Best Way to Get Yourself Killed by a Leftist: Tell him He’s not a Victim

I bought an interesting book. The author is Bryan Melvin, the guy who claims he died from cholera and had to visit hell. Amazon lists him as B.W. Melvin. The book is called A Land Unknown. I learned about Melvin from Youtube, and his book provides more detail on his experience.

I read most of the book yesterday. Fair warning: it’s a flawed book. I’m not saying that to insult the author, who surely did his best. I just want to prepare anyone who buys it. The first 60 or so pages are devoted to background material. Where he was born. What his life was like before the trip to hell. How he interacted with Christians and his doper buddies. He tries to recreate dialogue from the past, and it doesn’t work. It could make the book sound phony to a person who never gets past page 60. Once he gets to the cholera experience, things improve.

I don’t know if what he had was actually cholera. He said he and a buddy drank from a cooler mounted on a truck, and whatever was in it was foul. The cooler’s owner then told them his kids had used it as a portable toilet.

You can get pretty sick from ingesting sewage. I know. When I was a baby, I got a disease my mother later described as cholera. She said a neighbor’s septic tank overflowed on the grass, and that’s where she thought I got it. My fever went over 106, and they put me on IV fluids. For some reason, they used pins to attach my limbs to boards, presumably to keep me from thrashing and knocking the IV out. That sounds insane, but it’s what she told me. I don’t have any giant pin scars. Anyway, my understanding is that real cholera is caused by a bacterium called vibrios comma. I don’t know if it occurs in normal sewage, but I tend to doubt it, since it causes epidemics that kill great numbers of people. If all sewage caused cholera, it would be hard to dispose of safely.

A web source says there was only 1 cholera case in the US in 2015, so I think it’s safe to say that Bryan Melvin and I did not have cholera. It must have been e. coli or something.

I don’t understand how a bacterium found in normal excrement can be so deadly. After all, every human being is exposed to excrement ever day, and we don’t die.

To get back to the point, he got sick, toughed it out, and died, and at some point he was revived.

Melvin says a demon was forced to give him a tour of hell, and a lot of what he says happened sounds plausible to me.

A long time ago, God told me hell is not full of bad people; it’s full of people who don’t listen. Melvin’s story confirms this.

When I say hell isn’t full of bad people, I mean it’s not reserved for people who were nasty and mean on earth. It’s reserved for people who don’t accept salvation through faith in Jesus. You can be a very nice Buddhist, run an orphanage, donate organs to strangers, give everything you have to the poor, and still go to hell.

You don’t avoid hell by being nice. You avoid hell by confessing, believing in Jesus, repenting, and forgiving. If you do those things, you can make it, even if you’re a child molester. If you don’t do those things, you’re trying to get into heaven based on your own righteousness. Even if you’re very good by earth standards, the Bible says your own righteousness is like used menstrual rags in God’s sight. You can’t make it unless you accept the inheritance Jesus gave up for us. Essentially, you have to be a sort of identity thief. You have to appear before God with the righteousness of Jesus as your ID.

Sometimes (often, really) you have to look at Christianity like a lawyer. When we write laws, sometimes we have to do some funny things in order to shape the behavior of the public. Lawyers call this good “public policy.” For example, if you sue a company for negligence, you may not be allowed to introduce evidence of corrective measures in court. Say you slipped on a floor covered with a very slick brand of wax. If the company changes to another wax in order to prevent injuries, you may be unable to use it as evidence that they knew the wax you slipped on was dangerous. Why? Because it’s good public policy to encourage people to make the world safer. We don’t want companies avoiding making corrective measures because they think lawyers will use those measures in court against them.

Some people call Christian salvation “cheap grace.” The idea is that it makes no sense for a truly evil person to go to heaven simply by repenting and accepting Jesus and so on, in view of that person’s bad history. But look at it from a public policy standpoint. If evil people know they can’t be saved, what will they be motivated to do? They’ll do what Satan has done. They’ll go down in a blaze of rebellion. They’ll devote their lives to selfishness and hatred. They’ll do their best to offend God and hurt his children, because they have nothing to lose. On the other hand, if the option of salvation is always open to them while they’re alive, they will be motivated to change and join the team.

The idea that you can get to heaven by being good (and only by being good) is much worse than cheap grace, because even if you accept the erroneous idea that being good by human standards is enough, most of us can’t be good. We are bound by evil habits. Our free will is gone. Which universe would you prefer to live in? One in which Jeffrey Dahmer can change and enter heaven, or one in which a teenage drug addict and street criminal has already lost every hope of avoiding hell?

The Bible says God doesn’t want anyone to perish. He is looking for excuses to give us salvation. He’s not going to reserve it for a few superhuman sages. Most people go to hell as it is. That’s bad enough, without turning the quest for salvation into a sort of Jeopardy! tournament of champions.

You have to be extremely arrogant to think you’re so good you can get into heaven on your own feet. There is no room for humility in a scheme that requires self-salvation. If I can save myself, I don’t need God at all. I have no reason to acknowledge his existence.

Melvin’s book confirms that “good” people go to hell.

In the book, Melvin encounted a number of people who had been malevolent and sadistic on earth, but he also saw people who seemed nice. While he observed the people and demons around him, a voice gave him thoughts and words, explaining things to him. It repeatedly pointed out that people were there because they hadn’t listened.

The concept of reaping and sowing was also represented, but it seems to me that it came primarily through the evil spirits in hell, not the voice of God. The demon guide kept telling him people reaped what they sowed. Demons punished people with torments that reflected the evil they did on earth. For example, a man who was stingy was imprisoned in a barrel in a tight cave. Demons had things he could use to get free, and they put them just outside his reach. The book didn’t say this was God’s idea. The impression I got was that the demons came up with it.

It’s a brilliant punishment which I would never have come up with. When you give to the needy, you help them get out of life’s tight spots. Sometimes you can save someone from the destruction of their earthly life with a few hundred bucks, which is very little to most of us. I have seen that happen.

The system represented in the book makes complete sense. The Bible says the WAGES of sin is death, but it says the saved receive an INHERITANCE, which, by definition, can’t be earned. The demons were PAYING people what they had EARNED in life. In heaven, however, people INHERIT what JESUS EARNED.

I never ask God for what I deserve. I never ask for justice. I have stopped doing that. To ask for compensation or justice is to curse yourself. If I ask for those things, I ask for defeat and torment. Instead I ask for mercy. I ask to be a pampered heir, without pride or self-esteem. Hell is full of self-made men. You can’t put yourself in heaven, but you can definitely earn a spot in hell. You already have.

Bryan also says the spirits in hell criticized God constantly. They had a BLM/Antifa attitude. They pointed to the suffering people in hell, and they asked Bryan how God could be good if he permitted such things to happen. The voice of God came to him and explained that God is not responsible for the misuse of free will. It’s the same sound argument gun store owners make. If I sell you a pistol, and you shoot your family with it, it’s on you, not me. God also told him he refused to create a race of marionettes with no free will. The destruction of free will is Satan’s game and the game of misguided people. God doesn’t do it. He will let you damn yourself.

The things the voice told Bryan line up perfectly with what God has told me. Excuses are lethal. Blaming others for your sins is lethal. These things will put you in hell. You can have the sick pleasure of criticizing God and correcting his scheme for the rest of eternity, but you will do it in a flaming pit. Your whining won’t change the nature of the universe, no matter how much you want to be your own God.

The voice discussed the question of how God could create sinless beings who then went on to develop iniquity and to sin. The voice said the fact that iniquity was found in beings didn’t mean it had been placed there.

Here’s another interesting thing about the book: God and the demons described human beings as caretakers. The demon guide called Melvin “caretaker.” That’s completely consistent with what God has shown me about the system. God created the earth, and he put us in charge of it. We, not God, brought evil into it. We made evil grow, and we made righteousness wither. Why is there evil in the world? Because the caretakers are evil. God isn’t responsible.

The beings in hell, according to the book, are full of denial. They love excuses. They never discuss their own failures. They accuse God constantly. Good luck with that. Arguing with the one who creates the rules is idiotic. Many creatures prefer the pleasure of deflecting blame to the pleasure of release from hell and entry into heaven. They are getting exactly what they chose.

Melvin said he didn’t see children in hell. People there were old enough to be held accountable. He didn’t see retarded people. God didn’t impute blame to anyone who could not understand sin.

Melvin says he used to be a crabby atheist who argued with Christians all the time. He got off on it. In hell, all of his lame arguments were shot down. The demons handed Melvin the same arguments, which shows where those arguments come from. The voice of God obliterated them.

Fascinating stuff.

The more I know, the more I realize God is fundamentally conservative. He is a complete zealot about accountability. He hates whining and excuses. He derides those who devote their lives to blaming others. If there is one area in which he is not conservative, it’s the area of self-help. God wants us to be reasonably responsible, but he hates our ridiculous, haughty belief that we can be self-reliant and self-contained. We are expected to do what we should, but we are supposed to rely primarily on prayer and our other supernatural tools.

God doesn’t want you to go on welfare and suck your neighbor dry while blaming your neighbor for your self-inflicted poverty, but he also doesn’t want you to run around telling people you caused your own success through hard work and your own amazing brilliance. You have to make a contribution to your success, but most of it comes from him, and you have to admit that.

Poverty is self-inflicted, but a blessed life comes from God, not your hard work.

The more I understand, the more repulsed I am by modern American values. We hate God more every day. We sow curse after curse in our lives. We celebrate perversion, pride, cruelty, vanity, and fornication, giving demons more and more power over us. We plant land mines in our paths all day long. We’re spitting on God while he holds back the spirits that have the power to destroy us and give us what we deserve.

America has gone completely PC, and that means we are blaming everyone in sight, except for those who cause our problems. We blame white people, men, Christians, southerners, everyone who has a job, heterosexuals, and conservatives. I’m sorry to say it, but we’re blaming the people who bring us God’s help. We’re celebrating perverts, socialists, idolaters of every type, rebels, ignorant young people with too much power, sluts, ghetto musicians with the morals of rats, and revilers. We’re destroying those who bless us and empowering those who make us rot and fail.

We now have a culture in which the word “shame” has developed a stink. Shame saves us. Shame is realism. Shame allows us to see what needs to be fixed. It opens the door to God’s help. Instead, now we love pride, which is a granite wall that blocks God’s assistance.

Even Christians promote pride. That’s amazing. Have they ever read the Bible? Show me the verses that praise pride. Good luck with that. God hates pride, and the Bible says he actively opposes the proud. What could be worse than that? How can anyone want God to be his enemy? There is no enemy in existence whose power can compare. God is the most terrifying enemy conceivable.

The more I learn about the true nature of the world, the more I wish I could move somewhere else. America is the last major island in a rising sea of feces, and when we go down, there will be nowhere else to go.

I helped create this mess, though, so how can I expect to be rescued?

Today everyone is flipping out because the president supposedly used a curse word to describe Haiti and other miserable, filthy, backward countries. He should apologize for his language, but he’s right. I have one Haitian godchild and another who is one quarter Haitian, and I know lots of Haitians. I wish them the best, but I would not hesitate to call Haiti a hellhole in front of them, and if they were honest, they would agree, because they chose the USA over Haiti and most of them want their friends and families to be allowed to leave.

Haiti is a failed nation, period, and it stands out as exceptional even among failed nations. No sane person questions it. When they want foreign aid, everyone agrees they’re in trouble. When they want to come here and bring their cultural limitations, suddenly Haiti is a wonderful place.

Haiti is definitely a horrible place. How did that happen? Is there something in the rain or the soil that makes it bad? Do the animals and fish make it bad? Was it bad before people moved there? What if I make a crazy suggestion? What if I say Haiti has been screwed up by Haitians? What other explanation is there? People ruin their own countries, and that means they have cultural problems that can be detrimental to other countries when they emigrate.

Haiti is a mess, and Trump is merely putting America first (his job) when he questions the need for more immigrants from messed-up nations. Somehow, we have gotten the idea that we are supposed to be an unlimited sanctuary for people who have proven they are likely to cause problems when they get here. Other countries, such as Canada and Japan, look for immigrants who will help them. They look for the educated and the skilled. Typical Haitians, Mexicans, Hondurans, and so on have virtually no chance of being allowed to move to most top-tier nations. We, on the other hand, bring in criminals and the unskilled. We don’t look for doctors or engineers. We look for people who are willing to do the filthiest jobs we have, and who have the least potential to improve and advance.

