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That In Which We Live, Move, and Have Our Being

To Be Rather Than To Seem

August 13, 2024 / / 0 Comments

To Be Rather than to Seem – ESSE QUAM VIDERI – People pretending to be something that they aren’t is not new. We are warned against them in ancient myth, in the Bible, and by great orators such as Cicero who spoke clearly against them in his Essay on Friendship 2000 years ago. People have not changed noticeably since anatomically correct humans first appeared 400,000 years ago. Only our technology changes. Biologically we still respond to stimuli as we have evolved to. This is another entry in What Your Father Should Have Taught You. In a world where so much is fake it is perhaps even more important that we cling to what is real in ourselves and our lives.

Welcome sojourners. It’s been a while but we will do better in the future. Welcome back to any who seek to live truly! I have been working behind the scenes so know that you are not forgotten or neglected. However, as a one-man operation I need to do all the business, research, marketing, tech, and … well, everything alone, while supporting my family. Some of you will wonder that this seems to have a more political bent than religious. However, I have always thought that God was doing something special in the formation of “the Great American Experiment” of freedom and people’s self-governance. Most of th world was against it. Europe, in particular, thought it was doomed to failure that the “masses” could not govern themselves. Jefferson and the others proved them wrong for 200 years. Now, however, I feel the battle for our society is not just a political battle but a moral battle where Divine Forces struggle. Chaos and immorality against order and freedom, good and evil, are today battling for the future of humanity. As Ronald Reagan once said, “If we lose freedom here there is nowhere for us to flee to.” For now my friends welcome back to: To Be Rather Than to Seem – ESSE QUAM VIDERE. (Published in its original form at SabersEdge.Online presented here slightly edited. – Rivan Elan.)

WHY SHOULD WE CARE WHAT SOME ROMAN WROTE?

I used to think that my dad (who told me stories of the horse drawn dairy wagon coming by and how he made friends with the driver and he would give him a piece of cheese from the large wheel of cheese he had to sell with the other dairy products,) had to be amazed from riding his horse into town as a boy when he wasn’t working to seeing men land on the moon. The world changes fast. That was why I discounted much of what he tried to tell me when I was young. I thought it was outdated. But I have since found out again and again that my life would have gone easier if I had listened in the first place.

He told me people are the same as they have always been and that is why history is valuable and why it seems to repeat itself. When situations arise that are similar to the past people respond in a similar way to how they have always responded. I was skeptical, after all so much in the world has changed. Only when I found out from science that we really were the same as the Romans and earlier man did I fully believe him and completely understand what he had always been trying to tell me. Proverbs and the events of history (not the dates but the events and stories of history,) have lessons for us because people are, and will continue to be, people.

Humans have not markedly changed biologically for at least 400,000 years and, unless your a communist who still believes in the 19th century idea that everything is determined by our education and society we know that our neurological reactions and responses are largely hard wired by our evolutionary biology. We can modify those reactions with training but our physiological (and therefore our mental response which is largely biochemical,) to danger, love, lust, greed, or what have you are the same as they were in the Romans, the Vikings, or the ancient Egyptians (this is the theme of Brett Weinstein’s book A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century). The stimuli may change, our hard-wired reactions do not. Women still scream (a response to call for help from the more powerful and armed men or other wormen,) and men reach for weapons, draw themselves up for battle, or flee. Fight or flight. The response doesn’t change; only what we are running from. We evolved in a dangerous world and the struggle for survival is our natural state. Perhaps that is why every time we create a safe and stable civilization, we tear it apart. When the society is so successful we have no real enemies, we fight each other. We seem to see that today, don’t we?

So, when I considered what was going on in the world today, I remembered my father quoting Cicero who said in his Essay on Friendship (Laelius de Amicitia, Chapter 98,) that “Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.” Virtute enim ipsa non tam multi praediti esse quam videri volunt, is the phrase in Cicero’s own Latin language and it has been handed down to us through the centuries in the phrase:

TO BE RATHER THAN TO SEEM –

ESSE QUAM VIDERI

WHY VIRTUE MATTERS

What got me started thinking of this was that when I told a 7-11 clerk that my drink was a refill he looked at me and said that I need to tell him when I come in if I am going to have a refill. I have been doing this for 40 years and reuse plastic cups until they break. He was the first to question me as to if I really brought my own cup. Apparently, there are people who will lie to save 30 cents on a drink. I guess that was one key advantage when we were a Christian nation. People believed that whatever they did God was watching. My father used to say, “You are not just lying to others you are lying to yourself and to your God. When you give less than your very best you are not just betraying your employer who contracted for you and your skills (all of your ability be it great or small,) but you are betraying yourself and God.”

This is very sad, that people care so little for their own integrity that they would compromise it to gain an advantage worth less than a dollar. But that seems to be where we have fallen to. Such moral relativism is also not knew. It was really promulgated by Karl Marx and Friederich Engels in the 1800s when they began espousing communist ideals. Ideals which have contaminated not only society and politics but also our religious and educational institutions.

People today will find it inconceivable that workers used to be able to give a lad or lass ten dollars and ask them to go get them a coke and the child would go do it and bring them back their change. Even after this had faded in America it was still like that in Germany when I was stationed there in the 80s. It amazed many of my fellow soldiers who grew up in big cities (and had only joined the army to escape a bad situation.)

It is very sad, but I am not really too surprised. As we turn from traditional Christian values we turn toward darkness and chaos. As civilizations turn from their root values they begin to unravel. The sum total of these daily, seemingly small decisions, unravel the fabric of trust that every society needs to survive. The Left, spurred on by fanatics, is actively undermining this very key element to society. Most do it unknowingly but hard- core Communists do it precisely because they want civilization to fall. They believe that only after it falls, and they exterminate a quarter of the population (this is their estimate not mine,) that only then can a new and fair world appear. Somehow, in the midst of this mass murder a new virtuous human they call “the new Communist man” will appear. Communism is very vague on how the lying, murdering, schemers who don’t believe in any moral compass or virtue produce this altruistic individual but Communism is very shakey on all of the details. Even without communists and nihilists we would follow this path of decay. Every civilization does. They ever have trodden this path into a post-civilizational dark age again and again as as the pagan Seneca noted in Ancient Rome noted when the old virtues, (see my article on Pietas here: Pietas, Key to Good Government and Good Living – SabersEdge.Online ) faded and the virtue that made the civilization great became a thing of the past. Civilizations can only survive when parents, grand- parents, professors, and schools all teach the virtues that form the base of their society. When no one in the family has these virtues – in other words when children do not learn them from their parents or their grandparents the chain is broken (and we have now educated three generations in moral relatavism,) and the civilization collapses. That is because a child has no one in their life to point them back to “the old ways of belief and virtue.” This happened to Rome as they moved from a Republic to an Empire.

In such a world, ESSE QUAM VIDERI becomes not only a foreign concept but an anathema as corrupt people cling to appearances and increasingly lack all substance. And then they blame society for it, not realizing that they are a part of that society and society itself is only made up of the actors in that society and their ideals. In other words, we ourselves have become the problem. Only by doing the hard work of self-development can society return to the virtues of the past. There will still be wicked among us, however the survival of civilization requires that most of us live honestly or it will collapse around our ears. Not only did the Romans know this 2000 years ago but it was recognized nearly 4000 years ago as well and is repeated continuously through the Biblical narrative. It has been true for a very long time, and anyone who claims it isn’t, will be hard pressed to find evidence to support their claim. As they say, the wicked always eat themselves just as the Democrats seem to be doing today. It is sad, the Democratic Party used to stand for worker’s rights and the ACLU used to do good.

THE WAY OF THE LIE LEADS TO DESTRUCTION

As I have said before, I often noticed when I was an agent doing interviews and interrogations that people tended to assume the everyone is like them – that everyone naturally acted and believed as they do, and just as truly good people tend to not even see the darkness in others and are sometimes what people have referred to as “lawful stupid” so too dishonest people project their own malfeasance and spite onto others. Elsewhere I have talked about the People of the Lie and Alexander Solzhenitsyn told us that is the way of communism [See here: It’s Always Been About Lies and Control – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth and It’s Always Been About Lies and Control, Pt. II – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth ]

You see this a lot with Leftists and increasingly among the educated and Democrats – especially now that the Democratic Party and our educational institutions have embraced Neo-Marxist values and eschewed all true virtue. That is why the Left is terrified that when Republicans take power, they will warp the Justice Department and use Federal Agencies to attack them just as they do to attack their own political opponents. Despite the fact that we have actually seen what a Trump Presidency looks like and he did not do that. The very action would be antithetical to returning America to his vision of America in the 1980s; the last real vision of greatness and stability in our history.

Corruption cannot imagine honesty and virtue because they know that they simply pretend to have virtue and they assume that everyone else is simply pretending to. A common saying in counterintelligence was that “everyone is guilty we just need to find what they have done” and then turn that over to law enforcement and let them do their thing. Of course, that is not just cynical but comes from a knowledge that our legal system is so convoluted, immense, and tyrannically invades every aspect of our lives it is harder to obey than the Biblical laws of Leviticus.

Even if the wicked ones do come to believe that there are honest people, they dismiss them as stupid, naive, or lacking imagination. They believe no one is honest, everyone is a criminal who is just faking it, and no one is good. They believe deep in their hearts that if people are stupid enough to accept their lies then they deserve to be fleeced of all they have. Of course, a society cannot survive once even close to half of a population has that view and, I would say from the reactions of filming rape in the subway (among others,) that the large cities are infected with this corrupt view of society. That is why a change in administration isn’t enough to fix them and that is why we used to lock up the amoral cretins who believe and act in this way. Of course, nowadays the Justice Department is more interested in locking up patriots and people who think the government should abide by the Constitution. That, more than anything else, should prove that our government of, by, and for the people has been usurped and the usurpers now rule.

If these people actually revealed who they were deep down, we would be disgusted and repulsed so the saying of Cicero itself is an anathema to them.

In truth, the Bible says that. “No one is good in the eyes of God, not one.” For, “we have all sinned and fallen short of the Grace and Glory of God” yet, God be good, we are saved by faith and grace not by our works. However, repeatedly God’s judgment falls upon those who have given themselves wholly to a corrupt heart, “those who seek after blood” and covet the power or possessions of others. Like Satan himself these people must deceive to survive because we would be repulsed by their soul laid bare. While God can and will forgive he won’t do so until the wicked turn away from their dark path (the word repent simply means to turn and go another direction.) But the longer the wicked follow the path of corruption the harder it is to hear their conscience (an imbedded inner voice God has placed in each of us to guide our actions.) It is amazing how consistent virtues are throughout society: don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, respect your parents and those in legitimate authority, don’t lie, and protect your children and family. These are so imbedded in our psyche that they exist in all societies to a greater or lesser degree. They are hardwired in us [see also: We Are Men of Action, Lies Do Not Become Us – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth ].

I know people think like this because this is the prevailing attitude of counterintelligence agents, and it used to be mine. Counterintelligence constantly deals with the seediest most ruthless parts of society and, because they are about gathering information (and these scumbags are good sources of what the underside is doing,) CI Agents have to deal with them. Unlike police who arrest them CI Agents want the information they have, and we cannot get that as readily if they fear arrest. We have to work with the scum of society. It is a compartmentalization that works but leaves them thinking that the world is a very very dark place. It is commonly said that CI Agents start out as the best and the brightest, but the job corrupts them. I know many who came to believe, myself, included, that their task was to stand between the light and the darkness to keep the chaos and darkness at bay so the people could live in their make- believe Disneyland and believe the fantasy that everything is alright. That illusion cannot stand anymore. The darkness has bled through the barrier. Many with these kinds of jobs people come to feel they can no longer be part of normal society; that they are tainted by the darkness they fought. Indeed, it can take years of processing, and PTSD counseling to come to grips with it. I had decided that there could not be a God when I was doing that work. A retired MI colonel in our church told my parents that it takes time for an agent to recover from what they have seen and done. However, he told my folks that I had been raised well and that he knew that if they just gave me time I would return to the values of my youth. (I didn’t learn of this conversation until a decade later.) It took years to reset my way of thinking and my path of return (remember repentance means to turn and go a new way,) to God was a rocky one. But I still know the dark underside of society and the world. That makes it easy for me to see it and I often wonder why others cannot see what I can see so clearly.

Corrupt people, like Neo-Marxists, cannot imagine someone who operates according to principle or virtue because they have none. They may put a great deal of effort into pretending that they do have virtue and that they are good people but it is a lie. If they do encounter people who are genuinely good then they tell themselves that honest people are simply honest because their stupid or naive. If they believe their lies, they think, then the fools deserve to have everything taken from them. I guess it makes it easier to excuse your own faults that way. Unfortunately, far too many of these people have been allowed to assume power in our government and bureaucracy and to teach our children. Great or small corruption reveals itself foremost in their actions and results. As Jesus said, “you will know them by their fruits.” “A good tree does not produce bad fruit and a bad tree cannot produce good fruits.” In this parable we are the trees he is talking about.

Because I have been trained in interrogation and statement analysis I analyze what politicians say and the corrupt reveal themselves in their own lies. But someone who is not trained has more trouble seeing it. That is how the People of the Lie try to survive and live among us, their victims.

More common, most people are not so extreme or as lost as communist operatives. As Uri Bezmenov said there are those who actually believe the rhetoric. Communism not only allows for this they depend on them as cannon fodder. They call them useful idiots. Juri said these idealists must be killed immediately after the Communist revolution because they actually believe the lies. They therefore respond poorly when they realize that the revolution has been betrayed and it was all about power. But they still are lazy and seek to claim virtue or goodness that they haven’t earned. Great or small they still often reveal themselves by their own words.

DOING WHAT IS RIGHT – BEING GENUINE

The unchurched don’t understand sin. They imagine it is disobeying the somewhat arcane laws in the Old Testament, but it is not. Saint Paul made it clear. “He who knows what is right to do and does not do it – for him it is sin.” That is a tall order. It is not just avoiding wrong actions but in actually doing the good that is at our hand, that is our task. We must actually be virtuous and not just pretend to be. The more we act virtuous the more it will become a part of who we are, but it is a tall order and takes a lot of work, that is why so many just fake it. It is easier and they are lazy. But you, my friends, know what is right and how high the stakes truly are!

When I was working for Immigration and we got a new center director who said, “I know you all try to claim hours on your time sheets that you don’t work – but that ends now.” I thought, “Great, we have a liar and a cheater for a leader who assumes everyone else is a liar and a cheater. We are in trouble.” Indeed we were. This superficial fool destroyed the morale of a center with nearly 1000 good and conscientious workers…(OK, not all of them were good and conscientious but I think most of them were.) Of course, as problems arose and there were falling production numbers and rising absenteeism, he viewed it as the workers fault and not his own leadership…at least in his mind. He also did things like continuously challenge people who were hospitalized or disabled to constantly produce medical statements – even for long term and permanent ailments – to justify their doctor appointments or missing work. What kind of person sees someone in a walker after a car accident and assumes they are faking? How this man rose to leadership is a crime in itself and I seriously began to question the government that would put such a man in charge. He never once stopped to consider that these were essentially the same people that were putting in 60-hour work weeks to remove the massive backlog of immigration cases for the two years before he arrived. For some reason, people didn’t put out the same effort for this guy. Go figure.

We are talking about this because this entire train of thought started because I refill cups as my humble effort to recycle, reduce, and reuse resources that I have personal responsibility for. It may not seem like much but between my son and I we can keep 730 cups a year out of the landfill – and I have been doing this for over 40 years. My earliest still serviceable cups are from Micheal Keaten’s “Batman” movie and the “Catwoman” movie which were collectable when the movies came out. If I forget a cup and have to buy a new one then I reuse it as long as it can be rinsed out and reused – most stores have a sink handy for doing so. These are things that are in my grasp that I myself can effect and I decided to do so because I believe we all must try to live sustainably. As a Christian, but also as a good citizen, it is my responsibility to conserve and not waste resources unnecessarily. 730 cups a year in the landfill is unnecessary and it is something I can do that is in my power to change in 40 years that can amount to over 22,900 cups and I have five kids – each carried their own cup into the convenience store when we stopped for drinks on trips. My dad emphasized that we need to act out our beliefs and not just mouth the words to sound good. Be good, don’t just pretend to be good. Sure, none of us are without fault, but we must do the best we can. The world is big but if everyone does what they can it will make a difference not only in their own life but as an example to others.

ESSE QUAM VIDERI

My sons still recycle (our belief and actions are passed onto our children who have spent a lifetime watching what we do, even if they don’t listen to what we say.) They may not have their back hall full of bins for two different kinds of glass and plastic, tin, and aluminum and a compost bucket to recycle, reduce, and reuse kitchen waste by composting it in the garden.

Around the 1960s, when Marxist philosophy started to seriously take hold in general society, the atheists began to act like no one can be a hero if they have faults. This too, is a lie. Christians and our society which was based upon Christian values, knew that no one was perfect. Heroism was defined as people who rose above their own faults to do great things and make a difference in the world. You couldn’t “cancel” people because everyone knew that they also had thoughts. Atheistic Communists follow the examples of Alinsky and Marx in pointing at the faults of others to keep people from looking at how badly messed up their own life is. When the radical communist atheists decided that you cannot be a hero unless your perfect the world scoffed. But now that they have controlled the education of up to three generations their corrupt way of thinking has infected our entire society.

When I was in college I was on the Leadership Team of Ecology Now at the university. I organized demonstrations, boycotts, and campaigns to hold leadership accountable, save parks and play areas for children, and promote recycling at the university and in the community.

