Another Win for Mr. Popularity

If I recall correctly, I started my first Facebook account in 2009. Actually, it may have been my second account. I have dim memories of checking Facebook out during my blogging heyday, which would have been several years earlier. I recall wondering why anyone would want Facebook. People “poked” each other and sent each other beer icons. It seemed utterly stupid. That sounds doesn’t sound like the Facebook of 2009. Anyway, my first really active account probably began a little over a decade ago.

I was an armorbearer for Rich Wilkerson at Miami’s Trinity Church, and I had a lot of church friends. I noticed that a lot of the people I knew had been drinking the Social Justice Kool-Aid. They hated Republican politicians, and they put up emotional posts espousing leftist causes. It was very disturbing, because they were very clearly out of touch with the body of Christ.

They were out of touch with their pastor, who was a conservative. He kept his politics quiet.

I got frustrated with Facebook because it showed me that most of the people I knew were hypocrites. They went to church to feel good, but they remained unchanged. You couldn’t tell them anything. When I shared things that would not be controversial at all among Christians who knew the Holy Spirit, I got a lot of static in return.

A few years later, I belonged to New Dawn Ministries. I didn’t know the pastor was an active pedophile. I posted things that would have gotten a lot of likes from knowledgeable Christians, but I got more static, and a lot of it came from the pastors. The pastor’s wife was especially strident and rude. She was a huge believer in the prosperity gospel, and she believed she and her husband were to be treated like royalty. We were expected to submit to them like servants.

I eventually became very open in my opposition to the church, calling it a cult and denouncing the pastors for telling my friends not to talk to me.

During this time, I used a fake Facebook name, as any intelligent person would. Facebook had a rule I didn’t know about. No fake names. Someone turned me in, and my account vanished instantly. The pedophile pastor put up a post about it. His theory was that God had smitten me. He said, “God don’t like ugly.”

I didn’t bother resurrecting that account. I started a new one and continued doing what I was doing. But one day God told me to get off social media. I was only too happy to do that. I called it “the little rapture.” It was very pleasant.

I still avoid Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. A Russian hacker took over my old Instagram account after I deactivated it, so it still exists.

I had found that social media interaction led to a lot of nonproductive stomach-churning argument with people who thought they knew a great deal yet were very ignorant. I wondered if I was supposed to continue. Was what I was doing a ministry? I can’t say, but if it was, it didn’t work very well. The return was not worth the aggravation.

Today I got a reminder of why I quit. I put something on the web a while back, and even though social media sites were not involved, someone who was offended linked to what I had published, and the flying monkeys attacked. It wasn’t a big deal, but it reminded me how vile the Internet is. I was accused of characteristics I don’t have. One person found out I was a Christian and said I was delusional.

A crowd of venomous, deluded people doesn’t like me. This is nothing new, and I know why it happens.

The voice of Internet haters is the voice of the Beast. He speaks through crowds. He has always spoken through crowds.

A crowd tried to rape the cherubs in Sodom, outside Lot’s house. The crowd was against Noah; God killed all of them and only spared 8 human beings. A crowd delighted in tormenting Samson. A crowd listened to Dathan and Korah and opposed Moses. A crowd got Aaron to make a golden calf. A crowd murmured against Moses, Caleb, and Joshua and died in the desert because of it.

A crowd defied God and insisted he give them a king when he wanted to give them prophets and priests.

Elijah was against the majority. In his time, there were only 7,000 men in Israel who didn’t worship Baal. A crowd of kids insulted Elisha, and God sent two bears to maul them. Crowds abused and killed the prophets. A crowd arrested Jesus. A crowd forced Pontius Pilate to kill him, even though Pilate was determined to let him go. A crowed jeered at him while he was dying on the cross.

Solomon literally married a crowd. He had hundreds of wives, and he listened to them instead of God. He worshiped their false gods and died in disgrace. Solomon was a failure. People forget that.

Under Ahasuerus, crowds rose up to murder Jews. Some believe this was a shadow of the Nazi persecution.

