I Know What it is to Want to Punch a Book

I took a vacation from Augustine’s dreadful Confessions over the last couple of days, but I’m back at the grind today. I am within a dozen pages of the blessed finish line.

Augustine, to whom I will never apply the misnomer “Saint,” is really burying himself in these last pages. He is confirming every bad thing I believe about him. He doesn’t know God. He doesn’t know ABOUT God. He is a river of poison to ignorant people. He justifies every misinformed person who speaks against the supernatural. He rationalizes the failure of the Catholic Church, which, by his day, is already complete.

Christianity is a supernatural enterprise. It is primarily supernatural, not incidentally or peripherally. It’s not about hard work or obeying rules. It’s not about studying. It’s not a scholarly field, in which only people with abnormally high IQ’s can excel. It’s nearly everything Augustine thought it was not.

Augustine was a Bible scholar, but somehow he missed one of the obvious features of the Bible: supernatural events fill it, from one end of the other. Things he would dismiss as “signs” occur throughout the book, yet somehow he thinks signs are only for unbelievers. He can’t see the forest. He can’t see the trees. He can’t find the ground under his feet.

Let’s mention a few supernatural events. God created the earth supernaturally. God transported Enoch directly to heaven. God spoke to Noah and caused a flood to destroy the earth and kill the entire human race; in the process he brought a huge number of creatures to the Ark, by miraculous means. God spoke to Abraham. God appeared to Abraham. God consumed the pieces of flesh Abraham set out for him. God gave Samson the strength to lift a city’s gates out of the earth and carry them away. God gave Samson the strength to rip a live lion in pieces. God appeared to Moses in a burning bush. God afflicted Egypt with impossible plagues. God parted the Red Sea and instantly dried the bed. God gave water to the Hebrews out of a dry rock. God leveled the walls of Jericho without help. God held the sun still in the sky so Joshua could fight.

How many miracles do you want? I can do this all day.

Jesus turned water into wine. Jesus gave a blind man sight. Jesus called a rotten corpse, and it came to life and walked to him. God killed Ananias and Sapphira. God killed Herod. God prevented a snake’s poison from harming Paul. God healed many people, the dead included, through the Apostles. God gave New Testament believers the baptism with the Holy Spirit, complete with tongues, from the book of Acts through Jude and presumably through the Revelation.

God worked supernaturally in the Old Testament. God worked supernaturally in the New Testament. Jesus said his followers would do greater miracles than his own. Then the Catholic Church came into existence, and all of that stopped, and we have been cut off for 2000 years.

Isn’t it obvious that our situation is abnormal?

I knew Augustine would eventually attack tongues, and somewhere toward the end of the book, he does. He calls tongues a sign to ignorant unbelievers. Fine; that’s true. But what about the other things tongues are? Paul said a man who speaks in tongues speaks to God. Paul said he spoke in tongues more than any of the Corinthians, and he was writing to believers, not heathens. Jude said tongues would build people up, and he was not referring to marketing.

Augustine could not pray in tongues. Augustine worked no miracles. He healed no one. He received no prophecy or revelation.

Instead of asking God why he was so weak compared to the apostles, Augustine decided supernatural manifestations were things of the past. What a coincidence! A powerful church figure drew and propagated a cessationist conclusion, which, if true, would have been the best thing Satan could have hoped for.

Do I have to tell you who gave him that idea? Do you think the Holy Spirit was sitting beside Augustine, whispering, “My people are powerless against the enemy!”?

Jesus was not embarrassed to work miracles in front of people; he did it all day, over and over. He did not think it was a crass gimmick. Augustine thought he knew better than Jesus. Look what he said:

May your ministers now do their work on ‘earth’ not as they did on the waters of unbelief when their preaching and proclamation used miracles and sacred rites and mystical prayers to attract the attention of ignorance, the mother of wonder, inducing the awe aroused by secret symbols. That is the entrance to faith for the sons of Adam who forget you, who hide from your face (Gen. 3:8) and become an ‘abyss.’

Yes, you read that correctly. Adam got miracles. Moses got miracles. Jesus and the apostles got miracles. But that was just a marketing push. No miracles for you. No prophecy. No healing. Not even the supernatural gift of faith.

Augustine was an unusually smart lawyer. As he admitted, he was arrogant about his mind and loved admiration. He wanted people to marvel at the conclusions his little monkey brain had drawn about God, without the help of the Holy Spirit. He made up a bunch of garbage and published it, and people who didn’t know how to get the Holy Spirit’s help bought it and were destroyed by it.

Augustine supplied false knowledge; he supplied what military people and spies call “disinformation.” It displaced the truth. It occupied the place truth was supposed to fill, and it fooled people into giving up their search.

Thinking they had the truth, people who believed Augustine’s conceited ramblings did not try to learn the truth. As a result, they perished for lack of knowledge.

What’s worse? Publishing poisonous lies, or attacking people who had the truth? Augustine did both. He made true ministers of God sound like carnival barkers.

He spoke against the Holy Spirit. What worse thing can you do?

I don’t enjoy reading about people who wasted their lives. Augustine is a great example. He probably thought God would give him a prize when he died, and that he would be remembered forever as someone who helped people see God’s truth. In reality, he will eventually be remembered as a fool who led other people to disaster. If I’m wrong, remind me on Judgment Day, and I’ll give you five dollars.

He could have kept quiet. If he had done that, he wouldn’t have been remembered as a great man, but he wouldn’t have been remembered as a toxic failure, either. He took God’s name in vain, and there is a price for that.

As I read, I thought about people who have great earthly ambitions. They try to get rich. They try to become famous. They strive for admiration and power. They put their names on buildings. Then they die, and they find out God disapproves of their big achievements. They get no reward, and eventually, everything they create will be destroyed. Not even the earth their monuments sit on lasts forever. In the end, they will see piles of dust for which they traded their lives. They have invested in dust, very literally.

Augustine is probably worse off than that. His horrible Greek philosophy did more affirmative damage to God’s kingdom than a hundred Croesuses or Mark Cubans.

As I read his book, I realized he was just a pre-Dark-Ages blogger. You know how bloggers are. We argue and scuffle, and we ridicule everyone who disagrees with us. Most of us are wrong. Many of us lack the armament or information to come up with good arguments, but that doesn’t stop us. We have the shield of Dunning-Kruger to protect us.

That was Augustine’s style. He was wrong, but he loved being perceived as the Great Corrector, so he marketed his ridiculous theories and attacked everyone who disagreed.

I guess that makes me a comment troll.

Augustine also appears to be a major plagiarist. The book’s footnotes point out many unattributed liftings from the works of a character named Plotinus. Plagiarism is a disease of people who crave admiration.

If you aren’t baptized with the Holy Spirit, which is not the same as water baptism, you are behind the supernatural curve. If you aren’t praying in tongues, you are missing out on a lot of revelation and development. You can’t save yourself, and you can’t figure God out. You need the Holy Spirit, living inside you, doing the heavy lifting. It’s that simple. If you listen to Augustine or the people he influenced, you will remain weak.

God still works miracles. He heals people all the time. He talks to people. He defeats our enemies, right here on earth. Don’t believe the sour grapes crowd. Your potential is not limited by their failure.

One more thing: Augustine has very little to say about spirits. I’m here to tell you, we are surrounded by them. It’s not just a few possessed people here and there. It’s all of us. They talk to us constantly. They attack our bodies. They send deluded people after us. They are no joke. Jesus talked about them all the time. You need to be able to battle them if you want to do well. Augustine can’t teach you that. He seems to think it’s all about you, God, and the angels. “Satan? Never heard of him.”

How can anyone pretend to be a holy man and never mention our battle with the god of this world? Preposterous.

Maybe I’ll finish this miserable book today. I sure hope so.

If this book has taught me anything, it has taught me that there is a difference between aptitude and avidity. I can read and understand the boring books of Columbia University’s Literature Humanities course about as well as anyone, because I have certain innate abilities. Nonetheless, I would rather spend the rest of my life digging potatoes. The tedium is overwhelming. I use a timer to make sure I don’t put the books down prematurely every day, and I keep looking at it while I read, hoping it has miraculously jumped forward.

I can’t understand how anyone could dedicate a life to studying the classics. It must be an ego thing, because the material just isn’t that interesting. Or maybe there are people who have a perverse aversion to pleasure.

Of course, I have to remind myself: military deferments. If this were 1970 and I had the option of going to graduate school or being blown up in Vietnam, St. Augustine might look like hot cherry pie with vanilla ice cream. Fear of military service did a lot to increase the ranks of academics when I was a kid.

Right now I can’t wait to get to Dante, but I have a feeling I will change my mind once I’m mired in it.

My Time With Augustine Approaches its End

I have not finished Augustine’s Confessions. It’s around 300 pages, and I just stopped on page 252.

I thought things were starting to pick up a while back, but he has gotten more boring than ever. For some reason, Augustine was absolutely obsessed with time, and a huge portion of his book is devoted to his wild guesses.

There are several problems with this.

1. The subject is incredibly boring.

2. Augustine’s convoluted writing style makes reading a lot like driving in circles.

3. The whole time I’m reading this stuff, I am painfully aware that it is of no use to anyone, and that I will not be rewarded for the effort.

I think I’ll suffer through the process of transcribing some of this mess so you will understand what I’m going through.

That is why your Spirit, the teacher of your servant (Moses), in relating that in the beginning you made heaven and earth, says nothing about time and is silent about days. No doubt the ‘heaven of heaven’ which you made in the beginning is a kind of creation in the realm of the intellect. Without being coeternal with You, O Trinity, it nevertheless participates in your eternity. From the sweet happiness of contemplating you, it finds power to check its mutability.

Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turling dromes,
And hooptiously drangle me,
With crinkly bindlewurdles.

I may have edited that last bit a little.

Sorry. Last week I bought the TV version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s really good, in much the same way the movie version isn’t.

To get slightly more serious, Augustine is very disappointing. He seems to think God shares his fascination with philosophy, and that now that he has decided to serve God, the good Lord will reward him by giving him definite answers to his pointless, worthless questions.

It makes you wonder if he has any idea what God’s priorities are. Jesus didn’t run around answering questions that drove people crazy; he wasn’t Deep Thought. He healed the sick, and he told people they were going to hell if they didn’t watch it. He explained mysteries in parables and symbols, but they weren’t boring, useless mysteries. He explained important things, and his explanations would later guide the Spirit-led.

Jesus doesn’t care about Zeno’s Paradox. Take my word for it. Angels don’t dance on the heads of pins. God doesn’t make big rocks just to see if he can lift them. If these things are important to you, as far as God is concerned, you’re on your own.

It’s sad that the Catholics decided Augustine was a super-Christian and gave him the title “Saint.” He didn’t know the Holy Spirit very well. He is not a good teacher, because he didn’t know the subject. The apostles knew God, and their writing is scripture. Augustine was just a philosopher and rhetor who got baptized. His writing is self-indulgent, time-wasting speculation.