This way of living comes very much from my father. He never marched in a demonstration in his life but he quietly lived according to his values and tried to act according to his beliefs. My father, growing up on a family farm, greatly respected the Earth and nature as being a gift from God and His world that we were charged to keep in His stead. Together we took recyclables every month to the distribution center. He passed that on to me. When I became a pastor I realized that when it says “man was given dominion over the earth” the Hebrew word is clear an would better be equated to “man was made steward of God’s Earth” in the same way a steward of a castle in the middle ages was responsible for the castle and ran it in the lord’s absence but he knew that at some point the lord would return and demand an account. I try to remain conscious of being able to give an account of my actions, I am not a saint. I am human and I have faults. But I am conscious of my actions and in-action and try to keep in mind that sin, is failing to do the right that we know that we should do. I don’t care if you are a Christian or not. Such a belief is a better way to live.

Environmentalists use to know that the little things made a difference. Now, too often they want to force people to buy electric cars, wind turbines, or other doo-dads that make the very corporations that pollluted this world even richer.

When I was in the Army I was not as careful until, as an agent, I was driving down the New Jersey Turnpike toward NYC and saw the outlines of a trio of 3 mountains in the distance. Only as I got closer, I could see the bulldozers crawling up the sides. These were not natural mountains; they were mountains of garbage from New York City. Mountains of Garbage! How much smaller would those be if everyone in New York reused their cups, carried their own bags to the store, or some other small deed that they could do. I realize this goes against our conditioning. We are conditioned to a “throw away” society and most of the people who claim to be “environmentalists” throw away tons of garbage in their life without a moment’s thought. They want to be SEEN as Green and as good people but are unwilling to even do something as simple as reusing their cups, they want to get the benefit of the title with as little effort as possible. They pretend and give a false facade.

For committed communists it is all a lie anyway, remember: “All that exists deserves to perish.” Those who live a lie will hate what Cicero and the Bible have to say about being genuine and living out your beliefs. In fact, in Hebrew belief and action are so interrelated that it would be inconceivable for someone to say they believed something but didn’t act on it because ACTION defined what our beliefs really are.

Obviously, some of us do try to be real and to live out our beliefs. Recycling cups are one way I do it, maintaining a website to counter the empty narrative is another. Others do other things. I would be interested in knowing what you do to live out your beliefs. Please comment below. Remember, I never sell anyone’s information.

Leftists read Marx, not Cicero: TO BE RATHER THAN TO SEEM – ESSE QUAM VIDERI

People all over are turning out to demonstrate for issues they don’t understand and haven’t thought through. They want to be seen as “good” but they are unwilling to actually DO anything in their own daily life to make a difference. They want others to do what’s right and others to pay the consequences. They will show up for a day or two to demonstrate but they won’t actually change the way they live.

This happens all over. Not only in ancient Rome or in demonstrations in the streets or on TV. It happens everywhere. Even where you work.

When I was in Immigration a woman in a meeting was haranguing us about the environment and how the center needed to provide recycling bins for the workers. She said this while drinking out of her plastic cup, while holding a baby using disposable diapers and holding a bottle that used disposable plastic liners.

“Why don’t people just put a box under their desk and toss in their pop cans during the week and then they can take them home on Friday and recycle them with their home recyclables.” I asked.

“No one is going to do that!” She said. (What she really meant is that she wouldn’t do that and therefore didn’t believe anyone else would either.)

“I do,” I said.

“Yeah, sure you do.” The smart ass hypocrite yipped.

“He does,” one of my coworkers said.

“Yeah,” another one spoke up. “I see him leave every Friday with his bag of recyclables.”

Environmentalists used to help teach people a better way to live. My father lived the army slogan of “Lead by example.” When I was younger “Recycle, Reduce, and Reuse” was recommended as a way of life – each person doing what they could to make a difference. It may not feel like changing the world but in many ways it makes a bigger difference than we imagine. It is hard to change habits of a lifetime. But if we fail, we just need to decide to try again and do better in the future.

But too many people don’t want to take responsibility today. They want the government to take responsibility for them and force people to comply. Somehow, they believe that taking money from corporations or investing in “Green Energy” trusting the people who ruined the environment to now save it is an actual solution. That is a solution that Americans never would have stood for (or fallen for,) even a few generations ago. Back when Americans knew that the responsibility for their government, the environment, energy use, and family were their own and not something to be left to others.

Jordan Peterson says that people today (especially Leftists,) want to claim virtue that they didn’t earn.

TO BE RATHER THAN TO SEEM – ESSE QUAM VIDERI

“Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.” Virtute enim ipsa non tam multi praediti esse quam videri volunt.

This is a problem with humanity from Rome down until today. In truth from the Garden of Eden to today. As I told my District Superintendent once when he thought we have moved beyond John Wesley “I don’t think we’ve learned anything since Moses gave the Ten Commandments. Looking at the news today we are still doing the same things.”

As one parliamentarian said in a speech in the Italian Parliament “They hired our parents to destroy the world and now they want to hire us to save it. But here is the clincher – at a profit.”

Perhaps if we all took the time to read Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and the writings of Paul or about the life of Christ, or listen to these things through an audiobook, we would not be so easily taken in. Perhaps that is why discussions around some of the firesides in the Civil War in the 1800s showed more awareness of political realities than discussions today around the dinner table. They were not distracted by sports – that was an intentional distraction manufactured for us by the Fabian society citing the “Bread and Circuses” in Rome (the idea that if you give the plebs bread and games you can do anything you want in government and they won’t care. The Fabians had a classical education too, and they decided to use it against us to destroy what we have built.

Those who were educated in the past read the classics and they had a better understanding of logic, history, and people. They may not all have read Cicero but reading classical works prepared them for dealing with people better than our Public Education does, but Cicero and Marcus Aurelius were favorites of many of our founding fathers.

If you get nothing else from this article, I hope you get that the little things we do can add up and make a difference and we will never know how they affect the actions of others by our example. In my opinion we will all live better lives if we strive to be what we want to appear to be. Psychologically and Sociologically this is called Praxis. As Nietzsche said, if someone tries to be something for a long period of time, in the end it will be difficult for him to be anything else.

TO BE RATHER THAN TO SEEM – ESSE QUAM VIDERI

“Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.” Virtute enim ipsa non tam multi praediti esse quam videri volunt.

We Are Too Often Blind; You Must Unlearn All That You Have Learned

May 21, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Too often we are ill equipped to embark on a spiritual life. Even if we have been raised in the Church in Europe or America we are overly rationalistic and materialistic. Somehow we decided, largely due to the dominant fiction of Scientism – the cultic belief that science can explain everything of value in the world – that despite the fact that every human society and culture that has existed or does exist acknowledges (or at least explores,) the existence of a spiritual reality of some kind. Even in America we have begun to understand that sometimes health conditions are caused by mental and spiritual conditions. We are, as I have always preached, not physical creatures with a body, a mind, and a soul. Instead the truth is we are body/mind/soul creatures and everything is harmoniously interconnected. At least it is supposed to be harmoniously integrated and interconnected.

Welcome to the Nature’s God Blog for 20240519 Grace and Peace to you.

There is something very, very real about a war between good and evil. If you have been told there is no evil then please stay with me. I was raised with the idea of Spiritual Warfare, angels, demons, and many misconceptions that come with that – one of which you can read about if you read about the exorcism I conducted of a church – an exorcism that I thought was going to be a simple cleansing of residual negative feelings but found…suddenly…that I was facing an actual entity; an evil entity that according to all that I had read and be taught should not have even been able to enter church grounds let alone come to dominate them. I also knew that I was not alone that a Divine power was assisting me and communicating with me throughout the ordeal. The fight was by no means as certain or direct as you would see on TV or sometimes hear from a pulpit. As is so often true in life even if the end is certain because God is With You – that does not mean the resolution is going to be an easy matter or that you don’t have to work for it.

These entities I describe as evil. There is a deep hunger that can never be satisfied. It is a hunger for life that feeds on pain, fear, and suffering. In my mind the best way to describe such an overwheening desire and hunger for suffering and pain is evil. To me, living for the suffering of others or living in a way that causes the suffering of others is evil – or at the very least demonically insensitive.

One thing I have often mentioned is that most of the references to Satan in the English Old Testament are not a capital “S” Satan but a lower “s” satan. Satan means “enemy, adversary, prosecutor, etc.” There IS a big “S” Satan but most of the references to Satan that you read in the Old Testament are “enemies” of life and the Divine and not “The Devil” but devils, efreets, and other creatures just as most “angels” are a variety of creatures and not only the human shaped winged creatures we have been taught to imagine.

So, if you have trouble with “evil” maybe it is due to the over-used and sometimes comical simplicity of how good and evil are portrayed. I want to ensure that you understand my paradigm and definition.

Know that there is a Source of Life that I call God/the Divine/Source of Life/The Ground of All Being/etc. As I have said before I could care less what name you choose to give it if you are speaking of the Entity or Force that strengthens life, maintains or instigated the laws of physics and nature, and whose creative force initiated the Big Bang – quite possibly from the power of the Word. Then we are speaking of the same thing. I would include the Tao although those who follow Tao would say it has no intelligence, I have learned a lot about the Holy Spirit by studying understandings of the Tao. I suggest that perhaps Tao has an intelligence that you simply don’t recognize because it is not human.

The creatures that are evil have cut themselves off from this Source and therefore they are always “hungry” for survival. Since they have cut themselves off from the Source of life. But just as we need to convert food to energy to live they need energy to maintain their spiritual existence. They therefore have a parasitic existence by feeding off of (not the Source itself but by sucking the “life” out of,) the Source’s creatures that are still connected to the Divine Source – even if it is only residually so. They feed by creating “anti-life/anti-existence.” If truly living is having an abundant life they suck the energy of that life away by causing, fear, pain, suffering, and hatred. They do this not only just to survive but because of their jealousy and hatred of all things still connected to and created by the Source. They seem to feel they are exacting a kind of vengeance by twisting, warping, scarring, and destroying life and its quality.

We are born with our connection to the Divine but every decision we make that is “not God” [see also The Vital Truth of Life – ofNaturesGod.com ] moves us farther from the Source and closer to oblivion because we are not strong enough spiritual creatures to even survive in the “outer darkness” where the “evil” creatures were banished after they rebelled against the Divine.

So, that was all for anyone who have not been with us long enough to have “context.”

The battle between good and evil won a great victory for “evil” when the Western World became skewed and convinced in Scientism and the break between the spiritual and physical worlds as if they were different or even worse that there is NOTHING but the physical world. A lie that most of us have, at some level, been taught in America and Europe if we were born after 1900. It is a dead end that we are coming to that the Western World started down just over a hundred years ago. It is not the Western World it is a mutation of the Western World.

We are not physical beings but body/mind/soul creatures that are an organic/spiritual whole. The physical and spiritual are one but we have been raised in a world that directly cuts us off from the spiritual. We were conditioned by an infant “science” that could only focus on the physical and spread the belief of “radical materialism” that there IS no spiritual. This is really a fascinating development when testimony from every human society in every time and age has affirmed that there IS a spiritual world. Now medical science has come to realize that just as 50% of all cures with medicine are actually a “placebo” affect where the person heals themselves because they “believe” that they took a cure. So, they are beginning to understand that perhaps 50% or more of disease (read this as dis – ease) is actually caused by a dis-ease in the mental or spiritual whelm. Life is not physical or spiritual it is like science has discovered with the particle and wave physics (look it up with the particle/wave observer effect). They are both depending upon the observer but the physical reality is that existence is both.

Reality is a physical and spiritual reality that are not separate but a kind of unified field and we are not whole creatures unless we can perceive it as such. Because we have been formed in a world that told us all this is “just your imagination” or “that was a dream.” Then most of us have to do a great deal of work in order to learn to “see” because being raised in “radical materialism” we have to work at something that, when we are born, comes naturally to all of us.

I remember when my son first told me of “an invisible friend.” He was at an age where he could explain it and we could talk about it (about six or so.) I asked, “What did she look like?” He described a girl in a white shift that went down to her ankles. She had black hair beneath her shoulders and dark eyes.” I nodded an asked, “Did you feel scared or did she try to hurt you in any way.” “No she just surprised me and knocked me over. Actually, I don’t know if she knocked me over or if I fell backwards to keep from running into her.” I nodded again. “Yes, I have seen her too. I don’t believe that she means any harm she has just come to us because we are able to see her and most people have convinced themselves that what they are seeing isn’t real. So you need to be careful who you talk to about this because most people, even your mother’s family, are scared of this stuff and will insist it is your imagination because they don’t want to deal with it.”

I tried to raise all of my sons like that, however, my two oldest sons were the product of a marriage that was not a good match and my ex-wife worked very very hard at making sure they understood what she believed was “real” and what wasn’t. My sister maintained regular contact with her and by the time she was older I think she came around but she had rejected much of what we had encountered when married and convinced herself that it never happened. Likewise, when we ran out of gas on a Sunday and all of the gas stations were closed (yes it was a while ago and we were not near an interstate.) We prayed and drove an additional half hour on an empty tank. I suggest you not “test” that because “tests” where we don’t fully believe don’t do well. Somehow, my oldest son, convinced himself that we “had made that all up” for some reason. I asked him why we would lie to him like that? And he gave some vague answer that revealed he simply did not want to believe because belief held other ramifications for him he was not ready to deal with.

Be aware, don’t force this on people. Some cannot deal with it.

I had five parishioners/farmers standing around trying to get my tiller to work to get my garden ready. They all looked at it. We even took it apart. It seemed to be getting air, spark, and fuel so there was no reason why the simple engine didn’t work. But we had all tried it. One by one, farmers drove by and saw the pastor and others standing around the tiller and stopped to help. But none of us could get it to run. They all had to look for themselves and ensure that it had all three elements and that none of us could figure out why it wasn’t working. “Well,” I said. “We haven’t prayed over it and I’m the pastor so lets try that.” We joined hands and I prayed, “Lord, we have all tried to get this machine work and we cannot do it. We don’t see anything wrong with it but there is work to be done. Grant us your blessing and bring this machine to life so that I can get my garden ready for planting. In Christ’s name we pray.” We then tried the cord again and it started on the first pull. Eyebrows went up. There had been some chuckling when I suggested praying but, after all, I was the pastor so they did it. “Hmm” and “I’ll be damned, sorry pastor.” were the only comments I got, and then everyone left.

The physical and spiritual world are not separate. All are one. There is not a “spiritual reality” and a “physical reality” there is simply reality and the radical materialism found and propounded by modern scientism (the belief that science can find and define anything “real,”), and the emphasis on capitalistic consumerism, and communism which are all radical materialistic ways of understanding. Even our religions separate the material and spiritual as if “spiritual” is what you do at church and then you “put it away” to get on with life the other six days of the week. One advantage Catholicism can have is the availability of mass every day of the week in most places.

All of this is in the Bible because a unity and reality and omnipresence of the spiritual was assumed by everyone who wrote the Bible. As Jesus would say, “Let those who have eyes to see, let them see.” or “Let those who have ears to hear, let them hear.” Yet most of us have been taught to not see, and to not hear. We must unlearn, all that we have learned.

If this is very foreign to you you might try reading the Rhineland mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, the Gospel of John, Theresa of Avila, or any of the multitude of Christian mystics. There are other mystical traditions but the Western mind is not conditioned for Eastern thinking and most I have encountered who try make mistakes because they are looking at them through Western Eyes. They don’t have the “full moon sight” as discussed by good Shotokan Karate instructors and other marital arts ways.* Irish and Celtic traditions are closer but many who claim to follow them do not fully attain a Celtic way of thinking. The best introduction in my view is looking at Celtic Christian mystics because they are speaking from a Western way of thinking with a Celtic mindset – only without the blocks of “modern” Westernism. There is no way for us to fully recover ancient Celtic or Nordic thought because it died out due to lack of written record. We may approach it but it will always be colored by the radically materialistic world that we were raised in. Please note, as you will if you begin reading the Rhineland and Spanish mystics of the Middle Ages (although some translations work hard at translating these ideas into a radical materialistic paradigm and are not very useful. English, unfortunately, is an extremely materialistic language and not very good at spiritual matters. If you can fully learn German it will help open your mind – especially when you start reading German philosophy where the physical and spiritual are much more “real” and enterwined. Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft are a basic concept and we only really have half of it in English/American Western Culture. Again, our Western Culture is not real, it has been warped by radical Materialism but it is through Western Mysticism that we can most quickly and easily move back into the spiritual realm.

Christian mystics, Rosicrusians, can sometimes help depending on the prejudices of those you encounter. I am told the books The Burning Bush; Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy, and the Holy Scriptures: Terms and Phrases by Edward Reaugh Smith can help those well steeped in Christian background find the truths that they can glean from scripture. While Rudof Steiner’s book can. also be good books for beginners. The great morass of spiritual and mystical writing which you can find in an occult bookstore is a good way to spin your wheels and get nowhere for most modern books are written by dabblers who don’t really seem to understand what they are talking about and you will get lost in a surface study and never find your way out of the wading pool of knowledge they place you in.

You are a child of God and God’s Spirit was implanted in you at Birth (or conception,) and if you need help all you have to do is sincerely ask and then pay attention! The answer may not always come in the form you are expecting.

More advanced readers can find practices in Wisdom of the Mystic Masters by Jospeh J. Weed. I caution you though there are not a lot of advanced readers because, in the words of Yoda (and nearly every other mystic master you may encounter,) you must first “unlearn all that you have learned.”

The illusion of multiplicity that the Unity is sometimes presented as and the illusion of Unity of this Multiplicity is another “wave/particle” dichotomy you must come to understand.

The impatience of our society has caused too many students I have spoken with try to rush on to studies they are not ready for and sometimes disaster and destruction in their life has resulted and ultimately they turn away or lose themselves in the oblivion of drink as they are unable to reconcile their worlds, and return (with a vengeance,) to the world and paradigm of radical materialism. They, in the language of Star Wars, were tempted by the Dark Side and, because they were not yet ready for the challenge, they failed.