The kerfuffle over Trump’s language is a great example of the way PC and the supernatural inversion of our thinking has turned us into self-destroyers. We could be luring productive, successful people. Instead, we are filling ghettos. That’s the simple truth. That’s where these people go as soon as they get here.

I remember joining Trinity Church in Miami, which is 80% Haitian. A pastor told me, “The girls go to college, and the boys go to jail.” Look at other countries Trump is concerned about. Central Americans have a horrific crime rate, in their home countries and in America. They pour in, helping Democrats build their voter bases. Meanwhile, a Ph.D. from New Delhi who tries the legal route will be shoved further down the list because of all the less-desirable immigrants (and illegals) in front of him.

I heard some nut on NPR saying the alleged Haiti remark was “clearly racist.” Hmm. When did Haitian become a race? Obviously, Trump is not concerned about race. He is concerned about the way immigrants from screwed up countries drain us. I think it’s safe to bet that he would be happy to welcome immigrants from mostly black Barbados, which is considered to be the most developed nation in the Caribbean and Central America. I’m sure he would be happy to welcome black Haitians who are successful and educated.

I think if you asked most Americans to describe the purpose of allowing immigration, they would say it was to allow poor people to move here and do better. That’s insane. The correct purpose is to build America up. But if you say that, may God protect you from the PC mafia.

Anyway, America is under a supernatural delusion, and our hysteria over Trump’s alleged harsh remark shows how we love accusing those who help us. Whatever Trump’s personal failings may be, he has done a great deal for Christians and Israel, and he has been used by God to make the country stronger. We should be making allowances for his strange personality, in view of his accomplishments and what appears to be a genuine Cyrus anointing. Instead, we pounce on relatively trivial failings and work to oust him in favor of a poisonous, God-hating socialist to be named later.

I’m going to try to focus on self-criticism, repentance, and improvement. I wish everyone in America would get on board, but they’re not going to, so I’ll do what I can to save myself and whoever will accompany me.

Correction

I just found out the bacterium that causes cholera is vibrio comma, not vibrios comma. I remembered it as vibrios because that was the way a college friend of mine pronounced it.

I have finished the book, and it says the author’s doctor told him he did, indeed, have cholera. The doctor said the bug that got him was vibrio cholerae, which is another name for vibrio comma.

God is Consistent

I like watching Christian testimonies on Youtube. I prefer testimony to teaching. Teachers tend to anoint themselves. They decide they want to teach, and then they make things up, or they look for other misguided people who have created “institutes,” “centers,” “schools,” or “seminaries.” They may look to people who have created Christian franchises, like Calvary Chapel or Hillsong, as if God were using the McDonald’s model. The ones who learn from others usually repeat nonsense, but they justify themselves with their references and impressive-looking logos. “Joe Jones the famous evangelist who gives 90% of his salary to blind orphans and started the Hol-E-Mart church chain says THIS…”

One of the weird things a preacher may do to impress people is to call himself “ministries.” It’s just him and his laptop and GoPro, but the name is “Harvey Anderson MINISTRIES.” It’s not just one ministry. It’s “ministries.” I live in an area where a lot of farms, including farms where no actual farming is done, have signs saying “Farms” on them. “Windy Ridge Farms,” with no wind, no ridge, one property, and no farming. Same thing.

Some teachers are angry as they can be, as though they themselves were God, coming to get us for our sins (without a lot of discussion of their own failings). A certain amount of annoyance is normal and unavoidable, but when you give people the impression they sinned against you, personally, instead of God, you have a self-righteousness issue, and you probably lack love. On the other side of the coin, some teachers are aggressively warm, while still managing to be condescending. They’ve mastered the weary, all-knowing smile. “Oh, little children. What am I going to do with you? Come bask in the glow of my patience and false humility while I tell you AGAIN how to be as holy as me.”

If I want to hear from someone who is better than I am, I’ll go to God, and if I want the weight of authority, again, I’ll go to God. I won’t look to some guy who had his video-game-playing kid use Photoshop to make him a big shiny logo. Apart from hearing from God, I would like to hear from honest, knowledgeable people who know they’re not better than the rest of us.

Here’s something funny: a lot of people think they’re anointed to teach because their parents or husbands are anointed. Hello? Did Moses’ wife run a ministry? Did the apostles automatically hand their ministries over to their sons? I don’t think so. You shouldn’t give your obnoxious, spoiled kid a ministry just because you’re afraid he’ll end up working for Uber if you don’t. It’s not fair to the people who trust you. You can pass your chain of shoe stores on to your kid. Ministries are not yours to give away.

People who testify are better than teachers. Things happen to them, and they tell us what happened. If they’re truthful and what they say is scripturally sound, they’re considerably more trustworthy than teachers.

Testifiers often get in trouble because their stories don’t line up with doctrine. To me, that’s a sign that they’re right. The world is full of bad doctrine generated by teachers. No meat on Fridays! Pray to dead people and call them saints! Mary never sinned! Baptize babies who have no idea what’s happening! Don’t eat pork! Give God huge cash offerings on Jewish holidays!

The people who disturb me are the ones whose testimony lines up with Catholicism, Mormonism, and so on. Those people are just looking for attention or money.

Yesterday and today I watched a video featuring a former atheist who says he died and visited hell. His testimony is really something. He keeps verifying things that have come to me by revelation. Over the years, through prayer in tongues, I’ve learned a lot of things directly from God, and they are things no preacher ever told me (Actually, they did a great job of keeping truth away from me). In his testimony, the former atheist, Bryan Melvin, goes through a whole bunch of revealed ideas. He says they were shown to him during his visit.

This confirms what God told me a long time ago: “Authority comes from time spent in the presence of God.” This man apparently spent time in God’s presence, and he came back with authoritative knowledge of things self-anointed teachers don’t know.

Here’s one thing that shocked me: he confirmed that heaven is guarded so the flesh can’t go there and screw it up. Months or years ago, God showed me that heaven is a long way from the earth, and he made me understand two things: God wants to bring the rule of the Holy Spirit into the earth, and Satan wants to bring the kingdom of the flesh into heaven.

Down here on earth, human beings are ruled by the flesh. The flesh is a worthless animal. When I talk to God, I call it “this meat sack.” It’s about like a pig, except it’s malevolent. There is no type of filth, moral or physical, that bothers it. It is completely selfish. It is lazy. It is cruel. It can come to love any type of sexual perversion. The flesh is the receptor Satan uses to control us. He wants us to remain under its power until we die and beyond. He, himself, has the character of the flesh, even though he’s a spirit. He wants to rule heaven and earth in his filthy state, and for that reason, he had to be cast out.

There is a hierarchy of authority in the universe, and evil inverts it. Spirits are supposed to rule over the flesh, but in lost people, the flesh rules the spirit. Inversion of authority can happen on earth, but isn’t permitted to stain heaven.

Inversion of authority is a real problem. Ever know someone who is ruled by a pet dog she carries around in a purse, and who forces those around her to be inconvenienced by the dog’s desires? Know a man whose wife makes the rules? Know any parents whose kids call the shots? I’ve seen it over and over. I’ve experienced it in my own body and mind, unfortunately. My flesh has gotten me to obey countless orders. But I digress.

A fulfilled Christian, though burdened by a meat sack and subject to a certain amount of error, is primarily ruled by the Holy Spirit. He is in tune with God, just like the people and other spirits in heaven. Once the meat sack drops off, he is completely clean, and he is fit to enter heaven. He will not disrupt. He will think, feel, and act in harmony with his brothers.

Take a look at Psalm 133, as presented in the Complete Jewish Bible:

Oh, how good, how pleasant it is
for brothers to live together in harmony.

It is like fragrant oil on the head
that runs down over the beard,
over the beard of Aharon,
and flows down on the collar of his robes.

It is like the dew of Hermon
that settles on the mountains of Tziyon.
For it was there that Adonai ordained
the blessing of everlasting life.

That’s not about holding hands and singing Joni Mitchell songs (while eating tofurkey, spitting on combat veterans, and celebrating sodomy). It’s about beings who are united internally, through God’s power. It’s a description of the way beings live in heaven.

The psalm expressly mentions anointing, which means God’s authorization. Literally, “anointing” means “applying ointment,” or pouring oil on a person. Oil symbolizes the authorizing presence of the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit is with you, you will do his will and speak his ideas instead of wandering off on your own and telling people (to pick an example of bad doctrine) they can pray their relatives out of purgatory.

Authority comes from time spent in God’s presence, and so does harmony. God is not double-minded. He does not argue with himself, and people who are guided by him don’t argue. They want the same things.

Liberals and other people who don’t know God love to praise debate and argument. They say they’re healthy. Discord is not healthy at all. It’s sick. It proves something is wrong. When two people disagree, at least one of them (often both) is in disagreement with God. When both agree with God, they agree with each other. A Spirit-filled Christian argues as little as possible. It’s a last resort. Paul said he didn’t come to us with men’s wisdom, but with demonstration of the Holy Spirit and God’s power. Most of the time, in a religious context, argument doesn’t work. You can’t tear down supernatural walls with carnal tools.

One of the huge mistakes theologians make is to encourage hard study and debate. If study were the answer, a higher percentage of Jews would have accepted Jesus. They’re the best religious scholars there are, and they got it wrong. The most respected Christian scholars are long-dead Catholics whose obvious errors turned the church into a bastion of veiled paganism.

Jesus didn’t devote his life to long debates. He told people the truth, briefly, and then he moved on, making zero accommodation for their stupid opinions. The Bible lists short exchanges in which he corrected the misguided, but we have no record of him engaging in the kind of protracted disputes that have taken place since he left. “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like him.”

Bryan Melvin says we mistreat God’s integrity. That’s a funny way to say we sin in spite of our beliefs, but it’s right. God’s integrity is the most important thing there is. If he stops being completely righteous, the universe loses its compass, and the pattern of hell becomes universal. It’s completely natural that God separates himself from the earth. He has to be holy and perfect. How can he do that if he’s down here on the ceiling of hell, surrounded by vile morons guided by terrified spirits who would do anything to knock God off his throne and avoid the lake of fire?

I read a fascinating apocryphal book called The Ascension of Isaiah. Whether it’s true, I don’t know. The book describes an experience in which Isaiah is lifted up to God’s throne, through the levels of heaven. Every level is so much better than the next, the last one seems worthless.

We know the heavens have levels because it’s in the Bible. Paul says he was lifted into the third heaven. It makes sense, because ordinary human beings can see some of the levels of creation. Hell is inside the earth, which we can see. That makes two levels. We can see the first heaven, which is the air above the earth. We can see the second heaven, which is space. There is no reason to doubt Paul when he says there is a third heaven, and if Isaiah is said to have seen a seventh heaven, I have no reason to dispute it.

Anyway, the impression you get from reading the book is that God has put layers of insulation between the holy and the profane. I see the logic. If God’s integrity is as important as it seems, then you would expect to see a great effort made to insulate him from the presence of idiots. To me, when Bryan Melvin refers to God’s integrity, it makes sense.

Melvin says there are levels in hell, which is consistent with the notion of levels in heaven. There is tremendous symmetry in the supernatural.

I decided to buy his book. I want to see what else he knows.

I don’t know everything, but I can tell you this: if you don’t have a supernatural testimony, or if you do, but it stops updating and progressing, something is deeply wrong. Christianity is supernatural. It’s not just going to church and trying to obey rules. It’s not about making sure you eat as many crackers and drink as much wine as possible. You should be seeing God’s hand in action all the time, mostly in your heart and mind.

I’ll post the video I watched. Maybe you’ll get something out of it.

Admit the Truth: God Already Knows it

The more time passes, the more I learn about how I screwed my life up.

I suppose that sounds negative, but it’s not. When you don’t know a problem exists, you don’t try to fix it. Worse, you may think it’s a blessing. You may try to strengthen it. When God shows me what’s wrong with me, it can only mean one of two things: 1) there is no hope for change, so he wants to condemn me; or 2) he is showing me so I can be transformed and repaired. Because God has not given up on me, I know the answer is 2), so his criticism is a huge blessing.

