Miami’s Grinch Successfully Dumps his Load

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe he thinks converts are damned for some reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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