Read any book in the New Testament and then read ten pages of Augustine. You can feel the difference. It’s not subtle. Scripture is powerful and useful. Augustine…not.

This is a great example of what happens when people try to carry their own burdens. Augustine seemed to believe God was going to help him with the tedious, difficult intellectual task of understanding time. In reality, God wanted him to drop the subject and think about something productive. God never helped Augustine with the time thing. He would have helped him tremendously had he let God choose the subject of inquiry.

Believers progress in stages. Some people never get past salvation. Some people move on to the baptism with the Holy Spirit and then get stuck there. Some go on and move in the spiritual gifts. Every step is good, but each successive step is better than the last one. Augustine didn’t get very far. He was about like a devout Episcopalian in modern America. He had some faith, and he felt devoted to God, but that’s about it. He wasn’t able to prophesy or write scripture. He didn’t work miracles. He was nothing like the apostles.

Augustine spent his life making guesses about God and then disseminating them so other people could be deceived. That’s not good. That’s evil.

One telling difference between people who are and are not Spirit-led is that people who are Spirit-led do not waste their lives. Augustine wasted his. After he experienced salvation, he continued striving to understand difficult concepts in physics, and he failed utterly. He didn’t even come close to succeeding. If God is leading you, you will not spend your life walking in circles, and you will not end in failure.

With any luck I’ll be done with this book tomorrow. I had hoped it would be less dreadful than the Greeks and Romans, but my hopes have been dashed. Do I dare hope Dante is better? I don’t care. I just want to get it over with.

Start Your Collection

I have some revelation for you that will help you even more than Joyce Meyer’s claim that you can put God in your debt by sending her money.

I know that must be hard to believe!

First of all, a word about meditation. In America, the word “meditation” has a pagan smell to it, and it tends to make us think of a mystical process in which we empty our minds and think about nothing. That’s not correct, even to heathens.

The big meditation movement in America comes from demon worship (Hinduism), and it’s called transcendental meditation. I’ve known people who have done it, and I’ll tell you what they told me.

TM (as it’s called) is a religious practice. I don’t know how they do things now, but in the past, the people at meditation centers would have you bow before images and I was also told initiates had to bring offerings of food.

The TM people give initiates secret words or phrases called “mantras.” I believe these are Hindu words or words in whatever language is used for Hindu worship. They’re not English words. You have to keep your mantra private. To meditate, you sit alone and repeat your mantra over and over to yourself. You have to do this for 20 minutes at a crack.

Some people who have done this have claimed demons appeared to them. Whatever happens, it’s not good. You’re repeating words that come from a demonic religion, so you can’t expect good to come of it, regardless of the short-term benefits.

That’s heathen meditation for you.

I bring up heathen, Satanic meditation because our scriptures also mention meditation, and people don’t know what it means. Obviously, it would be bad if Christians took up a practice that came from Hinduism and tried to make it Christian. We’ve done that with yoga, which is also evil. That ought to be sufficient.

To meditate means to dwell on something. When heathens meditate, they dwell on phrases that come from Satan, by repeating them over and over. When Christians meditate correctly, the process is similar, but the content is different.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. Satan copies God because his effeminate, attention-loving self were God. He also copies God because God has the best ideas. The fact that Satan has copied God’s meditation shouldn’t surprise anyone.

If you look up “meditation,” you will find it in many places in the Bible. It doesn’t mean you should sit and empty your mind. An empty mind is a house waiting for a crooked tenant. It means you should sit and repeat God’s word to yourself.

Now we get to the interesting part. “God’s word” doesn’t just mean “the Bible.”

This is where the torches and pitchforks come out and people with no prayer lives and no understanding call me a heretic.

Anything God says is God’s word. That should be obvious. It should also be obvious that God is not wearing a gag. He can still speak. He speaks all the time. That means much of God’s word is not in the Bible or any book.

This idea makes people angry, because Satan drives them to stamp it out. They don’t think. They don’t look at the plain proof in the Bible itself. It proves what I say is true.

Adam didn’t have the Bible, because it had not been written when he was alive. He had God’s word, though, because he went for walks with God and talked to him. Abraham didn’t have the Bible, but he had God’s word, because God came to visit him. Moses didn’t have the Bible, but he had God’s word, because he and God had conversations. It was his hand, not God’s, that wrote the first books in our Bible. God’s word came before the Torah.

When God spoke to the prophets, what did they write? “In the year such-and-such, the word of the Lord came to so-and-so the prophet.” Look it up. God told them things that were not in the Bible, but what he told them was his word. The question can’t even be debated.

Meditation is powerful, and you can do it two different ways. You can repeat phrases from the Bible to yourself, or you can repeat things God tells you directly. Either way, you’re repeating God’s word. This is what you should be doing when you meditate. Sitting around trying to feel peaceful isn’t going to do anything for you.

A Second Amendment celebrity named Jeff Cooper supposedly said a pistol is a weapon you use to fight your way to a rifle. By that, he meant that pistols are very poor weapons, and that they should be seen as compromise tools used to help you get to better weapons. As good as the Bible is, compared to the word God gives you directly, it’s a pistol. It’s not tailored to your specific situation. It’s very general. If you turn it into a set of rigid rules, the devil will use it to paint you into corners.

If you want an example of the devil using the law as a weapon, think of Jephthah. He promised God he would sacrifice the first thing he saw coming out of his house. His daughter appeared at the door, and the priests, who hated Jephthah, wouldn’t bend. He had to cut her throat. Would that have happened if they had heard from God in real time? Of course not.

Written laws have no flexibility. They can be inappropriate for a given situation. If God is with you in person, he can make law on the fly, giving you commandments that make things better, not worse.

If you want examples of this, you can find them in the Bible. God told Jeremiah to eat food cooked over burning feces. That’s not exactly kosher. God was generally against killing, but he told the Hebrews to kill on many occasions. He even told them to kill babies and livestock. David ate the forbidden showbread in the temple. Jesus healed on the Sabbath. The disciples picked grain on the Sabbath. Jewish Christians were freed from the dietary laws and the requirement to observe the Sabbath and the feasts.

That’s not me talking; that’s the Bible.

Praying in tongues is a form of meditation.

When you pray in tongues, God decides what you need to say and hear, and he puts it in your mouth. If you have prayed in tongues, you know you repeat yourself a lot. That makes sense, because that’s how meditation works. You will also find that the things you say change with circumstances. That also makes sense, because medicine has to suit the disease.

If you pray in tongues a lot, you will eventually start hearing phrases from God. Don’t just thank him and move on. You need to write them down, because they’re valuable. You need to sit and repeat them to yourself over and over. You will benefit from it. After that, at later dates, you can look them up and reuse them (provided they’re not limited to a specific time).

These types of meditation will bring you revelation and strength, and they will also help you receive the mind of Christ. As Josef Goebbels knew, repetition changes minds; it changes what our hearts perceive as true. It works for evil, and it also works for good. The evil stole the idea from the good.

Charismatics tend to think “the mind of Christ” means something like having the Internet or the Enclyclopedia Britannica in your head. They think it means you know everything. You can guess people’s weight. You can tell people which cards they’ve pulled out of decks. God does reveal knowledge to us, but that’s not the whole picture.

People forget that “mind” doesn’t just mean “intellect.” It also means “mindset.” For example, we say, “I have a mind to do this,” or, “I have a mind to do that.” We say, “I have changed my mind,” meaning, “I have changed my intentions,” or, “I have changed my attitude about something.”

To have the mind of Christ is to have his intentions and attitudes, not his omniscience. If you want proof it doesn’t mean omniscience, let me ask you this: do you know any omniscient Christians? Have you ever heard of one? Even Jesus asked questions. He didn’t know the time of his own return.

If you meditate on scripture, in the Holy Spirit, or on phrases God gives you, you will start to develop the attitudes and intentions of Jesus.

That’s the big revelation.

Christians aren’t supposed to obey rules outwardly while remaining unclean inwardly. We are supposed to be cleaned up on the inside. Old churches tell us we have to do this through willpower, but no one in any of those churches has ever succeeded, so I guess you know what to think about their advice. Meditating on God’s word will put God’s power in you, and unlike you, he will make things change.

I’ve seen this in action many times, without completely understanding it. I’ve persuaded people to start praying in tongues regularly. I see the same things happen to them, over and over. They become disgusted with prosperity preachers and other fake Christians. They become more politically conservative. They become more upset about the way sin has conquered America. In other words, they become more unified with God and each other in their hearts.

Satan hates this. He likes enemies who are confused and fragmented. United enemies are strong.

People don’t like aligning with God. Unity brings power, but it also takes away some of your freedom. The threads in a rope all have to bend in the same direction. But it’s better to be a rope than a thread.

Try to receive the gift of tongues. Pray in tongues as much as you can. Try to hear from God. When you do, repeat what he tells you over and over. Until you get the gift of tongues, just repeat scriptures to yourself. You will see results, believe me.

I know this will helpful, and I’m glad I was used to pass the information along.

There are no Apostles on the Ballot

I don’t consider myself a political blogger any more, and I’m grateful to be out of the fight. Political blogging built up the worst parts of my personality and led to a lot of stress. Nonetheless, politics and our relationship with God can’t be separated, so sometimes I will write about political issues.

Today I’m thinking about the Donald Trump open-mike kerfuffle. It’s a remarkable thing to witness. Someone–almost certainly an IRS employee–committed a felony, providing part of a Trump tax return to the press. Then another person with a duty of confidentiality released a recording of comments that were clearly off the record. Is the press upset by the violations of privacy? Of course not. Republicans have no privacy.

The violations are offensive and unsettling, but the hypocrisy is worse. No one in the press seems to care. When celebrities send nude photos around on their phones, and hackers release them, there is always a firestorm of comments about the abuse and objectification of women, as well as outrage about the commission of privacy crimes, but when a conservative is exposed, all the salivating press cares about is the content of the stolen information.

Now, what about the content? Is it bad? Sure it is. It’s always bad when men say gross sexual things about women. But how many men can say they haven’t done it? I’ve done it too many times to count. All of my old friends have done it. I have female friends who have done it. We live in a society in which profanity and prurience are celebrated and smirked at, and most American men and women fall victim. Should that be grounds for excluding them from the job market? Seriously? Could you pass that test?

The vast majority of the men who are excoriating and repudiating Trump in the news are as guilty as he is, yet they’re acting as if they’ve never heard such talk before. Come off it. We are what we are.

What if we had a magical machine that could take us back in time and show us every coarse remark a person ever said, and then we applied the press’s Trump standard to all of those comments and disqualified the guilty from all positions of power? The streets would be crammed with unemployed men and quite a few women.

