Conservatives Falling into Leftist Habits?

Yesterday I was disturbed by the story about the bombs that were mailed to famous liberals. I thought, “Now people on the right are joining in the violence in a significant way.”

I wonder about that conclusion now.

In the past, we have seen a large number of liberal victimhood hoaxes. You know how it works. A black employee tells the police someone hung a noose in the break room at his company. Then security video shows him hanging it himself.

The bombs in the story have not gone off. Unlike the bombs Obama’s close friend Bill Ayers sent to people, they didn’t hurt anyone. How can that be? If you’re going to take the time to mail a bomb to someone, risking imprisonment or execution, won’t you take the time to get it right?

Maybe they were never meant to go off. Maybe they were meant to be found and used to discredit the political right.

Another thing: the labels on the bombs contained obvious misspellings. One wonders if this was an effort to promote the legend of the toothless backwoods Trump supporter who doesn’t know what’s good for him. “This is why we have to get rid of the Electoral College and rule these people from the coasts.”

I’m not placing any bets, but I have grave doubts about the theory that a conservative created and mailed these bombs.

There is no reason why a conservative could not have done this, but generally, American political violence is a leftist phenomenon. People like Timothy McVeigh are exceptional. We have seen a lot of skirmishes at conservative rallies, but that’s because leftists show up and attack. Leftist events don’t need conservative agitators in order to have skirmishes. Leftists are perfectly happy to fight the police. They think it’s cool.

In my mind, the odds that a conservative did this are about 25/75. I may be totally wrong. Sometimes things are what they seem to be.

Regardless of who did this, it was an appalling set of cowardly crimes. This is now how Americans should live. We should not have to be afraid to open our mailboxes just because we hold certain political beliefs. Antifa violence and asinine, frightening restaurant harassment scenes will never justify retaliatory terrorism.

I expect conservative violence to increase. Liberals identify us with Christianity, but many of us, including many conservatives who claim to be Christians, are against God. Many of us are so carnal, we think we have to respond in kind to gutter tactics.

Stories suggest Gavin McInnes’s group, the Proud Boys, promotes violence. I can’t tell whether that’s true, because as far as I know, they have never engaged in violence in the absence of a leftist attack. I hope it’s not true. The very idea of suiting up like brownshirts and taking to the streets with axe handles is repugnant and self-destructive. If that’s your answer to political problems, it doesn’t matter which side of the spectrum you embrace. You are the problem, not the answer. Leftism promotes barbarity and totalitarianism. If you’re doing the same thing, your system is a lateral move.

I don’t know much about McInnes. He seems like such a nice, funny guy in some of his comedy videos. I have read that he talks about his racial pride. I haven’t heard that, because I haven’t looked for his videos. Racial pride is a rabbit trail that leads to destruction, and it’s a delusion. Belonging to a particular race is nothing to be proud of. Pride itself is toxic.

McInnes complains about victimhood politics. I do that, too, because it turns people into dangerous racists and persecutors, but I don’t suffer from the delusion that I belong to a superior race. People of European extraction have experienced more success than any other group, but the reason we have succeeded is that we have made it our business to support the gospel. We have always been very corrupt, like everyone else, and we have done a poor job of serving God, but no one else was available, so God gave us hegemony in order to spread the word.

I believe God will help any person who submits to him. There are plenty of happy, successful Christians who are not white, and I believe that if white people had not supported God, we would be as unsuccessful as anyone else.

Far-eastern Asians are better at math than white Gentiles, and Jews are better at everything. If there is a master race, it’s not us.

People say McInnes claims white people are under siege. That’s true. When you live in a country where you can be forced to stay home from your job at a university so they can celebrate a white-free day, and when you are surrounded by people who use the terms “white privilege” and “the problem of whitness,” without fear, to suppress you, your race is under siege. That doesn’t mean we should turn on other races or see our genes as superior.

People are supposed to belong to what is known as the body of Christ. This is a group that spans all ethnic groups. A black person who prays in tongues every day and tries to live a sanctified life is my brother or sister. A white witch is not, even if she’s my biological sister. That’s how things are supposed to work.

I want to be among kind, gentle Christians whose hearts are in line with mine. Give me Christians of other races and nations any day, over white leftist Americans who support sexual confusion, witchcraft, pride, and atheism.

It’s useful for leftists to lump Christians and conservatives together, because Christians tend to be conservative, but conservatism is not holy or Christian. It’s simply something that tends to happen to people who know God, because God leads people out of leftism, which originated in the heart of Satan. A serious, Spirit-led Christian will eventually become conservative, but it’s also possible to become conservative and be a hate-filled racist who worships the devil.

It’s interesting. Destructive racists are criticizing victimhood politics and acknowledging the wave of hostility toward whites, and so are loving Christians who want others to do well. Many, many black and Latin Christians are against victimhood politics. We and the racists have somewhat similar views on these issues, for different reasons. That’s very useful to Satan, because he can convince the simple that everyone who is against these things is a racist who must be beaten into submission.

I can’t figure out where McInnes stands without watching a bunch of videos I have no desire to sit through. For all I know, he has been completely mischaracterized, just as President Trump has. I’m against what the press SAYS he is, but then I’m also a Trump supporter who is against what the press says Trump is.

I’m also against pride of any type, so I’m not crazy about his the name the Proud Boys. It supposedly comes from a Disney song McInnes hates, so I don’t know if the Proud Boys are proud or just sarcastic.

It’s sad that I can’t depend on the press to tell me anything without a ton of independent research and debunking.

If McInnes is a white supremacist, he must be completely incompetent, or maybe he needs remedial training. He married an American Indian, so he is an utter failure at perpetuating pure Caucasian genes. I mean an actual Indian, not a person who falsely claimed to be an Indian in order to get affirmative action. His three kids are not white. Each one has about 500 times as much Indian blood as Elizabeth Warren and infinity times as much as Ward Churchill, the briefly famous non-Indian plagiarist artist. I don’t think it’s possible for a true white supremacist to marry a non-white and deliberately produce exclusively non-white children. Even if such a person seriously thought he was a white supremacist, he would be a complete hypocrite unworthy of being taken seriously.

If we reach a point where Christians in name only come to represent us, and they’re out there in large numbers, battling Antifa with sticks and bottles, then whatever useful reputation real Christians have will be completely shot. There is no significant difference between a Satan worshiper in a black mask and a hypocritical person who behaves just like him and pretends to worship Jesus.

For whoever may be monitoring my site, I’ll say I’m against political violence. I own guns, but for the most part, they’re for my personal enjoyment, and the older I get, the more I think I would be inclined to let a leftist mob kill me than shoot in self defense. I get better at shooting, and I get better equipped, and this makes me potentially more dangerous, but I don’t love this tawdry life so much I want to squabble over it and marry myself to it in a deep and lasting way.

I would probably shoot to protect others. I have to admit that.

It’s disconcerting to see Democrats blame Trump for the bombs, claiming he set the tone for the attacks. Maxine Waters, a sick individual who is remembered for encouraging deadly riots, has urged people to violate the law and put conservatives in physical danger. Leftists routinely celebrate violence and harassment toward conservatives and their families, and they have developed an official policy of attacking conservatives and the police at events. All this is true, yet somehow, Trump is the problem.

Trump said something silly, praising a disgraceful politician who battered a reporter, and he has encouraged people to take action against a couple of violent protesters at his rallies, but his remarks are insignificant compared to the growing tidal wave of leftist violence.

The bomber will probably be exposed. I hope it’s not a conservative.

The Obvious Slips by me Again

I am often surprised to see that I have failed to notice something obvious about God. It has happened again.

Before Jesus received the baptism with the Holy Spirit and started his ministry, God sent John the Baptist out and told him to baptize people with water. This was a baptism of repentance. People were supposed to renounce their evil ways.

John’s ministry was strange and successful, so it made people curious, and they asked him about himself. In the book of Luke, he says this:

“I indeed baptize you with water; but One mightier than I is coming, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather the wheat into His barn; but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Winnowing is the process of separating useful grain from chaff, which includes stems and debris. A winnowing fan is a tool used to throw harvested grain and chaff into the air. The idea is that the wind will catch the chaff and blow it to the side, and the grain will fall straight down, where it can be gathered. In ancient times, chaff was gathered after winnowing, and it was burned.

The Bible uses wheat and barley to symbolize human beings. The seeds are useful, and they represent people who belong to God. The chaff is useless, and it represents people who refuse to submit. The burning of chaff symbolizes the flames of hell.

Nearly all Christians know about the first baptism, which is water baptism. The ancient Jews practiced it as a purification ritual. When you are water baptized, you are supposed to be immersed, not sprinkled, and it doesn’t work if you don’t know what’s happening. It won’t work on a baby.

The second baptism is the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Some fortunate people receive this at the same time as the water baptism, but many don’t. The baptism with the Holy Spirit causes the Holy Spirit to rest in you permanently, to the extent that you allow him, and it gives you access to the gifts and fruit of the Spirit.

What about the third baptism? That’s the one that got by me. John said Jesus would baptize us with fire, but when you go to church, pastors don’t invite people to come up for fire baptisms. They baptize with water, and some baptize with the Holy Spirit, but have you ever seen a preacher offer people a fire baptism? I haven’t.

If Jesus offers three baptisms, clearly, we should pursue all three. Fire baptism has to be important, or else John wouldn’t have mentioned it.

Last week, if memory serves, I started asking God for the baptism with fire. I thought it had to be some kind of supernatural thing that increased a person’s zeal. Whatever it was, I wanted it, and I didn’t think I had it.

This week, I have had a very unpleasant time. I will spare you the details. I don’t want people bothering me about it and prying. I got a very nasty surprise caused by my own character flaws, and it came at a time when I was in need of rest, not another gut punch.

Of course, I prayed and asked for help. I used all my supernatural tools. I wondered what was going on. Why did I get hit by a big wave right after increasing my prayer life and throwing out big bags of secular CD’s? I thought that if I strengthened my commitment, things would get better, not worse.

Night before last, a thought came to me. I had been asking for the baptism with fire.

What does fire represent in the Bible? God’s wrath. The fire of hell, which is currently burning many people you and I know, is God’s anger. The fire that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah was God’s anger.

The temple used fire to roast sacrificial animals. The fire represented God’s anger, and the animals took the place of sinful people. In movies, we see the temple as a nice clean place full of people in neat robes, but in real life, it was like a barbecue joint in some ways. Blood was everywhere, and the smell of burning meat was always in the air. They had to change the temple veil periodically because it got caked with blood.

Depending on your willingness to submit, the fire of God will either consume you or cleanse you.

I think the baptism with fire may be a time of having your sins and iniquities exposed to you so you can repent and take action against them. Maybe God uses it to burn away the parts of you that are chaff.

Last night, I saw a very interesting parallel. God has baptized the entire world with water, the Holy Spirit, and fire. I don’t mean he has baptized every individual. Just that he has provided the world, generally, with these baptisms.

The flood was a baptism by water. It drowned the wicked people who hated God and left one righteous man and seven individuals who were spared because they were related to him.

When Jesus died on the cross, he opened the door to the baptism with the Holy Spirit. On Pentecost, the Spirit came down and fell on the believers in the upper room, and since then, he has been available to all of us.

The Bible says God will not destroy the world with water again. It says that he will use fire the next time. A global baptism with fire.

The Bible tells us there was no rain before the flood. Where there is no rain, there are no rainbows. After the flood, God put a rainbow in the sky to mark his promise that he would never destroy the world with water again.

Homosexuals use the rainbow as their symbol now. Why? Rainbows have nothing to do with sex, and homosexuals are the same color as the rest of us. They use it because it’s Satan’s way of taunting God. “Look what we’re doing. Your hands are tied. You can’t drown us again.”

God won’t drown us over our new rebellion, but when he comes back to cleanse the world, the people who are still here will wish drowning were still an option. Drowning beats burning alive.

When the believers in the upper room were baptized with the Holy Spirit, flames appeared above their heads. I assume this means they were fortunate enough to be cleansed quickly, without going through what a person might have to go through today. I’m not sure.

It may be that the baptism with fire isn’t a time of purifying through suffering. Maybe it really is a sudden supernatural thing, and we should be trying to receive it, just as the disciples did. Now that I think about it, this seems more likely than my other theory. I don’t think God would give the disciples anything he would not give us. We have everything else he gave them.

In Psalm 104, and again in Hebrews, God is described as the one ‘who makes His angels spirits, His ministers a flame of fire.” “Minister” means “servant.”

It sounds like exposing and destroying sin and iniquity, primarily one’s own, is a very important part of serving God.

I’m learning a lot about my faults. I won’t lie; it’s tiresome. I have a lot of faults, so I’ve been learning about them for a very long time. I corrupted myself very badly, so there are a lot of smelly layers to the onion. I wish this weren’t the case, but it was all my doing, so who do I complain to?

I’ve learned how badly laziness and dread have messed up my life. I’ve also learned the covetousness is a major problem.

To covet means to set your heart on something. It’s good to covet salvation and the other things of God. It’s bad to covet objects, money, sexual partners, fame, glory, food, and so on.

I’m starting to realize how many sins are connected to covetousness.

Consider sexual sin. How do you end up in bed with a woman? You see her. You feel like you have to have her. You talk to her. You persuade. You do whatever it takes. First thing you know, you’re fornicating, bringing curses down on both of you.

What about gluttony? Food doesn’t jump out and attack you, no matter how much it seems like it does. A little voice says, “Pizza would be good right now.” You start thinking about toppings and garlic rolls. You think about beverages. Before long, you’re sitting behind a huge meal, eating 3,000 calories.

I write incredible recipes, or at least I used to. Ideas would pop into my head. “What if I took the bones out of a turkey and filled it with cornbread stuffing flavored with champagne?” “What if I put sour cream in a roti filled with curry?” I would dwell on these things, not realizing what I was doing was stupid and counterproductive, and I ended up with recipes.

I made food that was very hard for people to resist. That’s not what food is supposed to be. It should taste good, but it shouldn’t be meth on a plate.

We covet jobs. We covet houses. We even covet venting our anger on others. We think, “Just wait until I see him. I’ll say this, and I’ll do that, and I’ll fix him.” We look forward to the satisfaction.

When you covet, you set a course. Once the course is set, it’s not easy to change. The easiest way to avoid going somewhere you shouldn’t go is to avoid planning it.

The basic concept of nipping bad thoughts in the bud has been with me for a while. Sometimes when I looked at women, I heard myself think, “If you’re not going to the store, don’t get in the car.” That would put an end to the thoughts. But I didn’t realize I was dealing with covetousness.

Coveting is a type of obsessive thought which comes from demons and the flesh. We should not have obsessive, repetitive thoughts. They block the channel between us and the Holy Spirit. They prevent us from receiving his instruction.

Lust, greed, selfishness, stinginess, cruelty, and gluttony are all types of covetousness.

Coveting gets in the way of peace. Maybe that’s because it makes you feel that you can’t rest until you have what you covet. That’s a delusion. Often the things we covet decrease our peace after we get them.

Coveting seems a lot like worrying. It’s useless obsessing on future outcomes.

I couldn’t have told you these things 6 months ago. They surprise me. I wish I had found a preacher who could have told me these things, back in 1986 when I received the baptism with the Holy Spirit and didn’t know what to do. Preachers were too busy trying to make money. They knew practically nothing that was useful, and they didn’t care about me. That hasn’t changed. I have had to wait for God himself to teach me.

I am going to talk to God about the baptism with fire. If there is any way I can get a supernatural change, without a period of torment, I would like to receive it. I hope this is the way it works, because I have made an Augean stable of myself. The job of cleaning myself up is far too great for me.

Presumably, the third baptism and the resulting sanctification will give me a better life. I should have more peace and more authority. I should get faster and better answers to prayer. I should be healthier, with less involvement with doctors. This is what I hope.

