Drownproof Yourself

I had a dream last night, and it’s obviously a message from God.

Before I get to it, I’ll go back over some other dreams I’ve had which turned out to be messages.

I used to go to Trinity Church in Miami. It turned out to be a greed and fame cult dedicated to the promotion of the Wilkersons, the family that owned the church through a corporation. The head pastor was Rich Wilkerson. I left the church because God kept showing me bad things about it (and about the pastors), and Wilkerson ended up treating me like a sort of public enemy, as though I put the church in danger by speaking about its flaws.

After Trinity, I went to New Dawn Ministries in Miami. In many ways, it was much better. They took a serious interest in God’s presence and the supernatural. Still, the church fell apart because the pastors were greedy and arrogant. They were like pharaohs. They craved admiration and submission, like gods. They eventually rejected me, and I quit going. After that, they took the Wilkerson tack, treating me like an agent of Satan. The head pastor had a screaming fit in the parking lot while talking to a friend of mine about me.

While I was serving at New Dawn, I had this dream: I went to the church (a small rented room) at night. It was pitch black out, and there was only one light burning in the church. That light was in a small office. I looked into that office, and I saw Rich Wilkerson, wearing a visor, counting money. New Dawn was not his church; to him, all other churches in the area were business competitors. He was trespassing.

This dream meant that while the pastors were teaching about prayer and the supernatural, they were really thinking about money and man-worship. They wanted pretty much the same things Rich Wilkerson wanted. Sure enough, the dream turned out to be valid. New Dawn dissolved in greed, pride, and anger.

In the second dream, I went to New Dawn and walked into the kitchen. New Dawn didn’t have a kitchen, but that’s what happened. In the kitchen (not the sanctuary), I saw Rich Wilkerson, giving volunteers orders as though he owned the place.

The message: the Wilkerson spirit was in the church, working behind the scenes among people who served the pastor. This turned out to be true. Example: his sister and her husband got extremely holy after a year or two of Christianity, and the husband, who was very ambitious, started pushing carnal corporate culture and ideas on the church. He eventually got very angry at me and told me off on Facebook, saying I thought I was the voice of God. Very combative stuff. At the end, he said something like, “Love you, bro. Call if you want prayer.” I pointed out the utter hypocrisy, and that was that.

I’ll quit typing “the husband.” His name was Sander, and he was from Honduras. He came here as an illegal. His problems with me started when I wrote a Facebook post explaining that illegal immigration was a curse. The Old Testament warned the Jews that if they disobeyed, the alien among them would have power over them. That’s what’s happening today, to American citizens. Sander wrote a long, angry piece accusing and “correcting” me, and he never got over his offense.

Sander heard from the Holy Spirit sometimes, so I used to have high hopes for him, but as anyone who is familiar with my history knows, a carnal person can hear from God and still be a mess.

He accused the church of disloyalty after the pastor was arrested for child molestation. He didn’t say, “You are disloyal.” He posted a meme asking what the sheep do when the shepherd is wounded. His accusation:”Run?”

Here is a comment posted by a lady who worked in the church nursery: “Speak… We are called to forgive n continue to renew ourselves in His truth then restoration flows from within n we can extend it outwards.”

That is lack of understanding. Forgiveness doesn’t mean allowing a child molester to run a church. If he wants to attend, great. Supervise him very carefully and hope God reaches him. But don’t allow him to speak or give commands, and keep him far from the kids.

Charismatic churches have a poisonous tendency to circle the wagons when corrupt officials are exposed. Unfortunately, they circle the wagons with the wicked inside them and those they have harmed on the outside, receiving fire like hostile Indians in an old western.

Forgiveness and prayer are default options for Christians, but sometimes we are supposed to let people go and move on. God has told me over and over not to pray for the pastor and his wife. The message is very clear. Otherwise, I would certainly be praying for them. Even then, though, I would pray for God to keep them away from any type of authority in churches.

So. Those are my background dreams.

Today I dreamed I was at Middlebrook Church, the megachurch where I have been taking my dad. We sit in the back and mind our own business. I will never volunteer for anything. I will only give them money if God tells me to. If they have a pastor worship…I mean “appreciation”…day, I will stay home. I’m just there to be among Christians and to see if the experience will help my dad with his first steps.

In the dream, we were at the very back. The altar was maybe 150 feet away. Guess who was preaching? Rich Wilkerson. He was wearing what I keep wanting to call a clown suit. This is actually normal for Wilkerson.

Many charismatic preachers dress like clowns. It’s very strange, and it has nothing to do with lack of funds. They wear ugly jackets, silly ties, vests that are too tight, wild shirts, and so on. Keith Craft is a big-time greed preacher from Texas. He came to Trinity, and he wore a tiny vest and a weird little tie that came down to the middle of his chest. His hair was disorderly, as if he had just gotten out of bed. To make matters worse, he looks a lot like Gary Busey.

He looked like he was trying to be funny.

Wilkerson has a bad wardrobe, too, and it’s not unusual to see him wearing things other people clearly passed by when they went to the store. I think preachers dress this way because there are consultants who tell them to make themselves stand out. That’s my best guess.

I know the money preacher John Gray. He works for Joel Osteen now, and it looks like he wears nice suits. Back when he used to speak at Trinity, he dressed like a hobo who had been turned loose at Goodwill.

In my dream, Wilkerson was wearing a funny suit which was somewhere between purple and royal blue. He had a pink tie and pink shoes. He was wearing stilts under his pants, to make himself look larger. He had to swing his legs to walk.

I turned to my dad and excused myself, and I walked to the front left corner of the sanctuary. I felt I had to gather things I had left at the church and take them home. It amounted to enough to fill three cardboard boxes.

As I walked to the front, I passed low shelves that were against the left wall. They were full of goods. It was the sort of display you would see at a junk store. I saw a bunch of toys that belonged to me, and I realized I had to grab them or Meadowbrook would steal them.

The toys were odd. They were a little bigger than the green plastic soldiers kids used to play with before masculinity came to be regarded as a mental disorder. They were plastic. They were multicolored. Some had tiny lights on them. They were very, very sturdy, as if made by a technology we don’t have. I don’t know what they did, but I had a whole collection. Maybe a hundred.

My other items were already in two boxes. I walked around the church looking for a third box I could take. I felt that my experience as Wilkerson’s armorbearer entitled me to walk around and grab a box, whether I had asked permission or not.

While I was working with the toys, I got down on my hands and knees. I felt a hand touch me. Wilkerson was beside me. He said, “Steve, I’m going to have to say goodbye to you.”

That was remarkable. It was classic Wilkerson. Don’t confront. Never be “negative.” Passive aggression, all the way. It meant, “Get out of my church NOW and don’t ever come back.”

I did something strange. I don’t recall my actual words, but I told him it was all right, and I said something about how he needed to get it together. I called him by his first name. I said something like, “You need to get it together, Rich,” and I patted him on the cheek, like a condescending movie mafioso talking to someone he was thinking about whacking. When he approached, his head was way above me, but when I patted him on the cheek, I had to reach down.

I would never do anything like that in real life, and it would be very uncharacteristic for me to speak to another person like that. In the dream, it didn’t come from me.

Rich was mortified. His eyes went wide, and he was silent. He could not believe my gall. He had felt safe and omnipotent when he leaned down to run me off, and here I was, talking to him as though he were just another human being.

When I was at Trinity, he and his wife were exalted. No one called them by their first names. Actually, I did it once, but it just slipped out.

To slap one of them on the cheek would have been like elbowing God in the ribs. In the dream, he was aghast to see his pride violated by a mere former volunteer. By an ordinary mortal who didn’t get to sit in the green room or fly around the country at the church’s expense.

If Luther Campbell had done it, he would have been fine with it. He made Luther a VIP when he visited Trinity. We had to escort him to a special seat up front, and he was allowed to give a campaign speech. He was running for mayor.

If you have money or fame, you can talk down to the Wilkersons, and they will lap it up. If you’re rich, they want your huge tithes. If you’re famous, they want you to promote them.

Before I left, I saw sand on the floor, and I got a broom and swept it up.

I know what the dream meant.

Meadowbrook is a money church, and it’s a cult, just like Trinity and New Dawn. My former churches were obedience cults. You were supposed to give yourselves to the pastors completely. I don’t think Meadowbrook works that way. I think they charge people for the service of isolating them from God.

Meadowbrook whisks people in and out, and they don’t beg and cajole in order to get people to become their servants. They don’t seem to expect you to become slaves. On the other hand, they seem to work to avoid pushing people to become servants of God himself. There isn’t much talk about dedication or the Holy-Spirit-led life. The short services are scheduled rigidly, so it’s not like you can fall on your face at the altar and bask in God’s presence for an hour. The scheduling is a stronghold that prevents that.

If you go to Meadowbrook, you can enjoy very pleasant services which go by quickly, and then you can zip home or over to Cracker Barrel and feel like you have settled things with God. He has been fed for the week, so now you can go home and do your own thing.

Until today, I thought all cults enslaved people. I didn’t realize you could have a cult of denial that protects people from the voice of God and his demands.

Why did Wilkerson (actually the demonic spirit that limits the church) tell me he was going to have to say goodbye to me? He did it because a person like me would threaten the system at Meadowbrook if he opened his mouth. I will not be accepted. I’m being told in advance that I will never be a part of the church, and this will help me not to get stuck to a tar baby.

Should I accept this, given that it came from an evil spirit? Yes. It didn’t really come from an evil spirit. God created the image of a spirit in my dreams to let me know what was happening.

I can stay and battle the spirit, but there is the problem of free will. I would also be battling the people who obey the spirit. Even Jesus couldn’t tell human beings what to do. If the people could be reached, the dream would have been different. I’m not supposed to become an agitator at this church.

What were the toys? They were my non-spiritual gifts. Writing, cooking, and so on. Meadowbrook will never benefit from them. I will not do anything for them with the gifts God gave me.

I knew that already! From before my first visit, I intended to refrain from serving. I plan to do nothing at all for them except pray from a position of comfortable obscurity.

Notice that the gifts were toys. They weren’t very important. We greatly overestimate the importance of natural gifts. God isn’t twiddling his thumbs and fretting, wishing smart and gifted people would come to church and help him. We’re supposed to impress people with God’s gifts, not our own.

A lot of Christians would hate to read that. Christians who can sing or preach or whatever tend to think they’re very special. No. They’re not.

You know who didn’t have a natural gift? Samson. He was probably a bow-legged little runt with 10-inch biceps. The Bible never said he was big and strong. It said he performed great feats with the strength of the Holy Spirit. No Spirit, no strength.

There were huge, powerful men in Samson’s time who could not begin to do what Samson did when the Spirit was with him.

Gifts are not a big deal. I am gifted, and I say that. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.”

I’m not even sure what the purpose of natural gifts is.

What was the sand? Jesus said wise people would build their houses on rock, meaning revelation from God. The ideas of God are rock. They can’t fail. They are the solid foundation of the universe. Man’s ideas are sand. They are small and discrete. They are not bound together in unity, like the particles that compose rock. They are not anchored in anything.

If you wanted to build a barbecue, would you use bricks or sand?

Jesus said this:

“Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.

“But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall.”

The sand on the floor of Meadowbrook Church was the ideas of man. Things like Rick Warren’s awful book. Things that waste our time and open us up to disaster. I knew enough to sweep it up and dump it. That makes sense, because I have been telling a couple of people about the errors Middlebrook’s pastor makes. I didn’t do away with the dunes of the Sahara, but I cleaned up a small spill.

What were the stilts? Puffery and pride. The leaven of the Pharisees.

Preachers who don’t hear from God or possess his authority use man-made tricks to make themselves look powerful and smart. Wilkerson is a master at this. His church runs on debt, so it looks more successful than it is. He pushes people to donate money they don’t have, twisting scripture to find justification, in order to shore the place up. He is very quiet about the church’s failures. He uses every carnal tool he can find to pump the church up. Stilts everywhere!

When I left, he was up in his sixties and didn’t appear to have a single grey hair. He had had hair restoration surgery, too. Meanwhile, his body was in very bad shape. Lots of diseases. The facade was everything.

Meadowbrook appears to be a profitable church. It seems to run very smoothly, unlike Trinity and New Dawn. The pastor is a very gifted speaker. The people seem strong and well-fed. But the Holy Spirit is lacking, so all of these natural strengths are stilts.

I have been praying for correction for this church, so I hope people won’t lay into me for criticizing while doing nothing to help. I’m doing what’s important and powerful. Prayer is my best tool.

I’m sorry to see churches get things wrong, but it’s very nice to know I won’t get sucked into another pit of quicksand. I don’t want to sink again.

Carnal churches are like mills that grind up God’s seed so pastors can eat it.

Addressing preachers who cause others to offend, Jesus said it would be better if they had millstones tied around their necks and were tossed into the sea. Preachers who teach effort and carnality turn people into servants and milk cows instead of helping them to become powerful children of God who receive supernatural favor. They should be watering us so we can grow, but instead, they grind us up and combine us with leaven so they can stuff themselves at our expense.

A preacher who teaches carnality will not have supernatural help.

In the Bible, water represents voices and words. The world is a sea of this kind of water. Satan rules the world, and his spirits whisper and shout all around us. This is very powerful. Human beings who are against God and his children add their toxic voices. Look at the Internet and see what leftists are saying.

A person who doesn’t have revelation from God will sink beneath the waves. Voices that are against God will defeat him, and he will be the tail and not the head.

Here is what Psalm 31 says:

Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven,
Whose sin is covered.

Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity,
And in whose spirit there is no deceit.

When I kept silent, my bones grew old
Through my groaning all the day long.

For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me;
My vitality was turned into the drought of summer. Selah

I acknowledged my sin to You,
And my iniquity I have not hidden.
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
And You forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah

For this cause everyone who is godly shall pray to You
In a time when You may be found;
Surely in a flood of great waters
They shall not come near him.

You are my hiding place;
You shall preserve me from trouble;
You shall surround me with songs of deliverance.

Waters rise against Christians, and those who refuse to confess and repent will drown. If you think you can make it in your own strength, you are in denial. You are proud, whether you realize it or not, and you need to confess. Only then will God deliver you and lift you over the water.

Preachers who teach carnality rely on millstones, and those millstones pull them under the water and drown them. They don’t get deliverance.

The flood is rising every day, and we are relying on Rick Warren and other carnal preachers. They make us easier to drown.

Interesting stuff. Revelation is much better than guessing. Inheriting is better than earning. If God will simply tell us things, and we will believe them, we won’t have to perish for lack of knowledge. We need to inherit his knowledge and wisdom instead of working to develop our own.

Hell is full of self-made men, and there isn’t a single one in heaven.

Everyone in heaven is a pampered heir.

I think this was a neat dream, and I hope God keeps giving me information like this. There is nothing like solid guidance, in a world where everyone else is winging it.

Gab.com Crushed by Leftist Might

There is a fascinating story in the news. Gab.com is gone. The left made it disappear, like Thanos snapping his fingers. That’s how hard it was.

Gab is a social media site for conservatives. It was used by Robert Bowers, the accused synagogue murderer. When I heard he had used Gab, I had no idea what people were talking about. I seem to recall hearing about something like it in the past, but I’m not sure. I have a vague memory of hearing about a site called Cube or Square or something. Maybe I’m imagining it.

Anyway, I don’t use Gab. I can’t endorse or condemn it. I don’t know what happens…happened…there. I do know it’s supposed to be an alternative to leftist-controlled sites that restrain free speech by conservatives and Christians.

Robert Bowers is mentally ill or, at the very least, brainwashed. He has an irrational hatred of the Jews, which comes from antichrist demons who have access to him because he is not aligned with God. He has accused Jews of committing some sort of murder or other. I don’t know what it’s all about. His excuse isn’t all that important, because excuses are lies. The hatred is what matters. If he were angry at them for refusing to support the pork industry, the situation would be just as bad.

Bowers used Gab to say nutty things about Jews. Libels. Judging by the Gab thread snippets we have seen, he was not alone. Ordinarily, when you appear on a popular website and say something like, “Jews eat Gentile babies,” you can expect other members to chime in and disagree, to say the least. I don’t know if anyone responded to Bowers that way, and I guess I never will know, but at least one crackpot backed him up.