Here’s something that should not be news: both candidates are bad people. Hillary is a horrendous liar, she has taken huge bribes, she has a smear machine which has no equal, and she has personally taken part in the destruction of women who credibly accused her husband of sexual assault. Trump loves money, he’s arrogant, he’s rude, and he’s an adulterer. Those are our choices. Jesus decided not to run, so take your pick.

Bernie Sanders is hopelessly naive and incompetent, but he seems to have good intentions. Hillary and the DNC, with the cooperation of the press, destroyed him. Ben Carson is a pretty good guy, but the other candidates and the press smeared him into the ground. Rand Paul seems like a fine person, but the public rejected him. Ted Cruz, for all the blather about his personality, would have made a good president, but he didn’t survive the nomination process. Now we have Hillary and Donald.

We can’t choose the morally sound candidate, because there is no morally sound candidate. This shouldn’t shock us; it’s the kind of choice we usually end up with. We have to choose the candidate who will be best for the future of America, and if you’re a Christian, that means the candidate who will do most to delay the persecution of Christians, Jews, and Israel.

That candidate is Donald Trump. No contest.

If we’re going to vote based on the way candidates treat women, Trump is the answer. There can be no doubt. Trump says he grabbed women’s genitals, consensually and legally. No surprise, for a celebrity or even a popular bartender. Women throw themselves at famous men all day every day, and they permit liberties the rest of us will never experience. I’m going to open your eyes with a harsh remark: most men have no idea how slutty women can be, because most of us are not attractive enough to bring it out. The side of women you and I see is nothing like the side Trump sees.

In many cases, the size of the bait a woman puts out depends on the size of the fish.

Trump also said crude things, like 95% of the male population. Hillary, on the other hand, worked actively to ruin the lives of women her husband had sex with. She didn’t “believe the victim.” She put the victims on trial, which is the exact thing feminists complain about in these situations. As far as we know, Trump never did anything like that.

The next president will either cement Obama’s poisonous legacy in place and augment it, or he will work to undo the damage. It’s really that simple. Presidents appoint all federal judges. Those judges serve for life, and they are nearly impossible to impeach. If Hillary wins, we will have a far-left extremist Supreme Court within two or three months, and she will appoint startling freaks to district and appellate benches. When that happens, persecution becomes policy. We will be DONE.

God help Israel if Hillary wins. Jews and liberals can’t seem to understand that conservatives are their only friends, but anyone who pays attention knows that our support for Israel is one of the things the left hates most about us. Read a few hundred Internet comments and see for yourself.

Jews always vote as if they were trying to commit collective suicide. Strangest thing. You would think that out of all the people on earth, Jews would have learned that appeasement leads to annihilation.

Is it hypocritical for Christians to support Trump? No. Of course not. Righteous Jews served Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus, who were evil, genocidal dictators. Here’s what would be hypocritical: pretending Trump isn’t what he is. I can see what he is. I can see what Hillary is. Trump is the clear choice. I would rather have Constantine than Nero or Titus. Obvious?

We don’t get Christian leaders because this is not a Christian country. Yes, the population is primarily Christian, but we are not dedicated to God. We do what we want. We sin constantly, with premeditation and even effort. I’m sure good Christian men offer themselves up for political service, but we reject Christianity in the voting booth. If we’re waiting for John the Divine to pop up and run, we will be waiting forever.

Vote for Trump and work on your prayer life. Try to conform to God’s desires. Try to find his presence. Try to dedicate yourself to him. Accept the fact that secular politicians are on a different wavelength. You can’t fix it, but you may be able to mitigate the suffering of Christians and Jews.

If that doesn’t make you happy, abandon all interaction with people who have said crude things about women, and with all the adulterers and fornicators in your life.

Good luck, living in your lonely cave.

Lessons I Should Have Learned Sooner

Some of you know I have written about supernatural experiences I had when I was young. I got some new revelation regarding those experiences, so I thought I’d share it.

On two occasions, Jesus manifested himself to me. I did not see him, but I felt his presence, and I knew exactly where he was. I could feel his presence physically, and in my heart and mind. I knew who he was, too.

The first time he showed up, I was driving from Milwaukee to Kentucky after a weekend of drunken partying. The roads were covered with ice, so it was slow going. I believe I was somewhere between Louisville and Lexington.

Without warning, I was struck by the realization that I was going to die that day. I say “realization” because I was completely positive it was going to happen. I pulled over and parked. I knew enough about God to believe a spirit had attacked me, so I told it to leave in the name of Jesus, and I called on Jesus repeatedly.

At first nothing happened, but soon I felt a warm presence enter the car, and the presence hovered over the center of the front seat. It was roughly spherical, and I felt a current of love, peace, joy, and faith pouring out of it. The love hit me like heat from a wood stove, and I knew everything was going to be all right. The strange conviction that I was going to die was gone as though it had never existed. The warm presence didn’t just drive it away. It negated it, the way light negates darkness.

The second time, I was in bed, and a warm beam of love and power shone down on me and moved over my body. Wherever it touched me, I felt the same things I had felt in the car. It didn’t touch all of me at once. The parts of me that were in contact with it felt peace, love, joy, and so on. They felt better than the rest of me. Your foot can feel those things while your elbow doesn’t.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the presence of God, and I believe we are supposed to live in it as much the time as possible.

I’ve also thought a lot about praise. I’ve been praising God as I know him from experience, and that means praising him according to what I sensed when he touched me. I tell him he is my infinite reservoir or bottomless sea of peace, love, joy, protection, faith and victory. If you praise God before you start praying, things work better.

All this has come together into a revelation that God is not just peaceful; he is peace. He isn’t just full of faith; he is faith. He is love. He is victory and protection. He is lie a sea that drowns evil and evil beings. There is no peace, faith, love, joy, victory, or protection except for God.

You may think you have victories without God, but they’re not real. Anything that’s real has permanence and invincibility. Temporary things (and temporary beings like Satan and the damned) aren’t fully real. They will be gone soon. Beings exist in a number of dimensions; that’s what makes them real. For example, a box has width, height, and depth. Time is also a dimension. If the time dimension of a thing isn’t infinite, it’s not as real as something that lasts.

I’m still burrowing through Augustine’s confessions, and it looks like God told him the same thing. Real things are permanent.

When we disobey God, we cut ourselves off from his presence, so things like defeat, unbelief, fear, bitterness, anger, and sexual perversion come in. In other words, things that are contrary to the nature of God’s presence come in. If you’re in God’s presence, you can’t have these things.

We don’t understand this. Instead of seeking God’s presence, we look for a set of rules to follow, and we look for preachers to help us wash ourselves once a week. We see God one of two ways. Either he’s a washing machine that rinses away our filth on a weekly basis, or he’s a diplomatic plate that gives us a license to sin as much as we want.

The hard truth is that we have to belong to him completely. We think that’s crazy, because we’ve been raised in a crazy world where right seems wrong. If you think about it, what’s wrong about wanting to be in complete alignment with the being that created everything and runs the universe? But for the lies we swim in, we would think it obvious that a desire to give ourselves to God completely was normal. To feel otherwise would seem insane.

We don’t understand this, so we live with one foot in heaven and one foot in hell. We don’t get the promises of the Bible with any kind of consistency, because they’re not meant for parasites who serve God’s enemy.

If we don’t belong to God without reservation, we limit his presence, so we limit the power he is willing to exercise on our behalf.

You can’t tell charismatics that. They think God makes no demands on us. They think we just have to give money to preachers and pretend other people’s sins don’t exist. We have to be full of nice thoughts and refrain from judging, while giving as much cash as possible to predators like Benny Hinn and Joyce Meyer.

Charismatics are in denial. They don’t want to hear about God’s demands. They think that stuff is only for old dried-out churches that deny the Holy Spirit. They think God is a butler and sugar daddy who wants to give us money so we can continue living pretty much as we please. We think faith is all that matters, and that the need for obedience disappeared with the crucifixion.

If Jesus had had that attitude, the crucifixion wouldn’t have occurred. He would have refused and then asked for forgiveness.

Your lifestyle affects the presence of God in your life. What you watch and listen to matters. What you say matters. Your friendships matter. Your job matters. God doesn’t want to inhabit a filthy toilet.

This information is disturbing in some ways, because it means I have to give up enjoyable things I thought were just fine. I’ve thrown out some music. I’m being more careful about the way I talk, especially about others. I feel a little bit like a dog whose owner won’t let it run off and chase rabbits; it’s not always fun to be restrained. But I want the correction, because there is no other way. There is one path that pleases God, and there is an infinite number of paths that lead to misery and defeat. You can’t have God the way you want him. You have to be molded to conform with his demands.

It’s a little upsetting to give up self-determination, especially if you’re a man. But it has to be done. If you won’t submit, you can’t complain about your defeats. You asked for them over and over.

This is a hard word, but it brings power and victory, so suck it up and be grateful. It serves no purpose to beat your head against the rock. Your head may be pretty hard, but in the end the rock will win.

He Said, Ze Said

I have a new hero.

The University of Michigan is sinking under the fetid waves of gender fascism, and they have enacted a bizarre new policy that will make everyone who cares about the truth cringe: students are allowed to choose the pronoun by which instructors refer to them, and the choices are not limited to “he” and “she.” They offer a third pronoun, “ze,” which presumably refers to people with genitals ordinarily found on extraterrestrials. If that’s not crazy enough, they permit students to make up their own pronouns.

I’m sure most people just groaned, turned off their computers or dimmed their phones, and blew it off. Conservative student Grant Strobl, however, had a greater vision. He saw the possibilities. His chosen “pronoun”: “His Majesty.” Capitalized.

I love this kid. I want to buy him a steak. A steak made from a very flatulent corn-fed steer that was raised in a factory with no windows. And posters of Ronald Reagan on the lead-painted walls. The AGW platter, with white privilege fries.

Maybe a half-baked potato, in honor of the school administration.

My guess, based on my knowledge of the hypocritical, petty, self-unaware nature of leftist academics (“leftist academics”…I repeat myself), is that the school will refuse to accommodate him, even though his “pronoun” is an important political and social statement and not a backhanded way of saying “fungible pants-wetting snowflake.”

This may be the greatest thing I’ve seen on the Internet in five years. Not that this is a high bar to clear.

I want a ticket to Strobl’s graduation. I want to see the lemon-sucking look on the dean’s face when he has to call out “His Majesty Grant Strobl.” The faculty will probably stand to turn their backs on him, much as they have done with regard to reality.

I wish he had had more time to think up his title. I would have gone for “His Serene Imperial Majesty,” at the very least.

Or maybe “Zorro.” Or “El Kabong.”

“Kommissar.” “Darth.” “Obergruppenfuhrer.”

Maybe something earthy and simple: “Nugent Rules.” “Give me your thoughts on the Malthusian Catastrophe, Nugent Rules.”

It won’t fly. I guaranteed you, they will find an excuse for denying His Majesty his due. They say a black person who murders white people for being white isn’t a racist; surely, they will come up with a canard “proving” personalized pronouns can’t be applied to conservatives. It will be a lot like the “research” the Nazis did, proving the Japanese were Aryans.