I have never known what was good for me. I grabbed at whatever looked good. I need to get my flesh out of the way so I can see and go after what God has chosen for me.

Whatever happens, I’ll write about it. I hope I come back eventually with a good report that helps other people.

Delusion Sweeps America

If you have been waiting for conclusive proof that America is lost, I think I can produce it for you. A public junior high school just invited a professional cross-dresser to speak to the kids on a sort of career day. His stage name is Jessica L’Whor.

This is arguably worse than the story about homosexual militant atheist Dan Savage being invited to speak at a gathering of high school students, where he told the kids they could “learn to ignore the bulls__t about gay people in the Bible.”

You have to understand the facts of the story. Mr. L’Whor didn’t show up in men’s clothes and tell the kids about his career as a dental hygienist or CPA. He didn’t use his birth name. He didn’t speak as a person who has a normal career, while leaving his unusual sexual activities out of the discussion. He appeared in drag, calling himself “Ms. Jessica,” talking about his problem as though it were perfectly okay.

Maybe Rock Hudson spoke to students. I don’t know. He could have. He could have shown up in a suit with his wife on his arm, and he could have talked about his career as an actor, without mentioning the things he did in private. That’s not the kind of talk Mr. L’Whor gave. His sexual iniquity was central.

Mr. L’Whor talked about bullying. That’s interesting. For years, I’ve been telling people “bullying” was a code word for “criticizing sexual perversion.” That has certainly turned out to be true. Kids have always treated effeminate boys and masculine girls badly, and that’s a shame, but the “bullying” crusaders aren’t just pushing for kindness. They’re demanding endorsement and collaboration.

This bizarre appearance really happened. At Rocky Top Middle School, in Thornton, Colorado. In America. Junior high kids.

I’ve been thinking about my iniquities today–the habits and attitudes I bound to myself through repeated sin–and while I looked for wisdom on the Internet (stop laughing), I ran across some interesting stuff.

The Bible talks about iniquity bringing destruction on people. There are many places where it mentions iniquity implicitly in the context of the destruction of nations. We all remember the story of the flood. God said his spirit wouldn’t strive with man forever. He gave the human race 120 years to shape up, and then he killed nearly all of them.

In Genesis 15, after God and Abraham made the covenant of the pieces, God told Abraham about the future of the Jews. He said they would go into Egypt. He said they would come back to the place where the covenant was made after 4 generations, because the iniquity of the Amorites wasn’t complete.

People take that to mean that God knew he was going to have to crush the Amorites–inhabitants of the land he gave Abraham–but that the time was not ripe. God is patient, and he waits for nations to get very corrupt before he pulls the plug on them and brings them down.

We all know about Sodom and Gomorrah. They are famous for sexual iniquity, and Jewish legend also tells of their brutality, dishonesty, and deliberate unfairness.

Here is how things work. Temptation leads to sin. Repeated sin leads to iniquity. Once there is iniquity, you are “bent,” like a crooked tree, and it’s hard for you to stand up straight and stop sinning. You lose your free will, and you continue to sin even though you may hate it. As Proverbs 5:22 says, “His own iniquities shall entrap the wicked himself, and he shall be held by the cords of his sins.”

You are lucky if you at least hate your sins. Many of us come to embrace them. That’s depravity, or what the Bible calls “a seared conscience” or “a reprobate mind.” When you hit that stage, you may well be as good as damned, because if you don’t care about sin, you won’t listen when God offers you a way out. You’ll spit at him and persecute his servants.

Depravity is bound up with delusion. A depraved person can believe anything and take pleasure in anything. This is why we now have people who enjoy being pierced, cut, and mutilated. There is a whole community of people out there who amputate parts of their bodies for pleasure. they castrate themselves and cut fingers off for fun.

Depraved people come to hate Jesus. They hate Christians, and they call our mindset “hate.” When the Bible says, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter,” this is the group it refers to.

The reason why America is lost is depravity. Not only are we drowning; we’re batting away the life preserver as though it were a poisonous snake. This is Satan’s greatest success. It’s astounding.

I can’t understand why people are so adaptable. It’s strange that we are capable of loving filth and pain, but it’s true.

We’re so far gone now, many of us are defending foreign invaders who insult us as they approach. Have you seen photos of the Latin Americans who are trying to storm the border? They carry their own countries’ flags and give us the finger on camera, and leftists are supporting them with great fervor.

Here’s a photo I believe I’m entitled to repost as fair use. A bunch of Hondurans supporting the marchers took an American flag, painted a swastika on it, and set it on fire. And leftists want to roll out the red carpet. This is about as bad as delusion can get.

Ordinarily, when desperate people who have ruined their lives ask to be your guests, they try to be pleasant. Look at this bunch.

Sin has left us very jaded. We are no longer able to recognize evil when we see it, and evil looks very good to many of us. At worst, it looks harmless.

It reminds me of something former pro wrestler Jake “the Snake” Roberts said. He ended up on drugs, and he lost his career. He fell into poverty. When a film crew covered his fall, he talked about his sexual excesses. He said he could not have normal sexual relationships, because after the wild things he had done, ordinary relations with one woman couldn’t stimulate him any more.

Sin changes the way we see things. That’s the most lethal thing about it. If you can’t see your problems, or you think they’re blessings, you won’t want to change.

Why don’t preachers talk about this more? Very odd. They don’t hear from the Holy Spirit.

God is still showing me my iniquities and their painful consequences, and that’s what I was trying to find out about when I started searching today, but I ended up looking at our nation as well.

I don’t have anything clever to say about it. I’m just observing what has happened.

Resisting sin is important, and the younger you are, the more good it will do you. If you’re old, like me, and you’ve already put shackles on yourself, it’s harder to succeed.

I hope God brings revival and wakes up as many of us as possible. I believe people who can still perceive the truth are going to get lonelier and lonelier.

More

I wanted to say a few more things about iniquity, but I got pulled away, so here I am.

One of the reasons I started to write today was that I had come across the phrase “the mystery of iniquity.” I looked it up to find out what it meant. I still don’t know the exact meaning of the phrase, but I read a lot of interesting and enlightening things.

The phrase comes from 2 Thessalonians. Paul was writing about the rapture and the end of this age.

Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you, not to be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though the day of Christ had come. Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.

Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming. The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

This translation (NKJV) uses the word “lawlessness” instead of “iniquity.”

If you look at these paragraphs, you can see how they comport with what I’ve been writing today. I didn’t plan it that way. This is what happens when you hear from the Holy Spirit. You get ideas, and they feel as though they’re your own, but then you see them in the Bible, and you realize someone put them in your mind.

Paul says Jesus won’t come until after the world falls into Satan’s hands. This is a blow to people who think they can fix the world for Jesus. He says, “that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first.”

He writes of the Antichrist, saying he will be revealed, and will behave like a god, before Jesus returns.

The Antichrist will be a man of iniquity, which means he will be one who disobeys God as a matter of routine and principle.

Look what Paul said about delusion. He said the Antichrist would come with “all unrighteous deception among those who perish.” He’s talking about the people who think it’s okay to have a drag queen speak at a junior high school. The “unrighteous deception” has them under its spell, and they think evil is good.

Paul says God will reward their iniquity with “strong delusion” in order to prevent them from seeing the truth so they will be condemned to hell.

Anyone who thinks the Bible isn’t deep needs to take another look. Who would have guessed that sin would lead to something resembling insanity? It’s not obvious at all. Most intelligent people don’t realize it.

How can you explain the insanity that grips our nation without referring to supernatural causes? How can we move, during the second half of a President’s second term, from opposing homosexual marriage to endorsing it vigorously, unless something supernatural is at work?

Ten years ago, nearly everyone knew the difference between men and women, which is one of the more obvious differences human beings deal with. Now you can be fired from a job for refusing to call a man a woman. You can be thrown out of a gym for complaining that a man is in the women’s locker room. A change that drastic and quick is not natural. It can’t happen without spirits to push it.

The strong delusion of 2 Thessalonians is already here, and of course, people aren’t discussing it much, because deluded people can’t perceive their delusions. They think they’ve “evolved.”

It has been quite a while since God told me, “The hate is already here.” He was referring to the hate that would motivate–I’ll use the now-popular word–mobs to torment and kill Christians. We see it today in the startling willingness of leftists to confront and even attack conservatives in restaurants and at their homes.

Why is that hate here now?

The hate came with the delusion. I only see this right now. We endorsed sin, and we became bound by it. After that, we received delusion. Delusion caused us to invert good and evil. Now that we think evil is good, we think we have a moral obligation to storm Mitch McConnell’s restaurant table and throw his food into the street while banging on the table with our fists.

McConnell is a conservative figure, not a prominent Christian, but to the left, he symbolizes Christians. True Christians are conservative, and conservatives are the best friends we have in secular power. By attacking conservatives, leftists can get at us, and by driving leftists to get at us, Satan can get at God.

The leftist dream–a Godless society–is about to come true in America. Or is it? We’ll still have a “god.” Leftism has never really been about doing away with religion. We’ll have a fake god who has taken Yahweh’s place given people permission to ignore his commands.

I tend to think of leftists as people who hate religion, but that’s wrong. They love Wicca. They love astrology. They love Satanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, voodoo, and, strangely, Islam. They don’t have a problem with “gods.” They have a problem with OUR God; the only God that is God.

Today I read a little bit about John Cleese. A wealthy leftist, Cleese likes kicking at Christians and conservatives on social media. I looked up his religious beliefs. He’s a Buddhist vegetarian. He loves the Dalai Lama.

Tibetan Buddhism is demon worship. They pray to demons, and one witness says they make demons materialize in rituals. Whether they make demons materialize or not, Buddhism is a supernatural faith that teaches that spirits and the afterlife are real. It teaches about Buddhist hell. Tibetans recognize a spirit named Yamantaka who is supposedly the king of hell. Cleese seems to think we’re superstitious and primitive, but look at the faith he chose. Prayer wheels, ascetics on mountainsides, and reincarnation.

Many leftists are crazy about religion. They just reject the only one that’s valid and inconvenient.

We will not have a godless world. On the contrary; we will have a great abundance of “gods.” They’re all waiting to emerge and be worshiped, with the Antichrist at the forefront.

The hate that will put us in mass graves (more likely: crematoriums to remove the evidence of our existence from the earth) is already at work. It had a nice practice session under Hitler, focusing largely on Jews (beloved by God) and now it’s ready to spread all over the world and extend to anyone who seems to be on the side of Yahweh.

The workers of iniquity are not yet free to do as they wish, so they limit themselves to skirmishes. They are restrained until the proper time. Paul said, “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way.”

The NKJV capitalizes “he,” suggesting God himself restrains the workers of iniquity. I am skeptical. The restrainer sounds more like Michael to me. Michael is said to be the spirit that protects Israel, and since Jesus is identified with Israel, one would expect him to protect Christians as well. Jesus can protect us, but he can’t be “taken away.” No one can move him. When the scripture says the restrainer will be taken away, it appears to point to a lesser being.

Why would God remove our protector? There are still millions of people who belong to God. This same God was willing to save Sodom to protect 10 righteous citizens. The explanation that makes sense to me is that God will give the lawless complete freedom once there are no Christians left on earth. If we were here, it would make no sense for God to destroy the earth and give demons and fallen angels complete reign.

I believe our prayers and our existence restrain the looters and killers who are eager to turn the entire world into a riot zone. The need to execute judgment explains the rapture. God won’t want to do it while millions of us are here to suffer along with the wicked, and to pray for him to forbear.

I always wonder that the rapture will be like. Will we simply rise to meet God without warning, or will we get a push from the wicked? Martyrdom is a theme that has been with worshipers of God since Abel. Will God give us an escape hatch he never gave anyone else? I certainly hope so. I would rather disappear than be beheaded or shot.

Often, movies tap into supernatural ideas. It’s a strange thing to see. Even movies made by people who hate God sometimes seem to confirm prophecy.

I watched Avengers: Infinity War, and I saw something that reminded me of the rapture. Spoiler coming. Thanos, a well-meaning genocidal conqueror, believed the problem with the universe was overpopulation. The main problem people had was the existence of people. He obtained supernatural power, and then he snapped his fingers and made half of the intelligent beings disintegrate and die.

One wonders if something like that is in store for us. With modern technology, it’s possible to murder huge numbers of people simultaneously, if they cooperate (as martyrs often do). The Antichrist could fit millions of people with Internet-connected devices that kill in response to one person’s mouse click.

Things are going to get so crazy, people who love God will want to leave the earth. I already do. Many of us bluster about fighting and shooting, but I suspect God has Christians amassing guns so we can turn them over to the mob and surrender. If they have to storm our homes to kill us, and we shoot large numbers of them in the process and then die scrapping and kicking, it won’t glorify God. If we have the power to kill them, and we give it up and consent to die, it will mean something. It will tell the few remaining people who can be reached that our faith is something that can’t be dismissed. It will motivate them to look for God while there is still time.

Jesus told the disciples to carry swords, and when he was attacked by the high priest’s MOB, Peter cut off a slave’s ear. Jesus told him to knock it off, and he healed the slave. There was no battle, even though the disciples were armed.

What would people say about Jesus if he had had to be subdued? He didn’t go out that way. He wasn’t defeated. He sent Judas to bring the high priest, he waited, and he surrendered. The crucifixion was his own idea. It would make sense for informed Christians to go the same way. “Go ahead and shoot if you want. I am done with this place, and you may have it.”

I don’t know what the rapture will be like. On the whole, I prefer the easy route. One minute, standing in the aisle at Rural King. The next, floating away in the air.

Paul sends a confusing message about the rapture. He says the day of the Lord and our gathering to him (the rapture) will not happen until after the “falling away.” After mentioning the falling away, he says, “and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition.” This seems to suggest that the Antichrist will be here before we leave, but it’s not spelled out unambiguously. I think “the day of the Lord” refers to the Messianic Millennium, and the revelation of the Antichrist is a separate thing, which comes earlier. I believe the earth will see the falling away, persecution, the rapture, unrestrained rule by Satan, the appearance of the Antichrist, the great tribulation, and the final return of Jesus, in that order.

We are already seeing the falling away, so it obviously comes first. We know the return of Jesus comes last, because this is when the millennial reign begins.

The Revelation mentions the souls of martyred Christians, stationed beneath God’s altar in heaven, calling out for vengeance on those who killed them. That seems to point to a rapture by massacre. The Romans liked to execute Christians in groups, to please the crowds. Maybe it will work that way when the rapture comes. A big televised show, with billions cheering final relief from annoying people who believe gender is fixed.

I am not a student of prophecy. Just trying to make sense of things.

What does “lawlessness” really mean, in the era of Holy Ghost baptism? When believers were under the Jewish law, it meant breaking that law. Eating pork, lending money at interest, and so on…these were acts of lawlessness or iniquity. Today, it’s not that simple. We’re supposed to hear from the Holy Spirit all day, and we’re supposed to do what he tells us to do. That’s the new law. Most Christians are still stuck in the old law.

Jesus said we have to do God’s will in order to enter the kingdom of heaven:

“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!’

Jesus said people would come to him and tell him what he owed them. They would say they had done great things in his name. He said he would tell them to go away, and he would call them workers of iniquity. Why was that?

He wasn’t referring to people who didn’t call themselves Christians, and he wasn’t referring to people who didn’t do nice things. He wasn’t referring to unbelievers. He was referring to self-described Christians who decided, on their own, what to do to advance God’s kingdom.

Guessers, not listeners.

You can try to please God by doing things that seem right in your own eyes and end up provoking him. You can make God angry by opening an orphanage or giving a poor person money. It’s not the nature of an act that makes it pleasing to God. Remember how Saul was cursed for trying to perform a sacrifice? An act is only pleasing to God if he commanded it.

Trying to please God with acts he didn’t tell you to perform is lawlessness.