Is everyone on Gab a dangerous kook who is likely to turn violent, or who will at least support such kooks and make them more likely to act? I don’t know. Godaddy killed Gab because of hate speech, so I can’t go look at it. For all I know, 97% of Gab members were Spirit-led Christians who just wanted a place to talk in peace. Or maybe it was a very bad site, like Stormfront.

The interesting thing here isn’t the question of whether Gab was a bad site. The interesting thing is that it was so easy to stifle conservative speech. It has been happening on Facebook and Twitter for a long time. That’s why Gab was created, I guess. Certain conservatives looked for a refuge where they could get away from leftist censorship, and look what happened. Instead of conducting mini-raids resulting in deletions and bans, they sucked the floor out from under the place and made it disappear.

That’s how powerful they are.

The government can’t do these things. The First Amendment makes it impossible. Say you want to create a website called “All_Puerto_Ricans_Must_be_Sterilized.com.” Uncle Sam can’t do one thing about it. Uncle Sam is not supposed to get involved in political debates. It’s very important for him to stay out, because as soon as he steps in, we have oppression, even if he begins by oppressing truly obnoxious people. Uncle Sam can’t be trusted to do the right thing. He is a composite ogre made up of human beings who are highly susceptible to corruption, so he can’t be trusted to censor wisely or fairly.

A famous court case established the right of Nazis to march in a Jewish neighborhood. The courts defend the Westboro Baptist Church, which consists of 20 or 30 people who drive around offending absolutely everyone. If it were up to the courts, Gab would still be around, and fair, intelligent people would approve. They would not approve of Gab, but they would approve of its right to exist.

Thanks to leftist tech hegemony, Uncle Sam isn’t the problem any more. He has been bypassed. Facebook and Youtube aren’t governed by the First Amendment, and neither is Godaddy. If they want to ban every site and user who uses the word “Tuesday,” they can do it, and none of us can do anything to fight back.

It is conceivable that Congress will eventually act, forcing tech companies to operate fairly, under strict oversight. We now live in an age in which First Amendment rights don’t mean squat unless Facebook and Google have to respect them. The First Amendment’s purpose will be nullified if tech kids are allowed to silence people they disagree with.

I don’t think oversight is going to happen. It would be difficult to implement, and besides, it would replace the tech kids with government bureaucrats who would probably continue their policies with even greater authority backing them up.

The Internet is a fascinating thing. Between maybe 1995 and the reeking debut of Pajamas Media, the Internet provided a lot of freedom. It provided a gaping crack through which conservative voices could shout. That gap started closing with fake corporate “blogs,” and the ascension of social media will glue it shut forever. We would still be able to say things leftists don’t like if we were saying them on blogs, but as soon as the social giants took off, most of us took the bait and became dependent on them. We put our heads in Jeff Zuckerberg’s lap, went to sleep, and woke up bald.

If you want to reach people, you don’t start a blog. No one will read it. You start a channel or account. We accepted a lite version of the Mark of the Beast in exchange for eyeballs, and now the Beast is taking the eyeballs away and leaving us beached.

Meanwhile, leftists continue to enjoy the support of social media sites. They will have that, and we will have little tiny blogs. We will whisper, and they will have PA systems.

Fascinating. You can’t watch this taking place and not find it fascinating. The First Amendment had limited power to begin with, and now even that little bit of power is sliding away.

I’ve been predicting this for many years. How long have prominent conservatives been talking about it? Three years, maybe? I was here long before that. The script had been written, and it was going to be played out. No one paid any attention to me or anyone else who sounded an alarm. Not until it became so obvious that even famous pundits could see it.

What do you expect me to say? “Man the ramparts”? “Drag your friends to the polls”? “Get a stick and hit Antifa nuts with it”? Forget it. I’m not interested in fighting back with childish weapons. Every day, I become more averse to it. I’m not rabble-rousing. I’m just observing.

Leftists, come take my freedom of speech. Cancel my hosting account. Take away my phone. If you’re able to do it, go for it. I’m not going to be a Proud Boy or a Patriot Pray-er, waving a golf club at rallies. Any country, or planet, you can take over is not worth fighting for. The fact that a thing is within your reach establishes its worthlessness.

I have a better home waiting, and Antifa will never get across the border. My advice is to do your best to turn to God and obtain citizenship.

In an apocryphal book, Hezekiah’s son Manasseh had the prophet Isaiah sawn in half, acting on advice from a false prophet named Belchira. When Belchira adjured Isaiah to recant, Isaiah said, “So far as I have utterance I say: Damned and accursed be thou and all thy powers and all thy house. For thou canst not take from me aught save the skin of my body.”

That sums it up, except I am not cursing anyone with damnation.

Here’s an interesting thing about the world. Everything exists in four readily perceived dimensions. The first three obvious dimensions are length, height, and width. The fourth is time, and it’s just as real as the other three. All else held equal, a person who lives longer is actually larger than other people. It’s like being taller or wider.

I am getting very small. When I got here, I was much taller. I had maybe, optimistically, 100 years of temporal height in my account. Now that number has been greatly reduced. That means there is much less of me here for my enemies to grasp and abuse. I’m sliding out of their hands as I age. My interest in fighting over this accursed ball of dirt is waning. My willingness to be contemned and shut out is waxing.

The Old Testament is full of relatively carnal battles. God sent the Jews out to kill people with swords. They had to pray and obey if they wanted his help, but still, they fought with man-made weapons. The current age is different. Christianity is much less carnal than pre-Christian Judaism.

Paul said we don’t fight with men. We fight powerful spirits. Look it up. Men are just puppets. Our big weapons are things like repentance, prayer, cursing, blessing, casting out demons, and so on. We’re not making God happy when we pick up clubs and do exactly what our persecutors do. How is he supposed to choose between us?

Remember the final page of Animal Farm?

When carnal tools are all you have, you pick them up and do your best, but we should be fighting supernaturally, and we should be working hard to love our enemies and help them change.

I have wasted a ton of time, disobeying God, fighting my enemies by carnal means. I have let myself forget that God loves my enemies and wants to change them. I have lost sight of the fact that, in my own right, I am no better than they are. I may be trying to do right now, but a few years back, I was just like the people who are trying to erase my kind. God helped me change, but in my heart, I took credit as though I had earned it. He had chosen me because I was special!

People should vote for friends of God. They should speak against leftism. But these things aren’t battle-winning weapons. God fights the enemies of those who serve him. We need to adopt God’s priorities and do what he tells us to do. If we do that, he will help us. If not, the carnal tools won’t get us anywhere. We’ll just end up frustrated and defeated.

Anger abounds these days. Division is drowning us. Different factions are at each other’s throats all the time. Men are evil, and women are good. White people are privileged oppressors. Black people are born criminals who can’t stay out of trouble. Hispanics are greedy, hateful conquerors who want to invade and loot our country. Muslims are savages who shouldn’t even be here. These things are whispered in our ears all day.

We are bombarded with angry ideas around the clock. It’s a Satanic plot carried out by the demons we listen to. The purpose is to make us forget love.

God created the universe for love. His ultimate goal is to create a group of children who live with him in a place where everyone is bathed with love and peace. That’s the entire point of creation.

Unbelievers are the reason we’re still here. But for God’s love for them, he would have taken us out of this awful place already. That’s in the Bible. The people who make us suffer are the only reason we are here, so how can we treat them as though they were biting flies that need to be swatted and abandoned?

It’s hard to think about that when a Nuremburgian fog seems to be rising up to choke us. We can’t help but think about the vile mistreatment we receive, and while we’re in pain, it’s not easy to feel love for the people who make it happen. We focus on the pain and fear, and it makes love hard to dwell on. Satan knows that, so he keeps his people jabbing at us.

We have to separate ourselves from cruel, underdeveloped, worldly people, but we’re also supposed to see the evil in them as a signal that they’re exactly who we should be praying for. We should be praying for God to crush the spirits that run them. We should be asking him to look among them and open the eyes and ears of anyone who can still be reached. The more vile a person is, the more important it is that we discuss him with God and see what can be done.

Jesus was critical of those who are only nice to their friends, saying even the wicked could do that. He came to save people who tore his skin open and nailed him to a cross. What the Pharisees and Romans did to him was worse than taking away a Facebook account.

Lately I have made a point of praying for terrible people. The synagogue shooter is a perfect example of a good opportunity. Whatever he has done, hell is a very stiff punishment, and if he can be changed, it will serve no purpose for him to be condemned. The Bible says God himself, who throws people into hell out of duty, is not willing that anyone should perish.

Paul murdered people who gathered to worship. That was his job as a servant of the high priest. Some people can be changed.

This is my long way of explaining why I’m not interested in protests, armed resistance, and so on. The left is going to win, because too many of us will allow them to goad us into joining them in carnality. I accept the fact that socialism owns the future. Satan eventually wins every population contest here on earth. I don’t have to make myself more corrupt by allowing myself to hate the cruel people who are against me.

If I do that, they win twice, or, more accurately, all of us lose.

Demons run wild in the crowd that doesn’t know God, and if I insist on responding with carnality, demons will run me, too. Then I won’t really be led by the Holy Spirit, and I will have limited authority and success. I will give spirits and people the legal right to harm me.

A Christian is supposed to be more than a conqueror. He is supposed to have victory over his human enemies, which makes him a conqueror, and he is supposed to go beyond conquest, by helping them join the family of God. There is symmetry in the supernatural. Satan’s children can be more than conquerors, too. They can overcome weak Christians in the natural and also provoke them to obey anger and fear and join Satan’s team.

I expect Gab to die permanently or be diminished to the point where it might as well be dead. I expect tech companies to succeed in greatly reducing conservative and Christian Internet content. I don’t pin my hopes on websites or the government. Prophecy clearly says we’re going to be rejected, so I’m not going to fight it.

I hope I can get cleaned up internally. I hope I can reach a few people and avoid driving them away from God with anger and pride.

Life is Sweet in the Cheap Seats

I have returned from church, and of course, I have a review.

For a long time, I’ve had a habit of reviewing restaurants on Yelp as soon as I get home, so maybe it should not be a surprise that I do the same thing to what I will, for convenience, call “my” church.

I went to Meadowbrook Church again, and my dad was in tow. Straight away, we had a bad experience with an usher. I asked for two seats on an aisle, because of my dad’s problems. Instead of asking people to move over, he told us we could have one seat. Like we were negotiating. Then he said we could to sit way back in the corner, in seats clearly reserved for ushers. I really looked forward to explaining our presence in those terrible seats, over and over.

I knew what to do. I walked 20 feet and asked another usher, as though I had never talked to the first one. He was thrilled to help. Three seconds later, we were directed to a couple of nice seats.

I know everything about the work ushers do. They’re supposed to help people find seats, moving other people if necessary. The first guy I talked to didn’t know the job, or maybe he just wanted to assert his dominance. Some people look for little bits of authority so they can talk down to other people and say “no” a lot. Don’t know if that was his issue. Anyway, he was dealing with a former deacon and armorbearer, so I was more than ready to beat him at the game.

I was not happy to see that the topic was giving. I know what that generally means, in charismatic churches: “receiving.” As in “receiving unscriptural tithes and offerings.”

Pastor Gilligan didn’t do too badly at first. It was a general spiel about generosity. I have no problem with this. Giving is extremely important. Christians have a real problem with stinginess, and God wants us to give. He blesses people for giving. He promises this: “He who gives to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will repay him.”

Notice that the above passage mentions the poor, not Jimmy Swaggart.

Psalm 41 lists the blessings God will give those who look after the poor, but again, no mention of Kenneth Copeland or Joyce Meyer.

If you are capable of sensing the presence of God, you will notice a difference between a service at a charismatic church and a lecture in a rented banquet hall. The air seems sweeter and heavier. Peace hangs over the place. Compared to a church experiencing the presence of God, the rented hall will feel dry and lifeless.

Today, God’s presence was at Middlebrook Church. For a while.

The music team did a great job. People worshiped and sang. They prayed at their seats. God was clearly there, although the sensation was somewhat muted. He remained there through much of Gilligan’s sermon. Then Gilligan started homing in on his ultimate destination: giving money to him. I mean his church. After that, the air dried out, and it was like sitting in a continuing legal education lecture or a Herbalife recruitment seminar.

Gilligan told us a ridiculous story, which I will repeat. A little boy in Africa or some such place brought a fish to a missionary’s door. The missionary asked why he brought it. The boy said it was a tithe. The missionary asked him where the other 9 fish were. The boy said, “They’re in the river, and now I have to go catch them.”

Here are some things to consider:

1. The story isn’t true. I mean, it could be true, but what are the odds? Slim. Preachers make up stories like this all the time. You’ll never see one backed up with video. What was the missionary’s name? What was the kid’s name? What country are we talking about? What kind of fish? What kind of commercial fisherman, even in Africa, catches fish one at a time? Even primitive fishermen use nets, and it’s unusual to catch one fish in a net. If you did, would you quit work and take your only fish to a missionary? I think you would keep fishing, in order to avoid starving.

If the story were true, we would have heard some facts.

2. Lie that it is, it’s not even a good lie, because it doesn’t have the expected punchline, which goes something like, “And then the boy went fishing, 3,000 fish jumped onto the bank, and he sold them and used the money to build his mom a new house.”

Kenneth Copeland tells a lot of lies, and here’s one he used to tell. Missionaries in Africa taught farmers to tithe. When harvest came, the land looked like a checkerboard. The tithers’ farms were green, and the heathens’ farms were brown. This never happened, but it’s better than the fish story. At least it suggests tithing works. The kid with the fish may have drowned.

I just Googled the fish story. It comes from a 1988 book by a man named Hewett. The name of the book is Illustrations Unlimited. It’s a pack of fables and jokes and so on, intended to help preachers who don’t receive fresh material from God. If God doesn’t talk to you, but for some inexplicable reason, you think you should preach anyway, this book is for you.

The book doesn’t say the story is true, and it gives no facts that would authenticate it.

I’ll tell you another inspiring story. Rodney Dangerfield got lost at the beach when he was a kid. He approached a cop and said, “Officer, can you help me find my parents?” The cop said, “I don’t know, kid. There are so many places they could hide.”

What’s the difference between this and the fish story? Not a whole lot. They were both created by professional anecdote writers in order to make money. Neither is true. One nice thing about the beach story is that it has never been used to convince people to give a preacher cash. Rodney Dangerfield has the high moral ground in this case.

If you look up the story, you will see that many, many preachers have posted it online, without attribution. It sort of looks like they copied it word-for-word, which is plagiarism, a subheading of “theft.”

It’s amazing how many tithing miracles happen in Africa. Where we can’t check on them to see if they’re true. I have never seen a preacher say, “Bob in the front row tithed, and yesterday his mule started laying golden eggs, and now we are going to get in buses and ride half a mile to look at it.”

My friend Amanda has been attending church at Middlebrook. When the presence of God departed, I texted her to point it out, and she had already noticed.

When my dad and I left, he started talking about the sermon. If I were to paraphrase, I would say he said it was a load of crap. He said preachers were all about money. He concluded that the whole point of the sermon was to get people to donate. He was either mostly or completely right.

What was I supposed to say to this man who prayed for salvation only 5 weeks ago? “TOUCH NOT MINE ANOINTED AND DO MY PROPHETS NO HARM”? Should I have scolded him for doubting a man who has TV cameras and a big building? A lot of Christians I know would have responded that way. No, MOST. I know, because that’s how they treated me at Trinity Church in Miami and New Dawn Ministries when I criticized the fraudulent prosperity gospel.

I wasn’t going to lie to my dad. The thought never entered my mind. He may have dementia, but he’s not an imbecile. Besides, lies don’t win people to Christ. I say that even though a huge percentage of preachers rely on clumsy, transparent lies as essential tools.

Imagine God, sitting up there smiling, saying, “Steve just told his dad a real whopper, but it’s okay, because it will help him get to heaven. Satan, did you hear that lie? What a servant!”

I told my dad he was absolutely right. I told him about the way I was persecuted when I took on the tithe and offering nonsense. I told him I didn’t go to Meadowbrook Church to listen to Tim Gilligan. I said I went to be among Christians.

