Not Sure I Care

I have been working on my new site. What a mess.

I had a huge number of posts before I moved. Not all have been republished. The last six months are up, and there is some 2003 stuff. That’s about it.

I don’t know when, if ever, I’ll get the other stuff working. It’s a tremendous amount of work, and to be honest, there are a lot of old posts I just don’t care enough about to republish. And there are old posts that seem inappropriate in view of the changes in my life and outlook.

Sorry the Haloscan comments are gone. I don’t think they’re necessary any more. I needed them because of spam problems on the old site, and I’m hoping the same issues won’t arise here.

Phin graciously volunteered to send me a new theme to make the site look better. It will have three columns, a lot like the old site. I don’t know when it will arrive. The nice thing about WordPress is that it will go up instantly, once I upload it.

Aaron says there are ways to make WP more secure, so I’ll be implementing those. When he tells me what they are.

I appreciate all the comments on Communion. Based on what I’ve read, I’m inclined to think there is no reason it can only be done in a church.

I saw something interesting in a video last night. One of the items my sister brought me was a Perry Stone DVD about cleansing your house. As you probably know, in Christianity, “house” can refer to your home, or to your body. Some Christians believe that the presence of certain objects in your home can prevent you from having peace and prosperity and safety. I agree with that. I suppose everyone is familiar with the story of Joshua’s army losing the battle because of stolen treasures.

Oddly, I had been thinking about this idea the day before I watched the video.

Stone mentioned an interesting story. I can’t recall whether it was in the DVD or not. I also watched a couple of his Youtubes. He said he toured Jericho. They’ve been doing a lot of excavating there. His guide showed him a part of the wall, and in the wall, there was an embedded clay jar that had been cut open. The guide told him a baby’s remains had been found in it. He said the early inhabitants of Jericho used to sacrifice their children, and–if I recall correctly–this one had been placed in the wall to make the pagan gods bless the wall and keep it strong. Something like that.

Preachers lie a lot, I am sorry to say. They make things up, to make their sermons and teachings more entertaining. I decided to check this story out, because it sounded a little too neat.

It turns out Stone was right. You can Google “jar-burial” and find out. The ancient Canaanites used to kill their children and put them in jars. I’m sure you can guess which children were most often victimized. The eldest sons. And one item I found suggested that at least one excavated victim died at about ten years of age. Most were newborns, but that was not a hard and fast rule.

Think of that.

These days, we sacrifice the unborn to the god of pleasure and irresponsibility. But we kill them while they’re out of the parents’ sight, and we kill them as young as possible. That makes it easier, not just medically, but psychologically. If women had to see their unborn babies killed in front of them, abortion would be much rarer (and less lucrative). At least I hope it would.

The Canaanites were apparently more “advanced” and “progressive.” They were so cold, they could raise their children and name them and get to know them. And THEN slaughter them and have their bodies sealed up in their homes or other structures.

I think Stone was claiming that the walls of Jericho were, themselves, cursed by the presence of accursed objects, and that that’s why they were destroyed.

We don’t build walls or houses on the corpses of babies any more. But we do build careers and marriages on them. Have an abortion so you can go to school and get a good job. Have an abortion so you’ll have a better chance of landing a husband. That’s the thinking. You have to wonder how safe a life is, when it’s built on a foundation of abortion.

It’s peculiar; the near-sacrifice of Isaac and the actual sacrifice it presaged seem to be righteous parodies of the actions of the ancient pagans. God wanted a servant as devoted to him as the pagans were to their idols, but he didn’t want to permit the sacrifice. Instead, he intended to sacrifice his own eldest son. This underscores the difference between false gods and the real thing. False gods take, but the real God gives. You can give to God, but you can’t outgive him.

A number of times in my life, I have gotten rid of things that I thought were obstacles. I threw out the book Naked Lunch because it was so vile and disgusting I didn’t want it near me. I bought a Koran and started reading it, but after I learned that the Muslims considered it a physical embodiment of God, it seemed like an idol to me, so I dumped that, too. Last night I tossed some DVDs that made me uncomfortable. And a big pile of drawings from art classes I had taken. Maybe forty pounds.

I had been wanting to get rid of the drawings for a long time. I created them back in the days when I hoped to get a comic strip published or to become an animator. I took classes to sharpen my skills. The vast majority were quick, vague sketches of nude models; you couldn’t make anything out, because they were just a few strokes of charcoal. A few were more detailed. I got rid of everything, except for some items that were clearly harmless. Copies of masterpieces and so on.

