Recondite Cogitations

What CHRISTMAS means to me (CS Lewis)

2011-12-24T12:15:00.001-06:00

About ten years ago I stopped giving and receiving Christmas presents. It seemed perfectly clear to me that the entire holiday had become nothing more than a swap-fest. I thought, people only give presents to other people who they expect to get one back from, so it isn’t really a present—it’s a swap. What could be sillier? I was very happy when I found the following essay.

What CHRISTMAS means to me...
by C. S. Lewis
From God in the dock

Three things go by the name of Christmas. One is a religious festival. This is important and obligatory for Christians; but as it can be of no interest to anyone else, I shall naturally say no more about it here. The second (it has complex historical connections with the first, but we needn't go into them) is a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality. If it were my business too have a 'view' on this, I should say that I much approve of merry-making. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business. I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs. But the third thing called Christmas is unfortunately everyone's business.

I mean of course the commercial racket. The interchange of presents was a very small ingredient in the older English festivity. Mr. Pickwick took a cod with him to Dingley Dell; the reformed Scrooge ordered a turkey for his clerk; lovers sent love gifts; toys and fruit were given to children. But the idea that not only all friends but even all acquaintances should give one another presents, or at least send one another cards, is quite modern and has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers. Neither of these circumstances is in itself a reason for condemning it. I condemn it on the following grounds.

1. It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to 'keep' it (in its third, or commercial, aspect) in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25th everyone is worn out—physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merry-making; much less (if they should want to) to take part in a religious act. They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.

2. Most of it is involuntary. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail. Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter-box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?

3. Things are given as presents which no mortal every bought for himself—gaudy and useless gadgets, 'novelties' because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before. Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?

4. The nuisance, for after all, during the racket we still have all our ordinary and necessary shopping to do, and the racket trebles the labour of it.

We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed of the world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I don't know the way out. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If the worst comes to the worst I'd sooner give them money for nothing and write if off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.

Just A Little Appreciation For Bob Bennett

2011-11-27T22:13:00.000-06:00

Bob is in my opinion the best Christian songwriter of all-time.

I Survived . . .Beyond and Back

2011-10-30T15:57:00.001-05:00

We’ve all heard near death stories, but I thought the three individuals in this particular show were quite convincing compared to many. One man talks to Moses, one girl goes to Heaven and talks with her dead uncle, and one man goes to the entrance of Hell and sees a demon.

A common question is whether or not people see things during NDEs that relate to their own background, including their religious beliefs. Unfortunately, this does seem to be the case the majority of the time. An American Indian may see forest nymphs, a Chinaman may see Buddha etc. However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something real and of great value happening during these experiences. Quite often the person involved will attain information about the future or about other people and situations that is accurate and exactly what they needed to know in order to live a better life when they return. While I believe Christianity is the closest thing we have to a religion God approves of, I think stories like these only go to prove that God is very different from what any of us think he is.

The following 45-minute TV program is embedded by way of Hulu and is set to expire in about one month, so don’t wait too long to view it.

A Very Short Discourse On Faith Healers

2011-09-17T21:25:00.000-05:00

I posted this at Shadowland's (Ros) blog tonight and thought I would post it here too since I had never written anything on the subject of faith healers before. I guess I figured that anyone who had read me would already have a pretty good idea of how skeptical I would be of such people. The subjects of Smith Wiggelsworth and Nathan Morris had come up:

Smith Wigglesworth was in my opinion the Benny Hinn of his day. Like ALL faith healers since the apostles, he was a fraud. (His own daughter who assisted at his meetings was deaf until the day she died.) As is Nathan Morris. The very fact that he has allied himself with a mountebank like Bob Kilpatrick should tell you all you need to know about him. Delia Knox, incidentally, and despite numerous requests, has refused steadfastly to show any medical findings from her doctor (whose name she will not give either) that would substantiate any healing. Unlike most of you, I grew-up in a charismatic Assembly of God Church, the congregation of which personified the term Holy Rollers. Faith healers are a dime a dozen in those circles. I had to endure more faith healing rallies and revivals before I was eighteen than most people will their entire lives. Everyone from Ernest Angley to, well, name any faith healing evangelist who traveled the Midwest USA during the 60 - 70s and I probably saw them. Not one of them ever convinced me they had something real going on. It’s amazing how ALL their so-called healings happen internally where we can’t see them. I’d look around at people in the crowds, men who had come back from WWII or Korea missing hands, legs, and fingers, and not one of them ever grew a new one. Either God lacks the power to heal people of external afflictions or these faith healers are frauds. Or they may be something just as bad—self-deceived lunatics. When I see a hand grow where there isn’t one I’ll believe in them, and not one minute before. I’m not a Doubting Thomas. He had seen Jesus perform so many miracles (including restoring an ear that had been cut off) that it was more irrational NOT to believe Christ had risen from the grave like he said he would. We have every reason to be skeptical of modern day faith healers though, many of whom have been caught in outright lies and fraudulent activities. Some have even gone to jail for them. I approach faith healers with the same incertitude as marriage proposals. Either way, I’m a tough horse to rope.

The Cistaphasmatis by Charles Seper

2011-09-06T00:31:00.013-05:00

Update: It's now available at the following Amazon locations in Kindle (mobi) format:

USA
UK
Germany
France

Epub format in the near future for those who own e-readers other than Kindle.

If you'd like to read this story long with others from Amazon that are in their AZW (mobi) format and don't have an e-reader, you can still read them on your computer by downloading the free Kindle For PC and Kindle For Mac apps from Amazon here:

Kindle For PC

Kindle For Mac

There are also Kindle apps for reading on iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android.

This is a novelette I wrote some months ago of around 12,000 words. It's been completely reworked recently and is now available on Horatio Press via digital download for only a dollar.

Book Blurb:
The Cistaphasmatis is about a young man from Nantucket named Clifford who feels compelled to try and contact his deceased girlfriend on the other side of death's door using an age old mirror gazing technique in a home-built viewing chamber called a cistaphasmatis. About this time, he also finds himself becoming quick friends with the sexton at the graveyard his girlfriend is buried at, a retired Episcopal Priest named Bud Buchanan. Clifford soon finds that this priest has knowledge of the way the world works that's rather unique among men as Bud tries to keep Cliff from getting in over his head in "the void."

Excerpt 1

The main branch library in Nantucket has a large number of books on occult subjects, and it was here (unfortunately) that I found the title by Mr. Seagraves. It was called: Visions of the Sybil (seeking advice from the dead). This book held the answer to what I was looking for.

In it he described how the ancient Sybils in Greece used to sit in caves, usually over a fissure where the ground had split open and left a deep gulf. They thought it went down to an underworld that existed beneath the surface of the Earth, and here the dead lived. It was said that those who were deceased had an uncanny ability to see the future, and this is why kings consulted Sybils before going to war. The Sybil would sit in the cave with nothing but a small, dimly lit torch and would stare into the void of that gulf until she began to have visions. Other Sybils would look into a mirror or a pool of water.

I gathered from this book that when attempting to do this it was important to allow your eyes to sort of go numb. It's not so different from the way you look at one of those Magic Eye books to see 3-D objects. If you try to see the objects you never will. The harder you concentrate, the less likely you are to see anything. You have to be unfocussed and allow your eyes be completely relaxed.

The contraption Seagraves invented in 1821 aided him in doing this. It was like a sensory depravation chamber, basically just a wooden box painted black inside and just big enough for a man to sit in comfortably. It was actually a box within a box. He glued blankets around the entire outside of the first box and then nailed a second round of wood around it. The blankets acted like a buffer between the two layers of wood to help keep out sounds. He left an opening for a door, and inside the chamber he had attached a mirror to one wall. He brought one small, solitary candle into the chamber with him and set it on a shelf that stuck out below the mirror. The mirror was positioned above him so that he couldn't see his own reflection when gazing into it, only the blackness of the wall behind him and the dancing flame of the candle just below the mirror. Also, if he wanted to contact someone specifically, he found it helped to bring some small item the deceased person had owned before they died, something that they were very attached to, a wedding ring for example.

I found that other people had built similar chambers since his and referred to them as psychomantiums. Seagraves called his a cistaphasmatis, which as near as I can tell is from the Latin words cista meaning box or chamber, and phasmatis which means ghosts or spirits. His differed in one aspect however, and this I found to be strangely interesting. He claimed that trees had certain properties which the ancients thought of as magical, and that, being living creatures, they held the memories of all that happened on the Earth, not only while they stood, but from the generations of trees before them from which their seeds had sprung. It's possible that all plant life held memories, but trees could grow to be very old. Some had stood for well over a thousand years. He surmised that the oldest trees had absorbed more of humanity into them as well as something of the divine (although the reasons he gave seemed vague to me), and this was why ancient man all over the world worshipped trees, especially the very oldest of the oaks. They made some sort of conduit between man and the spiritual realms. If one were to build a cistaphasmatis, it would be best to build it of the oldest oak lumber you could find.

Fortunately, this is Nantucket, home to some of the oldest whaling ships that ever sailed. The ones from the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries were made from large oak timbers that must have come from very old trees. Very few of the most venerable whalers are left, but their timbers were reused for all kinds of things.

I knew of an old farm up for auction not too far away where the owner had claimed that the wood used for his barn came from the wreck of the Sheraton Whaler. The farm was such a mess that no one bid enough to make a sale worthwhile. I contacted the owner and made an offer for the huge barn door. It was off its hinges and laying against the side of the building, and truthfully, the entire barn was slanted to one side so severely that it couldn't possibly stand much longer anyway. They let me have it for next to nothing. The following morning I began construction of my cistaphasmatis in the back of my aunt's garage. I only used the old oak wood for the inside chamber. I used pine for the outside so it wouldn't be quite so heavy in case I had to move it, but it still must have been a little hefty at four feet in height, four and a half feet in length, and three feet in width. Instead of a door, I made the top hinged like a chest lid so I could simply slide over the side to get in and then pull the top back down. I also left a small air hole on the backside for the candle smoke to escape through and stuffed it with a piece of black foam so it would hardly be noticeable. I placed a pair of locks on it to finish the project. If anyone asked about it, I would simply tell them it was a storage bin for some expensive tools. By the following evening it was ready for use.

I waited till Aunt Caroline went to bed before I entered the cistaphasmatis. I wasn't nervous because I didn't particularly think it would work. A couple of weeks had gone by since I had heard Diana's voice at the cemetery, and that's just enough time for a person to forget how real an otherworldly experience can be. By now I had begun to convince myself that the whole thing had been a simple hallucination (whatever those are). Still I lit the candle and waited. Everything I knew of that Diana owned was burnt in the fire. We did, however, each have a copy of a photograph of us together that was taken by my mother last Christmas. This was the closest I could get to bringing an item she owned with me into the box.

According to Seagraves, part of the trick was to blank your mind, and I found this to be much harder than it sounds. It's amazing how little time goes by, just a matter of seconds, before some thought enters your mind or maybe a song, and the next thing you know you're in deep thought again. It must have taken me close to an hour of practice before I could manage to keep my mind free from thought for periods of just a minute or so at a time. This went on for several hours. Seagraves had come up with another aid for this sort of meditation. He used seashells large enough to cover each ear and glued them to a scarf-like strap that he tied around the top of his head to the bottom of his chin. He found that the airy sound they produced helped take him to the trance-like state that was needed. It was easy enough to make a similar head strap, but even though I had brought it into the chamber with me, I was very reluctant to use it. After all, I felt silly enough sitting in this contraption to begin with without having seashells glued to a strap around my head! Eventually, around 3:00 o'clock, I finally gave in and put it on.

I noticed immediately the effects of the shells. It was like focusing on someone else's breathing. Then again I thought it was also like a steady rain. You know, the kind that can lull you to sleep so easily. In only a matter of minutes I started to see something coming into view in the mirror. It was the outline of a woman. The light was so dim around her that I couldn't make out much. She walked with a heavy limp and had a cane or walking stick in each hand. As she came closer to the candle, which seemed to illuminate both our worlds, and although she was still difficult to see, there was no mistaking that face—it was Diana.

Excerpt 2

"Do you think you're the first person to gaze into a mirror and see another world? Man, that stuff's old hat. That's along the lines of parlor tricks any first year adept could do."

"First year what?"

"Clifford, people have been doing this sort of thing since the world began. Diana herself made mention of the Eleusinian Mysteries to you. It's an art that can, and has been, taught since time out of mind. Any fool can jump into the nearest sensory deprivation chamber and have a vision. But not just anyone can have a vision from God Clifford, and that's what I want you to understand. There are visions, and there are visions, just like most people have a dream that comes true at some point in their life, but not all of their dreams."

"So the other million dreams are just hallucinations?"

"I didn't say that. Most are fiction. Maybe being a character in a fictional tale is the best way for us to learn some things. But not all those tales are sent from God. You have to test them."

"And the same goes for the things you see in a mirror I suppose?"

"No; you can never trust anything you see in a mirror Clifford! You cannot force true visions. It just doesn't work like that. Visions have to come to you, and they usually come when you least expect them. I'm not saying that proper meditation in conjunction with prayer is bad or that it can't lead to a true vision. No priest would tell you that. Opening your mind to God should always be a part of prayer. People think prayer is talking to God when in reality you can't tell God anything he doesn't already know. Prayer should mostly be about God talking to you. That's what the true Mystics have always done. You've spent so much time reading all this occult nonsense. Have you ever spent any time at all reading about the lives and visions of the Mystic Saints? If you ever do, you'll soon come to realize that all these goofy theosophists and the like are just children playing as men. They're the biggest know-nothings since the priests of those Eleusinian Mysteries. And what's worse, the leaders among them know it. Oh they'll gladly sell you their books and take your dues, but they themselves have been practicing meditation techniques long enough to know that it all leads to the same dead-end."

We fell silent for a minute as an endless stream of bicyclists came by, apparently part of some kind of organized event, and I was glad. I needed time to regroup. Once they were out of earshot I was ready to go on.

"There's one problem with all this Bud. I know Diana. I know her as well as I know myself. I can see no good reason she would want me to deliver that small handful of hair to her unless she actually does need it for what she says she does. Who else in any world would care about having that hair for anything? What could they possibly do with it? I guess you'll say they want it for some sort of magic spell."

"First let me tell you that I don't believe you. You say you're sure this is Diana because you know her so well. But didn't you also just get done telling me that she was saying some things and acting in certain ways in that world beyond the mirror that took you by surprise? Wasn't she rather quick to rid herself of all her former religious beliefs on the word of some boy she had only just met?"

"Well, yeah, but—"

"And didn't you tell me that she was suddenly being alluring in a sexual way, a way that made you want to jump through the mirror?"

"But I didn't mean it to sound quite like that."

"Secondly, there's no such thing as magic. At least not in this world, not today. And probably not in that one. But I'll tell you one thing. She was right about the thin places. I know exactly what she's after, but I'll not tell you."

"Why not? Why shouldn't I know?"

"Because you probably wouldn't believe me. And because, if you did, I'm afraid you might try to prove it to yourself, and I'm just old enough that I would like one of my last great pleasures in life to be that of proving it to you."

I shook my head again. "You've lost me. I have no idea what you're going on about. How can you prove anything to me?"

"By letting me be the one who gets in that box tonight."

"It's called a cistaphasmatis, and are you nuts?!"

Excerpt 3

He was a man of his word. Bud pulled up in his pickup truck at exactly two o'clock. I opened the garage door manually as slowly as I could, not wanting the electric motor to wake Aunt Caroline.

"I hope you won't mind if we put these on your invention here," he said as he held up a pair of padlocks complete with hinges.

"No need," I said. "I already have locks on it. But why do you want them on there?"

"Maybe I don't want to be disturbed. Now how about that photograph? And the candle and matches?"

"I keep all that in a bag inside there. You shouldn't need the photograph anyway since you'll be carrying some of her hair. I think we're good to go."

The cistaphasmatis was lighter than I thought it would be, but it was still plenty heavy, and we struggled to get it into the truck. As we pulled away, I still had no idea where he was taking me. I didn't know it yet, but the real struggle was yet to come.