Somewhere, somehow, you must begin to unlearn your “radical materialist” beliefs to remove the blinders you were almost certainly raised with. People who are born with a deep understanding of this unity of physical and spiritual (in our society,) usually are drugged so heavily to make them “normal” that their “spiritual sight” is completely blinded. I was fortunate in that I had the parents that I had and a sister who was more than a decade older and had “the sight,” as did my brothers but one lost himself in alcohol and another simply seems to have ignored it. Even so, it was not an effortless journey for me and others seem to have a much harder time. I have come to realize that my upbringing and the writings I was exposed to were unique, then again, progressing to reading the Lord of the Rings in Second Grade probably gave me a head start as well as wondering through the dusty books of the stacks at the university among books that had not been checked out in over 70 years that probably helped as well.

There is no physical world and a spiritual world. There is a physical/spiritual world that is all around us. There is no “supernatural” all is natural and part of the Design, it is supranatural to our understanding.

So, I wish you good growth as you unlearn all that you have learned. Grace and Peace to you.

Above I made a comment of martial arts and full moon sight. Here is a more detailed explanation to introduce the idea to you:

*The full moon sight is an example of ideas of East and West and the depth of ideas. Like the existence of cherry blossoms as a sign of the brief and fleeting beauty of life and the immanence of death, in Japanese stories one need only show or mention a cherry blossom and all of those ideas and understanding are brought to the fore but for the Western it is just a flower. The Full moon sight is a simple phrase that Westerners may have to spend months or even years studying to fully understand. he concept of the moon hold significance in various martial arts philosophies (so martial artists may have some concept of this, that was where I first learned of it in Shotokan Karate by Sensei Schmidt and his classes on Martial Arts and Martial Culture through the classes, and practices. Martial Arts that does not try to teach the philosophy is like a child building blocks but never learning engineering.

For instance, in Karate, there’s a stance called Hangetsu-dachi or Half-moon stance1. This stance is part of the Hangetsu Kata, which emphasizes breathing, focus, and the flow of movements that are both circular and powerful, much like the phases of the moon.

Moreover, martial arts philosophies, such as those expressed by Bruce Lee, often draw parallels between the adaptability and formlessness of water and the moon’s influence on i2. Bruce Lee’s famous quote, “Be like water,” reflects the idea of being adaptable and resilient, qualities that are also enhanced by the calm and reflective nature of a full moon night.

The full moon can also symbolize the peak of one’s martial arts journey, where the practitioner has gathered knowledge and is now reflecting upon it, much like the moon reflects the sun’s light. It’s a time for introspection and understanding the depth of one’s skills and philosophy.

In traditional Chinese philosophy, which influences many martial arts, the moon’s phases are linked to the Yin and Yang, representing balance and harmony, essential principles in martial arts training and executio3.

Overall, the full moon can be seen as a metaphor for the martial artist’s pursuit of balance, clarity, and the peak of their personal development. If you’re interested in exploring this topic further, I recommend reading about the philosophies of martial arts masters and how natural elements are incorporated into their teachings. All of this, and more, are encompassed in the phrase “full moon sight” but if you weren’t raised in the background of it then you have to relearn all of it before it can make complete sense to you. This is just a fragment of one example for you to consider.

Don’t Be Lawful Stupid – Wesley’s Rules for Life

May 5, 2024 / / 0 Comments

It was Jesus that called upon all Christians to “be innocent as doves and wise as serpents.” Those in games and stories who equate the good guys with being “lawful stupid” don’t really understand good, (and having worked in the gaming industry,) they absolutely don’t understand evil. Equally so many Christians, who have fallen for the heresy of what I call “the Barney Gospel” (the idea that everything is about love and principles and violence is always wrong,) this is totally not Biblical, but the lies are regularly told from pulpits throughout Europe and America. [We will discuss Good and Evil and what I mean by those things in a future article.]

Despite the complete Biblical testimony which is balanced and designed for real life, ideologues from all sides have tried to make the Bible into something it is not. Humans like to follow rules and they want life simple. However, life is not simple, and neither is God. Jesus also said that “laws were made for man, man was not made for the law.” By this he was talking about his disciples being hungry and actually gathering food on the Sabbath when the Holy People said there was to be NO work done. Jesus acknowledged the law but said my disciples are hungry and they need to eat. The rules that the human church had made to interpret what the Bible said as “observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy” were not what God intended. He wanted people to take a break one day a week off from all their work (a radical idea in a world that had no days off except on the New and the Full moon.) God did not want people to go hungry when they were doing God’s work on the Sabbath. As a Pastor I regularly worked on the Sabbath, often more than 8 hours. In fact, some pastors have a problem in their 70-hour work weeks in that they don’t take time off for prayer, rest, and study. Burnout is a regular occurrence.

Many Christians have embraced the “innocent as doves” part but fail to be “wise as serpents.” In fact, some use the “innocent as doves” as an excuse to not have to act because it would stir up controversy. Remember, that “if you cannot say anything nice don’t say anything at all” is not a Christian way of life. It is a coward’s way that advises people to “keep your head down, don’t make waves.” Many call these people “sheeple.”

All over the world people attack the Bible for things either taken out of context or because of what Christians they knew have done to them that have nothing to do with authentic Christianity. They mistakenly use actions of Nominal Christians (people who wear a cross or call themselves Christians but do not know the first thing about being an authentic Christian,) as indicating what real Christians believe. Let me know in the comments if you have encountered this anywhere in your experience.

John Wesley was an Anglican Priest in the 18th Century whose preaching fathered over 185 denominations from the African Methodist Episcopal to the Nazarene to the Global Methodist. He offered three rules to live a Christian Life – 1st Do No Harm; 2nd Do All the Good You Can; and 3rd Attend to the Ordinances of the Church. Now language was used a bit different in the 18th Century – the 1700s, even the late 1700s were a long time ago so lets talk about them.

The first two really aren’t very difficult at first glance. At least they aren’t difficult to explain – they require constant vigilance and effort to accomplish.

First, Do No Harm – God made the world and called it good. Then we began mucking it up. People like to blame bad things on God but most bad things can be traced back to people and their actions or inaction. Science is even identifying that cancer, hormonal imbalance, and infertility can often be placed at the door of industrialists in packaging, pharmaceuticals, and food production who use chemical ingredients not found in nature and that have not been fully tested for their effects on humans.

There is more to this rule than simply doing “good deeds” there is also the requirement to stand for what is right. That is what served to build Western Society in the way it grew. Repeatedly, men and women chose to stand for what was right against the general push of society.

As Saint Paul said, “He who knows what is right to do and does not do it, for him it is sin.” That, if we are honest with ourselves, is an indictment against all of us. We have all, at one time or another, remained silent when we should have spoken truth to power, or truth to massed ignorance.

These are not problems faced in most primitive societies. Rather, they seem to be problems that have to do with our ‘modern’ way of life. As corporations take cheaper shortcuts in order to make more money by using chemicals and artificial preservatives to give longer shelf-life to their already overly processed and artificial foods those chemicals, as well as the hormones and drugs they give to food animals, genetic modification of crops, and pesticides that carry through the crops and into our cereal boxes. It is in the ‘modern’ world that we find a proliferation of cancer, numerous digestion difficulties, clogged arteries, obesity, unexplained pain and bloating, and much much more.

If your father or mother has a heart attack or stroke you may well ask God why. However, perhaps you would be more accurate to blame the foods available and stresses of the corporate lifestyle than to set the blame at the foot of God. Imagine the way life would be if corporate leaders followed this first rule of the Christian life and really and truly “did no harm.”

When we were predominantly a Christian Country with Christian values there were numerous cases of businessmen who refused to take actions that would increase their profits because they were morally wrong. It is so bad today that universities have started demanding that business majors take an ethics class because we increasingly live in a world where no one knows right from wrong. They increasingly believe the lie that everything is relative when, amazingly across cultures, rules amazingly similar to the Ten Commandments have regularly cropped up. Either there is a universal idea of good, bad, loyalty, and betrayal, or we are hard-wired through evolution to believe these things because those who rejected them were banished from society and their genes couldn’t reproduce. Despite that, every generation has its narcissists and psychopaths. But America and the Globalists seem to want to make those traits into virtues.

Christianity used to hold capitalism in some degree of check. The government, corporations, and individuals knew that if they flagrantly defied Judeo-Christian principles the public would turn against them. Even those who denied Deity and Religion had ideas of right and wrong that were based on the Judeo-Christian principles. Indeed, without religion, (as we are finding out today in our society.) There is no check on the potential wickedness, selfishness, and greed of humanity.

Moses was drafted by God to be that check and to carry his message to the people as were and are the prophets. Christ was sent to embody that check upon our wickedness. Without religion the only moral imperative is survival of your own tribe and to hell with anyone else. This is how the world outside of the West operates. Western Civilization built on the foundations of Rome, Christendom, and the Norse/Germanic egalitarian society traditions where their philosophers and the Havamal came to conclusions that were very close to what is found in the Proverbs and Wisdom literature of the Bible. There was an understanding that in Christendom you could basically trust your fellow Christians (whether, Catholic, Amish, Protestant, Quaker or any of over a hundred other ways to follow Christ, to obey the rule of law, to not bear false witness, and to conduct themselves with honor and respect for life even in war.

“Do no harm” means to NOT remain silent when lies are being spread and injustice occurs. “Do no harm” is a rule calling us to dare to NOT look the other way when crime, extortion, or government or corporate power does wrong. “Do no harm” means NOT stepping over the one who is beaten and bleeding and NOT crossing over to the other side of the street as happened in the story of the Good Samaritan that Christ told. It was the Samaritan, the outcasts of Jewish society in the first century, who stopped and helped the man to an inn and paid for his room, bored, and medical care – even though he didn’t know him. While the “good” people looked the other way and didn’t want to get involved. “Do no harm” means acting sometimes even when we are scared to and fear ridicule, rejection, or legal consequences (such as hiding Jewish families in Nazi Germany.)

Indeed, the song Amazing Grace was written by a slave trader (obviously someone who prioritized money over what is right,) in celebration of his encounter with Christ and his salvation. When he became a Christian he gave up his life as a slaver and spearheaded the campaign in England to make the international slave trade a thing of the past. Not because of secular values but because of Christian values. [See: An Amazing Story – ofNaturesGod.com ] One man acting on principle made a difference in the world.

Indeed, you can trace most of the rights, benefits, and blessings of twentieth century Western Society can be traced back to Christianity, Western philosophers, Rome, or the Germanic peoples. It was people who took their own principles, refused to compromise and made a nuisance of themselves that changed the world. It starts with one voice raised and speaking the truth. We make a mistake when we tell ourselves the whole world feels as we do. This is the heritage of Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, and Christianity and the value it places on all people and life itself.

John Wesley’s second rule of life is Do All the Good You Can. Yet, we are not all wise. Indeed, for some Do All the Good You Can meant to bring the teachings of Western Civilization to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, they did not always respect local cultures. Over all, however, if you look at the nations that are doing the best economically, and have the highest standards of living, they are the countries that are still part of the British Commonwealth or who were linked to them historically. That is because colonizers not only brought domination, they also brought respect for law and order, libraries, hospitals, sanitation, and schools to places that didn’t have them.

Most people don’t know but one of the goals of communism was to attack colonialism and use guilt to get the West to abandon their colonies before the colony was ready to take on the responsibilities of a modern society. Then, in the resulting chaos, the Communists could step in and re-order the society. Despite Marx’ predictions Communism has only been able to dominate in societies that were per-industrial or behind on the industrial curve from the West. This is not the only thing Marx was wrong on. [See: Are We the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? Or Did We Lose the Cold War? – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth ; and Admitted Goals of Marxists in America – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth ]

For some, deluded by the media and government misinformation, “doing good” was acting in ways that browbeat and isolated people who didn’t get vaccinated. The abandoned the principles of Liberty and America (if schools had taught even a modicum of understanding of Western Liberties – or even if they really believed “my body my choice” then they would have rejected these lies). But, as is so often the case, fear over-rode common sense and people acted in ways that were wholly against American Philosophy by marginalizing people who thought differently from them and who sought to exercise their rights over their own body. But even these natural rights are no longer understood in our society. [See also: Denial of Natural Laws and Natural Rights Endangers Our Survival – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth ; We Now Live In A Totalitarian State – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth ] (those who understood virology and still were thinking critically as opposed to those driven by irrational fear and ignorance.) Such people tell themselves they are good people but they are really self-interested people trying to cover their self-interest in a cloak of virtue. This is not the type of “doing good” that Wesley was speaking of. He was speaking of doing good in a rational and prayerful manner with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

This brings us to Wesley’s Third Rule of Life – attend to the ordinances and disciplines of the Faith. Because you cannot have any knowledge of the outcome of your actions – but God does know and by faithfully attending to the spiritual disciplines you learn those ways (although honestly, many who claim to be Christian don’t – as Father Hoolighan told me once: “Mr. Business went to church. He never missed a Sunday. But Mr. Business went to Hell for what he did on Monday.”

Ordinances and disciplines of the faith include studying the Bible and religious teachings, attend worship services, pray and meditate on the scriptures, seek communion with God, and grow in the faith. [If you want to grow in the Faith I have found the writings of the Benedictine Order to be incredibly helpful in living a godly life. See AUSCULA – Listen With The Ears Of Your Heart – ofNaturesGod.com ] Also, included in this was helping the poor and the destitute as Christ commanded and sharing the good news that we can escape this treadmill and the hell of this world we have made.

Christianity has been dumped on a lot with half-truths and out and out lies a lot in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

However, the world was arguably a better place when the West identified as Christendom. As for the Crusades, that deserves its own article but let me make it clear that Europe and Christian countries had been invaded for almost 400 years by Islamic nations before the first Crusade was launched. That is not opinion it is historical fact! And the first crusade was launched not to conquer Islamic countries but it was launched to defend the Christian city of Byzantium that was under attack by Islamic armies. Spain was conquered by Islam as was all of Northern Africa and now they were battling to destroy the Roman Empire whose capital was in Byzantium. Persia/Iran and Afghanistan were not originally Islamic. They were conquered and converted. Charles Martel turned back invaders in France or all of Europe would have been conquered long before now. Rome had been sacked, Christian Russia and balkans were repeatedly invaded, and FINALLY, Christendom rallied to defend Byzantium and the Eastern Roman Empire. Christians rallied again when Vienna was beseiged by the armies of Islam when an army of Germans and Poles led by Jan and the Polish Winged Hussars saved Vienna and saved Europe from the armies of Islam again in the 1600s.

Today we allow those armies across our border without restraint while Islamic Imams preach that after centuries of trying to conquer the West Jihad has a new form. They should now infiltrate the West have more babies than Europeans and Americans and take over their countries from within. This is not my idea. This is what THEY have said in their temples and websites. Why is it that we repeatedly ignore what our enemies themselves say they are going to do to us. Are we that fragile that we cannnot understand there are people in the world that hate us. That didn’t go well with Hitler and ignoring their aggression and stated intent to destroy America and the West won’t go well today. You can hide you head in the sand but it won’t change the result – it just means that you won’t see the sword when it falls. That is not skepticism that is denial and cowardice.

After the Crusades it was Christians that spearheaded the war against slavery and the international slave trade, not Muslims, not Hindus, not Pagans, but Christians. It was not secular society it was Christian society. Secular society didn’t give a damn about anyone but themselves and they have a long history of violating rights not preserving them. The most educated and advanced society in Europe in the 1930s was Germany and we all should know what happened there. While the Left is eager to distance themselves from the Nazis the more I study them the more clearly that they were, indeed, socialists. However, unlike the international socialist/communist movement they were nationalist socialists and after gaining power they broke the power of the right-wing conservative groups that didn’t toe the line of the national socialist worldview.

Oh, witches? Yeah, history has identified a few thousand witches killed by ‘the church’ which was horrible and wrong. But more witches were imprisoned and driven underground by secular doctors who accused them of practicing medicine without a license than were persecuted by the church and we don’t hear about that very much do we?

Its convenient for society not to mention the tens of thousands of Christians killed by pagans and the tens of thousands of Christians and Jews who are today still being killed in Islamic countries. If they mentioned it they may have to do something about it.

Somehow secular society, which has on its hands the 100 millions killed by Communists and the 6 million jews killed by Hitler. As I have said, Jews, like Christians, are still being killed in Islamic countries today. Israel is literally fighting for its right to exist. Palestinians don’t want a 2-state solution. “From the River to the Sea” means there will be no Jews left alive from the river to the sea, they are very clear about that in their own websites.

Selective morality is no morality at all.

Palestinians want to divest Jews of the lands of Israel and Judah that were theirs all the way back to the days of the Pharoah and the Babylonians. The Jews are the indigenous people of the area and the Palestinians the colonizers. They do not allow any Jews in Palestine but Muslims, Arab Bedouins, and more are allowed to serve as judges and in political office in Israel. Israel follows the values of a modern Western State including having one of the largest gay populations in Tel Aviv in the Middle East – one of the few places in the Middle East gays can live and not be killed.

But all of these facts are ignored or twisted by lying “fact-checkers” and other media magnates and their lackeys because they don’t fit the narrative. It’s easier to lie to people when you have stolen their education. [see also: Who Stole Your Education? Were You Indoctrinated in Ignorance? – SabersEdge – Cutting Through the Lies to Get to the Truth ]

The level of ignorance by the Left leaning political organizations of American campuses are disgusting to me. Universities are supposed to be centers of learning and not centers and instigators of anti-semitism. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised with all the Marxist professors because Marx was both of Jewish decent and flagrantly anti-Jewish…in fact Communism opposes all religions. I suppose because religious conflicts didn’t kill enough people to sate the blood-lust endemic to all communist states that have ever existed.

[But as I write this evidence is growing that many of those arrested in college demonstrations may not be students but agents of radical Islam and their sycophants.]