Maybe a legal name change is in order. They would have to comply. I should put up a Gofundme page, just in case. If it comes to that, he should change his name to “His Royal Eminence Trickle-Down Abortion is Murder McCankles.”

Students these days are amazing. They get top grades in aeronautical engineering, differential geometry, and Mandarin, but they can’t pass this one-question test: “Remove your clothes and look down. What does that tell you?”

The obvious problem–one of them–with the university’s Orwell-staggering, bullying, unconstitutional policy is that it serves the opposite of a university’s ostensible primary goal. It bans the dissemination of truth.

In reality, a person with male organs is “he.” There is no such thing as a “ze.” When the university forces employees to use pronouns that conflict with reality, they force them to lie in order to keep their jobs.

For people who hate the truth (most people), being forced to lie is no burden at all. They could not care less. So the punishment strikes only the principled.

What a surprise. Knock me over with a feather from Bruce Gender’s favorite boa.

That’s how the Beast is going to do things. Do this little thing you know is wrong, and we’ll let you earn money to buy your bread. Now do that little thing. Now do this great big thing you really can’t stomach. Now take the Mark. Now help my thralls put your Christian neighbors in hybrid vans so we can take them to a green facility where we address the Christian Question with finality.

It’s funny; the Bible refers to sexual deviation as “confusion.” Have you noticed how appropriate that is? As trendy imaginary genders multiply, a simple job application will grow to three or four pages. Ten years from now, a gas station may have to have five bathrooms. Or just one, with no stalls, because stalls are triggers to voyeur-Americans.

Maybe stores will have big storm grates in their parking lots, under the lights, and we’ll just drop our pants and let go. Festival seating.

The raft Christians are packed into is getting smaller, and one day it will sink. Might as well keep a sense of humor.

I applaud His Majesty. I would not want the grade point average he will have when his Marxist professors get done rewarding him, but I applaud him.

Maybe universities should replace desks with toilets, so each imperial snowflake can have zis very own throne.

God 1, Pundits 0

What a great day I’m having. There is nothing like the day after a hurricane misses you.

Matthew did a great deal of damage in Haiti. I read that the death toll is 283. It’s very sad, but it’s to be expected. Haitians don’t build well, they don’t have money to prepare for storms, and according to what I’ve been told (lots of Haitians in Miami), they ignore storm warnings because of their culture. Problems that would be minor in the US or other developed countries are disasters in Haiti.

In Florida, Matthew accomplished virtually nothing. The storm never came ashore. The wall of the eye sort of scraped Cape Canaveral, but that, after all, is a cape. It projects several miles into the Atlantic. A storm with an eyewall that hits Canaveral misses the mainland.

The storm is now projected to miss Florida and Georgia entirely. It’s supposed to bounce off South Carolina as a Category 2. That’s a far cry from the coast-sweeping monster we were expecting day before yesterday.

Matthew is not going to be a big problem for Americans. Even if it hits South Carolina, the storm surge will be small, and the winds will not be too bad. Life is about to return to normal.

Predictably, some Miamians have behaved like predators. I checked Craigslist for tool postings yesterday, and there were a lot of ads for generators. One lout put up an ad asking $475 for a generator that costs $275 new. The Miami mindset is incurable.

I’m so grateful to God for moving this thing away from me and from everyone else in America. What a miserable week this could have been.

“Matthew” means “gift of Yahweh.” I couldn’t have put it better.

At Least People Stopped Saying “Hunker”

Hello from not far outside the cone of aggravation.

It’s a little after 9 a.m. here. I can’t tell what to make of the weather. If you look outside, there is no rain, and nothing is moving. I would say the wind is below 5 mph. One weather site says the wind is 18 mph, and another says 8 mph.

The forecasts I’ve found vary widely. Some say we will have a long period of wind above 60 mph, which is enough to cause considerable destruction. Others say sustained winds will only hit the mid-forties. That would be much better.

I am inclined to believe the tamer predictions, because the pessimists are already wrong.

I just heard a few raindrops.

Now it’s raining. I’m sure it will come and go. That’s how it works.

Anyway, if the bleaker predictions are already off by 10 mph, they will probably continue to be off. Sure hope so.

The projected storm path has moved eastward a little, and now it looks like the eye will land north of Palm Beach, somewhere in Palm Beach County. I would have preferred Greenland, but I’m very grateful it’s not hitting me.

If the winds stay under 50, there is a very good chance I won’t lose electricity or phone service. If that happens, I’m golden. I don’t care about the traffic lights or the obstructed roads. I can sit at home and eat lunch meat. I do care about cold showers and enduring the misery of 24-hour profuse sweat.

The Maslow Hurricane Hierarchy of Needs goes like this:

1. Electricity
2. Water
3. Internet/wireless phones
4. Telephone (wired)
5. Transportation
6. McDonald’s breakfast

Actually, you can put anything you want after 5. Compared to 1 through 5, all things are equally trivial.

In a really bad storm, you could put “Shelter” at the top, or maybe “Life.” Andrew pulled the roofs and ceilings off of people’s houses in the middle of the night.

The phone used to be more important than Cyberia (3), but those days are over. They ended almost silently. Did you notice? Now there are many people who don’t have land lines. If you have Cyberia, you have communication, news, and a lot of entertainment. The temporary loss of a land line won’t hurt you much.

Where I live, we don’t receive white-page phone books any more. That’s really something. Also, it appears to be impossible to get directory assistance. When you call them, they give you a machine that can’t understand the names you ask for, and after a few tries, it hangs up. Also, cell phones are generally unlisted. I wonder if people are aware of these things. In a world where we are inundated with information and stripped of privacy, it is now almost impossible to get a person’s phone number.

I decided to fast and pray today. I am speaking defeat to the storm, and I am asking God to destroy it, send it out to sea, and keep it away from the property of the people who belong to him. Maybe it would have been smarter to do this three days ago, but I didn’t feel led to do it until today.

Prayer is the only option right now. We haven’t developed a machine that eats hurricanes yet.

The storm looks pretty bad, from a non-me-centric perspective. They think it will hit the coast and then follow it north, sweeping it like a demonic Roomba. If the wind and surge are severe, there will be a huge amount of property destruction. Usually, a hurricane will hit the coast, and then it will go inland and die, or it will cross the state, pop out on the other side, and go somewhere else. This one is trying to slide up the coast, hitting many of our most densely populated areas in serial fashion. A path like that would multiply the storm’s destruction; it would be one storm that does as much harm as several.

I’m interceding for God’s people; that’s about all I can do, and of course, it’s the most powerful thing anyone can do. I hope the suffering is very limited. Nothing is worse than having your home or business screwed up by a hurricane.

I’m grateful for the motivation to pray. God keeps reminding me of this: when you feel unsteady or worried, it’s just hunger for prayer in tongues. It really is that simple. When I do it enough, things work. When I cut back, the shipworms start to bore into me. I can’t complain when things go badly, because I have the power to prevent it.

If we all belonged to God, we wouldn’t have to worry about natural disasters. We wouldn’t have to worry about illegal aliens, terrorism, sexual-confusion fascists, or persecution. America has rejected God, so we get what we sow for. I wish it were otherwise, but prophecy proves we are not going to win. The world will continue to rot, and we will be removed from it so God can sanitize it. In the meantime, we have to do what we can, gathering new people to us and fighting the problems our rebellion creates.

I keep feeling like the end is closer than we think. I want to see the world last long enough so we can maximize the harvest, but I truly look forward to the end of the rot and violence.

I’m pretty old now. My life is as good as over. There are more years behind me than in front of me. I may have thirty or forty years to go; I hope God removes me from this place before that much time passes.

It would have been nice if I had done more with my time, but I’m glad I won’t be here too much longer. My future is a world without hurricanes, riots, diseases, bills, and vexatious people. I wish I could take a furlough and visit it now!

We caused this hurricane. We caused terrorism. We caused the leftist takeover of America. The smart thing is to admit your role in it to God, repent, and try to serve him. He’s not going to fix America, but he will make your life much easier, and he will give you a future to retreat to when it’s all over.

It’s 9:40, and we still have eight mph. I hope to see you on the other side tomorrow!

More

It’s 11:20. The forecast says the wind is 20 mph, but it’s not. It’s 10. Every so often, a few drops of rain fall as something passes over, but it goes away in a minute or less.

I’m pretty happy with the way things are turning out. I misunderstood a forecast yesterday, and I thought we were going to get high winds at dinner time, so everything that has happened, or failed to happen, since then feels like a bonus. Now I understand the forecast correctly, but the winds are still over an hour late. Winning! I guess. Suffering delayed, like justice delayed, is denied.

If the forecast is correct, this storm will never get more than maybe 70 miles closer to me than it is now. I certainly hope that’s right.

I found an online distance calculator, and it says Matthew is about 190 miles away. That’s from me to the eye. The smallest distance I expect to see will be around 120 miles. That’s well into the tropical-storm-force area, but I’ll be on the nice side. The wind pattern on the west side of the eye doesn’t extend out as far as it does on the east. From the online wind pictures (the ones that show how far out the winds extend), it looks like I won’t be far inside the tropical-storm-force area.

I’m writing because I’m bored.

It’s 11:42 now, and we’re up to 12 mph.

Thanks for your prayers.

1:14 P.M.

The craziest thing is happening. I keep waiting for the wind to increase, but it doesn’t. I’ve been watching the forecast graph at Weather Underground, and they are changing it retroactively to cover up the failure of their predictions.

Take a look at this capture. See the wind graph near the bottom? You will note that it kicks upward sharply after 12 p.m. That upward bit used to be somewhere around 11 a.m. They moved it to the right when the forecast failed. It’s still wrong. It’s after 1 p.m., and nothing has happened.

Higher on the page, above the capture, there is a wind indicator. It went to 27 mph a while back. Now it’s at 10. We were supposed to have winds of over 40 mph by now.

Based solely on the geometry, I can’t see how things can get really bad. The storm is passing by us tangentially, so the distance between the storm and me is changing relatively little as it moves. It’s not going to get a whole lot closer on this course. Fifty or sixty miles can make a big difference, but not that big.

The storm track is also moving east. It’s headed for Cape Canaveral now, and that’s not very close to the Palm Beach County destination they were predicting earlier in the day.

Man, I hope it keeps moving east, for my sake and everyone else’s. I had a power glitch a while back, and I thought I might be losing electricity long before I had thought it possible. I would rather not eat in the dark, and I really don’t want to have to try to sleep without air conditioning or a fan. I just washed my sheets.

I am going to keep praying and so on. The results so far are wonderful.

2:02 P.M.

I thought people might say I was lying about Weather Underground changing its forecast retroactively, so here is another capture.

I just captured that.