Christians who don’t hear from the Holy Spirit can’t help being lawless. If you can’t hear the lawgiver, you don’t know the law. They will end up working with the persecutors. They already are. Look at all the ordained homosexuals in the clergy.

I always complain about Christians who think being nice pleases God. Putting homosexuals in pulpits is nice. Telling people there is no hell is nice. Telling people Christianity is basically the same thing as Buddhism is nice. You can destroy a church with nice policies that demonstrate contempt for God.

If I had to sum up the important points, I’d say:

1. Don’t sin if you can help it, because you will eventually lose the ability to stop.

2. Once you lose your free will, you will lose the ability to distinguish right from wrong, and you will think evil is good. God will send you delusion as a reward for rebellion.

3. Once you start to believe evil is good, it is very unlikely that it will be possible to convince you to repent and avoid hell.

4. Once the spirit of delusion is on you, you will harbor animus toward Christians and Jews, and you will be motivated to commit great sins that will eventually be punished in ways too horrible to be imagined.

5. If you’re not hearing from the Holy Spirit, you are probably doing things God considers lawless, even if you’re trying to be very nice. You can offend God very badly while being nice and trying to do things to please him.

6. A huge percentage of the world’s population is already deluded and filled with rancor, and wholesale violence is on the way. Stop praying for a perfect world and ask God to prepare you for the decline and fall of our race.

I hope this material will help people. I always hope that if the rapture comes while this blog is up, people who are stuck here after I’m gone will be able to use it as a roadmap to repentance and salvation. Maybe that’s too much to expect. I suppose the Antichrist will have an effective program of censorship that will rid the world of Christian writings.

Sorry to be long-winded. It’s that kind of day.

I am not a Potted Plant

I feel like I should post a report on my latest visit to Meadowbrook Church.

Last week, I took my dad to church. I don’t know why he went, but the most obvious explanation is that he was bored. He jumps at any chance to get in the car. On the way out of the parking lot, he told me he didn’t believe what the preacher was saying, and he said people just buy into it because they’re scared.

Was he saying he rejected Christ, or just that he rejected the watery self-help message preached on that particular day? I didn’t ask. I let it drop. I don’t want to be the reason my dad comes out and announces that he rejects salvation. He prayed for salvation on September 22. Maybe he doesn’t remember. I want to let sleeping dogs lie.

This week, he surprised me by going with me again. I didn’t question it. I’m not going to push him to make ultimatums and declarations that will send him to hell.

When we arrived at the church, an usher handed us communion kits. These are tiny plastic cups. They have two seals. The lower seal holds the contents of the cup in. The upper seal holds a small cracker. I have seen many communion kits before, but I didn’t recognize these. The liquid inside was yellow, like olive oil. Communion requires red wine. Communion kits substitute grape juice, probably to avoid tempting alcoholics and upsetting parents with minor children.

I thought the liquid might be anointing oil, but eventually we were told we were going to have communion. I wondered if they were using white wine. They probably do that in California.

When communion time rolled around, Pastor Gilligan started telling us what it was about. I braced, because I fully expected him to get it wrong. I was not disappointed. He said something about togetherness, remembrance, and forgiveness. I didn’t really listen, once I knew he was on the wrong track.

I was not happy to hear him get it wrong. My dad was being misinformed, and a friend of mine was attending somewhere nearby, so she was hearing error, too.

The purpose of communion is to restore your relationship with Christ. We fall into corruption, and we need to confess and repent so we can be IN COMMUNION with Jesus. Here is what Paul said:

Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.

But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup.

For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.

We all consort with spirits, and sometimes we fall in with the wrong ones. Iniquity grows on us like mold, and communion is supposed to help us shed it.

I have never heard a preacher mention the real purpose of communion while speaking to Christians in a church. It’s like they’re allergic to it. Perry Stone wrote a book about communion, and it may be that he explained the real purpose. I can’t recall, because it has been so long since I read it.

My last church did something remarkable. They used bread for communion. Not unleavened bread; plain old bread raised with yeast. Talk about missing the point.

In the Bible, bread represents flesh. Leaven represents pride and sin. It puffs things up and makes them look bigger than they really are. Before the flight from Egypt, God created the Passover tradition of using unleavened bread in order to prepare the Jews for his arrival as a sinless messiah. Jesus was flesh, but he had no sin, so he resembled unleavened bread.

Wine represents blood, and as we know, the blood of Jesus, who was murdered to save the rest of us, washes away our sins, iniquities, and diseases and allows us to become sons of God.

By using raised bread for communion, my former pastor put a picture of pride before the church. That was appropriate, because pride destroyed him, his church, and his family. It’s bizarre that he couldn’t see the problem with using raised bread.

Does using raised bread cause spiritual issues? I would be very surprised. I think you can do communion with no food or drink at all, so I suppose Wonder bread will work. The problem, to me, is the lack of knowledge. If you know Wonder bread is the wrong thing, but it’s what you have, no problem. If you don’t know it’s inappropriate, then you don’t understand communion, so how can you benefit from it? It’s not like dipping a sheep. Communion is like baptism. You have to understand it in order for it to work.

When we took communion, I discovered that the liquid in the cup was apple juice. I don’t get that at all. Grape juice isn’t going to turn anyone into an alcoholic. Why not use it? I wonder if the pastor understands the symbolic significance of wine and bread.

I used to take communion every day at home, and I should start up again. When I do it, I ask God to show me what’s wrong with me. What sins have I committed? What iniquities are opening doors to demons? I confess to him and repent. I ask to be forgive and delivered. It’s a remedy for spiritual adultery.

My friend took her three sons to church yesterday, and it worked out well. They loved it. Unfortunately, the church appears to have put a little too much emphasis on fun. I expected that, because they take a “Christianity Lite” approach with adults, too. They provided video games and foosball for the kids. I wouldn’t let video games anywhere near a church if it were up to me. Think of all the evil they do.

The positive side of the experience is that the boys will get to know Christians, and they will learn a few things about God. They might even get to know him personally, which is the real goal.

Here’s my take on the whole thing: we send kids to school, where they learn a lot of garbage. At home, we undo the harm. We tell them God is real, and that homosexuality is not okay. We tell them there is no such thing as a transgender person. We tell them socialism is evil. We like to criticize parents who count on schools to raise their children. If we take this approach to school, why aren’t we treating church the same way? Kids will learn good things and bad things at church, and it’s a parent’s responsibility to do the weeding. You’ll never find a human institution you can rely on completely, so do your best and correct the unavoidable damage.

A man is supposed to be the priest of his home. You can’t sit around and trust preachers to do your job. Where there is no father, someone else has to step up.

Maybe the key to being satisfied with your church is dividing responsibility correctly. If you don’t give your pastor authority he shouldn’t have, and if you take care of your own responsibilities, maybe your church’s problems won’t affect you badly.

I’m happier than ever with my decision to refrain from joining churches and volunteering. I put ignorant people in charge of my decisions, and then I complained about their leadership. I shouldn’t make that mistake again.

Maybe this will be helpful to someone who is trying to make a sick church into something it will never be. I certainly hope so.

Evil Tidings From Miami

I got some sad news tonight. A pastor from a church I used to belonged to has just died. I hadn’t known he was ill.

To avoid writing critically of a freshly deceased person by name, I will call him Ned Ryerson.

I’m not going to pretend to be broken up about his death. I didn’t know him well. He knew who I was. He once got a church volunteer leader to ask me to perform a service for a Christian band which was truly degrading. I spent several hours driving in murderous traffic to save them the small cost of an airport limo to haul their luggage. That’s about the extent of our relationship. I’m sorry to hear he’s gone, but I will sleep tonight.

He died from cancer. In February, he was preparing to have some dental work done. He ground his teeth at night, so his teeth were in bad shape. He wanted total sedation dentistry. That meant he had to have a physical to make sure he was strong enough to be sedated safely. During the physical, they x-rayed his chest and found a big tumor in his right lung. Either at this time or later, they also discovered a large number of brain tumors.

Ned was the head pastor’s brother-in-law. He married the pastor’s wife’s sister. That made him a pastor, like the wife and the sister. In that church, virtually everyone who was related to a pastor was also a pastor or at least a paid employee. I have probably joked that their dogs were pastors. Qualifications weren’t an issue; genes were all you needed.

What did Ned do for a ministry? Real estate. He sold real estate for profit. That may not sound like much of a ministry, and that’s because it isn’t. The church was a monument to Mammon, and they talked about money and success all the time from the pulpit. They were huge promoters of “marketplace” Christianity. The idea is that you use your business to meet people and witness to them, but in reality, it works the other way around. You use your ministry as a way to make business contracts and increase profits.

What else did Pastor Ned do? Nothing I’m aware of. I saw him speak at a men’s conference once, and he led a prayer cell, but by preacher standards, that’s nothing.

As far as I know, Ned was a genial, warm-hearted guy, but no one would ever mistake him for Smith Wigglesworth. He didn’t do anything for the church’s actual ministries. He just showed up, occasionally said something or sang, and went home and sold real estate.

Ned had a Facebook page. I don’t mean his personal page. He had more than one additional page. He used one of his pages as his blog. He used it to tell people wise things about God, allegedly. I saw the page for the first time today. It’s not a great source of wisdom, even though Ned used the word “wisdom” to describe his content.

Ned believed he had a lot to say, but he was just a typical lukewarm, inattentive Christian who liked the limelight. If you read Ned’s page, you won’t come away wondering how to thank him for changing your life. It’s full of platitudes of the sort you might find inscribed on the sides of scented candles. That’s normal for teachers who don’t hear from the Holy Spirit.

Ned used his page to write about his disease. He suffered terribly. They gave him chemotherapy. They pulled a bunch of his teeth and gave him implants, without the sedation he preferred. He started having seizures and paralysis. He got a severe infection.

I’ll tell you something good about Ned. If he portrayed himself honestly on Facebook, he took it like a man. He didn’t complain. He didn’t give up his religion. He was cheerful, brave, and grateful. When things got bad, he didn’t log into Facebook and cry about his woes. He made some effort to stand in faith, and when that didn’t work, he accepted his situation without fear and looked forward to leaving his suffering body behind so he could be with God.

This is how people should face death. Some cancer patients behave disgracefully.

Here is what bugs me about Ned’s story: he was a pastor at a church that teaches that God heals people, and he didn’t know how to get healed.

When I was at his church, God showed me that sin and iniquity mattered. Christianity wasn’t all about being forgiven, feeling great all the time, and being rich. Obligations went along with it. We’re supposed to confess our sins and iniquities to God and get rid of them. We’re supposed to become sanctified. Failing to do these things leads to problems, and cancer is such a problem.

My mother died from cancer. She didn’t get cancer because bad things happen to good people. She got it because she was a drug addict. Using drugs is a sin. A drug habit is an iniquity. Nicotine is an extremely addictive drug which came to us from Indians who used it while worshiping demons.

My mother smoked heavily for 50 years, starting when she was a kid. I’m not bashing my own mother. I’m just telling you why she got cancer. She sinned every day, and there was a cost. Sometimes the consequences of sin are very obvious. Cirrhosis, syphilis, AIDS, type 2 diabetes, morbid obesity…we know what usually causes these things. It’s not random bad luck. It’s sin.

My mother wanted to quit smoking, but she didn’t know how to get God’s help. There was no one to teach her. Iniquities start out voluntarily, and then you lose your free will and become enslaved by resident demons. She was trapped. Churches couldn’t do anything for her. They should have taught her to confess and repent. That would have been a start. But they didn’t know anything, so she died without help.

If she could have gone to church in 2018, she still wouldn’t have found help. Churches have made no progress at all. Christianity is one of the few pursuits in which people become less knowledgeable and capable with time. Imagine what life would be like if medicine worked that way. Next year, we might forget about antibiotics and go back to injecting people with arsenic.

God showed me that it was important to get rid of iniquity, but no one at the church wanted to hear about it. They got angry at me. I didn’t beat a drum and tell everyone they were going to hell. I was polite. I was nice to people. It wasn’t my attitude that made them angry. It was the message itself. They treated me as though I were a prophet, and by that, I mean they got very angry with me and treated me with great disrespect because I told the truth.

It’s easy to make proud people angry. They overreact, and they take every suggestion as an attack. They see each correction as an insult offered by an inferior who shouldn’t have the audacity to speak.

A few people at the church listened to me. Generally, they did not. The pastors went beyond not listening. They fought me. They actually preached against things I said. I may have been partially responsible for some of the very few original sermons they wrote.

I found out about Ned’s death while talking to a friend tonight on the phone. He called for a prayer session. He prayed for me. He said things like, “I speak defeat to Steve’s pride.” I didn’t get angry. I was thrilled to have someone who was willing to do that. Man. You have to grow up and learn to be enthusiastic about taking your medicine eventually.

After we prayed, he told me about Ned, and I looked Ned up. While I was talking to my friend, I expressed my discouragement with the church and the people who run it. Let’s say the ruling family is named von Trapp. I said, “I’ve never seen a von Trapp get a healing.”

That had never occurred to me before. My friend was surprised, too.

The head pastor has, if memory serves, two new knees. He went bald, and when he had surgery, the incision from the flap refused to heal. He grew weird calcified things in his chest. He has a blood disease. He had to have horrible procedures for kidney stones (mine were healed without medical help at his church). He’s diabetic. I don’t know what holds him up.

Question: how many things have to go wrong before you ask yourself why the things you preach aren’t helping you? If there is one person at the church who should be able to get a healing, it’s the pastor. Every single time a preacher who was supposedly a healer showed up, the pastors received their best efforts, and they also got to spend time with healing preachers behind the scenes.

I get healings. Lots of people get healings. Many people have been healed of cancer. Christianity works for many people. We all know that, so why aren’t the people who run this church making any effort to find out why it doesn’t work for them?

They’re not questioning themselves, 8 months after Ned’s diagnosis. What will it take to snap them out of their coma?

They must not believe God will help them. That has to be the answer. Either that, or they’re convinced they’re doing everything right. But if they’re doing everything right, why can’t they receive healings? I don’t think they ask themselves. The inconsistency is just part of the hypocritical life they accept.

In some ways, Ned’s writings concerning his illness were inspiring, but in other ways, they were frustrating to read. He kept writing as though he had superior knowledge of Jesus. His illness was “a journey.” It gave him an opportunity to pass on all the things it taught him. Nonsense! If you’re dying of cancer, something is wrong with your relationship with God. You should be asking questions and admitting ignorance.

People commented on his posts. You would think he was preaching the Sermon on the Mount to read their responses. They seemed to be in awe of him. In awe of a man who was in the process of losing a battle with a bunch of filthy, defeated demons that should have been terrified to be near him.

Respect his courage? Yes. Honor his refusal to complain? Absolutely! But praise him as a teacher? No. That’s wrong.

If all you can do while you die is share warmth and make people feel good, I suppose you should go ahead, but that’s not Christian teaching. When things go terribly wrong, you should say, “I’m missing something; someone tell me what it is. Help me find out what’s wrong. If I don’t make it, keep looking at my life and trying to learn from my mistakes.”

I don’t think he ever expected to be healed. He was so used to carnal preachers who said things they didn’t believe, he probably thought there was no hope. Yet somehow he continued to play the game.

When my mother died, it was not a victory. It was a humiliating defeat for all of us. It was a glaring indictment of me, personally.

I was away from God when she got diagnosed, and I was so weak, if I had prayed for the sun to come up in the morning, it would probably have refused. I was full of lust and pride. I was ignorant because I had defied God’s instruction to pray in tongues every day. I sinned a lot because, like the people at Ned’s church, I thought salvation was a license to sin. “I shouldn’t do this, but I’ll pray for forgiveness right afterward.”