God teaches us not to believe in ourselves or in other people. He teaches us we are weak and dirty. He teaches us we can’t accomplish much. This is the complete opposite of what the world (including many Christian teachers) teaches us. The world tells us self-esteem is a panacea. It tells us we can do anything as long as we believe in ourselves and never give up. It tells us not to beat ourselves up. It says, “Bad things happen to good people,” which is an obscene lie.

The world teaches us egotism and denial. Only a small percentage of people get God’s help in any degree of fullness, and because so few of us get divine help, we are taught that it doesn’t exist. We are told God helps those who help themselves. We are told to believe in ourselves and pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. In a way, it makes sense. If you can’t figure out how to work a car’s ignition, you walk everywhere. If you can’t figure out how to work power tools, you use hand tools that break down your body and get little done. You use the best tools and weapons you can find. If you can’t find God, self-esteem and hard work look pretty good. They can’t compare to God’s help, but they do produce some results.

The Bible is nothing like self-help teaching. It says, “Lean not unto thine own understanding.” It says, “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit.” God sentenced Moses to die outside of Israel because he used a stick to do something God wanted to do with a miracle. Anthony Robbins and Richard Simmons tell you you can. God tells you you can’t. God says you are bad, weak, and small. And God is right.

The last two churches I belonged to taught people God would fix all their problems if they had faith and gave the preachers money. That’s more or less the sum of it. Trinity Church in Miami was worse than the other church. They refused to say anything negative about any type of behavior, except briefly and without sincerity. Gay boys on the worship team? No problem. Pregnant girls singing on stage? Fine. They were so blind, they let Richie Wilkerson do a video in drag. Richie did a promotion based on the filthy movie The Hangover, which would seem to suggest that he and the other people involved went to see it. It made it seem as though they approved of it.

Trinity had two slogans, and one was, “We’re gonna win.” Not, “God will give us victory.” Just, “We’re gonna win.” They encouraged people to live however they wanted, as long as they showed up, gave money, provided free work, and refrained from saying anything negative.

People at Trinity didn’t do well. They died young. They stayed poor while their preachers lived in luxury. They went to prison. No wonder. They were walking in circles in the wilderness, and the preachers had them convinced they were in the promised land.

Trinity and New Dawn Ministries did nothing to help me confront my iniquities. God had to teach me about it directly. That’s sad. People are supposed to pass knowledge and wisdom on to each other, so each generation doesn’t have to start from scratch. If your church doesn’t teach you, who will? You better hope God speaks to you.

I discovered the false gospel of self-esteem when I was a teenager. I had very low self-esteem, which is painful, so when I felt the positive sensation of increased self-esteem, and I saw how much easier it made my life, I thought I was onto something. I pursued it. I never developed great self-esteem, but I did develop a strong pattern of denial and an inability to perceive my faults clearly.

Because I lived in denial, I was able to sink further into sin. I became jaded. Things that should have disturbed me didn’t bother me. I participated in things I should have avoided. Over time, I wrapped chains around myself, and they got too thick for me to resist in any way.

About 10 years ago, I started to realize I had messed up, but even with God’s help, things that are built up slowly may take a long time to deconstruct. I tried and tried to confess and be honest with God, but my vision wasn’t good, so even when I looked for things to confess, I didn’t do a good job.

One of my problems is that I have been surrounded by vexatious people. More generally, I have been surrounded by people who tempt me. A vexatious person tempts you to be angry and strike back, just as a slutty woman tempts you to sin sexually. It’s all temptation of one kind or another. When I started to work to improve, it was very hard for me to feel anything but anger for the people who worked against God in my life. It was like being stung by clouds of flies. without rest. This is why I’m so glad to be out of Miami. Miami is full of obnoxious people and temptation.

I found it very hard to feel any warmth for those who were against me and against God. The pain and stress they caused me made it difficult to have any positive feelings about them. It’s hard enough to love people when they’re behaving. Loving them while they’re still driving the nails in is impossible without God’s help.

I’m not completely stupid. For years, I’ve been praying for God to help me love my enemies. The change hasn’t been instaneous, and I am not strong enough on my own to force it.

Yesterday I had issues with someone who tempts me. I woke up during the night and thought about it. I tried to put myself in this person’s shoes. I realized some things.

People who live in sin as a lifestyle, without remorse, are to be pitied. They never feel God’s love. They don’t know him. They don’t have prayer. There is no one to comfort them when life defeats them. They are absolutely alone, even in crowds. When they get sick, they have to hope primitive, expensive human medicine can fix them. When they have problems, they have no reason to think they will overcome them. They live with failure, hopelessness, and desperation all the time.

Godless people live in anxiety and darkness, and then they go to hell, where they are tormented by the hateful spirits they served all their lives. Whatever my challenges are, I live in victory. God has visited me personally. He tells me things. He heals me. He puts my enemies in their places. When I die, I will live with him in peace and joy forever.

God helped me to remember that my enemies are as human as I am, and that they are much worse off than I am. He helped me feel it. Most people who are against me have never heard from God, or they are so screwed up, they can’t accept it when he communicates with them. They deny it to themselves.

I am in a position of great wealth and complete security, and I am angry with people who are in complete poverty and destined for eternal agony.

God helped me focus less on the pain they cause me, which is fleeting and trivial, and more on the horrible circumstances in which they live. Because of that, I am now better able to forgive and pray for them, without anger.

He also helped me to admit that I am just like them, but for his intervention in his life. I am not a good person. My sins would take years to list. I am not a good person subjected to the company of bad people. I am a bad person who wasn’t brave enough or strong enough to resist God when he called. I got to know God largely because I’m not as strong as people who resist him.

Every Christian should realize he’s a bad person, but getting that knowledge into your heart is a job for God. Knowing it is not the same as having it be part of you.

I encourage people to sit down every day and ask God what’s wrong with them. Admit you’re not honest. Admit you’re blind and deaf, and that you made yourself that way. Don’t waste time with excuses. They slow the process down. If you’re restless and anxious, there is a reason. There is something you need to confront, and it won’t go away until you get it out. You may never have to confess it to people, but you definitely need to tell God and get help overcoming it.

A long time ago, God told me, “Peace lies on the other side of confrontation.” Feel-good preachers keep peace away from you, because they hate confrontation. They think it drives dollars out the door, so they tell us we’re great.

I feel much better today, and I expect my blessings to increase. This stuff does work. You just have to do it the right way, not the TBN way.

Eight Kids, Five Adults, Two Rib Roasts, and One Elderly Chihuahua

I hope everyone who reads this is having a great Christmas.

Yesterday I nearly killed myself and 12 other people with food. My friend Amanda showed up with her sons, and my friends and fellow Miami refugees Alonzo and Teri showed up with their 5 children. I made two standing rib roasts, a cheesecake, and brownies. I recruited Amanda to make Caesar salad from scratch, and I also made Texas trash, which is a snack made from Chex cereal and seasonings.

When I moved up here, I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing. I knew I hated Miami. I knew I would get out sooner or later, but I wondered if I was taking the right path at the right time. Maybe God wanted me to suffer a bit longer. I didn’t know if I’d have friends or anything to do. Ever since I’ve been here, friends have been showing up and helping me out. I have not lacked for a social life, and the people I’ve associated with have been good for me, unlike toxic South Florida riff-raff.

We had a real Christmas Eve dinner, and the house was full of kids running around and making noise. Some presents were opened. Alonzo’s kids ran around carrying Pumpkin, their new 12-year-old Chihuahua. It was much better than what I expected: two old men, watching TV in different rooms.

Alonzo and Teri used to go to Trinity Church in Miami, and when we all got disgusted with the pastors’ greedy slavemaster mentalities, we all moved to another church. I’ve been writing about a former pastor who got jailed for child molestation. He ran the second church.

I never saw anything weird about the man, but last night I learned that he had done something strange for one of Alonzo’s daughters. The daughter is the same age as the niece he is accused of abusing. At some point, the pastor gave Alonzo’s daughter a red Christmas ornament. The story is that he told her how pretty she was and that the ornament made him think of her. How about that? Terri says that when she heard about his arrest, they grabbed the ornament and threw it out.

The ornament story was disturbing, but it makes me very happy to know that Alonzo’s daughter was spared. She’s a terrific young lady. She started talking to me yesterday about her experiences as a high school freshman and her ideas for her future. This kid is going to be all right. Other girls her age are sending disturbing texts and pictures to boys all day, or sulking and whining. This one has a college picked out, and she’s trying to decide on a career.

I tried to give her whatever helpful tips I could. You never know when something you say will make a big difference in someone’s life. I am not great with kids, and being reasonably normal, I don’t want to hang out with them for long periods, but I see the need to make an effort once in a while. Dealing with kids for 2 or 3 hours can be rewarding. After that, I need to do something else.

I hate to think about how things would have played out, had this girl become a victim. I should be more disturbed about the niece. I can’t explain why I’m not. I feel more empathy for people I’m close to. I suppose that’s a flaw.

Maybe God is showing me I should not feel as badly as I do for the pastor. I feel sympathy for him, and his punishment makes me think about the sins in my past, but my strong impression, as it has been for a couple of years, is that God does not want me to spend time praying for him. Some people just aren’t good investments. He knows who can be helped and who can’t.

The reason God does not have me praying for him is not that his sins are worse than mine. The reason is that he is too stubborn to let God or anyone else change him. If you will listen, your sins can be worked with. If not, they will pull you under.

There are people who can’t be helped, because they won’t listen. That’s important for me to keep in mind, with regard to my own walk. When I was young, people thought I was a good kid, but in some important ways, I was a useless punk. That’s to be expected, when you’re fatherless. My dad didn’t make any effort to teach me anything, and I learned to think for myself. I relied on my own disastrous conclusions. By my teens, I was a hard person to counsel. When you’re used to getting no advice or stupid advice, you try to figure things out on your own, and you may develop a reflexive hostility toward other people’s suggestions. For the most part, the kids who were here yesterday are teachable. They are better off than I was. I’m old, and I behaved stupidly for decades, so now I’m like a tree that grew in the wrong direction. Reshaping me is a huge job only God can do.

I’m very glad I’m not beyond hope. The Bible compares stubborn people, including the damned, to clay jars that have been fired so their necks are stiff. You can’t change pottery once it’s fired. In ancient Jerusalem, they took misshapen pottery and threw it in the Potter’s Field, which was part of the city dump. That’s a picture of hell. My neck got pretty stiff, but I didn’t reach the point of no return. I’m not sure how close I came, but I think it was pretty close.

I don’t know why God started visiting me and calling to me when I was in my twenties. I never heard from him before that. Why he decided to make contact after I was an adult is a mystery. I didn’t do anything to merit a sudden change. I’m sure there are a lot of people in hell who have sinned much less than I have, and there are surely people who have done more good.

The church with the scandal was very messed up. We had a false prophet who got up and yelled for long periods, predicting things that never came true, and he was never held accountable no matter how often he was wrong. The pastors loved him and honored him because he always told them they were great, they were going to be rich, and that the church was going to grow. The pastors paid no attention to people who told the truth, i.e. that the prosperity gospel is a farce and that internal change is what God wants.

The pastors were odd people. They refused to eat non-starchy vegetables. They said they took vitamins instead. But they were happy to eat rice, bread, sugar, pork fat, and salt. Their attitude toward God was just like their attitude toward food. They only wanted the things that were pleasant on the way down.

When I turned back to God, I was mainly interested in the starch and sugar. I wanted to feel better, fast. He helped me understand that I needed the broccoli and and carrots even more. I don’t have a church now, but that’s a good thing. I don’t have people shoving plates full of Twizzlers and Moon Pies in my face when I show up asking for greens. Instead of a poisonous feel-good church, God gives me private sessions in which he helps me feel bad and clear the air with him. I would rather feel bad here with God than bounce up and down and snort glitter at a church full of boneheads hooked on false prophecy and fake joy.

Christmas Eve was great, and God is helping me be honest with him, so I expect the coming year to be much better than this one. I hope God gets in touch with every one of you and teaches you a thousand times as much as he has taught me.

Free 2-Day Shipping Takes a Week

Am I the only one who has noticed that Amazon Prime is a sham?

