Here is Your Reward for Serving Your Country

As much as I admire people who serve in the military, sometimes I wonder what they were thinking when they signed up.

Lots of us want to defend our country. Lots of us are willing to make sacrifices. What would drive me crazy, however, would be dealing with the bureaucracy, the waiting, and the foul-ups. It’s unbelievable.

Military people are slaves. They don’t call themselves that, but it’s true. If you have a job you can’t leave, in which your superior can command you to perform a task which probably includes being killed, you are a slave. Military people are always at the mercy of the people who run their services. When those people screw up, which happens all the time, there isn’t a whole lot our servicemen can do. They have to put up with it and suffer.

My dad was a soldier in the Korean War. He got very lucky and avoided combat. His platoon or whatever was on the way to Korea, and he was called aside to play in a band. Nonetheless, he’s a veteran, and he is entitled to stuff from the government. Now that he’s demented, I need to find out what they will give him.

In order to get this information, I have to sign my dad up for the VA website. In order to do that, I have to have his service record. In order to get that, I have to sign up for a site called Milconnect.

Signing up for Milconnect is basically impossible unless you served recently. My dad served quite a while ago, and the DoD, in its wisdom, decided not to put his records in their online system. Because, you know, who seriously expects Korean War veterans to need benefits? That could never happen.

I tried to sign up at the VA site. They sent me to the Milconnect site, which gave me an error. That sent me to a site called Iris something or other. That site told me to call a number. I called that number. The rude lady who answered told me 1) she could not do anything to help, 2) I should call the people at DEERS (the organization that handles the online records, I think), and 3) she had no supervisor I could talk to.

Evidently, she is the President of the United States. She answers to no one.

Of course, she was lying.

I called DEERS. They assured me the people at the first number could help. I called the first number again. I went around and around, back and forth. I spent 45 minutes on hold. Finally, someone connected me to a woman who had the answer.

Everything was fine then, right? No, because the last lady kept telling me she couldn’t help me. I kept asking new questions and rephrasing things, because I knew how the bureaucrat mind works. You can’t tell them what you need and expect them to figure out what to do. You have to ask THE EXACT QUESTION THEY ARE PROGRAMMED TO RESPOND TO. Until you guess that question, they squirm to get free, because getting free is their only real goal. I felt like I was wrestling with Proteus (look it up). Finally, she sent me to a website that allowed me to request my dad’s records. By FAX.

I am not kidding. I guess no one who works with the government will be surprised. The government, in 2018, insists on using fax machines. This technology went bust in what? Maybe 2010?

I have a fax, but why would I connect it to a phone line in 2017, when I moved to this house? The land line barely works, and NO ONE FAXES ANY MORE.

The website was amazing. They had nice forms I filled out online, and then instead of processing the forms online, the way every other organization on earth (outside of the government) does, they made me print it and fax it.

I had to scan the printout, turn it into a PDF, and pay a fax website to send it in. I could have mailed it, but that would have added days of waiting.

Shouldn’t the mere existence of fax websites suffice to let the world know that faxes have been replaced by computers? Faxing things from a website is like putting your riding horse in your car.

All of this only took around 4 hours. Should have taken 10 minutes. My guess: business as usual for military people. I have heard their stories. Constant screwups.

My dad told me a story once. The Army made his platoon crawl through ice water for some reason. They did this outdoors in the winter. Then they didn’t provide shelter or dry clothing. Everyone had to stand around in wet clothes, trying not to die. They stuck their arms straight out, like gingerbread men, trying to keep their freezing fatigues from touching their bodies.

Then they got good news. The Army was sending hot onion soup. The trucks arrived, and out came the soup. Boiled onions in plain water.

I feel like I got a tiny piece of the military experience today. I am so lucky I never got drafted.

My dad served during a shooting war, and he witnessed atom bomb tests. Maybe that will get him special stuff. I don’t know. Often, GI goodies are tied to income and net worth, and the thresholds are not high. Whatever. One way or the other, we will find out. I think.

They say Donald Trump is shoving his boot in the VA’s rear pretty far, forcing it to shape up and treat people better. I hope that’s true. We treat former soldiers like aborted babies. No one wants to look at them or deal with them.

I can’t figure out why the websites are so bad. The government always overpays for things and gets shoddy work. Good websites aren’t that expensive. If they were, little online retailers wouldn’t survive. If we can pay almost two million dollars for every Tomahawk missile, you would think we could manage to spring for two or three websites that work.

If memory serves, I have been told we can get $1800 per month. I have a feeling it will turn out not to be true. If it is true, I expect them to make mistakes and turn us down several times at first. Then I expect them to tell me it can’t be done. Then I expect to locate the one competent person who makes it happen. You always find that person if you hold out long enough. In the entire US government, there are approximately three.

Meanwhile, a few thousand disabled veterans will die listening to hold music. The Iraqis and Afghans couldn’t get them, but our bureaucrats will put them in their graves with Chuck Mangione.

I’m all done. Let’s not think of the 400 other things I needed to get done today. My dad will have frozen ziti for dinner, and I may have ice cream and a Powerade. The dump closed 21 minutes ago, so it looks like the garbage will ferment in my garage for another 48 hours.

If you served in the military, God bless you and keep you. He better, because no one else gives a crap about you.

Atheist Missionary Reviles Fallen Rival

I have been reading about John Chau, the man who tried to evangelize North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean. If you haven’t heard about him, the story is brief. There are a few dozen or maybe a few hundred tiny black people on the island. They are completely backward. They don’t wear clothing, they have no technology, they can’t make fire, they are illiterate as far as anyone knows, and they are extremely xenophobic. With some exceptions, they try to kill anyone who lands on the island, and their success rate is high.

In Mark 13:10, Jesus said the end of this age would come after the “gospel of the kingdom” had been preached to all peoples. The word I translate as “peoples” supposedly means “peoples joined by practicing similar customs or common culture,” so it may not be synonymous with “nations.”

I put “gospel of the kingdom” in quotation marks, because I don’t believe the gospel of salvation is the same as the gospel of the kingdom. We’re supposed to inherit the kingdom of God here on earth; it’s inside us. A lot of people preach salvation, tell their converts they are permanently saved no matter what they do, and never go on to teaching about the kingdom. I think most missionaries don’t know what the kingdom is.

Chau belonged to All Nations, a charismatic group which is trying to see to it that all peoples are reached.

The story says he made several approaches to the Sentinelese. The first time, he brought gifts for them and proclaimed his love for them. They ran him off, firing arrows at him. He made more attempts, and a boy shot an arrow at him, piercing the waterproof Bible he carried. He eventually had himself dropped on the island with no way off, and he was killed.

Nice people.

It is illegal to visit North Sentinel Island because it is believed the natives have no immunity to common pathogens the rest of us carry. Indian anthropologists visited successfully some years ago and threw coconuts to the natives, and the news stories don’t say it caused an epidemic, but in an unrelated incident, natives on another island supposedly died after drinking from a plastic jug that washed ashore.

I don’t know if Chau was supposed to visit the island. I don’t think he was. Ordinarily, when people who are Spirit-led evangelize, God sends them to people who are receptive. It’s a crazy thing to watch. Even hard core Jews and Muslims have been known to accept Jesus quickly. When you choose your own mission, you’re not likely to get as much support from God.

We’re not supposed to go wherever we want and try to evangelize. We’re supposed to wait for God to send us. Paul was not allowed to go into Asia to preach. A carnal Christian might get angry at a person who refused to preach in a certain area, but we’re supposed to obey God, not our egos.

Carnal Christians are always burdening us with jobs God doesn’t want us to do. “Crawl a mile on your knees with a cross on your back.” “Flail yourself on Easter until you bleed profusely.” “Tithe.” They waste our energy, and because God doesn’t help us with the things they tell us to do, we fail and become discouraged and bitter.

God shows evangelists where to cast their nets. In the Bible, the lake of Galilee represents the earth, and fish represent people. The disciples were fishermen, and on one occasion, they fished all night and caught nothing. Jesus then told them where to cast their nets, and they got more fish than they knew what to do with. Jesus did this so future evangelists would know they were supposed to wait for his orders.

Maybe God told Chau to preach on the island, but it does not look that way.

The public reaction to his trip has been disturbing. People are ridiculing him. Many are glad he died. Many are demanding that the Sentinelese be left in their ignorance and squalor. Some cite the danger of disease, but others are just furious at Christianity and white people, even though Chau was not white.

Boston Globe columnist Renee Graham wrote a scathing piece about Chau. It’s shocking. The title: “Missionary didn’t die from tribesmen’s arrows. He was killed by his own arrogance.” That may be true, but it could be put more kindly, and a non-Christian who doesn’t hear from God is not really in a position to draw the conclusion anyway.

Here are her last two paragraphs:

Some Christian compatriots have already anointed Chau as “a martyr.” He’s not. He did not die in defense of his religion. Instead he made a fatal miscalculation in deciding that his way and his God were the only acceptable path. He cared more for his flawed ideas about saving souls than about respecting lives.

Chau died trying to force on others his way of life; the Sentinelese did what they deemed necessary to protect theirs.

“Flawed ideas.”

Graham is a missionary, too. She is a missionary for atheism or whatever it is that she believes. She is against Christianity, and she takes Chau to task for believing and evangelizing.

That’s pure antichrist. People who belong to the Beast come up with all sorts of rationales for preventing evangelism, which is the sole reason God allows Christians to remain on earth after receiving salvation.

Her blatant persecution is really something. I’ll bet she would get in trouble with her editors if she called Islam or Hinduism false religions based on “flawed ideas.”

The Boston Globe is now, openly, an instrument of evangelism for atheists. What a strange development.

Atheists have always been ardent evangelists for their faith. They can be very shrill and pushy. Well, it goes farther than that. They have murdered, imprisoned, and enslaved countless people in socialist countries, trying to stamp out Judaism and Christianity.

How can you be angry at a man who tried to share the love of God with others, even if you think God doesn’t exist? How can you have no respect for his good intentions? It’s not a reasonable stance; it comes from demons. I can understand being angry at a person who risks infecting primitive people with diseases, but most of Chau’s critics are angry about his evangelism, not his microbes.

Incidentally, the disease argument is not very strong. The highest estimate for the population of the island is in the hundreds. These people have been there for thousands of years, and their numbers don’t increase. What does that mean? High infant mortality and short lifespans. The Sentinelese have been suffering a critical health crisis for as long as they’ve existed. They are a failed people. There are ways to reach them and improve their lives, without spreading disease.

The world is filling up with hatred of Christians, and we’re acting like the frog in the mythical story of the pan on the stove. Most of us will be sitting complacently when the water starts to boil, because we don’t listen to God. In the past, the hatred was more covert, but now it’s blatant and pervasive, and it’s going to get much worse, very soon.

Most of us will be like Jews who waited to long to leave Hitler’s Europe. Most Christians ridicule those who say we’re in for persecution resembling that which Hitler inflicted on the Jews. In time, they will see that we were right.