I helped kill my own mother. Who knows what I could have done for her, had I been praying consistently? The night she died, I was praying, and I felt sure she could not die. Then it happened anyway. I had some faith, but I didn’t know unconfessed sin and lack of repentance block prayer. For a long time after she died, I wondered how it happened. Now, too late, I know. Faith isn’t all it takes.

If I had been in good spiritual shape, I could have helped her. You could say she perished for my lack of knowledge.

Is it wrong to write something negative after someone dies? If so, then coroners and pathologists all over the world are sinning right now. When something bad happens, an intelligent person of integrity sifts the wreckage and looks for a reason, so he can prevent it from happening again. How can we help the next Ned if we pretend this one did everything right and still died?

It’s too bad people can’t return from heaven and hell to rebut the nonsense people say at their funerals. Or is it?

“No, I don’t smile down on you. I look up from the flames, see nothing but the ceiling of hell, and wish I were still here.” “No, I didn’t come back in a new body. I’m gone forever, and demons eviscerate me several times a day.” “No, your mom and I are not together in heaven waiting for you; your mom was an agnostic, and she didn’t make it.” “No, God my death wasn’t a victory. My death was not in God’s plans, and we did the wrong things.”

At funerals, we pretend everyone goes to heaven. Shows how we prefer comforting fantasy to liberating reality. I know people who are in hell right now, unless God took extraordinary steps to get them to repent as they were dying.

My high school classmate Ken shot himself in the head with a Desert Eagle at 25 after spending the day with me. He was a Jewish atheist. Another classmate who was Jewish fell into a crevasse in the Himalayas. Another died while scuba diving drunk. My aunt died, and she was an atheist who attended Mormon services purely for the social connection.

At my aunt’s funeral, we heard very funny stories about her.

Abraham was right when he spoke to the rich man. Most people wouldn’t believe the dead if they came back to help us.

People say God doesn’t always want to heal us, and that’s why we stay ill. How do they know? We don’t do what we’re supposed to. How can our experience be a valid test of Christianity if we don’t do what Christianity tells us to do?

If you Google a cake recipe, and it says to use eggs and sugar, and you use tofu and stevia, and it tastes like garbage, do you conclude the cook who wrote the recipe wanted the cake to taste like garbage?

I believe God wanted Ned to get well. Jesus healed people right and left. The apostles healed people right and left. I don’t think Jesus would have walked by Ned and told him his cancer was God’s will.

Very sad story. Whatever his shortcomings as a pastor may have been, Ned was well-liked for the most part, and his passing will upset many people. It will be even sadder when the next von Trapp dies unnecessarily.

The Occult is Real

Christians don’t understand the power demons have over them, and they don’t understand how important it is to get rid of them.

Today these truths came home to me during prayer.

For over a year, I’ve been working on confession and repentance, because I knew hanging onto sin gave spirits power over me, making me unhappy, bringing me misfortune, and hurting my body. A few days back, I decided to get rid of a lot of secular music CD’s; maybe 40 pounds of them. I knew I was supporting performers who were against God, and I believed holding onto their work held doors open and gave spirits permission to live in me and to keep returning after being cast out.

Think about the musicians you like, and ask yourself a few questions. Are they alcoholics? Are they junkies? Did they die young? Did they promote fornication or pride? Have they used their fame to fight Christianity or promote other religions? Did they start out in gospel and then move to popular music to make money? It’s amazing how often the answer will be “yes.”

I’ve been speaking defeat to demons that power my iniquities, and I’ve been casting them out. It’s not a joke. It works. When I start addressing them, I feel nausea, and I hear strange gurgling sounds from my insides. I’m not imagining that. I could record the sounds and post them here. I can’t make my innards sound off on command; it’s not me doing it. It only happens when I deal with demons, or when it’s caused by the normal workings of my body.

After I cast spirits out, I feel very different. I feel empty. I no longer feel urges and voices pulling me in different directions. Oddly, it feels like my thoughts and desires come from a deeper, quieter place inside me. If I’m in bed when I do these things, I tend to fall asleep right away. I have to fight to stay awake.

I’ve been reading John Ramirez’s books. To his credit, he is one of the few charismatics who talk about anything besides money. He put a table in one of his books, showing people how to tell the difference between God’s voice and Satan’s voice. Other ministers have used similar tables. I found one online, and I’m posting it below. I don’t know if it’s identical to the one Ramirez uses, but the idea is the same.

You should be able to look at that table and figure out who is talking to you. If it’s Satan, you need to do something about it before it destroys you.

God is like the sun, and demons are like the moon. The moon is much smaller than the sun, but because of its diameter and distance from the earth, it appears to be the same size as the sun, and it can block the sun from our view. We should hear from God all the time, but he is eclipsed by demons here on earth. Demons inside us chatter all the time. Through sin, we put them between God and ourselves, so they seem disproportionately important.

After I cast things out of myself, I can hear the voice of God, which lies deeper inside me. I don’t feel rushed or overwhelmed any more, even if my external problems haven’t changed.

Today I went to the Internet to see if anyone had any good teaching on deliverance, and I was disappointed. Some preachers know a little, but I can’t find anyone who isn’t behind me on the learning curve. They’re obsessed with money and fame, and they haven’t confronted their own demons, so they don’t have much to teach.

Joyce Meyer popped up in a Youtube search. So much pride and greed. Her masculinity is also a sign of spiritual issues.

Joyce Meyer teaches that after we give her money, God owes us. She says we can call on him to repay us. You can look it up for yourself. Imagine God, owing us. He allowed people to torture him to death for us in order to save us from our own evil deeds. He doesn’t owe us.

An inheritance is not something that is owed or earned. It’s a gift.

It’s disconcerting to see how backward the church is. You would think at least a few of our leaders would be teaching sound doctrine, but they aren’t. Here and there, some obscure individuals get a lot of things right, but all the big names–the pope, T.D. Jakes, Joel Osteen, John MacArthur, and the rest–teach harmful error. Satan promotes them just as he promotes rock stars and rappers.

Many of us are terrified of the occult, which is unfortunate, because Christianity is an occult practice. “Occult” just means “hidden.” It doesn’t mean “evil.” Look it up. We can’t see God with our eyes, any more than we can see the demons voodoo preachers try to command. Nonetheless, we worship him and expect him to take us to a permanent home in an occult world called heaven. That’s an occult belief.

We are afraid to talk about demons, even though Jesus, who is now an occult or unseen spirit, talked about them constantly. We know people will think we’re crazy. They will stop talking to us. They may try to have us adjudged incompetent so they can control our wealth.

We give up on the occult side of Christianity, which is where all the victory and power are, and we stick with rules instead. “Be nice to everyone.” “Tithe every week.” “Don’t touch alcohol.” “Don’t curse.” We think God will take us to heaven if we act like Mary Poppins. The Bible, on the other hand, says salvation only comes by faith. Heaven is jam-packed with sinners, and hell has plenty of disappointed, nice Christians who got it wrong.

People like to say Satan’s biggest victory was convincing the world he didn’t exist. I don’t know about that. How about convincing people that only his children were allowed to use supernatural power? The Bible says apostates have the appearance of godliness yet deny the power thereof. The power it refers to is supernatural power. Miracles, healing, tongues, prophecy…that’s all supernatural, or “occult.” We’re supposed to have these powers, but we settle for lives of defeat, as long as we get into heaven. Meanwhile, pagans are casting spells left and right.

If we ignore demons, we can’t cast them out. They can continue to warp our personalities and damage our bodies. They make us fat, angry, lustful, gluttonous, anorexic, cancerous, crippled, demented, gay, lazy, and insane. That’s what comes of condemning the supernatural side of Christianity.

It’s ironic that the people we go to for emancipation only make our chains heavier. They give us little bits of our inheritance, which is already our property, in exchange for money. Then they stand between us and the rest of it. It’s as if they were selling air.

Most preachers discourage us from pursuing the Holy Spirit and his gifts and fruit. The ones who don’t do those things discourage us from being sanctified. They discourage confession and repentance, so anything they cast out of us can return later in greater force.

You can’t have the fruit and the gifts of the Spirit–the kingdom of heaven–while your life is dedicated to the service of demons. God is jealous.

At my last church, the pastor taught about tongues, prophecy, miracles, and healing. He also rejected the notion that confession and repentance were important. He rejected the idea that healing could be prevented by pride. These ideas made him and his wife so angry, they came to consider me an enemy of God.

At the church before that, the pastor taught that people could be healed, but mainly, he taught that we should feel good and make money. He taught that God would make us rich if we gave him donations instead of paying our electric bills. He hated hearing about sin. He never taught people about the dangers of homosexuality, yoga, astrology, voodoo, or any other sins that were common at his church. He couldn’t teach, because he didn’t know anything. He wasn’t a pastor. He was just a guy working in a family business, for money.

He, too, got angry at me when I pointed out the truth. He even had secret meetings about me when I left his church.

Things would have been even worse had I gone to a traditional church that denies the Holy Spirit. I would have been taught that homosexuality is God’s idea, and that God doesn’t really do anything for us. If I had gone to a Catholic church, I would have been taught to worship statues representing “saints” created by the church to replace pagan “gods.” I would have been taught I could do nearly anything I wanted, as long as I attended mass and confessed. I never would have received a real baptism.

Sprinkling isn’t baptism, and no baby can receive a baptism. Baptism comes from Jewish ritual immersion, which involves a lot of water, and in order for baptism to work, you have to choose it and understand what it means.

You can’t push a baby into heaven. Besides, babies don’t need baptism. They’re not accountable, because they don’t know right from wrong.

I wouldn’t want to go through life hoping statues and medals would fight for me. That level of powerlessness is frightening. I can’t imagine praying to Jesus’ mother, an ordinary woman, because I had been taught that God didn’t have time for me or didn’t want me to approach him.

I’ve received so many healings. What kind of shape would I be in now had I called on statues for help? Bad knees. No gallbladder. Maybe cancer.

I would be even more full of iniquity than I am. I would think it was normal and untreatable. I wouldn’t know demons drive iniquity, or that they could be removed.

Now that I think about it, I would be a lot like my last two pastors. They’re both very unhealthy. One is obese and diabetic. His wife lost her gallbladder, and now she has a brain tumor. The other pastor has bad knees, diabetes, kidneystones that have required surgery, weird calcified tumors, and a rare blood disease. Calling on God himself is better than calling on a statue, but you also have to repent and put in time praying in tongues.

The iniquities and physical problems I have now can be ascribed to sin and pride. I have to keep pursuing sanctification, if I want help.

People always fail. You can’t count on them for anything. This is why God gave us the baptism with the Holy Spirit. He knew preachers were liars, and that they always would be. When you get in touch with the Holy Spirit, he teaches you one-on-one, and he will contradict preachers all the time. This is what’s supposed to keep the church alive.

I wish I could go to another human being–someone I could see and hear–and get solid instruction I could rely on. It isn’t possible. I can get a little piece of the puzzle here and another one there, but I have to go to God to correct the mistakes and fill in the blanks.

There is no point in being angry at preachers. That’s just a trap. I have to acknowledge their shortcomings and let it go. Anger won’t help anyone. It’s self-righteous. Another demon door.

This stuff is important. Maybe there will be a revival some day, and churches will catch onto it. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though. Might as well get to know the Holy Spirit now and get the information you need.

Fight or Die

Today I am trying to step back and get some praying and study done. I just watched an interesting video by a man named John Ramirez, and I’m reading one of his books.

Ramirez is a Puerto Rican who grew up in the Bronx. He claims he was a very highly ranked devotee of Hispanic and Haitian devil worship. In Miami, people know these things as Santeria, espiritismo, and Haitian voodoo. Other islanders in South Florida call it obeah. I guess Miami has everything.

He says that when he was practicing Satanism, which is a more concise term for his religion or any occult faith, he spent a lot of time cursing people. He found it easy to curse two kinds of people: non-Christians and weak Christians. A Christian who denied the supernatural side of Christianity didn’t have protection.

People he cursed had major problems. It worked. It was easier and more effective than going after them directly.

God keeps showing me that the supernatural is all that matters. Christians fight other people all the time, and we fight circumstances. We think we’re good Christians because we’re nice and we obey rules, many of which were made up by deluded human beings. We are trying to cut off the blossoms while we ignore and even fertilize and water the roots. Most Christians are losers, because they fight things at the wrong level.

I spend a lot of my time speaking blessings and curses, just like a voodoo practitioner or a sorcerer…or Jesus. Christians are divorced from the supernatural, but Jesus was obsessed with it, and so are occultists. Read the red words in the Bible. What did Jesus talk about? Sure, he told us to be good to people, but he also spoke miracles into existence. He cast out devils. He cursed things and people. He killed a tree by speaking to it. If you read a story about someone born in 1985 who went around doing the things Jesus did, you might think he was a warlock, not a messiah. That’s how brainwashed we are now.

If Jesus came back today and acted exactly like he did 2000 years ago, the authorities would try to put him in a mental home.

“Homeless; says he has no place to lay his head. Talks to trees. Says other people have demons. Didn’t eat for 40 days. Psychiatric hold and tox screen recommended.”

We need to get over the idea that being nice is all that counts. Jesus didn’t tell us to be nice because being nice was our purpose or because it would fix the world. He told us to walk in love because it produced supernatural results, just as walking in hate and selfishness does. He may have told us to behave a certain way in the natural, but he was mainly concerned about the supernatural effects.

Leftists are now the largest anti-God faction in America, and they hate being told so. Many even claim Jesus was a leftist, because he advocated giving to the poor and so on. Of course, the big difference between Jesus and Bernie Sanders (or Vladimir Lenin) is that Jesus advocated giving others YOUR OWN money and things, not your neighbors’, and he told us to do it out of love, not because the government forced us to.

Leftists go to the polls and tell the government to take things from other people and give those things to them, and then they call themselves unselfish. Meanwhile, conservatives earn less money and give more to charity.

The Democratic Party is the party of Satan now. Anyone who doesn’t believe that needs to explain a simple fact: when witches gather to curse politicians, they ALWAYS curse Republicans. Never leftists.

Good luck trying to respond to that.

Christians avoid developing supernatural power. Even though we worship someone who walked on water and talked to Satan and demons, somehow, we have decided that trying to do supernatural things is evidence of insanity. That’s amazing. I wish occultists felt the same way.

Here’s a good question. If occultists are holding big meetings to curse Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, why aren’t we meeting to curse leftism and the Democratic Party? I don’t mean we should be cursing people with disease and damnation and so on, but we should be cursing their efforts to oppose God and Christians. Why don’t we do that? The enemy’s soldiers are warring vigorously with us, and we don’t even show up. We are unarmed, and we aren’t at the battlefield.

We’re not even meeting to pray for leftists to be led out of their poisonous delusion. Preachers are generally gutless and insincere, so they’re terrified of mentioning politics. They should be openly opposing leftism and encouraging us to use supernatural tools–not voter drives, campaign donations, and stupid signs–to defeat it.

Most preachers are ignorant and powerless, so they teach nonsense instead of giving us weapons that work.

Preachers do not understand a simple truth: there is symmetry in the supernatural. When God comes up with something good, Satan copies it. Occultists don’t curse and bless because Satan is a genius who gave them weapons we don’t have. They do it because God himself does it. It works. God started it. Jesus did it. Moses did it. The prophets did it. Peter did it. We’re supposed to do it, too.

Whenever you see enemies of God doing something, you should ask God if there is something similar we’re supposed to be doing. Satan doesn’t come up with anything new. Compared to God, he is very stupid.

I can’t say all of my problems are fixed, but I have gotten tremendous mileage out of blessing and cursing. I curse my problems. I curse spirits and human adversaries with defeat. Of course, I also pray for my enemies and God’s; it makes no sense to fight them without adding any hope to their lives.

When praying, blessing, and cursing don’t work, ask God to show you what the hindrance is. You may be trying to get something you shouldn’t. You may also be hindered by a sin you haven’t acknowledged or turned away from.