Crowds and peer pressure are evil. The Bible is against peer pressure and the voice of the crowd. The Bible says we are to be the head and not the tail. The head leads; it doesn’t follow. When a herd travels, one animal in front turns its head a certain way and walks in that direction, and the other animals follow as though they were its tail.

I have never been good at picking up on the consensus of the herd, and I have always hated peer pressure. Many times, I have tried to give in to it in order to be accepted, but it never worked. You have to be a certain kind of person in order to pull it off.

If you don’t fit in with the herd, be happy, because it may mean you were created to be a child of God.

Jesus said his sheep would hear his voice. There is always symmetry in the supernatural. Maybe there’s another voice you’re not hearing.

The Biblical figures who pleased God were generally outsiders. John the Baptist is a great example. His father was a temple priest, but John was not given a priesthood. He lived in a time when the Romans, not the Jews, chose priests. It was all political, which is another way of saying the Beast made the choices. Moses was cut out of his Egyptian family and social circle. Noah built a huge ship in the middle of the desert, which was certainly not in accord with the beliefs of his neighbors. Lot didn’t fit in with his neighbors. Elijah was rejected by his king and queen and had to go live in the wilderness. Jewish legend says Enoch lived by himself and rarely appeared before other people. Jesus had no home and no title.

The other day I was thinking about myself, and I wondered why I had never had any ambition to speak of. I think most men are driven to succeed by the fear that they will be perceived negatively if they don’t. I would like to be admired and receive approval, but the desires aren’t strong enough to get me out of bed every day at 5 so I can be the best or richest lawyer on earth.

I don’t care for awards. Competitions are inherently corrupt, and if you win a prize, what does it prove? It shows that a bunch of people whose opinions you probably don’t respect felt like acknowledging you for their own selfish reasons. If I think you don’t have the capacity to form an opinion worthy of respect, how can I expect to derive pleasure from your trophy?

Cash prizes…now those are okay, regardless of whether they come from people I respect. I can use money to buy more tools.

Trophies are not very valuable. When you die, they stay here on earth, filling up with dead flies. They’re usually made of plastic, so it’s not like you can melt them down and keep the metal.

Oscars are made of bronze, which is a cheap metal. The gold exterior is plating. Olympic gold medals are currently made of 92.5% silver, which is okay, but have you checked silver’s price lately? Even including the tiny amount of gold on the outside, a gold medal won’t get you far in a barter economy. It may well be that Nobel medals, made of gold alloy, are the only major prizes that have intrinsic value.

The Greeks, whose culture was completely Satanic, loved prizes. They loved honoring athletes, which is very fitting, because athletes have short careers. Satan loves giving people things that rot quickly, in order to deprive them of eternal riches. Greek athletes got all excited over winning crowns made of leaves. Wonder how long it took those to wilt.

I’m sure Michael Jordan has a huge number of prizes. That’s great, but how would he look on the court today? He would have a tough time with talented high school kids. He might do fine for a short time, but forget playing competitively for a whole game. He has prizes for things he can no longer do. If you serve God, you receive prizes in heaven, and they last forever.

Maybe I would feel different if I had won a lot of prizes or if I had received a lot of approval from human beings. Public approval is like a bribe. It clouds your judgment.

I’ve always had the feeling that lack of ambition was a good thing. I think that’s an unconventional belief.

While I was at Trinity Church, I got a prize. They called it the Abishai prize. The idea came from the infected doctrine of Denny Duron, a football coach masquerading as a pastor. His daughter married Richie Wilkerson, who went on to be the proud pastor of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.

The idea is that Abishai was a nobody. In Duron’s brand of Christianity, Abishai had no talents and received no honor, but he was special because he was happy to continue working without recognition or reward.

In the Bible, Abishai was an honored military man of high rank, so one wonders where Duron got his ideas.

Duron wrote a filthy pamphlet called The Abishai Anointing, and the basic thrust was that some Christians are very special and you’re not. You should be happy to live in the shadow of people like Denny Duron and carry their laundry and so on, because it’s a big honor to be ignored.

Trinity used people and rewarded sycophants and rich people, so the leaders knew there were people who were not happy about being ignored. I suppose this is why they came up with the Abishai award. It was for selfless leaders who didn’t mind being treated like pack animals.