The ignorance of history is endemic in today’s society. As it has been for thousands of years. I guess that is why humans do the same things, and making the same mistakes, over and over again.

Fortunately, one of the ordinances of the church is communion. Communion should be taken only after confession and prayer. You don’t need to go through confession in the Catholic sense but before you become one with Christ through the ritual of Communion you must be sin free. For us humans that means we must repent all that we have done, and all that we have failed to do, that for us was sin. The glory of Communion is that when we repent and decide to turn from our failings that God throws those sins “as far as the East is from the West” and remembers them no more. While humans may nurse affronts and wrongs against us, God is able to completely forget transgressions that we confess and repent to God for.

I love Communion because I am a very imperfect servant of the Living God. I make mistakes regularly. Like King David I am not a paragon of virtue, however, I do love the Living God and my experiences and relationship with that mysterious indefinable but loving entity. Every time I take communion I know (from having read and taught the Bible,) that my sins are forgotten and as I take the elements into my body so Christ re-enters me in a special way and I am made new once again. A fresh start. Clean and new as Christ promised: “Behold, I make all things new.”

That is special and unique in human society. You cannot get that through the legal system. You cannot get it from Universities, and you sure as hell cannot get it from Communism and the Left who cancel, attack with law-fare, and imprison, people “at the drop of a hat,” as they say. But Christianity in each communion service offers a fresh start for all who legitimately repent of their sins. Maybe that is why secular society hates them so, because they know that no matter what they do they will never be free of their own past and Christians get fresh starts regularly.

Attend to the ordinances and disciplines of the Church and seek communion frequently. Especially if you are like me and need to make a fresh start often.

Whether you are Christian or not I suggest you consider at least the first two injunctions of 1st Do no Harm and 2nd Do all the good you can, as you journey through life and you will find that, ultimately, it makes a difference in society. Don’t be like those doomed to repeat history due to their own ignorance and stand up for truth wherever you may find yourselves. Don’t run from a “fight” but when truth is called for to oppose evil and falsehood stand in the gap. We don’t put our heads in the sand, or pretend not to see injustice. Draw sabers, ride to the sound of the guns, and cut through the lies to get to the truth, and…

[Edited version, the original was published on Sabersedge.Online another website of SabersEdge Foundation, an educational association that says the quiet parts outloud.]

The Vital Truth of Life

March 3, 2024 / / 1 Comment

Today’s Society and Life is a lie. You can tell it is a lie and that nearly everything is in service to The Lie because it makes you feel empty or anxious inside. It doesn’t call to you. Real life stirs something in your soul and makes you feel alive.

Thousands of years ago Herodotus wrote: “All of life is action and passion, and not to be involved in the actions and passions of your time is to risk having not really lived at all.”

About a thousand years later Jesus said, “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.” Same sentiment.

You see the Truth does not change over time. Humanity is basically the same as he was thousands of years ago and we react and live responding or not responding to life activating or not activating the emotions, passions, and acts that we are called to do. Our best chance at real living comes when Our Truth most closely aligns with The Truth. The idea that there is no truth is part of The Lie.

The lies they feed you change constantly.

A Marxist radical from the SDS once wrote: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” This statement highlights the idea that the apparent cause of a political action—whether it’s civil rights, women’s rights, transgender, or any other issue—is not the true focus. This is what people don’t get as good honest people fight one lie after another and wonder where they all come from. They come from the BIG LIE.

The Big Lie has two radically materialist ways of thinking – both take you farther from the Creator. One Lie is that of Neo-Marxism while the other is Robber Baron Radical Materialist Capitalism that devours everything it touches and crushes the free market under its totalitarian control of the market, crushing all seeds of opposition and competition as its poisons our lives and our environment and defies any hope of Free Enterprise. But, while we are distracted from the Truth by these Lies we see that both lies solely serve the diabolical path of the accumulation of power and resources into the hands of radical materialists underscoring the Machiavellian approach of prioritizing of the means over the end. Flexibility and opportunism is the key to revolutionary agendas and the Lie is that we must choose between the totalitarian Neo-Marxist’s Lies or the totalitarian world-eating consumerism forced on us by Robber Barons and Finance Capitalists.

From one we have a history of over 100 million lives snuffed out in the 20th century on the altar of Marxism and on the other we are handed a marketing triumph by people who are happy to see millions die of complications to a “perfectly safe” vaccine that causes greater instances of myocarditis and blood clots than the disease it was created for had of instances of death. Apparently, all is fine as long as it gives good returns on the balance sheets. And if it kills millions of youth between 18 and 52 – (an age group that was not even at high risk for Covid), apparently that is an idea that the caretakers of Societies Lies don’t feel they need to look into.

I suppose a third lie is the lie of Scientism where Dr. Fauci claimed that even if millions were to die because of a compromise of the security of a lab doing gain of function research the price would be worth it. Well, it did happen, millions did die, and it wasn’t worth it.

The Lie brings Death. God and the true path brings life and vitality.

Neither of these lies are Truth. They are not our only choices. I would call the Truth to be a Vitalist Truth. What I call Vitalism is that very essence which gives society, politics, family, and life itself meaning. The Vital Essence of Life is action and passion; it is fully participating in the life you have been given. Christ did not come and lock himself away in a monastery (although some may be legitimately called to do that, a monastic life if NOT a life of doing nothing but of actively engaging in prayer and the life of the monastery Ora Et Labora – as Saint Benedict would say,) Christ came and lived vitally and fully, The prophets came to call the World back to life; to bring it into accordance with the Vital Essence of Life Itself. As Herodotus said:

Truth does not change with the needs of the Revolution. Truth is Eternal.

There is a Divine Truth embedded in the Creation and science was originally envisioned as a way of learning about the Creator through the study of the Creation. It is only with the assumption that the world makes sense, that it was created with Intelligent Design that the pursuit of Science makes any sense at all. If the creation is random and without purpose then there would be no way to study it and no underlying order to discover. But there is.

By studying the very essence of Creation as a way of getting into the mind of the Creator – just as you can get to the mind of an artist by studying their creations. Now Science has delved deep enough it is leading us back to the Creator as it repeatedly points to an Intelligent Design and the God Hypothesis as the most logical answer to the questions that the cutting-edge scientists are now asking. Of course, that is only the Scientists who are dedicated to finding the underlying truth of the facts and data wherever their science takes them rather than modern science which is enslaved to the monetary donor of the research dollar or simply to the lie of Scientism.

The idea that Science has all the answers is a non-theist religion called Scientism and it is as empty as the Materialistic society that it has co-opted and poisoned against the vital message of Life and the Creator.

America was originally called to be a shining city on the hill, ONE NATION, UNDER GOD! But the lies in our society have warped it away from the vital essence of Life itself. An essence the founders believed in when they said “We hold these things to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Herodotus said it first, but Jefferson and Adams could have just as readily have said: “All of life is action and passion, and not to be involved in the actions and passions of your time is to risk having not really lived at all.” Jefferson, Paul Revere, John Adams, Sam Adams, and Ben Franklin and Washington were all vitally engaged in the actions and passions of their time and as such they are an example to all who have silent in the silent majority.

Do you feel passion in your life? For your life? Do you wake up with a joy to face the sunrise of another day with your children, your dog, and your cats (both of whom are already waiting at the food dish for you!)

Do you feel the joy your dog does at the simple reality of another meal?

Herodotus said all life is action and passion, Jesus said, I come that you might have life and have it abundantly. He wasn’t talking about things that leave you empty inside and fill your house choking your joy of life with clutter or things that keep you too to busy to actually live. He was talking about being filled with the experience of Living! Do you feel it? That is the Vitalist Essence of the message and meaning of life is.

The secret meaning of Life is that you are supposed to LIVE IT;

Tony Campolo said that many of us say the prayer “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my Soul to take.” But, he says, what we should be praying “Is if I wake before I die,” because most of us go through life as if we are half dead already.

Experience it and let it fill you with wonder at the bloom, the wind in the trees, or the toddler taking his or her first step. Interestingly enough Hebrew mystics taught that the orgasm was the moment when we most closely felt the joy that God felt in the moment of Creation the Bible says that the Spirit of Wisdom danced for joy with the Creator at the Creation. Our moment of Creation is a sign of The Creation. Only God didn’t abort it, even in the time of Noah he preserved the seed of new life.

Jesus called us to abundant living. Living each moment to the full! That is so different from the empty and angry existence Radical Materialists like the Capitalist Robber Barons and Neo-Marxist demonstrators that see us only as consumers and the Godless Marxists who see us as tools to bring about the Revolution, and angrily shout down reason and thought.

In Ecclesiastes 9:7-10a we find one of my favorite passages to preach on and which I have never heard anyone else preach on (the lectionary misses it by one verse) – probably because they have a translation that views Ecclesisastes as totally cynical instead of reading it with acceptance for the world God has made.

Now I am not Catholic, but the New Catholic Bible gets the essence of this passage right:

 7 Go forth, then. Eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a cheerful heart, for God long ago approved what you do. 8 At all times dress in white garments and always anoint your head with oil.

9 Enjoy life with the wife whom you love throughout all the days of your allotted span of life that have been given to you under the sun, because that is your lot while you live and labor here under the sun. 10a Whatever task your hand finds to do, expend all your efforts on it,

Here is just one example of the lies our society shoves into our lives. Such examples can be repeated by you many times over, pick a search engine. (I won’t say which I used but it is common for both Google, Bing, and some others that the big names have bought up and mutated to serve their anti-life, consumerist, radical materialistic agenda, ignoring what you really want to sell you a cheap substitute even as it offers a materialistic and cheap substitute for life itself. I typed in the search engine “Canva.com official website” (yeah, I should have just used the icon I had saved but I come from a time when Search Engines actually tried to find what you were looking for instead of feeding you more of The Lie. My search came back, and the first page didn’t even have canva as a choice! And, excuse me but I think that “Canva.com official website” is specific enough so that if the search engine actually wanted to serve it could do so.

But, like everything else in this sick society of lies it takes you on it’s own twisting algorithm away from the real life that God is calling you to and into an empty substitute. I got Vistaprint, Ninja Transfers, Lulu.com, RocketLawyer? and Paperculture, but NO CANVA.COM. Apparently, Canva didn’t bribe them sufficiently to be on the first page. NO CANVA.COM when I very clearly asked for it. If you are still using Bing, Google, Yahoo, or any of the conglomerate owned algorithm driven monstrosities you are just asking to be lied to and manipulated. I don’t know. Some people may feel more comfortable in the anti-life because then they never need to address the emptiness that is in them that way they can just stay busy doing nothing all day and not thinking or living. Our society that has been warped and wrenched from the natural world is an aberration and parody of life. It is so antithetical to the one we were created to live in that we don’t even notice there is anything wrong, the lie is too big, repeated too often, and yelled at us daily that we cannot hear the truth.

And too often our churches are empty echo chambers of an empty society that don’t stimulate us to life either. Jesus didn’t come to uphold the institutions and to be an opiate of the masses. He came to call us back to life!

We just lumber on like mindless zombies in a Romero Zombie Movie blindly shuffling back and forth to work or to the mall but understanding no more of what we do in the heartless and mindless shuffle that we never realize that whether we are a zombie or “living” we are existing in an evil construction of the Enemy. We live in An Anti-Life Parody of the true LIFE that God calls us too.

“I come that you might have life and have it abundantly.”

That is what the noise of society is trying to distract you from. Are you living abundantly? Is your life full? Are you living with the wife that you love and among the children of your youth, or old and among your children’s children? Does your job leave you fulfilled and full of life? Do your thoughts? Are your musings something God would welcome?

I had a seminary instructor who said that he liked to call John the Baptist John Hinge because it was like God swung open a door and changed everything with the New Testament. The Old is a God of Judgment and the New a God of Mercy and Grace. BULLSHIT! (He and I didn’t get along very well.) I say the New Testament is the Old Testament for Dummies. It doesn’t change the message it distills it down to the core so everyone who missed it in the original can get it. The Pharisees certainly missed it and, apparently, so have most Christian pastors, since they didn’t notice the continuity between the Old and New. But that’s OK most pastors have never read the Bible all the way through anyway. And if they did they read it with a closed mind thinking they all ready new what was in it rather than in an open mind and spirit guided by the DIVINE.

Have you read about the God who led his people out of Egypt. Before Moses had even received the Ten Commandments and after they had seen the plagues upon Egypt, the Red Sea part for them to cross and swallow up the army that was after them. (They have actually found Egyptian chariots on the bottom of the Red Sea by the way – I don’t think Pharoah put them there just to lend weight to some “Jewish Myth.” Like most things people say they don’t believe in they have never looked at the actual word or evidence themselves.)

They had been led by a Pillar of Cloud by day and a Pillar of Fire by night. THESE people, who had actually SEEN THE PROOF of a GOD who interacts with us. They turned away and built a golden calf and started partying and debauching themselves with one another (no love just sex – like modern society advocates in feminism – “men are horrible creatures who have sex just to satisfy lust” so Feminisms answer to that is to make women equally as contemptable? ) THAT is the way this society of Anti-LIFE works on every level. It is all a lie and calls you to live that lie just as it called the people of Israel to worship a calf of Gold instead of the God of LIFE.

Which will you give your life to? The gold or Life Itself?.

So, THESE people having seen all the proof that you might have asked for in your life, SAW it and STILL turned away. God was pissed. God continued to get pissed at this complaining, whining group, over and over again through the Old Testament. What did he do? He forgave them over and over again, personally I would have lost my temper, crushed them, and started over. So it is good we are not God.

You know a pastor doesn’t understand the Bible if he says that the God who is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow is different in the Old Testament and the New. It’s the same message and the same God it is only a superficial reading that makes it seem different. Both the New Wine and the Old are good. Don’t feel bad if you missed it. Jesus came because nearly everyone missed it.

The Shema, “Hear Oh Israel, the Lord Your God is One.”

Nearly everything that Jesus is quoted as saying is a quote from Old Testament Scriptures. I think that the idea that the New and Old Testaments are different is just one more lie that society feeds us and it is just one of many lies that the modern church has swallowed, (along with social justice, and DEI).

Any JUSTICE that has anything else attached to it is a lie. Social Justice is a Lie the American “Justice” system is not only a lie but has been proven in the past few years to be a complete travesty of Justice as people named Clinton can compromise national secrets, and normal people are jailed for taking a tour of the Congressional Building with the guards. Biden can be a senile agent of the CCP bought and paid for and Trump is fined 354 million for non-crime with no victims by a lying New York Court. I am not saying Trump is a Saint by any means but our court system and government has shown its true colors as a totalitarian system leaning toward the Woke Neo-Marxist Agenda repeatedly against Trump because he dares to challenge the BIG LIE that has trapped us all in modern society.

God called us to Be fruitful and multiply, to live life abundantly, to live our lives with joy and enjoy our family and put our whole might into the life that we have while we have it. But our society would rather trap us in a lie as cogs of either a consumer materialistic capitalist wheel or the soul-crushing, life-destroying cog of a lifeless Communist radical materialistic wheel that destroys everything, criticizes everything because EVERYTHING in Marxism exists to serve the REVOLUTION. The current thing is never the thing, it is the revolution.

Feminism is not the issue it is toppling the society to make way for the Revolution, Prayer in schools is not the issue it is toppling the society to make way for Revolution, Transgenderism is not the issue it is toppling the society to make way for Revolution. Trump is not the issue it is the revolution. Justice and bail reform is not the issue it is toppling society to make way for the revolution, queer theory is not the issue it is the revolution, Ukraine is not the issue it is revolution, inflation is not the issue it is revolution, corruption is not the issue it is destroying faith in our institutions to make way for the revolution. As the Marxist said “The thing is never the thing, it is always the revolution.”

So Neo-Marxists are busy destroying our society as well-meaning people try honestly exhaust themselves dealing with the endless issues they raise. Until honest men and women are too exhausted to prevent the revolution from occurring. They don’t realize that none of these issues truly matter to the Marxists they are simply tearing apart our society of the LIE to replace it with the NEW LIE .

Actually, they are the father of the lies in both societies since Neo-Marxists twisted the current society with their agitation since the 1950s. They have been twisting and warping American society for almost 80 years if not more moving it away from God. (Remember Marx was writing before and during the American War Between the States)…of course everything we see feels like a lie. The Lie has corrupted it all. But then Jefferson and our founders foresaw that:

The Constitution is not unable to deal with modern society, that is just another lie. The over-riding and watering down of the safeguards of the constitution and Bill of Rights that we have done over the last 200 years is what has brought us to this point. It is our changing and opposing the Spirit of the Constitution which, in my opinion, was divinely inspired.

Then they raise the LIE again. “You who want to return to the Constitution and want to put blacks back in chains?” The Constitution didn’t make anyone a slave, it just acknowledged the aberration of slavery as a fact marring the free society that was envisioned today there are no legal slaves, and the Constitution doesn’t and didn’t make slaves. That is why Jefferson originally wrote in his draft of the Constitution:

But they didn’t tell you that, did they?

That is because, like everything else they don’t tell you it doesn’t serve the lie.

We live in a hard time. But those who say we shouldn’t bring kids into this world have swallowed another of the Lies and are living according to it. God proclaimed the World to Be GOOD and it is only where we have deviated from the DIVNE PATH that we have sullied it and made it empty of the passion and vital essence of life.

Is this time harder than World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, or when the Mongols swept out of Mongolia to cover a third of the globe, hurling thousands of heads of their slain over the walls of cities to get them to surrender? Is today really harder than that? Every generation has faced the LIE and the ENEMY of their time, but we need to bring forth the vital truth of life with passion and action of our own to live life abundantly and truly; to suppress the Lies with Truth.