Gilligan and the other people who push this stuff don’t realize they offend intelligent people. They only see the people who continue to attend. They don’t see the people who quit immediately and never return. Those people don’t come every Sunday and stand outside waving signs. They’re invisible. If a preacher like Gilligan reaches a membership of 2000, he feels great, but he doesn’t realize he may have driven 20,000 away with a transparent pack of self-serving BS.

Amanda texted me after the service, and she said, “They parsed that together like the SC did in Rowe v wade [sic].”

You couldn’t sum it up better. This is exactly how bad religion works. A preacher with a predetermined conclusion acts like a lawyer trying to win a case. A lawyer will look at statutes and the case law and pick out phrases that help his client, and then he will cobble them together into what is known as an “articulated rule” the court will think it has to follow. Preachers do the same thing with the Bible.

The Bible doesn’t tell Christians to tithe ANYWHERE, and it doesn’t tell them tithing will make them financially prosperous ANYWHERE, so preachers tack together scriptures about pre-Christian Jews and vague promises like, “As you sow, so shall you reap,” and eventually they end up with, “Give Benny Hinn your children’s inheritance so he can buy a bigger yacht, and God will make you rich.”

They also have canned responses available in case you go broke while tithing. In classic gaslighting style, they will help you understand that you did it wrong.

Try this. Give everything you have to Joyce Meyer. Then when you’re old and disabled, call her ministry and ask for it back so you can pay for assisted living. Tell them it’s more blessed to give than to receive. Email them receipts to prove you’re not lying. Send them your medical file. Get back to me and let me know how it goes. Good luck with that.

Try telling them the fish story.

Joyce Meyer claims God gives us heavenly receipts when we give her money, and she says we can call on him to repay us when we’re in need. Let’s see if Joyce Meyer is as honorable as God. Show her your receipts and see if she will help you. Tell her $75,000 per year ought to do it. Try it with any prosperity preacher. They’re like casinos. No refunds.

You want to hear a prediction? I’ll give you one. God is going to bless me for writing this blog entry. He has always blessed me for criticizing the prosperity gospel, and he increased my wealth dramatically after I started doing it, PARTLY AT THE EXPENSE of a person who was a prosperity thrall.

God is the one who told me to criticize the prosperity gospel. It doesn’t make him mad when I do it. It’s obedience. The persecution that follows ought to be a clue.

Jesus criticized the prosperity gospel. Remember the stuff about making long prayers and devouring widows’ houses?

Trinity Church has huge debt, and the head pastor is falling apart. New Dawn is deceased, and its head pastor and his wife are headed for prison (25-year man-min) and death from cancer, respectively. New Dawn’s false “house prophet” has been humiliated and deprived of his title. His brother-in-law who lectured me watched the church crumble and disappear from under his feet. The people who railed against me have all been put to public shame. How much proof do you need?

I am not a good Christian. I may be among the worst. And I have my problems. But I have zero long-term debt, and God heals me all the time.

Tell me who is closer to the right doctrine. If these people are “God’s anointed,” anointing must not be all it’s cracked up to be. They are not doing well at all, and God helps their critics.

God may interfere with your financial progress if you give money to prosperity preachers. Following a false prophet is dangerous. There is symmetry in the supernatural. The Bible says anyone who receives a prophet receives a prophet’s reward. What, then, happens when you receive a false prophet? Check the Old Testament and see. One word: “Babylon.” How about this one: “diaspora.”

So, to sum up, I was not impressed by today’s sermon. It was full of advice that will hurt people, and it ran off the presence of God. I hope next week they’ll come up with something better.

As weak as this church is, I enjoy sitting in the back with no accountability and no yoke on my shoulders. I don’t have to ask myself whether I can leave early or what will happen if I’m late. I come in whenever I feel like it. I sit where I want to sit. I wear what I want to wear. I still haven’t given a dime. No one has asked me to cook, write, direct traffic, take backward classes, go get the pastor’s laundry, stand guard with a pistol, or participate in stage construction jobs that amount to perilous Chinese fire drills without the benefit of worker’s comp.

When I was a volunteer, I had to use crummy parking spaces and walk forever. Now I have my dad’s disabled permit, and no one can tell me where to put the SUV. We park like 75 feet from the door. If the people who run the place don’t like it, they better keep quiet. If I hear one peep, I’ll go to another church! For all they know, I’m giving $2000 per week.

Today someone mentioned “Pastor Appreciation Month.” Oh, boy. We had Pastor Appreciation Day about three times a week at New Dawn. I’m glad they never realized they could jack it up to a month. I’ve already picked out a gift for Pastor Gilligan: nothing. I’m going to get him a great big box of it, without the box. And no one is going to bother me about it. Because I’m not a volunteer, no one has any hooks in me.

I’ve prayed for him to be corrected. Same thing I ask for myself. That’s a pretty good gift. It could happen. Maybe he’s not stubborn. For all I know, he believes the things he teaches. Maybe his mind is not closed. I doubt it, however, because he seems very smart.

I hope something good happens to my dad at this place. It’s possible. On the other hand, maybe it’s temporary. Maybe God showed him Middlebrook so he’ll be amazed when he goes to a church where better things happen.

Historic Mismatch Blows Apart

I see Megyn Kelly’s show is gone. Remarkable.

When I saw the news, I wanted to know what the problem was. People kept referring to blackface. I looked up her remarks, expecting to find something really incendiary. All I found was a few words in which she said blackface wasn’t a big deal when she was a kid. This is a firing offense?

Blackface WAS okay when she was a kid. Kelly is no spring chicken. She is closing on 50. When she was a kid, you could go to the store and buy Rice Krinkles cereal with a slit-eyed cartoon Chinese boy on the front of the box. You could watch The Dukes of Hazzard on your huge 20″ TV without closing your blinds.

NBC was waiting for her to kick a tripwire. If it hadn’t been the blackface nonsense, it would have been something equally pretextual.

I don’t care about her show. I didn’t watch it. I’m not here to defend her. I was curious to see how well her fate matched up with my predictions, though.

I looked up an old post I wrote about her move to NBC, and it pretty much describes what happened. She didn’t hurt Fox when she left. She hurt herself, and she hurt NBC. She got fired, which is what I expected. NBC rejected her like a kidney patient rejecting an organ from a giraffe.

You know who hurt Fox by leaving? O’Reilly. He was not a great role model for young men, but he had a monster talent for self-promotion, entertainment, raising ratings, and selling books. Tucker Carlson is not doing too bad, but he can’t carry O’Reilly’s Paul Stuart tie.

Megyn Kelly never did much for me. She came across as a liberal who pretended to be conservative in order to make it at Fox. As for her personality, she could be tone deaf and overly forceful. She also seemed to think she was doing her job way better than she was, perhaps because of the promotion she received. She didn’t seem good at self-monitoring.

Kelly did good work, but she wasn’t a major talent like O’Reilly, Shepard Smith, or Sean Hannity. I believe her time slot at Fox made her successful. Tucker Carlson’s modest degree of success shows what a good time slot can do for a person who isn’t exciting to watch.

You can’t move from Fox to another network and expect to do well. Has anyone done it? Kiran Chetry disappeared. Alisyn Camerota didn’t do well after she left. I looked over a list of alumni, and I didn’t see anyone who accomplished anything after they left. The liberal media establishment doesn’t forgive or forget, even when they try.

I looked up my old predictions because it amazed me when Kelly moved to NBC. I was amazed that she left, and I was amazed that they wanted her. They overestimated her drawing power, and they underestimated the cultural clash that would brew between Kelly and her new coworkers. I assume these looming problems were obvious to most people, so why did the move happen?

Strange.

I think Megyn Kelly is done. The news says Fox doesn’t want her, and Fox is the only game in town for journalists who have the smell of conservatism on them. She proved she can’t draw eyeballs on a mainstream leftists network, so no one else will want her. She’s headed down the Debra Norville rabbit hole.

It’s not a tragedy. She’s rich. She can go do whatever she wants.

It’s funny, though, many people can’t be happy with money and free time. They have nothing but their chosen careers to keep them sane. I have never been like that. I don’t get bored. I don’t care at all about achievement or having my name on plaques. I would like nothing better than to have a hundred million dollars and no real responsibilities. I would never, ever wake up in the morning and ask myself if I were wasting my life.

If I had a mainstream legal job right now, I would be drinking the leftist Kool-Aid through a funnel held between my boss’s knees. I would be forced to take sensitivity training. I would be told what to say and what not to say. I could be fired for blogging or for going to the wrong church. Gays in my firm would be scheming to try to get rid of me, and they would succeed.

In addition to that, I would be fungible. I can do a bang-up job with a lawsuit, but that’s not a rare gift. Being a good lawyer is like being a good Jiffy Lube manager. If they fire you, they can replace you in a week. People who are fungible have to toe the line, because they’re so easy to replace.

Having a mainstream job is like joining a fraternity. You have to humiliate yourself and deny your soul, and what you get in return is something that doesn’t feel anything like you hoped it would. You sell yourself for a bill of goods, you work, you retire, and then, your purpose ripped away by people who are suddenly eager to be rid of you, you wait to die.

Working for yourself or having investments…that’s the only way to avoid going nuts these days.

I don’t know if Kelly can be happy with money and freedom. Maybe she’s a driven person who tosses and turns at night if she thinks other people don’t find her dazzling. It’s not a rare condition, especially among TV stars and other frantic self-promoters who crave attention.

I saw a neat video the other day. A man from Scotland made it. His name is Gordon. He smoked some kind of fake weed, and his heart stopped. He found himself in total darkness, in a huge void. Like a lot of other people in the same situation, he started to know things supernaturally; knowledge came to him from out of nowhere. One of the things he instantly knew was that everything he had done in his life, without exception, was worthless.

He’s a songwriter. He never made the big time. He has written hundreds of songs. He’s also an artist. He realized all of that stuff was garbage. It meant absolutely nothing.

Of course, when he regained consciousness here on earth, he became a Christian.

I’ve known and heard of a lot of driven people. They obsess on achieving and on putting their names on things. Many of them love putting their names on buildings and projects. The Wollmann Rink. The Widener Library. Carnegie Hall. The Nobel Prizes. They like getting awards and tributes. They like being acknowledged for the impressive things they’ve done. They don’t realize something: it all burns.

Christianity is correct. The only god is the God of Christianity. The only reason we exist is to please him. The only accomplishments that last are things we do in obedience to God, and the only real rewards we will have will be the people we help to gain eternal life. All the other things you do burn. Shakespeare’s plays, every piece of Renaissance art, every Frank Lloyd Wright structure, the pyramids of Egypt, the theory of relativity, the discovery of calculus, the invention of the wheel…it will all be gone soon, and no one will care about it. People in hell will be the only people who continue to think about this nonsense. They will regret dedicating their lives to it.

Here’s an interesting fact I don’t see people discussing: knowledge is multiplying at a phenomenal, unprecedented rate, but the means by which we store it are more ephemeral than ever. Isn’t that strange? Hard drives, digital drives, and optical disks aren’t very stable or durable compared to paper, stone, and clay. The oldest painting on a cave wall is more durable than the last fact recorded on a computer disk. Weird. I think about that a lot. An incomprehensible amount of knowledge, which we think is precious and important, may well disappear over the next few decades.

Jesus is going to return, a lot of cataclysmic events will take place, and after that, no one is going to care who got the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1974. No one will care who proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. No one will be interested in meeting Jeff Bezos.

The last shall be first, and the first shall be last. Women who did laundry with their bare hands in order to eat will be wearing glorious robes and walking on streets of gold, and actresses whom designers begged to wear their creations in red carpet interviews will be burning in pits in hell while maggots gnaw their bones.

It’s good not to be driven, and it’s good not to let your career define you. Careers can be taken away.

I’m rambling. I’ll wrap up by saying I think Megyn Kelly’s peak just passed. I don’t think we’ll see her running a major show on a major network ever again.

Here is Gordon’s video. You might like it.

Real Indian?

I am stuck on the phone with the guhmint. I have nothing to do but blog. I have to ask them something about corporations, and I fully expect whoever answers to tell me I called the wrong person. That’s how the government works. You wait half an hour to find out the main goal of the person you reached is to get rid of you regardless of whether your urgent need has been addressed.

The political right got a major disappointment today. It appears that the criminal who sent fake bombs to prominent liberals is, in fact, a conservative. I thought it was more likely that it was a hoax. Leftists pull hoaxes all the time, trying to make themselves look like victims, and in general, they are much more violent than conservatives, so it seemed likely that a leftist was behind the bombings.

Of course, leftist journalists and politicians will want to turn the alleged bomber, one Cesar Sayoc, into a visual aid. They will want to tell us this is what a Trump voter looks like. They won’t mention the Antifa characters who riot and beat innocent people as a matter of policy.

If there is a bright side to the story, it is Sayoc’s ancestry. He claims he’s a Seminole Indian. He is not white; that’s for sure. His photos reveal a man who could pass for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and his first name is Hispanic. Someone has dubbed him “the Magabomber” in an Internet comment.

Now leftists have to attack an Indian. An actual Indian; I always feel like I have to say that when I discuss leftists who claim to be Indians. I don’t mean he’s a whimsical individual who identifies as an Indian on this particular day.

Of course, he may not be an Indian. If current indications pan out, this guy will turn out to be a very strange bird, and pretending to be an Indian would not be outside his wheelhouse.

Judging by his very poor English skills, Sayoc (graduate of North Miami Beach High) is either mildly retarded or afflicted with a serious learning disability. He may have more than one mental issue.

Whatever he is, he is not white, so he will make the stomachs of liberal pundits churn this weekend.

Maybe they’ll say he was driven crazy by broken treaties and 19th-century massacres.

It’s very disappointing to see anyone commit vicious, cowardly crimes like this, but as a conservative, I am particularly disconcerted to see a perpetrator turn out to someone on my side. What this man [allegedly] did is beneath contempt, and it pushes us one step closer toward a state that resembles a never-ending riot. It shoves us in the direction of socialist Venezuela. The bomb mailings, with or without functioning bombs, were heinous crimes, and because of them, leftists may well succeed in using him against us successfully in the imminent elections.

It will be a catastrophe if we let ourselves sink into anarchy and routine political violence. Life will be intolerable in cities and many suburbs. The only places where there will be peace will be rural areas like mine, where minorities and leftists are relatively scarce. It’s impossible to have a riot without leftists.

What a place America will be, if we don’t rein the anger in. Nuts accosting each other in restaurants and stores, riots over nothing, and it will all be considered acceptable.

Maybe I should invest in body armor companies. Maybe everyone will be wearing it in a couple of years.

The incredible thing about increasing political violence is that it is taking place in an atmosphere of extraordinary prosperity. Ordinarily, leftist rage boils over in countries where poverty is unbearable. What’s our excuse?

Score one for the left. I hope we aren’t seeing the beginning of a tide of conservative violence. When leftists get us to adopt their tactics on a broad front, we will be as toxic as they are.

Cloud on the Horizon

My dad visited his cardiologist lately, and we learned he has a new problem: congestive heart failure.

This is a scary-sounding disease. “Heart failure” sounds like something that results in a sudden death. That’s not how it works, though. It’s a chronic disease which, if I understand it correctly, is related to new difficulties the heart faces when pumping blood. It can be caused by high blood pressure and obesity, and alcohol is also a factor, so I think I know what happened in my dad’s case. He has never had obstructions in his blood vessels, which is remarkable, but his blood pressure has been high, his weight has been out of control, and he has not been one to turn down a drink.

My dad had wonderful health until he was over 80. People always said he looked like he was 10 years younger than he was. He was strong and vigorous. When he was 82, he was a very capable lawyer. He has never had an operation. He has never had significant arthritis. All these things were true, even though he ate voraciously, drank whatever he wanted, and never exercised. He had high blood pressure and other problems, but they had no effect on the way he felt or what he could do.

He had minor lower back pain, but this was caused by a couple of falls he took after the age of 80. Other people have died after similar falls.

The new diagnosis signals a change in his general welfare. Up until now, his brain was the only part of him that was failing in a way that affected his quality of life. He was old, and he had the usual general deterioration age brings, but he didn’t have stents, insulin, a wheelchair, oxygen, a walker, or artificial joints.