The Sentinelese make me wonder how many peoples have not been reached. I read something interesting: according to some Bible translations, Peter said Christians were “expecting and hastening” the end of this age, suggesting we could speed up the return of Jesus. Maybe we’re supposed to be praying for God to help missionaries get the job done.

Talk about a worthy objective for prayer. This world is like a full diaper. I’m for anything that expedites the termination of the project. The sooner this age ends, the sooner the messianic age begins.

I’m not sure Peter was understood correctly, though. He may have meant “hurrying toward” instead of “hastening.” There is some evidence that God planned for Jesus to return after 2000 years, and if that’s true, can we make any difference? Maybe we can shift things a few, or a few hundred, years. That would certainly be worth praying for.

It’s strange seeing leftists stand up for squalor, ignorance, poverty, xenophobia, violence, and a high death rate. They’re always trying to control others, forcing them to accept their odd culture in its entirety. In the case of the Sentinelese, they are striving to keep “little brown people”–the people they always say they’re trying to help–in a position of weakness and failure.

For all we know, the Sentinelese have a patriarchal society in which women and girls are slaves. They may kill homosexuals. Maybe they’re trying to kill off certain species on their island. They hunt and eat meat. They may have all sorts of customs leftists would hate. You would think leftists would be trampling each other, trying to get to the island to correct the natives.

The Sentinelese are kept isolated by a demonic stronghold. Satan wants to prevent Jesus from returning, so he walls people off. That’s what’s really happening. Sooner or later, the Sentinelese will be reached, or they will disappear. You can’t stop prophecy with a few arrows. My own ancestors probably killed missionaries with primitive weapons. If so, it didn’t stop them.

Wow. Where would I be if leftists had stopped missionaries and educators in 100 AD? I would be illiterate. My most impressive piece of technology would probably be a simple iron knife or axe. I’d worship ridiculous false gods. I’d live in a society where many women died in childbirth and most kids died in infancy. Most people I knew would be dead by 35. Thank goodness no one had the common sense to preserve my ancestral culture. It was inferior and toxic.

Where did we get the backward idea that primitive cultures are as good as, or better than, advanced cultures? I know Montaigne put the general notion forth in a silly essay about “cannibals.” What are the odds that he actually knew anything about “cannibals”? Slim. He lived in France.

Interesting thing: overwhelmingly, when presented with a choice, primitive people choose Western culture over whatever it is they have to begin with. They learn to read and buy TV’s. It’s pretty unusual for people from sophisticated cultures to go the other way. Liberals from Cambridge, Massachusetts aren’t knocking themselves out trying to move to huts in New Guinea.

Maybe if things keep getting crazier, leftists will start refusing to teach their kids to read. As it is, many of them are against vaccinations.

I hope some of the Sentinelese get to know God. It’s a shame to see their lives amount to so little. I don’t think they go to hell, because the Bible says that where there is no law, there is no sin. That doesn’t mean it’s okay for them to have no relationship with God here on earth. Every human being is supposed to know God and receive salvation and sanctification.

The attacks on John Chau are sick. I hope Christians are taking notice of them. Many of the people who are celebrating his death today would gladly take life from the rest of us if they could.

Temporary Resource Pops Up Nearby

I am considering leaving The Compound and going to a Christian conference.

Years ago, God told me the age of big churches was over. They disgrace themselves over and over, and they turn people into pastor-worshipers. They invent bad doctrine in order to extract money from people. When a man who runs a church of 2000 people gets his doctrine wrong, 2000 people lap it up and catch the disease from him.

I’ve been expecting to see a different kind of church, composed of unpaid individuals who minister one-on-one. Christians always assume God needs TV cameras to reach people, but it’s a lie Satan uses to steer people into the arms of liars. The apostles converted half of the world on foot, before electricity, in a very short time.

I think I’m seeing God’s plan materialize. If you go to Youtube, you can find many videos from obscure preachers who go out and heal and cast out demons. They’re not connected to TV networks. They are not rich. They don’t charge. They don’t herd people into auditoriums and try to harness them to work for silly carnal campaigns and projects.

The last two churches I belonged to were big on projects. One of them had a huge campaign to help Haiti after the earthquake. The pastor said, “We’re in Haiti for the long haul.” Then the project quietly evaporated. He had another project: the 2020 Vision. He made it seem like it was his idea. Turned out zillions of preachers had already used the same gimmick. The church was going to convert a certain number of people by 2020. The campaign pooped out quickly, and everyone forgot about it.

Church projects sound great, but they don’t work unless God himself starts them. Usually, that is not the case.

If Satan can get church members to waste their time and money on church projects, he can divert them from useful ministry.

The Youtube guys are likely to end up running big organizations if they don’t watch out, and they, too, will end up turning people into servants instead of brothers and sisters. For now, though, they’re doing a lot of good work. They show up in public places, pray for people, cast out demons, heal the sick, and move on. It’s easy to resist a pastor who tries to persuade you with a reheated sermon one of his buddies wrote, but miracles get people’s attention.

Satan spreads iniquity the same way he spreads plagues. Individuals make contact, and contagion is accomplished. Christianity is supposed to be spread the same way. Instead, we focus on stadiums and big buildings. Every one of us is supposed to be a powerful ambassador of God, fully capable of reaching people, but to a great extent, we give up our power and leave the work to a few individuals who live in front of cameras.

One of the Youtube preachers is named Torben Søndergaard. I had to use “copy” to get that funny O that looks like Saturn. He’s from Denmark, which is not a very godly place. He runs an outfit called The Last Reformation. They go all over the world, doing their thing.

They baptize people with water and the Holy Spirit. Sometimes they do both at once. Sometimes demons manifest during baptism and depart.

They have events called “kickstarters.” They show up in various places and teach. I would like to see it in person. I don’t have any illusions. Every big Christian movement eventually becomes corrupt, and I don’t put my trust in men. Nonetheless, they seem to be doing good things now.

I found out Søndergaard is having a kickstarter in December, about eighty miles from me. Imagine that.

I would like to be baptized again. I don’t know if that’s permitted, but I don’t see why not. Baptism is ritual immersion, and Jews immerse themselves many times.

I have already been baptized twice, and I think it was done improperly both times.

The first time I was baptized, I was in Europe with my family. We were in an old church somewhere. I don’t take this baptism seriously. My mother reached into a font and put water on my forehead. She always had a strange attraction to the Catholic church. Women are drawn to the pageantry and the emasculated, feminine, nonthreatening priests. She hadn’t done a good job of teaching me about God, and she was worried about me, so she made this powerless gesture.

The second time I was baptized, I belonged to a little charismatic church south of Miami. Some of us gathered by a pond near some condos, and one of the elders put me under. I don’t recall hearing anything about repentance or cleansing. When I came up, he asked me if I had anything I wanted to say. I will never forget what I said. Here it is: “I think something’s biting my foot.”

Baptism is supposed to be an event of supernatural power. I didn’t know that. It should be about cleansing and deliverance, as well as the public proclamation that you belong to Jesus. Many people experience supernatural things during baptism. I did not, and I suspect I should have.

I don’t know if Søndergaard’s crew will be baptizing, but they will surely have useful information about it.

Hmm…just found a video about it.

It’s neat to see Christians DOING Christianity. Generally, we go to church and then go home, thinking only of ourselves. The apostles went out and raised the dead. They prophesied. Most of us are like medical students who never practice.

It’s difficult to get away and do things like this. I will have to have someone watch my dad. This may be a good opportunity to try Visiting Angels.

My dad’s problems are limiting my life now, and his hygiene issues are getting to be so bad I can’t take it without building myself a separate kitchen, so I am working on finding solutions. He has finally accepted the fact that he will have to have a CNA or move into an assisted living facility. I don’t want to put him in a home, but there is a limit to what I can do for him.

A home will cost a fortune. Over $70,000 per year. I can get daily CNA help for him for a fraction of that. A CNA in this area probably earns less than $30,000 per year. Maybe that’s the way to go.

It will be nice to get away and spend a few hours among people whose beliefs are like mine. I hope they help me to improve.

Church Visit Goes Poorly

I visited a new church today. The pastor talked about people coming to his church and then going home and rating them on the Internet. Well, here I am.

I went to Kingdom Revival Church in Ocala. It occupies a strange building which may have been a movie theater at one time. It’s set up very well for a church. Lots of room, a stage, and real auditorium seating that rises toward the back.

I had high hopes for this place, because it looked good on Youtube. They believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and they’re serious about praise and worship.

Today’s experience was odd. The music team did a good job, considering the fact that there were no musicians. There were instruments set up, but no one played. All they had were vocalists. Don’t know what that’s all about.

The music was a little too loud, but it wasn’t clearly unsafe. I decided not to use my ear plugs.

The music people praised and prayed and did all they could to help us enter the presence of God, and then the pastor came out. He got on his knees in the middle of the stage and called out to God and so on.

It was nice to see Christians trying to get close to God instead of putting on a slick show that didn’t help anyone.

Things looked pretty good, but when the pastor started talking, it was obvious that something was restraining the presence of God. The air felt dry. I felt like the pastor was talking to himself or trying to wake people up. Even though some people were hollering in response, I felt like the message was bouncing off the congregation.

For some reason, I got the feeling that hypocrisy was walling them off from God. I don’t know any of the people in the church, and they didn’t do anything that looked out of the ordinary, but I kept feeling that hypocrisy was their problem.

Maybe that’s correct. The church is mostly black. I am a veteran of minority churches, and hypocrisy is a huge issue they face.

White people do not like church. A white person who has no use for God will generally stay home on Sundays. There isn’t much else at church that we like. Minorities, especially black people, are different. Black people love church whether they like God or not. It’s a place to socialize. Black strippers to go church. Black drug dealers go to church. Black people who aren’t Christians go to church. I can name names. I’m not making it up.

Beyonce, Luther Campbell, and Kanye West are way out of God’s will, but they go to church. Lady Gaga, Eminem, and Justin Timberlake probably don’t go. Just a guess.

I’ve known black people who went to church and even took on major roles in spite of a total lack of interest in knowing God. Some preached. Some pretended to be under the influence of the Holy Spirit. At home, and even in the parking lot, they were different people. They lived pretty much like people who didn’t go to church.

Maybe Kingdom Revival Church has this problem. The pastor might not be aware of it, because he wouldn’t get to see the way the hypocrites behaved out of his presence. He would only get to see the acting and fawning.

Sure, white churches have hypocrites, but black churches expect and tolerate hypocrisy. They’re used to it. They know they have a lot of people who are just playing roles, and they live with it.

Whatever the fundamental cause was, God’s presence was limited, and I don’t want to deal with that every time I visit. I probably won’t go back.

The Perils of Owning a Tiny Hobby Pool

I feel like a rant. I will try to keep it short.

I do not like swimming pools. I don’t like public pools because they’re full of pee, dissolved feces and mucus and other secretions, hair, band-aids, and God knows what else. I don’t like private pools because they’re for suckers. You give up 1800 square feet of prime lawn, and in exchange you get a tiny patio and a pathetic pool which is, if you’re lucky, 30 feet long and 8 feet deep. Your insurance company won’t let you have a diving board or a slide, leaving you with very little to do on the four yearly occasions when you actually use your glorified kiddie pool.