"You look awfully chipper for two in the morning," he said.

"I just don't feel the need for sleep very much lately."

"That's understandable. They say some of the Mystics never slept."

"Is that what I am, a Mystic?"

"Not quite. What you did was for selfish reasons. You wanted to mitigate your conscience after your girlfriend died for having tried to manipulate her for your own lascivious purposes. Don't get me wrong Cliff, I'm glad you still have a conscience and tried to make a wrong right, but that doesn't make you a Mystic. A Mystic has no self. He doesn't meditate to try and contact the dead or to know the mysteries of the universe. He has no motive whatsoever but to seek the face of God."

"Okay, I'll buy that. But what's with the lack of sleep?"

"That's a byproduct of having transcended reality. Everyone does it when they sleep, but it's normally a slow process that can take as long as eight hours or more. The best way I can explain it is that we all have an attachment to another world. Let's think of that attachment as being something like a rubber band."

"Wait, another world?"

"Yes; nearly all religions preach that this world is not our true home. Our bodies may be part of it, but the portion of us that makes decisions and has a will is from much deeper in the heart of God. When we die, that part of us will go back to God in some way."

"What about Hell?"

"There are a lot of differing opinions about that, more than I care to get into at the moment. But the thing to remember is that, the part of us that's the real us was not made for this world and can only stand to be in it for just so long before it has to come up for air so to speak. That's what sleep does. It's like a whale coming up for air. He lives in the ocean, but he was not made for the ocean. The ocean was made for him.

"But let's get back to that rubber band. The bible refers to it as the 'silver cord.' Throughout the day it winds itself tighter and tighter, and the longer we stay self-aware in this world, the tighter it gets. It can only get just so tight before it has to unravel itself. And the only way it can do that is by loosing the ties of consciousness in this world and going back to where it came from."

"Which is where?" I asked.

"To the timeless void, the great sea which is God and which is everywhere and nowhere, the place from which all things have their first form (as Plato would have put it). Before anything was anything, it was a thought in the mind of God, and it still is. 'In Him we live and move and have our being,' Epimenides said, and he couldn't have been far wrong even if his own concept of God and reality was a bit skewed. There are probably many worlds. A creator is always about the business of creating. But he not only creates, he sustains what he creates or there'd be no point in creating it. Think of all the worlds, however many there are, as horses on a carrousel ride and God as the hub in the middle to which they're all attached and which continually spins because he makes it so. The void is the closest thing to the imagination of God we can conceive of (and we can't conceive much). It's a place where anything can become anything else just as a particle can become any other kind of particle in the material world after it first enters the place scientists call 'nonlocality' where time and space cease to exist, and even that I surmise is just another word for the void. But even that world, the void, is not without its rules, though I suspect many of its inhabitants don't know them, and their dreams and visions are as false and phony as the church doctrines which came from the sword-tip of Constantine.

"They say that St. Francis, and others like him, never slept. When a man transcends the material world, it's as though he unravels that rubber band in the blink of an eye—that same rubber band that most people have to sleep all night to loosen. It's not only holy men who do this, but only the holy men find the Divine during their moments of transcendence. You'll find more instances of it in the bible than just about anywhere. Men to whom the heavens were opened, and the light of God filled them with a lifetime of truth in an instant."

"That's quite a sermon," I said, not knowing how much of it, if any, was accurate or simply conjecture.

"That's what you get for inviting a priest to come along."

"The priest invited himself, but I'm glad you're here just the same."

He had no sooner said this than we pulled up onto a sandy beach. I had been listening so intently to him that I hadn't paid any mind to where we were going. I had to spend a moment taking in my surroundings before I realized Bud had driven us clean out to the other side of the island, out to Coskata Pond.

The Outer Limits - "The Conversion"

2011-08-12T16:25:00.000-05:00

If you have 44-minutes to spare, you could do a lot worse than to use it watching this particular episode of The Outer Limits. A lot of the second generation Outer Limits shows weren't particularly good, but this one was exceptional. There have been several films about angelic intervention changing people's lives over the years but none quite like this. The angel is played to the hilt by John Savage, who shows a troubled man, played by Frank Whaley, that his actions affect everyone and everything. Pointing upwards he indicates that even the angels are not immune from those effects. Indeed, if all the angels in heaven rejoice when there's a soul saved, perhaps they also share in out sorrows and cares. In the end, this angel shows what it truly is to take on the burden of another, and that from an angel's point of view, this is a joy to do and not a hardship at all. Perhaps taking on the burdens of others should be a joy for us as well.

"Apparitions" with Martin Shaw

2011-07-05T20:56:00.009-05:00

First let me say there seems to be some debate as to whether "Apparitions" was a mini-series or whether it was intended to be an ongoing series that was cancelled after just six episodes. I can only tell you that after the sixth episode, I felt it had ended, and ended well, but also felt it could go on if they wanted it to. So if it was meant to end at six episodes, I was well satisfied. If it was meant to continue, it's a crying shame it didn't. Don't be afraid to watch the six as-is though because it's like watching six 1-hour movies of the best religious programming I've ever encountered.

"Apparitions" appeared on the BBC in 2008. It starred Martin Shaw as Father Jacob, a Catholic Priest who has the job of advancing people to sainthood. However, he is friends with the priest who is in charge of performing exorcisms. He more or less takes over the job (unofficially) after this friend is forced to relinquish the position following strange and diabolical circumstances.

This is not an official trailer. It was edited by some kid on YouTube who put some music to it by his favorite band or something. It actually works pretty well though and will give you some idea of what you're missing.

This is not some corny horror series with projectile vomiting and heads spinning round meant to appeal to children. It's more along the lines of "The Omen" but with better acting and great scripts. Never have I seen the forces of good and evil so clearly brought out and shown for what they are in a story of any kind. A story-line in the first episode involving a young priest who's troubled by homosexual lust manages to perfectly show the profoundly wicked and perverse essence at its core, so much so that even the most adamant homosexual could not help coming away questioning his choices. It manages to put onto the screen exactly how I've always felt about homosexuality but could never quite put into words. However, this is just one short story-line in one episode.

Each episode connects to the one before with a subtext pertaining to a coming calamity of irredeemable quality. Among his Catholic family, only Father Jacob sees it coming and is prepared to meet the opposition head-on as every new episode finds him battling the same evil in a new form.

I've been reading amateur reviews of the show at both Hulu and the Internet Movie Data-Base, and one thing that testifies to the greatness of this show is how many atheists and agnostics can't help but love it. Their reviews generally start saying, "I'm an atheist, but...." The following short review at Hulu is my favorite:

***
Devout Agnostic Almost Converted

"This show almost...Almost converted me to Catholicism. No joke. Just saying. It's that good."
***

The only place showing this show on the Internet that I've seen is Hulu, but you must live in America and have a paid membership to Hulu Plus. See it here: Apparitions

You can rent this show on DVD if you're a member of Netflix. They have it here: Apparitions

Blockbuster doesn't carry it yet. I'm afraid the show may be impossible to find at local video stores in the USA, although people living in England can likely find it all over the place. If you're game to buy it, Amazon has copies listed in both Pal and NTSC format.

Thoughts On Dispensationalism

2011-06-07T19:21:00.004-05:00

Some people think that the Old Testament God and the New Testament Christ are so different in word and deed that they believe God may change the way he deals with mankind during different eras. It seems to them as though God reveals certain aspects of himself, and blesses mankind with particular gifts "when we're ready for it." That is, when we've more or less evolved to a certain state.

Now there are some people who believe just the opposite. They think that mankind has devolved over the years. That he once had certain gifts and abilities (usually psychic phenomenon are mentioned) which he has now lost. They often point out that the human race now uses only a small portion of our brains, and this is especially true of the frontal lobe of which little is known, and very little brainwave activity emits from that region.

I for one would also point out that anyone who has truly studied Greek, Chinese, and Jewish philosophy will recognize right away that those ancient super-thinkers were way ahead of anyone who has come down the pike since. Reading Kant, Berkeley, Descartes, and Kierkegaard may be a pleasure. But reading Plato, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Aristotle, and the words spoken by Jesus Christ is a revelation.

I probably fall into this latter camp of unbelievers for the most part. Still I hold onto the possibility of what may be called limited dispensationalism. But I see no big changes in mankind or God's relationship with man that appear to be in an ever evolving manner. I'm going to include the following letter to a gentleman named Adam who recently wrote to me, asking what both George MacDonald and myself had to say on the subject.

Hi Adam,

Nice to hear from you again. I don't remember GMD ever actually using the term Dispensationalism or anything like it. I may be wrong, but I really don't think he ever thought anything along those lines. But then again, I don't think it was a very widespread teaching until the 20th century (you probably know better than me though).

There are times I've wondered if perhaps God had carried out such stages in a sort of evolution of man, but it seems that every time I begin to think along those lines, something will happen to swing me back to where I started. For instance, I recall skimming through a book at the store one day by what I believe was an anthropologist who said that it seemed clear to him that mankind didn't become a self-conscious being until around 13,000 years ago. And this is about when the first civilizations that we know of came into being. People started farming and breeding livestock. Villages were built. Building projects as a group began for things like ziggurats and mounds. It sort of made sense that it took some kind of self-consciousness to allow people to think like this, and I wondered if it was a stage of development that God put into the mind of man.

But then I remembered GK Chesterton's comments in The Everlasting Man about the 35,000 year old cave paintings found in Lascaux and what wonderful works of art some of them truly were. Some were indeed quite good and showed that "feeling intellect" which Wordsworth so aptly named. These paintings weren't the work of a person or persons without self-consciousness. They showed a great ability to reflect on one's emotions, particularly one painting that showed a bison looking back over its shoulder.

I found The Everlasting Man online and copied what I thought was pertinent:

"They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognize; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.... So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane.... When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, 'The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,' he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things."

So, to bring an end to a long winded letter Adam, it seems to me that mankind has not really changed all that much no matter how far back we look. We might be a little less violent now, but that's about it. I see changes in science and its influence upon culture in every age, but I don't really think this has touched the heart of man. We certainly see a NT Jesus doing things very differently from the OT God, but I'm not convinced this has to do with the development of mankind and any sort of special dispensation. I have a lot of thoughts on that, but it's too much to go into presently.

I don't think I'm a believer in dispensationalism just yet. But who knows what the future may bring?

Bill

The Mom I Never Knew

2011-06-05T21:24:00.013-05:00

I was on my way out to the back-roads and wooded areas Friday night looking for something interesting to videotape when I noticed there was some kind of parade about to start in town. I had no idea what it was about but decided to stick around and shoot some video of it, partly for kicks, and partly with the hope of selling some footage (that's always the hope!) to one of the local TV networks. Well, I wasn't able to get any of the news stations interested in my footage this time, but the outing wasn't completely wasted.

I parked a couple of blocks away from the city square and walked the remaining distance to the front of the courthouse lawn which sits right across from it. Actually, "square" is a bit of a misnomer since ours is a roundabout with a large fountain at its center. There were people lined up all around the fountain and main street, most with beach chairs they had brought, while others just sat on the curb or used blankets spread on the sidewalk.

I couldn't believe my luck! The courthouse front lawn rises above the sidewalk some ten feet or so, giving a perfect view down upon the street below. It's beautifully landscaped and shaded (this proved to be of some importance since it was over 90 degrees that evening) and has about a half dozen benches along with a most pleasant little water garden. For some odd reason, most folks had taken to the street and left the courthouse lawn nearly vacant but for a few young people mulling around. I noticed a pair of benches facing one another at just the right spot to set up my tripod. There was an elderly couple seated on one of them, and I began to chat with them as I set-up the rest of my gear.

The parade turned out to be one for the Shriner's Circus that will be here over the weekend they told me. They had a nephew who would be in the parade, but I think they mostly were just looking for a night out and something to do. They were quite friendly, although the woman was a little on the quiet side and seemed content to let her husband do most of the talking. I soon found out that this man, Bob, was originally from the same nearby town that I was from and where my dad grew-up as well, so we had a lot in common and did a good bit of reminiscing about the old days. At some point I made mention of something that one of my uncles used to do, and Bob realized I was talking about someone he knew. Once he realized what my last name was, and then found out who my parents were, his face began to beam a bit.

(Bob accidentally steps into a frame.)

It turned out that Bob knew almost everyone in my family from childhood and was once very good friends with both my mom and my dad when they were all three just teenagers. Actually, Bob and my mom were much more than friends. Apparently she was the "one that got away," and Bob was very nearly my father. Mom was very young at the time. He knew things about her childhood that I didn't. But there were also some things she didn't tell him.

My mom's parents divorced while she was very young. Both remarried. Her dad was a poor Tennessee share cropper and remained in the same small town all his life. Her mother remarried a man from Indiana and they eventually made their home there. But immediately after WWII, they lived in some other parts of the country, and one of them happened to be the same nearby town that my dad grew-up in. After a series of events (which I'll get into momentarily), mom decided to move in with her mother and stepdad here in Illinois when she was fourteen, while her brothers and sisters stayed behind in Tennessee. She had dropped out of school and was working as a cashier in a big St. Louis department store. It was during this time that she met Bob.

It was easy to tell that Bob really loved my mom. They dated for about a year until he joined the Navy and had to ship out. He wanted to pursue the Navy as a career (which he did) and was too young to get married he thought. So it was best to break thinks off and leave mom behind. I'm not sure how old he was then, but he told me that mom was still only fifteen. He said she cried and cried and begged him not to leave her there alone. He said the reason she felt alone was because both of her parents were terrible drunks. To make matters worse, they weren't getting along at the time. He told me that when they came home from work, grandma would leave the house headed for a bar in one direction, while Renos (her husband) would head for a different bar in the opposite direction, while mom was left to herself. They also had many terrible fights.

Mom had told me that her parents spent a lot of time in bars when she was younger, but I had no idea how bad it really was. Bob said it was about as bad as it gets. Quite honestly, I never knew what to believe half the time. Mom could embellish the truth with the best of them. But the more I learn about her, the more I can see that her lies were a defense system for her. She had a lot to be embarrassed about, including one important thing that she never told Bob.

Mom quit school in the 9th grade after she turned fourteen and ran off to get married to a Tennessee boy. It only lasted a couple of months and the marriage was annulled. I guess mom felt foolish and wanted to basically get out of town, and that's why she moved to Illinois with her mom and stepdad. Bob looked genuinely shocked when I told him that. Apparently she wanted to keep her short-lived marriage a secret. Who cold blame her?

The following year, mom started dating my dad while Bob was away, and the rest is history as they say. The one thing I can't get over is Bob sitting on the bench next to me, shaking his head, saying, "I felt so sorry for her." I never I my life heard anyone say they felt sorry for my mom before. She could be your best friend or your worst enemy. She had a temper and could be as selfish as any other woman, but she could also be very compassionate at times. She had a bad side, but I'm slowly beginning to see how the events in her life brought that out in her. The older I get, the stranger the world is.

They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. That's an absolute lie. A day doesn't go by that I don't learn something new, or see an old thing in a new light. If it's like this now, I wonder what it will be like in Heaven where all things hidden are revealed? I'm sure that the afterlife will be full of new things and many surprises. But I suspect seeing the world we left behind through the eyes of God will be the biggest revelation of all.

The Cream Of Whose Jest?

2011-04-27T18:43:00.002-05:00

During the early 1900s, James Branch Cabell wrote a long series of books throughout his life that were all tied together as part of a whole. The series is known as "The Biography of Manuel," and in it, at least one or more of the main characters is always a descendant of one Dom Manuel from the first book who thought he lived on through them. In the book I'll be commenting on here, The Cream of The Jest, it's his youngest daughter, Ettarre, who shows up, as she does in many of Cabell's other works. Speaking of characters, another who is nearly always present (as he is in this book) is Horvendile. In Cabell's other stories, Horvendile represents the author himself entering the tale. In Jest, however, Horvendile represents a fictitious author by the name of Felix Kennaston (who in turn may represent Cabell). These are the only two characters we're going to concern ourselves with because the others only play small supporting roles and have little to do with Cabell's philosophical and spiritual outlook, and this is what I'm mainly concerned with.