To quote a line from G. Michael Hopf’s post-apocalypic novel “Those Who Remain”:

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”

To this Herodotus answers –

“Adversity has the effect of drawing out strength and qualities of a man that would have laid dormant in its absence.” and “All of life is action and passion, and not to be involved in the actions and passions of your time is to risk having not really lived at all.

CHRIST CAME THAT YOU MIGHT HAVE LIFE AND LIVE IT PASSIONATELY AND VITALLY. and not to simply exist.

Who Are the Children of God?

January 31, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Epictetus and the Bible both had the same answer. The first century Roman Philosopher writes: “If a man could only take heart to this judgement, as he ought, that we are all, before anything else, children of God and that God is the Father of gods and men, I think that he will never harbor a mean or ignoble thought about himself… We ought to be proud, but we are not; as there are these two elements mingled in our birth, the body which we share with the animals, and the reason and mind which we share with the gods, men in general decline upon that wretched and dead kinship with the beasts, and but few claim that which is divine and blessed.” -Epictetus, Philosopher of Rome 1st Century AD

This passage comes from page seventeen Chapter III of the book The Discourses of Epictetus and the Enchiridion which is available through Royal Classics; the 2020 Edition.

Today we will look at the wisdom of Epictetus and how it dovetails closely with the teachings of Saint Paul in the Christian Bible. Epictetus was not a Christian but, as I have said repeatedly Wisdom Literature appears to be remarkably the same from culture to culture. This is not too surprising because, for the most part, humans are genetically the same from continent to continent and people to people. Wisdom, offered by sage observers of human nature provided teachings on how to live successfully in a challenging and troublesome world based upon their observations of the world and their observations of people and their actions and reactions.

One of the philosophies of human nature and how to act that developed in the ancient world was Stoicism. While some stoics completely rejected emotions, and I do believe that is unhealthy, I do agree with the stoics that if we let our feelings and emotions dominate our life and our decisions then we are embracing an animal nature and denying our ability to reason and rise above the animals. This reliance on human reason and logic is a hallmark of the Western World that we rarely teach in schools or universities today. It is an ability that, ultimately, has created Western Civilization through logic, mathematics, and scientific inquiry. This is a civilization and society which is the most advanced and richest society the Earth has ever seen (at least that we can verify within our historical record.)

Stoicism is a philosophy that centered around self-control, self-knowledge, and maintaining a positive mental attitude as well as knowing your place in the Created Universe. Which, as Epictetus said included the knowledge that we are all children of God. Many of the philosophers referred to this as ZEUS or IUPITER as they were familiar to all. But most of the philosophers actually spoke of a God of Nature behind both Nature and the popular concept of gods.

Christianity told people the same, that we were children of the Living God and that our body was the temple of the Holy Spirit. Saint Paul said in one of his letters “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” The indwelling of an immanent God was indwelling in the entire Divine Creation (an idea called Panentheism – See Below,) but in a unique and special way in humans. In the Bible God speaks to the others and says, “Let us make man in our own image.”

This recognition that we had a divine nature eschewed complaining and whining about bad luck and stoics would have scoffed at today’s epidemic of professional victims and constant whining on social media about how tough life is or how you have been wronged. Many stoics became powerful men who had command of themselves and could therefore command others. One of the most famous and admired emperors of ancient Rome was the stoic Marcus Aurelius and he wrote a book of meditations that we can study and read today. I am actually much more familiar with the stoics Seneca and Marcus Aurelius (which is why I bought this book on Epictetus – to fill in gaps in my knowledge, I hate not knowing things. No matter how much I learn in this life it will just be a drop in an ocean of knowledge, but I believe that you must embrace your own drop of life to be part an active part of that ocean.)

Epictetus was a Roman and a Stoic who lived in the first Century AD. He was born a Caucasian slave at Hierapolis, Phrygia (now called Pamukkale, Turkey,) and spent his youth as a slave in Rome, owned by Epaphroditos, a wealthy freedman and secretary to the Emperor Nero. Epictetus was intelligent and had an interest in philosophy so his owner let him study Stoic philosophy under Musonius Rufus. As was the way in Rome the more educated the slave became the more status he had and the more valuable he was to his master. There is some confusion as to how Epictetus became crippled. Simplicius states that he had been lame since childhood while Origen stated that he had been deliberately crippled by his master when angry. We will probably never know.

Epictetus was freed sometime after the death of Emperor Nero in 68 AD when the youth was in his teens but we don’t know the year. We do know that Emperor Domitian around 93 AD banished all philosophers from the city of Rome and Epictetus went to Nicopolis in Epirus, Greece where he founded a philosophical school centered around stoicism.

I mentioned that his words were similar to several of the teachings of Saint Paul and this is not too surprising. In fact, I think it would be surprising if some Stoicism had not crept into Paul’s “gospel” because he grew up as a Jew but also as a citizen of Rome in the city of Tarsus. This was a city that held one of the three great centers of the Stoa (A College of Stoic Philosophy,) in the ancient world.

“If a man could only take heart to this judgement, as he ought, that we are all, before anything else, children of God and that God is the Father of gods and men, I think that he will never harbor a mean or ignoble thought about himself…We ought to be proud, but we are not; as there are these two elements mingled in our birth, the body which we share with the animals, and the reason and mind which we share with the gods, men in general decline upon that wretched and dead kinship with the beasts, and but few claim that which is divine and blessed.”Epictetus, Chapter III, p.17, The Discourses of Epictetus and the Enchiridion by Epictetus

So, in brief, Epictetus says everyone has two natures. An animal nature which is tied to the biology of our physical body and a Divine nature as children of the Father of gods and men through our higher brain functions. He encourages us to live up to our Divine heritage and not lower ourselves to acting on our baser impulses like animals.

I find it interesting that modern feminism has encouraged women to act out and sate their baser passions (like animals in heat,) rather than aspire to a higher idea or goal. In a sense they somehow believe it is liberating (?) to imitate the basest and most visceral failings of men and animals. I have noticed in my dogs that they really don’t have much ability to resist a bitch in heat. I have known one or two men with the same lack of self-control.

I will never understand how lowering yourself and giving full play to your animal nature somehow will make you a better person worthy of emulation and pride in self. I have watched numerous videos of women insisting that their body count doesn’t matter only to refuse to say what theirs is. This must be because down in their heart they realize that it very much does matter. At least a gentleman doesn’t tell or brag about it. But Gentleman, like Ladies, both seem to be a dying breed among the youth of today.

Still, everyone is entitled to ruin their own life in their own way. I cannot be terribly sympathetic when there are thousands of years of anecdotes, testimony, and tales that let us know that such behavior generally leads to ruin. My father always pressed the Biblical Proverbs on me telling me that I can either learn from the mistakes of others or learn by “the school of hard knocks” by getting knocked on my a** by life again and again. He told me that its much easier on you and your friends and family to learn from others. But, as I said, we are all welcome to fall on our faces and refuse to learn any other way, in fact many do so.

I cannot say that I always listened to my father. No, I first had to fall on my face several times until I recalled, “Oh, my Dad said something about this from the Proverbs in the Bible.” Eventually, I chose the easier path of going back to read philosophies and proverbs of the past. They have stood the test of time for literally thousands of years. Why? Because human nature evolves very slowly. This is why philosophies, such as communism, which rely on “creating a new man” are all dead-end philosophies because we evolve extremely slowly. Therefore, every generation needs to be retaught what previous generations have learned. Otherwise, you are forcing yourself to start over from scratch when the knowledge may well already be out there.

I remember complaining to my youngest son that it seems that all the movies of the last ten years are crap. He didn’t know what I meant until we sat and watched some old movies from the 70s and 80s that are classics. “You’re right he said. They are much better stories and have deeper characters.” I think the problem has to do with something the YouTuber Call Me Chato once said: “I have never seen a generation of directors, scriptwriters, camera men, and others who were LESS interested in learning the art of film making. They just throw something together and expect it to be good without considering the decades of trial and error that went into developing the movie industry.” That seems to be a problem that exists in other fields besides movies. Talk about doing everything the hard way.

Contemporary generations, more than any previous to them, seem to be unaware of the continuity of human knowledge. Every thing they know, every device they use, and every technology they covet has been built upon a long history of scientific discoveries preceding it and preparing the way for it. Knowledge is like people in a way. If you do not know where you have come from, and do not know where you are in relation to everything else, you have little to no chance of finding your way to where you want to be.

The worst work I have EVER seen is the Rings of Power by Amazon (well, except perhaps The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and The Banana Monster). I could go on for hours (and I have,) about all the problems there are with the elves and story in this Amazonian monstrosity… and I was really looking forward to it. But I never even got through the third episode before I gave up on it. But I have watched several excellent movies since 2020 – none of them were made in Hollywood though.

OK, that was a tangent, but it is an example of not listening to the wisdom of people who have gone before. I talk about that a lot. One of the things that is ancient knowledge is this idea that we have, in us, a spark of the Divine and we can either feed it so it grows or embrace our animal nature.

This brings me back to Epictetus. To realize we were created by the Living God, the Father of gods, is to know that we have a place in the universe and are not here by accident or chance (as radical materialism tries to ram down our throats…a theory that is no longer even sound scientifically although that is where it supposedly came from.) I believe that for fulfillment we need to have the higher mind engaged in what we do. While we should not indulge the animal self exclusively, I would point out to Epictetus that we are, in fact, also animals and we should not ignore our nature either. I believe in finding a harmony between the two.

Now, let us go no farther without addressing the warped character of American religious communities. Thanks to the Neo-Platonists and Manicheans (like St. Augustine,) who have had such a lasting effect on Christianity we view ANYTHING material or “of our animal side” as (almost) evil or at least dirty. This is not what I am saying. As the rabbi said, “God’s first commandment to humanity was to be fruitful and multiply.” Further, the ancient Hebrew mystics taught that it was in the moment of orgasm that we got a glimpse of the joy that would be ours in the world to come. A glimpse of the feeling of being one with God in the mutual climax of sex as two people come together and become one (even if only for a moment). You have to do some serious thinking of why did God put that there? It certainly wasn’t because he hated our bodies and our natural desires. God created those as well. Scientists today, although many don’t want to use the word God, they say there must be an intelligence behind everything because it all fits together with a mathematical precision.

Please note, I am not a Platonist or Manichean or Puritan who believes all nature is bad and spirit is good. We aren’t creatures with a body, a mind, and a spirit. Instead we are body/mind/spirit creatures. They are intertwined.

It was God who created the world and called it good. What we need is a full realization of that fact to find a balance, living in accordance with the world God gave us and feeding our spirit and our body, our reason and our heart. This is what is needed to make us “real” and not artificial. To give us life and that abundantly (as Christ promised.) Much of Christianity in America seems to hate sex – I think it goes back to our puritan roots. They say they don’t but then they act like they do. So, I am definitely not talking about rejecting our animal nature entirely.

But to focus on “that wretched and dead kinship with the beasts” as Epictetus says, while it may bring brief moments of pleasure that pleasure will be paid for by hours, or perhaps even years, of strife and sadness. It is the lingering regret that pays for the fleeting moments of joy and feeling, but regret is a feeling too and it is a poor exchange. Further, whichever side we feed…whether it is our kinship with the Creator or whether it is the beast within us that will be the side that grows in us and will eventually obtain dominance.

In the words of another Roman proverb we have discussed “Do what you are doing.” Be wholly present in everything you do bringing together the body, mind, and soul as one united effort that is wholly present in every aspect of your life.

This is something the younger generations desperately need to learn. Their life is empty and lonely, I believe, because they are not even living it. Friends can be sitting together at a table and absolutely none of them are even there. They are all electronically off doing something else on their phones and completely missing the visceral interaction with other human beings that produces the oxytocin and other chemicals that keep us happy and ward off depression.

Virtually no one is actually “doing what they are doing” and wholly present in the moment with their body/mind/soul fully engaged. They are too busy doing something else, checking their cyber world and getting cheap hits of artificial “likes” or “comments” and missing the real thing which is at the table with friends. In trying to keep track of everything and not be “left out” they are being left out of their own experience of living.

As they walk from point A to point B they are not experiencing the world. They are missing the singing of birds, the smell of flowers and trees in spring, the fresh smells of grass or cleanliness of a summer rain, they miss the rustle of leaves in the fall and the crisp cold air of winter and the crunch of snow under their feet. The are slaves to the notification chime and each time it rings, like Pavlov’s dogs (look it up on your phone,) they respond to the chime. They are not lords or their own life, neither is God, rather the media companies are.

I speak from experience about not living your own life. When I was a counterintelligence agent my mind was always on a case or the “fate of the free world” that hung in the balance. I went for years when I would be getting in my government car and I would look around and say, “Wow, the trees are full of leaves…I think I missed Spring.” Then suddenly the leaves were all about my feet and it was starting to sleet. After that, I turned back to heed what my Father had taught me long ago but I had set aside as “old fashioned” or as “wisdom for a happier day” which was to “listen to the trees – their talking to you if you listen. Cottonwoods talk to us more than any other tree. You can hear them in the rustling of the leaves in a breeze.” I finally, after missing years of my life, realized that it was as relevant for me today as it was for him decades ago…just as it was relevant for St Paul and Epictetus in the first years of the Roman Empire and as it was for every other human who has ever lived.

In the Proverbs it says that the female personification of Wisdom (the Holy Spirit) danced with God for joy at the moment of creation for God and with God. It is this sense of the Divine that takes joy in the act of living life and doesn’t let life fall by the wayside as we look dreamily toward heaven, the next life, or tweeking our profile picture. We all need to find our joy in the here and now and we need to dance a little ourselves with our friends.

As one theologian said, every moment we are either choosing “God” or “not God” and moving closer to our Divine nature or farther from it. I urge you to heed Epictetus and feed the Divine nature within you and remind yourself of that nature when you need to strengthen your confidence and resolve. I used to preach, and I often said to my congregation, “Children of God, remember who you are!”

So, while I agree with Epictetus, we all need to realize that we are the children of the Living God and start acting like it. Choose to live out of our higher nature and remember that we were made “stewards” of this world which we are a part of. A steward protected and cared for the estates of his Lord while the lord was doing other things. Somehow, our English Bibles have translated this idea of “stewards of Creation” as us having “dominion.” A steward does have such authority, but a steward is subject to answering to his or her Lord and will not be absolved for responsibility for his or her Lord’s creation. We need to accept our identity as children of the Living God, children of the Emperor of the Universe, that is truly something. But also we must accept our roles as caretakers of all that is natural and that we are a part of this world and that when it was created, with all its sex, emotion, desires, and reason God said that it was “good.” That too, is truly something.

“Do you not know that your body is the temple of the holy spirit and that God’s spirit dwells in you?” – Saint Paul.

Realize that you are a child of the living God while simultaneously you are part of Creation created to be stewards of that creation, linking the Divine and the material in the dance that we call life. You are supposed to live it and be wholly present in your life, and (as God said,) be fruitful and multiply. Live your life to the full, find someone to love and share your lives with each other, marry, raise the next generation and delight in watching your children grow, and learn to be wholly present for them as well. Then, eventually let yourself slow down as they replace you and get their own chance to lay on the grass and look up at the clouds, or to ride their bike as fast as they can, or to walk hand in hand with their mom and dad, and later with their lover and have a chance to live THEIR life and overcome THEIR challenges and make a mark on their world.

“I came that you might have life, and that abundantly.” That was Jesus mission but it seems many of us have missed that.

That is the meaning of life. It was right before us all the time. The meaning of life is to simply live it. Remember that you are a child of the Living God, created as one with nature, and you are to live life to the full.

That is the secret of life…to live it and remember that you are somebody. A child of the Creator and we are all family. Called to live our life as those who went before us. Live and grow, find a mate, have and raise your children and let your grandchildren be your joy in your declining years as you watch the next generation live and grow.

Saint Paul calls for us to be transformed by the renewal of our minds as we learn new ways to live and think of God, the world, and each other.

NOTE: Pantheism and Panentheism

Pantheism can speak of many gods or it can include an idea that everything has a divine spirit or is a god it its own right. Panentheism, in contrast, does not mean that everyone is God, but that God is immanent in everyone and everything. Immanent simply means that God is permanently pervading and sustaining the universe by Its presence through the Holy Spirit, or the Shekinah in Hebrew. It is similar to the idea of the Force in Star Wars which Obi-Wan Kenobi explained surrounds us, penetrates us, and guides us. Many churches today emphasize the transcendence of God while neglecting His presence and day to day interaction with His creation. Ancient Hebrew mystics taught that all of the universe existed in the mind of God and if God would ever stop thinking of us we would blink out of existence. I find the similarity between this ancient belief that we exist in the mind of God and the modern idea that we live in the “mind” of a computer matrix to be uncannily similar.

Panentheism was embraced in the concept of the Force in Star Wars and was developed by George Lucas in talks long into the night with his friend Joseph Campbell, a philosopher and expert in religions and cultures of the Earth.

Original version was posted on SabersEdge.Online with some differences.

Who Are the Gods?

January 18, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I have often said that English was a terribly unclear language to translate the Bible into. Now English is not bad at everything but it seems to have some unique weaknesses in the fields of theology and philosophy where I think Greek, German, and Latin manage better. I say this because of all the poor translations that I have found in the Bible in the translations from the original Greek and Hebrew.

As yet another example I offer the word “love” which is so often used by the writers of the New Testament who wrote in Greek. In Greek there are 8 different words for love and each of those words is simply translated as “love” in English. There is eros – sexual love; philia – brotherly love (as in Philadelphia); agape – unconditional/sacrificial love; storge – familial love; mania – obsessive love; pragma – love through obligation or duty – such as love of country; philautia – is self-love; and there is ludus (ok, this is Latin/Roman but some translations are translated from the old Latin texts instead of the Greek or Hebrew,) – ludus speaks of playful or non-commital love and can include courtship and flirting. Rarely, do pastors and parishioners seem to bother with a full explanation of what the original passage meant (see more here: 8 Greek Words For Different Types Of Love | Dictionary.com ). In addition, koinonia which is a state of fellowship, community, or partnership can also be spoken of as love.