Pools are a pain in the butt to maintain. The base fee for a service is around $1200 per year, and that doesn’t include replacing things that crap out. If you maintain the pool yourself, you end up spending a lot of time trying to fix inferior products designed by the worst engineers in the universe.

Pool parts are made from cheap plastic that isn’t strong to begin with. It starts out bad, and then it gets worse as solar radiation eats it. The materials are crap, and the designs are so bad, good materials wouldn’t help. O-rings poop out. Handles snap off. Plastic parts that are supposed to be watertight crack. And the replacement parts, which are also garbage, are overpriced. You can pay $20 for a few O-rings to rebuild a single valve. In the real world, O-rings are nearly free, but the people who make the pool junk won’t tell you which sizes you need, so unless you want to guess, you have to pony up.

My pool has driven me nuts. A doodad that lets air out of the filter screens fell off months ago, inside the filter. I couldn’t see the problem because it was internal. The pressure inside the filter kept going up, no matter how much I backwashed. This caused cracks to appear in the pump body. This caused water to spray on the motor. The motor would eventually have failed because of this, so I had to take the entire pump apart and cover the cracks with special epoxy.

The pump’s outlet was the location of the cracks. The outlet is threaded on the inside and outside. You can choose to use a male or female fitting to connect it to the system. Originally, it had a female fitting on it. I replaced it with a male fitting which screws into the outlet. It turned out the female fitting had been holding the pump outlet together, by squeezing it after it was tightened.

I turned the pump on after replacing the pipes and fixing the original leak, and while the old crack no longer leaked, I had water coming out in two more places. Screwing the male fitting in exerted outward pressure on the crap plastic of the outlet, so it either created new cracks or opened old ones.

I spent quite a while cutting and cementing PVC to make this stupid thing work, and now I have to rip it all out, apply more epoxy, and redo the whole thing with a female fitting.

While I was having problems with the filter pressure, I kept using the backwash valve over and over. I didn’t know these valves were junk. You can probably get by with only rebuilding yours once a year if you give it light use, but when you backwash 15 times a week, the O-rings die, and then you have to get new ones. Your local hardware store doesn’t carry the right sizes, so you have to go on the web, find out which ones you need, and order them from Ebay or some other source. Either that or overpay.

I rebuilt the original valve after waiting forever for O-rings to arrive, and it still didn’t work, because the valves themselves get corrupted with corrosion and so on. I had to buy a whole new valve which is more complicated. The design is supposed to be better than the old ones, but Amazon reviews mention quality control issues and so on, so I’m sure it will give me problems eventually.

The manufacturer is a company called Pentair. I think they get their engineers from mental institutions. The worst junk imaginable.

It’s possible to get around the backwash valve problem by choosing not to get a backwash valve. You can design and build a complicated system of ordinary ball valves that will do the same thing, but it may take up a huge amount of space.

My new valve is leaking. Not much, but enough to be annoying. I believe the ends of the pipes that exit the valve are irregular, preventing the O-rings from seating well. No problem. God forbid Pentair should have to make their parts correctly. I’ll just take the whole thing apart, sand the surfaces down so they’ll seal, and make it function.

I figure I only have another 4 hours of work to go, on a system that should have lasted 30 years without repairs.

Pentair isn’t alone. I’ve also used Hayward products, and they were also unreliable. When a pool pump says “Made in Mexico” on the motor casing, you ought to know you’re in for trouble.

Get this: pool pumps have open-frame motors. OPEN, instead of totally enclosed fan-cooled (TEFC) motors. Incredible. What kills pool motors? Water. How does it get in? 1. Seals that die because they overheat if you run them for 30 seconds without water, and 2. BIG VENTILATION HOLES IN THE CASINGS. Am I the only one who sees the issue?

The next time my pump motor dies, I should get myself a beautiful surplus TEFC motor (American made) from Ebay, for $60, and I should fab up a way to adapt it to my pump. Beats paying over $200 for three-year Mexican motor made from old hubcaps.

I have never owned a large hotel pool, but my guess is that they use much better pumps and filters. Pentair makes disgraceful Mickey Mouse products which are designed to fail, and I know hotel owners and universities and so on wouldn’t rely on that kind of equipment. Somewhere out there, there has to be a competent company that makes reliable products which are, sadly, too big for my tiny, shallow 30-foot pool that has no diving board.

If you’ve never had a pool, and you can’t wait to get one, think twice. My dad got our first pool when I was 12. My family has had two relatively nice 40′ by 20′ pools with diving boards. It’s not worth it. You will use your pool rarely after the first year, and after that, it will just be a money suck that increases your insurance rates.

Spend the money on a serious brick barbecue with a pig pit and pizza oven built in. Put in some shade trees and landscaping. Forget the pool. You’ll just be buying a headache.

Okay, I feel better now. You are dismissed.

Rethinking Holiday Gorging

I’m sitting here with Marv while he enjoys his time out of the cage. I’ve been watching Youtube, looking for videos that will be helpful in my efforts to be sanctified and corrected.

I started looking at a Derek Prince video about laziness, but since I am currently caught up in a holiday which has become a celebration of overeating, and because I am not completely happy about it, I changed my mind and started looking for material on gluttony.

I got completely delivered from gluttony in 2009. Then one day I went to Sonny’s Barbecue with my friend Mike, and we had the all-you-can-eat ribs. It seems like ever since then, the victory has been tempered.

Before my deliverance, I used to stuff myself routinely. It’s pretty unusual for me to do that now, but I do eat more than I should. When I moved to this farm, I worked outside a lot, and I lost weight no matter what I ate. Then the work slowed down, and I was in the habit of eating more than I had before, so I picked up some pounds.

I have been thinking about my strange talent for cooking, and I have been considering its negative effects. I can cook a lot of things I really enjoy eating, and that presents a problem. Because I have a long list of recipes, I can always cook something I haven’t had in a long time and tell myself it’s okay to eat it because it’s a rare treat. That might be okay if you can only cook 4 things, but when you can cook dozens, you can have a rare treat several times a week. Every dish is “special.”

I thought about that, and then I asked myself what I’m trying to do when I eat something “special.” There had to be a root iniquity that paved the way for gluttony. I realized I was trying to reward myself. “I worked all day with the chainsaw and tractor, so now it’s okay to have a pint of ice cream.” “I spent 5 hours dealing with a mess my dad made, so now it’s okay to have a big bowl of pasta.”

Why would I do that? Why would I feel like I needed a reward? The answer is self-pity. I allow myself to overeat sometimes because I’ve convinced myself I’m a victim. I feel that I’m owed.

I don’t think of myself as a self-pitying person. When I have a problem, I don’t ask God why it hit such a wonderful person. I assume I’m doing something wrong. I ask for correction. I try to attack the problem. I don’t like self-pity. Nonetheless, it looks like I have it. I may have a flavor that’s different from the ones I recognize, but it’s still self-pity.

Here’s another strange question I asked myself: I can’t do anything sinful to reward myself…so what do I do? Other people get drunk or high on Saturday night. They indulge in sexual sin. They gluttonize. I can’t think of anything I can do, as a Christian.

I don’t know if people are supposed to be able to reward themselves, but we do. Tonight I’m thinking about that, so it’s only natural that I would wonder if there are any rewards I can give myself.

I can turn off the phone and read a good book. I can go for a walk in the woods. I can watch a movie I like. Those things aren’t all that rewarding, though. Not like a pint of ice cream, a line of coke, or a night of fornication. No one ever says, “I’m going to go crazy and spoil myself tonight with a nice walk.”

This is really weird. Maybe we’re not supposed to give ourselves rewards. If not, what are we supposed to do when we’re tired or upset? Do we just take the hit and walk it off? Maybe that’s the actual answer.

It’s not a pleasant prospect. I don’t want to go through life sucking it up and enduring. It would be sort of like going through life holding your breath. Eventually you want to exhale.

Unpleasant things happen to us all the time. Life on earth is like being outdoors in a hailstorm that never stops. You keep getting whacked. One would think God would occasionally provide pleasant experiences to counterbalance the whacks. Surely there must be something.

I’ll have to ask God for the answer. Whatever the situation is, I want to know and accept it.

When you’re a worldly person, you don’t expect to deprive your flesh all the time. You look for cheat days and so on. Christianity doesn’t work like that. You never get a free day to sin. There are no vacations.

I’m always glad to find out I have a character problem, because the information is an open door to freedom. Character problems cause failure and suffering, so when you find out you have a character problem, you suddenly have a way to improve your life. Fix your character, and you will definitely be freed from certain things.

I am not a victim. I like to say that to myself. It’s a little bit like taking a bad-tasting medicine, but it’s a good thing to say. It’s true. People and spirits have done terrible things to me, but that doesn’t mean I’m a victim. My sins and iniquities more than justify every bad thing that has happened. If I admit I’m part of the problem, I claim that in the past, I’ve changed my life for the worse. If I can change it for the worse, I can also make it better. God told me that when I deny an excuse, I take my power back.

I used to drive my sister crazy by saying, “You’re not a victim.” I was angry when I said it, so maybe I should have refrained. It made her furious. It enraged her to be told she wasn’t a victim. False victimhood was a treasure to her; she built her life around it. She truly loved it. She used it as justification to treat people horribly, and she didn’t want it taken away.

I don’t get furious when I say it to myself, but it’s sobering.

When I was young, I was sure I was a victim. I was raised in a house of hatred and abuse. All sorts of misfortune came to me, for no apparent reason. People mistreated me. Maybe I had a point when I was very young, but once I became an adult, I should have knocked off the victim nonsense and taken responsibility.

Interesting stuff.

I really don’t want to stuff myself on holidays any more, and I hate the effort of cooking elaborate meals. Maybe I’ll blow off Christmas dinner entirely. I’m souring on the whole concept of feasts.

What kind of holiday is it if you have to eat yourself sick in order to feel like you celebrated?

Cooking Hints of Dubious Value

Another Thanksgiving dinner is behind me. I learned some things.

For the first time, I did exactly what I wanted to do, instead of making the cranberry sauce and gross oyster dressing my dad used to insist on. It was the right idea. The food was phenomenal, and he didn’t complain once.

When you listen to other people, your food will generally suffer badly. My big talent is not the ability to cook anything you throw at me and make it taste good; it’s the ability to write recipes. People who can’t cook have no idea how that works. It means this: if you ask me to cook for you, don’t tell me what to do, and don’t ask me to change my recipes. There is absolutely no point in letting me cook if you’re going to add your really bad ideas. You can cook your own bad food without my help. If I listen to you, you’ll moan about how bad the food is, and then you’ll tell people I can’t cook.

“Oh, can you use margarine instead of butter? Oh, have you tried turkey instead of pork?”

No; I can’t. If you want Weight Watchers food, go buy it in a Weight Watchers box like everyone else.