I wish I could tell you how many times I’ve overcome people, spirits, and problems by blessing and cursing. I do it all the time. I’ll even speak defeat to the difficulty of finding my car keys. If there is an area where you have problems, of if there is an area in which Satan will attack you, God will help you in that area. He never roped off regions of activity and told us we were on our own against our enemies.

Don’t be shy about asking God for help with trivial things. Satan attacks in trivial areas. God will not leave you to fight by yourself. What kind of father would do that? Pray, bless, and curse often throughout the day.

Some people think we abuse God when we ask for too much or we pray too often. Really? God wants to be with us all the time. How is he supposed to do that if we’re not communicating with him?

Prayer gets better the more you do it. Don’t be ashamed to use little things as an excuse to pray. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you God doesn’t want to hear about your little problems.

God is not busy. He has infinite time. He has never slept; not once. He has infinite power. Nothing is hard for him. He has said so repeatedly. You’re not burdening God when you ask for help. That isn’t possible. He doesn’t have your limitations. When you ask him to help you decide what to have for lunch, he doesn’t have to step away from fighting a hurricane or an epidemic. He doesn’t have to put people on hold.

Satan is the finite one. Everything is easy for God, and he almost begs us to ask for help. The Bible says to acknowledge him in ALL our ways. God will never say, “Don’t you think I have better things to do than to help you get your lawnmower started?”

Many people think John Coltrane was the best jazz musician who ever lived. He was known for practicing 8 or more hours a day. He always had his horn with him. Don’t expect to be the John Coltrane of prayer if you have the practice schedule of Henny Youngman.

One of the biggest problems I have is a habit of trying to fix my problems on my own before I pray, bless, or curse. The supernatural things should always come first. The supernatural existed before the natural universe was created. When I put my own strength first, I delude myself with pride, and I motivate God to refrain from helping.

Don’t say Christians shouldn’t speak curses. Don’t wave a finger and say, “Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be,” without understanding it. Jesus blessed, and he also cursed. When James warned us about cursing, he was talking about reviling and cursing for no good reason. He didn’t mean you couldn’t speak defeat to your santero neighbor who leaves chicken parts in your yard.

If it’s wrong to curse, and Jesus cursed, what does that make Jesus?

It’s disturbing to read about the hard work Satanists put in, casting spells and decreeing curses. They’re battling us every day, and we’re sitting around watching Joel Osteen mumble self-help garbage he cribbed from secular motivational speakers. We’re sending money to Rod Parsley and waiting for God to send us our “miracle harvests” that never come. We’re at war, and we’re forfeiting.

I can’t tell you how much I wish I had had someone to teach me how to fight when I was young. I went to preachers, which was the only thing I knew to do, and they put millstones around my neck. They lied to get my money. They taught fables. There was literally no one I could go to for instruction. Not one person. The things that are so helpful to me now were hidden from the church because the people who came before us threw them away. I had no one to teach me, and the preachers I went to for help had had no one to teach them.

We’re going to lose the war for humanity. The Bible makes that clear. Our rejection of the supernatural, in favor of feel-good sermons and carnal effort, is the reason why. It’s amazing how easy it is to delude us and pull our teeth. We look back at Samson and think he was an idiot, but we’ve done the same thing he did. We sleep with our heads in Satan’s lap while he shaves away God’s glory and power.

Samson put his head in Delilah’s lap, and she soothed him until he fell asleep. She had been vexing him continuously in order to get him to reveal his secret, so he must have been worn out. He looked to a woman for peace–the same woman who took his peace to begin with–when he should have been spending time in God’s presence. We do the same thing. We listen to relaxation CD’s. We meditate. We do yoga. If Samson had been spending time with God, he wouldn’t have needed help relaxing.

The world is doomed, but no individual has to go down with it. I’m going to keep doing what works, even if every other person on earth goes to hell.

I Have Been Processed

If you read my last post, you know I’ve been installing new smoke detectors. I installed three, liked what I saw, and bought 5 more. I just tried to install the three remaining upstairs detectors, and I discovered two of the new ones I bought were missing parts. Now I’m stuck until tomorrow, because I’m not going to Home Depot three times in one day.

I finally found out why people like hardwired smoke detectors. They can communicate with each other, so if an alarm goes off in one end of your house, the detector in your end may also go off. This prevents you from sleeping through a fire in a distant room.

I’m not all that worried. I sleep in a room at one end of the house. I can clearly hear the alarms in the upstairs hall, my bedroom, and the bedroom next to mine. I would surely be awakened by the alarms in the other two upstairs bedrooms, even though they’re farther away. Besides, I don’t know whether my old detectors communicated. I can’t even find out how they’re wired up. They don’t have a circuit breaker. That’s ridiculous.

They’re intolerable. They have no UPS and no way to hook one up, and they seem to go off every night because they’re sensitive to power outages, so I’m going to take my chances with 11 battery-operated detectors, including three that are connected to a blaring whole-house alarm.

I can’t understand the purpose of the hardwiring. Hardwired detectors still need batteries. I can get battery-powered detectors that communicate. Seems like the only feature hardwiring provides is an endless stream of late-night false alarms caused by AC power failures.

What’s the purpose of the alarms? The batteries will keep the detectors working, so what do we care if the power goes out for an hour?

The detectors I’m removing were made in late 2016, so they shouldn’t be obsolete, but they clearly are.

In other news, my dad went to church today. I took him to Middlebrook, the slick charismatic megachurch I visited last week. I’ve already written about it. It’s a big, efficient church that runs three quick, impersonal services every Sunday. It’s sort of a drive-by experience, but it’s good enough for now.

We sat in the back, and Pastor Tim Gilligan started talking with about 35 minutes left on the big countdown clock on the rear wall.

Right away, I knew what I was dealing with. He started his sermon by mentioning Rick Warren.

If you don’t know who Rick Warren is, you must have forgotten the 2008 fiasco in which he moderated a “forum” featuring Barack Obama and John McCain. He sat and smiled and asked softball questions, pretending to be a Christian authority while giving equal dignity to a Republican and a leftist extremist who favors abortion so strongly he refused to vote for a law requiring doctors to give care to babies who survive the procedure.

If you can’t figure out that God is against the murder of the unborn, you have no business standing behind a pulpit. It’s not a hard question.

Warren gave the invocation at Obama’s 2009 inauguration. It was a good deal. Obama got to pretend he respected God and Christians, and Warren got promotion.

I can’t read Warren’s mind, but he seems to run on attention. He is a huge networker and self-promoter. People say he’s noble and unselfish because he’s a “reverse tither.” He makes a gigantic amount of money, and he lives on 10% and gives the rest to the church. There are a lot of problems with that logic.

First, as Jesus noted, if you want to be considered generous, look at what you have left, not what you give away. Warren is not poor. Second, as any informed Christian knows, we are discouraged from talking about what we give to others, yet Warren makes sure people know. Jesus said people who do that get their reward here on earth. Third, again, tithing is from the Jewish law, so if you’re tithing in any manner, reverse or otherwise, you’re showing your ignorance. Fourth, not all greed applies to wealth. Some people are greedy for admiration and attention, and it’s just as bad.

Pastor Gilligan quoted Warren’s appalling book, The Purpose-Driven Life. I probably sighed. This book is a carnal attempt to replace the Holy Spirit with human effort. When I was an armorbearer at Trinity Church in Miami, the leader of our team told us to buy the book. I read a few pages, and then I threw the book out. Before I threw it out, I tore it in half so no one else could read it. I didn’t want to be responsible for the harm it could do.

Warren is not a charismatic. He knows nothing whatsoever about the Holy Spirit. He believes the gifts of the Spirit are optional, and he magnanimously chooses to tolerate them in his church, but it seems clear he doesn’t believe they’re real. If he thought they were real, they would be hugely important to him. People are dying all around us. If healing is real, it’s a big deal. It would certainly be more important to him than his pathetic, ineffective, God-negating, third-tier motivational drivel.

Warren thinks Christianity is about working hard and being nice. Be nice all the time. He thinks our job is to make the world a nicer place. Jesus, on the other hand, was intolerant of other religions and said the world would end in catastrophe. He says he will return and kill so many people his robe will be red with blood.

I’m not saying we’re supposed to go out and kill people. Just that the notion of reforming the world with niceness is Satanic, not Christian. The world is going to fail, just as it did before Noah. We’re not going to fix it, and anyone who tries is fighting God and denying prophecy.

Warren is a proud and condescending man who likes being nice and working really hard. Jesus, on the other hand, never worked in the Bible. Paul chose to work, but he didn’t have to. The Bible doesn’t say God wants us to work hard. It says work is a curse that fell on us because of disobedience. Hard work did not exist until Adam and Eve sinned and lied to God. Jesus didn’t reward anyone for hard work. He rewarded them for faith, compassion, and sincerity.

Remember Mary and Martha? Jesus and his boys were eating in their house, and Martha was working herself to death, trying to serve everyone. She told Jesus to yell at Mary, who was sitting and listening to him instead of helping. Jesus said Mary, not Martha, had the better part. Rick Warren would have sided with Martha.

Here’s something God told me: “We become arrogant through striving in the flesh.” When we work hard and succeed, we credit ourselves, not God. God wants the glory, and God is not a cheat. If he wants the glory, it means he expects to do most of the work. He’s not going to let you bust your hump so he can take the credit. Who could worship a God who makes people give him glory for their own achievements?

It’s disturbing to see any Christian support Warren. It proves they don’t know much. Gilligan is a wonderful speaker, but he isn’t worth listening to when it comes to God.

He also promoted tithing. That’s an error which is to be expected in charismatic churches. Charismatics like money a little too much; more than they like the Holy Spirit. Tithing brings a lot of money in. Pastors are afraid to rely on freewill offerings motivated by the Holy Spirit, probably because they don’t know the Holy Spirit and have not taught their flocks how to hear from him. Tithing is not scriptural. Gentiles have never been required or even allowed to tithe. It’s an Old Testament thing. Also, the tithe wasn’t composed of cash. It was things like sheep and grain.

The Bible says were are not under the Jewish law, and we quote that scripture all the time. We can eat pork. We can eat shrimp. We can work on Saturday, which is still the sabbath. We do not have to observe the Jewish feasts. Somehow, though, pastors think the law of the tithe, which didn’t apply to us in Paul’s time, applies now.

Okay. Middlebrook is a feel-good church with no depth. Maybe that’s fine. My dad doesn’t need to study at Paul’s feet right now, and neither do I. As a dementia sufferer who just accepted salvation, he just needs to be among Christians and know God’s presence. Pastors are generally useless, but powerful Christians can be found in great churches, and you have to attend and tolerate the prattling of pastors in order to meet them. My hope is that my dad will pick up a few basic things, that he will sense God’s presence, and that he will meet other Christians.

A friend of mine also attended today, and when we texted later, she mentioned her negative feelings about Warren and tithing. I didn’t prompt her. It’s not easy to slide that stuff past intelligent people.

She has kids. They need to know Christians. Maybe Middlebrook will get them through Christian preschool, and then the Holy Spirit can take over.

I’m just happy my dad went to church. That’s a huge milestone.

He didn’t like the sermon. He may be demented, but a highly intelligent person who becomes demented will still see things ordinary people do not. My dad didn’t hear prophecy or see anyone healed. God didn’t speak to him (or anyone else) through Gilligan. He never sat up in his chair, and said, “That word was for ME!” On the other hand, he only had to sit still for 35 minutes, the music was done well, and getting on the road back to the house was easy.

The musicians at Meadowbrook were beyond reproach in their proficiency. Very, very impressive. Everyone sang on key. They were good looking, too. The songs were very bad, however. I am guessing it’s new stuff Hillsong put out after I quit going to church. Listening to Hillsong is like having a paste of Wonder Bread and mayonnaise jammed in your ears. It’s completely uninspired because the motivation is money and attention, not the glorification of God.

I don’t know where the songs came from, but they were really bad. It’s unfortunate that such talented musicians had to play this material. I couldn’t pick out the melodies because they were so flat and monotonous. The opposite of catchy. I sang in the Spirit instead.

Lionel Richie is one of the most successful songwriters in history. He has said that when he writes a song, he starts with a hook and writes the song around it. The hook of a song is the catchy part that sticks in your memory and makes you want to hear it again. The songs I heard today didn’t have any features like that. They droned and meandered pointlessly. The musicians at Meadowbrook were fishing for men without hooks.

I noticed one other thing about Meadowbrook. There were a number of pretty women. That’s an oddity in Ocala. I can’t explain it, but while the men here look pretty much like the men everywhere else, good looking women are as rare as hen’s teeth. Whenever I see one, it makes an impression on me, because it doesn’t happen most days.

I can’t understand the lack of beautiful women here. Somehow, though, Meadowbrook has attracted a relatively high percentage of beauties.

I don’t think it means anything, but it’s weird.

I plan to keep going back until something better pops up. Maybe this as as good as we can do. That’s okay. I don’t need or depend on a church, and I don’t think my dad is going to get so far in his devotion that he requires top-notch instruction.

As annoying as the fakery and grandstanding in ethnic churches are, I do miss the moves of God. I have heard a lot of inspired words in ethnic churches, and I have had healings and so on. I don’t those things will ever happen at Meadowbrook. They don’t have time for it. Maybe it’s because the people aren’t poor. When you go to a Puerto Rican church, you sit with people who are on parole, on drugs, suffering from diet-induced diseases, and so on. You’ll sit with prostitutes and former pimps. Most people around you will be poor. They aren’t like the successful, corn-fed Christians of Middlebrook, who show up in nice shiny cars and clean, pressed clothes. Maybe desperation adds something Middlebrook lacks.

The lack of God’s participation makes for a boring sermon. When you’re used to hearing God speak through preachers, a speaker who relies on his own ability is pretty dull. Gilligan is very, very good at what he does, like Dave Chappelle or Fidel Castro, but 35 minutes of human effort, when you came expecting to hear from God, are way too much. I like a good speaker, but a plain old orator can’t compete with someone through whom God speaks. Not even close.

I’m not looking for perfection any more, except in my own relationship with God. A weak and superficial church will do, as long as they don’t cause me a lot of problems.

The services I’ve seen have been so backward and uneventful compared to my own daily prayers, I have no hope that Meadowbrook will ever be important to me. Maybe it’s time for me to sit back and rest. I was hoping to find a church where I could rest instead of being used and slandered, so maybe I got what I wanted.

Time to Pay the Piper, Little Buddies

Today I had some fun with a new project. I added a spray boom to the utility cart.

You may wonder what a spray boom is.

When I moved to this farm, the seller left me a 25-gallon spot sprayer. This is a contraption with a polyethylene tank and a wand you hold in your hand. You hook it to a cart battery and drive around, shooting various types of poison at plants and bugs.

Last week I started using the spot sprayer, and I saw that it was good. I found a huge jug of concentrated glyphosate in the workshop, and I obliterated a huge number of troublesome weeds. So much better than paying $18 for a tiny jug of Roundup with a wimpy squirt pistol.

Unfortunately, it was a pain to use. I had to steer the cart with one hand and spray with the other, and I could only cover a three-foot swath. I would like to spray my pastures, and there is no way I’m doing it three feet at a time.

I looked into the matter, and I learned about spray booms. A boom is a rigid beam or pole. A spray boom has nozzles attached to it. You attach it to a vehicle, and it will spray a nice, consistent swath. You don’t have to hold anything in your hand.

I also looked into boomless sprayers. A boomless sprayer doesn’t have a rigid support member. It only has one nozzle, and the nozzle sprays out to the sides. With the right pump and nozzle, you can spray a swath 25 feet wide.

A boomless sprayer is better for most people. It’s less cumbersome, it’s cheaper, and it will do most of what a boom sprayer will do. It’s not as good for hitting plants that are behind other plants, however.