When I first signed up, I wanted free shipping. That was the thing. I knew I would save more than the cost of Prime. But I also liked the 2-day time frame. Amazon promised they would ship stuff to me for nothing, in 2 days. Obviously, there are exceptions. They’re not going to ship you a bulldozer in 2 days, and if you order at 9 p.m. on a Monday, you’re going to wait till Thursday. But generally, 2 days.

Now that I think about it, Bezos has a lot of nerve, putting things he can’t ship quickly on the Prime list. It’s dishonest. If you can’t ship a heavy item in 2 days, it’s not Prime, now, is it?

Anyway, at first things were great. I could order an Arduino board on a Friday and receive it on Sunday. I received things on Saturdays, too. The 2-day promise was no joke.

Over the last few months, I’ve seen a big change. Order on a Monday, receive on…Friday. Extra charges for weekend delivery, too.

Yesterday I ordered 2 Prime items. That was Wednesday. Now Amazon says they will arrive in a week. Is Amazon on Mars time? Maybe on Mars, 2 days equal 1 earth week.

I got no explanation. I didn’t get an email containing an apology. Just a notification on Amazon’s site, telling me I had to wait a week.

It’s interesting. It’s not surprising. To me, it’s consistent with the way evil works.

I think the Internet is basically evil. I use it, but I think the devil is using it to do us great harm. It has spread pornography to every corner of the world. It has helped hostility increase to levels no one could have predicted 30 years ago. It’s going to destroy cash, so the government will be able to control us by freezing and confiscating our money and by using our purchases to surveil us. It’s going to destroy free will by making us unable to do anything without being observed.

The Internet is a bad thing, and one of its evils is the destruction of retail businesses. Malls are closing because no one wants to get in the car any more. We are headed toward a state in which a few big companies hold all the inventory, and you won’t be able to get the things you need unless you deal with them electronically, leaving a trail of bread crumbs for Uncle Sam, who is stupid, cruel, and unfair.

About half of Americans have Amazon Prime now. That’s an astounding statistic. It’s very powerful. And 2-day shipping was a big part of the appeal. Now that we’re hooked, the shipping guarantee is dissolving. That’s completely typical of the way evil works. No drug dealer charges you for your first line of coke. He lets you develop a taste for it, and then you pay whatever he asks.

As we become more dependent on Amazon and other online companies, they will lose their motivation to provide good service. That’s what’s happening with Prime. They have half of America. They know you won’t quit now. Maybe technological advances will make Prime a real 2-day service, and maybe Amazon will tell us to shut up and accept delays. Either way, Amazon comes out on top.

Am I saying we should boycott Internet vendors? No. They already won. There is nothing we can do. Depriving yourself won’t fix the situation.

It doesn’t matter that much to me. I went without house shoes and a housecoat for most of my life. I can wait 6 more days. But I find it interesting, and I wonder why no one seems to be talking about it.

Amazon says it will refund your membership for a month if they deliver something late. At least that’s the Internet scuttlebutt. Something to look into, if your Christmas socks haven’t arrived yet.

He is God, and This is the Christmas Season

I was just reading about Kim Jong-Un, North Korea’s eccentric leader. The guy Obama and Bill Clinton allowed to build nuclear weapons. I should also add Bush, since he didn’t stop it.

Like all serious leftists, he has a bee in his bonnet about God. Socialism has always been about dethroning God and replacing him with an impossible messiah in the form of a benevolent mommy state.

Kim (I assume that’s his family name) has decided to attack Christmas. He has banned all gatherings involving singing combined with alcohol. If he ruled Ireland, he could simply have banned wakes.

My first thought was that Kim would fit in really well on America’s coasts. The leftist war on Christmas is very real. Bill O’Reilly was ridiculed for acknowledging it, but he was right. These days, a store employee who says “merry Christmas” is regarded as though he had said “Heil Hitler.” A crazy judge just issued a ruling in which he made the utterly fatuous claim that Christmas has a “secular half.” Look it up. He was being generous. These days, Christmas (the mass of Christ) has a secular 95%. We see a whole lot of reindeer and snowmen, and we hear the word “holidays” a lot, but we don’t hear a whole lot about Jesus.

Once again, I am reminded how much I hate Miami. Where I am now, things are very different. I don’t live near a mainstream city. After I moved here, I noticed something incredible. You can walk into a business belonging to a national chain here and hear Christian music playing in the background, and when you leave a store, they usually wish you a merry Christmas.

The first time I noticed the music, I marveled at the courage of the store manager. I was thrilled, but I also felt like we were getting away with something. I wondered if the manager would get in trouble.

It’s very sad that we have to pretend this isn’t the Christmas season. What other major holidays are there at the end of December? Atheists don’t have holidays, unless Festivus counts. Kwanzaa is a made-up holiday created by a white-hating black supremacist, and no one pays much attention to it. Chanukkah is real, but let’s face it: we didn’t start decorating our houses because of a holiday that applies to 3% of the population. Yom Kippur is much more important than Chanukkah, and you will notice there is no Yom Kippur season. We don’t even celebrate Purim, the fun Jewish holiday where everyone gets hammered.

This is the Christmas season, plain and simple. It always has been, at least since we stole December 25 from the pagans. Without Jesus Christ, the messiah, the sole incarnation of God, the “holiday” season would not exist. Tell me I’m wrong.

I don’t know what God thinks about the Christmas season, except that I’m sure he appreciates us acknowledging Jesus. We don’t know the correct date, and we adopted a lot of pagan nonsense when we created the holiday. We are extremely materialistic at this time of year. I’m so sick of it, I give very cheap presents these days. God may not be all that happy with the way we handle things, but I’m sure he is offended at the way leftists treat the name of Jesus. We censor it like a curse word, while promoting the open use of all actual curse words.

Cover your eyes, if you’re a leftist. I am about to blaspheme your god.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Merry, merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Have a great time, celebrating the birth of the only supreme messiah; God in the form of a man. Roast a reindeer for your family and tell your kids there is no Santa Claus.

Jesus is God. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. J-E-S-U-S. If I ever said “season’s greetings,” I now repent. Jesus allowed himself to be murdered in order to save me from myself. The least I can do is say his name.

Yesterday I saws the testimony of a converted Jew from Israel. His grandfather was a very rich rabbi and a member of the Sanhedrin. When this man told his grandfather he had accepted Jesus, his grandfather threw dishes at him and opened up his forehead, leaving a scar. He ran him off. When his grandfather died, he left him a fortune worth over $40 million, on the condition that the grandson renounce Jesus. The grandson rejected it. His family told him he was dead. His mother said he was worse than a terrorist. He had to go live in a tent and wash dishes for an Arab who hated Jews. Seven famous rabbis from the Sanhedrin invaded his tent and spat on him. He never gave up on Jesus.

But we don’t have the nerve to say “Jesus” or “Christmas” at Banana Republic, in a putatively Christian nation.

We’re so brave!

We’re being conditioned to hate and deny the name Jesus. In the future, leftists will have the power to kill us for our beliefs, right here in America, and we will be asked to renounce the Lord in order to save our lives. By then, we’ll be used to being embarrassed by the mention of his name. We’ll be used to hiding our beliefs, as though we were hiding pornography addictions. If you can’t say “merry Christmas” today, you may have a hard time standing up for Jesus when a government stooge tries to get you to renounce salvation in exchange for a few more years of life.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Get over it.

Never forget that this is the Christmas season. You can call a cat a chicken if you want, but the truth is the truth.

Plus More Testimony

I got a nice surprise today. My sliced country ham arrived, and it’s much better than I expected.

I ordered it from Gatton Farms in Kentucky. I quit using them a long time ago, because they sent me a ham that wasn’t smelly enough. A few days ago, I started looking for a new ham, and I decided to try buying a Gatton Farms ham (because the price isn’t bad) and letting it sit around for a week or two before refrigerating it, to see if it improved. When the ham arrived today, I couldn’t resist frying a couple of slices. The last country ham I had was from Cracker Barrel, and it was pretty bland.

The new ham looked promising right out of the box. The slices were vacuum-sealed in clear bags, and the color was dark and nasty-looking, the way it should be. I flopped a couple into a skillet and gave them about three minutes on a side, after adding two tablespoons of bacon grease for good thermal conduction.

When I took them out, I poured off the excess grease, added a little water to the skillet, and boiled it down to make redeye gravy. Some people call cream gravy redeye gravy, but it’s much simpler. Cream gravy is bechamel sauce made from pork grease and pepper, more or less. Redeye gravy is what you get when you deglaze a skillet with water and then reduce it. People will tell you to add coffee to it, but my grandmother never did.

I’m very impressed. The ham and gravy were nicely acidic, the way they should be. The meat wasn’t too dry. It was nice and salty. I didn’t add water to cut the salt.

I don’t know if they’ve improved their curing method or if the disappointing stuff they sent in the past was just bad luck.

My half-gallon container of sorghum molasses hasn’t made it here yet. I look forward to trying it. I want to make biscuits and eat them with ham, butter, and sorghum. I hope the sorghum is thick. I’ve had sorghum so thick it made me want to chew on it.

Things are going very, very well in my prayer life. God has been helping me to spend more time praying in tongues, in several sessions every day. I can’t tell you why, but when I do this, life just flows. Problems solve themselves. Stress disappears. When I don’t do it, problems pile up.

I got a phrase during prayer the other day. It was, “I know the answer.” It just means I need to quit asking God for new answers and start applying the answer he already gave me. In 1986, he told me I needed to pray in tongues for long periods every day. For a long time, I’ve known that it works, but I haven’t applied it enough.

I always say I would be the most boring preacher alive, because I would always say the same thing: get baptized with the Holy Spirit and pray in tongues as much as you can. I keep coming back to it. It never doesn’t work.

It’s a great message. Think of all the effort it obviates. Denominations are teaching people to slave away at unpleasant methods that do not work. They tell them to make pilgrimages on their knees, give all their money to grinning monkeys on TBN, go on long fasts, pray this canned prayer, pray that canned prayer, pray to this or that false “saint,” give up good food for Lent, avoid meat on Fridays, and a whole list of other useless tasks, when what people really need is to connect themselves to God’s power and let him do the work.

Yesterday I had a funny thought. Imagine you dig ditches for a living. One day your foreman comes up to you and tells you to dig a ditch of a certain size. You give yourselves blisters and make your back sore, digging the prettiest ditch in history. Then the foreman makes you and all the other workers assemble to praise him for the great job he did. “You’re so worthy. Look at this great ditch you gave us, o foreman. We thank thee for thy ditch.”

How would you feel about that guy? You’d think he was an parasite and a colossal jerk. But somehow, we expect to do all the work to straighten out our lives…AND praise God for it.

Is God a colossal jerk? Does he want credit for the things you do? If you have to do the work, what, exactly, are you supposed to praise him for?

God wants to do the work. We know this because he wants the praise. He doesn’t want you to praise him for what you do without his help. When you pray in tongues, he does the work. He gives you the words. He answers the prayers. You’re barely involved. It only makes sense that you would praise him when you see the results, because there is no way you can take credit. You had no idea what you were saying!

God fixes people’s problems, and he even wants to do the work of changing your character. Your catastrophically disordered and disabled character is too screwed up for you to fix. You already blew it. The damage is done. If you could repair it, you wouldn’t need Jesus. The crucifixion would have been a waste of time. It’s as if you spent your life mining sin, and while you were a thousand feet down, the mine collapsed on you. You can’t move the timbers and boulders. You’re pinned. God understands that, and when you keep trying to dig yourself out, your pride tries his patience. It proves you haven’t learned anything. It drives him to stop helping you.

We are heirs, not self-made men. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We’re supposed to sit back and let God give things to us. It’s humiliating, but then it should be. Humiliation just indicates that we finally understand what we are.

Here’s something I realized the other day: when God gave his stamp of approval to Jesus, he didn’t say he was proud of him. Remember? Jesus was baptized, and when he rose from the water, the Holy Spirit alighted on him, and God said, “Behold my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” Not, “of whom I am very proud.”

Sometimes when I accomplish something satisfying, I think about that. I feel like saying, “I’m proud of this,” but I know better than to do that. The correct thing to say is, “I am pleased that this is done.” We like to say we take pride in our work. That’s wrong. We should say we take pleasure in doing it well, and that we’re grateful God helped us. I think about that a lot. You don’t need pride. It’s a poison. You can be satisfied with what you have and what you do, without ruining everything by bringing pride into it.