The doctor asked me how aggressive we wanted to be in treating the problem. I explained that the question was confusing to me. What does it mean? Was she asking if I wanted my dad to die as quickly as possible, because of his dementia? Was she asking if we wanted to pull out all the stops and devote all our energy into a consuming, expensive, arduous, unproductive effort to squeeze a couple of more years out of him? I’m still not sure.

I want my dad to be comfortable, so I want anything that makes him feel better. If there is anything that will fix the problem, yet which will not make impossible demands on both of it, I’m for it. On the other hand, I think surgeries would cause more problems than they would alleviate. After surgery, patients have to cooperate with their caregivers while they recover. That’s a tough order when a patient can’t remember what has happened. Also, I would have to find ways to provide a greatly increased level of care.

Some people with congestive heart failure get transplants. Do we want that? Because of dementia, he probably has only a couple of years left, even if his heart works perfectly. His type of dementia kills quickly. Do we want to put him through months of suffering in order to buy mere months of life? Also, is it even feasible? I can’t imagine putting him through rehab and taking on a new wave of powerful prescriptions at this point in his life.

I believe he would have to move to a facility. I don’t think I could handle the work and still cope with my other responsibilities. He would be isolated from me and away from his home. Maybe that would be okay. Maybe he would enjoy it. It doesn’t sound like something he would like, however. He wants to be near me, and I think he enjoys his home.

Bypasses are also used to treat congestive heart failure. I don’t know how hard that would be on him or me, or whether the likely outcome would justify the effort. In the old days, a bypass involved opening a person up like a gutted deer. Maybe it’s not as traumatic now.

Death is normal and unavoidable. Health problems associated with age are normal and unavoidable. On the other hand, sometimes suffering can be ameliorated with effort. I don’t have any human beings who can tell me what choices to make, and my dad is not much help.

We are going for an echo test soon, to see what the situation is. Maybe I can get better advice at that time, but the truth is, we are not going to get much help from doctors. They are pretty good at telling people what’s wrong with them and what can be done, but they aren’t capable of making our decisions for us or even providing sound guidance. Our medical infrastructure hasn’t provided a branch that does that, even though the need is great. It may be impossible.

Here’s what happens when someone dies. You find out they’re sick. Doctors give you options. You and your family–people who are not experts–have to make the choices. When the patient goes in for exams and treatments, he’ll get test results and procedures, and almost every time, he’ll be sent home afterward without much consultation. You won’t really know what’s going on, even if you ask.

Sometimes a patient gets better. Sometimes you’ll think he’s going to get better, and then one day he’ll have a crisis, and when you take him for treatment, you’ll find out he has a day or two left. He may lose consciousness, permanently. You may not get to say goodbye.

He may rally, and you may start to call everyone you know, to tell them he’s going to be okay. After that, he may collapse suddenly and die. This is something people should see coming. You don’t know whether a rally is real until the patient goes home improved.

When he dies, you may be sitting on airplane tickets and hotel reservations because you thought things were going to be okay. When it becomes clear the end is at hand, the family gathers, the patient dies, the body is whisked away, and you go home to a quiet house. You have a funeral, and then you get bills. That’s the process, in case you haven’t been through it. You’re not going to be part of a big happy team that gets regular newsletters.

Don’t expect things to be handled well. You will be winging it all the way.

In 2018, we are used to attacking illness and death as hard as possible. When a problem pops up, we assume we have to go to war. Sometimes it’s the right move, but very often, we treat people who, barring divine intervention, have zero chance of recovering. We deplete estates. We prolong suffering. Frequently, the people we try to help are harmed by our efforts. Often, their suffering is made worse and their deaths are hastened.

My mother was diagnosed with lung cancer in the summer of 1996, and about 8 months later, she was dead. She got the best treatment. She went to Sloan-Kettering and M.D. Anderson. When she died, she was missing part of a lung. She was bald. She was emaciated because radiation had burned her throat, making eating nearly impossible. She got 8 months for her trouble. How much sooner would she have died had doctors merely admitted she had a terminal disease and provided palliative care? For all we know, she might have lived as long or longer, with less distress.

Did the doctors know they were wasting their time? I wasn’t involved in her treatment. I don’t know if my dad and my sister ever asked. Maybe they knew, and they treated my mother simply to make the family happy and to make money.

We have come to see death as an anomaly that has to be corrected. We feel that it’s a crisis, like a boil or an aneurysm. For older people, death isn’t a crisis that happens because something is amiss. It’s universal and normal, like birth and puberty. Even healthy old people die.

Sometimes we need to admit that what’s abnormal is excessive striving to remain alive. When you’re 15, you do everything you can to beat death. When you’re 86 and suffering from dementia, more thought has to go into medical decisions. The people around you have to decide whether they’re taking practical steps to do what’s best for you or merely flailing at the wind.

What is determination in the case of a teenager may be denial in the case of a man in his 80’s.

I would not like to see my dad fall into deep dementia before he dies. I don’t want him staring at me, wondering who I am. I don’t want to see him in despair because he can’t understand what’s happening and he feels powerless.

Ronald Reagan lost his mind completely, and he lay in bed all day while people read him stories. That’s not what I want for my dad. I don’t know if President Reagan was kept alive when he could have been allowed to go gracefully, but there was no good reason to stall until he was 94 and totally helpless.

I think I know what will happen. We’ll get the test, and the doctor will say he needs a stronger diuretic. Then we’ll go home, and the disease will progress. Maybe it will be retarded somewhat. I don’t think we’re headed for a full court press with lots of invasive treatment. Major surgery would be very difficult, and I can’t change his diet or make him work out. No one can undo the damage the lifestyle of his youth has already done. I expect the answer will be new pills and altered expectations.

I have read that congestive heart failure can be a cause of dementia, so perhaps my dad will decline faster now.

I’ll keep taking him to church and praying. I want him to be on solid ground when he makes his journey. He may not be highly honored when he gets to heaven. That’s okay. As long as he makes it through the gate, everything will be fine.

To Dust You Shall Return

I have been under considerable stress this week, but yesterday something happened which brought me some distraction and peace. My new blackboard arrived.

I have had a problem with responsibilities slipping through the cracks. I am naturally absent-minded. I use Google Calendar to keep track of a ton of things, but the problem with Google Calendar is that it beeps and then goes away. If it beeps while I’m doing something even slightly interesting, I dismiss the alert and forget about it until I hear another beep. When I do this, I don’t realize I’ve done it. I don’t think I can change. It’s part of my nature.

It occurred to me that a blackboard would help. A blackboard will not shut up or disappear. It sits there, glaring at you, politely but firmly, until you do whatever it’s telling you to do. When you finally get it done, you don’t have to push a lot of annoying buttons on a screen. One swipe of the eraser, and it’s gone.

I also wanted a blackboard because…I wanted a blackboard.

I am a former physics instructor. As a grad student, I taught pre-meds and engineers using big dusty blackboards. Which may actually have been green. But still. I grew to like blackboards a great deal. You write whatever you want on them and as soon as you’re done with it, you make it go away. You don’t have to crumple up paper and throw it out. Another plus: no reading glasses.

I have been fooling with STEM stuff for a while, trying to dredge up, and add to, ancient memories of my forgotten studies. I’ve been learning engineering statics and strength of materials. This week, I received a new (ish) copy of a beloved math text: Redheffer’s Differential Equations. My old copy was eaten by ants many years ago. I read a little today, and I plan to keep poking around in it in the future.

I have been using a clipboard and pencils to do problems. This is not a bad way to go about it, but you get tired of throwing out sheet after sheet of paper, and I don’t enjoy all the tedious pencil erasing. I just bought a bunch of kneaded rubber erasers to make life easier, but no matter how you pretty it up, a clipboard isn’t a blackboard.

Another nice thing about a blackboard: it reminds you of your accomplishments. If you do a STEM task in chalk with some degree of intelligence, and you walk away, you will still see it smiling at you from the wall hours later while you’re watching cats or whatever on Youtube.

I thought I was going overboard when I sprang for a 4-foot blackboard, but now that I’ve used it, I wish I had gotten a bigger one. I like it as much as I thought I would, which is saying a lot, and I can see that a bigger one would be even better.

I may buy a second board and put it on the wall by the first one.

Some people like whiteboards. I prefer chalk. Markers go dry when you need them, and anyway, they’re just not as pleasant to use. Besides, chalk is much classier. It’s ancient. It’s a bona fide artistic medium. Michelangelo could walk into my den, pick up the chalk, and get straight to work. He used chalk all the time, so he would know how to make it do what he wanted. Markers? Forget it.

I’ve never understood the whiteboard concept. My first whiteboard class was ninth-grade biology. On my first day at Miami’s best prep school, I walked into the classroom in the hugely expensive, nearly new Math/Physics building, and I saw greasy-looking plastic boards in front of me. They were still considered unusual back then. We talked about them while we waited for class to start. I thought they were interesting, but I never came to like them. I didn’t understand their purpose, and I still don’t.

What is it that whiteboards do better than blackboards? Is chalk dust the problem? It never bothered me. Classrooms with chalkboards aren’t dusty unless the people in charge of mopping drop the ball. Maybe there is some sort of phobia of chalk-induced disease. Chalkitis. Suppurating Chalkosis of the Golgi apparatus.

I’ll look it up.

If the Internet is any guide, there is no reason for whiteboards to exist. I guess it’s one of those things man chose to create simply because he could and he thought it was nifty.

I’ll bet leftists like whiteboards better than chalkboards. They like changing things that don’t need to be changed. “Ban chalk! Stop whitewashing knowledge! Save the chalk deposits!”

Once I got my board screwed to the wall, I got out my chalk, wrote down some things I needed to remember, and did a quick physics problem using the Lagrangian. I chose something really simple, as a nod to my cankered, vestigial skills. I figured out the formula for the force on a pendulum bob, as a function of the angle. I really enjoyed it.

To be strictly accurate, I derived the acceleration, not the force. Sue me.

Hope I didn’t get anything wrong. The result is correct. Twenty years ago, doing this problem would have been like breathing.

I screwed it up the first time around. Skipped a step and ended up with the wrong formula for the height of the pendulum. I didn’t notice at first, because the error mostly fell out when I took the time derivative, and the final result was correct except for a sign error.

After I was done, I wondered how to get to the result everyone in physics is familiar with: the formula for the period of a pendulum. I looked it up, and I found that you have to use the expansion for the sine of an angle and settle for a first-order approximation. Otherwise, the differential equation is too hard. Wikipedia refers to the expansion as the Maclaurin series. I know the sine series by heart, and don’t recall thinking of it that way, but I suppose it must be true. I remember that a Maclaurin series is the special case of a Taylor series, centered at zero, and you can use complex variables and a contour integral to derive the general Taylor series formula. I think.

Man, I used to know some stuff. All I get now when I concentrate are bits and pieces.

I think I’ll need that second board. Might as well double down. I hope this thing is durable. I would hate to buy two boards that didn’t last.

I don’t know if blackboard paint works. If I trusted it, I could buy a 4 by 8 sheet of hardboard and paint it.

My new board has a steel back, so it accepts magnets. Not sure that will be useful, but it’s nice to know.

I hope this board will help me hold it together. I have no help whatsoever, and organization is not my thing.

Conservatives Falling into Leftist Habits?

Yesterday I was disturbed by the story about the bombs that were mailed to famous liberals. I thought, “Now people on the right are joining in the violence in a significant way.”

I wonder about that conclusion now.

In the past, we have seen a large number of liberal victimhood hoaxes. You know how it works. A black employee tells the police someone hung a noose in the break room at his company. Then security video shows him hanging it himself.

The bombs in the story have not gone off. Unlike the bombs Obama’s close friend Bill Ayers sent to people, they didn’t hurt anyone. How can that be? If you’re going to take the time to mail a bomb to someone, risking imprisonment or execution, won’t you take the time to get it right?

Maybe they were never meant to go off. Maybe they were meant to be found and used to discredit the political right.

Another thing: the labels on the bombs contained obvious misspellings. One wonders if this was an effort to promote the legend of the toothless backwoods Trump supporter who doesn’t know what’s good for him. “This is why we have to get rid of the Electoral College and rule these people from the coasts.”

I’m not placing any bets, but I have grave doubts about the theory that a conservative created and mailed these bombs.

There is no reason why a conservative could not have done this, but generally, American political violence is a leftist phenomenon. People like Timothy McVeigh are exceptional. We have seen a lot of skirmishes at conservative rallies, but that’s because leftists show up and attack. Leftist events don’t need conservative agitators in order to have skirmishes. Leftists are perfectly happy to fight the police. They think it’s cool.

In my mind, the odds that a conservative did this are about 25/75. I may be totally wrong. Sometimes things are what they seem to be.

Regardless of who did this, it was an appalling set of cowardly crimes. This is now how Americans should live. We should not have to be afraid to open our mailboxes just because we hold certain political beliefs. Antifa violence and asinine, frightening restaurant harassment scenes will never justify retaliatory terrorism.

I expect conservative violence to increase. Liberals identify us with Christianity, but many of us, including many conservatives who claim to be Christians, are against God. Many of us are so carnal, we think we have to respond in kind to gutter tactics.

Stories suggest Gavin McInnes’s group, the Proud Boys, promotes violence. I can’t tell whether that’s true, because as far as I know, they have never engaged in violence in the absence of a leftist attack. I hope it’s not true. The very idea of suiting up like brownshirts and taking to the streets with axe handles is repugnant and self-destructive. If that’s your answer to political problems, it doesn’t matter which side of the spectrum you embrace. You are the problem, not the answer. Leftism promotes barbarity and totalitarianism. If you’re doing the same thing, your system is a lateral move.

I don’t know much about McInnes. He seems like such a nice, funny guy in some of his comedy videos. I have read that he talks about his racial pride. I haven’t heard that, because I haven’t looked for his videos. Racial pride is a rabbit trail that leads to destruction, and it’s a delusion. Belonging to a particular race is nothing to be proud of. Pride itself is toxic.

McInnes complains about victimhood politics. I do that, too, because it turns people into dangerous racists and persecutors, but I don’t suffer from the delusion that I belong to a superior race. People of European extraction have experienced more success than any other group, but the reason we have succeeded is that we have made it our business to support the gospel. We have always been very corrupt, like everyone else, and we have done a poor job of serving God, but no one else was available, so God gave us hegemony in order to spread the word.

I believe God will help any person who submits to him. There are plenty of happy, successful Christians who are not white, and I believe that if white people had not supported God, we would be as unsuccessful as anyone else.

Far-eastern Asians are better at math than white Gentiles, and Jews are better at everything. If there is a master race, it’s not us.

People say McInnes claims white people are under siege. That’s true. When you live in a country where you can be forced to stay home from your job at a university so they can celebrate a white-free day, and when you are surrounded by people who use the terms “white privilege” and “the problem of whitness,” without fear, to suppress you, your race is under siege. That doesn’t mean we should turn on other races or see our genes as superior.

People are supposed to belong to what is known as the body of Christ. This is a group that spans all ethnic groups. A black person who prays in tongues every day and tries to live a sanctified life is my brother or sister. A white witch is not, even if she’s my biological sister. That’s how things are supposed to work.

I want to be among kind, gentle Christians whose hearts are in line with mine. Give me Christians of other races and nations any day, over white leftist Americans who support sexual confusion, witchcraft, pride, and atheism.

It’s useful for leftists to lump Christians and conservatives together, because Christians tend to be conservative, but conservatism is not holy or Christian. It’s simply something that tends to happen to people who know God, because God leads people out of leftism, which originated in the heart of Satan. A serious, Spirit-led Christian will eventually become conservative, but it’s also possible to become conservative and be a hate-filled racist who worships the devil.

It’s interesting. Destructive racists are criticizing victimhood politics and acknowledging the wave of hostility toward whites, and so are loving Christians who want others to do well. Many, many black and Latin Christians are against victimhood politics. We and the racists have somewhat similar views on these issues, for different reasons. That’s very useful to Satan, because he can convince the simple that everyone who is against these things is a racist who must be beaten into submission.