I was going to order myself a boomless sprayer, but I decided to hit Rural King today, to see what they had. They stock a two-nozzle boom that will attach to “most” spot sprayers. It was only $49. I didn’t know what to do, so I prayed. I felt like the boom sprayer was the right choice, even though I wanted the other one, which cost over twice as much.

I got the thing home, and I found out it only fits “most” spot sprayers if you do some work on it. It had a strange “return” nipple on it, to return unused stuff to the tank. My sprayer doesn’t do that. It just pushes stuff out. Nothing goes back. I had to find a way to stop up the return nipple. My machine tools are still in Miami, so I couldn’t make a threaded plug.

I decided to plug it from the inside with an old foam earplug. There was no way the pump would be able to push it out, and it would seal the nipple nicely. It worked perfectly.

Of course, the one-size-fits-all struts that came with the boom would not attach to my sprayer or cart. I ended up taking the tailgate off and using Irwin clamps to attach the boom to the rear of the dump bed. It turned out this was an ideal solution. Instead of a bulky sprayer with steel struts on it, I only have to deal with a small boom and two clamps. Excellent. When I prayed for guidance, I felt like the boom was a bad idea, but it worked out great.

I didn’t know what kind of fertilizer to use on my grass. The whole point of buying a boom was to avoid using hobby-grade products that come in tiny packages. I assumed that Rural King would have some kind of soluble fertilizer in big bags, for tractor-pulled sprayers. Unfortunately, they only had one product: ammonium sulfate. Fifty-one pounds for 11 dollars. It’s sort of like ammonium nitrate, only cheaper.

For 11 bucks, I was willing to take a chance. It was way cheaper than things like Scott’s Turf Builder, and because it was soluble, it worked in a sprayer. I wouldn’t have to push a spreader like a peasant.

I mixed 10 or 15 pounds of ammonium sulfate with 25 gallons of water, and I added some 2,4 D just for fun. Off I went. It worked great. Now I have to see how it affects the grass. I hope the yard doesn’t die.

It would take a long time to spray my 13-acre pasture this way, but it could be done, and it would be better than paying someone else $75 per hour or whatever. I would like to get rid of the weeds that are taking over. If I could do that, I might have an easier time getting someone to mow my land for the hay, and besides, it’s not a good idea to let weeds eat a pasture.

I sprayed a little bit of my small pasture, just to see how well the chemicals worked.

I may upgrade my pump and try a boomless sprayer for the pasture. I think the boom sprayer is better for the yard, because it won’t hit shrubs accidentally, but when it comes to larger areas, it’s clearly better to spray 25 feet at a time instead of 6.

I couldn’t find insecticide for the sprayer. That’s not totally true; they had malathion. I want some something better. Maybe I can buy several jugs of concentrated imidacloprid. The yard needs something powerful.

Hmm…Ebay has super-concentrated imidacloprid, cheap. It’s considered safe, and it does a great job on bugs, even underground. SOLD.

We had a lot of problems with moles and/or gophers last year. Today I read that the way to get rid of them is to kill the grubs they eat. Wish I had known that last fall. I’m going to blast the whole area around the house with imidacloprid. I should also soak the bases of the oaks near the house, to kill the bugs that make them fall over.

I really want to get the lawn and grounds under control. I was afraid of spending money last year, and I was busy coping with downed oaks. I was also very ignorant. All these things contributed to the chaos the yard is now experiencing. I think the sprayer will make a big difference, provided I don’t kill everything with it while I’m learning about chemicals.

Maybe I’ll post a photo of the cart with the sprayer rigged up.

With God’s help, this farm will survive me. It just has to last long enough for me to figure out what I’m doing.

Democracy is not a Blessing

I seem to be writing a lot today.

I wanted to mention something God showed me last night. For years–since before pundits started saying it–I’ve been saying the Internet, TV, and the telephone were going to merge. It was obvious, even when 1 MBps was a big deal. Crank up the speed, reach more people, and you find yourself in a situation where it makes no sense to have three wires doing, poorly and expensively, what one wire can do very well.

For a long time, we’ve been able to place landline and cell calls over the web. Over the past few years, we’ve been using the web instead of cable TV. If it weren’t for my dad’s needs, I wouldn’t dream of paying for TV. I have had cable, and now I’m stuck with DirecTV. Both are inferior to the Internet.

It will be an embarrassment to mankind if cable TV and ordinary cell and landline service still exist in 5 years.

I thought I was clever when I saw the future of TV, the Internet, and the telephone, but last night God showed me something very obvious which I missed: the Internet is going to replace the government. Not only that, but Satan is all for it.

The political left belongs to Satan. In case anyone is interested, this is why we see witches getting together frequently to curse conservative politicians but never liberal politicians. The left is against Jesus, Israel, Jews, Christians, conservatives, sexual morality, cleanliness, good manners, and nearly every type of good behavior one can think of. If you want to find someone who thinks burglary should be legal, you have to look to the political left.

Look how leftists are acting now. They hate our current democracy. That shouldn’t surprise anyone; they supported Castro and Stalin. We have a democracy (please, nerds, no “republic” comments), and it’s not giving leftists what they want, so they have decided they’re not bound by its authority.

They attack conservatives on the street. They accost and frighten conservative politicians and their families. They doxx conservatives. Their leaders tell them to go after us in public places. They’ve gone berserk with civil disobedience.

Trump was elected fairly, in accordance with the law. Our Supreme Court justices were appointed and confirmed legally. Our GOP-controlled senators and representatives were put in place legitimately. We have a lot of conservative governors, and they won their seats in elections. Leftists aren’t having it. They’re not just complaining about the results; they’re saying the system itself has to be discarded and rebuilt so it works in their favor.

Suddenly, leftists hate the Electoral College and call it racist. They have no idea why it was created. They’re making up slavery-related stories in order to turn anyone who supports the College into a target for damaging accusations that are impossible to disprove.

They’re upset because Hillary Clinton got the popular vote but not the office of president. They say the person who gets the popular vote should get the job. Great logic. If that’s true, then we should abolish the Senate. Wyoming is basically empty, but it has the same number of senators as California.

The Senate is racist! Wyoming must be a racist state.

Leftists want a system in which the majority gets its way fast. They want hyper-democracy. They don’t want to be hindered by laws or morality. They believe they know best and that the rest of us have no rights except the right to be managed.

In the past, there was no way for citizens to get around the need for government. We didn’t have the ability to coordinate quickly and effectively. In order to influence society, we had to rely on representatives and tedious processes. That won’t always be true. Computing power is increasing all the time. Our ability to network and act quickly is increasing. We live in a world where a bunch of ghetto kids who feel like destroying a mall can organize their attack in hours.

In the future, leftists will be able to use the Internet and their personal devices to put mobs wherever they want, faster than the rest of us can react. When they want something, they won’t have to vote. They’ll show up in numbers the government can’t cope with, and they’ll rule by force.

At first, the new government will appear in isolated guerrilla actions. We’re already seeing that. As things develop, the left will cohere, and they will act with one deranged mind a good part of the time. Eventually, they will be like one communal organism, with what almost amounts to a single consciousness. They’ll be wrong about everything, but it won’t matter. They’ll be unified. Just as Spirit-led Christians have the mind of Christ, they’ll have the mind of the Beast.

Tech companies are run by extreme leftists, so they’ll be on the side of the mob. They’ll pretend to be dismayed at first, just as they pretend to want to be fair to us now, but gradually they will out themselves as supporters and architects of the revolution.

This has to happen. We can’t keep binding our minds together more and more effectively without developing a hive consciousness.

The hive will be very powerful, and when people are powerful, their real natures emerge. They don’t have to hide any more. They don’t have to pretend to have compassion or to care about fairness. Cruelty and deliberate injustice will surge to levels we can’t imagine right now.

Computerized persecution will be a wonder to behold. The other day I was in line at a grocery, and I saw all the technology around me. I realized it was a small step from persecuting Christians and conservatives on Facebook to fixing things so we could not buy food. “Your chip says you’re against gay marriage. You can’t shop here.”

If God lets the world continue long enough, technology will destroy and replace individual sovereignties. Countries will become obsolete. When we’re thinking and feeling across borders, with lightning speed, conventional governments won’t be able to regulate us.

The bizarre, infantile, cruel mob behavior we’re seeing from the left today is the Beast, taking baby steps. They’re going to get better and better at it, and because they control technology, we will not develop electronics-based power along with them.

The other day I dreamed I died. Nearly. For some reason, it seems like when I dream of death, I always die in a falling vehicle. Remember the death of the Illinois Nazi in the original Blues Brothers movie? That’s what it’s like. Somehow or another, I find myself and my vehicle plummeting, and it doesn’t scare me at all, because I’m tired of this place. When I think I’m about to die, I feel like I’m embarking on a thrilling adventure.

In my latest dream, I was driving a big vehicle like a bus. I was on an impossibly high overpass. A storm surrounded me and lifted the vehicle off the overpass, and I figured I would die when I hit the ground. I prayed intensely, trying to make sure I had salvation sewn up while I still had time. Suddenly, I saw a bright light, and it occurred to me how similar it was to the “white tunnel” stories people like to tell.

Unfortunately, I did not die. It turned out the bright light experience was the result of slamming into the ground and losing consciousness.

I was very disappointed. That’s how tired I am of this earth. Surviving what I thought was a fatal accident was a big blow. I was thinking, “Now not only do I have to stay in this miserable, evil place where I don’t belong; I may have to face all sorts of surgeries and physical therapy, and then I may be crippled. Great.”

I’ve had funny experiences during prayer when I felt like I would leave my body. I’ve had supernatural chest pains during prayer. I didn’t ask God to protect me and keep me alive. No way. I told him to do whatever he wanted to do. Any excuse to get sent home from the front.

Our future with a digital antichrist put together from juvenile, trashy individuals that hate me for existing is not alluring. This world is a mission field, so I know I have to stay here a while, but when it gets too sordid, and too much of the population has become unreachable and filled with apelike, unrestrained hate, I want out.

The left doesn’t want us on the planet any more. I am in complete agreement, but God’s plan doesn’t let me off that easy.

It’s astounding to see the capabilities electronics have given us. Unfortunately, the increase in power has been accompanied by a degradation of our humanity. It has eroded kindness and civility. We can’t handle the power. It’s going to destroy us. We will continue to use it to indulge, magnify, and mutate our basest drives.

By “us,” I mean the species. Myself not included.

This stuff will happen. It may not happen exactly as I describe, but it’s coming. You don’t need prophecy to see it coming. It’s the obvious, inevitable result of the changes we’re going through. We created new toys we are too stupid and venal to use in a mature fashion.

I don’t like being old. I hate reading glasses and knowing my potential is limited. I don’t look forward to falling apart. But I’m very glad I’m not young. The lucky people are the ones who are at the end of their lives. I read about a famous person’s death recently, and before I had time to censor myself, I thought, “Good for him!” He won’t have to suffer the indignity of being crushed by the autonomy-sapping strangler figs, Alexa and Siri.

I can’t believe people want Alexa in their homes. Imagine the digital surveillance records they’re creating. And they trust Jeff Bezos with it! A merchant! When did he prove he was worthy of that? Jeff Bezos is doing things that would have made J. Edgar Hoover faint from ecstasy.

One nice thing about my age is that it limits what the left can do to me. I’ll be gone in 30 years, more or less. That’s all the time they have to work on me. Then I get my vision back, along with perfect health, safety, and an atmosphere of overwhelming love. What if I were 20? It would scare me to death. Even with God at my side, helping me, I would not want to be here for another 70 years. I can see why Jesus left when he was young.

Our dystopian future will make films like Soylent Green and Alien seem idyllic, at least for people who see it for the horror it is. It makes me glad I’m mortal.

Life Isn’t a Disney Cartoon

I love confirmation.

In “Christianese,” or the jargon of charismatic Christians, “confirmation” is what happens when you think God is doing or saying something, and then you get independent corroboration. For example, during your morning prayers, you get a strong impression that God wants you to spend more time in confession. Then later in the day, a Christian friend calls you and starts telling you about a revelation he received about confession. That’s confirmation.

I few days ago, I wrote about the importance of confession. I wrote about the way your prayers can be hindered by refusing to confront sin and iniquity. I said pride kept people from getting healed and so on.

A friend of mine who is not a Christian posted a familiar scripture in the comments: “God is near to all who call on him.”

The problem with the comment was this: you have to read the whole Bible and consider it when you look at individual verses. Otherwise, you get the wrong idea.

Imagine this. You buy a band saw. You want to know how to turn it on, so you read part of the manual. The part you read says to flip the “ON” switch. You flip the switch, and nothing happens. What went wrong? You failed to consider the page that said to plug the saw in.

God is in the business of answering prayers and helping people. When he doesn’t answer, it doesn’t mean he just didn’t feel like it. He is honest. He has promised to answer prayer, and he means it. Either you asked for something you should not have asked for, or something blocked the response. God is near to all who call on him, EXCEPT for those who have problems that put him at a distance or motivate him to close his ears.

I started looking for scriptures one should think about in addition to the one about God being near, and in a few minutes, I had posted a large collection.

I’ll repost the scriptures here. I doubt you’ll ever hear Joyce Meyer or T.D. Jakes mention them.

“Though the Lord is on high,
Yet He regards the lowly;
BUT THE PROUD HE KNOWS FROM AFAR.”

“Because I have called and you refused,
I have stretched out my hand and no one regarded,
Because you disdained all my counsel,
And would have none of my rebuke,
I also will laugh at your calamity;
I WILL MOCK WHEN YOUR TERROR COMES,
When your terror comes like a storm,
And your destruction comes like a whirlwind,
When distress and anguish come upon you.

THEN THEY WILL CALL ON ME, BUT I WILL NOT ANSWER;
THEY WILL SEEK ME DILIGENTLY, BUT THEY WILL NOT FIND ME.
Because they hated knowledge
And did not choose the fear of the Lord,
They would have none of my counsel
And despised my every rebuke.

Therefore they shall eat the fruit of their own way,
And be filled to the full with their own fancies.
For the turning away of the simple will slay them,
And the complacency of fools will destroy them;
But whoever listens to me will dwell safely,
And will be secure, without fear of evil.”

“If I regard iniquity in my heart, THE LORD WILL NOT HEAR.”

“Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened,
That it cannot save;
Nor His ear heavy,
That it cannot hear.

But your iniquities have separated you from your God;
And your sins have hidden His face from you,
SO THAT HE WILL NOT HEAR.”

“The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous,
And His ears are open to their cry.

THE FACE OF THE LORD IS AGAINST THOSE WHO DO EVIL,
To cut off the remembrance of them from the earth.

The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears,
And delivers them out of all their troubles.

The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart,
And saves such as have a contrite spirit.”

“Then the Lord said to me, ‘Do not pray for this people, for their good. When they fast, I WILL NOT HEAR THEIR CRY; and when they offer burnt offering and grain offering, I will not accept them. But I will consume them by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence.’”

“Because of the multitude of oppressions they cry out;
They cry out for help because of the arm of the mighty.

But no one says, ‘Where is God my Maker,
Who gives songs in the night,

Who teaches us more than the beasts of the earth,
And makes us wiser than the birds of heaven?’

There they cry out, but HE DOES NOT ANSWER,
BECAUSE OF THE PRIDE OF EVIL MEN.

Surely God WILL NOT LISTEN TO EMPTY TALK,
Nor will the Almighty regard it.”

“THE THOUGHTS OF THE WICKED ARE AN ABOMINATION TO THE LORD,
But the words of the pure are pleasant.”

“THE LORD IS FAR FROM THE WICKED,
But He hears the prayer of the righteous.”

“When you spread out your hands,
I will hide My eyes from you;
Even though you make many prayers,
I WILL NOT HEAR.
Your hands are full of blood.”

“GOD RESISTS THE PROUD,
But gives grace to the humble.”