The main theme in all the stories from "The Biography of Manuel" is a quest for an object of beauty or happiness (usually a woman, and usually Ettarre) and almost, but not quite, attaining that goal. Thus, every book ends in loss but with the hope that some day happiness may yet be found.

Jest is a story about the dreams of a famous author by the name of Felix Kennaston and his then using those dreams as the basis for the stories he writes. These dreams take place in several different geographic locations, but most of them are in the land of Poictesme—a fictional province somewhere in Europe. When Kennaston enters his dreams, he does so as a different man, a much younger man by the name of Horvendile. Kennaston always finds Ettarre waiting for him in those dream worlds. And once there, he is never eager to return to what he perceives as a the mundane life of a middle-aged man in a loveless marriage during waking existence:

Thus he walked in twilight, regretful that he must return to his own country, and live another life, and bear another name, than that of Horvendile.... It was droll that in his own country [waking life] he should be called Felix, since Felix meant "happy"; and assuredly he was not pre-eminently happy there.

Kennaston invented the province of Poictesme and it's characters just as any writer of fiction invents the people and places in his books by way of imaginative day-dreams, the substance of which may be found in the heart of God as George MacDonald suggested. But Kennaston hasn't learned this yet, and he still believes that he himself is the force behind the world of imagination just as many inconsiderate people often do.

Imagine that you are wide awake in your dreams (as I have often been) and that you try to make the people who populate your dreams understand that you are from another world and that they are mere creations of your inner self... as many foolish psychologists have claimed.

"I will tell you," Horvendile replied, "though I much fear you will not understand—" He meditated shook his head, smilingly. "Indeed, how is it possible for me to make you understand? Well, I blurt out the truth. There was once in a land very far away from this land—in my country—a writer of romances. And once he constructed a romance which, after a hackneyed custom of my country, he pretended to translate from an old manuscript written by an ancient clerk—called Horvendile. It told of Horvendile's part in the love-business between Sir Guiron des Rocques and La Beale Ettarre. I am that writer of romance. This room, this castle, all the broad rolling countryside without, is but a portion of my dream, and these places have no existence save in my dreams, and fancies. And you, messire—and you also, madame—and dead Maugis here, and all the others who seemed so real to me, are but the puppets I fashioned and shifted, for a tale's sake, in that romance which now draws to a close."

This statement appears early in the book during a day-dream as Kennaston walks through a garden. He is apparently thinking about his book and the things he will write in it and how he will end his story. It seems very odd that he would say such things to characters in a mere day-dream, a reverie. But at this point reality and imagination cross paths. Before he left his day-dream, Ettarre gave him half of something along the lines of a brooch which she wore as a pendant around her neck. (How she managed to break it in half is unknown since it's made of metal.) This brooch/pendant is called "the sigil of Scoteia." Of course a day-dream character can't give you an object that you can take back with you to waking reality. But as Kennaston walks in the moonlight he spots something glowing in the path and stoops down to pick up what is obviously the same half of the pendant which Ettarre had given him in the day-dream. He decides that he must have glanced at it much earlier in the day and then incorporated the likeness of the object into his reverie. Of course, this doesn't exactly turn out to be true as you'll find out later in the story.

One thing you need to know, however, is that Kennaston finds that if he lies in bed and allows light to shine on the sigil at just such an angle, he will soon find himself in another world with Ettarre. The book never refers to the phrase "out of body," but we may assume that some such thing has happened. In any event, Kennaston finds himself, or at least his consciousness, in a different kind of reality, and unlike his day-dreams, he has no control over his destination, nor much of anything else.

"Things happen so in dreams," he observed. "I know perfectly well I am dreaming, as I have very often known before this that I was dreaming. But it was always against some law to tell the people in my nightmares that I quite understood they were not real people. To-day in my daydream, and here again to-night, there is no such restriction; and lovely as you are, I know that you are just a daughter of sub-consciousness or of memory or of jumpy nerves or, perhaps, of an improperly digested entree."

"No, I am real Horvendile—but it is I who am dreaming you."

And thus he comes to understand that this world is very different from the day-dream worlds he created, for here he surely is not the creator. But is she just teasing him? Is he really part of her dream? How does a dream character have the power to dream us into their worlds? He finally decides that neither is dreaming the other into existence, but rather, they are somehow equally a part of the same dream, and that the sigil has something to do with it. He also quickly comes to realize that something else is quite different from his mere day-dreams. In those, he could touch Ettarre. Here he cannot. If he tries to, the dream ends, and it's the same in every dream he has of her thereafter. This woman whom he thought he had invented through sheer will applied to imagination, and who he grows to love as such, has become untouchable. Even his travels through other worlds with Ettarre is something he believes he has unwittingly invented through that psychological fiction called the subconscious. He even begins to show some excitement about this newfound power he has.

"He looked at her; and again his heart moved with glad adoration. It was not merely that Ettarre was so pleasing to the eye, and distinguished by so many delicate clarities of color—so young, so quick of movement, so slender, so shapely, so inexpressibly virginal,—but the heady knowledge that here on dizzying heights he, Felix Kennaston, was somehow playing with superhuman matters, and that no power could induce him to desist from his delicious and perilous frolic, stirred, in deep recesses of his being, nameless springs. Nameless they must remain; for it was as though he had discovered himself to possess a sixth sense; and he found that the contrivers of language, being less prodigally gifted, had never been at need to invent any terms wherewith to express this sense's gratification. But he knew that he was strong and admirable; that men and men's affairs lay far beneath him; that Ettarre belonged to him; and that the exultance which possessed him was the by-product of an unstable dream.

It's not long after this that twice Kennaston is queried about his book—Men Who Loved Allison—both times by men who might be considered influential and/or powerful. They seem concerned about the sigil of Scoteia (Kennaston has written it into the story), and they talk of white pigeons (essentially doves) and hold small mirrors in their hand. One of these men is a Church Bishop by the name of Arkwright.

"Yes, I was often a guest at Alcluid—a very beautiful home it was in those days, famed, as I remember, for the many breeds of pigeons which your uncle amused himself by maintaining. I suppose that you also raise white pigeons, my son?"

Kennaston saw that the prelate now held a small square mirror in his left hand. "No, sir," Kennaston answered...

"The pigeon has so many literary associations that I should have thought it would appeal to a man of letters," the prelate continued. "I ought to have said earlier perhaps that I read Men Who Loved Alison with great interest and enjoyment. It is a notable book. Yet in dealing with the sigil of Scoteia—or so at least it seemed to me—you touched upon subjects which had better be left undisturbed. There are drugs, my son, which work much good in the hands of the skilled physician, but cannot without danger be entrusted to the vulgar."

He spoke gently; yet it appeared to Kennaston a threat was voiced.

...

"Since then, sir, by the drollest of coincidences, a famous personage has spoken to me in almost the identical words you employed this evening, as to the sigil of Scoteia. The coincidence, sir, lay less in what was said than in the apparently irrelevant allusion to white pigeons which the personage too made, and the little mirror which he too held as he spoke.... I could find it in my heart t o believe it the cream of an ironic jest that you great ones of the earth have tested me with a password mistakenly supposing that I, also, was initiate. I am tempted to imagine some secret understanding, some hidden co-operancy, by which you strengthen or, possibly, have attained your power.

"Think well, my son! Suppose, for one mad instant, that your wild imaginings were not wholly insane? suppose that you had accidentally stumbled upon enough of a certain secret to make it simpler to tell you the whole mystery? Cannot a trained romancer conceive what you might hope for then?"

Very still it was in the dark room....

Kennaston was horribly frightened....

So into the mix comes the suggestion of a secret society with an occult power that enables them to be in power the world over.

Upon first reading of the sigil I was taken aback at the name because typically I think of a sigil as a symbolic drawing used in magic. It later dawned on me however, that a sigil can also be something used as a seal like the signet rings kings used in ancient times, and that's what this pendant in the story is for. It's three inches in diameter (when both halves are together) and has a long line of reverse writing on it which will be read forward after the seal is stamped with the sigil. There's an illustration of the sigil on the book's frontispiece. The writing reads:

James Branch Cabell made this book so that he who wills may read the story of man's eternally unsatisfied hunger in search of beauty. Ettarre stays inaccessible always and her loveliness is his to look on only in his dreams. All men she must evade at the last and many are the ways of her evasions.

So Cabell is just having a little fun with the sigil's writing. There is some talk about the material that makes up the sigil, who manufactured it etc., but none of that is important. What's important is the fact that Kennaston eventually finds the other half of the sigil in waking life, and it belongs to a woman he knows quite well and whom he never would have suspected it belonged to. This discovery changes everything, as you will see, and reality takes yet another bizarre turn.

Cabell may owe something to Mark Twain's short story—My Platonic Sweetheart—written in 1898 (though not published until 1912, well after Twain's death). Cabell claimed to have written Jest sometime between 1911 and 1914. Both stories are essentially about a man who meets a woman during recurrent dreams who is the love of his life, (though not necessarily in the way you may be thinking). They always look a little different from dream to dream, yet they always find one another, and each knows the other straight away even though their names may have changed as well. In Twain's story, the man (Twain himself) is always seventeen and the girl fifteen no matter what Twain's age was in waking life. In Jest, Horvendile and Ettarre are also young in all of Kennaston's dreams except for one (as I recall anyway), while Kennaston is in late middle-age during waking life. We also find in both stories that our young couples occasionally travel to exotic localities in the Earth's past and meet historic figures.

While Twain is able to hold his dream sweetheart and kiss her (though nothing more is mentioned), Horvendile cannot touch Ettarre. If he does, the dream ends and he awakens. Thus, while Horvendile deeply loves Ettarre, he can never have her as anything more than something like a friend, and yet something more special and quite uncommon than merely a friend. This may sound different from Twain and his dream girl, but Twain makes an odd remark in his account:

The affection which I felt for her and which she manifestly felt for me was a quite simple fact; but the quality of it was another matter. It was not the affection of brother and sister - it was closer than that, more clinging, more endearing, more reverent; and it was not the love of sweethearts, for there was no fire in it. It was somewhere between the two, and was finer than either, and more exquisite, more profoundly contenting. We often experience this strange and gracious thing in our dream-loves; and we remember it as a feature of our childhood-loves, too.

Journalist, Burton Rascoe, wrote in his introduction to the 1921 edition of Cabell's book—Chivalry: Dizain des Reines—the following:

It is perhaps of historical interest here to record the esteem in which Mark Twain held the genius of Mr. Cabell as it was manifested as early as a dozen years ago. Mr. Cabell wrote The Soul of Melicent, or, as it was rechristened on revision, Domnei, at the great humorist's request, and during the long days and nights of his last illness it was Mr. Cabell's books which gave Mark Twain his greatest joy.

So we know that late in the life of Samuel Clemens, he befriended Cabell, and even had some influence on his stories before he died. It is perhaps not unreasonable to consider that Jest may owe something to My Platonic Sweetheart.

What Jest has to say to us is really nothing more than the echo of what every great mystic had said before him—that reality isn't what we think it is. That there are binding strands which link waking existence to both the worlds of dream and imagination. At first Felix Kennaston's love for Ettarre is such that all he can think of are those dream worlds and being with her as a man loves a woman. But by the end of the tale, he begins to think more deeply about things like creation, life, and a creator. His dream lover becomes for him, just as those dream lovers did for so many other writers before him, a personification of God, for that's what the Helen of Troy motive' represents for writers, dreamers, and lovers. She's the object of desire who symbolizes all that is beautiful, good, and perfect. She's always to be admired, but never to be owned. She was Beatrice to Dante. She was the Marble Lady to Anodos in George MacDonald's Phantastes. She was Mark Twain's Platonic Sweetheart.

She certainly takes center stage in many of my own dreams and probably in many of yours. I've been dreaming of my Helen for at least a decade now. I've never quite been able to have my dream lover either. We're always playing cat and mouse—always a little leery of one another. And yet we're always together. Not lovers, but more than friends. Yet the relationship is deeper than either lovers or friends as Twain said. It's only been during the past year or so that I've come to realize that she represents...well, many people at times, but on the highest level she's symbolic of the "Holy Other". Hers is a love we must all strive for, and I believe it is a love we will find if we keep knocking at love's door long enough. She is nothing less than God calling out to humanity saying, "Come and dine."

I'm not sure if Cabell's story expresses this in quite the way I would have hoped. For a time in his life, he did become interested in magic and secret societies. (The episode about the white pigeons and mirrors surely owes itself to the "magic mirror of Solomon" to some degree.) He seemed to move away from all that rather quickly though, and when none other than freemasonry's class clown, Aleister Crowley, tried to correspond with him, Cabell was cordial enough, but in private seemed very put off and had very little use for Crowley and his type. (Crowley did write an essay on Cabell that appeared in a Virginian publication called "The Reviewer" that was actually pretty accurate in most ways, but failed to truly understand what Cabell was trying to say on a deeper level.)

Mostly I find in Cabell's Kennaston someone whose search for Helen hadn't quite reached fruition yet. But, does anyone's this side of Heaven?

That'll Be 20 Our Fathers And 10 Hail Marys—Now Bend Over And Grab Your Ankles

2011-04-09T09:21:00.006-05:00

Isaiah 40:1 & 2

Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the LORD’s hand
double for all her sins.

I ask you, is there anything at all in the NT that reads like the above? This is typical of OT thinking, and is the way we deal with people in the secular penal system today. Commit the crime—do the time.

But is this what Jesus taught or did? When a woman drew water from a well for him, and he told her about all her husbands among her many sins, did he then tell her to go sacrifice a lamb? Give money to the church? Did he repeat his now famous "Our Father" prayer for her and tell her to repeat it until she was sick of it to atone for her sins? Hardly. What he did was to atone for her at the cross.

There is nothing I've ever come across in the NT that shows anyone doing anything to atone for their sins. Only Jesus made an atonement—once and forevermore. No penitence was, or is, necessary. Repentance—yes. Penitence and atonement—no. "To obey is better than sacrifice." "Go, and sin no more." This is the NT recipe. Jesus says to let him worry about penitence and atonement. That's his job, and the toughest of all jobs it was/is. He did away with our atoning and penitence at the cross. Will someone please tell me why the Catholic Church decided to defile the cross by trying to undo everything the cross was ever about?

The Catholic Church is very big on penitence. This is carried out by atonement and absolution. The atonement is a kind of punishment handed out by the priests, usually nothing more than a rather dull and mundane repetition of prayers over and over. This is unbiblical, pointless, and anti-Christian. I've yet to find anything within Catholic doctrine that links any NT teachings of Christ with punishments being meted out by priests. He told his disciples to forgive people's sins—not to punish them. Even the woman brought before him on grounds of adultery was forgiven and sent on her way. Jesus made no demands of penitence by way of punishment with her, nor with anyone else that we're aware of. He simply says, go and sin no more. However, he also says to pay our debts and the like, so I think he certainly expects retributions to be paid for harming people or damaging their property in our sinning. But beyond that, he just wants us to stop sinning, to be better people, to try our best. Why the change? Jesus taught us something completely new at the time, to be good servants, to constantly look for ways to serve others. Could it be that our good works take the place of any need for punishments and sacrifices? Isn't a good deed a sacrifice in itself? And of course, all atonement was settled at the cross.

The Catholic Church has not only rejected the work of the cross by their demands of penitence, they've done it in a harmful way in my opinion. Does it really make any sense whatsoever to make prayer a form of punishment!? Demanding people to pray the same repetitious prayers over and over as a form of punishment can only serve to make those same people hate prayer! What good thing could possibly come from it? Mark tells us that Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane, went and prayed that the agony of the cross might in some way not have to happen, but to let that "cup pass" from him. A short time later it says he went back and prayed "the same thing." So yes, it appears even Jesus prayed the same prayer at least once, though I doubt he used the exact same words. But he was in distress at the time, and had every reason to be. We often find ourselves praying without ceasing during times of distress, and truthfully, it's during those times that our prayers seem to be answered most fully. But this is very different from vain, repetitious prayers as mere punishments—something that belittles the work of the cross. Something like praying the Rosary may be a good thing, though repetitious, if done in the proper frame of mind and spirit. But it should never be a punishment.