I made a pizza for a vegan friend once. It’s surprising she was willing to eat the cheese, since some poor cow’s teats had to suffer multiple microaggressions in the name of capitalism. I bought the plastic sausage my friend requested. It tasted like formaldehyde. And I am not using the word “formaldehyde” in order to be funny. That’s really what it tasted like.

Thank God she was used to the taste, so she didn’t run around afterward telling everyone my pizza tasted like formaldehyde.

I’ll tell you how most people approach cooking. They decide they want to cook something. They open a book or go to the web and pick a recipe. They assume the recipe is good without really knowing. They cook. They feel like their work is done. Most people have no palate, so they don’t know whether their food is good or not. They figure it must be good if they followed a recipe.

That’s not how a good cook does things. A good cook always creates his own recipes. He may start with someone else’s recipe, but that’s just a way to get the project going. He will always make changes later. A good cook isn’t satisfied with a recipe until he, himself, is stunned by the result.

If you’ve put in the time creating a great recipe, and then someone who can’t cook asks you to take out the cream and use skim milk, the correct response is, “Let’s go to Burger King instead.” If you don’t want the recipe, you don’t want the cook, even if you don’t realize it.

This year, I learned fresh turkey is the way to go when you bone your birds. If you thaw a turkey, you’ll probably run into ice when you bone it, and that makes your hands numb and causes problems. I used a fresh turkey this time, and I had no difficulties.

I sewed up the bird with dental floss, and it worked fine, but I should have used dental tape. It’s easier to work with, and it seems to be easier to pull out when the bird is done.

It’s pretty hard to over-salt a turkey. I boned my turkey, opened it up, salted it hard on the inside and outside, and then applied a seasoning mix that contained salt. In all likelihood, it had already been injected with salt at the turkey factory or whatever. It was great. Most turkeys don’t get enough salt.

Seasoning a turkey is really simple. I crushed 9 beef bouillon cubes and mixed them with melted butter, sage, Korbel brut, salt, and pepper. I could also have added garlic, but I forgot. I made around 8 ounces of this stuff, and I slathered it on the inside of the bird before I sewed it up. When the bird was stuffed and ready to go in the oven, I covered the outside with the seasoning mix. When you use what I use, the turkey will taste exactly the way a classic roasted turkey should taste but usually does not.

The stuffing was magnificent. I made cornbread with bacon grease, and I used it as the foundation. I sauteed 4 Aidell’s andouille sausages in butter and stirred them in, along with the sage, butter, eggs, beef broth, Korbel, and so on. I thought my dad would blow a gasket because of the sausage chunks, but he threw it right down and said it was excellent.

The turkey was fantastic, but I think it would have been even better had I cooked it at 200 instead of 275. Low temperature cooking makes a turkey juicier. I like to pray in the morning, so I didn’t get the turkey in the oven until almost noon. I had to jack up the temperature a little in order to have dinner in the afternoon.

There is nothing unsafe about cooking a turkey at 200. As long as you get the stuffing up to 165 at the end, you’re fine. I turned the heat up to 400 when I was getting close, to brown the skin.

I think people worry about turkey germs too much. Have you ever known anyone to get sick from Thanksgiving dinner? I haven’t. The government (famous for making great food) used to tell people to bring turkey to 185. Ridiculous. That’s at least 20 degrees past done, and it turns the turkey into rubber.

The government says to cook beef to an internal temperature of 145. Come on! That ruins it. I go 120 and call it done.

I came up with a good way to get the right amount of potato jacket in your mashed potatoes without choking your potato ricer. I peeled stripes off the potatoes before I boiled them. The remaining skin wasn’t enough to bother the ricer. After every potato chunk went through, I knocked the peel off the perforated plate and into my potatoes. Very easy.

I think potato ricers are overrated. I’ve used mine for a number of years, and it’s not noticeably better than a masher. The potatoes look really fluffy when they come out of it, but then you have to stir butter, milk or cream, salt, pepper, and garlic into them. After that, the result is a lot like what a masher provides.

I’ve had very good mashed potatoes at expensive restaurants, and they never looked like they were prepared with a ricer. Maybe I should dump that thing.

The beans were intoxicating. I found big green beans at the store. I broke them and simmered them for several hours yesterday. I seasoned them with a smoked ham hock, salt, pepper, a tiny bit of sugar, and some butter. The hock meat fell apart into the beans. I left the beans in the fridge overnight to let the flavors mingle. Today they were superb.

To get any flavor out of green beans or greens, you have to boil them until the texture starts to give way. It would be nice if you could have firm beans AND flavor, but you can forget it, because it doesn’t happen. If you’ve always eaten your green beans firm, you have no idea how good beans can taste.

Yankees criticize southerners for boiling vegetables until they turn into mush. I think they get the idea that we can’t cook from going to restaurants in the south where the food is bad. If you go to a Morrison’s cafeteria (a southern chain), and the beans are mushy and flavorless, the problem is this: you went to Morrison’s, where nearly everything is bad. If you ever tried my beans, you would understand why I cook them for three hours.

My gravy came out really well this year. I made it a little thinner and browner this time. I saved grease from the bottom of the turkey pan so I can make more later.

I learned pecan pie tastes even better if you screw up and triple the vanilla. I also added a little sorghum, because I was afraid I had left too much Karo in the bottle. I wanted to make up the difference. The sorghum improved the flavor. I also added a little whiskey, as always. I usually use Jack Daniel’s, which is a poor drinking whiskey that makes an excellent seasoning. This year, I did something awful. I had a nearly empty Knob Creek bottle, and I used it. Knob Creek is very good whiskey. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but JD would have cost me $19, and who knows when I would have used it again.

I think things worked out well. My dad was happy, the workload was not too bad, and I got a decent meal.

I still have a lot of food. I plan to get rid of it no later than Saturday. I don’t want this stuff sitting around tempting me. Thanksgiving is over. Time to move on. I could have a debauched weekend of reheated turkey and stuffing with gravy. All of these things get better after a day in the fridge. I’m not going to do it. It’s a sick American tradition that needs to go.

It’s kind of sad, seeing food this good go to the dump. I have never had holiday food that comes anywhere close to what I can cook for myself. I don’t care. It has to go, go, GO.

Christmas will be a lean operation. Prime rib, potatoes, salad, and maybe cheesecake. Much easier than what I just did. Then I’ll throw the leftovers out again.

I rarely cook anything good these days. It’s no longer a hobby. I try to make things that are quick and reasonably healthy. Holiday foods are aberrations.

This may be my dad’s last Thanksgiving, so I’m glad he enjoyed it. A friend congratulated me on my dad’s “first” Thanksgiving, meaning his first since he asked God for salvation. That was nice, but I’m not sure my dad is saved at the moment.

I don’t know if he understood what he was doing when he asked for salvation. I’m not even sure why he agreed to do it. Since then, he has said things indicating he doesn’t really believe.

I don’t believe in the doctrine of “eternal security.” I just learned the proper name for it a few days ago. I used to believe it. It means you can never lose your salvation. I’ve seen all sorts of testimonies from Christians who believe they went to hell, and I read a convincing book by a lady who said she was taken to hell and saw Christians there. I think at least some of these people are telling the truth.

Some people will point to verses like, “whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Here’s a problem:

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’

It certainly appears that Jesus was describing Christians who had called on him.

If calling on the Lord, all by itself, will bring salvation, why can’t renouncing God later, through words or actions, remove it?

Revelation 14 says people who renounce Jesus during the tribulation will go to hell. I don’t see why things should be any different now. I believe fear of hell is one of the main reasons the martyrs of the past were willing to be tortured and killed rather than repent.

Here’s what Revelation 14 says:

And the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever; and they have no rest day or night, who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.

You have to be careful about focusing on one verse and forgetting the rest. Peter said this:

For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning.

Did the disciples receive salvation when they believed in Jesus before he was crucified? Many would say yes, but if that’s true, what about Judas? The Bible describes him as “lost,” and he committed suicide in a place that symbolizes hell. It sure looks like he went to hell, but if he believed before he died, and he could not lose his salvation, what’s going on?

If my dad can’t lose his salvation, then I should never have bothered talking to him about God, because he went to Sunday school when he was a kid, before becoming an atheist. If calling on God in 1938 solved all of his problems, then I have been spinning my wheels over nothing.

I hope I’m mistaken, because it would mean most people I care about would be in heaven or on their way there, but I think salvation can be lost pretty easily.

Am I worried about my dad? No, because God keeps telling me he will be saved. My expectation has always been that my dad will give up for real when death looks him in the face. That can still happen. Maybe what happened in September, when he asked for salvation the last time, was just a rehearsal.

I want to get this right. My own salvation, I mean. I don’t want to die and find out I’m on the wrong path.

Tomorrow I plan to eat normal food again. I almost dread Christmas dinner. I do not understand why I have a talent for cooking, since it causes more trouble than it’s worth. Today I wondered if it might have come from Satan instead of God. Maybe when I cook, demons are telling me how much butter to use and which spice to add. I hope not.

Derek Prince cautioned people to avoid the martial arts, because they tend to be entangled with eastern religion. He said he cast demons out of a karate expert, and afterward, the man couldn’t do a kick he used to do. Supposedly, demons had been helping him kick.

Maybe the stories about Robert Johnson are true. Maybe you really can sell your soul to Satan in exchange for the ability to play the guitar.

I would hate to get in trouble with God just so I could make coconut flan.

Anyway, Thanksgiving is over. Now I can relax.

Icebergs Ahead

I am working on Thanksgiving dinner for two.

I have a great tip for anyone who drinks eggnog. I’m too lazy to make my own, so I buy the store stuff and doctor it if necessary. Adding more vanilla and nutmeg can help. That’s not the tip.

I have put several different spirits in eggnog. Bourbon. Brandy. Probably rum. This week I tried something new, and it turned out to be better than anything else I had tried. I had to pick up some Grand Marnier for my cranberry relish, and it was sitting on the counter while I poured myself an eggnog. The wheels turned.

It’s excellent. I filled a mug halfway, added Grand Marnier, and filled it the rest of the way. I dusted the top with nutmeg. I can’t recommend it highly enough. My guess is that an XO brandy would be even better, but to spend $200 per bottle for something you put in eggnog is to meddle with the primal forces of nature.

Grand Marnier is one of those things that doesn’t fit in just everywhere. You certainly wouldn’t want to drink it straight. It’s good for things like injecting orange sections or strawberries you intend to dip in chocolate. It’s also an ingredient of crepes Suzette. Now I know of one more use for it.

I hope the relish comes out good, because I had a little incident with the pecan pies. I misread the list on the Karo bottle, and I put in three times as much vanilla as I was supposed to. I have a feeling it will be better this way, but I’m still kicking myself [Note: it was wonderful.].