“You ask and DO NOT RECEIVE, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.”

“Husbands, likewise, dwell with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life, THAT YOUR PRAYERS MAY NOT BE HINDERED.”

Wow. That’s pretty clear.

When things go badly for you, there is always a reason. God has promised he will do whatever we ask in the name of Jesus, provided it comports with his will, yet many people go down in flames while praying in the name of Jesus. Does it mean God lied? No, it means we do things that interfere with his help.

Look at the Old Testament. What do you see? People get in trouble. They consult God. He tells them what they’re doing wrong. They repent. God fixes their problems. It happens over and over. If there are any examples of people who pleased God, living in defeat over the long term, I am not aware of them. The Jews under the Egyptians were idolatrous. The Jews who had problems with the Philistines were idolatrous. The Jews who were taken to Babylon were idolatrous. You won’t find examples of people who behaved extremely well, living in defeat their entire lives and then dying in misery.

I’m not saying people who are faithful to God don’t have problems. They are attacked in various ways, and they have a tendency to die as martyrs. But an upright person who isn’t ignorant will be able to defeat most attacks and will not live in subordination over the long term, and there is a difference between martyrdom and failure.

Jesus was a complete success, yet he was martyred. That was his choice. It wasn’t a defeat. He sent Judas to turn him in. He waited for the high priest to come and take him. He prevented his armed disciples from defending him. He refused to mount a legal defense. It was time for him to go, so he went. Jesus suffered for a single day, by choice, but we have no record of him suffering even once before that. We never see him work. We never see him get sick. We never see him injured. He never even loses an argument.

There is no record of Jesus ever losing, but then he never did anything wrong.

Many holy men in the Bible suffered. Paul got beaten and stoned. Elijah had to run from Jezebel, who worshiped devils. Paul and Elijah weren’t perfect. They were like us. They made mistakes, and surely those mistakes gave their enemies the upper hand from time to time. Paul had issues with pride. Elijah ridiculed the prophets of Baal instead of standing by with humility. It makes sense that things went wrong for them on occasion, but in the end, they still prevailed.

Think about David. His infant son died, and this was a punishment from God. It was predicted. David prayed and fasted, but his son died anyway. It wasn’t because God doesn’t answer prayers. It was because David’s sin closed God’s ears. David murdered Uriah and had sex with his wife.

The Bible says God himself killed David’s baby.

I spent a good part of this morning throwing out music CD’s and related books I felt were coming between me and God. I should have done it decades ago. I chained myself to demons, and then I prayed to God, asking him to free me from their attacks. I was under a delusion. I was like an unfaithful wife who still expects her husband’s support. God did an awful lot for me, in spite of my rebellion, but some strongholds refused to budge.

The Hebrew word translated “iniquity” in the Bible means “crookedness.” Think of a tree which is bent as it grows. When you cut it and try to straighten it, it always springs back to its bent shape. It’s like the lady Jesus healed; the one who couldn’t stand straight. When you cultivate iniquity, you put habits in yourself, and they act like springs. When you try to do what’s right, you can’t sustain it. The force of habit, which is driven by demons you invited, eventually overcomes you.

Iniquity and habit are the same thing.

By holding onto cultural garbage, I reinforced and protected my iniquities. I gave new power to the very things I was asking God to take away from me.

I used to say my dad would be my last unequal yoking. When he prayed for salvation, I thought I was through. I was wrong, because I was still yoking myself with the world. The ridiculous music I had collected was a yoke. Fortunately, it’s a lot easier to throw out a CD than to abandon a father.

I was thinking about this today while I looked at Youtube. I was looking for Christian material. I found some. There’s something interesting going on in Sweden, of all places. Europe is an atheist/pagan stronghold now, so it’s amazing when anyone there supports God. There is a movement called The Last Reformation. Charismatic Swedes are going around praying for people, baptizing them with the Holy Spirit, and so on.

They have some Youtube channels, and today I looked at one to see what was available. I saw a title: “Our sins hide Gods face, so that he cannot hear us.” Okay! That sounded good. Then I looked at the date: October 10. Two days ago. One day before I got agitated about the music.

That’s what confirmation looks like.

I’ll embed the video here. I think you’ll like it. If you’re humble, I mean. If you hate advice and think you already have all the answers, it will make your stomach hurt.

He talks about confessing to everyone you feel you’ve wronged. We are not really obligated to do that, so I don’t endorse his message 100%. Sometimes ungodly people use our confessions against us, and besides, once you’re over the age of three, trying to dig up everyone you’ve wronged is far too burdensome to even consider. God will give you the opportunity to confess and apologize to everyone you really need to speak to. Nonetheless, I know he is right about confessing to God and forgiving everyone.

I don’t know what else I have to get rid of, but I can’t wait for God to show me. I am tired of being hindered, and knowing I do it to myself makes it even worse.

Who Really Chains You Down?

Today I’m doing something interesting. I’m throwing out compact disks.

For maybe 9 years, God has been helping me understand that iniquity and sin ruin our relationship with him. If you go to a charismatic church in the US, you won’t hear that. You’ll hear, “It doesn’t matter what you do. God is crazy about you! All you have to do is believe…AND GIVE US A HUGE PERCENTAGE OF YOUR INCOME!” If you talk about repentance and the common demons that attach themselves to Christians who don’t get sanctified, they get very angry, and they drive you out of their churches.

I have been asking God to change me for a long time, and he has been doing it, but I was so corrupted in the beginning, it took me a long time to improve.

I had a dream a number of years ago. I was in a big boat, cruising up a dirty canal in Miami. The canal was full of floating trash and dying fish. The canal was only open to the bay on one end. In order to get to the clean water of the bay, I had to turn around and go past all the filth I had seen on the way up the canal.

God was showing me that when I turned back to him, I would have to revisit my sins. I would have to go back, past all the rotten things I had done in the past. It would take time.

I have improved in steps. I would give this or that up, and then I would plateau. Then I would give something else up. There were things I couldn’t get rid of.

Last night I started thinking about my music collection. It has been sitting in boxes in a storage room for a year. I haven’t bothered fooling with it. A lot of it is also stored on electronic devices.

A while back, I threw out my only Aerosmith CD. Maybe that was before I left Miami. I can’t recall. I figured I would eventually get around to deleting it, and everything else that was offensive, from my devices.

I wake up in the middle of the night a lot, worried. I have help from my smoke detectors. I didn’t know how they worked until a week ago. It turned out I had two sets of detectors. One belonged to the alarm company, and one was built into the house. Even though the house detectors are connected to AC, they still have batteries, and the batteries don’t charge. You have to replace them. When you don’t replace them, they start going off in the middle of the night. Never during the day.

I found a great deal on batteries, on Amazon. I ordered them. They cost about a third as much as batteries from the drugstore. I figured I could deal with the beeping for a couple of days while I waited for the batteries.

Amazon canceled my order without explanation. I ordered the batteries again. Amazon canceled again. I suppose I spent almost two weeks waiting for the batteries. During this time, I was being awakened a lot. When I awakened, I had to pray and use my supernatural tool set to get peace.

Yesterday I deleted Aerosmith from my main computer. When I woke up, I thought about it. I thought about the problems that still cling to me. I felt that I needed to get into my CD’s, throw out the ones that were problematic, and ask for forgiveness. I’ve been doing this today.

I can’t believe how much garbage I’m throwing out, and I’m amazed that I allowed so much of it to remain so long.

Get this: I had two Enya CD’s. I bought them ages ago. Enya’s music is lowbrow, but it’s relaxing, and it makes a good stereo sound great. Why did I have this filth, after turning back to God? Enya is a pagan. Her music is for people who worship demons. I was very angry with myself when I saw the CD’s.

I also had relaxation CD’s. I am very wary of these. Relaxing in God’s presence is wonderful. We’re supposed to do it every day. Relaxing without him can open doors. Relaxation and hypnosis are tools demons use to get at us. Even though my relaxation CD’s were not religious in nature, I threw them out.

I had music from a company called Hearts of Space. I don’t know if they still exist. They used to produce collections of music to show off stereos, and it leaned toward the occult. A good stereo will simulate a large space very well, and New-Agey music is heavy on ambience effects.

I had a little bit of rock and roll. Gone. I don’t need it. How much brains do you need to realize rock culture belongs to Satan? It celebrates rebellion, drugs, and fornication. What else do you need to know? It embarrasses me that I didn’t throw it out a long time ago.

I threw out blues music. I guess I’ll get rid of all of it. I’m not done yet. I threw out B.B. King, Albert King, Big Joe Turner, Lazy Lester, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Johnny Winter, and a pile of other things.

I have excellent taste in music, so I’m throwing out a lot of things that have real artistic quality. I’m not a teeny bopper or a woman. I don’t listen to Hanson, Kenny G, Beyonce, or Lady Gaga.

It’s amazing, the junk women like.

I’m wondering if I should dump Johnny Cash. People think of him as a country musician, but he started out in rockabilly, and he was an amphetamine addict. He had problems with the law. He broke up June Carter’s marriage. Not a great role model.

It’s tough, throwing out my blues CD’s. Pete Johnson, Jimmy Yancey, Ben Waters, Willie Smith, Albert Ammons, Meade Lewis…most people don’t even know who they are.

I pitched almost every Cuban album I had. Cuba is extremely screwed up. Cubans are passionate about voodoo; it’s why Cuba fell to Castro. The famous song “Babalu” is about a demon Cubans worship. I threw out Cugat, Beny More, Orquesta de la Playa, and Miguelito Valdes. I have been throwing out albums that are not easy to find. To buy them, I had to look them up on obscure websites.

Freddie King. Jackson Browne. Buddy Guy. Duane Allman. It’s a massacre.

When I’m done with the trash, I have to start deleting things.

For months, I’ve been asking God to show me the ropes that attach demons to me, and I know these CD’s are among them.

I wonder if I’ll be able to keep my jazz and classical music. It’s less offensive, but apart from a few classical tunes, it’s not pro-God. Jesus said those who were not for him were against him.

Whatever. I can’t have this mess clinging to me any more. How can I ask God to set me free while I hold onto my chains?

One reason I didn’t do this sooner is that I was afraid of going too far. When I was in my twenties, I went through a period when I wanted to get rid of everything that seemed ungodly, and I threw out things I should have kept. I burned some diaries I wish I still had. Having been through that, I was afraid of going overboard again.

Is it really possible to go overboard? Isn’t it better to overdo it and then have things restored to you than to refuse to go far enough? I’m not sure. The main thing is to be guided by the Holy Spirit. If you do the sorting yourself, you’ll be guessing, and you’ll make mistakes.

I have DVD’s I should dump. The entire Blackadder collection, for example. I loved The Big Lebowski, but I threw it out a long time ago because of the nudity. Anything that has nudity is already gone, as far as I know.

If I were a parent, I’d probably be taking a hard look at Pixar and Disney. Disney has always been creepy, because they struggle so hard to avoid promoting Christianity. They look for substitutes. I would also get rid of everything remotely related to Harry Potter. I can’t believe parents let their children look at that filth.

Later on, I’ll visit the dump. If you were to meet me there, you could make a huge CD score. You could get a lot of carefully collected top-quality music for nothing. It’s not going to happen. This stuff will be crushed and buried.

Might as well do it now. There will be no ZZ Top in heaven, so why listen to it on earth?

Christian entertainment is pretty thin. I can’t replace the things I’m discarding with Christian material of equivalent quality. It doesn’t exist. That’s too bad, but then we live in a sick world that ignores God.

I expect what I’m doing to improve my life. I wish I had started sooner. Take a look at your house, and see if there’s anything you should get rid of. Ask yourself how you would feel if Jesus walked in and saw it. Maybe that will help.

More

I finally found the last big box of CD’s. Thank God, it was mostly box sets. That made sorting it a faster job. All of the CD boxes have been purged.

I still have some box sets somewhere. Really nice stuff. Howlin’ Wolf. Buddy Guy. It has to go.

I’m wondering what to do with my copy of the movie Schindler’s List. It’s a remarkable movie about a pivotal event in human history, but it has full frontal nudity in it. This was not necessary, but you know how filmmakers are. They have to shock and titillate. Spielberg should have created a version with no nudity, for younger audiences.

I guess I’ll dump it. I can live without it.

I still have a few music books related to rock and the blues. I will dig them up and consign them to the dumpster.

Stick With It

Right now, I’m listening to a Tom Fischer video about our purpose. Earth is a disgusting place full of astounding agony and injustice, and heaven is a place of eternal joy, peace, safety, and victory, so why doesn’t God take us there as soon as we receive salvation? The answer is in the Bible, which says he leaves us here to reach others.

A Christian is supposed to be an ambassador, and his body is supposed to be an embassy. An embassy is a building which stands in one nation and belongs to another. The ground under it is considered part of the other nation, and the other nation’s laws apply there. That’s what a Christian should look like. A Christian’s body houses an agent of a foreign government, and within us, that government is supposed to be sovereign.

I don’t think about this as much as I should. Christianity is promoted to us primarily as a way to get our problems solved, and we have plenty of problems, so most of us never reach the point where we devote most of our energy to advancing God’s kingdom. We’re always trying to fix things like family dysfunction, poverty, and cancer. It’s not easy to focus on pulling other people into the lifeboat while we’re busy bailing.

I should write more about God.

Yesterday I got a big reward. A young friend of mine left the ghetto and got himself a music scholarship at the University of Miami, and since then, I’ve been doing what I can to help him succeed. Primarily, I’ve been telling him about the tools and weapons God has given me. Prayer in tongues, blessing, cursing, cutting off the unequal yokings in our lives…things like that.

This week he contacted me and said he was discouraged. He didn’t know if he could succeed. He received a scholarship, but they didn’t give him money to live on, and the money they paid him for working in the band wasn’t sufficient, so he has had to hustle and work. As a result, he had to take incompletes in some courses.

I wrote him an email and reminded him he already had the tools for the job. I told him he needed to make time for prayer in tongues no matter what. I told him he had to get rid of the unequal yokings in his life. He’s black, and I’m sorry to say it, but black people are surrounded by a lot of individuals who are poisonous. They are pumped full of leftist gibberish and identity politics. They are coerced to identify with a race instead of the body of Christ. I told him to stay away from leftism and BLM.

He called me last night, and I assumed he wanted to tell me about his problems. Instead, he thanked me for the email and told me how it was paying off. He said he was getting his prayer life together, using the power of blessing and cursing, and putting things in God’s hands as his problems confronted him.

He had taken an exam. It intimidated him. He remembered what to do. He spoke defeat to the difficulty of the questions, and he remembered to do it during the exam. He asked God for help. He waited and let God give him the answers. It worked.

That really touched me. I went from algebra ignoramus to grad student in a top physics program in under 4 years. I eventually quit physics and took up law, which is infinitely easier. I had problems in grad school because I was burned out, and I was doped up on ADD drugs that made it impossible for me to eat and sleep. I had no one on my side. I was away from God, so when I prayed, I felt as if I were praying from within a dark cistern made of brass. The prayers seemed to bounce off the ceiling. Actually, they did bounce off.

Even though I was in rebellion, I had one good tool, and I failed to use it. When you study physics, often you get extremely hard problems. Professors will assign problems they, themselves, can’t solve. I spent a lot of long nights going in circles, trying to find answers. Eventually, I learned that if I closed my eyes and thought about other things, the answers came to me, but I could never make myself do it consistently, so I quit.

My friend is doing what I couldn’t make myself do. He is giving up pride and letting God give him victory. I wish I had done that myself, but at least I managed to help someone else do it.

It’s strange, but it seems like most of my friends are helpless. They have all sorts of problems. They struggle financially. Some have problems with transportation. They have family issues they can’t beat. When I need help, there is very little they can do for me, but I am able to do them considerable good, with virtually no sacrifice on my part.