God himself is not proud. That’s incredible. The Bible says it’s true, though. God himself, who has more reason to be proud than anyone, is humble. But somehow we, who offend God constantly and live on his mercy, think our asinine pride is a virtue.

I hope things continue to go well. I know from experience that I can always find a way to drop the ball.

I don’t care if anyone agrees with me or not. What I am doing was not my own idea, and it works. I can’t force anyone else to accept it. I wish they would. I’m not going to be disturbed if they tell me how offended they are by “cheap grace” and so on. Maybe they’re so great they can save themselves. I’m not, and clearly, I am not required to.

Self-Righteousness is Cancer

I decided to take down yesterday’s blog post and start over. I have more more important things to write about than the saga of Al Franken and Roy Moore.

God has been giving me a lot of help lately. He has been helping me to see how screwed up I am, and how far I am from the person he wants me to be. It really started to hit home after my former pastor was jailed for child molestation. We all plant the seeds of our own destruction, and even if we don’t end up facing public disgrace, those seeds need to be rooted out and replaced with seeds of blessing. They do harm, even if they don’t become full-blown disasters.

During the last century or so, Americans have taught themselves to love sin and pride. As a result, we no longer fear punishment, and worse, we are no longer able to perceive our baseness. When you don’t notice your symptoms, you don’t know you have a disease, so you don’t try to get healed.

Sometimes I watch old TV shows and movies. I see grown men and women using separate twin beds. I see well-made movies about mature topics, in which the dialogue is completely G-rated. Then I see modern entertainment. Performers on broadcast TV–not just cable–joke about oral sex. Sometimes we actually see them having sex. We see them naked. We hear all kinds of filthy language. This happened within the span of one lifetime. Surely that’s unprecedented.

If you had been born in 1750, in 1825, you would have found yourself in a world that had not changed much. Prices would not be much different. Technology would only be a little better. People’s manners would be about like they had been when you were born. Consider the last century. When I was born, there was no Internet. There were no personal computers. Most Americans attended church and owned homes. Women wore slips. The only really dirty movies were illegal stag films shot in cheap motels. You could make it to college before finding out what the word “condom” meant.

Now the world is a locker room patrolled by sex-crazed, pride-crazed bullies. The filth of society commands our attention. We used to look up to people who at least pretended to have morals. Now we make the Kardashians rich. We worship illiterate rappers who tell our kids they want to kill the police. Public nudity is legal in many of our cities, and if you don’t want your kids to see it, you can just stay home.

We are completely jaded. Our consciences are seared. We have absolutely no fear of God.

We go to church, and preachers don’t tell us to repent. They tell us God is all for homosexuality, and that he creates homosexuals just as they are. We are told pride is a good thing. We are told to relax and stop feeling guilty, because Jesus (if they admit he was real) carried all that on the cross. Just enjoy yourself, scrupulously avoid criticizing sin, and give preachers your life savings instead of paying your just debts.

Preachers are cowards and pinworms. They don’t have the guts to tell people things that will save them. They only care about money and fame. They do their damnedest, perhaps literally, to avoid saying anything that might cause even one paying person to walk out the door. God will hold them accountable. They represent him to people who need him desperately, and they lie and keep them from finding him.

I feel like I know a little bit about God, but I’m like a pair of socks that has only been through the prewash cycle. The wash and rinse haven’t even started. No one around me knows enough to teach me. I have to go to the source–the Holy Spirit–because preachers are slime. The very best preachers I know of are hopelessly inadequate.

Last night, I suddenly realized I had wronged someone, and once God showed it to me, I did not understand how I could have missed something so obvious. I still don’t understand. Spiritual blindness is supernatural. It defies explanation. I talked to God about it for a long time. I know there must be other obvious sins in my life, thriving under my defective radar. How did I let this blindness happen to me? I adopted the standards of a world which is literally the ceiling of hell instead of thinking about the standards of heaven, which is my real home.

Pride is not okay. Sexual sin is not okay. Cruelty is not okay. Name a habitual sin. It’s not okay. But our culture praises sin so highly, we actually compete to see who can be best at it. We spend our lives tying weights to ourselves, to drag us down toward hell. How shocking it must be for a modern American to die and stand in God’s presence. It must be overwhelming to see how wrong we are about everything, and how beautiful life is supposed to be.

If you want to ask God for something, ask him for correction. Ask him to fix your roots, not your leaves and fruit. The apparent things will heal, once the hidden things are put in order. Forgiveness is great, but as Paul put it, it’s not an occasion to the flesh. It’s not permission to sin. Repentance and clean living are important. You need to be set apart, not just after you die, but right now.

You also need to know that God expects to do the hard work for you. You can’t fix yourself. You can’t even diagnose yourself. You have to have his help, and he allowed himself to be tortured to death so he could give it to you. Don’t be ashamed to ask for handouts. You can’t earn anything. You are too wicked and weak. Accept the fact that you’re a criminal and a charity case, and be willing to be given the things you can’t provide for yourself.

Preachers tell us fear of the Lord isn’t really fear. They say it’s reverence or awe. That’s misleading. Read an interlinear Bible. The word translated “fear” means “terror.” No one wants to admit that God is dangerous, but he is. He is the most dangerous being there is. He, not Satan, created hell, and he is the one who puts them there to burn. He allows bad things to happen to sinners who don’t repent. His love is the best thing there is, but his enmity is a horror that defies description. There is no defeating it. There is nowhere to hide. There is no shelter. No one can hold him back. We have to be afraid to do evil, instead of seeing God as someone who changes our filthy diapers once a week and then sends us home to continue sinning.

The filthier you are, the more you will suffer as God’s enemies gain power in America. The disciples were stronger than common people, and Jesus was stronger than the disciples. You can’t complain if you don’t change, and then you find that you’re the tail and not the head. That’s how things are supposed to work. It doesn’t mean something went wrong. It doesn’t mean bad things happen to good people. You will have brought it on yourself, and accusing God of letting you down will just make it worse.

Ask for the ability to see what’s wrong with you, and don’t be a wimp about facing the discomfort. You can’t fix an abscess without ripping off the scab and cleaning out the rot. We put scabs on ourselves. We put thin skins of denial over our iniquities. It’s like shoveling dirt over a seed. They continue to grow. The demons that live in us keep getting more powerful. We need to confront our faults and our denial and have our inner illegal aliens torn out and driven off.

Repentance brings new power. Denial blocks God’s power. Don’t be discouraged by the need to repent, because it will open a channel to great strength and peace. You’re not beating yourself up for nothing.

This world is really nasty. Try to snap out of your trance before it destroys you.

It’s Good to Feel Bad

I am having a surprisingly good day, and the events surrounding my former pastor helped make it happen. I know that sounds bad.

I am tired of calling him “former pastor,” so I will give him a phony name. I will call him Eduardo.

Eduardo’s situation is hard for me to accept. In a very short time, he went from respected pastor to homeless, penniless outcast. It may turn out that he lost his entire future. He may be given a life sentence. If he gets convicted on the worst charges he faces, he will spend 25 years in prison. No parole. No time off. Presumably very few visits.

When I found out about it, I had a strange reaction. I felt as though I were the one in jail, awaiting trial. I felt as if I were the one who had been exposed. It drove me deeper in to self-examination, and that has paid off.

A long time ago, God showed me that Holy-Spirit-filled churches were wrong to talk about money and blessings all the time. The prosperity gospel doesn’t work; it makes people poor, and it prevents them from looking for the truth about God’s desires. God showed me that we should be focusing on getting ourselves rehabilitated. We need to have our characters changed supernaturally. That comes first. The other things are relatively unimportant.

I made some effort to get correction. I pray for it every day. I encourage my friends to pray for it. I cast things out of myself. I spoke defeat to the spirits I had allowed to enslave me. It did me a lot of good. I recommend you do these things, too. But the Eduardo scandal has moved me to go further.

I was making what I thought was a pretty good effort. I was patiently waiting for the fruit to grow. Over time, I became more and more honest with God. In prayer, I confessed to everything I could think of, as sincerely as I could. But there were still nagging issues. I still had bad habits that seized me once in a while. I didn’t feel as much love for God or human beings as I wanted. I didn’t pray enough. I was putting in at least three hours a day, and that sounds like a lot, but I needed more than that. I knew it and admitted it, but I couldn’t find the determination to do it consistently.

If the good things God promises aren’t coming through, you are doing something wrong. There is no other explanation.

What Eduardo did was absolutely disgusting. I am not saying that to condemn anyone. It’s necessary for me to mention it in order to talk about what I’m going through. What he did was not sex with a teenager, which would have been bad enough. It was pedophilia. Women may get angry at me for saying this, but it’s completely normal and unavoidable for a man to be attracted to a young girl who looks like a woman. Undeveloped children are another story. That’s a sickness.

I suppose I should try to head off female outrage, so I will say something about my past. The most attractive female I ever knew may well have been a 14-year-old I knew in Israel. I was working on a kibbutz. A woman who was a journalist in Finland worked as a volunteer, and she brought her troubled daughter, Anke. Anke was completely mature, physically. She could have passed for 25. Without makeup or retouching, she looked the way models looked in Playboy magazine. Stunning. She was also promiscuous. One night she came up to me and asked me if I wanted to make out. Even at 22, I was not totally stupid. I turned her down. And I was not exactly dripping with women! I got very few opportunities for sex and romance. I was not happy.

I was not willing to touch her. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t attracted to her. She was physically magnificent. I just knew it was wrong. I knew she was messed up, and I knew people took advantage. I did not want any part of that, and I certainly did not want to be exposed. Later on, I saw a friend of mine from New Zealand, rolling around on a bed with her with his lips pressed against hers. He was older than I was. Part of me was jealous, but I was also disappointed in him.

Anyway, male sexual attraction is unrelated to morality. It’s purely physical. A man doesn’t stop being attracted to a girl the second he sees the wrong year on her driver’s license. Anyone who expects us to find beautiful teens unattractive is living in a fantasy world. If you think a man–even a moral man who behaves himself–can’t find your daughter attractive because she’s in the 8th grade, you are ignorant.

Eduardo would be somewhat less disappointing if a stunning high school junior had thrown himself at him and gotten her way, but the victim was a little girl who probably weighed 80 pounds when the whole business started. The attraction itself is outside of normal male parameters. It’s like being attracted to another man or a pet. Also, the corruption is worse. Having sex with a round-heeled cheerleader would be very bad, but an 11-year-old? You’re introducing her to types of filth and evil she shouldn’t even be aware of.

So. That’s how I see his actions. I understand lust for females who have been through puberty. I can see how someone could slip under the right circumstances. I can’t relate to lust for little kids. How can the temptation exist?

I’ll say something else that may surprise women. Little boys are not that pure. Something to think about when you’re undressing in front of them or saying things you should not. When I was in the second grade, my favorite teacher left to get married. She took me aside to tell me she would miss me and that I should be nice to the new teacher. The whole time, I was looking down the front of her dress. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Second grade. Be careful around boys.

What Eduardo did is shocking, but I have done bad things, too. While I was praying last night, I dredged them back up in my mind and threw them out in front of God. I had done that a lot in the past, but I hadn’t felt the same level of shame and fear. Eduardo unlocked those things for me. I was able to feel more shame, as well as the fear of God.

Eduardo is where he is because God did not protect him. He got outside the realm of protection. He didn’t protect Eduardo from the girl, her mother, or the cops. Fear of God means fearing losing his protection. You really need to be on his good side, because if you’re not, he will let extremely ugly and humiliating things happen to you.

Tongue-talking preachers like to try to make us feel better. They get so excited about refraining from condemning people, they lead us to treat our sins as though they don’t matter. That’s a big mistake. Accepting shame and fear opened doors in me. I felt good about feeling bad, if you can understand that. I felt like I was letting pus out. I stopped trying to feel good about myself. I just wanted it all out of me.

God helped me to spend an adequate amount of time praying last night, and I put in two hours of prayer in tongues this morning. I was very serious. I was intent on getting it done. I had the motivation I had been lacking. I welcomed fear and shame. I knew that walls would be breached, and things that had been inhabiting me would be exposed and driven out.