Personally, I think Catholics would be better off to avoid confession, and especially not to send their children to confession, lest you want them to grow-up hating prayer, the very thing they ought to learn to love doing most. Prayer, when done properly, transcends the hard turf of materiality, passes through the thin places (made thin by the power of the resurrection), and seeks out the Light of Heaven. Prayer is our only connection with our origin. It's a call home from a homesick boy at camp-Earth.

Why The Bible Is Different

2011-03-27T13:31:00.014-05:00

About fifteen years ago I began to read a lot of writings from the Mesopotamia. I also read a lot of American Indian myths and quite a bit of Hindu writings. After a year or so of this little journey, one thing became abundantly clear. There is nothing like the bible despite its faults.

The first thing I ever read by Plato was The Republic. Two things struck me about it. The first was that Plato actually chastised the writings of Homer and others who had presented the Greek gods as being corrupt. He actually suggested changing them! (The stories—not the gods). The second was that Plato believed in the gods, but didn't seem to believe much at all that had been written about them. You'll find this is true of most Greeks from his time and the later Romans as well. Almost none of them believed their mythology to be non-fiction, let alone journalism. They knew the stories were made-up. They had festivals and celebrations based around these stories at times because they enjoyed the parties. The wine ran like a river at them. No wonder they had such respect for so detestable a character as Bacchus! Their mythology was nothing but fun and games for them. It was like reading comic books. They just weren't taken seriously.

We might say something similar concerning Plato's writings about Socrates. I doubt that anyone believed these stories about Socrates were anything other than Plato's own tales being put into the mouth of his hero and teacher. It might be true that Socrates said many of the things Plato wrote, but obviously Plato invented the bulk of the dialog that went with it. Of course no one could put down from memory long conversations that took place between people years earlier, so Plato had to invent most of the conversations and probably many of the settings and characters as well. Nobody minded this because this was the way stories were passed down in those days. They got the gist of things right more often than not, and that was all that was important. Virtually 90% of everything you'll ever read from ancient authors that involved real people was heavily embellished and fictionalized. In fact, if other of Socrates' peers hadn't also written about him, most of us today would probably think he never really existed at all and was just a character Plato invented from scratch.

CS Lewis said that part of what convinced him of the truth of Jesus was that the stories about him in the four biblical gospels read more like a person's diary, and at times even outright journalism. The writers seemed to just be reporting the facts of what they saw and heard. That doesn't mean there wasn't any sort of embellishing of those stories. They weren't written until decades after the Resurrection. I doubt very much if any of the early churchmen took the stories and all those long conversations, such as the sermon on the mount, as being told verbatim. Like Plato, the gospel writers probably had to invent some of the dialog. They obviously couldn't remember long conversations from decades gone by, and since no one's memory is perfect, this accounts for their versions of certain events all being at least slightly different. It's probably also true that later writers like Mathew and Luke took the earlier gospel of Mark/Peter for reference in their own writings. John's gospel is of course very different from the others. And it may be that some things in those gospels were simply made-up. This is especially true of Mathew's gospel. We don't know for sure. Did the virgin birth really happen? I've personally always doubted it. I think it's quite possible that Mathew and Luke both invented this to keep up with the Romans around them who had many heroes that were said to have been born of a union between a god and a mortal. Could it be that these writers were only human and caved in to peer pressure? After all, aside from Mathew and Luke, no other NT book makes mention of the virgin birth at all. My question is, does it matter? Can't we be happy and live the lives God wants us to live whether the virgin birth story is true or not? What possible effect could that have on my life? None that I can think of. But embellishments aside, the gospel stories mostly do not read like fiction. They mostly read like true stories about real people. You simply don't get the impression of "fiction" when you read them.

One of the more important discoveries that came from my reading ancient texts was how honest the Jewish writers seemed by comparison. I recall a guy named Peter that I mentioned this to one day, and I really think it was the biggest part of what made him re-evaluate his life and get back into the Christianity he had known as a boy. Pete was very interested in all things Egyptian. He had even been to Egypt a few times. He, like a lot of people, was convinced that the Egyptians were an advanced race just like those fables of Atlantis. I mentioned to him that the biblical writings seemed the most truthful of all ancient manuscripts to me because the bible actually told you all the bad things the Jews ever did right from the beginning. Adam and Eve messed up. Solomon built temples in the "high places". Cain killed Able. David and Bathsheba. Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. On and on. Kings and Chronicles will tell you not only the great achievements of Israel's kings, but they'll also tell you every little thing they did wrong. I've yet to come across any other ancient writings anywhere in the world that did that. I told Pete to go and read all the Egyptian priestly writings and then come back and tell me all the bad things the Egyptians did. He thought about that for a very long while and realized he obviously wouldn't come back with very much. There's simply nothing about them that seems realistic. And it's the same with their gods. Who on earth would read the stories about Horus, Osiris, or Isis and believe them to be anything but fiction? If you read those writings along with those from the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Akkadians and others, they read as though they had never lost a war and how all the peoples of the Earth were subject to them. We know they're dishonest because their neighbors wrote entirely different accounts about them (and the writings of all their neighbors matched). Where do other ancient texts tell you all the bad things they and their forefathers did? I've yet to come across such a book.

The Jewish writings were simply like nothing else on earth. That doesn't mean they're completely accurate or that God inspired them all. But where we find truth, we find at least a glimpse of the Divine, and you simply won't find that kind of honestly where people are actually self deprecating in any other ancient work. Homer and Virgil probably came closest, but it was seldom the actions of their own people they condemned. It was the actions of their gods!

At any rate, this has been one of the more effective arguments I've used for years when talking about Christianity to people. The self deprecating honesty of the Jews sets their writings apart from all other ancient peoples. I don't think anyone said it before me fifteen years ago, though someone certainly may have. But you're welcome to take this argument and make it your own just as several people already have.

The Power Of Servant-hood

2011-02-26T13:49:00.005-06:00

When I was young I used to love playing jazz. I was convinced there was some higher power in music you could magically tap into if you were in the right frame of mind. But when I got older I realized that you couldn't play your way out of a really bad mood. And I also came to know that music is mostly just numbers. It could bring a certain state of pleasantness to the mind, but it was merely a sense of beauty that's not so different from the same sense of beauty Einstein saw in a perfect equation built upon—you guessed it—numbers. Furthermore, I'm convinced that art in painting also draws upon this balance of numbers. Even in writing and storytelling there's a certain meter that's pleasant to the ear. Poets realized this thousands of years ago, and so they divided sentence structures into repeating rhythmic lines, so numbers is still a part of it all. Writing and storytelling can go considerably deeper than other art forms though because words can express thoughts in a more exacting detail. Not only can you paint a picture with words, you can tell what the picture means. I think that's why Christ came to Earth as a storyteller rather than a musician, a painter, or a sculptor. He wanted to make the best use of the limited amount of time he had to be here in the flesh. But as much as we like to read about the things he said, the stories he told, and the philosophies he conveyed, this was really something that only took up a small portion of his time. The vast majority of it was taken up with playing the role of a servant.

The bible tells over and over of how Jesus healed everyone that came to him. Can you imagine how much time that took to go to each person individually and heal them? And unlike most physicians today, he actually made quite a few house calls. When he wasn't healing the sick he was feeding the poor, making wine at weddings, calming storms, even playing with people's children. John says this in the very last sentence of his gospel: "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written." You'll notice he said that Jesus did many other things, not that he said many other things. That in fact, he did so many things that it would be impossible to tell about them all.

Something that's become quite popular today among Christians is meditation. They think that if they can just get into the right mode of consciousness that God will bless them for it and reveal all the secrets of the universe or some such thing. And for sure, there is something to be said for quieting the mind and allowing God to fill it. That may in fact be what the Sabbath is all about. But even so, the Sabbath comes but one day per week. Jesus spent time in prayer, and he spent time teaching and storytelling. But the vast majority of his time was spent in work. It was spent serving others day in and day out. He could have healed all the sick on the face of the Earth and fed all the poor with the wave of his hand. Instead he chose to take the hard road and make an example for us to follow in meeting people's needs individually by the sweat of his brow. I can envision Jesus on many hot summer afternoons refusing to leave a place until every one of the thousands who came to him had their needs met. I can see him drenched in sweat, knees aching, back hunched over till he looked like death, all out of love for others to the point of placing their needs before his own.

The bible tells us time and again that the only good religion is the one that defends the cause of the orphan, the widow, the poor etc. I don't care how well you know your bible, or how much time you spend in prayer or meditation. If you aren't sweating and aching in the service of others, you don't yet know Christ, and all your prayers and bible studies are futile.

Job 14

2011-02-21T12:28:00.002-06:00

Job 14
1 “Mortals, born of woman,
are of few days and full of trouble.
2 They spring up like flowers and wither away;
like fleeting shadows, they do not endure.
3 Do you fix your eye on them?
Will you bring them before you for judgment?
4 Who can bring what is pure from the impure?
No one!
5 A person’s days are determined;
you have decreed the number of his months
and have set limits he cannot exceed.
6 So look away from him and let him alone,
till he has put in his time like a hired laborer.

7 “At least there is hope for a tree:
If it is cut down, it will sprout again,
and its new shoots will not fail.
8 Its roots may grow old in the ground
and its stump die in the soil,
9 yet at the scent of water it will bud
and put forth shoots like a plant.
10 But a man dies and is laid low;
he breathes his last and is no more.
11 As the water of a lake dries up
or a riverbed becomes parched and dry,
12 so he lies down and does not rise;
till the heavens are no more, people will not awake
or be roused from their sleep.

13 “If only you would hide me in the grave
and conceal me till your anger has passed!
If only you would set me a time
and then remember me!
14 If someone dies, will they live again?
All the days of my hard service
I will wait for my renewal to come.
15 You will call and I will answer you;
you will long for the creature your hands have made.
16 Surely then you will count my steps
but not keep track of my sin.
17 My offenses will be sealed up in a bag;
you will cover over my sin.

18 “But as a mountain erodes and crumbles
and as a rock is moved from its place,
19 as water wears away stones
and torrents wash away the soil,
so you destroy a person’s hope.
20 You overpower them once for all, and they are gone;
you change their countenance and send them away.
21 If their children are honored, they do not know it;
if their offspring are brought low, they do not see it.
22 They feel but the pain of their own bodies
and mourn only for themselves.”

Is there anything more beautiful in all the books in all the world? The entire chapter of Job 14 is utterly perfect. "So look away from him and let him alone, till he has put in his time like a hired laborer." People are always praying for God's intervening into the affairs of mortals, but Job knew better. Miracles are rare. They're supposed to be. More often than not it feels as though God created the world and then walked away from it. Job felt it too. It's like when a kid leaves the nest and has to make his own way in the world. The parent has to let them go. That's what God did when he created the universe. He made it for us, and then let us go, knowing full well that we'd return to him one day. Maybe we demanded our freedom. But we had to experience material life with all the joys and all the pains that go with it if we were ever to be anything more than mere puppets.

You have to read Job with the same honesty he had when he said these things. One moment he's full of understanding. The next he's full of questions that almost end in despair. One moment he's certain of his place in the world. The next he feels abandoned: "Mortals, born of woman, are of few days and full of trouble." He's wiser and more honest than any man the world has ever known. Theologians, philosophers, and psychologists try to make God fit into their own life's context. Job will have none of this. Some questions were meant to go unanswered, and he knows it. But it doesn't stop the questioner from making his queries known. Life is certainty followed by uncertainty over and over in a never ending cycle till: "All the days of my hard service I will wait for my renewal to come." Job bottom lines it for us. Most people think life is about survival, first of the self, then of the human race as a whole. But that's not at all what life is for. Life is about work, but not in self survival. It's about finding joy in service to others and letting go of the self. The Christian life is antithetical to politics. Politics is about getting what you want, whereas the Christian has no self and instead says, "How may I serve you?" We had Jesus to teach us this. Job had to figure it out on his own. There was never a mortal like Job.

Holy Synchronicities

2011-02-16T22:37:00.003-06:00

One point I've been trying to drive home with people for nearly twenty years now is that God doesn't care what your opinions about him or the bible are. That's not what's meant when Christ talks about believing in him or having faith. Belief and opinion simply do not equate. He didn't say that if you believe he exists you can gain entrance to Heaven. When he uses terms like belief and faith, what he's always talking about is something along the lines of putting your hope and trust in him.

Well either someone's been listening to me, or what is more likely the case, God plants seeds in several people simultaneously for the sowing. I've always thought the latter to be true. That is, God plants certain notions and inclinations in people here and there the world over when he wants to make a point or bring about a change rather than relying on just one person to do it alone. Besides, if only one person was given the message it might swell his head and make him think he's special or better than others. God's too good a parent to set someone up for moral failure (except for on certain occasions when he's trying to teach us our shortcomings).

I'm finishing up on Orson Scott Card's Ender Quartet. Now there are some things I have a great aversion to in Card's writing style. He's a stream of consciousness writer, and that generally means (and certainly means in Card's case) an author constantly telling you exactly what his characters are thinking instead of allowing you the satisfaction of figuring it out yourself. But regardless of writing style, Card does make some potent points now and then, and in the final book of the series, Children Of The Mind, he writes the following:

"I certainly do too believe in God," said Ender, annoyed.

"Oh, you're willing to concede God's existence, but that's not what I meant. I mean believe in him the way a mother means it when she says to her son, I believe in you. She's not saying she believes that he exists—what is that worth?—she's saying she believes in his future, she trusts that he'll do all the good that is in him to do. She puts the future in his hands, that's how she believes in him. You don't believe in Christ that way Andrew, [Ender]. ... You aren't leaving anything up to God. You don't believe in him."

Card says it better than I ever did. This in fact is exactly why I've taken to writing fiction and is also the reason Christ taught short stories known as parables to his followers. You can set up situations between characters to express a moral truth in such a way as to make the reader see it more clearly, make it seep in more deeply. It's what writing's all about, expressing the things God places within you to others, and doing it with the best clarity and simplicity you can muster. Simplicity has been the key to what God's been trying to bring out of me as of late. Oddly, writers tend to think that filling pages with indecipherable terms and six syllable words will gain them respectability in their profession, but it seldom works out that way. We have a whole genre of literature called Literary Fiction which is devoted to exactly that, and the amount of memorable works that have come from that field are infinitesimal. It's all just lofty words with no heart in them more often than not. If you're expressing something from God, you should want as many people as possible to understand and learn from it, and that means clarity and simplicity. God will bless that.

And pay attention to those holy synchronicities when they crop up in your life. It usually means you're on the right track.

Could It Be? - CS Lewis

2011-01-27T09:20:00.011-06:00

I guess most people know that I've been searching for some film footage of CS Lewis for several years now. I know both in my heart and my head that it must exist for several reasons. The catch is that any such footage, while rare, would probably be fairly unexciting. If any is found, he would probably just be another face in a crowd at some event at Oxford or Cambridge. I've been mostly searching through various archival footage of "events", "commencement ceremonies", and "graduation ceremonies" at these schools. I think today I may have finally hit pay dirt. The above is a still I've taken from a ceremony at Oxford where various ally leaders from WWII (most notably General Eisenhower) were given honorary degrees. As near as I can tell, this film was made in 1945, or at least NATO's web page lists Eisenhower as having received such a degree that year:

Nato's Eisenhower Page

This still is from low resolution footage from an 8-minute film, but I ask you, does this not look like Lewis' round Irish mug? You'll notice from the collar that he's wearing an Oxford gown. I thought I'd post it here to get a few opinions first before I lay out the money to the film news agency who owns this for higher resolution footage where I'll be able to see his face much better.