Take a look at the upturn in the wind graph. They moved it. It used to start at 12 p.m. Now it starts at about 1 p.m. But 1 p.m. is long gone, and there is no wind. The wind indicator says 11. They got it wrong again. Will they move it again?

I am not criticizing Weather Underground. I love that site. I’m just proving the forecasters were very wrong. I was supposed to have high winds two hours ago.

I just checked the NHC’s site. The storm is NORTH of me. I’m not kidding. The current latitude is 25.7 N. I’m at about 25.4. That means the storm has already passed me. It doesn’t mean it can’t get closer, because the storm is moving northwest, but the forecast track doesn’t take it much closer to me than it is right now.

I don’t know what to make of this. I am fasting, praying, and speaking defeat, but this is a whole lot better than I expected. I have had ZERO…ZERO adverse effects from the weather so far. It’s very pleasant outside, if you don’t mind drizzle.

Maybe things are going to go much better than I thought.

2:59 P.M.

As further evidence that I am not insane, let me present another screen capture from Weather Underground. They just killed the forecast for afternoon wind. Take a look and compare to the other screen caps.

As you can clearly see, they no longer predict significant wind before 6 p.m., and after that, it peaks at 40.

I know prayer works, but this is just spooky.

I took a ruler and lined stuff up on the monitor, and it sure looks like the tropical-storm-force area will miss me by 15 or 20 miles. It’s incredible. Maybe there is something I’m missing, which would be obvious to a meteorologist, but I sort of doubt it.

5:03 P.M.

People in Miami are getting bored, sitting indoors while nothing happens. A friend called, and since the storm didn’t seem to be accomplishing anything, he came over for a prayer session.

At a time when the wind was supposed to be at 50 mph.

People are surfing off North Miami Beach.

No complaints here. Things are quiet, and the roads are clear. It’s nice to drive without traffic for once.

8:33 P.M.

I give up on this hurricane. It has been a complete failure.

It’s 8:33 p.m., and the real-time wind measurement on Weather Underground’s site is 17 mph. According to the little forecast graph, the wind should be at its peak now. The graph thinks the peak is something like 37 mph. Whatever you say, graph.

My best guess is that the folks at Weather Underground will go back and revise their forecast again, to make it look as though they had gotten it right. I don’t understand this. What’s the point? No one needs a rearcast or a postcast. We are already familiar with past events. It serves no purpose to try to predict them. It certainly isn’t challenging.

I am done hedging my bets. I’ll just say it: I have seen the worst this storm has to offer. I feel confident about that. It’s way up by Palm Beach now.

It’s really something. Where I live, it’s not unusual to have power outages due to wind when there are no hurricanes around. Today a hurricane blew right by me, and the power is fine.

Enough about me. Matthew is still a big threat to people up the coast.

According to the news, people in evacuation zones are not taking the storm seriously. That’s a big mistake. Before the storm arrives, you can get in your car and leave. That provides a false sense of security. By the time things get bad, the roads may be closed, and it may be impossible to drive due to flooding or wind. Then where are you? Stuck, hoping the roof doesn’t come off. And the cops can’t get to you to help you.

Concrete blocks hold up to hurricanes just fine. They stood up to Andrew. But a lot of people have houses built from various types of ticky-tacky, and they can do upsetting things like falling over. My guess is that the farther you get from South Florida, the weaker the houses are, because no one up north worries about hurricanes.

The thing that makes the difference in dealing with hurricanes is experience, and people who have never seen a city destroyed don’t have experience. They don’t know what it’s like to be unable to go outside and walk ten feet. To a person like that, a drunken hurricane party seems like a great idea. There are probably half a million people sitting in their living rooms right now, with extremely unrealistic expectations about the way things will go if Matthew hits.

On top of that, a huge amount of property is at risk, and losing and replacing property is a miserable thing to go through.

I’m going to bed at the usual time tonight, but until I conk out, I plan to pray for the people Matthew hasn’t visited yet. I hope you will join me. I also plan to pray that if God delivers them, he does it in a way that leaves them with a healthy respect for danger instead of a juvenile sense of invincibility. I will pray that his help glorifies him and helps people see their need for him instead of convincing them they’re fine without him.

One day, Christians who are close to God will leave the earth, and people won’t realize we were one of the main reasons things went as well as they did. They won’t know our prayers helped hold the earth together and prevent God from afflicting or abandoning them. They won’t feel it when God’s help leaves them, but once he’s gone, things will turn very sour. They’ll know something is wrong when problems they used to coast over kill them or destroy what they have.

I was talking about this today with the friend who came over to pray. Supernatural affairs are like economic affairs. When it comes to money, a certain percentage of the population works and creates wealth, and the rest are leeches who destroy and consume. When it comes to the supernatural, a certain percentage brings God’s blessings and protection down, and the rest benefit just by being near them. Sooner or later, supernatural socialism will come to an abrupt end, because the supernatural red-staters will be unhooked from the plow and taken to the barn. That will be a horrible thing to see.

I hope my prayers do some good. Might as well do some good while I’m still here. I remember what Jesus said: “I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work.”

As long as we’re here, the sun is shining.

Quick mathematical observation: Matthew has high winds, but here’s something no one is talking about. There is a big difference between hurricane-force winds and maximum sustained winds. If a storm has maximum sustained winds of 130 mph and it has an area of hurricane-force winds 50 miles wide, it doesn’t mean everyone within 25 miles of the center will get 130 mph. The highest winds are just outside the eye, very near the center. Unless the storm comes very close to land, we shouldn’t expect extremely high winds to hit Florida. Matthew could get very close and never manage to blow harder than maybe 75 mph on land. If prayer pushes this thing ten miles off the coast it will make a huge difference.

Andrew surpassed 160 right where I’m sitting. Completely different scenario.

Food for thought.

Leaving Santeriaville

Yesterday I found out the house that used to belong to my sister is ready to rent.

It may not be ready physically; there is still some fine-tuning to do. But it’s ready legally. The contractor is waiting for his final check, and the inspection for the overall remodeling is done.

I thought this day would never come.

My sister was supposed to get this house, free and clear, when my dad died. He bought it for her, and she was going to receive it, on top of half of his estate. We tried to get her to move out while we fixed it, and we were then going to return it to her, but we were not able to get her cooperation. She didn’t maintain the house. Code problems kept piling up, and because my dad’s name was on the deed, he had to do something. He bought her out, and since then, we have been suffering through the miserable process of fixing it.

What did we have to add? Not a whole lot. New yard, new walls, new floors, new subfloors, new doors, new kitchen and bathrooms, new lawn and landscaping, new roof, new air conditioning system, new appliances, new security system, new phone and Internet wiring, new garage door, new windows, new paint…just a few things. We were able to keep the outside walls. Termites and rats can’t eat concrete.

If you want to destroy a house and yard, here’s what you do: nothing. You don’t have to bulldoze it. You don’t have to set fire to it. Just sit. In ten years, the house will be in such bad shape, you may be legally compelled to demolish it. Until I witnessed the slow destruction of this house, I had no idea how hard time is on houses.

Right now Hurricane Matthew is getting ready to pass this area, so there is a limit to what I can do to the house. Once things stabilize, I will be touching up a few things, and it should be ready to advertise next week.

This is significant, because my dad and I have a deal. I agreed not to leave him alone in Miami, and he agreed to buy a big place farther north, with room for both of us. Now that this aggravating project is almost done, we are going to focus on moving.

I would love to move to a place like Ocala or the panhandle, but it’s looking like God wants me in Broward County, which is the county where Ft. Lauderdale is located. It’s not the greatest place on earth to live, but it’s much, much better than Miami. Most people there speak English, and they are not as aggressive, rude, or inclined to practice various types of voodoo. I’ll take any improvement I can get.

I’m not kidding about voodoo in Miami. We have Cuban voodoo, Haitian voodoo, Puerto Rican voodoo, Jamaican voodoo…you name it. Cubans call their voodoo “Santeria,” but if you look it up…it’s voodoo. There are little shops called “botanicas” all over Miami, and they sell voodoo paraphernalia. When you deal with Cubans, you never know whether they’re into voodoo or not. It draws even educated Cubans.

If you live in Miami, sometimes you’ll notice a person who wears white all the time. That’s a voodoo thing. I don’t know much about it, but the scuttlebutt is that when you get into Santeria, you have to wear white for a year. Also, some people wear cheap, colorful voodoo bracelets.

I don’t want to be around these people any more. Evil has a stink, and people who love evil emit that stink to their surroundings. I would like to be in a place where the stink isn’t as thick.

You would think that a person would miss a place where he has spent much of his life, but I won’t miss Miami one bit. There is absolutely nothing here that interests me. The climate is unpleasant. The people have no class. The traffic is a nightmare. There is no culture. People who don’t speak Spanish are being shut out of everything. When I say it’s literally like living in a foreign country, I am not exaggerating at all. When you walk around in public, you expect to hear the people around you speaking Spanish, not English.

I look forward to being farther from the ocean. I’ve had all I want.

If you fit in here, it’s a very bad sign. It says a lot about your values.

Sadly, the Broward housing market is not the buyer’s paradise it was a few years back. There are still real bargains in the panhandle, and Ocala is also better for buyers, but Broward is drying up. Why? Because people hate Miami. They move to Broward to get away.

Small wonder. How can you feel comfortable in an area where pagans are literally cursing you every day?

My tenure here was my own fault. I rebelled against God, and he didn’t help me. I belonged here. The Bible says rebellion is as bad as witchcraft, so here I sat, among the witches. How can I complain?

I look forward to being able to drive five miles in less than 20 minutes. I look forward to not having to repeat myself over and over to people who don’t speak our national language. I look forward to letting my guard down to some extent. I can’t wait to lose my Miami manners. Maybe I should wear a gag until they wear off.

If you want to help me out, you can pray this hurricane misses my property, and that God helps me get out of this awful county. I would appreciate that.

It would be so nice to move to north Georgia or southern Tennessee.

Best not to think about it.

The US is falling apart even faster than I believed as recently as two weeks ago. Persecution is really coming down. If Hillary Clinton wins, a Cambodia scenario may be less than a decade away. Our cities are becoming dens of feral losers; I don’t want to be very close to one when things get really nasty.

If you want out of the mess you’ve landed yourself in, God is your ticket. Don’t wait as long as I did. Get started now. It won’t change overnight.

I am out of here, as soon as humanly or divinely possible. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

A: Who Created it?

Last night I realized there had been a change in my life. I’m pretty happy about it. I am no longer having bad dreams.

For a long time, I had bad dreams most nights. To make things worse, I had the same dreams over and over.

Often I dreamed I was back in Austin, Texas, where I lived when I was in graduate school studying physics. I got burned out and quit, and apart from my childhood, it was the most miserable time of my life. I was separated from God. My prayers didn’t go anywhere.

In the dreams, I went back to my old apartment, which was, mysteriously, still mine. I would find huge rooms hidden in it. It was full of great tools. The space and the tools sound nice, but the apartment was a depressing mess. Things were piled up on the furniture; it was as if I had left in a hurry, after living like a slob.