I can’t figure out where McInnes stands without watching a bunch of videos I have no desire to sit through. For all I know, he has been completely mischaracterized, just as President Trump has. I’m against what the press SAYS he is, but then I’m also a Trump supporter who is against what the press says Trump is.

I’m also against pride of any type, so I’m not crazy about his the name the Proud Boys. It supposedly comes from a Disney song McInnes hates, so I don’t know if the Proud Boys are proud or just sarcastic.

It’s sad that I can’t depend on the press to tell me anything without a ton of independent research and debunking.

If McInnes is a white supremacist, he must be completely incompetent, or maybe he needs remedial training. He married an American Indian, so he is an utter failure at perpetuating pure Caucasian genes. I mean an actual Indian, not a person who falsely claimed to be an Indian in order to get affirmative action. His three kids are not white. Each one has about 500 times as much Indian blood as Elizabeth Warren and infinity times as much as Ward Churchill, the briefly famous non-Indian plagiarist artist. I don’t think it’s possible for a true white supremacist to marry a non-white and deliberately produce exclusively non-white children. Even if such a person seriously thought he was a white supremacist, he would be a complete hypocrite unworthy of being taken seriously.

If we reach a point where Christians in name only come to represent us, and they’re out there in large numbers, battling Antifa with sticks and bottles, then whatever useful reputation real Christians have will be completely shot. There is no significant difference between a Satan worshiper in a black mask and a hypocritical person who behaves just like him and pretends to worship Jesus.

For whoever may be monitoring my site, I’ll say I’m against political violence. I own guns, but for the most part, they’re for my personal enjoyment, and the older I get, the more I think I would be inclined to let a leftist mob kill me than shoot in self defense. I get better at shooting, and I get better equipped, and this makes me potentially more dangerous, but I don’t love this tawdry life so much I want to squabble over it and marry myself to it in a deep and lasting way.

I would probably shoot to protect others. I have to admit that.

It’s disconcerting to see Democrats blame Trump for the bombs, claiming he set the tone for the attacks. Maxine Waters, a sick individual who is remembered for encouraging deadly riots, has urged people to violate the law and put conservatives in physical danger. Leftists routinely celebrate violence and harassment toward conservatives and their families, and they have developed an official policy of attacking conservatives and the police at events. All this is true, yet somehow, Trump is the problem.

Trump said something silly, praising a disgraceful politician who battered a reporter, and he has encouraged people to take action against a couple of violent protesters at his rallies, but his remarks are insignificant compared to the growing tidal wave of leftist violence.

The bomber will probably be exposed. I hope it’s not a conservative.

The Obvious Slips by me Again

I am often surprised to see that I have failed to notice something obvious about God. It has happened again.

Before Jesus received the baptism with the Holy Spirit and started his ministry, God sent John the Baptist out and told him to baptize people with water. This was a baptism of repentance. People were supposed to renounce their evil ways.

John’s ministry was strange and successful, so it made people curious, and they asked him about himself. In the book of Luke, he says this:

“I indeed baptize you with water; but One mightier than I is coming, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather the wheat into His barn; but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Winnowing is the process of separating useful grain from chaff, which includes stems and debris. A winnowing fan is a tool used to throw harvested grain and chaff into the air. The idea is that the wind will catch the chaff and blow it to the side, and the grain will fall straight down, where it can be gathered. In ancient times, chaff was gathered after winnowing, and it was burned.

The Bible uses wheat and barley to symbolize human beings. The seeds are useful, and they represent people who belong to God. The chaff is useless, and it represents people who refuse to submit. The burning of chaff symbolizes the flames of hell.

Nearly all Christians know about the first baptism, which is water baptism. The ancient Jews practiced it as a purification ritual. When you are water baptized, you are supposed to be immersed, not sprinkled, and it doesn’t work if you don’t know what’s happening. It won’t work on a baby.

The second baptism is the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Some fortunate people receive this at the same time as the water baptism, but many don’t. The baptism with the Holy Spirit causes the Holy Spirit to rest in you permanently, to the extent that you allow him, and it gives you access to the gifts and fruit of the Spirit.

What about the third baptism? That’s the one that got by me. John said Jesus would baptize us with fire, but when you go to church, pastors don’t invite people to come up for fire baptisms. They baptize with water, and some baptize with the Holy Spirit, but have you ever seen a preacher offer people a fire baptism? I haven’t.

If Jesus offers three baptisms, clearly, we should pursue all three. Fire baptism has to be important, or else John wouldn’t have mentioned it.

Last week, if memory serves, I started asking God for the baptism with fire. I thought it had to be some kind of supernatural thing that increased a person’s zeal. Whatever it was, I wanted it, and I didn’t think I had it.

This week, I have had a very unpleasant time. I will spare you the details. I don’t want people bothering me about it and prying. I got a very nasty surprise caused by my own character flaws, and it came at a time when I was in need of rest, not another gut punch.

Of course, I prayed and asked for help. I used all my supernatural tools. I wondered what was going on. Why did I get hit by a big wave right after increasing my prayer life and throwing out big bags of secular CD’s? I thought that if I strengthened my commitment, things would get better, not worse.

Night before last, a thought came to me. I had been asking for the baptism with fire.

What does fire represent in the Bible? God’s wrath. The fire of hell, which is currently burning many people you and I know, is God’s anger. The fire that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah was God’s anger.

The temple used fire to roast sacrificial animals. The fire represented God’s anger, and the animals took the place of sinful people. In movies, we see the temple as a nice clean place full of people in neat robes, but in real life, it was like a barbecue joint in some ways. Blood was everywhere, and the smell of burning meat was always in the air. They had to change the temple veil periodically because it got caked with blood.

Depending on your willingness to submit, the fire of God will either consume you or cleanse you.

I think the baptism with fire may be a time of having your sins and iniquities exposed to you so you can repent and take action against them. Maybe God uses it to burn away the parts of you that are chaff.

Last night, I saw a very interesting parallel. God has baptized the entire world with water, the Holy Spirit, and fire. I don’t mean he has baptized every individual. Just that he has provided the world, generally, with these baptisms.

The flood was a baptism by water. It drowned the wicked people who hated God and left one righteous man and seven individuals who were spared because they were related to him.

When Jesus died on the cross, he opened the door to the baptism with the Holy Spirit. On Pentecost, the Spirit came down and fell on the believers in the upper room, and since then, he has been available to all of us.

The Bible says God will not destroy the world with water again. It says that he will use fire the next time. A global baptism with fire.

The Bible tells us there was no rain before the flood. Where there is no rain, there are no rainbows. After the flood, God put a rainbow in the sky to mark his promise that he would never destroy the world with water again.

Homosexuals use the rainbow as their symbol now. Why? Rainbows have nothing to do with sex, and homosexuals are the same color as the rest of us. They use it because it’s Satan’s way of taunting God. “Look what we’re doing. Your hands are tied. You can’t drown us again.”

God won’t drown us over our new rebellion, but when he comes back to cleanse the world, the people who are still here will wish drowning were still an option. Drowning beats burning alive.

When the believers in the upper room were baptized with the Holy Spirit, flames appeared above their heads. I assume this means they were fortunate enough to be cleansed quickly, without going through what a person might have to go through today. I’m not sure.

It may be that the baptism with fire isn’t a time of purifying through suffering. Maybe it really is a sudden supernatural thing, and we should be trying to receive it, just as the disciples did. Now that I think about it, this seems more likely than my other theory. I don’t think God would give the disciples anything he would not give us. We have everything else he gave them.

In Psalm 104, and again in Hebrews, God is described as the one ‘who makes His angels spirits, His ministers a flame of fire.” “Minister” means “servant.”

It sounds like exposing and destroying sin and iniquity, primarily one’s own, is a very important part of serving God.

I’m learning a lot about my faults. I won’t lie; it’s tiresome. I have a lot of faults, so I’ve been learning about them for a very long time. I corrupted myself very badly, so there are a lot of smelly layers to the onion. I wish this weren’t the case, but it was all my doing, so who do I complain to?

I’ve learned how badly laziness and dread have messed up my life. I’ve also learned the covetousness is a major problem.

To covet means to set your heart on something. It’s good to covet salvation and the other things of God. It’s bad to covet objects, money, sexual partners, fame, glory, food, and so on.

I’m starting to realize how many sins are connected to covetousness.

Consider sexual sin. How do you end up in bed with a woman? You see her. You feel like you have to have her. You talk to her. You persuade. You do whatever it takes. First thing you know, you’re fornicating, bringing curses down on both of you.

What about gluttony? Food doesn’t jump out and attack you, no matter how much it seems like it does. A little voice says, “Pizza would be good right now.” You start thinking about toppings and garlic rolls. You think about beverages. Before long, you’re sitting behind a huge meal, eating 3,000 calories.

I write incredible recipes, or at least I used to. Ideas would pop into my head. “What if I took the bones out of a turkey and filled it with cornbread stuffing flavored with champagne?” “What if I put sour cream in a roti filled with curry?” I would dwell on these things, not realizing what I was doing was stupid and counterproductive, and I ended up with recipes.

I made food that was very hard for people to resist. That’s not what food is supposed to be. It should taste good, but it shouldn’t be meth on a plate.

We covet jobs. We covet houses. We even covet venting our anger on others. We think, “Just wait until I see him. I’ll say this, and I’ll do that, and I’ll fix him.” We look forward to the satisfaction.

When you covet, you set a course. Once the course is set, it’s not easy to change. The easiest way to avoid going somewhere you shouldn’t go is to avoid planning it.

The basic concept of nipping bad thoughts in the bud has been with me for a while. Sometimes when I looked at women, I heard myself think, “If you’re not going to the store, don’t get in the car.” That would put an end to the thoughts. But I didn’t realize I was dealing with covetousness.

Coveting is a type of obsessive thought which comes from demons and the flesh. We should not have obsessive, repetitive thoughts. They block the channel between us and the Holy Spirit. They prevent us from receiving his instruction.

Lust, greed, selfishness, stinginess, cruelty, and gluttony are all types of covetousness.

Coveting gets in the way of peace. Maybe that’s because it makes you feel that you can’t rest until you have what you covet. That’s a delusion. Often the things we covet decrease our peace after we get them.

Coveting seems a lot like worrying. It’s useless obsessing on future outcomes.

I couldn’t have told you these things 6 months ago. They surprise me. I wish I had found a preacher who could have told me these things, back in 1986 when I received the baptism with the Holy Spirit and didn’t know what to do. Preachers were too busy trying to make money. They knew practically nothing that was useful, and they didn’t care about me. That hasn’t changed. I have had to wait for God himself to teach me.

I am going to talk to God about the baptism with fire. If there is any way I can get a supernatural change, without a period of torment, I would like to receive it. I hope this is the way it works, because I have made an Augean stable of myself. The job of cleaning myself up is far too great for me.

Presumably, the third baptism and the resulting sanctification will give me a better life. I should have more peace and more authority. I should get faster and better answers to prayer. I should be healthier, with less involvement with doctors. This is what I hope.

I have never known what was good for me. I grabbed at whatever looked good. I need to get my flesh out of the way so I can see and go after what God has chosen for me.

Whatever happens, I’ll write about it. I hope I come back eventually with a good report that helps other people.

Delusion Sweeps America

If you have been waiting for conclusive proof that America is lost, I think I can produce it for you. A public junior high school just invited a professional cross-dresser to speak to the kids on a sort of career day. His stage name is Jessica L’Whor.

This is arguably worse than the story about homosexual militant atheist Dan Savage being invited to speak at a gathering of high school students, where he told the kids they could “learn to ignore the bulls__t about gay people in the Bible.”

You have to understand the facts of the story. Mr. L’Whor didn’t show up in men’s clothes and tell the kids about his career as a dental hygienist or CPA. He didn’t use his birth name. He didn’t speak as a person who has a normal career, while leaving his unusual sexual activities out of the discussion. He appeared in drag, calling himself “Ms. Jessica,” talking about his problem as though it were perfectly okay.

Maybe Rock Hudson spoke to students. I don’t know. He could have. He could have shown up in a suit with his wife on his arm, and he could have talked about his career as an actor, without mentioning the things he did in private. That’s not the kind of talk Mr. L’Whor gave. His sexual iniquity was central.

Mr. L’Whor talked about bullying. That’s interesting. For years, I’ve been telling people “bullying” was a code word for “criticizing sexual perversion.” That has certainly turned out to be true. Kids have always treated effeminate boys and masculine girls badly, and that’s a shame, but the “bullying” crusaders aren’t just pushing for kindness. They’re demanding endorsement and collaboration.

This bizarre appearance really happened. At Rocky Top Middle School, in Thornton, Colorado. In America. Junior high kids.

I’ve been thinking about my iniquities today–the habits and attitudes I bound to myself through repeated sin–and while I looked for wisdom on the Internet (stop laughing), I ran across some interesting stuff.

The Bible talks about iniquity bringing destruction on people. There are many places where it mentions iniquity implicitly in the context of the destruction of nations. We all remember the story of the flood. God said his spirit wouldn’t strive with man forever. He gave the human race 120 years to shape up, and then he killed nearly all of them.

In Genesis 15, after God and Abraham made the covenant of the pieces, God told Abraham about the future of the Jews. He said they would go into Egypt. He said they would come back to the place where the covenant was made after 4 generations, because the iniquity of the Amorites wasn’t complete.

People take that to mean that God knew he was going to have to crush the Amorites–inhabitants of the land he gave Abraham–but that the time was not ripe. God is patient, and he waits for nations to get very corrupt before he pulls the plug on them and brings them down.

We all know about Sodom and Gomorrah. They are famous for sexual iniquity, and Jewish legend also tells of their brutality, dishonesty, and deliberate unfairness.

Here is how things work. Temptation leads to sin. Repeated sin leads to iniquity. Once there is iniquity, you are “bent,” like a crooked tree, and it’s hard for you to stand up straight and stop sinning. You lose your free will, and you continue to sin even though you may hate it. As Proverbs 5:22 says, “His own iniquities shall entrap the wicked himself, and he shall be held by the cords of his sins.”

You are lucky if you at least hate your sins. Many of us come to embrace them. That’s depravity, or what the Bible calls “a seared conscience” or “a reprobate mind.” When you hit that stage, you may well be as good as damned, because if you don’t care about sin, you won’t listen when God offers you a way out. You’ll spit at him and persecute his servants.

Depravity is bound up with delusion. A depraved person can believe anything and take pleasure in anything. This is why we now have people who enjoy being pierced, cut, and mutilated. There is a whole community of people out there who amputate parts of their bodies for pleasure. they castrate themselves and cut fingers off for fun.

Depraved people come to hate Jesus. They hate Christians, and they call our mindset “hate.” When the Bible says, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter,” this is the group it refers to.

The reason why America is lost is depravity. Not only are we drowning; we’re batting away the life preserver as though it were a poisonous snake. This is Satan’s greatest success. It’s astounding.

I can’t understand why people are so adaptable. It’s strange that we are capable of loving filth and pain, but it’s true.

We’re so far gone now, many of us are defending foreign invaders who insult us as they approach. Have you seen photos of the Latin Americans who are trying to storm the border? They carry their own countries’ flags and give us the finger on camera, and leftists are supporting them with great fervor.

Here’s a photo I believe I’m entitled to repost as fair use. A bunch of Hondurans supporting the marchers took an American flag, painted a swastika on it, and set it on fire. And leftists want to roll out the red carpet. This is about as bad as delusion can get.

Ordinarily, when desperate people who have ruined their lives ask to be your guests, they try to be pleasant. Look at this bunch.

Sin has left us very jaded. We are no longer able to recognize evil when we see it, and evil looks very good to many of us. At worst, it looks harmless.

It reminds me of something former pro wrestler Jake “the Snake” Roberts said. He ended up on drugs, and he lost his career. He fell into poverty. When a film crew covered his fall, he talked about his sexual excesses. He said he could not have normal sexual relationships, because after the wild things he had done, ordinary relations with one woman couldn’t stimulate him any more.

Sin changes the way we see things. That’s the most lethal thing about it. If you can’t see your problems, or you think they’re blessings, you won’t want to change.

Why don’t preachers talk about this more? Very odd. They don’t hear from the Holy Spirit.

God is still showing me my iniquities and their painful consequences, and that’s what I was trying to find out about when I started searching today, but I ended up looking at our nation as well.