The art world is seriously screwed up. I took a class from a guy at Florida International University, and I remember two things about him. First, he often gushed about total crap, but he sometimes insulted people with real talent. Second, he seemed completely consumed with lust. You could feel it when he came in the room. I think some people become artists largely because it makes it easier to get other people’s clothes off. Maybe this is how this guy got started. I don’t know. Generally, he was a good instructor. But something there was not right.

I took some classes at Parsons, in New York, and I remember a creepy incident. A nude model failed to show up, so the instructor in charge of rounding up models took her place. He stripped from the waist down, and then the model showed up, and there was some kind of confusion, and he had to do some paperwork. He stood at the front of the room for maybe five minutes, working on his papers and talking to students, wearing only a golf shirt. It was obvious he was reluctant to pull his pants back on. So odd.

I’ll tell you something which ought to be obvious. You can learn to draw very well, without studying naked models. In fact, the way cloth stretches and folds and drapes over the human form teaches you a lot about how figures should be drawn. But I don’t run the schools.

I also tossed some Kevin Smith DVDs. He has gotten so gross, and he was so offensive in Dogma, I prefer not to have that material displayed in my living room. In what appears to be desperation, he just made a revolting, nudity-filled comedy about the filming of a low-budget porno. I don’t think that was a smart move. He says he’s a serious Christian, and I have no reason to doubt him, but I think he’s way off track with his strange conviction that filth and blasphemy mesh smoothly into a valid Christian lifestyle.

When I was getting my last book ready for publication, I worked to remove things that I considered problematic, but I didn’t do a great job. I hope I’ll get a chance to revise it.

It occurred to me today that losing so many old blog entries might be a therapeutic purge. I try not to worry about losing old material; holding onto the old is crippling for a creative person. More often than not, the best way to improve an essay is to delete it and start over. Maybe a life is the same way. Strip down and rebuild.

One more interesting thing before I go.

I’m not big on eschatology, because it’s a mistake to try to predict the end of time. It’s better to try to live right and not worry about the tribulation and the rapture and so on. I remember 1984, when a whole bunch of people were convinced the world was about to end. Didn’t happen. Still, I can’t help getting drawn into the subject, and last night, I succumbed.

Perry Stone was talking about signs and wonders. He thinks we have been living in an age ruled by Gentiles, and that it’s the last age before the end of the world. He’s convinced that living believers will be raptured, and that there will then be a seven-year tribulation here on earth. And he says we are seeing signs. For example, he talked about roaring waves and so on. And here we are, in the post-tsunami, post-Katrina era. Post-Nargis.

Do you know what “Katrina” means? He said it meant “cleansing,” but that’s a little misleading. It’s a form of “Catherine,” which comes from the same Greek word that gives us “catharsis.” It means “pure.” Spooky.

He also referred to the passage that says that at the end of time, it will be as it was at the time of Noah. Well, Noah lived before the extermination of a human race absorbed by evil. Aaron says the Jews believe that one of the last straws, before the flood, was the creation of marriage contracts between humans and animals. I had never really thought about the passage relating Noah to the end of the world, but it has to be a reference to evil, because that is what distinguished Noah’s era.

Stone also mentioned Comet Hale-Bopp, which appeared recently, and which last appeared at about the time Noah was commanded to build the ark. I looked it up, and it’s true. And he noted that Comet Shoemaker-Levy, which broke in pieces, began hitting the planet Jupiter on Tisha B’Av, 1994. The most ominous day in the Jewish calendar. The day both temples fell.

Jupiter is the same person as Zeus. People who worshipped Zeus use to sacrifice pigs. A couple of centuries before Christ, a Roman emperor put a statue of Zeus in the temple and used the altar to sacrifice pigs. This was part of the struggle between Jewish ways and Hellenism, which continues today. Only today, the world fights to absorb and defuse Christianity as well as Judaism.

Non sequitur, I guess. Also, Stone claims the reason a herd of pigs was present when Jesus expelled the demons from the Gadarene demoniac was that pigs were raised so Zeus-worshipers could sacrifice them. Zeus was worshiped in the Middle East as Ba’al-Shamayim, the Babylonian sun god.

Fascinating stuff. But like I said, I am not going to waste time trying to pinpoint the end of history, so I can have my credit cards maxed out on that day.

That’s it. I got things to do.