In the dream, I had no friends in Austin. That’s what it was like in real life, unfortunately. The physics guys were very socially inept, and a lot of them were downright creepy. Some were full of anger, possibly because of all the wedgies and red bellies they received while they were growing up. In the dreams, I felt the isolation of Austin again.

When I went to law school, I had lots of friends. I still don’t understand the physics personality.

Sometimes I dreamed I was in a big airport, which I took to be DFW. I never actually got anywhere. I was just moving around in the terminal, as though changing planes. When you’re on a journey, you don’t want to spend an entire day in an airport. You want to board a plane, fly, get off, and do whatever you wanted to do at your destination. I never flew or arrived. I just walked, past endless book kiosks, smelly bars, and Cinnabon stands.

I also dreamed I was back in college. I would find myself walking around on campus, or going to and from campus. The disturbing thing was that it was late in the semester, and I had forgotten about one or two courses. I had dropped them, but I hadn’t filed the paperwork, so as far as the school knew, I was just failing. I kept wondering what I was going to do. I wondered if they would give me a break.

I hated these annoying, persistent dreams. Life was getting better and better, but my nights were unpleasant.

It wasn’t the first time I had been plagued by bad dreams. When I was young–say before the age of eight–I had nightmares every night. I would find myself at parties, surrounded by relatives I loved. When they came close to me to greet me, their bodies would twist apart so they were unrecognizable. They were impostors, sent to scare me. I also dreamed a pure white devil would come up through a manhole under my bed and torment me; sometimes he chased me in a van. He always had a big smile. Making a defenseless child suffer brought him glee.

My worst dreams took place while I was awake. I would wake up and see enormous bugs, snakes, and lizards climbing all over the bedroom. They were on the walls, ceiling, floor, and furniture. They crawled over me on the bed.

One night I woke from a nightmare and yelled for my mother. When she got to the bedroom door, she suddenly shrank in size, down to a height of two or three feet. It showed me she was powerless to help me. That was the point.

It’s wonderful to have peaceful dreams again. I’m not sure what the significance is. I believe spirits that have access to us give us bad dreams. I’ve been attacked by spirits during dreams.

Sometimes I wish my dreams were less vivid. When I’m awake, I remember visiting places that don’t exist. Sometimes I have to ask myself whether I went to a certain place or just dreamed it. It can be very hard to tell.

It seems like I’m going over a hump. Behind me, there were a lot of bad experiences I had to go through in order to be corrected and made strong. Ahead of me, there is more peace and help. I feel that way during the day, not just at night. I expect things to continue to improve.

If you lack peace, there are spirits behind it. You can count on that. If you ever get into the presence of God, you will feel overwhelming peace. That proves that anxiety and agitation come from the other spirits. They are not like him. Other spirits nag, threaten, and manipulate you. They try to make you afraid not to obey. God offers you peace and rest in exchange for preferring him.

You should always be aware that anyone who torments you in order to make you comply is doing evil. God doesn’t work that way. It’s beneath him. God wants free consent. He does not like coercion. Something to think about when other people try to get you to do things.

I would go further than that. If anyone has the power to coerce you, and they use it, there is a kink in your relationship with God. He is jealous; he doesn’t want anyone else to be your master or your father.

I don’t have complete peace, but things get better all the time. I have plenty of incentive to continue, and I have overwhelming incentive not to go back. Some ex-cons are willing to die before being sent back to prison; I feel that way about the powerless life I led before I started doing things God’s way. You can have this planet. You can have the prestige and riches. You can have the fame. Just give me my peace and power.

Like a Dental Cleaning That Never Ends

I’m not quite ready to get moving today, so here I am, procrastinating.

I’m still slogging through Augustine’s Confessions. Some of it is fairly good. Most of it is tedious.

I’m somewhere around page 150, and Augustine has finally gotten to the point where he appears to be about to convert. He tells the story of a pagan sage named Victorinus. This man came around after talking to Ambrose the bishop or whatever of Milan. He then decided to proclaim his conversion publicly. Ambrose offered him the option of proclaiming it privately, which seems a little stupid. Victorinus declined.

Back in Augustine’s day, proclaiming yourself a Christian could have repercussions. It seems that Christians were tolerated fairly well when Victorinus came out, but the church still permitted former pagans to announce their conversions privately, so clearly, there were dangers. Call me crazy, but if you come out in a locked room in front of a few old men, I believe you’ve done pretty much the opposite of coming out. Victorinus seems to have agreed.

Augustine felt like a coward, because he didn’t have the guts to convert. At the point where I stopped reading today, he said he was trying to man up and join the church, but he was having trouble making himself do it.

He says: “The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.”

Here is his problem: he believes willpower is the answer. That’s pride. No one but God has ever done the right thing consistently with willpower. That’s not how Christianity works. If you could make yourself do right without God’s help, you would have the right to stand in front of God and tell him you didn’t need him.

Old-school Christians adore pride. They can’t get enough of self-righteousness. Work hard! Struggle! Don’t ask God to do what you should do for yourself! It’s all lies and poison, but we swallow it because we know we’re bad, and we want to turn around and do things for God.

The Bible makes it clear that we are not required to be strong without help. One of the fruit of the Holy Spirit is self-control. If it’s a fruit of the Holy Spirit, why would you expect to manifest it without him?

The more you pray in tongues, the more faith and authority you’ll have. Sooner or later, you will start to develop the ability to command your flesh and your mind. Jesus even commanded his spirit. He sent it to God when he died: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

I have found this ability rising up in me, and it’s a wonderful thing. I find I can command my mind to stop thinking about things I don’t want to think about. This is impossible for people who don’t have God’s help. If you don’t believe me, take the challenge Dostoevsky use to give people: sit still and try not to think of a big white bear.

One of the big problems with lust is that once thoughts of sex get into a man’s mind, they stick around until he obeys. When you develop the ability to command your mind, that problem goes away. You can command your mind to stop thinking about sex. You can command it not to be angry. You can command it not to worry.

Augustine didn’t know this, because by the time he was born, the church had already abandoned the Holy Spirit. They had given up the powerful knowledge that gave the apostles victory, so they were about like the Jews who lived between the prophets and Jesus.

The human body is a house, and even if you don’t choose a side, spirits will fill it. You will be led by spirits. If you’re not led by the Holy Spirit, you will be led by other spirits. They will sit on little thrones you gave them and rule you. The purpose of the baptism with the Holy Spirit is to deport these illegal aliens and put God back on the throne.

The keys to all power lie in the supernatural realm. If you keep relying on your natural strength, you will never find the control panel that gives you power over your life.

The devil hates salvation, but he really REALLY hates the truth I’m sharing with you. Most Christians who are saved have virtually no authority or victory in this life. They’re like soldiers without radios, who carry whistles instead of guns. Spirits that oppose God walk through them unseen and unhindered, just as Jesus walked through the crowd of Nazarenes who wanted to murder him.

They say a pistol is just a weapon you use to fight your way to a rifle; a rifle is a much more effective weapon. The strength you have in your own right is a tool you use to get to the power of the Holy Spirit. Most Christians don’t realize this, so they receive salvation and then live in weakness and defeat.

The gospel of pride sounds righteous. That’s why it’s so easy to fool people with it. What sounds better? Lying back and letting God do things for you, or getting up and working your rear end off to prove you’re grateful? To most people, the second option is clearly the righteous choice, but it’s the opposite of what the New Testament teaches.

In the Revelation, John saw the elders in heaven throwing their crowns at the feet of Jesus. Why? Because he was the one who had earned the crowns. They were just his heirs. They received what he built.

The Catholic church has always been very big on pride. Catholics have beaten themselves with clubs. They have made pilgrimages over stones on their knees. One “saint” cut her own eyes out. Catholics have always given clerics fancy costumes and big hats. They worship people they call “saints.” The rest of us…we are lesser beings. It’s okay if we never dedicate ourselves to God, because we’re just riff-raff. We will sit in the cheap seats in heaven.

The Baptists are the same way. So are most churches. “If you’re not willing to earn God’s help, get out of the church!” “God helps those who help themselves!” It’s completely perverse. God is burdened with treasures he wants to give us, and we reject them so we can present him with our mud pies and then demand praise and rewards.

It’s nice to read that ancient Christians shared certain types of experiences with us, but overall, Augustine is a stumbling block. He is stuck in the pride of the mind, just like the Jews who sit around studying the Talmud all day. God is for everyone; not just the brilliant, and not just the strong-willed.

When you try to lift yourself up, you bring strange fire to the altar. God rejects it.

I don’t know when I’m going to be freed from this book, but I look forward to it. I’m glad to know Christians don’t have to make themselves miserable reading stuffy volumes like Confessions in order to get to know God.

I hope Dante’s Inferno is more entertaining. It will be loaded with errors, but maybe there will at least be an amusing story.

Charlotte Sacrificed on the Altar of Pride

What’s happening in Charlotte is remarkable, but it’s not surprising. I expect things like this to happen more and more often, in Obama’s stuck-in-1968 America. I expect black people to riot over and over, regardless of the consequences or the slenderness of the rationale.

It’s just how things work these days. It’s now normal.

We should all take note of the facts in the Charlotte shooting.

1. The black man police shot was holding a pistol, which he refused to drop.

2. The officer who shot him is black.

3. The dead man’s brother blamed white people, saying we are all “f______ devils.”

4. The BLM crowd is rioting and targeting white people.

None of it makes any sense. Sometimes the police have to shoot people, and this was one of those times. The shooting was completely justified, and the dead man is 100% responsible for what happened to him. The cop is completely innocent. No one should be protesting.

If people are determined to protest, they should be angry at the police, not white people. This was a black-on-black shooting. White people were not featured players.

It’s as though white people and black people are married, and white people are the husband. Women tend to blame their husbands for all of their problems. It’s raining, so go and nag the husband. A black cop shot a black man in self-defense, so go and protest the existence of the white race.

Black people in America are self-destructing. The people who are rioting and promoting racism think they’re hurting whites, but they’re actually hurting themselves and everyone who looks like them. They’re driving businesses out of their areas. They’re making themselves unemployable. They’re driving their own property values down. They’re making it harder for black people to assimilate and share in the blessings this country offers.

When those problems manifest, that will be the fault of white people, too.

You can’t succeed if you insist on blaming others all the time. In order to fix a problem you caused, you have to take responsibility for it. What’s happening in black America right now is highly erosive. Black people are discouraging each other from taking the only attitude that will lift them up.

It’s bizarre, how BLM keeps choosing the wrong battles. Tamir Rice was killed by police in Cleveland, and it was murder, but the rioters didn’t get very excited there. Michael Brown was a vicious criminal who was killed in self-defense, but he became the face of the St. Louis riots. Black people in America are like Jews; as a group, they make very bad choices.