Also, there is shalom, shalom is simply translated as “peace” in English from the Hebrew. However, shalom actually means a state where the entire earth is in a state of mutually supportive and fulfilling relationships – this includes our relationship to the environment, each other, our animals, the animals of the wild, relationships between nations, businesses, and anything else that you can imagine under creation. Cornelius Plantinga brings this out very well in his excellent book Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be; A Breviary of Sin,. Yet, in your Bible shalom is translated as “peace.” Shaqat, which means to be quiet or undisturbed. In some bibles this is describes as peace or peaceful. For other translations of shalom in the bible see: The True Meaning of Shalom // Defining Shalom — FIRM Israel

I have already spoken of the frivolities of translation that go with “diakonos” depending on whether someone is a man or a woman [for more on this see: What is a Good Bible? – ofNaturesGod.com ] and the mistranslation of the word for murder ratsahk/mut as “kill” in most versions of the ten commandments. For further discussion on the ten commandments you can see: Why is “You shall not murder” in the Ten Commandments? | GotQuestions.org and You Can Kill, But Not Murder: The Case for the Ten Commandments – The Dennis Prager Show

This did not include harag – which can also be translated as kill but means to slaughter, murder, or to slaughter the enemy after the battle.

Let’s talk about the plural Elohim. Many ministers will buy off this word as saying it along with the statement “Let’s make man in our image.” is simply referring to God as the Trinity. Others will just say it is the angels (from the Greek Angelos which means “messenger” and is used for nearly all of the different servants of God in heaven that are often mentioned by name or species in the Bible.) Yet Elohim really is more accurately the court of the gods. El means “god” and “him” refers to a race or a people. Elohim represents the entire heavenly court including the various children of God who were the gods of the nations of the Earth (such as the Prince of Persia.) You will remember the Ten Commandments says “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Repeatedly the Bible says that God is the God of gods whom they all have to answer to and that he is God Most High. All of these are unnecessary distinctions if there are no other real gods.

I always find it fascinating when people say they believe in the Bible exactly as written make all kinds of exceptions for things that don’t fit their theology or lack of belief in ghosts or spirits, or their belief in other gods, or lack of belief in demonic possession or magic all of which are taken seriously in the Bible.

In the book of Job, it mentions the divine court at the beginning where these heavenly beings are all assembled, and the Satan comes before God to accuse Job. The Bible also mentions some of these gods mated with the “daughters of men” and begat the Nephilim in the Bible and god was not pleased.

This is all a very complex concept and I can see why most pastors and teachers take the easy way out because many parishioners ask because they want comfort and reassurance not knowledge.

When I had rejected God (long story that but it was after I had been a counterintelligence agent and seen some dark things.) I studied the religions of the world, analyzing them as an investigator or intelligence agent to see if I could find any truth in them. (You would rightly find it significant that after I did this study I became a pastor of the United Methodist Church – before I decided they had turned from the Biblical message and were indulging in heresy.)

In the Greek and Roman pagan religion we have hints of a supreme being the gods must obey. For just one example Jupiter/Zeus has his lightning bolts. He can strike where he will with the first, to do more he needs the concensus of the major gods, to launch the final lightning bolt he needs the agreement of some force greater than the gods of Olympus. This force is unexplained and many assume it is the fates but the fates are named and this force is not. Like the example I will offer next you have to dig pretty deep into Greek texts to find this out but it is there.

In Norse mythology there is a force that goes beyond simple destiny that the Gods are subject to. It is a deep and mysterious force that was there when the gods were born and will be there after they die in Ragnarok to preside over the rise of the new gods. In this aspect, the tree Yggdrasil which shelters the new gods during ragnarok and connects all the universe together bears, in some texts, an interesting similarity to the Holy Spirit. The Well of Wisdom is at the base of Yggdrasil just as Wisdom (which was there at the beginning of the world with God) is a trait of the Holy Spirit. This force too, is not clearly defined (although Yggdrasil is more clearly defined.)

Let’s look at a good teaching that explains this further. I cannot give you an embedded video because Youtube has it as age restricted. Apparently, children cannot understand it. Personally, I think children understand so much that their parents would be uncomfortable if they knew. Anyway, here are two links to the same video: The Unseen Realm (youtube.com)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV2CUWcKMa8

Another interesting post on this is from a different perspective where Metatron examines the words around the name of God from a literary standpoint – Metatron is a highly competent scholar on ancient studies and several languages from a secular standpoint: The Truth About The Biblically Accurate Name of God (youtube.com)

Don’t Feed The Trolls – A Fool And His Folly

January 7, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Have you ever encountered a fool who was always talking but had no knowledge of the issue(s) they were talking about? If you have used social media I know that you have. If you have ever been to a cocktail party or a kegger, or listened to an “ex-pert” on mainstream news I imagine you have as well.

Maybe you have encountered such a fool who dismissed every argument you had because they didn’t understand, or maybe didn’t even care about data. Maybe they only cared that they are right, or just wanted the attention from talking/posting. Have you ever driven yourself nuts trying to deal with such a person?

There is a reason these people are commonly called trolls (in the old days in social circles they were called cads, or fools, or idiots, or worse. Troll is a good name because they stink, they’re rude, ignorant, bitchy, aggressive, impossible to talk to rationally, slimy, unedumicated, and they ruin any nice or beautiful thing they can, and they even seem to regenerate if you try to “kill” them. If you ban them they reappear under a different login.

In fact, many fools (trolls if you prefer,) can actually get stronger and more active if you try to engage them at all.

They are also living embodiments of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. If you don’t know the effect it was from a study by Dunning and Kruger that found the less intelligent a person was the smarter they believed themselves to be. Further, the less someone knew about a topic the more they thought they understood it. In short it essentially showed that the less you know the more you believe that you really do understand the topic. This is because the more you know about a topic the more variables you are aware of and you become aware of the vast body of knowledge that exists on the subject. If you only know a little about the topic you may feel you have a good grasp on it. A person aware of that field of knowledge essentially knows that they do not know while someone who is ignorant of the scholarship doesn’t and may well feel they have a good grasp of the topic.

Further, the smarter a person was the more they reflected upon themselves and second guessed their answers. In the tests they were fully aware of which topics they understood and which ones they knew little about and were nervous about the topics they were tested on that weren’t in their area.

The test showed that the smarter someone was the less smart they rated themselves (because they knew they had a lot to learn,) while if someone was less intelligent they thought they knew all they needed to know on the topic. Such people had a simple understanding and provided simple answers and they were confident they did well on the tests (even when the bombed.) Essentially, any fool could tell you!

As a political science professor Col. Phil Dyer once said in class, “I wish I could have taught this class in when I was a high school student. I knew everything then.”

Apparently, this is not a new phenomena. Thousands of years ago the Jews, Romans, Egyptians and Greeks all knew of these foolish trolls and their Wisdom Literature addressed it. I could write pages of proverbs on this topic and the just the Book of Proverbs in the Bible has dozens of verses about fools. Egyptian wisdom literature, Viking literature, and even Chinese and African literature and proverbs are very similar to the Hebrew.

As a reminder, Wisdom Literature is like early sociology and psychology (although it was less subject to fads and kooky theories.) To be a proverb a behavior had to be proven as relevant to human nature over generations. Sages studied human behavior and noticed tendencies in human nature and they then wrote proverbs to help people navigate through life with a minimum of pain and disappointment. Those who did not learn from such collected Wisdom were called fools because they insisted on living through all of the pain themselves rather than learning from others so that they could avoid pain and disappointment in their own life.

Its what my dad used to call the “School of Hard Knocks.” The “School of Hard Knocks” is that school of lived life where life beats you up and spits you out all demoralized and bruised. He would say, “You can either learn from the wisdom of others or you can learn from the School of Hard Knocks, son. Learning from the lessons of life experienced by others is less painful for you – both physically and emotionally.”

“But things have changed so much!” you might say. True, but people have not. We process our thoughts and emotions bio-chemically and we just don’t evolve that fast. We are genetically the same people as those who built the Roman Empire. In fact, humanity has not substantially changed in over 400,000 years! While our society changes our ability to process events through thought and emotions have not because they are primarily physiologically processed in our bodies. So human reaction to stimuli is often imbedded in us from millennia of experience and through the constant struggle for survival and passing our genes on to future generations.

Every night I would see my father sitting in his chair and reading the Bible for a while before he went to bed and when we were walking in the woods, around the block, fishing, or just sitting on the porch he would talk to me about things or I would ask him about things. Often he talk and explain things and then he would punctuate his point by sharing a Bible verse that summed everything up that he had logged into his memory.

So, what did these ancient sages say about these fools on social media? OK, for them they were just fools in the tavern, in the Senate, or at the social gathering or theater.

“Do not answer a fool according to his folly, Lest you also be like him.” – Proverbs 26:4

I have noticed that answering these trolls online often simply encourages them, sometimes I watch some well meaning person pour out their heart and their best efforts to the troll – perhaps thinking they just don’t know any better – and don’t realize that fools and trolls are only there to cause trouble and get attention. Sometimes, these people get so discouraged they drop off the list because trolls can be so emotionally exhausting. Thus the warning, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly,” because conversing with a fool is a waste of time and energy that you could best spend elsewhere.

Who knows? Maybe they are attention starved because no one in their right mind would want to be with them in real life. I know that in some cases bullies and real life trolls gravitate to churches because people there are often too nice to tell them no. These are people who thought their mothers advice, “if you an’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all” actually came from the Bible. It absolutely didn’t. The Bible is about truth and tells Christians to “Speak the truth in love.” The Bible hates lies and deception and so does God, according to it.

Unfortunately, some of the best discussion groups I have encountered online were killed by trolls and administrators who were too nice, weak willed, or wishy washy with their principles and allowed the trolls to run amuck and destroy what was a good site with world-ending destruction. One by one people would leave because the troll was dominating the list and no one wanted to talk anymore just to be attacked by the troll. I’ve even seen lists break in two because people want to leave the troll behind and the troll shows up on the new list! Sometimes under a false name! If you really want to understand these people you need to read M.Scott Peck’s book The People of the Lie. (M.Scott Peck is a professional psychologist but the book is very readable.)

If you ignore fools many of them will go away to somewhere that they can get the emotional “hit” of attention. However, others get their perverse ‘joy” from wrecking things, crushing real joy, and they delight in watching the list die even if no one even talks to them directly.

The proverbs of the ancient sages also recognize that fools cling to their own ignorance. They simply don’t want to learn! Now change may be hard but another saying my Dad had “It is better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” However, true to the Dunning-Kruger Effect the fool seems to have no idea that he or she is revealing themself to be either an idiot, a jerk, or both…or they don’t care.

Verse 4 of this chapter of proverbs recognizes that fools refuse to learn and tells you not to waste you time talking to them. It’s like the saying about “Don’t wrestle with pigs. They drag you through the mud and the pig enjoys it.” The foolish troll loves rolling in the mud and causing strife. This is why trolls are on the side of chaos and evil in games.

I used to have the liberal bias that evil, prejudice, and stupidity were due to a lack of education. But some refuse to learn and even when educated will remain a fool. This may be why the Bible repeatedly combines wisdom and understanding and says that learning is not enough. You have to have understanding. My sister was a college professor and so I learned early that some PhD’s were pretty dumb about life and how things really work. Education does NOT equal wisdom.

We saw what turning everything over to a “subject matter expert” did to the economy and psychological distress during Covid. They may have known something about virology but the destroyed the economy, small businesses throughout the country, and the psychological stability and development of millions doing it. We seem to have followed an “educated fool” on that one. OF course Fauci is the same doctor who in the 70s said everyone was going to get AIDS from toilet seats and fast foods. He was wrong on that too. But some other fool promoted him so he could do more damage.

I once had a relative by marriage once brag that she had never read a book after leaving high school! Why would anyone brag about that? Its like saying “I have chosen the path of ignorance ever since they could no longer make me learn.” As you all know I read 2-5 books a month (unless I read novels then I read 2-10 a week. I do read novels a couple times a year but there is so much out there to learn I just don’t have the time.) I thank my sister and parents for that who always promoted life-long learning.

They encouraged me to always carry a book with me (which is even easier electronically.) I encourage you all to learn and embrace the concept of life-long learning. Always have a book with you so if you are waiting in a line you can read and learn. Keep your mind busy because if you don’t use it you lose it and if you have seen the elderly in a nursing home you have a clear picture of what can happen if you don’t keep your mind and body sharp through using them. (Yes, I know some have other complications.)

So, don’t ruin your own enjoyment and energy by letting trolls and fools suck the life out of you. Even if they are related to you. You won’t get any enjoyment out of it and if you fight with them you are just making them happy because they love the mud and the filth.

So, now lets look at verse 5:

Answer a fool according to his folly, Lest he be wise in his own eyes. -Proverbs 26:5

Uh-oh! Well, that’s confusing. Yes, the Bible in English frequently is. It was a horrible language to translate it into and worse some people translated it to fit their own prejudices and dogma. (So I also encourage you to learn Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.) Philosophy seems to be so much better in German, Latin, or Greek, in my opinion. English has become a “mushy” language and the left’s attempts to change the meaning of words is making it even harder to understand. Get an old dictionary from 1965 or earlier and use it. Read ten definitions a week open it randomly and picking out words you don’t know for 2 a day at the start of each business day. Write the definitions in a journal or on you calendar if you can and you will remember better.

OK. What gives? Verse 5 cancels out verse four! Greaco-Roman culture likes to pin things down into concrete rules good for all times and places. But in the Bible it recognized that life is more complex and flexible that that. Righteousness in the Bible is not about following all the rules but knowing the right time and right place to place what rule in. In some cases an act would be reprehensible and in another it is laudatory. Murder is bad, that’s why its condemned in the ten commandments but killing is not necessarily bad. Killing a murderer could save your family’s lives. Killing the enemy saves your city. The Bible says there is a time to kill and a time to heal. You need to understand life and know what time it is and what act is appropriate. So the ancient Hebrews wouldn’t have the problem with this that we do. They would have just shrugged and said “DOTS! Depends on the situation.” (OK they probably wouldn’t have said that unless they were also in the US Army.)

Sometimes, a person will use a phrase that is common propaganda but utterly wrong. In that case I respond to them explaining my view and context. There is always the chance they are open to learning and are only repeating what they are told or that, conversely, I may learn something. I have made several friends that way! If a person is open to learning you may make a new friend.

However, real trolls and fools have no desire to learn they simply want to make waves or be right! Even if they are wrong! In that case it does no good to that person to answer them according to their folly. They won’t learn. If the person is just ignorant and they don’t know they will learn. However, there are times when the troll may say something that is a popular take on things and I answer because I want others on the list to know the statement was wrong. I am not engaging the troll I am putting out knowledge to the silent lurkers who never speak.

I have found explaining once gives me the option of making a friend or educating someone on a topic. If they show they are unwilling to learn the response demonstrates to anyone watching that the fool is not correct. I have always been concerned that fools could lead people astray. If no one is willing to speak the truth then how can others learn.

So, I tend to respond once to see if it is just someone who doesn’t know or if I am dealing with a fool. Or, if it makes sense I may respond a couple times until I discover I am talking to a fool or other fanatic and then I stop and I also tell them why I am stopping. They aren’t willing to learn, they are not discussing with an honest desire for knowledge or they are fanatics.

So, as you go through life, whether at a family dinner, business social, or on social media, don’t answer a fool according to their folly unless you think it is a learning opportunity for others.

This is something that your father should have taught you but I have noticed that a lot of people didn’t have a father like mine on hand. Thank you father.

Do not answer a fool according to his folly, Lest you also be like him.

Answer a fool according to his folly, Lest he be wise in his own eyes.

Proverbs 26:4-5

WHAT IS YOUR WORLDVIEW? Part 1

December 17, 2023 / / 0 Comments

What is a worldview? Surveys of Americans have shown that as many as 80% of Americans do not have a coherent worldview that they make decisions from. They make their decisions based “on the moment.” For this reason, they can be manipulated by algorithms and speakers quite easily as their beliefs are buffeted this way and that by a barrage of images and posts. A coherent worldview can help keep you on course in your life, or to find a course if you had none before. A theologian once said every moment of every day with everything we do or say we either choose God or we choose Not-God. I think we do ourselves a dis-service when we try to put our spirituality and God in a box that we only look at when we participate in ritual, prayer, or worship. This post by Sister Elizabeth addresses that issue. This is Rivan Elan (or Pastor Daniel depending on where you first came across me,) and I am pleased to bring you this post by Sister Elizabeth addresses this issue. [Please be aware there is an administrative note at the end about this site and issues we’ve had.]

Now I give you Sister Elizabeth:

Good day, gentle folks. Are you enjoying the slow down of this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere? Or are you enjoying the sunshine of summer in the Southern Hemisphere?


I have been thinking about the separation of church and state recently. I agree and disagree with this. I agree that countries don’t need a state church, but individuals should let their beliefs regarding God/the Divine/the Universe influence their choices on a daily basis. Yes, even in the political ring.


Before some of you get up in arms about my last statement, let me ask you to think about this. We have laws, correct? Laws try to direct the community in a certain direction that best benefits the community, in some peoples’ interest. Not everyone agrees with this direction, but usually most of us will follow it. Letting your religious beliefs influence your decisions is similar. Not everyone will agree you.


Having a coherent worldview where your theology (thoughts about God/the Divine/the Universe), your philosophy, and your actions work together is a very beneficial thing. Why? Well, let me give you an example from my personal experience. When I was in my 20s, I was passionately opposed to abortion except in necessary cases. I would become emotional during discussions of this topic and was not able to contribute much information. This was because I FELT that abortion was wrong, but had no other reasoning behind my position.