In other news, I called my dad’s doctor today and said I wanted information about hospice evaluations. I also called a hospice that was recommended. My friend Mike is a hospice exec, and he told me I needed to get on this now, before things really get crazy. He kept pushing me to do it. I think he’s used to hearing about people who were in denial and kept putting it off. That’s not me. Half of my family is dead, and I accept death as part of life, so I don’t shy away from death-related responsibilities.

When you get old and need a lot of assistance, you eventually become eligible for hospice care. They have a bunch of criteria. Can you walk? Can you communicate? They look you over and make a decision. If you fail, you get hospice care, and Medicare pays for it. That’s the test I’m trying to get for my dad.

I have always thought of hospice care as something you receive in a hospice, but there is more to it than that. You can receive hospice care in your own home. That’s what I’m shooting for right now. They’ll move equipment in and send people to help you bathe and so on.

Mike thinks my dad is ready. I’m not so sure. Some sources say you can get hospice care if there is a good possibility you will die during the next 6 months. Others say you get it if you’re expected to die during that time. My dad could die during the next 6 months. I have a feeling he will. But he could make it another 5 years, and no physician has flatly stated he is likely to go within 6 months.

I called the hospice Mike recommended, and they told me they wanted a referral from my dad’s doctor, so I left a message at the doctor’s office. Maybe we can get an appointment or phone consultation next week.

Mike says doctors hate to recommend hospice care. He says they hate to talk about death. I think that’s true. I don’t think any doctor ever told my mother she was terminal.

I don’t know why they won’t talk about death. I hate to think it’s because they make so much money on futile efforts to prolong life. Maybe they just don’t want to be involved in the discussion, because they don’t want responsibility. If that’s the case, they should man up. When you get a medical license, you agree to deal with every aspect of your job.

Maybe they don’t talk about death because they’re afraid of it, and they assume everyone else is, too. Solid Christians tend to have little fear of death. Most people scared and repelled by it. Most doctors aren’t solid Christians.

It would be nice to have people come every day and deal with my dad. He doesn’t have the kind of respect for me that he has for strangers, so they would be able to get a lot more done than I can.

His mobility is not what it was two months ago. At some point within the next three months or so, I expect him to start requiring so much help getting around, sitting, and standing, that we have to come up with a new solution. Will it be new devices? Assisted living? A move to a hospice? I don’t know. I know I can’t carry him around, and I’m not going to start helping him in the shower or on the toilet. That’s too much. You do those things if you live in India or Sudan, on ten dollars a month. Here, you look for professional help.

Some people seem to think changing a parent’s diapers or washing their private parts is a beautiful bonding experience. Not me. I think an ordeal like that is an insult from Satan. I’ve already seen way more than I want to.

My friend Amanda has offered to stay with him if I need to travel to Miami. Today I realized that’s off the table. He is starting to have problems that go beyond what you can allow a friend to deal with. The next time I travel, it will have to be Visiting Angels or some other business.

The more I think about it, the more I think physical illness is better than dementia.

When a relative dies from cancer, at least you can still interact with him. You can still have conversations. The patient can help you plan and react. He can understand what’s happening to him. He can grow. He can atone.

With dementia, it’s like half of the person has departed for good, and you’re left with the other half. It’s like the executives have left the building, and you get to talk to the janitors and the answering service. Once it really sets in, you can’t discuss the problem with him in any meaningful way. That’s especially true when the patient is a master of denial, like my dad. He sees a dementia diagnosis as a slander to be vigorously refuted.

If my dad had cancer, we could still talk. He could help me with his care. Spending time with him wouldn’t be work. I wouldn’t have to get away every day and be alone in order to get over dealing with him. At the end, we would be able to say important things to each other. Vascular dementia may leave him with the mind of an infant, so when he dies, he may not be able to communicate or understand at all. That’s how his sister went.

If I get any useful results from my hospice inquiries, I’ll write about it. Maybe I can help other people prepare better than I did.

Everybody Else Gets Tested

One of the neatest things God has taught me is that there is no substitute…for God.

I turned back to God for real in about 2007. I joined a church in Miami. Eventually, I learned that the pastors were wrong about many things. I learned that they were liars; they taught things they knew were not true, because their false doctrine moved people to give them money. I learned that they were ignorant about many things; they couldn’t even get themselves blessed, but they were teaching other people.

These things are true, but I got a lot of benefit from the church at first. Some things they or their guest speakers taught were true and useful.

I joined another church, and the same thing happened. The church disappeared in a puff of pride and anger, but I learned a lot of good things there. The pastor was an active pedophile, but he still managed to teach me things that were worth holding onto.

What’s the big lesson here? It’s this: don’t trust people to teach you about God; not forever, anyway. Learn to hear from the Holy Spirit himself. This is how Christianity is supposed to work.

In all likelihood, if you turn to God right now and accept Jesus, and you tell God you only want to learn from him, you will have problems. I don’t know of anyone who instantly developed a reliable channel of communication with God. You will probably have to find teachers. Nonetheless, you have to go beyond them eventually, because every Christian makes mistakes.

My last two pastors taught me some good things, and they also taught me some toxic garbage. Human beings didn’t expose the errors to me; they defended and reinforced them. Human beings could not be trusted to refute false doctrine for me. The Holy Spirit himself woke me up and showed me what was wrong with the churches. No one else is reliable.

You have to rely on men a little bit, but if you’re still breastfeeding from your pastor 5 years into your walk, you’re doing Christianity wrong. God didn’t save you and fill you with the Holy Spirit so you could hang on every word from Andrew Wommack or Jentezen Franklin. He did it so you could know him personally and receive his instruction directly.

Teachers are like human parents. It’s fine if your mom changes your diapers when you’re 6 months old. If she’s still doing it when you’re 40, something is amiss.

Lately I’ve been listening to Derek Prince a lot. He has done some wonderful teaching. I’ve benefited a great deal from listening to him. These things are true, but I’m already spotting his errors, and some of them are pretty bad. Derek Prince is not Jesus. He made mistakes.

I’ll tell you about the first error I noticed. Prince has a long history of casting out demons. He has teachings in which he discusses things demons told him. For example, a woman he helped had a demon that claimed it had followed Prince from Africa. Prince asked it a lot of questions, and it answered him. Prince was pleased to get the information and pass it on.

Problem: demons are liars. The demon didn’t tell him the truth. It told him things that would hurt his ministry and the people who listened to his teachings. Do I know which things it said were lies? No. I don’t have to. I have common sense, so I know it lied.

What do you think a demon is going to do when you ask it questions? Do you seriously think it’s going to be truthful and try to help you? The Bible doesn’t say that. It says Satan is a liar and the father of lies. Most of Satan’s power comes from lying. MOST.

Lying is much easier than working. It makes your enemies do your work for you.

Satan is like a woman. He is very feminine, which is why he chooses to manifest as “goddesses.” A man will try to destroy you by beating you to death. A woman will simply lie about you until you dry up and die.

Prince himself says Jesus told demons, “Be muzzled,” when he cast them out. Jesus didn’t have long conversations with demons. The longest interaction we know of consisted of Jesus agreeing to let some demons go into a herd of pigs. He didn’t ask for their life stories. When he spoke with Satan himself, he kept it brief.

Think about it: why should we go to demons for instruction? The very idea is insane. How is it different from idolatry? It’s an effort to get, from another spirit, what God himself isn’t giving us.

The Bible says they who trust in God will lack no good thing. If God won’t give you something, it’s not a good thing, and you shouldn’t have it.

There are a lot of preachers on Youtube, shooting the breeze with people who are supposedly letting demons speak through them. How can anyone think the demons aren’t using these conversations as opportunities to spread poison? It’s their job! If I were a demon, it’s exactly what I’d do. Am I smarter than Satan? Have I come up with a strategy he never heard of until today? Bet I haven’t.

Here is the second error: Prince endorses the law of tithing, for Christians.

I can’t say it enough: we are not under the Jewish law. We can eat rabbits and oysters. We can wear poly/cotton shirts. We can eat toast during Passover. Tithing, as a required practice, comes from the Jewish law.

Preachers love to claim Abraham’s tithe to Melchizedek proves we have to tithe, and Prince is no exception. Yes, Abraham tithed before the law existed, but he only did it once as far as we know, and we have no record of him requiring other believers to do it, as he forced them to be circumcised.

There is no record of Christians tithing in the New Testament. There is absolutely no record of the prosperity gospel.

If you have to tithe, you have to obey all of the laws of ritual giving. If you grow crops, you can’t harvest the corners of the fields; you have to invite the poor to come and glean. If you have a pear tree, you have to take 10% of the pears to church (tithes went to the temple, not the church, but still). You’re not allowed to tithe until you pay all your bills. The Jewish law is very complex, and Prince didn’t know much about it. He taught people to obey a law, but he taught a very incomplete and, therefore, invalid version of the law.

Here’s what Paul said about legalism in Galatians:

For everyone who depends on legalistic observance of Torah commands lives under a curse, since it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not keep on doing everything written in the Scroll of the Torah.”

Now it is evident that no one comes to be declared righteous by God through legalism, since “The person who is righteous will attain life by trusting and being faithful.”

Furthermore, legalism is not based on trusting and being faithful, but on the text that says, “Anyone who does these things will attain life through them.”

The Messiah redeemed us from the curse pronounced in the Torah by becoming cursed on our behalf; for the Tanakh says, “Everyone who hangs from a stake comes under a curse.”

Yeshua the Messiah did this so that in union with him the Gentiles might receive the blessing announced to Avraham, so that through trusting and being faithful, we might receive what was promised, namely, the Spirit.

Paul began Galatians 3, addressing their legalism, this way:

You stupid Galatians! Who has put you under a spell?

Don’t dismiss the word “spell” as though a modern American had said it without sincerity. Paul meant what he said. He knew witchcraft and demons were real. He was being literal. He used a Greek word which referred to witchcraft. He knew legalism sometimes resulted from spells cast by witches, and he believed the Galatians should be aware that they might be under such a spell.

Prince himself cast out a religious demon that told people not to eat pork.

I’m not going to count my grapes and take 10% to a church. Forget it. I have a huge rosemary bush. Do you seriously think I’m going to drive to the property where it grows, cut 10% off, and take it to a preacher? Come on! The law requires those things.

The law is very hard. One of its purposes was to show people they could not be righteous through their own efforts. Jesus freed us from the burden of the law by fulfilling it on the cross. If you pick the burden up again, you’re making a mistake, and you can’t expect God to back you up.

I went to Middlebrook Church here in Ocala about 4 times. Maybe 5. I didn’t give them a cent. I’m glad I didn’t, because during the last service I attended, the pastor taught New Age idolatry. If the Holy Spirit had wanted me to give, I would have given. I’m not going to support idolatry just because Abraham gave a bunch of sheep and chickens to Melchizedek. I believe God would hold me responsible if I gave stupidly. I believe he has done it in the past.

It’s strange that idolaters use the term “New Age.” All of what they teach is very old. There is nothing new about it.

You can’t serve two masters. Jesus made that clear. The law is one master, and the Holy Spirit is another.