I didn’t completely understand what was going on back then, and I was slightly honored to receive the award, even though I knew they treated me badly. I got my two minutes onstage, and I was expected to be happy about it and find comfort in it during my remaining years of peonage.

One day I popped the prize, which was a cheap certificate, out of the very cheap frame and put a photo in it. I burned Duron’s ridiculous booklet, and I probably burned the certificate. It’s always unpleasant to learn that you’ve been suckered, even partially.

I hadn’t wanted a prize to begin with, but if you’re going to give me one, don’t bend over backwards to make it an insult.

I criticized Duron and his nonsense publicly after that, which could not have done much to enhance my popularity.

It’s a good example of the sort of earthly rewards I’ve received from preachers and churches.

If they really wanted to honor me, they could have made some effort to clean the area where I worked in the kitchen, instead of leaving it to me and my friends to clean piles of mouse manure out of drawers and treat them with bleach. They could have stopped piling junk on the surfaces where I made pizza that netted them $12 per pie. They could have backed me up when they told me to get the kitchen in shape, instead of siding with a hotheaded underpastor who responded to my efforts by standing up for dangerous filth and telling me I was the problem.

The whole church was like a clown act. It was as if little kids had broken into a building and set up a church. The best way to get in trouble was to try to teach people how to behave responsibly. They hated that.

The mouse manure is back. That’s my guess. It’s very dangerous, and feeding people from a kitchen full of excrement is despicable, but Trinity doesn’t care about reality. They only care about image and money.

Today I got a call from my aunt. I rarely hear from her. She wants to decorate my parents’ grave for Memorial Day, at her expense. That’s nice of her.

She never got to hear my dad’s conversion testimony. She was not at his funeral. She had an appointment for someone to come and measure for blinds.

Her son and daughter-in-law were present, and they heard the testimony. I guess they didn’t tell anyone. That’s surprising, because it was quite a testimony, and I didn’t just deliver it so people could be amused at the viewing. I hoped it would help them.

I told her about his conversion today on the phone. I don’t expect anything to come of it, but you never know.

It’s considerate of her to decorate the grave, but I’m not very excited about cemeteries and mortal remains. My mom and dad aren’t in a hole in Kentucky. Everything here on earth will be destroyed, so putting a lot of effort into caring for a grave is not that appealing to me. After my aunt goes, I plan to do nothing whatsoever to maintain the grave. I don’t have any desire to visit it or to see Eastern Kentucky again. It’s a disappointing place.

A tombstone is a lot like a trophy. It honors a person without actually helping them, and a nice tombstone doesn’t make you a success. There are plenty of people in hell who have beautiful graves.

Maybe I should make burial arrangements for myself, but do I really care? At the moment, I have no will. I was working on one, but my friend Travis died, and he’s one of the people I wanted to bless. Now I can’t do anything for him. I suppose I could help other people.

If the money is wasted, which will almost certainly happen if I die intestate, I won’t care. I’m not going to be sitting in heaven watching unimportant things happen on earth.

I don’t care what happens to my body. I won’t be here to see, and if I were, I still wouldn’t care. I’ll be finished with it, forever. I don’t care what happens to things I scrape off a plate after dinner. What’s the difference?

I’ll be glad to get rid of this thing. I miss not being farsighted. I’m not thrilled about sagging and deteriorating. I don’t like the feeling of greatly diminished potential. There are so many things I can’t look forward to now.

People teach that our dead bodies will be raised and transformed. I don’t think that means you have to protect your dead body. I’m sure that if Jesus can resurrect people who died in explosions, he can fix whatever happens to my carcass.

When I let people and things go, I really let them go. I’m grateful for that, because I’ve seen what happens when people hold on too long.

It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I don’t care about people and things I know I can’t change.

The crowd is getting very ugly. How much time do we have left? Even human promoters pull acts offstage when crowds get sufficiently hostile. How long should we stay here while unbelievers hurl garbage at us?

It’s good to be reminded of my outsider status. Not that it wasn’t already clear.