Now that I am older and have done more research and learned more about the topic, I am at peace with my opposition to abortion. I have found doctors who believe life begins at conception. A TV personality and their partner were using a surrogate to have a baby. They were allowed to watch the insemination of the egg. Once that was completed, the doctor asked them what they wanted to know about their baby. The doctor told them he could tell them the baby’s gender, eye color, hair color, etc. because the baby’s DNA was set at the moment of conception. Science is truly amazing when done right.


This ability to determine the child’s traits within minutes after conception reminds me of one of my favorite verses in ancient scriptures:

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.


I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful, I know that full well.


My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.


Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.

The Book of Psalms, Chapter 139, Verses 13-16

The journey to a coherent worldview is not an overnight one. Rather, it is one that continues throughout your life. Mine started as a child. When I would wake up in the night with sleep paralysis at age 4 or so, I would turn to Jesus. I just knew I could trust Jesus to help me move again. Jesus continues to teach me even today.

Throughout the rest of my childhood, I had many people that helped shape my worldview including my grandparents, aunts, cousins, teachers, pastors, and friends. Upon reaching college, my studies in physics and astronomy were essential to rounding out my worldview. After receiving my bachelor’s degree, I entered a United Methodist seminary for a master’s degree. This also expanded my worldview, sometimes in ways I really shouldn’t have gone!

I have continued to learn since my college days. Through reading, current events, and discussions with my husband and friends, I have learned to put what I believe into words. I have found that saying things out loud helps me to hear where I have inconsistencies. My husband often reads his posts to me to help him express his thoughts more clearly as he forms his work. In the Book of Proverbs there is a verse that says “as iron sharpens iron so does one wit sharpen another.” So, through discussion my husband and I grow together and by discussing with friends and others we continue to grow as well.

The writing of my final paper called a Credo (Latin for I believe), really helped to solidify my views on the Divine, but not necessarily in ways the seminary wanted. By sitting down and writing it I formed a coherent world view that has served me well. Now when I have experiences or I am faced with questions, I can address them rationally and purposefully. My Credo continues to crystallize each year as I have new experiences and I learn more.

But the biggest factor in pulling together my worldview is taking time, alone and in the quiet, to think about all you know and believe. During these times of silence, I meditate and journal my thoughts. I take walks and observe nature. Sometimes I listen to music and color. (Yes, I love my coloring books; bringing color to a plain page!) Once a week I have adoration where I go sit in the church for an hour to pray and be with God. Church is one of the places that I feel closest to the Divine and sometimes I like to just be there without the busy-ness of worship.

All this Worldview stuff is not as scary as it sounds. You can simply take a blank piece of paper and just start writing. No topic is needed. One time I was angry and I just started writing about my anger. When I read over what I wrote, I found out that I was very angry with my Mom, which was not what I expected to find. Reading over what you write can help you look for patterns in your writing as well as words or phrases that stand out to you. Do you find yourself writing about the same person over and over again? Maybe you should sit with that situation for a bit to see if you can learn more. You can even keep such writings in a book to form a journal that you can review when you want to remember where you’ve been and who you are. That can help you decide where you are going.

The foundation of my worldview came from writing my Credo in seminary. It now carries throughout my worldview. Everything I do and the decisions I make stem from this one theme. Even what I buy now is formed within this theme giving everything in my life place and purpose. Later in Worldview Part Two, I will discuss this theme and how it became important to everything I do. I mentioned it briefly earlier in this discussion.

Can you figure out what it might be?

Since this is a discussion, what are your thoughts on having a coherent worldview? How might you expand or strengthen your own beliefs? What do you do to seek the Divine and to remember who you are? Please feel free to discuss this in the comments below and remember Theology just means thinking about God. Until next time, gentle folks.

~ Sister Elizabeth

[We have been offline for some time and been locked out of the site for a variety of reasons. We continue to struggle financially as our sites are not monetized and do not pay for themselves. We were locked out of our sites due to an inability to pay as I was unable to work due to my disability acting up. When we came back the site had been disconnected from our domain name and no one knows why. I do know that our sites are constantly under cyber attack and we are told that it is by an unusually high number of attacks. It may have been due to some attack that the site became disconnected. However, we were able to get everything back up and we are hoping that we can get support for the site so we can get some site security. Recently, we obtained our SSL certificate to ensure readers that the site itself is safe and malware free so that is one less worry for all of us. Thank you for being patient and staying with us through these difficulties. – Rivan Elan / Pastor Daniel

What is a Good Bible?

July 29, 2023 / / 1 Comment

Grace and Peace to you. May the Living Force, the Ground of All Being, and the Divine Spirit that guides and nurtures all life be with you and guide you into all truth.

In keeping with that wish everyone should have a good Bible. The Bible is the most accessible tool we have to access the ancient scriptures and the Wisdom of the Divine and I keep one by my chair and take one with me wherever I go (if I will be gone for more than a day).

That may surprise many because I often rail against the translations of the Bible that we have in English. I think English is a poor language to translate the Bible into. When it comes to philosophy and theology English is a very imprecise language and the way some political parties manipulate and play with the meaning of words it is making the language even worse. However, the Bible is the most accessible document we have for ancient Wisdom and the most diverse collection of ancient scripture that we can easily access today. I would like you to have the best chance of getting an accurate translation that is not colored by human prejudice.

I firmly believe in the passage: “Every word of the LORD proves true. He is a shield for those who take refuge in Him.” However, because I firmly believe this I want to ensure I know what the Divine One actually said and that I am not getting a poor or “political” translation that has more of some churches DOGMA in it than it does the word of truth from ancient scripture. What did the original actually say and do we actually understand it today?

Too often, what we think it says is colored by what we already believe before we start reading. This is why I go back to see what the passages originally said in the oldest version of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic that we can find. I consider it so important I dig for the buried truths beneath the surface words and invite you to go with me on these digs.

I will have many more posts in the future than I have had in the past as I will begin concentrating more time here.

There are two passages I look for to see how they are translated so that I can avoid church politics and dogma. You see, even John Wesley’s Methodism (which originally employed women preachers – if Wesley and his brother determined that they were “called to preach” by a Divine Call) became a denomination that, in the 1960s, told my sister “Women can’t be preachers.” Like so many religions this isn’t, in my mind, Biblical because the Bible says that “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male or female, slave or free but all are one in Christ Jesus.”

Happily, myself, my wife, and my sister, all became pastors and ministered together in the same district. It was a wonderful experience.

If any “Christian” tells you that race, gender, or social status is important to the Divine they are denying the verse I just quoted because the Bible says that NONE of those things are important to the Eternal One. They may be important in our relationships with one another but they are not important for our union and relationship with the Divine Source.

Unfortunately, they are very important to some churches. I even had a friend who showed me the list of beliefs that her denomination put out and it listed the verse I just quoted near the top of their beliefs. She had circled that one and then circled one farther down that said, “We don’t believe that women can preach or be leaders in the church.” This was especially significant because I thought that she was called to preach by the Holy Spirit and teach but her denomination and family were all opposed to women’s leadership in that way and, if she was called, she never answered because of the social stigma in her denomination and family was too strong.

Paul is often said to have been a misogynist because of the things he wrote to the church at Ephesus. However, we have no clue what questions he was responding to when he wrote what he wrote to Ephesus.

We do know that Ephesus was the home to one of the Ancient Wonders of the World – the Temple of Artemis. More than any other ancient city the priestesses and women of the Temple of Artemis had influence there. People often quote him saying “Women should be silent in church.” But he ONLY wrote this in answer to an unknown question at the church of Ephesus where the Temple of Artemis dominated society.

I love the Pauline letters and much of my theology is drawn from them and the Hebrew Bible. However, my Bible instructor highlighted the problem we have drawing conclusions from Paul’s letters when he said, “We have to remember when we are reading these letters that we are reading someone else’s mail. On top of that, we only have Paul’s answers and we don’t have the questions nor do we know the situation that he is responding to. For that reason, we have to compare and contrast the different letters to see what Paul was actually saying.”

When it comes to women we know that Paul entrusted his most important letter, the Letter to the Romans, to Phoebe a minister at the Church of Cenchreae, to carry for him. As the letter to the Romans is the most complete explanation of Paul’s theology it is considered to be his most important letter and it is definitely his longest. It had to be very important to him he put a lot of time and effort into it. He could have entrusted it to anyone but he sent it with a woman. You can find this in Chapter 16, verses 1 and 2.

I quote from the NRSV (a book I consider one of the better translations for Bible study, however not a very good one if you are looking for comfort – more on this later.)

16: 1-2 “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, so that you may welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a benefactor of many and of myself as well.”

OK, we know that Phoebe was a powerful woman. She is described as a deacon and a patroness of the church. In those days Christians had no churches and they had been kicked out of the Jewish Synagogues so they couldn’t worship there either. Early Christians gathered together in the houses of believers. The largest churches met in the houses of the wealthy and they were under their protection. We get a pretty good clue that Phoebe was one of them because she is a “benefactor of many” and the Greek words used pretty clearly identify her as a patron.

Now in many Christian sects (there are well over 350 Christian denominations and sects and many of them will fight tooth and nail over varying beliefs – so when someone says “Christians believe…” they are gas-lighting you. They are either telling you what “they” believe and are pretending that all “real” Christians believe the same or they are hating on Christians and have created this phony boogeyman in their mind. I once spent almost an hour arguing with someone who told me “Christians believe…” and proceeded to tell me things that I have NEVER met ANY Christian of ANY denomination who believed the things this truly ignorant person thought Christians believed. I am a minister. My Master’s Degree is in Religion. I think I have a pretty good understanding of religions and what Christians believe but, like all trolls, he was “right” and not open to learning anything.

Beware of non-Christians who tell you what Christians believe. I have seen way too much gas-lighting on this topic in New Age and Wiccan books as well. Some of these books are well written but they have such a misconception about Christianity that they confuse the worst actions of those who “claimed” in History to be “Christians” and seem to know nothing of what Christ actually said or taught. These people MAY have known a grandma, an aunt, or someone in their life who believed what they say “Christians believe…” but I have an Encyclopedia of Christian Worship and Religion that has studies of hundreds of denominations, how they worship, and what they believe, and far too often I cannot find these supposed “Christian beliefs” in any of them.

Further, anyone who says Christians believe and says anything other than “Christians believe in Christ” is gas-lighting you because that is literally the only thing that all Christian denominations and Messianic Jews agree on. They don’t even all believe that the Christ they worship was a real person (some believe in a Cosmic Christ concept that is present in many religions,) and they definitely don’t all believe that he rose from the dead. Yet Paul, who knew the original disciples said, “If Christ did not rise in body than our preaching is empty and our hope is vain.” So, it seems pretty clear to me that they were being literal in what they claimed because that is a pretty strong statement.

But back to Phoebe. She is a deacon of the church of Cenchrae. A deacon is a minister who is also a servant. Christian ministers are supposed to be “servant-leaders” because they follow a Christ who knelt down and washed the feet of his disciples. This was an act that servants tended to do because it was a dirty job in a world where everyone wore sandals everywhere and didn’t bathe every day. Christ did it as an act of love and to demonstrate to his disciples what leadership really meant. It meant caring for those you lead.

Many churches have the belief that women need to take a back seat. Perhaps there is something to that because nuerological studies tell us that when women talk their body releases ten times as much dopamine as a man’s does. So if you ever got the idea that women like to hear themselves talk this is literally true. I don’t say this to put women down it is just a biological and nuerological fact. It is probably a necessary fact because women provide primary care for young children. They have to do this because they have the breasts to nourish the child. Children grow and develop faster, like plants, if they are spoken to in a loving manner so it makes total sense that they would have evolved mechanisms to encourage them to talk to their children. God would be stupid if he didn’t make it that way. We will never know if it is because of this tendency to talk more, or if it was out of hand in Ephesus, that Paul said “women should be silent in church.”

However we do know for a fact that he entrusted his most important letter to Phoebe a deacon of the church at Cenchrae.

Now here is why I look at this verse.

Some translations of the Bible were written by denominations that believe that women cannot be leaders, even if God calls them to be so, and so whenever women are mentioned as Deacons in Greek they translate women as “servants” and men as “ministers.” Christian Deacons are servant ministers but this betrays their own prejudices and NOT the prejudices of God when they assume that Deacon means “servant” if it is applied to a woman, and “minister” if it is applied to a man. That is an example of human prejudice affecting the translation and not Biblical truth.

I have talked to persons who say things defending their denominations beliefs by saying that “God wouldn’t do that” (such as make women a leader.) I hate it when people say that because right away you know that they think they can determine what God will do or won’t do. In my opinion their God is too small. The Divine One is so much greater and transcendent than us we will never fully understand its ways and we need to be more humble in our searching of scriptures.

So if a Bible calls Phoebe a servant I generally don’t buy it. If they call her a minister I do buy it. This tells me if the translator was reading into their translation their own prejudices and beliefs about women and I don’t want to read their prejudices I want to read the truth; or as close as I can get to it.

A second place I look is verse 16:7 (also in the book of Romans,) where Paul says:

“Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.”

In Greek Junia is written Iounia and is sometimes translated as Julia in some Bibles Origen, who lived 185 to 253 AD, was clear this was Junia the wife of Andronicus as were most ancient commentators and scholars. It wasn’t until the 12th Century AD that commentators began to insist that Junia was a Junias.

Some translations admit that Junia was female but change the translation. Even in Wikipedia, (and no real scholar actually uses Wikipedia as a source,) one passage says that she was “known to the apostles” not that she was one of the apostles. Better translations of the Greek are that she and her husband were “counted among the apostles” and you can even make a case that it should be translated that they were “outstanding among the apostles.”

Here is the ranking (if there is a ranking,) of Christians. Seekers who are looking for the truth. Believers who have found the truth. Followers who are living out the truth. Disciples who are dedicated to following Jesus wherever he leads them, even unto death, and Apostles.

Apostle is the highest praise that a Christian can get. Jesus told his apostles, I no longer call you disciples but friends because now it was up to them to take his teachings out in the world even as he had represented his father to them, now they were to do that for the world.

Junia, in this passage, is called an apostle. Some Bibles were translated from the Latin and when the Roman culture translated this passage they said, “That must be a mistake. Women can’t be apostles. It must be a Greek name and not actually the Roman name of Junia. They, therefore, translated it as Junias putting a Greek male ending on it and making the name male. However, subsequent studies have shown conclusively there is not and never was a Greek name of Junias. If your Bible calls Junia Junias it is doing so because it is pre-empting Paul’s statement that she was a female Apostle because the translation doesn’t believe that women can be leaders (no matter what some upstart who actually knew the disciples of Christ and wrote half of the New Testament might have written, or what the Bible actually says.)

In my mind changing the Bible to fit your prejudice is heinous and these are two easy verses that I check to try to avoid bad translations that are going to give me more of their religious DOGMA from their particular Christian denomination than they are going to give me the truth of scripture.

But we all need to make our own decisions and you need to make yours.

Oh, I almost forgot. I said that the NRSV is not a good translation to read when you are in crisis. That is because we want something sure when we need help not “ifs.”

In the NRSV they had a huge company of scholars argue over every verse before they wrote it down. I happen to know a man whose Father was involved in the process. Like the council of Nicaea where they decided what books were to be put in the Bible, they had a few yelling matches as people defended their positions. Eventually, they wrote a Bible in the NRSV that if it was vague in the Hebrew and Greek and people were not in agreement with what it said they left that vagueness in the English and provided a brief (sometimes all too brief,) explanation in a note. That is why I use the NRSV for Bible Study. I think it is the best English translation that I have read and most free of religious dogma from specific denominations because it had so many different representatives from the different Christian sects present to argue over the translation.

However, if you are up to your tush in alligators you don’t want to know that the instructions you have on how to drain the swamp are vague. You want something clear, concise, and comforting. So, I have other Bibles I read if my life is falling apart but I use the NRSV for study and Lectio Divina.

My family Bible that I kept for family Bible readings when my kids were little was the New International Version. It translated the above verses accurately but it was written so it was easier for kids to understand (and adults too.)

I have other Bibles. I often preach from the New King James, (or the NRSV, New International Version, St. Joseph’s Bible, or others). I have many. I take the translation that, in my study, seems to be the closest translation to the Greek or the Hebrew of the verse that I am preaching on. I have not found any Bible that seems to adhere all the way through. Anyone who knows other languages than English knows that some words just don’t translate very well.

For instance, there are many Greek words for “love” but we only have one. Whether the Bible is speaking of physical love, sibling love, spousal love, or whatever they are all translated into English with that one word.

If you really want to explore the truth of the Bible a handy tool is the multi-volume Bible Dictionary called the New Interpreters Bible. It is not cheap but there is a good chance that your Church pastor may have a set on his bookshelf. If he doesn’t then I would find yourself a new church because it may be that your pastor is taking everything at face value and is not digging for the truth in the scriptures.

Too me truth is too precious to leave to others or to trust to someone else’s opinion. I dig for it.

May the Grace of the Living Force and the Communion of the Holy Spirit be with you, now and forever.

Our Coming Task – To Recombine the Fragments of Divine Truth

July 9, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Our New Task [Note: When this was written I believed it would be the last post I would ever be able to make so it is a stream-of-consciousness presentation of everything I wanted to say in the coming year…OK, some of what I wanted to say. Also, I edited this on 30 August AUC 2776. I thought of deleting it because it was a mish mash but that seems disingenuous so I edited it. Originally it was a rushed job before I thought the site would be deleted. It needed work. – Rivan Elan]

I have not given this website the attention it deserves. I concentrated on political and social matters through SabersEdge.Online. However, I have come to realize the actual sickness in our society is from a stunted spirituality that is confused and lost. Increasingly I came to understand that by addressing social and political issues I was playing an endless game of whack-a-mole that I could never win.