It’s frustrating for black people who see through the craziness. I know, because I talk to them and I see what they say online. They live inside gauntlets, where speaking their minds can lead to quick repercussions.

Suddenly, white racism is on the rise. There have always been nuts out there with far-out hateful views, but these days they are much more common. I keep seeing Internet comments containing words like “monkeys” and “animals.”

As a white man, I’m not worried about myself or other white people. Personally, I have God’s protection. Other white people are protected by superior numbers, superior wealth, superior power, and geographical separation. Most of us don’t have to spend a lot of time in areas where we will be subject to racist violence. There is no possibility that black people will rise up and destroy us; the worst possible outcome is that more of us will be subjected to violence. We will absorb it and survive.

We will prevail, but that’s not a good outcome, because we will live in a country where there is more hatred than ever.

Here’s the real problem: people can’t identify races correctly. They think the races are black, white, yellow, and red. That’s not how it works. There are only two real races: children of God and children of Satan. As long as we persist in identifying with our biological races, we will have unnecessary conflict and defeat.

In this country, black people have been taught that racism is okay. They’ve been taught to stick together against the non-black enemy. That won’t work, any more than becoming a skinhead will work for a white person. We have to start dropping our polluted, worldly cultures and unite in the culture of God.

I know black Christians, and they have a lot of issues with the people they know. They have friends and relatives with a lot of negative attitudes and behaviors. They struggle, because they want to improve themselves, but they will be called race traitors if they don’t toe the line. They are afraid of social isolation and guilt. These things hold them prisoner and pull them back into counterproductive habits.

People who are related biologically are united by a few strands of DNA. People who belong to God’s family can only be united by the Holy Spirit. You have to receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit. You have to pray in tongues so he can change you and help you to be aligned with other Spirit-led believers. Christians don’t teach these things; we’re too busy focusing on stupid, useless notions like hard work, the false prosperity gospel, positive thinking, and social justice. Those things don’t come from God. They are distractions that keep us divided.

It always makes me groan when a Christian gives his opinion about God, as if it matters. Where opinions exist, disunity exists. We are not supposed to have opinions. We are supposed to hear from God and adopt his positions, which are correct. Two Spirit-led Christians can’t have a serious, prolonged disagreement. The Holy Spirit will always lead us to the same conclusions, if we can hear him.

A lot of the lawless people burning buildings and attacking people think they’re Christians. So do a lot of the disgraceful characters posting racist comments about black people. In reality, they’re all in rebellion. They are disconnected from God.

I disavow my culture. I started some time ago. I used to be proud of my Southern heritage, and I was proud to be from Eastern Kentucky. I was insane. Eastern Kentucky is a white ghetto with trees. The culture is backward and unsuccessful. There are also some problems with Southern culture, and it’s important for me to reject them. Your culture has problems, too. Rejecting them isn’t disloyalty. It’s maturity and humility. It’s the way to break your chains.

No one on TV will speak honestly about what’s happening right now. They will coddle black people, and they will look for ways the government to fix things. They will issue ridiculous, empty cries for unity. I’m telling the truth. Riots are not protests. White people are not the problem. Insulting black people is not going to do anything to improve the situation. The Holy Spirit is the only way out, and that way out is only for individuals, not communities or ethnic groups.

Twenty years from now, if God hasn’t returned, black people will still be poor, and their neighborhoods will still be full of crime and poverty. Rioting will probably increase. That’s just reality. But individuals can rise out of that, with God’s help. We should focus on what we can get, not what we wish we could have.

It’s strange how the first black president presided over this predicament and even contributed to it. What a pitiable legacy.

Whatever your culture is, get over it. If you’re a believer, your race is Christian, and your hometown is heaven. Get in touch with the mayor, and he will tell you what to do.

Or keep floundering and enjoy your pride. Nobody can make you help yourself.

Hope for an Early Flight

I guess it’s weird to post two blog entries a few minutes apart, but I felt like I had something else to say.

One of the Youtube people I watch is convinced that Christians will be here during the Tribulation. I felt I should add my two cents. I do not believe Christians who are walking by faith will be here.

I will give you my reasons.

God loves to foreshadow what he does. He works in repetitive patterns, so people who have understanding given by the Holy Spirit will understand the way the universe works, and so they will not be taken by surprise. In the past, he has foreshadowed the Rapture and Tribulation, and he has indicated an intention to remove Christians from the earth before things get really bad.

Example 1: the flood.

The world became corrupted before the flood. Angels reproduced with women and gave rise to beings which were superior to human beings. They were bigger and stronger. They were presumably smarter and more talented. They polluted the earth with angel worship, and they probably received worship, themselves. They polluted our DNA and our morals.

People got so filthy, they wrote marriage contracts between human beings and animals. It sounds a lot like what’s happening today. We are already seeing incestuous marriages between parents and children. It has happened at least once; look it up.

God decided to purify the earth, just as he will purify it during the Tribulation. He drowned everyone except for eight people, and seven of those eight only survived because they were close to Noah.

They were removed from the earth, in a boat that floated above the waves. They were not drowned. They were preserved so they could repopulate the planet and restore the worship of God.

Did they suffer at the hands of the people who later drowned? Surely they must have. There had to be persecution. The world was disgusting. People hated God, and here was Noah, honoring God by building a boat in the desert, on a planet where it had never rained. If the wicked didn’t insult and abuse Noah and his family, it would be a major deviation from the general pattern of life on earth.

Surely, the good were mistreated, but they were not here when the real misery started. They were here while halfbreeds and angels were inflicting suffering, but they weren’t here when suffering started pouring down from God.

Another example: Sodom and Gomorrah.

Lot lived near Sodom, which was near Gomorrah. The people in these cities were cruel and sexually perverted. They were heavily into homosexuality, and not the gentle kind. God agreed to spare the cities if five decent people could be found, but those people could not be found. God sent angels to Lot, and the gay men of Sodom tried to rape them.

That bit about five people is important. If God would spare Sodom and Gomorrah for five people, why would he rain fire on the entire earth while millions of Spirit-led Christians still lived there?

God told Lot to get his family out before the destruction began. He didn’t burn the cities until Lot was safely on his way to a new home.

Third example: the parting of the Red Sea.

God told the Hebrews to flee Egypt. He led them to the edge of the Red Sea, and the Egyptian army chased them, intending to kill them. God opened the water, waited for the Hebrews to cross (with dry shoes), and then he closed the water on the Egyptians. He didn’t close the water on everyone and pick a few Hebrews out of it.

The pattern is very clear, and it would be out of character for God to deviate from it during the Tribulation.

The Tribulation can’t come while Christians are here in large numbers, because we pray all the time. We are the salt of the earth; our presence preserves it. God isn’t going to pour fire on the earth while millions of us are praying for him to have mercy on us and our neighbors. We have to be removed first; we would be a hindrance.

Does this mean everything is rosy for Christians? Sadly, no.

The Tribulation will be a time when God himself torments humanity. It will be worse than anything that has ever happened. But it won’t be the only suffering that will take place before Jesus comes. The ungodly will rain misery on Christians before the Tribulation begins. It’s already here. Gays are destroying Christian careers and businesses. We are absorbing huge numbers of illegal immigrants who will eventually vote for candidates belonging to the party that fights God the most. The strongholds of God are breaking down, and we are not protected the way we used to be.

It’s going to get worse. Many of us will be killed, tortured, imprisoned, robbed, and raped. But we will not be here when the real agony starts.

The things that will happen before the Tribulation will be bad enough. The weaker you are as a Christian, the worse it will be for you.

God refused to flood the world until Methuselah was safe with him. He refused to burn Sodom until Lot was safe. There is a limit to what he will do to people while his children are among them.

The good news: you may not be here when God burns the world. The bad news: you may be here to be tortured and killed. And it appears that bad things are going to happen to Israel; God will have to step in to prevent complete destruction.

Prepare, prepare, prepare. Don’t find yourself watching porn and doing lines of coke when the world really turns against you. A lot of Christians are storing food and guns. Great, but you should put prayer and repentance first. Your primary fortress is you.

Hope this is helpful.

Get That Stupid Cat off my Screen

What is Youtube for? It’s for posting boring videos of your cat. We all know this. Or it’s about posting clickbait in order to make money.

Those are clearly the main purposes of Youtube, but there is also a lot of useful content. You can study many, many subjects using Youtube. You can learn about almost any hobby. On top of all that, and most exciting: people are using Youtube to talk about God.

Christian Youtube videos didn’t make much of an impression on me until week before last. I knew there were bootleg videos of greedy prosperity preachers, and a few ambitious preachers put their own videos up, simply because not every preacher has a TV network that will accommodate him. The videos I’ve mentioned didn’t have a huge impact on me, but last week I started watching videos by random individuals, in which they gave their testimony and taught what God had shared with them.

That’s pretty neat.

These people aren’t pushing the prosperity lie. They don’t charge money. They don’t sell DVD’s. They’re not trying to turn God into a career. They have very little to gain, and if their employers catch them, they have a lot to lose. Many of them are more credible than the narcissists we see on TV.

A surprising number of people are posting videos about prophetic dreams and so on. There are a ton of videos warning Christians about Obama’s anti-God tendencies. A lot of the videos were made relatively recently. Here’s refreshing news: many of these videos were made by black people.

One of the frustrations I’ve endured while attending church in South Florida is dealing with liberal charismatic Christians. They don’t pray much, so they don’t get much guidance from God. As a result, they tend to hold onto the poisonous political beliefs of their parents and friends. They vote for abortion, homosexuality, and the persecution of the church. They see nothing wrong with it, because they have a supernatural blindness. They’re too proud to listen to correction from people who know better. This is a very big problem among blacks and Puerto Ricans, who traditionally hate Republicans.

It’s great to turn on Youtube and see that for some, the blue ice is melting.

I found a lady named Beverly Moore. I don’t know much about her. She sits at her laptop and shares dreams, and she offers correction to other women. She talks too slow, so her videos are longer than they need to be, but other than that, they’re a pleasure to watch. They prove not everyone is crazy.

She posted an interesting video criticizing Obama. She said she had voted for the man twice, which was upsetting, but since then she has come around. She says he may not be “the” Antichrist, but he is surely “an” antichrist. And she mentions the same issues I do; you can’t vote for one thing on Sunday and then vote for its opposite on Tuesday. I’ll embed the video. It’s long, so I completely understand if you don’t watch it, but it’s there in case you decide it’s worth it.

She posted another video about a wonderful dream she had. In the dream, she was a man’s girlfriend. The man was helping her move. Two professional movers were also helping. She kept complaining and shrieking. She was ungrateful and disrespectful. She was emasculating. Then God switched her roles, and she became the boyfriend. She got to see what men experience when they deal with…I’m not going to use the B-word…contentious women. In the video, she lays into women who won’t let men be men.