You really have to get to know the Holy Spirit. You can’t trust human beings all your life. You can’t trust Derek Prince, the pope, me, or anyone else. Try to pick out the things that are true, get yourself baptized with the Holy Spirit, pray in tongues a great deal every day, and listen to God. He is the only truly trustworthy being there is. Everyone else, without exception, can fail. There are people in hell who gave some good teaching as pastors while they were alive.

By the way, I will mention this again: I heard a teaching that said the ability to pray in tongues could be blocked by unforgiveness and unconfessed sin, so if you’re still stuck, think about it. From personal experience, I can tell you that even when you think you’ve confessed everything, you will probably turn out to be wrong. Ask God to show you what you still have to get out of yourself.

Don’t think of confession, repentance, sanctification, and having demons cast out as one-time things. It’s like taking out the garbage. You have to keep it up. You wouldn’t take your garbage out in January and forget about it for the rest of the year because it was already done.

God told me this: “I am a living thing.” He also said, “Things get better, or they get worse.” We are always improving or deteriorating. Demons, sicknesses, and iniquities can come back, so keep doing what you’re supposed to do. Improve or deteriorate. There is no third choice.

I won’t let myself get frustrated with Prince. He’s not a failure, as far as I can tell. He’s just imperfect, like the rest of us. He did a lot of great work, and I will still listen to him sometimes. If I get disgusted because of his little errors, I’m condemning and discarding every preacher who ever lived, and I’m certainly condemning myself.

Trump Finds Support in Tijuana

This is too funny. Mexicans are angry because Central Americans in the infamous “caravan” are in Tijuana, and their complaints are just like ours.

They also complained about how the caravan forced its way into Mexico, calling it an “invasion.”

Juana Rodriguez, a housewife, said the government needs to conduct background checks on the migrants to make sure they don’t have criminal records.

Honduras has a murder rate of 43 per 100,000 residents, similar to U.S. cities like New Orleans and Detroit.

It’s amazing. First, I’m amazed that Mexicans are willing to out themselves in this way, after so many have worked so hard to help illegals get here. Second, I can’t believe the Associated Press has hired reporters who would tell the world instead of censoring the news.

Then Just Keep Running

Yesterday I went shopping for Thanksgiving food. I’m afraid I was not as thankful as I should have been.

When I was a kid, Thanksgiving was not my problem. My mother cooked everything, or we ate at my grandparents’ house, and that meant the cooking was divided up among a bunch of relatives. Now, it’s all me. Shopping. Cleaning up before the meal. Cooking. Running around frantically during the meal to make sure my dad doesn’t defile anything and ruin it for everyone else. Dishes. Cleaning up after the meal. It’s a drag.

I was reluctant to cook at all this year. I don’t know if my dad would care. By Friday, he will be thinking of other things. In the past, he has suggested going out for Thanksgiving, but that’s depressing. I feel like I have to do something here at the house.

I decided to cut the menu down. My dad likes oyster dressing, which I find disgusting. I don’t know how to make oyster dressing, so I make cornbread dressing and shove oysters into it. It’s probably wrong, but he eats it. I’m all done with it. It won’t hurt him to eat normal dressing like everyone else. I’m thinking of stuffing the turkey with cornbread stuffing containing chunks of sauteed andouille.

He can’t smell anything, and that means his sense of taste is very limited. He doesn’t really taste oysters. He will enjoy my stuffing as much as he would the nasty oyster mess. He just wants oysters because his mother used to use them. Some traditions are well worth killing.

No yams this year. I used to make a dish which was basically yams mashed up with pineapples, brown sugar and spices, topped with pecans fried in brown sugar and butter. Forget that. Takes too much time.

There will be no pumpkin pies. I don’t particularly care for pumpkin pie. I don’t think anyone really likes it. Try comparing it to apple, cherry, or peach pie, and you have to admit, it comes in second every time. I’m making two pecan pies, using crusts from the store. Good enough.

Pecan prices have gone nuts, to use an appropriate adjective. I paid $18 for my pecans. There must be a blight.

My dad insists on cranberry sauce, which is a very weak dish. It’s cranberries, sugar, and water. I’m all done with it. This year, it will be relish alone. Everyone gets relish, and they will danged well like it. I’m tired of making sauce AND relish.

I won’t make fruit salad (or any type of salad), and there will be no rolls. No snacks. No cookies. It will be turkey, beans, potatoes, cranberry relish, and pecan pie. I think I cut four hours of work out of my life.

I have learned to love small turkeys. The store was full of birds the size of toddlers, but I dug out a 12-pounder. I am going to bone it and stuff it. It’s a lot of work, but once you’ve had a boned turkey, all other turkeys are disgusting.

You know the big, dried-out turkey cadaver you end up with every year? You struggle to fit it on a platter, and then you try to cover it with foil, but people never put the foil back correctly, so everything turns into leather? You don’t get that with a boned turkey. You get a solid loaf of pure food you can slice and put in Tupperware. The bones go in the trash on Thursday, not Monday, or you can use them for gravy.

If you don’t know how big your turkey should be, you can find the information on the web. If the raw weight in pounds is 1.5 times the number of diners, you’re good. If you want a lot of leftovers, maybe you need to go bigger. I do not want leftovers. Sharing leftover food with a dementia patient is a bad experience. You go to the fridge hoping to make a turkey sandwich, and then you see that someone else has handled the meat with his fingers. That kind of thing happens.

My dad was never a great person to share leftovers with. He would eat the best stuff right away, and the more there was, the more he ate. No one else got very much. He’s an unusual person. I take him to restaurants for big lunches, and then when he gets home, he eats ice cream out of the carton.

I’ll be throwing out any remaining leftovers on Saturday. My dad hates that, but I hate dealing with the mess. Turkey bits on the counter. Cranberry sauce on the floor. As long as I’m the sole member of the cleaning crew, I make the rules. On Saturday, out it goes.

When I finally gritted my teeth and decided to cook, I invited my friend Amanda over. She has three sons and an elderly parent (not demented). Like me, she has no help whatsoever. None. Nada. I figured things would be easier on both of us if we teamed up. Also, if she wants, she can fill in with items I refuse to cook. I am hoping both of us will do a lot less work than we would have had to do with two separate operations.

My attitude toward the whole affair is not all that positive. I suppose I should think of Amanda’s sons. Thanksgiving was a big deal to me when I was a kid. Maybe if I think of this as a chance to help patch up their childhoods, I’ll feel more motivated. I should focus on that, because feeding my dad is not all that rewarding.

I don’t see the holiday as an opportunity to give thanks. I give thanks like crazy every day. I’m not sure jamming yourself full of food is a good way to express gratitude. I’m also unexcited about the idea of going somewhere and feeding the poor. If you’re only good to other people on holidays, I suppose working at a homeless shelter two days a year is better than nothing, but I want no part of it. I’m not sure how people who do it manage to put any food on their own tables. I expect to be cooking from 9 a.m. until at least 2 p.m., not including the things I’ll do tomorrow and Wednesday. There is no conceivable way I could produce edible food AND spend three hours virtue signaling and posting selfies of myself hugging the poor while trying not to get too dirty.

If you want to freak the poor out, go feed them two weeks after Thanksgiving, and stay all day. Or feed them in March, giving up a vacation day. That will make an impression. Much better than hopping out of your Range Rover and slapping instant mashed potatoes on trays for 45 minutes.

If I cook anything at all for Christmas, it will be rib roast, baked potatoes, and cheesecake. Maybe a Caesar salad. I would fix these things on Thursday if I could get away with it. The cheesecake takes a little effort, but the other things are as easy to prepare as toast. It’s also a much better meal than turkey and dressing.

It looks like the best strategy is to think of the kids. That gives me a little enthusiasm, or at least it makes me feel some obligation. My dad and Amanda’s mom–I think Amanda will forgive me–are not the sort of seniors who make you want to cook special stuff for them in order to thank them for being so wonderful.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll get amped up and cook yams.

No pumpkin pie. No way. I hate fads, and for the last couple of years, we’ve been seeing way too much “pumpkin spice.” Pumpkin spice cookies. Pumpkin spice cappuccino. Pumpkin spice pork rinds. Pumpkin spice Preparation H. No; someone must rage against the machine, and as Dean Vernon Wormer said, that foot is me.

Try that boned turkey. You don’t know what you’re missing.

If I Want Buddhism, I’ll go to a Temple

I am not going to church today.

I can’t do it. I would like to go, for my dad’s sake, but after watching Tim Gilligan preach “mindfulness” (the new Buddhist/Hindu fad) to Christians, I can’t make myself go.

Here’s what happens when I take my dad to Meadowbrook Church. He sits through the service without saying much. Then as we drive home, he criticizes. “They just want to get your money.” He doesn’t encounter God at the church. He can tell the pastor doesn’t have much to say. He knows the message is empty.

The apostles preached with power and authority. They didn’t crib from Oprah and Dr. Phil. They didn’t plagiarize from Gwyneth Paltrow. They healed people. They raised the dead. They prophesied. They told people things only God could have revealed to them. In short, it was pretty much the opposite of what happens at Meadowbrook.

Nothing is going to happen to my dad at Meadowbrook. It’s a church that can only reach people who already want to believe.

I’m looking at other churches online. I don’t know what else to do.

I’m checking out a place called Kingdom Revival Church. They have a live Youtube feed. Right now the music team is going at it. The music is much better than the music at Meadowbrook, which features Hillsong-y stuff so bland it’s impossible to discern the melodies. Meadowbrook has better musicians, but listening to them is like having white bread with “lite” mayonnaise shoved into your ears.

Kingdom Revival appears to be what I call an “ethnic church,” which means it looks like it’s minority-heavy. I am reluctant to go to another ethnic church. As a veteran of ethnic churches, I am used to services where people get so emotional, they mistake emotion for the Holy Spirit. It wears you down. Meadowbrook Church is a lifeless, dried-up caricature of real church, but ethnic churches tend to be places where people work harder at pretending to be full of the Spirit than they do at getting to know him. If you want to see a pregnant single woman on a stage, singing on the music team with full approval and speaking in tongues, or if you want to see an active car thief playing the piano in a position of authority, your best bet is an ethnic church.

I generalize, of course. If I were not aware that there were exceptions to generalizations, I wouldn’t be watching the service.

It’s frustrating to see how churches go to extremes. They smother the Holy Spirit, or they work themselves into a frenzy, pretending he’s in charge. Satan likes extremism, so I suppose it makes sense.

The music people are speaking in tongues, so I guess I don’t have to ask whether the church is charismatic. It doesn’t look bad so far. Now they’re praying for a friend who is in the hospital. I haven’t seen anything like that at Meadowbrook.

I’ll watch for a while and see if it looks like this place is worth visiting. Hopefully no one will mention yoga or BLM.

Wow. He just said, “They can’t place hope in Buddha, because Buddha can’t move. Buddha is a statue that sits on a shelf and collects dust.”

Hmm. That was timely.

I just realized I’m watching last week’s service. I’ll switch to the current service.

