know what you’re thinking. “Celebrities.” No, I was thinking of “fleshly.” Satan is the god of the flesh. He is training these kids to shut off their brains so he can bypass them and send commands directly to their animal natures.

It’s really something. In a way, it’s brilliant. Satan is programming these people to go to hell, by turning off their brains.

Hell isn’t full of people who are especially bad; it’s full of people who don’t listen. Hell is for people who can’t be reached through reason and love. You can be a pedophile who eats dead children and still receive salvation and sanctification if you will listen and change, but there is no hope for an ordinary person who can no longer be touched by logic. Hell is for people who can’t be fixed.

Heaven is full of murderers and rapists who repented. Hell is full of gentle Buddhist monks who thought they were doing the right thing and didn’t listen to missionaries.

It’s terrible to see how confused these young SJW’s are. The Patriot Prayer people are disappointing, too. The leftists are just plain gone, and the Patriot Prayer members are caught up in carnality which gets in God’s way and causes offense.

We must be very, very close to full-scale civil war. Evil is taking over, fast. The Antifers in the video are not rare specimens. Their bizarre ethos of hatred and mindless hysteria is now the official ethos of the Democratic Party. It has gone mainstream. They still make some effort to cover it up and deny it, but it won’t be long until they feel safe and take the gloves off. Maxine Waters is already there.

I didn’t think it would happen so quickly. It’s terrible that so few people understand what’s happening. Most people aren’t ready. I don’t know what the Mark of the Beast is, but most Christians will line up eagerly to receive it. They swim in ignorance. When things go completely haywire, Christians who see people like me as alarmists will still be living in urban areas, and they’ll think they can reason with the looters and lynch mobs.

My last two churches were full of blacks and Puerto Ricans who thought Obama was their savior. They were extremely ignorant and proud, and they are siding with the devil while blind feel-good preachers tell them they’re pleasing God. What’s going to happen to them? What will God do to the pastors who lie to them and withhold correction in order to get their tithes and offerings?

The urban poor in America are unbelievably arrogant and hard to help. America is full of people who can’t break 700 on their SAT’s, yet who believe they are smarter than everyone around them. I’ve known rich people, and I’ve known the poor, and I know what I’m saying.

I wonder what Spirit-filled people supposed to do. I hope we manage to hear God when he tells us.