I don’t have anything clever to say about it. I’m just observing what has happened.

Resisting sin is important, and the younger you are, the more good it will do you. If you’re old, like me, and you’ve already put shackles on yourself, it’s harder to succeed.

I hope God brings revival and wakes up as many of us as possible. I believe people who can still perceive the truth are going to get lonelier and lonelier.

More

I wanted to say a few more things about iniquity, but I got pulled away, so here I am.

One of the reasons I started to write today was that I had come across the phrase “the mystery of iniquity.” I looked it up to find out what it meant. I still don’t know the exact meaning of the phrase, but I read a lot of interesting and enlightening things.

The phrase comes from 2 Thessalonians. Paul was writing about the rapture and the end of this age.

Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you, not to be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though the day of Christ had come. Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.

Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming. The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

This translation (NKJV) uses the word “lawlessness” instead of “iniquity.”

If you look at these paragraphs, you can see how they comport with what I’ve been writing today. I didn’t plan it that way. This is what happens when you hear from the Holy Spirit. You get ideas, and they feel as though they’re your own, but then you see them in the Bible, and you realize someone put them in your mind.

Paul says Jesus won’t come until after the world falls into Satan’s hands. This is a blow to people who think they can fix the world for Jesus. He says, “that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first.”

He writes of the Antichrist, saying he will be revealed, and will behave like a god, before Jesus returns.

The Antichrist will be a man of iniquity, which means he will be one who disobeys God as a matter of routine and principle.

Look what Paul said about delusion. He said the Antichrist would come with “all unrighteous deception among those who perish.” He’s talking about the people who think it’s okay to have a drag queen speak at a junior high school. The “unrighteous deception” has them under its spell, and they think evil is good.

Paul says God will reward their iniquity with “strong delusion” in order to prevent them from seeing the truth so they will be condemned to hell.

Anyone who thinks the Bible isn’t deep needs to take another look. Who would have guessed that sin would lead to something resembling insanity? It’s not obvious at all. Most intelligent people don’t realize it.

How can you explain the insanity that grips our nation without referring to supernatural causes? How can we move, during the second half of a President’s second term, from opposing homosexual marriage to endorsing it vigorously, unless something supernatural is at work?

Ten years ago, nearly everyone knew the difference between men and women, which is one of the more obvious differences human beings deal with. Now you can be fired from a job for refusing to call a man a woman. You can be thrown out of a gym for complaining that a man is in the women’s locker room. A change that drastic and quick is not natural. It can’t happen without spirits to push it.

The strong delusion of 2 Thessalonians is already here, and of course, people aren’t discussing it much, because deluded people can’t perceive their delusions. They think they’ve “evolved.”

It has been quite a while since God told me, “The hate is already here.” He was referring to the hate that would motivate–I’ll use the now-popular word–mobs to torment and kill Christians. We see it today in the startling willingness of leftists to confront and even attack conservatives in restaurants and at their homes.

Why is that hate here now?

The hate came with the delusion. I only see this right now. We endorsed sin, and we became bound by it. After that, we received delusion. Delusion caused us to invert good and evil. Now that we think evil is good, we think we have a moral obligation to storm Mitch McConnell’s restaurant table and throw his food into the street while banging on the table with our fists.

McConnell is a conservative figure, not a prominent Christian, but to the left, he symbolizes Christians. True Christians are conservative, and conservatives are the best friends we have in secular power. By attacking conservatives, leftists can get at us, and by driving leftists to get at us, Satan can get at God.

The leftist dream–a Godless society–is about to come true in America. Or is it? We’ll still have a “god.” Leftism has never really been about doing away with religion. We’ll have a fake god who has taken Yahweh’s place given people permission to ignore his commands.

I tend to think of leftists as people who hate religion, but that’s wrong. They love Wicca. They love astrology. They love Satanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, voodoo, and, strangely, Islam. They don’t have a problem with “gods.” They have a problem with OUR God; the only God that is God.

Today I read a little bit about John Cleese. A wealthy leftist, Cleese likes kicking at Christians and conservatives on social media. I looked up his religious beliefs. He’s a Buddhist vegetarian. He loves the Dalai Lama.

Tibetan Buddhism is demon worship. They pray to demons, and one witness says they make demons materialize in rituals. Whether they make demons materialize or not, Buddhism is a supernatural faith that teaches that spirits and the afterlife are real. It teaches about Buddhist hell. Tibetans recognize a spirit named Yamantaka who is supposedly the king of hell. Cleese seems to think we’re superstitious and primitive, but look at the faith he chose. Prayer wheels, ascetics on mountainsides, and reincarnation.

Many leftists are crazy about religion. They just reject the only one that’s valid and inconvenient.

We will not have a godless world. On the contrary; we will have a great abundance of “gods.” They’re all waiting to emerge and be worshiped, with the Antichrist at the forefront.

The hate that will put us in mass graves (more likely: crematoriums to remove the evidence of our existence from the earth) is already at work. It had a nice practice session under Hitler, focusing largely on Jews (beloved by God) and now it’s ready to spread all over the world and extend to anyone who seems to be on the side of Yahweh.

The workers of iniquity are not yet free to do as they wish, so they limit themselves to skirmishes. They are restrained until the proper time. Paul said, “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way.”

The NKJV capitalizes “he,” suggesting God himself restrains the workers of iniquity. I am skeptical. The restrainer sounds more like Michael to me. Michael is said to be the spirit that protects Israel, and since Jesus is identified with Israel, one would expect him to protect Christians as well. Jesus can protect us, but he can’t be “taken away.” No one can move him. When the scripture says the restrainer will be taken away, it appears to point to a lesser being.

Why would God remove our protector? There are still millions of people who belong to God. This same God was willing to save Sodom to protect 10 righteous citizens. The explanation that makes sense to me is that God will give the lawless complete freedom once there are no Christians left on earth. If we were here, it would make no sense for God to destroy the earth and give demons and fallen angels complete reign.

I believe our prayers and our existence restrain the looters and killers who are eager to turn the entire world into a riot zone. The need to execute judgment explains the rapture. God won’t want to do it while millions of us are here to suffer along with the wicked, and to pray for him to forbear.

I always wonder that the rapture will be like. Will we simply rise to meet God without warning, or will we get a push from the wicked? Martyrdom is a theme that has been with worshipers of God since Abel. Will God give us an escape hatch he never gave anyone else? I certainly hope so. I would rather disappear than be beheaded or shot.

Often, movies tap into supernatural ideas. It’s a strange thing to see. Even movies made by people who hate God sometimes seem to confirm prophecy.

I watched Avengers: Infinity War, and I saw something that reminded me of the rapture. Spoiler coming. Thanos, a well-meaning genocidal conqueror, believed the problem with the universe was overpopulation. The main problem people had was the existence of people. He obtained supernatural power, and then he snapped his fingers and made half of the intelligent beings disintegrate and die.

One wonders if something like that is in store for us. With modern technology, it’s possible to murder huge numbers of people simultaneously, if they cooperate (as martyrs often do). The Antichrist could fit millions of people with Internet-connected devices that kill in response to one person’s mouse click.

Things are going to get so crazy, people who love God will want to leave the earth. I already do. Many of us bluster about fighting and shooting, but I suspect God has Christians amassing guns so we can turn them over to the mob and surrender. If they have to storm our homes to kill us, and we shoot large numbers of them in the process and then die scrapping and kicking, it won’t glorify God. If we have the power to kill them, and we give it up and consent to die, it will mean something. It will tell the few remaining people who can be reached that our faith is something that can’t be dismissed. It will motivate them to look for God while there is still time.

Jesus told the disciples to carry swords, and when he was attacked by the high priest’s MOB, Peter cut off a slave’s ear. Jesus told him to knock it off, and he healed the slave. There was no battle, even though the disciples were armed.

What would people say about Jesus if he had had to be subdued? He didn’t go out that way. He wasn’t defeated. He sent Judas to bring the high priest, he waited, and he surrendered. The crucifixion was his own idea. It would make sense for informed Christians to go the same way. “Go ahead and shoot if you want. I am done with this place, and you may have it.”

I don’t know what the rapture will be like. On the whole, I prefer the easy route. One minute, standing in the aisle at Rural King. The next, floating away in the air.

Paul sends a confusing message about the rapture. He says the day of the Lord and our gathering to him (the rapture) will not happen until after the “falling away.” After mentioning the falling away, he says, “and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition.” This seems to suggest that the Antichrist will be here before we leave, but it’s not spelled out unambiguously. I think “the day of the Lord” refers to the Messianic Millennium, and the revelation of the Antichrist is a separate thing, which comes earlier. I believe the earth will see the falling away, persecution, the rapture, unrestrained rule by Satan, the appearance of the Antichrist, the great tribulation, and the final return of Jesus, in that order.

We are already seeing the falling away, so it obviously comes first. We know the return of Jesus comes last, because this is when the millennial reign begins.

The Revelation mentions the souls of martyred Christians, stationed beneath God’s altar in heaven, calling out for vengeance on those who killed them. That seems to point to a rapture by massacre. The Romans liked to execute Christians in groups, to please the crowds. Maybe it will work that way when the rapture comes. A big televised show, with billions cheering final relief from annoying people who believe gender is fixed.

I am not a student of prophecy. Just trying to make sense of things.

What does “lawlessness” really mean, in the era of Holy Ghost baptism? When believers were under the Jewish law, it meant breaking that law. Eating pork, lending money at interest, and so on…these were acts of lawlessness or iniquity. Today, it’s not that simple. We’re supposed to hear from the Holy Spirit all day, and we’re supposed to do what he tells us to do. That’s the new law. Most Christians are still stuck in the old law.

Jesus said we have to do God’s will in order to enter the kingdom of heaven:

“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!’

Jesus said people would come to him and tell him what he owed them. They would say they had done great things in his name. He said he would tell them to go away, and he would call them workers of iniquity. Why was that?

He wasn’t referring to people who didn’t call themselves Christians, and he wasn’t referring to people who didn’t do nice things. He wasn’t referring to unbelievers. He was referring to self-described Christians who decided, on their own, what to do to advance God’s kingdom.

Guessers, not listeners.

You can try to please God by doing things that seem right in your own eyes and end up provoking him. You can make God angry by opening an orphanage or giving a poor person money. It’s not the nature of an act that makes it pleasing to God. Remember how Saul was cursed for trying to perform a sacrifice? An act is only pleasing to God if he commanded it.

Trying to please God with acts he didn’t tell you to perform is lawlessness.

Christians who don’t hear from the Holy Spirit can’t help being lawless. If you can’t hear the lawgiver, you don’t know the law. They will end up working with the persecutors. They already are. Look at all the ordained homosexuals in the clergy.

I always complain about Christians who think being nice pleases God. Putting homosexuals in pulpits is nice. Telling people there is no hell is nice. Telling people Christianity is basically the same thing as Buddhism is nice. You can destroy a church with nice policies that demonstrate contempt for God.

If I had to sum up the important points, I’d say:

1. Don’t sin if you can help it, because you will eventually lose the ability to stop.

2. Once you lose your free will, you will lose the ability to distinguish right from wrong, and you will think evil is good. God will send you delusion as a reward for rebellion.

3. Once you start to believe evil is good, it is very unlikely that it will be possible to convince you to repent and avoid hell.

4. Once the spirit of delusion is on you, you will harbor animus toward Christians and Jews, and you will be motivated to commit great sins that will eventually be punished in ways too horrible to be imagined.

5. If you’re not hearing from the Holy Spirit, you are probably doing things God considers lawless, even if you’re trying to be very nice. You can offend God very badly while being nice and trying to do things to please him.

6. A huge percentage of the world’s population is already deluded and filled with rancor, and wholesale violence is on the way. Stop praying for a perfect world and ask God to prepare you for the decline and fall of our race.

I hope this material will help people. I always hope that if the rapture comes while this blog is up, people who are stuck here after I’m gone will be able to use it as a roadmap to repentance and salvation. Maybe that’s too much to expect. I suppose the Antichrist will have an effective program of censorship that will rid the world of Christian writings.

Sorry to be long-winded. It’s that kind of day.

I am not a Potted Plant

I feel like I should post a report on my latest visit to Meadowbrook Church.

Last week, I took my dad to church. I don’t know why he went, but the most obvious explanation is that he was bored. He jumps at any chance to get in the car. On the way out of the parking lot, he told me he didn’t believe what the preacher was saying, and he said people just buy into it because they’re scared.

Was he saying he rejected Christ, or just that he rejected the watery self-help message preached on that particular day? I didn’t ask. I let it drop. I don’t want to be the reason my dad comes out and announces that he rejects salvation. He prayed for salvation on September 22. Maybe he doesn’t remember. I want to let sleeping dogs lie.

This week, he surprised me by going with me again. I didn’t question it. I’m not going to push him to make ultimatums and declarations that will send him to hell.

When we arrived at the church, an usher handed us communion kits. These are tiny plastic cups. They have two seals. The lower seal holds the contents of the cup in. The upper seal holds a small cracker. I have seen many communion kits before, but I didn’t recognize these. The liquid inside was yellow, like olive oil. Communion requires red wine. Communion kits substitute grape juice, probably to avoid tempting alcoholics and upsetting parents with minor children.

I thought the liquid might be anointing oil, but eventually we were told we were going to have communion. I wondered if they were using white wine. They probably do that in California.

When communion time rolled around, Pastor Gilligan started telling us what it was about. I braced, because I fully expected him to get it wrong. I was not disappointed. He said something about togetherness, remembrance, and forgiveness. I didn’t really listen, once I knew he was on the wrong track.

I was not happy to hear him get it wrong. My dad was being misinformed, and a friend of mine was attending somewhere nearby, so she was hearing error, too.

The purpose of communion is to restore your relationship with Christ. We fall into corruption, and we need to confess and repent so we can be IN COMMUNION with Jesus. Here is what Paul said:

Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.

But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup.

For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.

We all consort with spirits, and sometimes we fall in with the wrong ones. Iniquity grows on us like mold, and communion is supposed to help us shed it.

I have never heard a preacher mention the real purpose of communion while speaking to Christians in a church. It’s like they’re allergic to it. Perry Stone wrote a book about communion, and it may be that he explained the real purpose. I can’t recall, because it has been so long since I read it.

My last church did something remarkable. They used bread for communion. Not unleavened bread; plain old bread raised with yeast. Talk about missing the point.

In the Bible, bread represents flesh. Leaven represents pride and sin. It puffs things up and makes them look bigger than they really are. Before the flight from Egypt, God created the Passover tradition of using unleavened bread in order to prepare the Jews for his arrival as a sinless messiah. Jesus was flesh, but he had no sin, so he resembled unleavened bread.

Wine represents blood, and as we know, the blood of Jesus, who was murdered to save the rest of us, washes away our sins, iniquities, and diseases and allows us to become sons of God.

By using raised bread for communion, my former pastor put a picture of pride before the church. That was appropriate, because pride destroyed him, his church, and his family. It’s bizarre that he couldn’t see the problem with using raised bread.

Does using raised bread cause spiritual issues? I would be very surprised. I think you can do communion with no food or drink at all, so I suppose Wonder bread will work. The problem, to me, is the lack of knowledge. If you know Wonder bread is the wrong thing, but it’s what you have, no problem. If you don’t know it’s inappropriate, then you don’t understand communion, so how can you benefit from it? It’s not like dipping a sheep. Communion is like baptism. You have to understand it in order for it to work.

When we took communion, I discovered that the liquid in the cup was apple juice. I don’t get that at all. Grape juice isn’t going to turn anyone into an alcoholic. Why not use it? I wonder if the pastor understands the symbolic significance of wine and bread.

I used to take communion every day at home, and I should start up again. When I do it, I ask God to show me what’s wrong with me. What sins have I committed? What iniquities are opening doors to demons? I confess to him and repent. I ask to be forgive and delivered. It’s a remedy for spiritual adultery.

My friend took her three sons to church yesterday, and it worked out well. They loved it. Unfortunately, the church appears to have put a little too much emphasis on fun. I expected that, because they take a “Christianity Lite” approach with adults, too. They provided video games and foosball for the kids. I wouldn’t let video games anywhere near a church if it were up to me. Think of all the evil they do.