To be honest, the more I view the footage, the less I think it's him. The man here seems to almost be a little too bald. His face comes up in the footage several times. There's an extremely good chance though that Lewis and JRR Tolkien both are in this crowd along with Lewis' brother Warnie (all were war vets). Even if they are not, it's fun for me to watch a ceremony where many of their peers and friends must be present, and to see how life was during this time at Oxford. It gives me the feeling of what it was like to almost be with him. You can watch it for yourself here at Pathe Films.

Here's another film Pathe has of the same event which mostly shows the people coming into the hall. It's also much shorter in length: Second Film

Setbacks? We Got Plenty

2011-01-09T20:24:00.007-06:00

I told my dad, just before he died, that I was working out again and trying to get back into the kind of shape I used to be in. I know that made him real happy because he was worried about my health among other things. I was a pretty dedicated power lifter for a number of years. When I quit lifting ten years ago I was 41 years old, 6'5" tall, weighed 260, and could dead lift and squat around 600 Lbs. Now I'm way over 300 and get out of breath just doing basic things around the house.

It was nice to be working out again. I was doing pretty darn good I thought. I had already dropped about twenty pounds... and then dad got sick. Going to the hospital and later the nursing home every night left little room for working out. I had something more important to do now.

Then after pop passed on I went through a nightmare with Citimortgage Company. The bank my dad had his home loan with was bought out by this company, and a worse company I have never come across. They have no local offices, and if you call them you'll have a very hard time getting anyone on the line who can speak proper English. (Yes, it's that bad). I was the executor of the will and my sister's name and mine both were on the deed to dad's house. I wanted her to have it. No one was contesting anything. But still, this world's worst excuse for a mortgage company insisted I go to court and pay hundreds of dollars to get a Letter of Office before they would allow me to make any changes to the deed. It was just absurd! Dad didn't owe much on the house, and my sister had enough with her share of the life insurance money to pay it off completely. I finally had to get a lawyer to handle things. Of course the first thing he said was that I shouldn't need a Letter of Office for putting the deed solely in my sister's name since we were both already on it, and I just wanted to take my name off. Once a lawyer got involved the mortgage company quickly gave in. Why didn't they relent without us having to pay a lawyer? It was just a matter of doing the right thing, something they had no intention of without a lawyer to threaten suit against them. Mortgage companies, usury, it's an evil road to travel.

Finally winter came, work slowed, the mortgage thing was settled, we were done with all the other normal things you have to do when there's a death in the family, all was well with the world, and I was ready to get going on this workout routine again. I cut myself down to 1,500 calories with less than a hundred grams of fat and a hundred of carbohydrates. I settled into a pretty grueling routine of two to three hours per day. An hour and a half of lifting weights and riding the stationary bike followed by an hour of climbing steps and maybe a little bit of clobbering the big bag. Things were going swell! Then I suddenly got hit with insomnia. I've never had it this bad. I went three nights in a row with a total of six hours sleep. The following day I started getting cold symptoms. And then it hit me hard! Man I don't know if I've ever had a cold that made me so run down. I couldn't move. Unfortunately I've found that old saying about feeding a cold and starving a fever to be correct. Your body will reject food if you have a fever. It will also crave carbs if you have a cold. That's just the way it works. If you have a cold and you want to get well, you have to eat.

So here I am hoping and praying that I haven't been knocked back to square one. I feel a bit better today. Perhaps the end of the bad times is in sight. I'm down, but still kicking. No one will care about this post. This one is just for me. It's just to remind myself of the best adage in the world: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going!"

Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, a night and a day I have spent in the deep. I have been on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers on the sea, dangers among false brethren; I have been in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.
~~ St. Paul

As Batman... ur... Fatman would say:

KA-POW!

ZONK!

SPLATT!

Three Rabbis

2010-12-29T19:23:00.004-06:00

This is an excerpt from Orson Scott Card's novel, Speaker for the Dead. It's a quote from an imaginary character in the story named San Angelo who started a Catholic Order centuries earlier. I thought it was good.

A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.)

The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. "Is there any man here," he says to them, "who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?"

They murmur and say, "We all know the desire, but Rabbi none of us has acted on it."

The Rabbi says, "Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong." He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, "Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant."

So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, "Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone."

The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. "Someday," they think, "I may be like this woman. And I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated."

As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head and throws it straight down with all his might it crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones.

"Nor am I without sins," he says to the people, "but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it."

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So of course, we killed him.

-San Angelo
Letters to an Incipient Heretic

The Final Transformation

2010-12-27T23:57:00.004-06:00

I've had a small mole beside my nose since I was born. At least it used to be small. It also used to be light in color and mostly unnoticeable. People even used to call it a beauty mark. A mole can make a face interesting if it's small and in the right place. Did someone say "Honey West?"

But during the past ten years that mole of mine got bigger and darkened in color. Instead of a beauty mark, it began to stick out like a witch's nose wart. I finally decided enough was enough and went to have it removed. No big deal right? I mean, it wasn't hurting or bleeding or anything. It was ugly, not cancerous. Any doctor/dermatologist could do the job in five minutes. I used to be in the VA health system until a few weeks ago when they told me I made too much money and promptly booted me out. Serves me right. I was a bad soldier. My soldiering was almost as bad as my singing. I haven't gotten any other health insurance yet. No health insurer would have paid for this anyway unless I lied and said the mole was hurting or something. But I figured, how much could it cost? It's not much worse than popping a zit. Sure enough, the doctor put a shot in to numb it (moles don't have much feeling anyway), cut it off, cauterized it, and bandaged it up. It took maybe five minutes. The bill—$200!!!!!!!!!!!

To say I was put out would be a great understatement. I asked why such a hefty fee. Would you believe his reply was, "It's cosmetic surgery." I said, "So is a haircut, except it takes considerably more time and talent to perform."

Doctors are as greedy as anybody else. Have you noticed that the more money people have, the more they want (and think they deserve)? Now I've always been a republican at heart, but this is exactly why we need a two party system. Many republicans are greedy, but many democrats are power hungry. Their faults are what actually allows them to keep each other in check.

We need a new kind of court system. One that allows you to take someone to task for their greed. I didn't pay just to have a mole removed. I made a greedy man's boat payment this month. This is exactly the point CS Lewis was making in his Reflections on the Psalms. Many of the Psalms are about the topic of justice. "Lord, these people have mistreated me. When will you bring them down low and exalt your faithful servant"? The Jews wholly believed that in this world, or some world to come, there would be a just account given for every action in this life. They were anxious to get what they felt was rightfully theirs, but they were also anxious to see sinners punished. But you'll notice that there were precious few prayers for their enemies.

That to me is the most striking aspect to reading the Old Testament. Forgiveness seems all but lost on the Jews. They're always anxious for God to forgive them, but where do they ask God to forgive their enemies? Where do they themselves forgive their enemies, especially those who are not Jews? You seldom run across such a passage. They had trouble just forgiving members of their own families.

When Jesus came into the world he brought about a true paradigm shift on the subject of justice. He implored us to temper justice with mercy. But forgiveness was better than either. I heard a friend talking on the phone to someone a while back saying that Christianity was all about forgiveness. Without forgiveness, justice and mercy go out the window. If we don't forgive, we won't be forgiven. And if we don't love others, God won't love us.

In Lewis' Till We Have Faces the character of Orual in many ways exemplified the Old Testament (the old paradigm) view of justice, while Fox, whom she called grandfather, saw the new paradigm coming into view.

Orual: "Are the gods not just?"
Fox: "Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?

Jonah slept through a storm because he had no conscience. Jesus slept through one because he did, and it was clear. Most people don't sleep nearly so well as either.

Till We Have Faces was about a young women's journey from childhood to adulthood, about her awakening from childhood selfishness to adult selflessness, and about learning to let go of anger while learning to love her enemies. She also learned to see herself for what she truly was and what she truly was becoming. She learned that her own heart was the most deceitful one of all and that with a deceitful heart comes a false face. And by the end she learned that in order to find her true face—the person she was meant to be—she had to seek the face of another, the face of a God.

Her story reads very much like the story of the Old Testament's transformation into the New. We find a different kind of man in the old one full of selfishness, envy, greed and violence and yet remarkably intent on getting an undeserved justice from God. But in the new we find a man humble, claiming to own nothing, giving all his excess to the poor, loving his enemies and wishing them the best, and perhaps most importantly we find him at peace while the world around him is in turmoil because his conscience is clear and beaming. And in the end we find the new man transformed yet again into a new body and a new world. It's not a new paradigm but a perfection of what began with Christ.

It's the final testament, but not the final story, for the best story has been saved for last, and only God knows its content. I often imagine it will be like that show "Stargate SG1" where we find these adventurous people stepping through a stargate for the first time, not knowing what they'll find on the other side. It must be very much like being born again. Personally, I can't wait. I like to say that the older I get, the better eternal rest sounds. But I'm only joking because I'm expecting eternal life—not rest. And it will happen. But this stargate will have a sign above it: NO MASKS ALLOWED.

Kubla Khan in Perelandra

2010-11-16T20:51:00.003-06:00

I wrote this in 2006 and posted it to my old blog. Since I've been consumed with work as of late and haven't had time to write much, I thought it might be nice to post this old article here.

CS Lewis was extremely fond of the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and often made mention in particular of his poem, Kubla Khan. In the afterward to the 3rd edition of The Pilgrim's Regress Lewis talks about mystical longing: "...that unnamable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire... the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan... or the noise of falling waves."

That "unnamable something" is of course what draws all the mystically curious to the writings of CS Lewis as well as to poems like Kubla Khan. I think (sadly) that few people take part at that table where sounds are felt, and curious smells produce imagery from the fringe—the borders of consciousness—where just on the other side of the wall lies the source of that unnamable object of desire that tries to sing out to us of its existence all of our lives. How very few listen for it at all.

Kubla Khan presents us with the imagery of forbidden lands from the other side of that wall. We find both the paradise of the pleasure dome and the deep mysterious icy cavern, "A savage place! as holy and enchanted". Holy in this case meaning just what it was intended to mean—set apart by the divine, apart from our present material existence and, for us, forbidden realms. But now and then there seem to be some people who are allowed a momentary glimpse into these realms. The poetry of Kubla Khan provides for us such a glimpse; Perelandra builds from it. But lets read Kubla Kahn before we venture any further here. It's a short poem:

Kubla Kahn by Samuel Taylor Coleridge-1798

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And `mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And `mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight `twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honeydew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Xanadu, originally known as Shangdu, was a real place, a sort of miniature city that housed the summer palace of Mongolian Emperor—Kubla Khan (sometimes written as Kublai Khan). It was only about 5 1/2 miles around, but Marko Polo described it as quite beautiful with palaces carved from marble and covered with gold. Other than the fact that the city existed and was quite exquisite the rest of the poem would seem to rest on poetic license. There are no caves or caverns nor rivers running through Xanadu. The river, Alph, mentioned in the poem is likely a variation on the Alpheus River of Greek mythology. So let us bear in mind that Coleridge probably made use of several old tales in fashioning his poem.

Lewis, it would seem, drew deeply from Coleridge's poem for the final four chapters in his novel—Perelandra. There are some striking similarities between the descriptions of the two worlds.

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

This one is obvious enough. In chapter 14 of Perelandra, Ransom is fighting at night in the ocean with the Unman and finds that he's being dragged way down deep until he's sure he can hold his breath no longer and will die. But just then he finds that they are on a beach. After managing to subdue his adversary, Ransom waits for what seems like an eternity for daylight to appear. It never does. Eventually his suspicions are roused. He stands up and walks along the sandy shoreline feeling upward with his hands until he touches rock. The realization sinks in that, during the struggle, he must have come up into a cavern of some sort from under the ocean. This underground shoreline is certainly "a sunless sea" for him. There is total darkness here. After following along the cavern wall, he meets up with a trickle of water which he hopes may come to a stream if he follows it, as he desperately trying to find his way to the outside world again. He gropes in the darkness for what must be days. The cavern opens up into a vast array of underground vaults which seem endless, "caverns measureless to man". Eventually he comes to a red glow that leads to a very hot area in the cavern, very deep, and it becomes evident that this leads down to something like a river of lava and a huge pit. It's hot, but at least now he can see a little. Ransom descries some strange things including beings that he can only see shadows of far off but which appear humanlike. He's in a chamber now that seems manmade, something like a cathedral with two huge thrones and chairs on either side of them that are much too big for any earth man. Ransom has said on a couple of occasions already in the story that he wonders, "Were all the things which appeared as mythology on earth scattered through other worlds as realities?" But he doesn't pretend to know if these are some sort of gods. A short time later he slips and falls into the rushing water, and soon he's cast out into a pool with the sun shining overhead. He's free. Looking back at the entrance to the subterranean world, he sees, "...a river pouring from the mouth of a cave, a cave that seemed indeed to be made of ice." Actually Lewis decides to make a change here and Ransom finds that it's not really ice after all, but rather, a transparent substance of some kind. However, it is interesting that Coleridge's Xanadu is described as, "A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!"

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

Now compare the above with Ransom coming from the cave, and, taking in his surroundings, he sees the river going down a long, steep slope, "in a series of cataracts... It went down a long way and ended in a winding and wooded valley which curled out of sight...", and likely back to the ocean from which he came. In his description, he also talks of huge mountains and hills, "of almost Himalayan height." An interesting choice of words. Not that Xanadu was in the Himalayas, but it was in China at any rate.

He goes on in his description of the mountains, woods, and valleys: "At his side rose a cliff mantled with streamers of bright vegetation, but gleaming like glass... at each pace his contact with soil and bush appeared to wake new odours that darted into his brain and there begot wild and enormous pleasures."

In Xanadu we find:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

And we also find aural sensations of a mystical nature in both worlds. In Perelandra, Ransom says that there were three lasting impressions on him of his journey beyond the cave and that one of them was, "the song... it floated through his sleep and was the first sound at every waking. It was formless as the song of a bird, yet it was not a bird's voice... rich and golden-brown: passionate too, but not with the passions of men." Ultimately, we learn that it's the song of a large dog-like creature as big as an elephant, a creature who's very existence was owed to its song. When Ransom hears the eldila (angels) speaking, he takes great pains to remind us that they are not creatures of flesh and blood, and as such, have no lips and vocal chords; their voices are of an entirely different nature, "like a chime of remote bells... It is by art, not nature, that they effect human ear-drums and their words owe nothing to lungs or lips." He also mentions the songlike sound of the streamer-trees.

In Kubla Khan sounds also play a big role:

And `mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

And also Kubla Khan presents us with the singing Abyssinian maid:

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight `twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

Perhaps this would be a good place to take a closer look at the structure of the poem and Coleridge's opening comments on it. Coleridge says of himself:

In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall." The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

"Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as were, given to him. [I shall sing a sweeter song today]: but the tomorrow is yet to come. As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease."

So it appears that the last fragment he refers to are the lines beginning with: "A damsel with a dulcimer", and we can probably assume he means that the rest of the poem was exactly as he remembered writing it during his dream-state. Incidentally, the "slight indisposition" he speaks of was actually a fairly severe case of rheumatism, and the "anodyne" prescribed was opium. This was really just about the only effective drug known to ease pain in those days. Some critics are of the assumption that his opium induced trance states shouldn't be taken seriously by the modern student of the metaphysical. I differ in opinion with those critics, and I believe Lewis did too. Coleridge meant no harm in taking the drug, and I find it's best not to limit the powers of the Divine by claiming that drugs effectively keep them at bay. If God be God, he can certainly do as he wishes during a man's drug induced state just as he can in his normal dream life. This is probably subject to the reasons for taking a drug. Coleridge probably didn't like taking it. It was simply something he had to do if he was to live at least a somewhat normal life.

In the final two lines of the last stanza Coleridge writes:

"For he on honeydew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise."