BTW, the wife of the pastor of my last church died this week, and her husband, who has pleaded guilty to felonies, is scheduled to go into custody two weeks after Thanksgiving. You can see why I’m reluctant to listen to preachers without testing them.

You Can’t Get Rid of God With Science

This week I received a copy of Testament, which is a video series created by a historian named John Romer. It aired in the late 1980’s. I enjoyed it the first time around, so I wanted to see it again.

Romer has a very engaging way of speaking. Every word and gesture are planned. He makes you feel as if everything he said were a staggering revelation of enormous importance. I know I’m not the only one who enjoys watching him, because dinosaur expert Robert Bakker has done a series of his own, and he imitates Romer with extraordinary faithfulness. It’s almost as if he’s making fun of him, but he’s very serious.

I’ll post two videos so you can see what I mean. First, Romer.

Now, Bakker.

Now that I think about it, it’s funny that Bakker would model his manner of presentation after Romer’s, because they’re in the same basic line of work. They look at old objects and present their opinions on them, in ways that appear intended to refute the Bible.

When I was a kid, I sometimes misused the word “archaeologist.” Somehow I got the idea that “archaeologist”–the name for a person who studies distant human history–was also the right name for paleontologists, who study distant plant and animal history. The fields have a lot of similarity.

When I was in college (the first time), I studied vertebrate anatomy as part of my ill-fated effort to be come a doctor. The professor who taught the class was one Walter Bock. He was wonderful. He talked about bones and joints and weird characteristics of animals. Each of us got a box of cat bones, a dead cat, and a dead shark to dissect. I loved it.

One of my lab T.A.’s was a guy named Neil Shubin. Years later, I saw him on TV, telling people about dinosaurs. I guess he went full-throttle paleontologist. It’s kind of a neat career. I don’t think paleontologists have to be as smart as biologists who work with plasmids and pipettes, and I doubt they get as much respect from scientists, but they get to go on digs and build cool museum displays kids love.

Well, I’m wrong. He’s an evolutionary biologist. Apparently, he has become somewhat famous. He wrote a bestseller. Here he is on Youtube.

We had a fascinating textbook, which, coincidentally, was written by a man named Romer. I don’t know if it was great science, but it was interesting. I recall reading that spiders use blood pressure to extend their legs.

I wish I still had that book. Somehow it vanished. Maybe I’ll get a new copy.

Real, hard core science is all calculus. Kids don’t know that. They grow up thinking it’s all like the Discovery Channel. The neat thing about vertebrate anatomy (and similar topics) is that it really is like the Discovery Channel. You don’t have to be Johnny von Neumann to study it and enjoy it. You don’t even need to be a high school graduate. The lectures Professor Bock gave were not much harder to understand than TV shows.

I did a terrible thing with the cat. We didn’t need the whole cat for our work, so I took the tail from mine and inserted it in a hole in the button panel in one of my dorm’s elevators. For some reason, a button was missing. When my work was done, it looked as if a cat had been sucked into the panel, but for its tail.

I was a real idiot back then.

He was an orange tabby, if anyone cares. No; she. We had to become familiar with our cats’ entire bodies, and I recall examing the parts that established her gender.

Wow; Professor Bock is still working. He must be a thousand years old. He still has a page on Columbia’s site.

He was an ornithologist. Sometimes he would show up for lectures fresh from the field, with his pants pulled up over his boots. He worked in Schermerhorn, one of Columbia’s neatest buildings. It was a perfect picture of an early 20th-Century science building. It was full of jars containing pickled snakes and other creatures. They had an extinct Tasmanian tiger in a jar.

These days, the antique jars themselves would probably be worth more than the contents. I can see hipsters buying them to hold their homemade, locally sourced, non-GMO pemmican. Or whatever it is they eat.

Unfortunately, my parents drove me nuts while I was in college, so I did not complete the course. I tried twice, but I was a basket case.

Romer (not the book guy) starts his series with Abraham, and he devotes a lot of time to “debunking” the Bible. For example, he says Abraham could not have had camels, because they didn’t show up in the Middle East until 500 BC. He goes on like this throughout the series.

He loves saying there is no evidence of the Hebrews or God until pretty late in the archaeological record. What he doesn’t say is that archaeologists don’t have a perfect record. He draws a lot of definite conclusions about what does and does not exist, based on excavations covering what surely has to be less than a hundredth of a percent of the relevant landscape.

He finally admits evidence of the Hebrews exists when he gets to the palace of Omri, father of Ahab. Here’s the question he doesn’t ask himself: if Omri was a Hebrew, did he come from nowhere? If Omri was a Hebrew, then his father was a Hebrew, and his grandfather was a Hebrew, and they came from a people who were Hebrews. Omri didn’t just wake up one morning and say, “I suddenly feel Jewish. Let’s start an ethnic group and a religion. Someone start smoking salmon!”

Omri was a descendant of Jeroboam I, who stole half of the kingdom of David when Solomon died. He is believed to have been born somewhere around 900 BC. David is believed to have ruled during an era somewhere around 1000 BC. Moses is thought to have left Egypt around 300 years earlier.

Moses to Omri…~400 years. That’s not a terribly long gestation period for a people. It stands to reason that Omri’s people existed in the time of Moses.

Aside from that, Moses himself seems legitimate. His name is believed to be Egyptian, not Hebrew. Joseph, who established the Jewish connection with Egypt, seems legitimate. Romer himself says the Bible’s description of him is consistent with what we know of Egyptian officials of his time, right down to his wardrobe.

Romer’s series devotes time to the City of David, which is a well-known archaeological site in Jerusalem. Romer claims there is no evidence David existed. Well, his series was released in 1988. Since then, archaeologists have found evidence of David in other countries. An ancient king claimed he had defeated kings from David’s line. There is also strong evidence of a Jewish outpost on Elephantine Island in Egypt, dating back to about 500 BC. There is a temple there with two stars of David carved on it.

One wonders what evidence Romer was looking for when he visited the City of David. Did he hope to find a bronze plaque in English, reading, “This is the City of David, second king of the Hebrews,” along with a vial of blood for DNA testing?

Romer also talks about the compilation of the Hebrew Bible, and he uses a very deceptive word: “versions.” He says the people who hid the Dead Sea Scrolls in order to preserve the Bible wrote many “versions.” That’s incorrect. They wrote many “copies” or “editions.” “Version” implies a difference in the text, and the Hebrew Bible is famous for its consistency throughout history. Look at it this way: if I own two King James Bibles from different publishers, I own two editions but only one version.

Romer’s slander is a lot like the one we hear from some Jews, concerning the New Testament. I was told that over 20,000 “versions” of the New Testament had been found. I looked into the story, and what I actually saw was that they were copies, not versions. They were consistent. The story didn’t debunk the New Testament; it supported its legitimacy.

Here’s how I feel about historical and scientific arguments about the veracity of the Bible: they will be resolved in time, in favor of the text. Maybe the word translated “camels” in Abraham’s story was a general term meaning “beasts of burden.” Maybe Abraham had camels, and historians are wrong about the time camels arrived in the area; they are proven wrong every month, about similar issues. Sooner or later, scripture will be vindicated, and people will regret obsessing on the matter to their own detriment.

I’ve seen spirits. I’ve had many miraculous healings. Jesus visited me twice. The Bible is obviously true. When you know God personally, it makes no sense to pore over the Bible and look for flaws. If a guest were staying in your house, you wouldn’t go to the Internet and Google him relentlessly to find out whether he existed or not.

If you don’t know God personally, your problem isn’t the Bible. You need to get in touch with him and ask him to show himself to you. He does this all the time.

Remember; as important as the Bible is, it is no substitute for God himself. Abraham had no Bible, and he did just fine. Isaac, Jacob, Jacob’s sons, and Moses (writer of the Pentateuch) had no Bible. Enoch, Methuselah, and Noah had no Bible. When God proves himself to you, quit worrying about how many animals will fit in an ark. You’re making things harder than they have to be.

I don’t know if people should watch Romer’s series. If you aren’t grounded, it could sow doubt in your mind. Maybe I should quit watching. I enjoy it, and some of the material is valid and educational. I have asked God about it, and I don’t think there’s a problem, but I will not make a firm decision to keep watching. I make mistakes.

If you like Romer, remember: you’ll also like Robert Bakker. His impression of Romer is so good, if either of them dies, the other can continue his work.

More

I got nostalgic, thinking about my brief time as a biology major, so I looked around to see if my old textbook was available. While I did that, I learned that Columbia University has stopped teaching vertebrate anatomy. They taught it in 2008, but the class listing is gone now.

Here’s something interesting: you can buy your own specimens for dissection online, and they’re cheap. For under a hundred bucks, you can have your own dogfish and dead cat, complete with dissection tools and lab guide. Now you know what happens to Fluffy and Snowball when you get tired of them. The companies that sell them fix them with formaldehyde and shoot their blood vessels full of red and blue rubber.

You can get a cleaned up cat skeleton for $125. Exciting. Educational and decorative.

When I was at Columbia, cutting up dead cats with a friend who went on to become a very unhappy radiologist, my friend told me biologists didn’t respect the kind of work Professor Bock and his students did. Biology had gone molecular and so on, so memorizing cat bones was not considered important. I have to wonder if that was a smart position to take, since doctors have to know how bodies are put together. I guess now students don’t see real bodies until they get their cadavers.

Good news for the guy who cleans the elevators in the East Campus dormitory. Still, it’s kind of sad to see da Vinci’s type of science disappear.

Failure is Victory

I watch a lot of Christian videos on Youtube. One of Youtube’s prominent features is video recommendation. Their computers make wild guesses based on things you’ve already seen, and probably based on other types of Internet surveillance, and they show you videos they think you’ll want to watch. They also show you targeted ads.

For a long time, I was bombarded with ads for Mormonism, which is not, not, NOT Christianity. Mormons believe Jesus and Satan are brothers. They believe works will get you into heaven. One of their “prophets” denounced the “heresy” of salvation by faith, which is THE central belief of Christianity.

The only way for a Mormon to get into heaven is to do Mormonism wrong and accidentally accept enough true Christian doctrine to get him in the door.

The original Book of Mormon says black people will turn white and “delightsome” when they become righteous. Look it up if you don’t believe me. They didn’t allow black men to become priests (or allow black men and women into their temples) until 1978. They think American Indians are really descendants of Jews, which is not what DNA or common sense tells us. They believe God has a sort of wife, and that other beings were created through their union. They think God has a physical body, right now, in heaven (which is supposedly a planet).

They don’t believe Jesus is really the eternal, always-existing God, in the sense that Christians do. They think he started out imperfect and became God through obedience. Mormons also think they can put dead people in heaven by baptizing them by proxy.

It’s pretty strange.

If you look at the history of Mormonism, you will see a lot of proven fraud. I don’t mean individual Mormons defrauded people in their personal affairs. I mean Mormons committed fraud in creating doctrine and sacred writings and so on. It’s fundamental fraud that indicts the faith as much as the participants.