The positive side of the experience is that the boys will get to know Christians, and they will learn a few things about God. They might even get to know him personally, which is the real goal.

Here’s my take on the whole thing: we send kids to school, where they learn a lot of garbage. At home, we undo the harm. We tell them God is real, and that homosexuality is not okay. We tell them there is no such thing as a transgender person. We tell them socialism is evil. We like to criticize parents who count on schools to raise their children. If we take this approach to school, why aren’t we treating church the same way? Kids will learn good things and bad things at church, and it’s a parent’s responsibility to do the weeding. You’ll never find a human institution you can rely on completely, so do your best and correct the unavoidable damage.

A man is supposed to be the priest of his home. You can’t sit around and trust preachers to do your job. Where there is no father, someone else has to step up.

Maybe the key to being satisfied with your church is dividing responsibility correctly. If you don’t give your pastor authority he shouldn’t have, and if you take care of your own responsibilities, maybe your church’s problems won’t affect you badly.

I’m happier than ever with my decision to refrain from joining churches and volunteering. I put ignorant people in charge of my decisions, and then I complained about their leadership. I shouldn’t make that mistake again.

Maybe this will be helpful to someone who is trying to make a sick church into something it will never be. I certainly hope so.

Evil Tidings From Miami

I got some sad news tonight. A pastor from a church I used to belonged to has just died. I hadn’t known he was ill.

To avoid writing critically of a freshly deceased person by name, I will call him Ned Ryerson.

I’m not going to pretend to be broken up about his death. I didn’t know him well. He knew who I was. He once got a church volunteer leader to ask me to perform a service for a Christian band which was truly degrading. I spent several hours driving in murderous traffic to save them the small cost of an airport limo to haul their luggage. That’s about the extent of our relationship. I’m sorry to hear he’s gone, but I will sleep tonight.

He died from cancer. In February, he was preparing to have some dental work done. He ground his teeth at night, so his teeth were in bad shape. He wanted total sedation dentistry. That meant he had to have a physical to make sure he was strong enough to be sedated safely. During the physical, they x-rayed his chest and found a big tumor in his right lung. Either at this time or later, they also discovered a large number of brain tumors.

Ned was the head pastor’s brother-in-law. He married the pastor’s wife’s sister. That made him a pastor, like the wife and the sister. In that church, virtually everyone who was related to a pastor was also a pastor or at least a paid employee. I have probably joked that their dogs were pastors. Qualifications weren’t an issue; genes were all you needed.

What did Ned do for a ministry? Real estate. He sold real estate for profit. That may not sound like much of a ministry, and that’s because it isn’t. The church was a monument to Mammon, and they talked about money and success all the time from the pulpit. They were huge promoters of “marketplace” Christianity. The idea is that you use your business to meet people and witness to them, but in reality, it works the other way around. You use your ministry as a way to make business contracts and increase profits.

What else did Pastor Ned do? Nothing I’m aware of. I saw him speak at a men’s conference once, and he led a prayer cell, but by preacher standards, that’s nothing.

As far as I know, Ned was a genial, warm-hearted guy, but no one would ever mistake him for Smith Wigglesworth. He didn’t do anything for the church’s actual ministries. He just showed up, occasionally said something or sang, and went home and sold real estate.

Ned had a Facebook page. I don’t mean his personal page. He had more than one additional page. He used one of his pages as his blog. He used it to tell people wise things about God, allegedly. I saw the page for the first time today. It’s not a great source of wisdom, even though Ned used the word “wisdom” to describe his content.

Ned believed he had a lot to say, but he was just a typical lukewarm, inattentive Christian who liked the limelight. If you read Ned’s page, you won’t come away wondering how to thank him for changing your life. It’s full of platitudes of the sort you might find inscribed on the sides of scented candles. That’s normal for teachers who don’t hear from the Holy Spirit.

Ned used his page to write about his disease. He suffered terribly. They gave him chemotherapy. They pulled a bunch of his teeth and gave him implants, without the sedation he preferred. He started having seizures and paralysis. He got a severe infection.

I’ll tell you something good about Ned. If he portrayed himself honestly on Facebook, he took it like a man. He didn’t complain. He didn’t give up his religion. He was cheerful, brave, and grateful. When things got bad, he didn’t log into Facebook and cry about his woes. He made some effort to stand in faith, and when that didn’t work, he accepted his situation without fear and looked forward to leaving his suffering body behind so he could be with God.

This is how people should face death. Some cancer patients behave disgracefully.

Here is what bugs me about Ned’s story: he was a pastor at a church that teaches that God heals people, and he didn’t know how to get healed.

When I was at his church, God showed me that sin and iniquity mattered. Christianity wasn’t all about being forgiven, feeling great all the time, and being rich. Obligations went along with it. We’re supposed to confess our sins and iniquities to God and get rid of them. We’re supposed to become sanctified. Failing to do these things leads to problems, and cancer is such a problem.

My mother died from cancer. She didn’t get cancer because bad things happen to good people. She got it because she was a drug addict. Using drugs is a sin. A drug habit is an iniquity. Nicotine is an extremely addictive drug which came to us from Indians who used it while worshiping demons.

My mother smoked heavily for 50 years, starting when she was a kid. I’m not bashing my own mother. I’m just telling you why she got cancer. She sinned every day, and there was a cost. Sometimes the consequences of sin are very obvious. Cirrhosis, syphilis, AIDS, type 2 diabetes, morbid obesity…we know what usually causes these things. It’s not random bad luck. It’s sin.

My mother wanted to quit smoking, but she didn’t know how to get God’s help. There was no one to teach her. Iniquities start out voluntarily, and then you lose your free will and become enslaved by resident demons. She was trapped. Churches couldn’t do anything for her. They should have taught her to confess and repent. That would have been a start. But they didn’t know anything, so she died without help.

If she could have gone to church in 2018, she still wouldn’t have found help. Churches have made no progress at all. Christianity is one of the few pursuits in which people become less knowledgeable and capable with time. Imagine what life would be like if medicine worked that way. Next year, we might forget about antibiotics and go back to injecting people with arsenic.

God showed me that it was important to get rid of iniquity, but no one at the church wanted to hear about it. They got angry at me. I didn’t beat a drum and tell everyone they were going to hell. I was polite. I was nice to people. It wasn’t my attitude that made them angry. It was the message itself. They treated me as though I were a prophet, and by that, I mean they got very angry with me and treated me with great disrespect because I told the truth.

It’s easy to make proud people angry. They overreact, and they take every suggestion as an attack. They see each correction as an insult offered by an inferior who shouldn’t have the audacity to speak.

A few people at the church listened to me. Generally, they did not. The pastors went beyond not listening. They fought me. They actually preached against things I said. I may have been partially responsible for some of the very few original sermons they wrote.

I found out about Ned’s death while talking to a friend tonight on the phone. He called for a prayer session. He prayed for me. He said things like, “I speak defeat to Steve’s pride.” I didn’t get angry. I was thrilled to have someone who was willing to do that. Man. You have to grow up and learn to be enthusiastic about taking your medicine eventually.

After we prayed, he told me about Ned, and I looked Ned up. While I was talking to my friend, I expressed my discouragement with the church and the people who run it. Let’s say the ruling family is named von Trapp. I said, “I’ve never seen a von Trapp get a healing.”

That had never occurred to me before. My friend was surprised, too.

The head pastor has, if memory serves, two new knees. He went bald, and when he had surgery, the incision from the flap refused to heal. He grew weird calcified things in his chest. He has a blood disease. He had to have horrible procedures for kidney stones (mine were healed without medical help at his church). He’s diabetic. I don’t know what holds him up.

Question: how many things have to go wrong before you ask yourself why the things you preach aren’t helping you? If there is one person at the church who should be able to get a healing, it’s the pastor. Every single time a preacher who was supposedly a healer showed up, the pastors received their best efforts, and they also got to spend time with healing preachers behind the scenes.

I get healings. Lots of people get healings. Many people have been healed of cancer. Christianity works for many people. We all know that, so why aren’t the people who run this church making any effort to find out why it doesn’t work for them?

They’re not questioning themselves, 8 months after Ned’s diagnosis. What will it take to snap them out of their coma?

They must not believe God will help them. That has to be the answer. Either that, or they’re convinced they’re doing everything right. But if they’re doing everything right, why can’t they receive healings? I don’t think they ask themselves. The inconsistency is just part of the hypocritical life they accept.

In some ways, Ned’s writings concerning his illness were inspiring, but in other ways, they were frustrating to read. He kept writing as though he had superior knowledge of Jesus. His illness was “a journey.” It gave him an opportunity to pass on all the things it taught him. Nonsense! If you’re dying of cancer, something is wrong with your relationship with God. You should be asking questions and admitting ignorance.

People commented on his posts. You would think he was preaching the Sermon on the Mount to read their responses. They seemed to be in awe of him. In awe of a man who was in the process of losing a battle with a bunch of filthy, defeated demons that should have been terrified to be near him.

Respect his courage? Yes. Honor his refusal to complain? Absolutely! But praise him as a teacher? No. That’s wrong.

If all you can do while you die is share warmth and make people feel good, I suppose you should go ahead, but that’s not Christian teaching. When things go terribly wrong, you should say, “I’m missing something; someone tell me what it is. Help me find out what’s wrong. If I don’t make it, keep looking at my life and trying to learn from my mistakes.”

I don’t think he ever expected to be healed. He was so used to carnal preachers who said things they didn’t believe, he probably thought there was no hope. Yet somehow he continued to play the game.

When my mother died, it was not a victory. It was a humiliating defeat for all of us. It was a glaring indictment of me, personally.

I was away from God when she got diagnosed, and I was so weak, if I had prayed for the sun to come up in the morning, it would probably have refused. I was full of lust and pride. I was ignorant because I had defied God’s instruction to pray in tongues every day. I sinned a lot because, like the people at Ned’s church, I thought salvation was a license to sin. “I shouldn’t do this, but I’ll pray for forgiveness right afterward.”

I helped kill my own mother. Who knows what I could have done for her, had I been praying consistently? The night she died, I was praying, and I felt sure she could not die. Then it happened anyway. I had some faith, but I didn’t know unconfessed sin and lack of repentance block prayer. For a long time after she died, I wondered how it happened. Now, too late, I know. Faith isn’t all it takes.

If I had been in good spiritual shape, I could have helped her. You could say she perished for my lack of knowledge.

Is it wrong to write something negative after someone dies? If so, then coroners and pathologists all over the world are sinning right now. When something bad happens, an intelligent person of integrity sifts the wreckage and looks for a reason, so he can prevent it from happening again. How can we help the next Ned if we pretend this one did everything right and still died?

It’s too bad people can’t return from heaven and hell to rebut the nonsense people say at their funerals. Or is it?

“No, I don’t smile down on you. I look up from the flames, see nothing but the ceiling of hell, and wish I were still here.” “No, I didn’t come back in a new body. I’m gone forever, and demons eviscerate me several times a day.” “No, your mom and I are not together in heaven waiting for you; your mom was an agnostic, and she didn’t make it.” “No, God my death wasn’t a victory. My death was not in God’s plans, and we did the wrong things.”

At funerals, we pretend everyone goes to heaven. Shows how we prefer comforting fantasy to liberating reality. I know people who are in hell right now, unless God took extraordinary steps to get them to repent as they were dying.

My high school classmate Ken shot himself in the head with a Desert Eagle at 25 after spending the day with me. He was a Jewish atheist. Another classmate who was Jewish fell into a crevasse in the Himalayas. Another died while scuba diving drunk. My aunt died, and she was an atheist who attended Mormon services purely for the social connection.

At my aunt’s funeral, we heard very funny stories about her.

Abraham was right when he spoke to the rich man. Most people wouldn’t believe the dead if they came back to help us.

People say God doesn’t always want to heal us, and that’s why we stay ill. How do they know? We don’t do what we’re supposed to. How can our experience be a valid test of Christianity if we don’t do what Christianity tells us to do?

If you Google a cake recipe, and it says to use eggs and sugar, and you use tofu and stevia, and it tastes like garbage, do you conclude the cook who wrote the recipe wanted the cake to taste like garbage?

I believe God wanted Ned to get well. Jesus healed people right and left. The apostles healed people right and left. I don’t think Jesus would have walked by Ned and told him his cancer was God’s will.

Very sad story. Whatever his shortcomings as a pastor may have been, Ned was well-liked for the most part, and his passing will upset many people. It will be even sadder when the next von Trapp dies unnecessarily.

The Occult is Real

Christians don’t understand the power demons have over them, and they don’t understand how important it is to get rid of them.

Today these truths came home to me during prayer.

For over a year, I’ve been working on confession and repentance, because I knew hanging onto sin gave spirits power over me, making me unhappy, bringing me misfortune, and hurting my body. A few days back, I decided to get rid of a lot of secular music CD’s; maybe 40 pounds of them. I knew I was supporting performers who were against God, and I believed holding onto their work held doors open and gave spirits permission to live in me and to keep returning after being cast out.

Think about the musicians you like, and ask yourself a few questions. Are they alcoholics? Are they junkies? Did they die young? Did they promote fornication or pride? Have they used their fame to fight Christianity or promote other religions? Did they start out in gospel and then move to popular music to make money? It’s amazing how often the answer will be “yes.”

I’ve been speaking defeat to demons that power my iniquities, and I’ve been casting them out. It’s not a joke. It works. When I start addressing them, I feel nausea, and I hear strange gurgling sounds from my insides. I’m not imagining that. I could record the sounds and post them here. I can’t make my innards sound off on command; it’s not me doing it. It only happens when I deal with demons, or when it’s caused by the normal workings of my body.

After I cast spirits out, I feel very different. I feel empty. I no longer feel urges and voices pulling me in different directions. Oddly, it feels like my thoughts and desires come from a deeper, quieter place inside me. If I’m in bed when I do these things, I tend to fall asleep right away. I have to fight to stay awake.

I’ve been reading John Ramirez’s books. To his credit, he is one of the few charismatics who talk about anything besides money. He put a table in one of his books, showing people how to tell the difference between God’s voice and Satan’s voice. Other ministers have used similar tables. I found one online, and I’m posting it below. I don’t know if it’s identical to the one Ramirez uses, but the idea is the same.

You should be able to look at that table and figure out who is talking to you. If it’s Satan, you need to do something about it before it destroys you.

God is like the sun, and demons are like the moon. The moon is much smaller than the sun, but because of its diameter and distance from the earth, it appears to be the same size as the sun, and it can block the sun from our view. We should hear from God all the time, but he is eclipsed by demons here on earth. Demons inside us chatter all the time. Through sin, we put them between God and ourselves, so they seem disproportionately important.

After I cast things out of myself, I can hear the voice of God, which lies deeper inside me. I don’t feel rushed or overwhelmed any more, even if my external problems haven’t changed.

Today I went to the Internet to see if anyone had any good teaching on deliverance, and I was disappointed. Some preachers know a little, but I can’t find anyone who isn’t behind me on the learning curve. They’re obsessed with money and fame, and they haven’t confronted their own demons, so they don’t have much to teach.

Joyce Meyer popped up in a Youtube search. So much pride and greed. Her masculinity is also a sign of spiritual issues.

Joyce Meyer teaches that after we give her money, God owes us. She says we can call on him to repay us. You can look it up for yourself. Imagine God, owing us. He allowed people to torture him to death for us in order to save us from our own evil deeds. He doesn’t owe us.

An inheritance is not something that is owed or earned. It’s a gift.

It’s disconcerting to see how backward the church is. You would think at least a few of our leaders would be teaching sound doctrine, but they aren’t. Here and there, some obscure individuals get a lot of things right, but all the big names–the pope, T.D. Jakes, Joel Osteen, John MacArthur, and the rest–teach harmful error. Satan promotes them just as he promotes rock stars and rappers.

Many of us are terrified of the occult, which is unfortunate, because Christianity is an occult practice. “Occult” just means “hidden.” It doesn’t mean “evil.” Look it up. We can’t see God with our eyes, any more than we can see the demons voodoo preachers try to command. Nonetheless, we worship him and expect him to take us to a permanent home in an occult world called heaven. That’s an occult belief.