In Perelandra when Ransom first emerges from the cavern weak and hungry, he finds that within arm's reach are clusters of something like grapes. He lays beside the pool eating and sleeping for quite some time until he recovers from his injuries and fatigue. It may have been as long as three weeks he tells us. Lewis also says, "Indeed it was a second infancy: in which he was breast-fed by the planet Venus herself...." And of course Perelandra was a new Paradisiacal Garden of Eden. Honeydew by the way is a sticky material found on certain plants and was often referred to as the food of fairies. Lewis also writes, "Much that his fingers touched was gummy...".

Coleridge mentions reading, "Purchas's Pilgrimage". He's referring to the book, Purchas his Pilgrimage. Besides Marko Polo, Purchas also mentions seeing Xanadu. It is Purchas who mentions "streams" and "springs" within its walls. When Coleridge writes of an "Abyssinian maid... Singing of Mount Abora" he is probably making reference to a hill in Ethiopia called Amara. (Ethiopia used to be called Abyssinia). Purchas also wrote of this sacred hill:

"Heauen and Earth, Nature and Industrie, have all been corriuals to it, all presenting their best presents, to make it of this so louely presence, some taking this for the place of our Forefathers Paradise." The sides of the hill are of overhanging rock, "bearing out like mushromes, so that it is impossible to ascend it" except by a passageway "cut out within the Rocke, not with staires, but ascending little by little," and closed above and below with gates guarded by soldiers. "Toward the South" of the level top "is a rising hill ... yeelding ... a pleasant spring which passeth through all that Plaine ... and making a Lake, whence issueth a River, which having from these tops espied Nilus, never leaves seeking to find him, whom he cannot leave both to seeke and to finde.... There are no Cities on the top, but palaces, standing by themselves ... spacious, sumptuous, and beautifull, where the Princes of the Royall blood have their abode with their families." [Quote taken from Frederick H. Sykes]

It's likely that Lewis also read of Purchas' journeys and got some of his ideas directly from it as well as from other old tales about lost regions of paradise (especially the realm of Prester John of which much has been written; it held a particular fascination for his friend Charles Williams).

One could easily write a book twice the size of Perelandra in trying to describe all the small details Lewis encompassed in the making of the novel. Having no wish to do so, this is where I will end.

My New Blog

2010-10-17T00:25:00.003-05:00

I've started a new blog that's just about anything and everything. Basically it's just a place to cut loose a bit and talk about whatever's on my mind from the latest computer gadgets to last night's basketball game.

http://yahoobuckaroo.blogspot.com/

The Big Blue Castle

2010-10-16T20:13:00.010-05:00

Stephen Hawking made some big waves last month upon the release of his latest book: The Grand Design. You've probably heard about it already, but indulge me. For the record, I haven't read the book yet and have only browsed the internet for quotes from it.

In The Grand Design Professor Hawking syllogizes (his hypothesis is based on both M-Theory and the Big Bang Theory) an argument for a self-creating universe. You may have heard lately that Hawking has stated that the universe was not made by God. Well he hasn't actually said this. He does, however, come very close to it. This seems to stem from an article in last month's Wall Street Journal where they printed an excerpt from the book. The excerpt was titled: "Why God Did Not Create the Universe (There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world—no gods required)." Then below this it says: "By STEPHEN HAWKING And LEONARD MLODINOW." This makes it appear as though Hawking and his physicist writing partner had written the excerpt and the title of it. Obviously a guy like Hawking does not send in articles to publications like the WSJ. Of course the excerpt title was given by a staff member there.

But Hawking does say something very disturbing: "As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist."

That sure sounds like an atheist talking to me. This genius professor has never professed a belief in any kind of God, but in his past books he always seemed open to the possibility of a mind in the mix of things. What happened? Hawking is now 68 years old. With Lou Gehrig Disease, it's amazing he's lived this long. He's made some amazing discoveries throughout his career. It seems to me, however, that he's losing his perspective on what science is actually capable of achieving.

For instance, he says, "According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing."

Really? Out of nothing? Undoubtedly he's knowledgeable about primordial matter—that small bit of stuff which has always existed and from which our universe sprang. The only thing that comes from nothing is nothing. Something had to have always been here. According to Big Bang Theory, in the beginning the universe was a very tiny place indeed. There was not in it the four forces of energy we know so well today, but instead one super-force. Was there matter? We have to remember that all energy has matter, and all matter has energy. It's very much like the way a particle can also be a wave. Therefore we have to think of this super-energy as being matter also, but not yet in a material state so to speak. The super-energy would remain in an energy state for a an unknown period of time before it changed into matter, so we should probably think of it more as potential matter. At the very least we can say that the energy has always been here. Energy is not "nothing." But I am certainly not telling you anything Mr. Hawking does not know himself and know better than I, so why he states that universes were created out of nothing is curious. He even mentions primordial elements (what that energy turned into) at one point in the book and goes on to list many of the things that had to have taken place to the nth degree for a place like Earth to exist where life can thrive.

The tale of how the primordial universe of hydrogen, helium and a bit of lithium evolved to a universe harboring at least one world with intelligent life like us is a tale of many chapters. The forces of nature had to be such that heavier elements—especially carbon—could be produced from the primordial elements, and remain stable for at least billions of years. Those heavy elements were formed in the furnaces we call stars, so the forces first had to allow stars and galaxies to form. Those in turn grew from the seeds of tiny inhomogeneities in the early universe.

Even all that is not enough: The dynamics of the stars had to be such that some would eventually explode, precisely in a way that could disperse the heavier elements through space. In addition, the laws of nature had to dictate that those remnants could recondense into a new generation of stars, these surrounded by planets incorporating the newly formed heavy elements.

By examining the model universes we generate when the theories of physics are altered in certain ways, one can study the effect of changes to physical law in a methodical manner. Such calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5% in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4% in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it. Also, most of the fundamental constants appearing in our theories appear fine-tuned in the sense that if they were altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different, and in many cases unsuitable for the development of life. For example, if protons were 0.2% heavier, they would decay into neutrons, destabilizing atoms.

If one assumes that a few hundred million years in stable orbit is necessary for planetary life to evolve, the number of space dimensions is also fixed by our existence. That is because, according to the laws of gravity, it is only in three dimensions that stable elliptical orbits are possible. In any but three dimensions even a small disturbance, such as that produced by the pull of the other planets, would send a planet off its circular orbit, and cause it to spiral either into or away from the sun.

The emergence of the complex structures capable of supporting intelligent observers seems to be very fragile. The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned. What can we make of these coincidences? Luck in the precise form and nature of fundamental physical law is a different kind of luck from the luck we find in environmental factors. It raises the natural question of why it is that way.

Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God.

In reality he hasn't even begun to list all the things that had to happen for us to be here. That life exists anywhere is a miracle beyond any proportion the mind can conceive. There are billions of biological evolutionary steps that had to happen and happen in just the right way at just the right time, all while the cosmological setting of our planet maintained a near perfect orbit for billions of years in just the right conditions. Professor Andrew Watson from the University of East Anglia, a mathematician, says:

If we learned the planet would be habitable for a set period and that we had evolved early in this period, then even with a sample of one, we’d suspect that evolution from simple to complex and intelligent life was quite likely to occur. By contrast, we now believe that we evolved late in the habitable period, and this suggests that our evolution is rather unlikely. In fact, the timing of events is consistent with it being very rare indeed. ... Complex life is separated from the simplest life forms by several very unlikely steps and therefore will be much less common. Intelligence is one step further, so it is much less common still....

He goes on to say that the probability of each step occurring at all is less than 10% and that the probability of intelligent life occurring is less than .01% over 4-billion years. Also, each step must happen in a precise order, and this is even less likely.

Professor Hawking invokes the atheist magic dust of infinity to account for all this. M-theory predicts nearly an infinite number of universes to have coincided with the Big Bang. He believes that with an infinite number of universes anything and everything will eventually happen—possibly more than once. Some people actually believe that infinity could eventually produce an exact duplicate of Earth somewhere in some world—perhaps many copies with doppelgangers of each one of us.

Now I ask you, if you were to roll one die, what are the chances of that die coming up on a number you predict? One in six of course. And the chances of two dice coming up on the same number is much greater than that. If you had a trillion dice, what do you think the chances are of every one of them coming up on the same number? It will likely never happen did you say? Every time you add more dice your odds get worse—not better. The number of particles that had to be aligned just so in such a way to get an Earth and intelligent life on it is immeasurable. It might as well be an infinite number. To think this would ever happen again is the stuff of such madness that only a conspiracy theorist of the highest order would entertain such a notion. I've heard similar imaginative ramblings from professors who claimed that if you tossed a box of sand in the air enough times, the grains would eventually land on the floor in a perfect outline of the Mona Lisa along with every other piece of art ever created. The fact is that this has been attempted several times with computer generated random graphics, and not once has it ever exactly duplicated any recognizable artwork.

Here's something else to consider. I mentioned before a trillion dice all coming up on the same number as probably being impossible even given an infinite length of time. Let's say they all had to come up with the number-3. That atheist magic dust of infinity also works the other way. If you want to say that anything is possible given an infinite amount of time, then it's just as possible that a trillion dice could all land on the number-4 every time you threw them till the end of time... (Wonderful how a tiny ellipsis can represent something as large as infinity isn't it)?

I'll tell you how I view this world of ours. Suppose you had a bush pilot fly you to a remote part of Alaska that wasn't on any map. Someplace where there exist mountains, valleys, and lakes that no man has ever seen or set foot on. And after hiking through this barren landscape for several weeks you climb to the top of a mountain and find there a large blue castle luxuriously furnished with all the requisites for life—a refrigerator full of food, running water, a bed and chair that seemed tailor-made for you, a furnace to keep you warm, a thermostat set at the exact temperature your body desires, electric lights along with a hydro powered generator outside perfectly placed by a waterfall to keep them on, and every other modern convenience you could ever desire. If it's a matter of odds, which would seem more likely to you: that this big blue castle and everything in it "just happened" to be produced by mere chance? or that someone created it?

My Life as a Quitter

2010-09-26T00:27:00.003-05:00

I don't know what's wrong with me. I really don't. I've passed up so many opportunities to really do something with my life. My parents discouraged me from going to college, and it'd hard to blame them. They really couldn't afford to send me, and my grades sure weren't good enough for a scholarship. I never brought home a book during high school. Actually, I hated school and hated studying, but I somehow had it in my head that I would do well in college despite my track record for being lazy with the books and not sticking with things. I didn't recognize it for what it was then. I just knew I had a kind of restlessness in me that wouldn't allow me to focus on anything long enough to get good at it or take it seriously. I also had a prideful streak. I was a darn good basketball player for instance, but when we moved to a new town and I had to transfer schools after my sophomore year, I decided I didn't like the new coach and would just be a walk-on in college. Of course college never happened really. (I did eventually get a year in). I went into the Army instead and was basically a washout there too. That is, I didn't even finish my first hitch once I was offered an early out. Also, my second day at boot-camp, myself and one other recruit, were pulled out of the lineup and taken to a room where we were both offered the chance to go to West Point because our entrance scores were pretty good. Here I finally had my chance to go to college, and I promptly turned it down!, saying I had already had enough of the Army. All I did was complain the whole time I was in too. And there were other missed opportunities. Lots of them.

My sister and I were going through some old books our parents had after they died. In one of two big family bibles I found the following pictures. I drew them when I was only about five or six years old, and I think anyone would admit these are pretty accurate drawings for someone so young. And no, I didn't trace them either. Most of these cartoons were on a lunchbox and thermos I had. I just sat in front of them and drew what I saw. The Popeye drawing comes from a punching bag I had. Part of the reason it looks a little out of kilter compared to the others is because I had to try to follow around the curve of the bag,

and also because I wasn't very good yet at up-sizing and down-sizing pictures, so trying to make this big print on the punching bag fit onto a small piece of drawing paper was quite challenging for me as a child. However, I soon managed to draw this Popeye picture from memory. I recall all the kids in my 1st grade class hovering around my desk waiting for me to finish a drawing of Popeye for each of them.

Many people, especially teachers and an artist from our church, constantly told my parents to get me into an art school. I'll tell you what happened though. When I was in the 5th grade I met a kid who was better then me. He already knew all about shading and other things no one had taught me.

I didn't realize at the time that someone had taught him these things. I just figured he was naturally a lot better or smarter than me, and I didn't want to do something unless I could be the best at it, so I basically quit drawing after that. That was my life in nutshell until I was in my late thirties. I seldom finished things, and would quit anything art related if I thought someone was better than me. I guess the latter was a pride thing. I wanted to make my mark in the world. It's hard to do that when other people's marks are so much bigger than yours.

What turned me around? God and Christianity did. CS Lewis once said that Christianity was an education in itself, and that it's what permitted a guy like John Bunyan to change the world with just one book despite his lack of formal education. I think this must be true. I had read the bible all my life, but had never really studied the thoughts of other people about God and the world. I had plenty of my own thoughts about the cosmos, because I had been a slacker and had little else to do but daydream and think about life. I figured no one else thought like I did about things. Then I read Mere Christianity and found someone who had all my thoughts. More than that, Lewis knew of lots of other people who had had those same thoughts long before either of us did. He had studied the philosophy of mankind through the ages and the mythology that inspired so much of it. Before long, reading philosophy became a passion for me too, especially theology and thoughts in general from Christian thinkers. I learned things from them, but it was mostly this confirmation of my own thoughts I was after, and I found it in spades. There was something about studying spirituality on a deeper lever that turned my whole life around although I couldn't tell you how it happened. All I knew was that when I emerged a few years later on the other side, I was suddenly a better man. I could stick to projects and get things done. I've recorded several CDs, written a book, made a movie etc. None of these are great art by anyone's measure, but just the fact that I was able to get them done seems a minor miracle considering how useless I was before. I guess that's the bottom line in a Christian self-education. It takes useless people and makes them useful. They used to call Christian hippies Jesus Freaks, but those same people would reply, "God doesn't make freaks out of people; he makes people out of freaks."

I always knew I would have to be an autodidact if I was going to learn anything in life. I don't like formal education. I enjoy learning what I want to learn on my own. But it took Christianity to give me the tools to do it right. I'm fifty-one now, but I'd like to think I'm actually gaining steam, and the best is yet to come.

Fray José de Guadalupe Mojica

2010-09-10T18:51:00.004-05:00

When I was about five years old I was playing in the woods near my house when I found some old broken records sticking out of the dirt. They looked like they had been there for years. They were also about a quarter of an inch thick--much thicker than other records, and I had never seen anything like them before. I eventually discovered that these were Edison diamond discs and could only be played back on a diamond disc player.

Ever since then I've wanted an old Edison Diamond Disc Phonograph. When I saw one on Craigslist this week for only $150, I jumped on it, figuring I'd never see one that cheap again.

The guy I bought it from also gave me one diamond disc record to go with it. Now I'm not one of those people who believes there are no coincidences and that every single event in my life is orchestrated by God. For one thing, a life that's nothing more than a written script would be very little fun for God or me either one. When someone ties their dog to the back of a bumper and accidentally drives off later, dragging the dog to his death, I don't think God's behind that. That person simply made a mistake. Accidents happen. Tornadoes kill people. Old folks fall and break their hips. There's plenty of happenstance in the world. But there are also times when God intervenes and puts you on a particular path for a particular reason, and it's important to be able to discern between the two. And now, as I listened to the voice coming through the speaker I began to feel that God put this recording in front of me for a reason. The recording was made by someone I had never heard of. His name was Jose Mojica. I began to research him, and was very glad I did.

Jose was born in Mexico in 1896. As a young teenager he was already tall and strong. He ran with a tough crowd and eventually joined Francesco Madera's group of revolutionaries that ousted Porfirio Diaz from power during the Mexican Revolution. It was also about this time that Jose discovered he had a real talent for singing opera. Overnight he was able to bring his family out of poverty and became a sensation both in Mexico and abroad. But this was just the beginning. While on a trip to Mexico, Enrico Caruso took in an opera in which Jose was appearing. He was so taken with the young singer that he had him brought over to his table. They quickly became friends for what was left of Caruso's short life, and Caruso, unbeknownst to Mojica, recommended him to the producer of the Ravinia Festival in Chicago in 1919. Jose would remain there for the next nine years singing with the Chicago Opera. It was during this time that Thomas Edison signed him to sing for Edison Records after having no luck finding any good Italian tenors.