Look up The Book of Abraham. Joseph Smith took some Egyptian material concerning embalming and tried to pass it off as the story of Abraham’s life. Apparently, he did not realize that scholars who were familiar with hieroglyphics would eventually decode the Egyptian material and tell the world its true meaning.

As for Joseph Smith, the founding false prophet of Mormonism, he was arrested and tried in 1826. The crime was “glass-looking” or “money-digging,” which means he pretended to use magical stones in order to find buried treasure. It was a con game, and Smith admitted his guilt. The court records still exist.

I’ve had a number of commenters and email correspondents try to tell me Mormonisn is Christianity. Of course, they were all Mormons. Mormons are the only non-Jews who seriously believe Mormonism is Christianity. Jews can’t tell the difference. They probably think Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists are Christians.

Youtube can’t tell the difference between Christianity and Mormonism, so I got ads for a long time.

Lately, Youtube has been trying to get me to watch a video about David Goodall. He killed himself recently. He was a prominent botanist. He was still going to work at 102, when the university that employed him told him he would no longer be allowed to go to his office because it was unsafe. He became dissatisfied with life and traveled to Switzerland, where a doctor helped him commit suicide with Nembutal. He was 104.

I have watched a number of videos in which Christians testified about dying and coming back to life, so maybe that’s why Youtube thinks I’m interested in assisted suicide.

I have not watched the video. I have no interest in it. Goodall’s story is a tragic tale of utter defeat. This man had over 104 years to get to know God, and he didn’t make it. He thought he had the right to take his own life, and he died in sin.

Some people think every suicide goes to hell. Some think suicide is not a sin. I suppose there must be cases in which suicide is forgiven. What if you try to kill yourself, but while you’re in the process of dying, you repent sincerely? What if you throw yourself on a bomb to protect other people from a terrorist attack? As law professors say, every case is different. Generally, though, I would expect people who kill themselves deliberately to go to hell.

God gives us forgiveness for all our sins, but we’re supposed to repent in order to be forgiven. If you know you’re doing something sinful, you choose to do it anyway, and you die as a result, how can you hope to be forgiven?

Leftists want people to think Goodall’s experience is an indictment of England’s “backward” laws, which required a frail old man to travel hundreds of miles in order to end his suffering. That’s terrible. They want to make it easier for misinformed people to do things that will condemn themselves to hell. Their policies will help people die in unbelief.

Euthanasia is a wonderful thing…for lower animals. It’s great that we are allowed to spare animals pointless suffering. But animals are not human, and human beings are not animals. Animals can’t go to hell. They can’t sin, because sin requires the ability to distinguish good from evil.

The life of an animal is not sacred. You can kill an animal simply because you’re hungry or you need a piece of leather. You can kill an animal because it digs up your garden. Killing a person to end his suffering is like killing him for stealing your tomatoes.

People are very important. God told me this: no one is disposable. Euthanasia makes us out to be no more important than bugs and rats. Every one of us is here for a reason. We have assignments. We don’t have the right to quit before our time.

It’s too bad we can’t see Goodall as he is now. We can see him in a video, praising his uninformed decision…before receiving the consequences. We can’t see him in hell, in flames, crying and screaming in pain and regret.

The disinformation that surrounds us in this world is amazing. We swim in it every day. The enemy destroys people with lies, and then to make things worse, he persuades the rest of us to admire them after they’re placed in hell. The damned are still alive, suffering horrors beyond description, while we smugly celebrate them up here on hell’s roof.

I finally clicked the little links and told Youtube to quit showing me that video. I don’t know if it will listen, but I certainly hope so.

Signs Continue to Increase

I’ve been reading about the fires in California. Usually, I don’t pay any attention to these things. Fires come and go, and California is a long way off. The current crisis attracted my attention for some reason.

One of the interesting things about the fire is that it has destroyed or damaged a number of homes belonging to celebrities. I can’t help wondering if there is a message there. Look at some of the names.

1. Miley Cyrus. Promotes nudity, drug use, and every type of sexual sin.

2. Neil Young. Aging counterculture hero who seems to have no interest in changing.

3. Robin Thicke. Promoter of sexual sin. Notorious for a music video featuring nudity and a vulgar TV performance with Miley Cyrus.

4. Scott Derrickson. Director of Doctor Strange, a Marvel movie in which a witch helps save the world.

The fire also destroyed the Paramount Ranch, where M*A*S*H (the TV show) and a lot of westerns were filmed.

If the fire hurt these people and destroyed this property, there must be many showbiz people whose sad stories we haven’t heard yet.

Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but maybe it does. Satan owns Hollywood, and entertainers have gotten so crazy it’s hard to believe.

The Bible says God is not mocked. What it really means is he will not be mocked forever. You can mock him right now and not be struck by lightning. He shows patience, but eventually, someone has to pay the bill. If you won’t confess, repent, and let him pay it, it’s on you.

People from Hollywood are pulling together and supporting each other. You have to wonder if it was like that during the plagues of Egypt. What if they had had Twitter? Would they have praised each other for helping victims of the flies, frogs, and wild beasts? I suppose they would have. They thought worshiping idols was righteous, so they wouldn’t have understood the plagues.

Imagine the torrent of anguished tweets that would have poured out when God killed the firstborn of every house.

It just occurred to me: that’s what it will be like in the future. When God’s judgment really starts to rain on the earth, Twitter (if it still exists) will be full of selfies and shoutouts. There will be vigils and candles. There will be benefit concerts. Maybe Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke will perform.

I never thought of that before.

The children of darkness generally don’t embrace what they consider to be evil. They embrace an alternative righteousness, which looks shiny and promising. They preach acceptance and unconditional love (except for God’s children). They love holding banners and singing together. They think they’re doing the right thing. In that respect, they’re a lot like Christians who cling to dead churches and the prosperity gospel.

Leftists want a world where sin doesn’t exist because there are no longer any rules. They want a world without consequences, except for people who commit serious crimes such as wearing Chick-fil-A T-shirts. Those people have to be fired and impoverished, at the very least; mercy is not for them. Leftists want a Muppet/Pixar world, without God’s interference. It doesn’t work, because God is real, and he can’t be put off forever.

There is a scary video on Youtube right now. A Christian tried to help his friends escape a fire, and they didn’t make it. Their cars burned. He went back and filmed their corpses. I shouldn’t call them corpses. They are charred skeletons. One victim can be seen sitting in a front seat while a flame burns in the car behind him. Somehow his bare skull is still upright on his shoulders.

I don’t understand what happened. The Christian had to abandon his car, but when he returned, it wasn’t damaged very badly. It still ran, and the tires were intact. The other cars were shells with no paint.

One victim was a woman who refused to leave until she had applied makeup. He said she died because of that. That’s a metaphor. We hold onto things that can destroy us.

Sanctification is very, very important. We aren’t paying enough attention to it. We say a quick prayer, declare ourselves saved, and continue to live very much as we lived before. We think we can’t lose our salvation, and we think every bad thing that happens to us is unjustified. That’s not how it works. You can still go to hell, and holding onto sins will help you get there. It will allow demons to ruin your body and your life.

A young friend of mine tells his friends they’re going to arrive in heaven smelling like smoke. They say they’re Christians, but they do what they please. Their works will be burned, and if they are allowed into heaven, it will be as underachievers who didn’t accumulate much treasure. I think of that when I consider the video. Most of the people in the escape caravan died. The Christian who tried to save them made it, but the heat melted parts of his car.

It would be interesting to see God take a swing at Hollywood. I don’t know if that’s happening now, but it may be.

You won’t believe what’s happening in my own life. I have been hesitant to write about it, because it’s so strange. I passed several more kidney stones, in a single day. I have lost count.

As I wrote recently, I woke up with pressure on one side of my back, and I took a Roxicet because I was afraid it would turn into severe pain. I prayed and so on, and the pain left. I passed a big stone and went back to bed and slept soundly. I thought I was done. Then three more stones came out in one day.

I haven’t had any real pain. I don’t think I have a fever. I feel no pressure. I have had some symptoms I won’t describe because it would be TMI, but it’s not a big deal. Oddly, things down there are working better than they were before the first stone popped up. If you’re a middle-aged man, you may understand without further explanation.

I’m not worried at all. About anything. I was having a lot of problems with worry, and I mean general worry, not worry about kidney stones. I thought it was spirits that were allowed to get at me because of things I was holding onto, so I fought the spirits verbally and started cleansing my house. Yesterday or the day before, I realized I didn’t worry any more. I still have problems, but I don’t seem to be able to worry now. I almost feel irresponsible for not worrying.

I feel like the stones are connected to sanctification. It had to be a message. There must have been things I needed to confess and get rid of. I blocked God, so I was blocked. That’s how I see it. Our curses tend to have some resemblance to the evil things we do to God and other people.

The first time I had a stone, I was far from God. I paid about $7000 for unpleasant, humiliating medical treatment that amounted to nothing in terms of help, and I suffered for days while I waited to pass the stone. I just remembered that I went to a doctor for one other stone, but it wasn’t nearly as big a deal. The rest have come out with prayer, without a lot of misery.

When you have a problem, the first thing you should do is ask God what you’re doing wrong. Confess and repent, for real. After that, rely on prayer, fasting, casting out, and so on. Going to a doctor shouldn’t be your first move. Even if he helps you, you may be in for a repeat engagement because you haven’t pulled up the root. If you do things right with God, you should usually be able to get relief without medical help.

I’m so glad I didn’t have to go to a doctor. I hate dealing with people who offer primitive, superficial solutions that involve suffering and expense. I hate being misdiagnosed and given worthless treatments; that has happened a lot. It seems like I never have something simple which doctors understand correctly.

I mentioned blockage. One thing I have blocked is love. This has driven me crazy for years.

When I was young, I responded to abuse by making myself an angry person who ridiculed others. I also convinced myself I was an innocent victim, which is always a mistake. People who think they are victims are the cruelest people there are.

When Jesus visited me, I felt his overwhelming love, and I know I’m supposed to radiate love, too. On a few occasions, God has supernaturally allowed me to feel and give off love for everyone around me, so I know what it’s like. Nonetheless, I haven’t had consistent victory. For years, I didn’t know what was blocking it. I knew I had to get rid of demons and iniquities, but I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know much about sanctification.

When I pray in tongues now, I feel God’s love, and I’m trying to focus on it and open the passage wider. God is supposed to pour a lot of things through us; love, faith, prophecy, and so on. I constricted the pipe by embracing cruelty, so now it’s like a blocked artery. I am hoping homing in on God’s love while praying in tongues will wash away the accumulated crud and open up the channel.

The Bible says completed love casts out fear, and fear and worry are virtually the same thing. If love flows through me, fear and worry won’t be able to compete with it.

The world is being wound up to a state of enmity which will force a confrontation and resolution before long. Every time I think I’ve seen it all, I look at the news and see something that surprises me and makes me think we will see things fall apart even sooner.

If we want to see any improvement in the people around us, we will have to focus on internal improvement. I hope God raises up teachers who will tell us things that are useful instead of leading us in circles and amplifying our foolishness.