We are afraid to talk about demons, even though Jesus, who is now an occult or unseen spirit, talked about them constantly. We know people will think we’re crazy. They will stop talking to us. They may try to have us adjudged incompetent so they can control our wealth.

We give up on the occult side of Christianity, which is where all the victory and power are, and we stick with rules instead. “Be nice to everyone.” “Tithe every week.” “Don’t touch alcohol.” “Don’t curse.” We think God will take us to heaven if we act like Mary Poppins. The Bible, on the other hand, says salvation only comes by faith. Heaven is jam-packed with sinners, and hell has plenty of disappointed, nice Christians who got it wrong.

People like to say Satan’s biggest victory was convincing the world he didn’t exist. I don’t know about that. How about convincing people that only his children were allowed to use supernatural power? The Bible says apostates have the appearance of godliness yet deny the power thereof. The power it refers to is supernatural power. Miracles, healing, tongues, prophecy…that’s all supernatural, or “occult.” We’re supposed to have these powers, but we settle for lives of defeat, as long as we get into heaven. Meanwhile, pagans are casting spells left and right.

If we ignore demons, we can’t cast them out. They can continue to warp our personalities and damage our bodies. They make us fat, angry, lustful, gluttonous, anorexic, cancerous, crippled, demented, gay, lazy, and insane. That’s what comes of condemning the supernatural side of Christianity.

It’s ironic that the people we go to for emancipation only make our chains heavier. They give us little bits of our inheritance, which is already our property, in exchange for money. Then they stand between us and the rest of it. It’s as if they were selling air.

Most preachers discourage us from pursuing the Holy Spirit and his gifts and fruit. The ones who don’t do those things discourage us from being sanctified. They discourage confession and repentance, so anything they cast out of us can return later in greater force.

You can’t have the fruit and the gifts of the Spirit–the kingdom of heaven–while your life is dedicated to the service of demons. God is jealous.

At my last church, the pastor taught about tongues, prophecy, miracles, and healing. He also rejected the notion that confession and repentance were important. He rejected the idea that healing could be prevented by pride. These ideas made him and his wife so angry, they came to consider me an enemy of God.

At the church before that, the pastor taught that people could be healed, but mainly, he taught that we should feel good and make money. He taught that God would make us rich if we gave him donations instead of paying our electric bills. He hated hearing about sin. He never taught people about the dangers of homosexuality, yoga, astrology, voodoo, or any other sins that were common at his church. He couldn’t teach, because he didn’t know anything. He wasn’t a pastor. He was just a guy working in a family business, for money.

He, too, got angry at me when I pointed out the truth. He even had secret meetings about me when I left his church.

Things would have been even worse had I gone to a traditional church that denies the Holy Spirit. I would have been taught that homosexuality is God’s idea, and that God doesn’t really do anything for us. If I had gone to a Catholic church, I would have been taught to worship statues representing “saints” created by the church to replace pagan “gods.” I would have been taught I could do nearly anything I wanted, as long as I attended mass and confessed. I never would have received a real baptism.

Sprinkling isn’t baptism, and no baby can receive a baptism. Baptism comes from Jewish ritual immersion, which involves a lot of water, and in order for baptism to work, you have to choose it and understand what it means.

You can’t push a baby into heaven. Besides, babies don’t need baptism. They’re not accountable, because they don’t know right from wrong.

I wouldn’t want to go through life hoping statues and medals would fight for me. That level of powerlessness is frightening. I can’t imagine praying to Jesus’ mother, an ordinary woman, because I had been taught that God didn’t have time for me or didn’t want me to approach him.

I’ve received so many healings. What kind of shape would I be in now had I called on statues for help? Bad knees. No gallbladder. Maybe cancer.

I would be even more full of iniquity than I am. I would think it was normal and untreatable. I wouldn’t know demons drive iniquity, or that they could be removed.

Now that I think about it, I would be a lot like my last two pastors. They’re both very unhealthy. One is obese and diabetic. His wife lost her gallbladder, and now she has a brain tumor. The other pastor has bad knees, diabetes, kidneystones that have required surgery, weird calcified tumors, and a rare blood disease. Calling on God himself is better than calling on a statue, but you also have to repent and put in time praying in tongues.

The iniquities and physical problems I have now can be ascribed to sin and pride. I have to keep pursuing sanctification, if I want help.

People always fail. You can’t count on them for anything. This is why God gave us the baptism with the Holy Spirit. He knew preachers were liars, and that they always would be. When you get in touch with the Holy Spirit, he teaches you one-on-one, and he will contradict preachers all the time. This is what’s supposed to keep the church alive.

I wish I could go to another human being–someone I could see and hear–and get solid instruction I could rely on. It isn’t possible. I can get a little piece of the puzzle here and another one there, but I have to go to God to correct the mistakes and fill in the blanks.

There is no point in being angry at preachers. That’s just a trap. I have to acknowledge their shortcomings and let it go. Anger won’t help anyone. It’s self-righteous. Another demon door.

This stuff is important. Maybe there will be a revival some day, and churches will catch onto it. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though. Might as well get to know the Holy Spirit now and get the information you need.

Letting Chemistry do the Work

Today I worked on the big oak that fell over in the large pasture to the north of my house. I have had over a year to cut it up, but I made it my lowest priority because it enhanced the property’s privacy. For most of the year, it had leaves on it, and even though it was on its side, it provided a screen that was maybe 20 feet high. Hard to give that up.

I stuck a chainsaw and some other stuff in the tractor ballast box, and off I went.

Actually, that’s not true. First, I tried unsuccessfully to start my big chainsaw. I opened it up and looked at the carb. I did all sorts of things. No joy. I thought I was protecting it from leftist-mandated, CO2-generating, vehicle-destroying ethanol, but maybe I failed. Ethanol will freeze up any engine if you don’t drain the gas during long periods of inactivity. I know of three ways to get around this. First, buy real gas with no ethanol in it. Second, drain the gas whenever you stop using an engine. Third, put a product called Sta-Bil in your gas. It will buy you two years. I have a special gas can for my saws, and I always put Sta-Bil in it.

I had to give up on the 20″ saw and fall back (not literally) on the 16″ job. Frustrating. I looked up ways to de-crud carburetors, and I found an interesting method: dishwashing liquid and water, in an ultrasonic cleaner. I just happen to have two ultrasonic cleaners that belonged to my mother. I think she used them for jewelry. This gives me a strategy.

Gas was making it to the cylinder, but I don’t think it was enough.

Anyway, after I gave up trying to start the big saw, I got to work on the tree.

The first thing I tried was to lift a bunch of branches I cut recently. I learned something new. When you lift something with a tractor’s front end loader, you can turn the tractor over very quickly.

I tried to lift the branches, and the load was mostly on the right side of the tractor. As the hydraulics extended, the right side of the tractor leaned toward the ground. It was disturbing.

I never use the tractor’s seat belt, because I have an irrational fear that it will make an accident worse, not better. I have to get over that. I know the roll bar won’t fold up, but it looks so flimsy.

We are having record heat here, just as I was getting excited about cool weather. The temperature in the nearest town is 93 degrees right now. That would be a little high for August. Last year on this date, the high was 77. Tomorrow the weather is supposed to go back to normal. Not sure why I felt like I had to pick today to work in the sun.

I also wanted to work on a stump so I could prepare it for an application of stump remover, but I ran out of steam. I’ve been applying potassium nitrate (saltpeter) to stumps since August. It’s an amazing product. You drill holes in the stumps, pour in a fairly small amount of saltpeter, add water, and walk away. A few weeks later, you will find that your stump is mushy and rotten. If you put 8 or 10 holes in a stump 2 feet wide, you will find that a lot of the stump AND the roots are so mushy you can cut them up with a maul.

I have tried burning stumps with charcoal, and it will work, but it takes a long time and a lot of charcoal.

I don’t know why it works. I can’t understand how a chemical in a hole an inch wide can rot wood a foot away, but it does.

There is a problem with saltpeter, however. It used to be dirt cheap, and you could buy it anywhere, but now it’s scarce. The best price I’ve found is 8 bucks per pound, at Tractor Supply. Why is it scarce? I’m not sure, but I think it has to do with Islam, the religion of terrorism.

Saltpeter is an ingredient in gunpowder, and it appears that it has been used in other explosives for the purpose of killing the innocent. You can look around and read about a failed terrorist bomb made from saltpeter and one other ingredient.

I don’t know if terrorism is the reason why it’s so expensive for me to dissolve stumps, but it sure seems likely. What other reason could there be for the sudden scarcity of a very familiar product Americans bought in bulk for centuries?

It’s like the disappearance of Postal Service mailboxes. Remember those? We had them before 911, and then they started disappearing. A mailbox is an easy place to deposit a bomb. Not sure it’s any easier than dropping it in a post office lobby, where it will kill more people, but I suppose it’s harder to do that without being identified.

I have not been able to find any references to terrorism’s connection to the disappearance of mailboxes, but it seems obvious, and the government’s own explanation–cost cutting–seems stupid. It doesn’t cost any more to grab mail from a box than it does to take it out of a bin in a post office. Whatever. Thank you, Mohammed, for one more inconvenience.

Timothy McVeigh, one of the left’s hens’-teeth-rare white, non-Muslim terror celebrities, used ammonium nitrate, a popular fertilizer, to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City. Now it’s hard to get ammonium nitrate. You have to fill out paperwork, apparently.

It’s a wonder we still have access to anything that blows up.

Before I realized someone had choked off the saltpeter supply, I looked all over the web, figuring someone had to be selling big sacks of it. I thought I found a source on Amazon. Someone was selling 5-pound bags of saltpeter for about $20, so I ordered one. Better than paying 50 cents an ounce. Today I found out what I actually ordered is “Chile saltpeter,” or sodium nitrate. People say it’s chemically similar to potassium nitrate, so I’m going to try it anyway. It can’t hurt anything, and it may do the job.

I have read that a lot of other chemicals will soften stumps. Epsom salt and the unobtainable ammonium nitrate have been mentioned. I would not be surprised if sodium nitrate worked and saved me some money.

I had to buy a 1″ wood auger in order to make deep holes in stumps. I also sprang for a decent lithium drill. I can’t believe the amazing cordless drills they make these days. I bought a Makita, and I made sure I checked the torque and ordered a good one. Makita makes like 400 different drills; not sure why. They could cover all the bases with a dozen.

My experience with the drill was startling. Live oaks are extremely hard, so I thought drilling holes in them would be a terrible job. I was mistaken. The auger went through oak like it was cheese. I can’t understand it.

While I was drilling more holes this week, I realized it was so easy, I could get rid of small oaks simply by hollowing them out with the drill.

Now that I know how easy it is to get rid of stumps, I wonder why most people leave stumps in the ground and walk and mow around them.

I have stumps that are sprouting suckers. I hate that. Live oaks refuse to die gracefully. I figure stump remover will put a stop to it. If the wood is falling apart, it can’t be expected to remain alive.

I spent a lot of time Googling stump-removing chemicals this week, and I ordered sodium nitrate, so I’m sure I’m on all sorts of government lists now, as if I hadn’t made them already by joining gun forums, buying ammunition online, and writing blogs critical of Obama and Islam. I know the DoD has me on a hate list; I’ve seen the block page. Nice. Thanks, guys. I wonder if Farrakhan’s website–an actual hate site–is on the list.

I hope the government isn’t wasting much energy on me, because they have limited resources, and there is absolutely no possibility that I will try to blow anyone up.

Of course, that’s exactly what I would say if I were a terrorist.

There is no way to win.

I should have waited until tomorrow to work on trees, but I wanted to get outside. Maybe tonight I can get the big saw’s carb fixed up, and later this week I can wreak some real havoc.

It was hard to be effective today. Work a little, overheat, gasp for air, stop, rest, work a little more, and so on. I was wearing steel-toed boots and jeans with a lot of heavy stuff in the pockets, and I was wrestling branches and holding a saw. The sun was fierce, and the breeze was nonexistent. Overheating took place quickly, and when you’re too hot, you feel physically weak. Your body stops supplying power in order to force you to rest.

I left my chainsaw and pole saw out in the pasture. Time to get back up and retrieve them.

I should have this huge tree cleared away by the end of the month, or, alternatively, I may be dead. I am hoping the tree loses.

That’s all the excitement for today. Be careful what you Google, or you may end up bunking with me in Leavenworth.

Pettiness Redefined

Politics gets sillier all the time. Elizabeth Warren is now declaring victory over Donald Trump because she got a DNA test which suggests she has a maximum of 1/64 American Indian blood. She believes this proves she’s an Indian. She is demanding Trump give a million dollars to the charity of her choice.

Is this really happening?

A long time ago, Trump said he wanted to give Warren a DNA test and have it processed. He said he would donate a million dollars to the charity of her choice if it proved she was an Indian.

Here are the problems with Warren’s claim to the money. Trump said he would give her a DNA test kit if she showed up for a 2020 presidential debate, and he wanted to provide a kit. He also said he would pay “if it show’s you’re an Indian.”

Warren cherry-picked an academic from Stanford test her. He’s an academic, he’s Hispanic, and he lives near San Francisco. What are the odds he has a bias? He said he had to use genetic markers from South American Indians to check Warren, so we don’t even know if the test means anything in a case where a woman claims to be part Cherokee.

The test didn’t show Warren was an Indian. It showed the opposite. It showed that she probably has somewhere between 1/64 and 1/1024 American Indian blood. That doesn’t make you an Indian. It puts her at less than 1.6%. At the low end, she may have 0.001% Indian blood. That’s not going to get you into the sweat lodge.

The Genetic Literacy Project (whatever that is) claims an average American of European extraction has 0.18% American Indian blood, which means an awful lot of us are just as “Indian” as Senator Warren.

Warren pretended to have so much Indian blood she deserved special recognition for it. That simply is not true, even if we assume the best and say she’s at 1.6%. When one out of 64 of your ancestors is of a certain race, and the rest are not, it has zero impact on your experience as an American.

Some people claim “one drop” of black blood makes you black, for racists. That’s not true. How would they know? If you had one black ancestor out of 64, you would be white. I guarantee you, there are white racists with more than 1/64 black blood. There have to be. Very few people know who all of their ancestors are, when you go that far back.

Why did she even bring it up? We already knew her claim was bogus. This makes her look even worse. For all I know, I have more Indian blood than she has. After my grandfather died, my grandmother married an Indian named Smitty. Do I qualify for affirmative action?

There are stories in my mother’s family, asserting that my great-great-grandfather married an Indian. This story is based on the following science: my grandfather and his siblings had black hair and big noses. Unfortunately for the family members who buy the story, records show that my great-great-grandmother was a lady named Murphy.

When I was a kid, I was told that my great-great-grandfather was a huge man who lived to be 104 years old. In reality, he was a skinny old dude who made it to about 85. I don’t know where the weird stories came from.

Americans love pretending their ancestors were Indians. I don’t know why. Frankly, Indians have not accomplished much. White people were doing calculus in the 1600’s, and Indians were still illiterate and unable to figure out the wheel. Not to be harsh, but that’s history.

Indians excelled in one area. They had more style than anyone. Look at the old photos. They look fantastic. When it comes to style, no one can touch the Indians of North America. Other than that, their culture was pretty bad. War as recreation, torture, slavery, cannibalism…it didn’t have a lot to offer.

If you want to brag about your ancestors, pretend you’re Jewish. Moses, Solomon, Jesus, Einstein…highest average IQ…most Nobel Prizes per capita…who else comes close? Just make sure you don’t mention athletic records.

We’re so childish now. It’s shocking that someone who thinks of herself as presidential timber would pull a stunt like this. She should have admitted guilt and moved on. And Trump…well, he’s Trump. He is not known for his mature demeanor.

Leftists are getting behind Warren, as if there was any doubt that they would. They are claiming, in complete seriousness, that the test is a vindication. Unbelievable. Just let it go. Say you know she fibbed, but you’re willing to forget it.

I’ll bet I have no non-European blood. I’ll bet my DNA is as boring as it gets.

Trump should get himself tested. It would be hilarious if he had more Indian blood than Warren.

Trump doesn’t owe Warren’s charity a penny. She needs to move on.