Good for her! You would think this would be obvious to women, but it’s not. Any woman who has dealt with a child who ridiculed and disobeyed her should know what it’s like for a man to deal with an emasculating woman, but somehow, many don’t make the connection.

You can’t be in charge unless people allow you to be in charge. You need a certain amount of respect. This is one of the reasons God throws people into hell. He can’t permit people who try to emasculate him to pollute heaven with their filthy presence.

Women complain about men not being men, but ungodly women won’t let men be men. And ungodly men can’t get relief, because they don’t treat God with respect. When you’re walking in God’s will, things start to line up and work in harmony.

I also found a guy named Shawn Weed. He’s a former marine. When he was in the corps, his friends killed him. They put a noose around his neck as a prank, and he died. He encountered a huge demon that grabbed him and started running toward the flames of hell.

He thought he was a Christian, and he thought he was a pretty good guy, so he was very confused by his experience. Fortunately for him, God sent him back, and now he tells other people what he knows, in order to save them. He’s pretty long-winded, but if you have time, his video is great.

He’s not charging. He’s not making a career out of it. He’s not telling the poor to max out their credit cards. In other words, he is not like Rod Parsley or Jerry Savelle.

Here’s a third Youtube warrior: Billy Hobbs. I mentioned him here a week ago. He was a drug addict and outlaw biker. He had to have neck surgery, and the surgeon made a mistake. He suffered some paralysis, and he lost the ability to work full time. He spent 21 days in a coma, fighting a spirit that wanted to take him.

Needless to say, he’s not an outlaw biker or an addict any more. He has a lot of insight into the things God really cares about.

These people aren’t right about everything. One interesting thing about people who have supernatural visitations and so on is that God will not always tell them every important truth. He allows some error to remain, because human beings failed in their responsibility to preserve knowledge. There are a lot of things we are supposed to know already, and it’s not his job to keep presenting all of it to us, over and over. We’re responsible for that. The people in the videos above don’t know everything, but they do seem to understand faith, humility, and teachability. That’s more than TV preachers can say.

Billy Hobbs thinks tongues aren’t for everyone, and that’s not true. The gift can be blocked, but you’re entitled to it. Pride can block it, and so can unbelief. Fortunately for me, I managed to receive it in spite of pride. Don’t ask me to explain; God does what he wants.

He says many people who speak in tongues don’t lead godly lives. That’s certainly true. One of the purposes of prayer in tongues is to cleanse you. It won’t happen instantaneously, and if you don’t use the gift assiduously, you can remain filthy. It doesn’t mean the gift isn’t essential or effective. It just means you wasted it.

For a few years now, I’ve been telling people that the age of the big church was dead. Prominent preachers are just too crooked and evil. They are killing and eating the people they’re supposed to help. I believe God showed me that what he really wanted was a grassroots church, where one person reaches ten people, correctly, instead of ten thousand, badly. The gospel should spread like the flu, from one ordinary person to another. When I see these videos, I consider it confirmation.

Satan’s method of spreading things works really well. One homosexual airline steward infected the whole world with AIDS. Supposedly, he killed 20% of the gay population in some major cities. If disease can spread that way, so can salvation. God doesn’t actually need TV. Paul didn’t have it. God doesn’t need gigantic churches, either. Greedy preachers need gigantic churches.

The funny thing about this is that God is using social media, which is generally a counterproductive thing. Facebook and Twitter are big drains. Youtube seems different. Perhaps it’s because Youtube doesn’t have a newsfeed that pours garbage into your heart every time you turn it on.

Sooner or later, Christians will be banned from the Internet. I often wonder…will our digital presence be preserved in some way, to help people who are trapped on earth during the Tribulation, or will it disappear entirely? If so, will that disappearance be part of humanity’s punishment?

God allowed the teaching he gave our predecessors to disappear.

Anyway, for now, Christian Youtubers are doing a lot of good. They may be beholden to Google, which is a somewhat evil, anti-God enterprise, but they’re not beholden to Mammon or narcissism, which are even worse. Many of the TV preachers are in the grip of something they will never be able to overcome…because they don’t want to overcome.

I started coming across these videos because I was watching videos about people’s visits to hell and heaven. A lot of people have claimed they’ve been to hell in visions or in the spirit. Some are lying; others are telling the truth. For two or three weeks, I was very caught up in this material.

Last week, a relative of mine had a near-death experience. I heard two different stories about it. The first said he didn’t go to work, and his boss found him unconscious, incapacitated by a diabetic coma. The second story, which appears to be correct, is that he was unconscious because he had an intestinal infection and vomited up a lot of blood.

He has been in the hospital for some time. My aunt called me and asked for prayer, and I had friends pray for him. He was on life support. At first I thought they expected him to be fine, but yesterday they told me they were having a meeting about his condition, and that they were going to have to test him for brain activity.

We were afraid he was going to die. Things looked very bad.

I had slacked off on prayer, because I had thought things were going well. Yesterday I resumed, and I spoke defeat to the spirits that wanted to take him. I asked God to bring him back and give him another chance. He’s a former yoga instructor; he has opened occult doors, and he was likely to go to hell.

I felt tremendous faith surging through me. Just crazy faith, like water through a fire hose. Prayer in tongues causes you to develop that.

My aunt called me again later in the day, and she said he was awake and speaking. He asked them to turn the TV on so he could watch football. He has some kidney problems and cirrhosis (he’s not a drinker), but they expect him to go home in a day or two. She said it was miraculous.

I don’t know if God had me watch the hell videos to give me motivation or what, but I’m very glad my cousin is still here.

If you have a testimony, maybe you should put it on Youtube. The world can only stand so many cat videos.

I Think I Hear Spitballs Bouncing off the Hull of the Ark

I am reviewing the news after a tasty McDonald’s breakfast coupled with an episode of Dennis Gage’s cable show, My Classic Car. What do I see before me? Yet another ridiculous attempt to discredit Jesus.

A few years back, James Cameron, who, having directed a successful movie about a sinking ship, is clearly an authority on ancient history, said he had found the tomb of Jesus. Now, we all know Jesus had a tomb. In fact, you can go to Jerusalem and visit TWO tombs of Jesus. If the line at one is too long, why, just go to the other one! But the one Cameron was pushing was different; he claimed the dead body of Jesus stayed in it permanently. If that were true, it would put a serious dent in Christianity.

Now a Jewish geologist–hello, Jewish–says he has proof Cameron’s tomb belongs to Jesus. Actually, here is what he says: “I think I’ve got really powerful, virtually unequivocal evidence that the James ossuary spent most of its lifetime, or death time, in the Talpiot Tomb.”

Not really the same as, “I proved this is the tomb of Jesus,” but that hasn’t kept the press from treating it as a conclusive debunking of Christianity.

People really need to stop falling for stories like this. Let me explain why we will never be presented with a legitimate permanent tomb of Jesus: if the Jews had known the location of his body, we would have been hearing about it for 2,000 years.

People seem to forget that religious Jews absolutely hate Jesus. They’re so angry at him, they’ll acknowledge a Satanist Jew or an atheist Jew, but they call Christian Jews “Christians of Jewish birth.” They say they are not Jewish. In reference to Jesus, they have said, “May his name be blotted out forever.” He is not popular with them.

They don’t talk about this much, because they believe persecution is strongly connected to their behavior. They don’t want to provoke anyone. In truth, they would still be persecuted even if they sewed their mouths shut and went to live in huts without electricity or telephones, because their real enemy is Satan, and he really doesn’t care what Jews do. He wants to eradicate them, period, and he will always have lots of servants handy who are willing to do the job.

Jews work very hard, to this day, to prove Jesus was a fake. The idea that they would sit around for two millennia, keeping quiet about the location of his dead body, is patently absurd. If someone proved Jesus was a fake, the parties in Israel and Brooklyn would last a month.

When Christians began to outnumber Jews, they persecuted Jews. Back when Jews outnumbered Christians, it was the other way around. They rounded us up and murdered us. Paul did this for a living; Christians were as terrified of him as European Jews were of Hitler. In the first century A.D., Jesus was already considered to be an enormous problem. If Jesus had been buried permanently in Jerusalem, Paul and his friends would have known, and they would have publicized it. We would still be hearing about it today. We are not.

There is a book called The Passover Plot. It suggests Christians paid off the Romans who guarded the tomb of Jesus. The idea is that Christians stole the body, hid it, and claimed Jesus was resurrected. Because they really wanted to dedicate their lives to a false religion, lose their jobs and property, lose all their friends, and be stoned to death.

Hal Lindsey, a Biblical scholar who makes guesses about eschatology, pointed out the obvious flaw in this theory. Aside from the fact that there is no evidence to back the story up, Roman soldiers were subject to the death penalty for relatively minor acts of disobedience. You can pay a guard to let you sneak into the movies, because very little will happen to him if you get caught. Paying a Roman soldier to face the death penalty would not be that easy. You can’t spend a bribe when you’re dead.

This “debunking” stuff has been going on for centuries. It’s asinine.

For some reason, the deniers love to claim Jesus married Mary Magdalene. It’s as if they read a bunch of Archie comic books and assumed that because the only women the books mentioned were Betty and Veronica, Archie must have married one of them. He could also have married Midge, but Moose would have beaten him to a pulp. In all likelihood, a lot of the motivation to pair Jesus with Mary Magdalene comes from the perverse pleasure of accusing him of having sex with a former prostitute.

It’s like the false stories about him, calling him “Jesus ben Pandera,” suggesting Mary was a prostitute and Pandera was the Roman soldier who fathered Jesus. Ho hum. Business as usual.

Jesus didn’t promote celibacy, but he didn’t marry, because God sent him to be the husband of the church. Also, his wife and children would have been worshiped; God didn’t want that. The Catholics already worship everyone he knew. His descendants would have been worshiped. His tomb would have become an object of idolatry. Actually, the two tombs promoted as his have already become objects of idolatry; people kiss and fondle the rock in order to absorb supernatural power.

Maybe there is a tomb belonging to a man with the common first name “Jesus,” and maybe his mother’s name was Mary and his dad’s name was Joseph. In a country where people don’t have last names, you would expect to find more than one tomb fitting that description, especially if you hated Christianity and made a point of searching. There must be two million graves like that in Mexico. “Here lies Jesus, son of Jose and Maria.” There are probably a thousand in Hialeah.

If you believe Jesus and serve him, he will eventually manifest himself to you, making all this noise irrelevant. He has manifested himself to me twice.

James Cameron hasn’t manifested himself to me even once; maybe he’s a myth, like The Most Interesting Man in the World.

Don’t pay any attention to the nonsense. If you’re relying on newspapers and Jews to teach you about Jesus, you are going to have a lot of problems. It’s like relying on Naomi Wolf to teach you about masculinity. Not that I’m thinking about anyone in particular. Certainly not a former Vice President.

But I digress.

The tomb of Jesus is a fake. The tomb of James Cameron will be very real. That about sums it up.