I know that anyone who listens to me will cease being helpless. I didn’t save myself or bless myself. I don’t think most of my friends understand that I am not special. They think I have special abilities, or that I’m such a great person, God does more for me than he does for other people. In short, they seem to have swallowed a lot of toxic nonsense.

Everyone can be blessed. Everyone. You don’t have to be a saint. You don’t have to be smart. You don’t have to be white. You just have to do what God tells you to do. Get baptized with the Holy Spirit. Pray in tongues as much as you can stand to, every day. Read the Bible. Listen to Christians who are blessed, not liars and confidence artists. Cut your ties to people who don’t serve God; just cut them off, and quit whining and making excuses. Get to know real Spirit-led Christians. Confess and repent, daily. Quit complaining to God as though he owed you something; you deserve hell, so whatever you’re getting is a bonus. You really do deserve hell. Stop defending yourself. Finally, give up pride and get used to giving your problems to God and waiting for his help. Pride in your own abilities is sin.

Read the above paragraph and apply it, and you’ll be fine. You really will. It’s all you need. Take care of the things I wrote about above, and God will handle the rest.

Your race isn’t your savior. Your political party isn’t your savior. Self-esteem isn’t your panacea; it’s a poison that will eventually destroy you. Psychiatric drugs aren’t the answer. Self-help books won’t get the job done. You need to give yourself COMPLETELY to God and follow HIS program. He has a program, and now you know what it is.

When you have problems you can’t overcome, it’s because you failed to do one or more of the things I just told you to do. There is no point in asking why. You already know, and you know how to fix things, so get to it.

Do things your own way, or according to the tenets of backward denominations who reject the Holy Spirit and scripture, and you will live as the tail and not the head. That’s just how it is. You can’t force Catholicism or other man-made doctrines to work. God will not have it.

You don’t need me or any other person to help you. Depending on me is the height of idiocy. I have done too many stupid things to number. I am not reliable. Submit to God, do things his way, and he will make your life work.

I hate it when people tell me I’ve done things for them which I have not done. I don’t change people’s hearts. I don’t heal anyone. I haven’t used my amazing mind to figure out how to get blessed. I was an idiot, and God told me a few things, and now I pass them on. I was tired of living with my own screw-ups, so I reluctantly listened to God.

Anyone who credits me with things God has done is speaking for Satan and putting me in danger. God owns the glory, and it’s a disgrace to me when someone praises me for what he does. It can provoke God to act against me, and it’s a form of idolatry. Wood and stone idols are better than human ones. At least they haven’t sinned habitually and disgraced themselves.

I can’t wait to see the future blessings that will unfold in my young friend’s life. I’m going to have at least one friend who isn’t helpless.

Guilty

I am following up on the story of the pastor of New Dawn Ministries, the last church I belonged to. After a number of delays, his case crossed a threshold on October 5.

There were 8 charges. According to a county website, he was charged with 4 counts of lewd and lascivious molestation on a child under 12. It says he was charged with 4 counts of lewd and lascivious conduct (different thing) with a child under 16.

Last Friday, he was adjudged guilty on one count of lewd and lascivious conduct with a child under 16. He was also convicted of one count of lewd and lascivious molestation (not conduct) with a child under 12. He took a plea, which means he said he was guilty.

“Molestation” is a worse crime than “conduct,” and it carries a much heavier punishment.

A person guilty of L&L conduct has:

Intentionally touched the victim in a lewd or lascivious manner; or
Asked the victim to commit a lewd or lascivious act…

A person guilty of L&L molestation has:

“In a lewd or lascivious manner, intentionally touched the breasts, genitals, crotch, butt, or clothing covering those areas of the victim; or
In a lewd or lascivious manner, intentionally forced or enticed the victim to touch the breasts, genitals, crotch, butt, or clothing covering those areas on the defendant…”

I thought he was accused of rape, but that may not be the case. The prosecutors may not think he committed rape, or they may think it’s too hard to prove.

I am not a criminal attorney, so I am not completely sure how the process works at this point. I worked for the PD in Miami very briefly, and then I put in some time as an intern with the legal aid people in domestic violence. What I recall is that people who took pleas were sentenced immediately, because part of the plea process is negotiating a sentence. There is no point in having hearings to decide on a sentence when a defendant has already agreed to a punishment. Perhaps that isn’t always the case, however. Maybe my former pastor hasn’t been sentenced yet.

The clerk’s site says he will have to surrender on December 5, so he must not be in prison or the county jail right now. Maybe he got a break because his wife is dying from a brain tumor. Maybe the court is giving him time so he can be present when she dies. I’m just guessing. There has to be an explanation.

The site also says something about a probation agreement being unsealed. Certain sexual crimes require post-incarceration probation.

Florida has a number of mandatory minimum (“man-min”) sentences on the books, and child molesters are among the targets. Lewd and lascivious “molestation” of a child under 12 carries a man-min of 25 years followed by probation. That’s not the maximum; you can get life. Once you’re in prison in Florida, the best outcome possible is to shave 15% off your sentence through “gain time.” It’s not clear to me whether a molestation defendant is allowed this option. Some courts have said they are not.

The punishment for L&L conduct is not as bad, but it’s still very severe. It’s not like you can pay a fine.

One would assume that a convicted child abuser would do serious prison time no matter how well things went for him in court. Thing is, man-mins are pure fiction, at least with regard to certain crimes. My sister was charged with two man-min offenses, and she was convicted of one. She never spent a day in prison. She put in a fair amount of time in the county lockup because she paid little attention to her felony diversion conditions before her trial, but the county lockup isn’t prison.

Although convicted, my sister was sentenced to probation, not prison, and she failed to comply with the conditions. After she disobeyed the court, she went to prison, right? No, the court simply said she had “failed.” Apparently, this means she will not be eligible for probation if she is convicted of new crimes. Basically, it means she was not punished at all.

All this shows that mandatory minimums don’t always have teeth. Whether they’re enforced uniformly in molestation cases, I could not say. Florida has the nation’s harshest child-protection laws, so it’s not a great place to live if you’re a molester. Maybe molesters never get what are called downward deviations (sentence reductions) in man-min cases. A Florida Supreme Court case (Rochester v. Florida) suggests they do not.

I could figure this stuff out and provide a certain answer if I were being paid and took the time to do quality research, but that’s not happening, so I’m making a fair effort and hoping I’m right.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that a middle-aged man who molests his own niece for years, in Florida, is absolutely sure to do multi-year prison time. Surely there is no way the courts will allow him to avoid incarceration.

The grapevine (relatives of the pastor) says his sister is pushing for 7 years, and that his wife is somehow involved in a sympathetic filing asking for no more than 2.5. The relatives don’t really know what’s happening, however. It’s gossip. If the state websites are correct about his status, my former pastor is looking at over 25 years, no matter what.

I don’t like rooting for someone to go to prison, because I’m a bad person myself, and I certainly don’t want to be exposed or held accountable. I believe it’s important for this man to be imprisoned, however, because child molesters often have multiple victims. We don’t know who else he has hurt or will hurt. We don’t know whether he can control himself. Also, I think his niece would be harmed by the knowledge that the justice system cared about her so little it allowed her molester to remain free. I don’t know how she could feel safe in that situation. She should be able to associate with her family and friends, secure in the knowledge that she won’t see her uncle walk in the door. She shouldn’t have to worry about seeing his car creep by while she stands in her yard.

Whether society really needs to put him away for 25 years (or even 85% of 25 years), I could not say. He shouldn’t be able to be near her until she’s an adult, at the very least.

I have told all I know. It’s a very sad story. If the man-min means anything in his case, his family is in for an extremely rude awakening, and the free world may never see him again. For a 51-year-old, 270-pound diabetic who absolutely refuses to eat vegetables, 85% of 25 years could well equal a life sentence.

This is certainly a different outcome from the one we used to hear about from Jorge, our “house prophet.” He told us we were all going to mount unicorns stuffed with gold bars and ride them into the gates of the Emerald City, more or less. One rosy prediction after another. We would have a big building. There would be miracles. None of it happened. And I was the jerk because I was “negative.” I didn’t buy into everything that was said.

I may have been less than positive, but the bad things I thought would come to pass, did. Those things happened, and it didn’t stop there. The end of the church and the destinies of the pastors were actually much worse than I thought they would be.

The strange thing is that the pastors did give us truths from God. He spoke through Pastor Albert many times. I benefited a lot from listening. It goes to show you that you can’t assume a person is right with God simply because God speaks through him. Consider Balaam.

In other news, it looks like Hurricane Michael is going to miss me and everything I own. That’s a relief. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent last year, cutting, moving, and burning trees my myself. I didn’t enjoy using buckets of pool water to bathe, either, and caring for a dementia patient without electricity or water pressure is an ordeal I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

On the down side, Michael is headed for an area not too far from Milton, Florida, where some friends of mine live. Milton is on the east side of Pensacola. It seems like the Gulf Coast gets whacked a lot these days.

If the forecast is right, Milton will only get tropical storm-force winds. That’s a lot better than 125-mph winds, which have 4 times as much energy.

Ocala is wonderful, but Michael has me thinking about Tennessee. I can’t lie. It seems like I go through the hurricane waiting game every year, and it gets old. Eastern Tennessee has no real natural disasters to worry about. I’m sure they have occasional tornadoes and floods, but it’s not like living in a hurricane zone, and they don’t get frequent earthquakes or tidal waves. Also, it’s maybe 6 degrees warmer than Kentucky in the winter, and there is no state income tax.

I Have Been Processed

I visited a church today.

I am not interested in hearing from preachers any more, because as far as I know, none of them are really on track. Preachers from Spirit-led churches are obsessed with money and fame. Preachers from old-line churches never knew much to begin with. These days, when I listen to preachers, I don’t hope to find a great teacher. I listen to see how toxic they are. If a preacher isn’t likely to do a great deal of harm, he’s okay. That’s all I can hope for.

I have zero interest in preachers, but my dad needs to have some sort of connection to Christians, and I would like to meet a few, myself. Also, my dad is not a sophisticated Christian, so it won’t harm him all that badly to listen to preachers who don’t know much. They have a certain amount of useful, basic knowledge, and he can benefit from receiving it. He can’t rely on me for everything. I’m just one person.

There are a lot of churches in Marion County. I have been looking at them online.

I wanted to avoid minority churches. They’re way too emotional, and they’re even more phony than white churches. Also, I can’t deal with Obama/BLM worship and leftism. You can’t be a mature Christian and fall for that nonsense, and minority churches produce a lot of extremely immature Christians. Hello…Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson…both reverends.

I looked at churches that were more mainstream. A lot of the websites made it clear that the churches to whom they belonged to didn’t know anything about the Holy Spirit. I wrote those places off. I also saw what looked like typical megachurches or wannabee megachurches. I was reluctant to visit them. I don’t want to be subjected to the Benny Hinn/Kenneth Copeland/Joel Osteen craziness if I can avoid it.

I settled on a place called Meadowbrook. I’ll be honest. It looked like a megachurch online. It looked typical. “Let’s make Jesus cool and turn the church into a smooth-running mall complete with a restaurant and shops.”

My impression was correct. I showed up a couple of minutes after the 11:30 service was supposed to start, and what I saw was a large, very nicely kept lower-tier megachurch. They had a cafe and a shop. Everything was highly organized. They had a big check-in counter for kids. It was like going to a mall, except unlike a mall, it was busy.

The sanctuary was a lot like the sanctuary at Trinity Church, the unsuccessful mini-megachurch I belonged to in Miami. The walls and ceilings were black. I don’t know why churches do that. It makes things easier for the video people, and it’s cheap to maintain, but it’s not exactly warm. It’s like worshiping in the Batcave. I would guess the place holds 1500 people, and it was nearly full.

The music team (I refuse to call it a “worship team,” as though all worship were music) was excellent. Everyone who sang could carry a tune. I don’t know if the musicians were good, because churches will not let musicians solo. You can go all Star Search with your voice if you want, but it’s a sin to do the same thing with piano keys. Anyway, they did a great job, and they weren’t singing in Spanish, which was nice.

The people in the crowd looked great. They weren’t sloppy or ghetto. Lots of mixed couples and families. Everyone looked clean and alert. They were very nice.

They didn’t have any offering cards in the chair backs, so I stiffed the church. I wasn’t going to chase down an usher. They should be able to look after the offering cards without being micromanaged by visitors.

The pastor, a Mr. Gilligan, is a talented speaker. He’s smart, and he’s very funny. He taught a reasonably sound message about how we need personal relationships with God. Can’t argue with that. He didn’t give much practical information (“Do this, then do that…”), but not many preachers do. They tell you you’re doing things wrong, but they don’t tell you how to change.

There was a countdown clock on the back wall. I was happy to see that. My last pastor loved attention, and he was happy to speak for three hours. Gilligan gave himself half an hour, and when the clock reached zero, he wrapped things up.

I wouldn’t want a church to allow a clock to rush a pastor if supernatural things were happening, but this service wasn’t like this. No one was prophesying or healing anyone.

When he was done speaking, he called on a younger pastor to say some few things. “This is happening next week; that’s happening next week.” I asked God if I should get up and go, to avoid traffic, and I felt I had the go-ahead, so I got up and left. I wasn’t the only one. When the sermon is over, people at this church MOVE. I assume they want to get to Cracker Barrel before everyone else.

It’s important for me to maintain my independence from now on, so leaving early helped me establish boundaries. I MAY attend, sometimes. I may or may not give you money. I will not be an usher. I will not cook in the cafe. I will not sign a membership contract. I will not bring my tools to the church so I can be part of a dangerous, ineptly supervised building crew. I will not go on retreats where I have to share an outhouse with strangers.

Consider me a permanent guest. If I come back.

My take on Meadowbrook is that it’s a reasonably good church. It appears to be refined and processed to a somewhat excessive degree, but nobody begged me for money, nobody tried to make me join a pastor cult, and I didn’t have to deal with ladies yelling, “SANTO!” and literally having screaming conniptions in their seats.

I found the church impersonal. I got the impression that the people who attend only see each other for an hour a week. Usually, pastors in Spirit-led places interact with people they know during sermons, but Gilligan might as well have been preaching on closed-circuit TV from a remote location. He might as well have been a hologram. He interacted with the crowd, but not individuals. Maybe that’s a good thing this time around. It will make it easier to keep a safe distance.

I think it’s good enough for my dad.

I need to learn their policy on concealed carry. I do not like leaving my pistol in the car. Once it’s out of my pocket, I forget about it, and then it’s in the car all day, instead of where it should be.

The church had a bomb scare last month. Some guy who had been Baker Acted several times showed up with a backpack and box. The church’s security people cuffed him, and the cops blew up his property. I don’t know if that means they’re in favor of concealed carry, because it makes the church safer, or they’re against it, because they are afraid of nuts.

I’m impressed that they have trained security people who carry handcuffs. I was an armorbearer at two churches, and we were pretty unsophisticated. We had a Florida Highway Patrol officer who served at Trinity Church, but the rest of us were winging it.

I may go back to Meadowbrook next week with my dad. I hope so. He needs to have some sort of reconciliation with Christians, not just with God. He has a lot of crazy ideas about us.

Today I was texting someone about Meadowbrook. I said all churches were disappointing. That doesn’t mean they’re completely useless. If you’re smart, you don’t go to drink the Kool-Aid and believe everything you’re told. You pick up basic training, and then you get to know God on your own time. After that, God takes over and teaches you things that are true. If you continue to go to church, you go to be among Christians, not to hang on the pastor’s every word. Christians need each other.

Truthfully, preachers seem to be the most useless people in churches. They get in the way and put heavy burdens on everyone. The people you really need to know are sitting in the pews.

It was very nice to sit in a big room full of Christians again. I guess I do that every time I go to the nearest Sonny’s Barbecue, but you know what I mean.

The next service is a week from today. Perhaps I will be there.