Before long Mojica's talents and good looks also came to the attention of movie producers, and in 1930 he made his only American movie called "One Last Kiss" in which he played a sort of Zorro-like singing cowboy. He made several other films in America aimed primarily at a Mexican audience, and afterwards he would go back to Mexico and become a regular big screen attraction there where he was known as the Mexican version of Valentino.

But he also, for some unexplainable reason, would very often find himself playing religious roles in films even though he was not a particularly religious person like his mother. In fact, Jose was always in search of a good time, and more often than not he found it. He always had an eye for the ladies, and the ladies sure had an eye for him.

He had several friends in both the opera and movie industries. People like John Wayne, John Ford, and Gary Cooper often would visit at his sprawling Mexican estate. He would later give this estate to his mother as a gift.

He never knew his father, and like a lot of young boys in that situation, he grew-up being very close to his mother. After her death in 1942 his life would take a staggering turn. Before she died, she asked him to give his life to the church. This was the one woman in his life he found hard to refuse. But another would soon enter. He was working in America at the time, all the while deep in grief and depression, when he suddenly had a vision of St. Theresa of Avila who outright commanded him to follow the path of Christ. Now he was certain of what he had to do.

At the age of 46, he gave away all his possessions, most of it to the church, and started a new career. He boarded a plane for Peru with nothing but $35 in his pocket, and joined the Franciscan order as a monk and was given the name of Fray José de Guadalupe Mojica. Within five years he would attain priesthood.

After becoming a full-fledged priest, the church decided they would use his talents rather than put them to waste, and he began singing at many fundraiser events while also doing missionary work. He eventually worked in three more films over the next twenty years, always playing himself as a priest, with the proceeds going to the church.

He wrote two of these films including one which was based on his big selling 1958 autobiography I, a Sinner which he wrote to earn funds for the rebuilding of a school which had fallen from an earthquake. During the mid 1950s he counseled another great Mexican movie star, Humberto Almazan, advising him to also follow the gospels, turn his back on the bright lights, and give away all his possessions, which he did, and today Father Almazan's story is equally inspiring.

In 1969, Jose was given a tribute by the National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City. He was beginning to go deaf, and it was one of the last events at which anyone would ever hear him sing. Soon after he returned to Peru where he spent his final years in retirement among fellow monks.

He died in 1974 of heart problems, and oddly, like Thomas Edison who had given him his start in recording, he was nearly completely deaf but as content as a man can be in this world. It's been said that Edison liked Mojica's voice so much that he played his records every night before going to bed even though he was so deaf that he had to actually bite down on the record console so the vibrations from the record would travel through his teeth and make their way to his inner ear.

For a hundred and fifty bucks I got more than a record machine; I got an education.

Closer To Truth

2010-08-30T00:24:00.002-05:00

This is probably the most thought provoking video website on the internet. They have all the episodes that the "Closer To Truth" TV Show has ever done. I don't think there are many stations in America that carry the show, so it's good to see it on the web. It features interviews with scientists and philosophers talking about God and the universe. Some of you may be surprised how many scientists are either believers or are at least open-minded about the God question. Actually according to most poles the majority of scientists in the world believe in a higher power.

Closer To Truth

The Other History Of The Jews

2010-08-01T22:43:00.008-05:00

I've only read bits and parts of the works of Josephus until now. I already knew there were several things in his Jewish Antiquities which were slightly different from the history of the Jews as given in the biblical books, and that there were some details which were exceedingly different. Historians, however, probably turn to Josephus more often than not for the stories he gives that are nowhere to be found in any bible or any other piece of writing. Now there are other Jewish writings such as the Talmud which also give a somewhat different version of biblical writings here and there, but those works generally deal with a very different kind of information centered almost exclusively on religious rituals and the spiritual life rather than a historical outline of a nation.

At any rate, I've finally decided to read all, or most of Josephus' Antiquities although I'll probably skim less interesting parts, and I'll not read much of his other volume on the Jewish War with Rome. I thought I would share some observations that might wet your appetite to read Josephus yourself.

He begins much as the bible does, with the creation, followed by stories about Adam, Eve, and their children. He then moves on to Babel, the flood, and the patriarchs etc. The Gospel of Luke starts out with the author sounding as though he intends to write a more accurate history of Christ than some of the other writings about him which had already surfaced (whether he is referring to Mathew, Mark or apocryphal gospels is unknown, and of course John's Gospel hadn't been written yet). Luke states this in quite diplomatic tones however. But Josephus is not nearly so subtle. He starts by saying, "...I intend to refute those whose writings were falsifying the truth...."

In his retelling of the tempter in the Garden he mentions a tree of wisdom (knowledge?) which Adam and Eve were not to touch, but he says nothing about a tree of life. One of the more astounding claims he makes here is, "At that time, all living creatures spoke a common language, and a serpent maliciously lured the woman into tasting of the tree of wisdom..." So he believes that every animal, bird, fish etc. spoke and communicated. How fish were able to speak underwater is difficult to comprehend. And how larger creatures such as men or horses were able to hear the tiny voices of lice, dust mites, and fleas is beyond understanding.

His take on the story of Cain and Abel is that Cain was "depraved and greedy". He goes on to say that God preferred Abel's offering because it was "produced by nature, not human ingenuity." This is interesting because the bible doesn't tell us why God preferred Abel's offering. There's also the fact that God does in many instances seem to have little use for the human capacity in using our intellects while building things. Many times the Jews were told to build objects like altars without the use of tools, as though a tool would defile the rocks or wood. I realize the tree of knowledge was symbolic of something by which mankind tapped into imagination, but I've often wondered if our use of imagination in order to make tools, smelt metals, and build things was something God was angry about. In fact, the book of Enoch says that it was some of the fallen angels who taught men the use of the first tools, medicines, sorcery, astrology and so on. Later God appears to have relented and even gave specific instructions on building-projects. Josephus also says this about Cain: "Indulging in every form of vice and violence, he grew rich and ended the simple life by inventing weights and measures." We can come up with all kinds of scenarios concerning Cain having inventing weights and measures (something not mentioned in Genesis) and how he might have cheated people (think of the butcher's thumb on the scale) to get rich by them; however, it's Josephus' line about how Cain "ended the simple life" that's more interesting to me. I think Josephus believed that eating from the tree of wisdom/knowledge was the beginning of the end of a more simple kind of existence mankind was originally meant for--probably not so different from the Neanderthal who ate what he could find and lived wherever he found shelter in his natural surroundings. If Josephus was right, it must make us wonder why God would bother to make man such an uninteresting creature in the beginning?

Josephus says of Seth's descendants, that they, "...discovered the science of astronomy. To prevent their findings from perishing in the destruction by fire and deluge predicted by Adam, they inscribed them on two pillars, one of brick and the other of stone. The latter exists to this day in the land of Seiris."

If those two pillars ever actually existed, no one else seems to have written about them or knew where they were. We have no ancient records of Adam having predicted the flood or another kind of destruction by fire. Josephus often mentions and quotes historians from other nations and equates them with certain old testament writings. It may be that he believed something another historian wrote about a man predicting a deluge and a fire was actually about Adam and incorporated that into his own Antiquities. He also quotes from questionable sources from time to time. For instance, he makes mention of some writings by the Chaldean historian, Berosus, where the famous historian supposedly talks about the location of the ark, but many of the works attributed to Berosus are thought to be later forgeries. Josephus also says (as do other ancient historians in regards to the flood) that there were other people besides Noah's family that survived by fleeing to the mountains.

I've barely scratched the surface concerning Josephus' work. Even though his writing isn't always trustworthy, he'll give you things to think about, and in the process, you may find yourself with a whole new perspective on biblical figures such as Abraham and Moses, both of whom he makes out to be very smart and brave military men rather than just the humble prophets most of us generally think of them as being. (He confirms, or perhaps just borrows, what the earlier Jewish historian, Artapanus, said about Moses leading an Egyptian military campaign well before the Exodus in which the Ethiopians were defeated). If you can read his works with an open mind, neither believing too much nor too little, (and how rare those individuals are) you may find yourself making connections within ancient legends that will change your outlook on the history of both the Jews and the peoples of the Mesopotamia Valley.

My Dad

2010-07-25T08:44:00.006-05:00

The nursing home my dad has been recuperating in temporarily just called saying they couldn't wake him up this morning and that they're sending him to the hospital. He's been sleeping almost constantly for two days and has lots of things wrong with him. Maybe it's just his time to go. But if he's going to live I want him to live well and not be sick. Prayers are appreciated.

Update: Dad died about an hour or two after I left this post. Thanks for your concern and your prayers. This is one of the last photos taken of him. He was teaching at his little Assembly of God Church, the same one I grew-up in.

Initiations of Myth

2010-07-04T19:50:00.010-05:00

It's often been said that real mythology died out with the Norse sagas. The people who say this assume that science now provides us with the answers to our origins and the origins of all things, and that if science can't yet answer all our questions, just give science time. Statements like these make me think that real wisdom died with the ancient Greeks because Plato would have been very amused at such assumptions. And it wasn't as though science didn't exist in Plato's time. They were already working with very advanced concepts in geometry. Eratosthenes had actually managed to calculate the Earth's circumference by the 3rd century BC to within 15% accuracy. Aristotle probably knew more about zoology (a science he practically invented) than any man who ever lived. Earth science, biology, and botany all had their start in ancient Greece. But those Greeks were smart enough to know that science always introduces more questions than it answers. Plato would have told us that the world would always be in need of fresh myths.

Myths vaguely explain the unexplainable in wispy, shadowy terms like dream symbolism. God sends us these myths through various means. They can come by way of imagination, meditational states, dreaming, real life strings of coincidences where it seems the world is trying to tell you something, or through the observance of animals and nature.

A few years ago I was watching the 70s sci-fi movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, certainly one of the very best films ever made about alien encounters with man. As I was watching, I came to two realizations. One is that our generation's stories about space aliens are a new kind of mythology. There are a few tales here and there about visitors from space found among ancient legends but certainly not anywhere near the level our age has produced. Whether there really are intelligent non-spiritual life forms (beings composed of matter like us rather than ghostly types of beings) outside of Earth I wouldn't venture to guess. But there have been so many tales of encounters with space aliens that even if these tales come only by way of trance states, dreams, or imagination we still have to wonder what these stories are trying to tell us. Even if people are just tapping into the world of imagination, that world is ruled by God too. We have to consider that he may be sending us a new myth. We should ask ourselves, what is the purpose of this new myth? While I do believe the many, many stories of space aliens and UFO encounters are a kind of new mythology for our age, I have yet to discover its deepest meanings.

The other realization I came to while watching the movie was the way myths come to us in this hazy sort of state. In the story, certain people around the world were having visionary experiences that were very undefined. They would see an object shaped a certain way, kind of like a small mound, and it would remind them of something, but they couldn't quite figure out what that something was. A man would be shaving and look down at the mound shape of cream in his hand before putting it on his face and realize it meant something. A person might be eating mashed potatoes and instinctively push them together to form a mound shape without knowing why. Another person might be driving by a haystack and have that same vague recollection of something. People started trying to better define what this something was. They would try to draw it over and over or make clay models etc. Some of them eventually managed to get a form that satisfied them. They all created the exact same shape that looked just like Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, which ended up being the place where the space aliens landed.

I think this is very much the way God introduces myths to mankind. These symbols may come through dreams, real-life experiences, or any number of other ways. We should be on our guard when we notice many individuals all encountering the same manifestations of what may or may not be imagination, but which seem more symbolic than anything. They will generally be something that gives you a vague sense of having come from another world. As fortune would have it, I just finished rereading Arthur C Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey last week and started on CS Lewis' The Magician's Nephew a few days ago. They both contain passages that to me convey the same mythical message even though the two storylines are quite different.

From Clarke's story:

David Bowman, an astronaut, is flying in a space pod toward a mysterious object. It's a giant monolith nearly a mile high resting on Saturn's moon--Japetus. He tries to land on it and instead feels himself sinking into it. As he does so he can see that inside this slab of darkness there are innumerable stars. Time begins to slow down as well. It says, "The seconds themselves were passing with incredible slowness, as if time itself were coming to a stop. At last, the tenth-of-a-second counter froze between 5 and 6." Eventually he comes out into another world. Whether it's merely another part of our universe or another universe altogether he can't say for sure:

He was emerging from the tunnel. ... At the same time, he felt that he was moving upward.... But even before the space pod soared out into the open he knew that this place had nothing to do with Japetus, or with any world within the experience of man. ... He must be above a world of enormous size--perhaps one much larger than Earth. Yet despite its extent, all the surface that Bowman could see was tessellated into obviously artificial patterns that must have been miles on a side. It was like the jigsaw puzzle of a giant that played with planets; and at the centers of many of those squares and triangles and polygons were gaping black shafts--twins of the chasm from which he had just emerged. ...in a flash of insight that might have been wholly spurious, he knew what this thing must surely be. It was some kind of cosmic switching device, routing the traffic of the stars through unimaginable dimensions of space and time. He was passing through a Grand Central Station of the galaxy.

So imagine an artificial planet that has upon its surface thousands of giant domino-shaped monoliths, each of them routing you to a different world or a different part of our world. We're never really made clear on that. At the book's end we certainly find David Bowman living in a totally different kind of existence, yet he can still find his way back to Earth anytime he desires. He's living in a very strange form of non-material existence now.

From CS Lewis story:

Two children, Digory and Polly, have found that all the houses on their street are connected together with no space between them. There's a passageway in the attics, a small space close to the roofline that will allow you to crawl from house to house. Climbing through it, they accidentally come out into Digory's house but in the upper room where his uncle lives. The uncle is a typical freemason magician wannabe who thinks he knows things that he doesn't. He does, however, have in his possession a set of rings that will bring you to and from another world. Both children put on the yellow rings and end up in something like a small pool, but you can breath in this pool and you don't get wet. It comes up into a wooded area that appears to be another kind of reality that's very dreamlike and is described as a place where nothing ever happens:

The pool he [Digory] had just got out of was not the only pool. There were dozens of others--a pool every few yards as far as his eyes could reach. ... This wood was very much alive.
...

"What's the matter?" said Polly.

"I've just had a really wonderful idea," said Digory. " What
are all the other pools?"

"How do you mean?"

"Why, if we can get back to our own world by jumping into this pool, mightn't we get somewhere else by jumping into one of the others? Supposing there was a world at the bottom of every pool."
...

"You mean, this wood might be only one of them?"

"No, I don't believe this wood is a world at all. I think it's just a sort of in-between place." ... Think of our tunnel under the slates at home. It isn't a room in any of the houses. In a way, it isn't really part of any of the houses. But once you're in the tunnel you can go along it and come out into any of the houses in the row. Mightn't this wood be the same?--a place that isn't in any of the worlds, but once you've found that place you can get into them all." ... "And of course that explains everything," he said. "That's why it is so quiet and sleepy here. Nothing ever happens here. like at home. It's in the houses that people talk, and do things, and have meals. Nothing goes on in the in-between places....

"The wood between the worlds," said Polly dreamily. "It sounds rather nice."

Lewis says a little later: "It seems to be always the same time in the Wood between the Worlds." So, like in Clarke's story, this sort of switching station is a place of no-time.

Now in the case of the Lewis story it seems rather obvious that he's giving a short lecture on the out-of-body experience taking you to another world and the trancelike sleep state you need to attain that kind of journey. However, he also makes it clear throughout the Narnia tales that you should never try to enter these worlds on your own, but rather, you should wait to be drawn in by Aslan if you're to go at all. He's obviously read his MacDonald.

The Clarke story is of course a little different, yet at the same time we have here two tales expressing doorways into new worlds and the unknown. We also find in both Clarke's novel and the Narnia tales a new world that's coming into view which will change our current world. A new heavens and earth so to speak. And it is in these other worlds that we find the beings (either God or godlike) who truly run our own world and bring it into being.