The real problem is spirituality or a lack thereof. The hunger in humanity can only be satisfied by the Divine Presence that our society has lost. If you truly have an encounter with this presence you will know it. God gave the gift of discernment and I have seen people who were Buddhist, pagan, and also Hindu that all radiated the presence of the Divine…sometimes more than some of my parishioners. This does not change that I believe the Bible to be the best information source available to the Western World to discover the truths of the Divine. It is not God, it is religions and dogma I tend to have issues with. But whatever discipline you follow the Holy Spirit can lead you to all truth.

I do not have the money to continue this website. I need 200$ to renew my subscription by the 14th of July and it is apparent to me that I will not get it now. So this is my parting message and gift to you all.

[Note: Obviously, we were received what we needed and good triumphed ;-).]

Initially, everyone should bury themselves in their religious tradition and learn all they can. But this is not just mental. You must connect with the Divine Presence. Seek out the mystical traditions of your faith; for in these lie the true answers and experience of the Divine Presence. Saint Paul said to Christians 2,000 years ago “I feed you on milk because you are not yet ready for solid food.” Sadly, 2000 years later Christianity is still wallowing in the milk of infancy and any attempt to grow in God’s presence and experience has often been crushed by religious institutions and marginalized.

This is not surprising. Religion is a good that can be twisted to harm. Religion comes from the word Religio which means “to bind us back.” In other words, it begins as an attempt to reconnect us with the Source of All Life, the Ground of All Being, the One of Many Names.

Unfortunately, religions create institutions and institutions are about power. Power does not like people who reconnect with God because earthly institutions cannot control them – so they attack them as they have Jesus and innumerable spiritual leaders and saints of the past. God and the Divine Power and Presence are always a threat to Earthly Power. Yet it is the key to reconnecting with Nature and Nature’s God. We must do it.

Once you have immersed yourself in your religious tradition, if you reach the point where you find that it is the way to the truth and the light you may notice what I did. Religion is a block to that Truth.

When I studied Greek and Hebrew I became increasingly aware of limitations in translation in English versions of the Bible. Rather than translating true to the original they translated according to the dogma that they followed, thus obscuring part of the truth and the path to God. Sometimes, this is simply a matter that there is not always a one-to-one correlation with words. Words in one language can carry levels of meaning that do not exist in another.

At some point, you may, if you seek union with the Divine Source, reach beyond the limits of the religion you follow. This is because an infinite God may not be fully realized in any one religion. We can connect to It but we can never fully experience It. However, we are each called to experience the Divine as fully as we are able.

There is not a “doing it right” or “I am farther than you” situation here. We are each called to do what we can when we can. We each experience the Divine in our own way. The Bible says the way to God is straight and narrow and if we deviate to the left and the right we will miss it. This is true.

However, religions often mean by this that you must follow their own dogma and non-biblical (or partially biblical) injunctions and if you deviate outside of that you are apostate. They limit your growth and understanding of the Divine to what their understanding is. This is a pale imitation of God.

The truth is that every life giving, thriving faith, has a piece of the Divine puzzle. Not every religion is equally true. Not every religion is the same. That is not what I am saying. But there is a unity in multiplicity and a multiplicity in the Divine Unity.

Rather, every religion is incomplete. Some are more incomplete than others. All have the truth obscured by surface levels of teaching that too many never seek to move beyond. In truth, I think that the majority of people are fine at this level. Many are fine enjoying the waters near the shore and have no yearning to explore the depths of the ocean. This is where religions are. They are the waters near the shore that everyone has access to. But every religion also has mystical traditions that explore the depths that resonate far beyond and away from the safety of the shoreline.

If you begin to explore these depths you will find that the Hebrew, Sumerian, Vedas, Brahmins, Chinese, Egyptian, and other ancient traditions lead us to a Divine Core and to the extent that it is reflective of the Source, the Creative Power of the Universe, the All, it is a reflection of the Divine. Similar imagery rests in each: Yggdrasil – the World Ash Tree, the Tree of Life, the Djed column of Egypt, and so on. This core pillar of creation that binds everything together, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge in Eden. There are always masculine and feminine principles that are present and a vast, unknowable, mysterious mystery that is behind it all.

I created ofNaturesGod.com to explore these for those who were ready but was cautious because too often I had seen students fall off a “deep end” drown and turn away because they had gone too far too fast. They were not ready. Too often we read and think but we don’t take time to experience and make those experiences a part of us.

This will only be here for awhile. On the 14th, if I don’t get support from somewhere this will disappear and all the posts will be erased.

Perhaps the world was not ready, perhaps I was not ready to fulfil the potential of the site. Either way I encourage you to devote your understanding and your heart to connecting with Nature’s God. This is the Creator/Creatrix of All and I invite you to broaden your understanding and experience thereof.

The existing religions have existed for thousands of years (except for Islam which is barely a thousand.) I believe the next thousand years we will be called to bring together the disparate parts of these religions – the elements of truth that lie in each – and to set aside the errors that have grown in each and to experience a spiritual enlightenment that will be as transforming as the intellectual enlightenment of the 17th and 18th Centuries was transforming. As the faith of Ahkenaton tried to be transforming. I believe this is what God is calling us to do and for that reason, many spiritual leaders have been placed here with us today to bring people to this understanding.

This is what God called me to do but I too often let events in my life distract me. Every time I approached the point he called me to be at I let myself be brought down by divorce, career failure, conflict with the church, or conflict in personal relationships. I am now going to do what I can to reconnect with the Divine and see if I can return reach the place that I first approached in my teens or early twenties before I was derailed by a sexual relationship.

Please understand, sex is powerful and good, but misused it can hinder our spiritual growth and create pitfalls that mire us down in a level of reality that is difficult to escape. That is why so many religious adepts swear off sexual contact entirely. It is powerful. Ideally, it should be part of a reality that embraces both spiritual and physical life in the oneness of God but I have only very rarely found relationships where that actually happened.

Too often, our societies prejudices separate the spiritual from the physical and the mental from the spiritual and the mental from the physical. We must achieve the point where these artificial barriers are broken down and ESP, spiritual healing, mental learning, physical wisdom, and our relationship to creation is all part of a Divinely ordered oneness. These are things that God has made part of our nature. Military experiments indicated that everyone has some extra-sensory ability but (like running,) not everyone has the potential for being an Olympic athlete.

I encourage you to find your own path toward that oneness with the Divine.

Beware of distractions. Only the Divine Spirit and an active relationship with it can guide you. You also must test any spirit that you connect with to ensure it is the One. There is evil. Although American Christianity is deceptive about it.

The Hebrew Bible speaks in only one passage about “The Satan”. But all through the Hebrew Bible there are little “satans.” Satan in Hebrew means enemy or accuser.

Because several of the early church fathers, such as Augustine, were originally Manicheans, they brought their ideas of an all-powerful good god and an all powerful evil god into Christianity with them. These beliefs colored their writing and made Satan more powerful and independent than he truly is. God is the Source of All Life and evil has to parasitically feed off of life to survive.

Evil can only exist as a parasite to the life provided by God to His created beings and order. If they were cut off from the Source of Life they would cease to exist. We are connected to the Source of Life so they feed on this life through us. Their only connection is to suck this life and joy from us. These are spiritual enemies that abound and seek our destruction. But English translations emphasize a “devil” and not the myriad of enemies the Bible actually speaks of.

My contact with these creatures has convinced me that they feed off our life energy because they have none of their own. Having cut themselves off from the Source of All Life all they can do is draw the energy of life and love from our own existence to keep them from oblivion. God is the Source of All Life and Satan, as well as the many other satans that English Bibles also call Satan are our enemies. I have stood between them and my parishioners more than once to help people resist their influence.

Here is a link to one of my videos. I may try to proceed with video and see if that works.

I was hoping to bring others to this understanding and thought this might be the venue to begin doing that. But God has not blessed my efforts and I do not have the financial support to continue. [Obviously he did before it vanished]. However, that does not mean that you should abandon the path. I encourage you to read Wisdom of the Mystic Masters by Mr. Weed or is it Reed? You can find it online.

There is one warning though. In it he has a meditation that activates the heart, throat, third eye, and crown chakras. He says that he won’t use the others because they are physical and we are too caught up in sexuality in our society. He is correct. What he failed to understand was that we need all the Chakra activated and interacting to lead a balanced life. It was not that the “lower” Chakra were too strong in our society it is that they are sick and warped in our society. What Indian religion calls Chakra exist in every mystical tradition on Earth, even Hebrew mysticism through the writings of the Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism. We need to bring everything (our lives and the chakra,) into line and order with the Divine Purpose.

Sexuality is for interconnection and procreation.

Current gender confusion is trying to further distance us from the created order that reflects the divine. As the Star of David represents the combination of the Male (the upward pointing triangle,) with the female (V shaped triangle) into a coherent whole so is sexuality supposed to combine us into a spiritual unity with our mate. This symbol too, is in nearly every religion on Earth and means essentially the same thing. It is a one-ness that is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible as man and woman becoming one flesh. The gender disphoria and homosexuality is not due to evil in our society but due to a separation from God. Too many religions point to these as unacceptable to God without fully realizing that ANY sin is unacceptable to God. We are all unacceptable in our natural state and need spiritual healing by unity with the Divine One.

Even if someone was fully healed I am not sure that God would desire a committed life-long homosexual couple to separate. They have already connected. Would not breaking that connection be wrong? I don’t know. The Bible says to remain as you were when you came to Christ. Obviously, if I was an axe murderer I wouldn’t keep doing that but they aren’t really the same. I remember the story of Amazing Grace [see: ] where the author wanted to be the best and most compassionate slave trader ever…it took a couple years for him to realize that being a slaver was NOT Christian no matter how “nice” he tried to be about it. When he realized that he wrote “Amazing Grace.” But it took time for him to reach that point. In the book the Screwtape Letters “uncle Screwtape” (an experienced demon,) advises his Nephew Wormwood to have his charge (who had just became a Christian,) to try to change everything at once. ‘He will become so frustrated in his failure he will be more surely ours than he was before.’ I don’t think we can judge in every case what another should do, they would have to make that decision with their God. It is not for us to fully know or understand everyone else’s relationship with their Creator.

The Bible says: Who are you to judge the servants of another? Meaning that we are all servants of God. When we judge others we are usurping the Master’s role. That is not good. Still, we are called to model the right behavior however we conceive that to be. We all must proceed with the understanding that we know but a part of the Divine Whole.

Above I mentioned that there is but one way to God and we must not deviate to the left or the right. This does not mean that any religion is totally correct. Think of this as like the lid to a soda at Kwik Shop. There is a circle perimeter and in the center is a little nipple where the lid was connected to the form (or Source.) We are on the perimeter. At any point we are at on the perimeter there is only one path for us to take to reach the center. If we deviate to the left or right of the line created by connecting the point on the perimeter to the Source then we miss the Source completely. There is only one path for each of us to the Source. It is not the exact same as your friend’s path or a Saint’s path but their journey CAN inform ours.

One of the strengths of the Bible, or in studying the lives of the Saints or great religious leaders like John Wesley, is that it provide many examples of how people faithfully lived out their lives to be true to their experience of God. Although I have talked with a Muslim and we compared the words of Christ and Paul with the teachings of Mohammad and found a wondrous similarity, one advantage the Bible has is that it was written by many authors and they each experienced the same God differently. Somewhere in there, we can probably find an example that is close to our own experience and speaks to us in our own path. Everyone has favorite Biblical figures and stories and they are all different.

One of the things a minister is asked to do is to ask themselves who they relate to in the Bible. I resonated with David because he was a soldier and a bit of a stinker. He repeatedly failed God but God described him as his favorite because whether he failed or succeeded he did it with his whole heart. I have noticed that Great Men succeed marvelously and fail dramatically. They all have human shortcomings but succeeded despite them. I have had my failures and some dramatic successes against evil. I also related to Samuel and Amos, and Hosea. I wear a Saint Joan of Arc medal around my neck to remind me how she kept to her path when everyone doubted her. Saint Ignatius was also a soldier of Christ and Saint Francis was an unsuccessful soldier who became a radical pacifist. I am not a pacifist but I also am drawn to Saint Francis. Find the Saints and lives that inspire you and learn from their successes and their failutes. But put your faith in God and not in a religion. By that I mean ground your faith in the God that the religion points to and don’t become a slave to the dogma to the point where you blind yourself to things God my be trying to tell you.

I have done both. Blinded myself to truth because it was against the dogma I was taught and so I was unable to believe in the God I was taught when I came face to face with evil as a counterintelligence Special Agent and turned from God. My turn away from religion ultimately led me back to it as I saw elements of the Divine in every religion I studied. The same elements. The same glimpses. Yet each religion seemed at odds with the others. Please understand, religions are not all the same. They are all limited but they are the best and most grounded starting points we have to Oneness with the Dviine. Most will live their whole lives and never need to go beyond that. I have a hunger to explore every aspect of the Divine so I probe deeply. I want to be fed on solid food and not just the milk of the Bible and Christianity that St. Paul spoke of.

For instance God never told us to put his writings into a Canon (the Bible) and to close that canon. The Bible is closed but God never stopped talking to us. He never said He was done talking to us or done sending messages to His prophets. We did that. We closed the canon so religion could have a core to prevent people from falling into error. If people were connected to the Divine they wouldn’t have needed that closed Canon. But they weren’t and false teachers were leading people into error. I believe God guided the Council of Nicaea in its choices but there is not one Bible. There are about three or four. The Bible originated in the Middle East and North Africa. The One we have is the one that predominated in Western Europe but the Eastern Orthodox and African Bibles include (although 95% the same,) a book called the Shepherd of Hermas and a couple others. In the West some of these books are preserved in the Apocrypha of Catholic Bibles. None of thie invalidates the Bible we use. The Bible is very useful but those who believe it is the final word of God worship the Bible and not the true Living God. And that is idolatry.

Anyone who has had an actual experience of the Divine knows that language is wholly insufficient to communicate the richness of the Divine Presence. IF you have not had such an experience fervantly pray for one. The Bible says that we should knock and the door shall be opened. Seek and you shall find. Ask and it shall be given unto you. The Divine will reveal its presence to you. Beware of imitations. The satans are also very powerful and can overwhelm our senses. Surround yourself with light in your mind and pray for Divine protection and then ask for God to reveal Itself to you and to come into you life in a tangible way. Ask until it happens. You will know when it does and it will transform your life. If you turn away turn back to it. Jesus said anyone who turns from the plow after he is called is not worthy of the Kingdom. I have turned away and the satans used that verse to keep me away until God pointed out to me that NO ONE is worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven it is all given by Grace. When people judge someone unacceptable they are usurping Divine Authority.

Now we ARE called to provide warning to someone when we honestly believe they are in error and they will need to work out there own salvation with fear and trembling. That is where we fail. Too often we have confidence in our own efforts and don’t proceed with the fear and trembling. God says many will come to me in that day and say, “Lord Lord!” and I will say, “Get away from me you doers of iniquity I never knew you.” and they will say that they taught, cast out demons, and did wonders in God’s name. But their heart was never one with God. God wants union with you whole heart and too often we keep back part of our hearts for our own use. We don’t devote all to the Divine. Those that do are rare. We call them saints, avatars, or great spiritual leaders. That is how rare they are. Sometimes we might call them aunts or grandpa’s or gramdma’s and they shine with a light that their family sees but does not transform the world. But it transforms the lives of those around them.

The Living God is worshipped in Spirit and Truth and in the way we live and is not solely found in what we live or believe. Western Society buts too much faith in beliefs. But in Hebrew the words are clear if action does not reflect belief then the words are not real. Belief must affect every aspect of your life or it is an empty mental exercise. It is not solely in the words we read. Jesus is called the Word in Greek. But the Greek word used is a word of command. It is a Word that creates immediate action. We lose this meaning in English. Just as there are four words for With in Greek, at leasts seven words for Love, and Hebrew distinguishes Satan from satans in English translations all of this is lost. But it is a start. For this reason, I have found that the Bible is one of the absolute best sources to discern God’s intention as long as it is read with the guidance and presence of the Holy Spirit and not just by the mind – which can make mistakes. The mistakes are small and the Spirit can correct us in our mistakes, if we open ourselves to It.

Anyway, sorry I was not more active with this site and devoted too much time to whack a mole with the political and social problems. Our Republic cannot survive cut off from God.

Our society lies to you everywhere. One of those lies is that Christianity is a white European religion. It is not and it never has been. It was inspired by Semitic peoples in the Middle East and has more roots in Eastern Beliefs than it does in Greaco-Roman beliefs. To some degree our merging of Christianity with Western Philosophy – while giving new and valuable insights – also obscured the original message. That is whay I said we would be better off to study the Old Testament in the original Hebrew and take it for what it says and not for what we are told it says.

One last thought. The Holy Spirit, Wisdom, Breath/Wind/Spirit of God in Hebrew is always female and Elohim the name of God is plural . What does this mean. You will have to ask the Living God. For this is my last post – unless God or one of His servants sends me $200.00 to renew my subscriptions for another year in the next few days.

This is from my site SabersEdge.Online and has contact info: (see also https://sabersedge.online/be-part-of-the-struggle-for-freedom )

SabersEdge strives to be your voice and the voice of everyone who has been driven to silence by people who will attack you if you speak out. I was a soldier and I will speak out. My whole life is about fighting battles. I have always fought for America and Americans and I am fighting for you but I cannot do it alone. We can do it together.

You can reach us at SabersEdge.Online@gmail.com ; or at PO Box 433, Leavenworth, KS 66048; or support us through Patreon: SabersEdge Association is creating Videos, Blogs, and Writings for Education and growth | Patreon

May the Force Be With You and Guide You and I wish you all the best.

Rivan Elan / Pastor Daniel

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