When I was young, I thought self-esteem was a panacea. I had low self-esteem, and I thought high self-esteem would make me succeed in life. We hear this all the time from educators and TV shrinks. The problem is this: sometimes low self-esteem is healthy and appropriate. High self-esteem is unjustified. We go into ghettos and teach immoral future sociopaths they’re beautiful, talented, and good…when they’re not. We put lipstick on pigs and send them out into the world. It doesn’t work. We teach pride, and what does the Bible say God does to the proud? He fights them.

Eduardo is one of the proudest people you will ever meet, and his wife and son are just like him. Pride got him where he is. He was completely unable to listen and learn.

Today I believe it’s okay to feel bad about what I am. If it brings God’s help to me, it’s great. It’s not that painful, and it takes less effort than lying to myself all the time. I really want my inner self to change. If permitting myself to be ashamed is all it takes, it’s a bargain.

One nice thing about accepting and confessing shame is that you can’t invite exposure or a fall. No one will ever say, “You held yourself out as a rotten person, but here’s what you REALLY are!” That kind of thing only happens to the proud. Pride goes before a fall. If you’re already ashamed, where can you fall to?

I believe God will help me more now. It’s consistent with scripture. He has certainly been more helpful since I found out about Eduardo.

The path of divine improvement has plateaus. It’s like peeling an onion. Every time you reach a new plateau, it’s a good thing, but you have to keep going. You can’t say, “I’ll just stay here and be satisfied.” You grow or you rot. You can’t stay still.

I am better than I used to be, but I still need lots of work. Admitting it and feeling shame and remorse will help make it happen.

To get more information, look at Psalm 32. I think it will help. It says God will help a man who confesses, when the great waters rise. The great waters are the voices of the ungodly. They control this nation. Their filth is flooding us out. When things get even worse than they are, you will need God to lift you up.

Don’t let self-righteousness pull you under. At the mercy of these people (and the spirits they serve) is not where we want to be.

If You Want to Survive, Keep Improving

I am still upset about my former pastor’s molestation arrest.

Last night I woke up full of anxiety. It’s odd, but I felt as though I were the one who had committed the offenses. I felt as though I were the one who had to be concerned about punishment.

I kept having thoughts about my own sins and irresponsible acts. I have gotten away with a lot in this life. So far!

I suppose it’s harsh to compare myself with someone who is charged with molesting a girl under the age of 12, but I am not nearly what I should be. And it’s better to be too contrite than not contrite enough. If other people have to fall, I should try to benefit by observing their fate and trying to avoid it through confession and repentance. There isn’t much to be gained by patting myself on the back and telling myself I’m doing fine.

I thought about my past and the divine opportunities I’ve missed. I didn’t hear from God until I was about 22, so maybe I should get a little slack for my failures up to that point, but at 25, I was baptized with the Holy Spirit, and God had made it clear I was supposed to pray in tongues every day. I didn’t do it. I fell away. I got worse instead of better.

It’s funny, but it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, and it wasn’t deliberate rebellion. I didn’t decide God wasn’t real. I didn’t doubt that prayer in tongues was important. I just wandered off. I was distracted and forgetful.

I don’t know why God was so distant when I was a kid. I heard from the devil all the time, and there were plenty of evil people around me to abuse me and mislead me, but I didn’t get visits from God, and I didn’t know any righteous people who could help me get to know him. I hear from God every day now. I don’t understand I why made it into my twenties without hearing from him once. It’s very strange, because it seems unlike him.

God is always right and good. I can’t criticize him just because his actions don’t always suit me. What he did was correct. And once I started hearing from him, I should have held on for dear life.

Heaven is very far away, and help here on earth is not automatic. We’re like egg cells. You know how that works. The body produces a lot of them, and very few get fertilized and become human beings. The rest get washed out of the body and die. A lot of people are born, but not many come to know God, and not many are saved.

The earth is a very bad place, much more like hell than heaven. We’re just too used to it to see the evil.

Often, I feel like I’m much better than I am. I feel that the overt things God has done in my life are some sort of stamp of approval. I know better, and it bothers me that I could feel that way. Sometimes I make myself think about the bad things I’ve done and thought, just so I can regain perspective. God fights the proud. I do not want God to fight me. Not over an idiotic misperception.

It disturbs me when people tell me I’m a good person. I feel like they’re driving nails in my coffin. I am a product of 20th-century America. I am a mess. If I succeed in concealing it, it doesn’t mean you should reward me for it. If God tells me things, it’s because I needed to be told, not because I was perfect.

God told me something interesting: if you’re 99% good and 1% bad, you’re bad. That’s the way it works in heaven. Being good by earthly standards is different. The standard is much lower. Heaven has quality control. Nothing imperfect gets through the door.

I’m not saying I’m only 1% bad. Just making a point.

I got up and paced the floor, and I thanked God for the correction. I asked him to send more. I asked him to help me to be judged privately by him, and I asked him to help me avoid being judged publicly. In the past, when I felt negative feelings, I worked with God with the intention of getting rid of them. Last night, I said I was fine with feeling bad. Sometimes you need to feel bad for a while.

Too many of us go to church to be helped to feel good in spite of our sins. We don’t have any intention of changing. We just want God to wink at us and tell us this week’s sins are forgiven, and then we want to go home and resume sinning. You can’t enter the kingdom of heaven that way. If you want power and help on this earth, you have to love correction. Christians die of cancer. They go bankrupt. Their wives cheat on them. They get killed in church by mass murderers. You need to get close to God if you want help. His help isn’t for rebellious Christians. It’s for the contrite.

While I was lying in bed praying, I thought about the pastor. At that very moment, he was lying in a jail 300 miles away, with no prospect of relief. As bad as things were at that moment, they were likely to get worse. Some of the charges carry a 25-year mandatory minimum. No parole until every day is served. No time off. And inmates do not like sex offenders. Guards look the other way when they are mistreated. Unless he catches a break from the prosecutor or judge, or there is a technical issue that helps him, he may die surrounded by evil people who live to torment him. He may have to put up with that for 40 years.

It’s too much to absorb.

I thought about a testimony I read. A lady named Mary Kay Baxter said Jesus had taken her through hell. The people there lived in flaming pits, with huge maggots chewing tunnels through their bones. The guards were huge fallen spirits that hated the damned. It sounds so much like prison. Prison is a picture of hell.

I would be happier had I learned the pastor had died. He would be better off.

I still don’t understand how it happened. I don’t think he has no conscience. Maybe he was unprotected because he was too proud to develop spiritually, and when a loathsome spirit came to him with a sick urge, he could not fight it off. This life is a war, not a pleasure cruise. We’re supposed to train for battle.

I don’t know the answer, though.

When I was done praying and exercising God’s authority, I went back to sleep and slept soundly and peacefully. That was nice.

I hope my distress improves me. I don’t think anything better can come of this.

Surprising News from Miami

This can’t be right. I got bored and Googled a few people I know in Miami, and it looks like a former pastor of mine has been arrested for child molestation. Eight counts.

The mugshot is on the web, and it sure looks like him. The name is correct. The age is different from the age on a people-finder site, but it’s off by less than a year.

He used to have a Facebook page with his wife. Now she has her own, and his doesn’t come up. The church’s website is down for “maintenance.”

This is a guy who was not good to me. He ran a cult, and he and his wife broke up friendships. He would not listen to anyone. He was too proud. Not my favorite person on earth. But this news is very upsetting. I would not wish this on anyone.

I have to wonder if it’s true. He is in jail in Miami. The judge denied bond for some of the counts. The inmate search page has domestic violence notes. If he got into it with his wife, maybe she accused him falsely. Women do things like that.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong to suggest she would do it.

For the record, I never saw the slightest hint that he was capable of this. It does not ring true. Maybe it is true, but it doesn’t sound right. I’ve known people who seemed creepy and perverted, and he is not one of them. I never heard him say anything libidinous. I never saw him put a hand on anyone. I never saw him stare at a child. He didn’t seem particularly involved with kids at the church. Many molesters become teachers, youth pastors, scoutmasters, and so on, so they can get close to kids. I never saw any of that.

The clerk’s site doesn’t mention child pornography. It would be odd for a pedophile in 2017 to lack pornography.

Sometimes when something bad happens to someone who is out of line, it’s hard not to feel satisfaction. Not this time. If he gets convicted, his life is over. Everyone on the outside will hate him, and so will all of the prison inmates he lives with.

Am I wrong to feel sympathy for the accused and nothing for the victim? I don’t know who he is alleged to have molested or what he is alleged to have done. I don’t know the first thing about it. If there are victims, those are the people I should feel bad for.

Maybe I feel sorry for him simply because I know him.

If there really is a victim, I may know that person, too.

This is staggering. I did not like the things he did, but I don’t want to see this happen to him. I suppose it didn’t “happen to him,” though. If he’s guilty, he himself made it happen, intentionally.

After I left the church, I used to ask God if I should pray for him and his wife, and I kept feeling that God was telling me not to, because they could not be corrected. Maybe I was right about that.

It may sound funny to say I didn’t pray for someone who mistreated me (and others), but I’ve found that effective prayer takes time, and you have to try not to waste that time on the wrong people. Some people who harm you can be changed. Others can’t, and the time you waste praying for them could be spent on people who would be improved by it. You can’t pray all day. Your prayer time and energy are limited. You have to choose your battles. More accurately, you need to get God to choose them for you.

America is going to go down the toilet, and a lot of people are going to waste their time praying for God to fix it. That’s a great example of misguided prayer. You can’t pray against prophecy. When my sister ruined her life, I felt that God didn’t want me to pray for her any more. There was no way to penetrate her self-righteousness and utter lack of honesty. I try to get God to help me pray for people who can change, so my time here on earth amounts to something.

Man, this is bad. And one of my best friends was counting on that church to provide a career. There were kids who went to that church without their useless parents, because they wanted to know God. People depended on that church.

I reserve judgment. I don’t know whether he’s guilty or not. Most arrestees are guilty of at least what they’re charged with, but you never know.

I reserve judgment. I don’t know whether he’s guilty or not. Most arrestees are guilty of at least what they’re charged with, but you never know.

Be careful whom you worship with, and don’t let your desire to see the best in people lead you to associate with the wrong individuals.

I’m glad God got me out of that place. At first, I thought the pastors were wonderful, but they kept hitting me over the head with their faults, and then they did something stupid that made it too awkward for me to continue attending.

I was a deacon. I’m glad I won’t be known as a deacon of a church with the molestation scandal.

A friend just confirmed it. He molested his niece. The niece told her mom. Her mom put it all over Facebook. He apologized to the church and stepped down. Terrible.

For a while after he left, my friend pastored the church. I guess that fell apart.

Confessing in front of the church was the right thing to do, I suppose, but it will all but guarantee a conviction.

Hope this is the most disturbing news I get this week.

Calls God’s Judgment Down on Man Who Rejected Him

I have to ask: is James Comey the pettiest politician ever?

Maybe I should not ask. The president is vying for that title as well. But I think Comey has him beat. If Comey had fired Trump a long time ago, Trump would not still be tweeting about Comey. He eventually moves on. Comey is like a jilted ex-girlfriend. You dump a woman because you realize she’s toxic and impossible to help, and then years later, fat and undesirable, she’s hovering over a keyboard in her manless apartment, trying to turn people against you on the Internet and using clothes she didn’t return to you to clean the litterbox used by her many cats. That’s Comey.

Michael Flynn lied to the FBI about his Russian contacts. In a moment of insanity, Attorney General Sessions appointed Robert Mueller to investigate Russian interference with the 2016 election. Now Mueller has decided to prosecute Flynn in hopes of squeezing him for dope on everyone else who might be involved. There is no reason at all to think Trump–Comey’s ex-boyfriend–is in trouble. Even if it were proven Trump colluded every day, “collusion” is legal, and there is no evidence that Trump is guilty of this non-crime. But Comey, in lieu of vandalizing Trump’s car like any normal ex-girlfriend, posted this weirdness on Twitter:

But justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

That’s supposed to be Amos 5:24, but Comey got it wrong, and somehow he has not seen fit to correct it. The actual quotation is, “But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” That’s from the English Standard Version of the Bible. I could not tell you anything about that translation. I had never heard of it until today. I wonder if it’s one of those “evolved” translations that endorse homosexuality and call God “She.”

I took a look at Amos, and his words seem irrelevant to the version of Trump that exists in Comey’s mind. Amos was complaining about idolatry. He was criticizing the Jews for turning away from God. He said they shouldn’t hope for the day of the Lord, because it would make them even more miserable. It would be a day of judgment.

I don’t think Donald Trump is rooting for Jesus to come. I’m sure he’s basically for it, but I don’t see him as a person who thinks about it a lot. I don’t see him as a highly religious yet hypocritical figure who needs to fear God’s judgment because he has held himself out falsely as a godly man. Trump is pretty worldly.

People who aren’t close to God quote scripture pretty badly, and Comey appears to be an example. “Oh, this is a good one! Justice flowing down on people! I’ll just cut and paste!” They don’t understand the context of the quotations they wield like pea-shooters. If you’re going to get mad at someone and quote scripture at him, you should at least read the book from which you’re cribbing.

I would quote Amos 5:24 with regard to America’s future. I would definitely quote it in reference to filthy prosperity preachers who make Christians poor and pretend God put them up to it. Quoting it at a former employer, as a vague indication that I hope God gives him a sharp kick in the butt…that, I would not do. I would look small, and people who actually read the Bible would consider me ignorant.

When you read a thing like this, you wonder. Does Comey have a job? Does he do anything? Is he sitting around texting random acquaintances, hoping it will shame someone into inviting him to a Christmas party?

If I were a friend of his, I’d be telling him to drop the bone already. Let it go. Life is about the future, not your unsatisfying past with the guy who didn’t appreciate you. Living well is the best revenge, isn’t it? Stop sitting around pouting. Join Crossfit. Take the wife on an Alaskan cruise. Buy a set of Bob Ross DVD’s, some oil paints, and some single-malt Scotch and just go crazy.

Learn Hindi. Take a Thai cooking class. Join a Bible study group and read the whole book instead of random snippets you hope might embarrass an inattentive billionaire.

James Comey is not a happy little tree. Not by a longshot.

Nothing bad will happen to Trump unless he lies to the investigators or tells someone else to. Impulsive as he is, he is probably smart enough not to do those things, especially after what happened to Scooter Libby.

It seems like the whole world has turned into junior high. Maybe it always was, but it didn’t seem this blatant.

When I got done with my utterly heinous voyage through the Columbia College Literature Humnanities syllabus, I found myself in need of things to read (other than STEM books), so I bought myself the complete works of William Shakespeare on Google Play. I’m reading Richard III. Here is a great quotation from Richard himself: “\

[T]he world is grown so bad that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch. Since every jack became a gentleman, There’s many a gentle person made a jack.”

Isn’t that beautiful? Talk about apt. Our heroes are semi-literate rappers who want to shoot our president and the police. Our great ladies are Instagram sluts with sex tapes and nude photos they themselves leaked. Every jack has become a gentleman. And people like Comey, who should be gentle persons, lower themselves in the public eye every day.

Here’s an apt Bible quotation. In Isaiah 3, God describes what happens to a nation that forgets him:

For behold, the Lord, the Lord of hosts,
Takes away from Jerusalem and from Judah
The stock and the store,
The whole supply of bread and the whole supply of water;

The mighty man and the man of war,
The judge and the prophet,
And the diviner and the elder;

The captain of fifty and the honorable man,
The counselor and the skillful artisan,
And the expert enchanter.

“I will give children to be their princes,
And babes shall rule over them.

The people will be oppressed,
Every one by another and every one by his neighbor;
The child will be insolent toward the elder,
And the base toward the honorable.”

That’s us. Our President fires off angry tweets all day. Our journalists, politicians, and entertainers expose and pleasure themselves in front of female coworkers. We fawn on unsavory idiots like Kim Kardashian, J.K. Rowling, George Takei, and Chrissy Teigen. Our educators tell us men are women and women are men, and that white people, who developed the greatest civilizations in history and gave us science, medicine, engineering, and the very best of the arts, are the main problem with the world. They are now telling us a white student can decide to be black. I predicted that a long time ago. It won’t be long before they tell us you can choose to be an espresso machine.

Our idols are sleazy, impulsive, incurably conceited ignoramuses. The worst people in society have the greatest influence.

We were better off in the days when everyone understood that entertainers were base. When you turn on the TV and look at Bruce Jenner, the Kardashians, Charlie Sheen, Kevin Spacey, and the rest, you realize we had more sense back in the old days. It used to be understood that when entertainers came into a town, they had to be watched and isolated, and they had to be sent on their way after a few days. We knew their presence meant theft, swindling, prostitution, the corruption of our youth, and a bunch of other ills, so we didn’t let them hang around. Now we worship them as gods.

If J. Edgar Hoover were alive, he would marvel at Comey’s lack of gravitas. Hoover was weird, but he wouldn’t have lowered himself to tweeting smug, hopeful Bible quotations about annoying presidents.

Dignity is dead. The modern peasantry won’t let you have any. The pillars of communities run from tattooed, pierced cretins who ought to be in the stocks. It’s too bad we quit using words like “knave” and “slattern.” We need them now more than ever. Kids grow up having no idea what class is, so they don’t know what they’re missing, living in a juvenile and impudent society.

Comey probably thinks he’s the exact opposite of what he is. He probably thinks he looks like the voice of maturity.

Remember what Mr. Lebowski said? “The bums lost.” He was wrong. The bums won. The slouching, dope-smoking, sexually polyvalent, arrogant-for-no-conceivable-reason looters of civilization won. They lowered our standards so much, even those of us who think we recognize class and breeding can’t tell butter from margarine.

I wish I had never been influenced by them. To one extent or another, all of my life, I have degraded myself by emulating know-nothing pinheads who, in a sane world, would have been servants and laborers. When I look at Comey, I see the damage I have done myself.

It makes sense. God puts halfwits in charge of fallen countries, and if you corrupt yourself, he will put a halfwit, i.e. you, in charge of your affairs.

The movie Idiocracy is turning out to be a blueprint for our future. I’m so glad I’m not young. As bad as things were when I was a kid, at least I was around to see a shadow of the country we used to have.

No Room for Manspreading on the Group W Bench

Matt Lauer is out! That was fast!

Without wasting time repeating the scant details of the story, I will go right into a discussion of the thought Lauer’s ejection brings to mind: news organizations are in trouble because they’re hypocritical. The hypocrites in the news attack everyone else ruthlessly (and, let’s admit it, joyfully), but they don’t report on themselves, and they work hard to cover up for employees who act up.

“Wait!”, you’re saying, “News organizations reported on O’Reilly and Rose when they fell!” Yes. Organizations O’Reilly and Rose didn’t work for! That doesn’t count. Venal, ambitious people love it when their competitors get in trouble, so naturally, news people report on scandals at competing companies. The don’t talk a whole lot about their own scandals, until they have no choice.

Sexual abusers and other bullies almost always have long histories. A normal guy generally won’t go nuts, put his hand up one secretary’s skirt, and then never do it again. Bullies are egotists who lack compassion, and they are driven by powerful urges they can’t or won’t resist. They become bullies at early ages, and their behavior persists for their entire lives. Over time, they develop long lists of victims, as well as long lists of silent witnesses. When a sex bully works for a company for a long time, people find out what he does, and they keep it quiet.

If Lauer was a sex bully, a lot of people at NBC knew it. They knew for decades. They worked for a news organization, so they knew what was happening was legitimate, important news. They chose not to report on it, just as Fox, CBS, and PBS chose not to report on O’Reilly and Rose. As a result, the perpetrators had free run of the hen houses, long after their proclivities were known.

There is no way to justify treating outsiders harshly while coddling and shielding guilty insiders. News is news, no matter where it occurs. If journalists knew anything about ethics, they would realize this, and we would hear about abusers from their own companies first.

If Matt Lauer had come up with a cure for cancer, NBC would have reported on it first. No doubt about it. News companies are happy to report positive news about insiders. They should report the negative things, too. They should be completely neutral and open as to the professional affiliations of the people they report on.

One of the things they teach lawyers is that we should present our clients’ negative information before the opposition gets a chance to do it (unless we can get courts to suppress it). When you get in front of your client’s faults and misdeeds and tell them to a finder of fact, you get the first shot at shaping the story. You get to present excuses and explanations. You make yourself and your client look honest. When you wait for the opposition to bring out the dirt, they get to twist things in the minds of the fact-finder, poisoning them against you and giving you a wall of disapproval you have to dismantle. And they make you look dishonest.

Scientists are taught that no one is objective. We are taught that experimental results have to be reproducible, so we don’t end up believing results that only occur in the laboratories of experimenters who want them to occur. We are taught to use double-blind studies.

As a lawyer and former scientist, I acknowledge the importance of fairness and objectivity, even if I am not particularly good at maintaining either. Journalists don’t care. They publish things that advance their preconceived agendas, not so they can inform, but so they can manipulate the public.

Journalists don’t care about ethics. Supposedly, journalistic ethics are codified, and journalists who go to journalism school study the subject, but in reality, that stuff is a joke. In practice, almost anything goes. If journalists had ethics, we wouldn’t have a left-wing news establishment that lies to us and covers up stories like the Menendez trial as a matter of policy. It could not happen. It has happened, so there is no need to explore the subject further. No reasonable person can look at the news and conclude that journalists try to be fair.

If journalists weren’t hypocrites, there would be no conservative or liberal news channels. MSNBC wouldn’t be liberal, and Fox wouldn’t be conservative. All channels would be neutral.

If journalists had ethics, the news would be very boring. Journalists would simply tell us what has happened. They wouldn’t sneer and smirk. They wouldn’t jab each other on Twitter. They wouldn’t scream and yell on TV panels. The news would be what NPR news pretends to be and isn’t. No one would watch or read it. Publishing news takes money, and that means an audience has to be attracted to look at ads. For that reason, among others, the news is a circus, and it attracts people who are entertaining, not people who are honest or intelligent. It attracts partisan squabblers. It’s also the reason most national-level female news people are exceptionally good-looking. Attractive news anchors who are borderline stupid tend to succeed in spite of their lack of brains.

There are a lot of female news anchors who couldn’t finish a crossword puzzle if the price of failure was death. Yet somehow we allow them to present and even interpret the news. Crazy.

Everyone who worked with Matt Lauer knew he was a problem, and everyone covered up. And in the aftermath, no one with any power or audience will say the networks need to start reporting on themselves. It will never happen. It would be Jerry Maguire behavior. Anyone who had reported on Lauer at NBC would have been congratulated, like Jerry Maguire in the memo scene, and then they would have been slowly eased out onto the sidewalk. Anyone who pushes self-examination now will get a warm clap on the back and a slow spiral into obscurity.

A while back, God told me this: “The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.” That’s true. God forgives sin all the time. Heaven is packed with sinners. What he does not forgive is sin that has knowingly, persistently been denied. That principle works on earth as well as in God’s court. If Lauer and O’Reilly had come clean privately twenty years ago, they would still have their jobs today. Something would have been worked out. Instead, they denied and pretended, and the infection kept growing. Nobody squeezed the pustules. They just applied Clearasil until they exploded on prom night.

It amazes me that O’Reilly claims he executed settlements to protect his kids from scandal. Wouldn’t trials that exonerated him have protected them better? Of course they would. No one believes him. Trials would have confirmed many of the accusations. When he uses his kids as human shields, he’s just looking out for himself, badly.

Lauer must be huddled up with a whole platoon of handlers right now. They must be sweating bullets, trying to craft a statement. Al Franken and Kevin Spacey tried to make themselves look good in their responses to exposure, and they ended up buried under hails of contemptuous tweets from people whose intelligence had been insulted. Lauer and his team must be wondering what he can say that won’t backfire. I very much doubt he’s cloistered with his wife and a clergyman, confessing his heart out, repenting, and trying sincerely to find a path to redemption.

I really hope he doesn’t go the rehab route. Trying to convince people that sexual bullying is a disease that requires treatment is annoying, and apart from that, it’s trite. Harvey Weinstein and a slew of others wore that excuse out. Sexual predation isn’t opioid addiction. It just means you’re a jerk who enjoys humiliating other people and treating them like toilets. Sexual predation isn’t just sex. It’s driven by cruelty. Even when the acts themselves are not cruel, the victim mistreatment that follows exposure usually is. Ask Hillary Clinton.

I think about the guilty people who haven’t been outed, who will have to report on Lauer. I wonder if it will be possible to see the fear in their faces. They will be wondering if video of their reporting and commentary will be replayed when their turns come.

The iceberg is still there. Lauer is part of the tip. He’s not the train’s caboose. There is a nearly inexhaustible supply of candidates for exposure, like oil reserves sitting in the ground. It will take a very, very long time to go through our reserves.

I am ashamed of my own sexual sins. I hope they never end up in the public eye. I’m glad my sins aren’t worse. I hope God will continue helping me. I hope he will keep changing my heart so I indulge less in all types of sin.

Get ready to see more icons fall. I wonder what kind of people will replace them.

Press Corps Journalist Wages Fact-Free Pie Jihad

Is it funny when deranged leftists attack the president’s press secretary because they think she took credit for someone else’s pie?

I suppose it is, but it also highlights a disturbing trend: Satan is teaching Americans the truth doesn’t matter.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders baked a pie. She put a photo on Twitter. The URL for the photo has the letters “pbs” in it, but the photo has nothing to do with public broadcasting. The “pbs” is just a string that occurs in the URL of a Twitter server. The pie was a chocolate pecan pie made with what appears to be a store-bought crust. Such pies are extremely easy to make. You mix the ingredients, dump them in the crust, add pecans from a bag, and bake.

This is all the background you need.

A leftist journalist (but I repeat myself) named April Ryan accused Sanders of lying. She did not believe Sanders herself baked the pie.

It is not clear why Ryan thinks Sanders didn’t bake the pie. One guess: Ryan can’t cook. A person who can’t cook might think baking a pecan pie is a big deal. Ryan probably gets most of her food from delis, vending machines, grocery story freezers, and big plastic bags marked “Lays.”

It doesn’t help that the pie had a near-perfect crust, or that the background of the photo was pure white, as you might expect in a shot by a professional photographer.

Sanders baked the pie. Her relatives confirm it. She has a long history of baking pecan pies for gatherings. No rational person seriously thinks she stole a pie photo. It’s possible to upload a photo to Google and search to see where it appears on the Internet, and when you do that with the Sanders photo, nothing comes up. Also, there are 170 million people in the United States who would love to embarrass Sanders, and none of them has come up with the original source of the photo. No photographer. No one who runs a stock photo service. No one.

Sanders…baked…the…pie.

Nonetheless, even now, if you look at Twitter, you’ll see Ryan and the flying monkeys high-fiving each other, as though they had “TAKEN DOWN” or “SHUT DOWN” (trendy, annoying leftist Internet cliches) the press secretary. And they think it’s important.

We should be taking their infantile, tone-deaf antics seriously, because they show how America has changed. Even during the Bush Derangement Syndrome years, it would have been very unusual for a professional journalist from the White House press pool to gin up a blood libel like this, about a matter completely unrelated to a press secretary’s job, on a holiday when we are supposed to be unified in reverence, peace, and gratitude. It would not have been necessary for conservatives to complain. Even liberals would have ridiculed the journalist.

Today liberals who seem to agree that Ryan was mistaken are attacking Sanders for provoking Ryan. By working for Trump. As always, conservatives must be put on the defensive. If your nutty leftist neighbor attacks you from behind and breaks six of your ribs, it’s your fault for not letting him tell you how to landscape.

In 2017 America, childishness and dishonesty are acceptable for leftist journalists. No one notices the lack of dignity and professionalism.

The left is in a state of frenzy. It’s a sort of cold riot. George Orwell, who predicted a lot of what we are currently experiencing, coined the term “cold war” to describe a state in which nations live in great tension, under the threat of war, while not engaging in full-blown combat. What we have now are hundreds of millions of disgruntled, pouting leftists who are not (always) out in the streets burning cars, yet who fester with rage and look for every opportunity to direct harassing fire at conservatives and Christians.

Ms. Ryan can’t march up to Mrs. Sanders’ podium, shove a spear through her heart, and announce that Antifa and BLM are now in charge. We haven’t reached that stage yet. But she can use Twitter to launch a ridiculous and very personal attack on Mrs. Sanders’ credibility and then stir up and encourage the idiots who buy into it. It’s the Internet equivalent of slashing tires and egging houses. And it’s bullying.

I don’t know if Mrs. Sanders lies or not. It doesn’t matter. If she lied constantly, it would not justify perpetrating a fanciful and sophomoric canard, and the ensuing campaign of ridicule and persecution, based on the origin of a pie. And what about failing to admit fault when the pie attacks were proven wrong? It will never happen. It will be like the Dan Rather forgery case. “We lied, but we did it for a good reason, so it’s okay.”

Rioters don’t think. They show up believing they’re right and that everything they do is justified. They are like kindling waiting for a match. They don’t question themselves. They see their victims as the aggressors. That’s why they’re able to beat people to death and set fire to buildings. Self-examination and accountability aren’t on the table. Neither is truth.

We should not be surprised. Reason tends to debunk leftism, so decades ago, many leftists adopted the position that logic itself was a Eurocentric, male-imposed construct intended to disempower women and minorities. Look it up. I’m not making it up. Robert Bork wrote about it.

It you can’t allow yourself to be proven wrong, you can’t change. This is why the left’s abandonment of reason is so dangerous. A person who can’t be corrected is depraved, and the depraved are beyond redemption. Depravity is why hell exists. The Bible refers to this condition as a seared conscience. Nothing penetrates. There are some beings who can’t be fixed, so they have to be confined eternally in order to protect the redeemed from their presence.

Satan is bringing hell up through its ceiling, onto our streets. He is bringing hell’s culture up onto the earth’s surface. It’s a marvel.

No wonder the Bible says God will return to purge the earth. The infection has won. Gangrene has taken over. There is nothing we can do to fix it. Only God himself can set things straight, and he will have to do it by binding and eliminating his enemies. He will have to use force. They have made themselves too stupid to change.

I feel bad for the Trumps. They will never have peace on this earth. Trump will leave office in 2021 0r 2025, and he and his family will still have to live on this planet. They will be under attack until they die, and the people who are out to destroy them will never relent, because they can’t be reasoned with. Barron Trump’s grandchildren, if he has any, will have to have their own professional security people. No President has ever been hated this much.

The leftists will eventually win, and when they do, they’ll bring out their lists. They will remember everyone who offended them, and they will punish. Remember the Cambodian killing fields? That same hatred exists here. I hope Trump dies of old age before they get their hands on him. I don’t even like to think about the imaginative torments they would impose. It would be worse than what happened to Mussolini and Khaddafi.

Totalitarianism is on the way. There aren’t enough Americans who serve God to prevent it. Most American Christians have no roots in the Holy Spirit. They will do whatever Satan tells them to do. He is already getting them conditioned.

I don’t think there is anywhere we can go. America is the last big country that’s safe for Christians and Jews. Europe is out. Asia is out. Africa is out. A last stand is inevitable.

I hope I’m not here to see it. I would rather die this year than live under unfettered leftists. I’m not alone. There is a reason why Cubans put their families on rafts. There is a reason why a man would let himself be shot several times, running away from North Korea.

April Ryan is a fool, but she has a lot of power behind her. We can laugh at her right now, but we should take the spirits that empower her very seriously.

CNC Lathe Next

My friend Amanda has a son who has some cognitive issues. Oddly, in some cases, people with his problem turn out to be unusually well suited to the trade of CNC machining. Mental characteristics that cause problems in many areas of life can be assets in machining. There’s a dude in California who runs a school that trains such people.

I learned about this from a TV show called Titans of CNC. A man named Titan Gilroy was convicted of a violent crime, and when he got out of prison, he learned CNC and started a big, successful shop. Now he teaches inmates at San Quentin. He has a son with Asperger’s, and he discovered that his son was very good at CNC. Now he works with the guy who runs the school.

I mentioned this to Amanda a few weeks back, and I said I had some interest in CNC and robotics. We showed her son some Youtubes, and he seemed interested. That’s good, but it’s also a problem. I have only one CNC tool, and it’s a home-built adaptation which I haven’t perfected. Not counting my vacuum cleaner, I have only one robot, and when I bought it and assembled it, I was not able to make it work.

Since showing her son the videos, I have retrieved my CNC lathe from Miami, and I am ready to see if I can make it work. Last night, I took the robot out of the box I had tossed it in, and after an hour or so of reprogramming and researching, I figured out what was wrong with it. Now it’s working.

The robot is a B-robot, from a company called JJ Robots. It’s a two-wheeled balancing robot a little bigger than a box of Pop Tarts. It’s based on an Arduino Leonardo board.

Here’s how it works. It has a tiny board containing circuitry that measures the robot’s vertical orientation. This shouldn’t amaze anyone. Cell phones have circuits that tell them whether they’re level or not. The robot checks the board’s output, and then it accelerates in the direction of the tilt, bringing it back to vertical again. In other words, when the robot starts to fall in a certain direction, it takes off in that direction, bringing itself back under its top. It can do this so often it appears nearly stable.

I found I had installed the orientation board sideways, so the robot was sensing angular deviation along the wrong axis. The robot can’t fall from side to side, so the board’s input was useless. I reinstalled it according to the directions.

The robot still refused to stand. I took a look at what it was doing. It was accelerating away from the direction of fall, making the fall worse. I then turned the board 180 degrees, and everything worked.

Now I have a self-balancing robot.

I had some other problems with it, and they’re even more boring, so I don’t want to get into them too much. I found I could not upload programming to the Arduino. Somewhere on the web, someone said I had to press the board’s reset button immediately before uploading. Not exciting, unless you’re a nerd.

The robot has wi-fi. When you turn it on, you connect your phone to the robot’s network, and then you use an app to steer the robot. Obviously, it needs an onboard camera, like a drone, so you can see what the robot sees as it moves. Maybe I can figure that out some day.

Anyway, next time Amanda brings her son around, I can show him the robot and see if he has any interest. Maybe in a week or two, I can get the lathe working better.

It’s a little strange that I decided to buy and assemble a robot, but the whole exercise has turned out to have a purpose I could not have anticipated. That’s God for you.

Robotics and CNC are not the same thing, but it’s basically the same skill set, applied in different ways. Programming, boards, and servos or steppers. My guess is that a person who has CNC aptitude also has robotics aptitude. The question is which one he will like well enough to stick with.

Her other two sons are interested in music, but the instruction opportunities are limited. I suggested Adventus Piano software for one and Justinguitar.com for the other. Justinguitar.com is a teaching site run by, as you might guess, a guitarist named Justin. It has lots of exercises and videos. It’s not a teacher, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing.

The hard thing will be to get them to learn to sight-read. This is much more important than learning to play. Any idiot can learn to play songs by memorizing them. Ask me how I know. A real musician can read music, and he must also understand theory. A singer who can sight-sing and who understands theory is a better musician than an untrained pianist who plays extremely well.

Math, languages, and music. You have to learn while you’re young. After you’re seven or eight years old, your aptitude drops off, and as far as I know, you can’t get it back.

It’s hard to tell when you’ve scored a point with her kids. Other kids get excited. Hers just sit and think, and sometimes they want to know how soon you’ll be finished so they can do something else. She says it’s working, though.

Sooner or later, if they want to get anywhere with music, they’ll have to find people they can play with.

The robot is interesting to me because the concept doesn’t have to be limited to a tiny machine. The stuff that tells it what to do could be installed on a robot the size of a building. I could yank the guts out of it, find a way to make it run bigger steppers, and make a robot big enough to run around the yard. Jam a lithium battery in there, and it could run for an hour. Not sure what accessories I could add to it to make it useful. Anyway, it doesn’t have to be a small toy. Could it ever be useful for anything? That’s a hard question. I would have to come up with a function for it.

I wish I could make it paint the fence or kill squirrels.

Now that the major crises of moving are abating, I feel like I’m getting my life back. I had time to work on the robot. I’m anxious to get my machine tools up here. Next year, life should be less hectic, and I should be able to get more done. Maybe I’ll be able to make some knives. Right now I can’t run my big grinder without a gas generator and an adaptor (which I don’t have), so knife-making is not possible.

I’m giving up on tree removal. The trees that cause problems will be moved. The rest will be ignored until it’s convenient to do something. It’s just too much work. Surrendering will give me more free time.

Guess I’ll go check out robot accessories. If I can find one a kid could use to drive his brothers nuts, I think it will be a hit.