How did these two authors end up writing stories about trips to other worlds through holes in reality in much the same way? I really don't think Clarke borrowed from Lewis on this (although they did correspond from time to time). And they aren't the only ones. For instance, there is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called "The Library of Babel" which is about a cosmic library that represents the universe, which in turn represents not only multidimensional space and time, but the building blocks of reality on every level:

The universe (which others call the library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below--one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides.... One of the hexagon's free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first--identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. ... Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. ... (Mystics claim that their secret ecstasies reveal to them a circular chamber containing an enormous circular book with a continuous spine that goes completely around the walls. But their testimony is suspect, their words obscure. That cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice for the moment that I repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable.

Men for ages have searched through the library trying to find the meaning of life etc. It contains all the mysteries of the world. Now you may look at the passage from Borges and not see any connection to either of the other stories. But I think most of you will feel there is a certain something being conveyed that is somehow related, and yet you can't say why. Well that is precisely how the symbols of myth come into the world. What does it all mean, these infinite spaces, infinite worlds, and travel between them? Does it relate at all to the space alien myth our age has produced as well? I really don't have an answer. But I feel there's one coming. We are experiencing a myth in the making, and that myth has to do with a remaking of the world. Perhaps God is merely trying to give us a sense of destiny. Mankind cannot go on existing without one.

Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Ethanol

2010-06-24T22:43:00.004-05:00

Christians have been called upon by God to be the caretakers of the Earth since the first man appeared. We're also commanded to be good stewards of our money. It's with that attitude in mind that I present this article.

There are currently 1900 filling stations in the USA with E-85 fuel pumps. The number goes up considerably every year, and the trend is not going to go away. Despite attempts from the oil industry and its congressional cronies to defeat ethanol proponents entirely and send them packing, the grassroots efforts to bring ethanol into the 21st century are alive and well. I will attempt to be a political centrist in this article. In interest of full disclosure, my political leanings are mainly conservative. However, the topic of ethanol is one in which everyone, republicans and democrats alike, have been handed a fistful of misinformation thanks to the deep pockets of the oil industry.

I don't know if ethanol, hydrogen, or some other fuel will win out in the end. But as far as ethanol goes, there are no inherent problems with ethanol itself as a fuel alternative to gasoline; the problem is primarily with corn and corn subsidies. I've been investigating this a lot the past year after hearing David Blume, author of Alcohol Can Be A Gas, give a short talk about the benefits of ethanol and the many false claims about it. Here's a short rundown of much that I've discovered:

1. Corn is one of the worst crops to use for making alcohol/ethanol. It requires much more by way of farm equipment, underlying groundwater, and energy, yet it only produces between 350 to 500 gallons of ethanol per acre. It's simply not worth it trying to make ethanol out of corn, and no one in the greater ethanol industry supports doing so. Sugar cane, for instance, costs less than half the price of corn to make ethanol out of and produces twice as much ethanol in the process. So why do we continue to pay out all this subsidy money to farmers for growing corn? Because, believe it or not, farm lobbyists are extremely powerful critters. The one and only reason they have any power at all is because of the almighty Iowa Caucuses. If we would simply change early caucus locations every four years it would take away all the power that the farmer welfare kings now enjoy. Farmers are used to growing corn and have a lot of money invested in harvesting equipment and so forth that's corn related. Many are reluctant to change. But farm subsidies of any and every kind need to go! Enough of this welfare already.

2. Some of the better crops for ethanol are sugar cane at 900 gallons per acre, buffalo gourd & fodder beans 900 gallons, cattails 1,000 gallons, sorghum 1,500 gallons, switch grass 2,000 gallons, and industrial hemp possibly as much as 2,500 gallons. This last one is very controversial; however, there isn't an agriculturalist on the planet that won't tell you what a tremendous textile industrial hemp is/was. It's the strongest textile known to man which is why boat sails are still made from it (albeit from foreign farms). You can make some 10,000 different products from hemp including every single thing that comes from petroleum oil such as plastics. You can even make a darn good particle board from hemp. I for one would like to see hemp grown again in America. And, no, you cannot make marijuana from industrial hemp.

3. Ethanol detractors constantly talk about how much energy it takes to make ethanol. One of the many things they don't realize (or don't want you to) is that the byproduct of ethanol can be run through a digester to make methane gas. That same methane gas can then be used to heat your next batch of ethanol in the distiller. I've also read of complaints about ethanol not being suitable for sending through large pipelines for shipment like the oil pipelines in Alaska. This is silly. Few, if any, modern pipelines are made from iron. More importantly, crops for ethanol can be grown in every individual state, so there's no need to ship it through pipelines anywhere to begin with.

4. Nearly every detractor of ethanol not only bases all his arguments on corn, but will generally use it to tell you that it will take an incredible amount of land to grow all the ethanol crops we would need to become an all ethanol fueled country. However, Brazil is a good example of what the reality is. They import no oil whatsoever. They have quite a bit of their own oil for one thing, plus they raise sugar cane to make ethanol out of and then run a 50/50 blend in their cars. Sugar cane produces around 900 gallons of ethanol per acre. They grow all the sugar cane they need on only 2% of the land. They've been doing this successfully for over 20-years. They also have enough ethanol leftover to export to other countries every year. If they can do that, then it's hard to believe that we couldn't grow a crop that produces 1500 gallons, or more, of ethanol per acre and run on E-85. Switch grass and hemp will both grow just about anywhere by the way. In fact, it's been said that there's enough switch grass growing wild along the highways in Missouri to fuel every vehicle in the state for the next year. And if you're still concerned we might not have enough land on which to grow our ethanol crops, here's an idea: ban tobacco, the most useless excuse for a crop ever seen on the face of the earth, and use that land to grow ethanol crops. The only downside would be that healthcare costs would drop by at least 20%. Oh... wait....

5. Any gas based car can be converted to run on ethanol, although cars made before 1985 that have carburetors will need several more modifications. Most cars made after 1980 will do just fine with only a cheap converter kit installed. Of course flex fuel vehicles are ready to go.

6. There is nothing better that you can put in your vehicle than ethanol. You'll get around 15% more horse power than with gas. Your motor will have almost no carbon buildup at all which means it will last two to three times longer. Imagine getting 500,000 miles on your car before its first overhaul! There are almost zero emissions. Your motor will run so cool that in many cases you won't even need a radiator. Some naysayers claim that you'll get worse mileage; however, if you design a motor with ethanol in mind you can get better mileage than with gas. Also (and this is a biggie), ethanol burns over 98% clean. That means we can get rid of our catalytic converters and other pollution control items that kill our gas mileage and performance. Your fuel mileage will be considerably better with ethanol. We can also go back to making simple cars that we can all work on again. Wouldn't that be nice?

7. Ford's Model T was designed to run on ethanol. Both Henry Ford and Charles Kettering (of GM back in the day) referred to ethanol as "the fuel of the future". The only reason we're running on gas today is because Rockefeller and his oil baron pals got together and priced gas so cheap (even taking a loss on it for a few years) that ethanol couldn't compete back in the 1920s.

8. GM is plainly on the ethanol bandwagon and will have the world’s largest ethanol plant, 100 million gallons/year, up and running by the end of 2010, and they already have 2.5 million flex fuel vehicles on the road. GM has also invested heavily in Coskata, a company that's producing ethanol from agricultural leftovers and municipal and industrial waste. They claim to be able to produce ethanol for around a dollar a gallon in the near future using an entirely different technology in making it. They say: "During gasification, carbon-based input materials are converted into syngas using well-established gasification technologies. After the chemical bonds are broken using gasification, Coskata's proprietary microorganisms convert the resulting syngas into ethanol by consuming the carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2) in the gas stream. Once the gas-to-liquid conversion process has occurred, the resulting ethanol is recovered from the solution using "pervaporation technology.""

9. One of the many myths about ethanol is that it will corrode engine parts, especially seals. This is only partially true. Ethanol is hard on gaskets and seals made from cork, and can eventually erode iron fuel tanks and lines (though it would take a long time) because of the small amount of water present in ethanol. Also, fuel pumps have to be made to withstand the slight electrical conductivity of ethanol. However, all cars made after 1980 or thereabouts have corrosion resistant tanks and fuel lines, they have no cork gaskets anymore, and they all have the correct fuel pumps. A lot of ethanol corrosion myths are based on ethanol's evil cousin--methanol--the stuff they use in race cars which is generally made from wood grain alcohol and is very hard on a motor. There's a fantastic video on YT showing the torn apart motor of a 2000 Chevy Tahoe which was run almost entirely on E85 for 100,000 miles. This vehicle is NOT a flex fuel vehicle, and it never had an ethanol converter kit installed. It was completely stock. I've never seen such a clean looking motor inside. Even the seals look like new:

10. The question on your mind should be, why doesn't the general public know all this? Why have we been sold this ridiculous bill of goods? Of course the answer lies where it usually does when politics are concerned--in money. Very simply put, ethanol has no rich men with deep pockets to fund campaigns or to even fund their own lobbyists, while the oil industry is so powerful and has so much money to throw at legislators, even funding their campaigns, that ethanol is completely shut-out. Big oil spent over $400 million in lobbying while Bush and Cheney were in office, and 80% of it went to republicans. (When Bush and Cheney, two oil magnets themselves, took office, they put together a special energy taskforce in 2001 and wouldn't tell anyone who was on it. It was later leaked in 2005 that every person on it was a representative from a big oil company). But now that the democrats are in control we're seeing big oil starting to toss quite a bit of money their way as well. Among all the people running for political office in 2008, the person who received the largest campaign contribution from big oil was John McCain. However, you may find it harder to guess who the person was that received the second largest amount. It was Barack Obama who raked in a cool million from them. Yeah, it's good to be president.

Seeing Around Invisible Corners

2010-06-17T19:04:00.003-05:00

I've mentioned several times how much respect CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien had for John Dunne's dream experiments with Oxford students during the 1920s. These culminated in his seminal book, An Experiment With Time, about people who often dreamed of future events. Something that I think is just as interesting are the experiments Rupert Sheldrake did with cats and dogs that proved they can often find their way home from just about anywhere. Some dogs also showed an amazing ability to know the exact moment their owners were about to come home. The dogs would go over and sit by the door at the precise moment their owners were beginning their homeward journey. He wrote a book outlining his experiments called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.

While I have very little use for psychology, and I think Carl Jung's dream archetypes are a bit silly, Jung did have a very honest outlook on the more strange abilities that humans show now and then. The following is from a TV interview he did toward the end of his life:

Interviewer: I know that you say death is psychologically just as important as birth and like it is an integral part of life, but surely, it can't be like birth if it is an end. Can it?

Jung: [W]e know that there are these peculiar faculties of the psyche--that it isn't entirely confined to space and time. You can have dreams or visions of the future. You can see around corners and such things. ONLY IGONRANTS DENY THESE FACTS. IT'S QUITE EVIDENT THAT THEY DO EXIST AND HAVE EXISTED ALWAYS. Now these facts show that the psyche--in part at least--is not dependent on these confinements. And then what? When the psyche is not under that obligation to live in time and space alone--and obviously it isn't--then to that extent the psyche is not submitted to those laws, and that means a practical continuation of life, of a sort of psychical existence beyond time and space.

Isn't it nice those few times you come across a respected professional who acknowledges the incredibly obvious?

Aberrations of Intimacy

2010-05-31T23:38:00.005-05:00

This is one of those politically correct, or incorrect, topics that people with brains are smart enough to leave alone.

So, as I was saying... I'll be the first to admit I don't understand homosexuality anymore than I appreciate it. And quite honestly, I don't think I'm supposed to understand it. Sin is an aberration. Beyond that, the actual mechanisms of sin are something completely beyond human understanding. Only God can properly understand sin and properly hate it. That almost magical framework which supports sin and infuses our world with it is unknown to mortals. Negative thoughts, suggestions, appetites and habits are constantly poured into the cup of each soul. The bible tells us from whom they flow. It does not tell us how. At its most diminutive, sin preys upon the weakness of our flesh. These are appropriately referred to as sins of weakness. Sin begins to show its real strength, however, when it is premeditated. It then gathers even more steam and becomes the custom of small groups. And at its deadliest it takes on the function of a worldwide tradition just as human sacrifice once was.

If there's one characteristic of sin that stands out it must be that of senselessness. Not that all sins appear senseless at all times. For instance, to a lazy man, it must seem quite sensible to steal. But there's usually a root to sin that has no sense in it. In this case it is the laziness itself. Laziness provides no real function in life. Laziness enhances the life of no man, and lazy men do nothing to enhance society. It's not just that no good thing comes from it that should astound us though. It's that any man should ever think to be lazy in the first place. How did he ever conceive of such a way of life? Did the world's first lazy man actually conceive anything at all of laziness? Or did he merely act on impulse? Impulse! Ah, where did that impulse come from? How? And why? I also must say that the closer you look at the psychology professional's view on the impulse to sin, the more you come to realize his view is all smoke and mirrors. It's no secret that I have always had a very low opinion of psychology. There are simply no answers there--only men who put on the pretense of one who knows.

The only thing about homosexual acts that can in any way be construed as desirous is that of the physical pleasure some claim to derive from it. But physical pleasures cannot be thought of as positive or negative. They are simply physical states such as hot or cold. They are neither good nor evil. Physical discomforts are also neither good nor evil. They may not be desirous, but they are just a state of existence.

I would also quickly admit that I've heard locker-room talk where guys mentioned things their wives or girlfriends did with them sexually that seemed quite pleasurable to them, but which sounded just as strange to me as any homosexual act and sometimes just as sickening. Frankly, anything involving the word "anus" is disturbing, and to me, comes under the heading of mentally imbalanced. Is this a way of getting back at their parents for not allowing them to play in the city sewer system as kids? That might be the best answer a psychologist could come up with. But isn't it obvious that there's something very wrong, something very insensible going on?

Of course it hardly stops there. One of the more oddball intimate behaviors people sometimes engage in was immortalized by ZZ Top in the song "Pearl Necklace". Need I say more? My question is, what's the point? Physical pleasure? But couldn't performing the sex act in the normal way bring the exact same pleasure? What compels people to do the very strange?

These are the kinds of weird explorations I would expect of six year old kids if six year old kids could have sex. But is there anything about these acts that conjure up images of well-balanced adults?

Now I'm not letting myself off the hook here. For several years I had a thing for married women. I never once acted on the impulse, but still, the compulsion was there, and for the life of me, I don't know why. It made no sense whatsoever. The last thing I was looking for was a wife myself, so it wasn't like I was hoping any of these women were going to leave their husbands for me. That was the last thing on my mind. It was simply a kind of appetite, and maybe that's the word we should be focusing on.

An appetite in this case can best be described as a wild craving. For some it can even become insatiable over time. Life is about making choices. But where do those choices come from? I'm especially thinking of choices involving cravings that appear from within. Sexual appetite is often thought of as merely a physical and biological desire (or bio-physical if you like), but I see much more at work here because so often those cravings have little or nothing to do with the flesh. Normal humans have a physical craving for sex. But strange sexual aberrations begin from within and will manifest themselves even when the physical body is craving nothing at all. Our mind tells us it wants to have sex, and it wants to have it in an abnormal way, even though our bodies are telling us no such thing. I truly believe this is how many people get involved with weird sexual behaviors. They'll so often claim, "This is the only way I can do it", when the truth of the matter is that they could perform the act in the normal manner if they waited until their physical bodies were actually craving sex rather than just their minds. It's rather like a man saying he doesn't like water and can only drink a particular kind of imported wine when in truth he would gladly drink water if he were very, very thirsty.

I've mentioned before of how I once knew a married couple, both of whom were afraid of being in high places, not because they were afraid of heights, but because both of them felt the same insensible compulsion to jump.

These insensible impulses we feel in life have a way of bringing about self-hatred. It begins with a sort of disgust we have toward ourselves for even being tempted to act irrationally in the first place (perhaps because we allowed the impulse in) and ends with an all out self-hate when we fall completely out of control. I've always felt homosexuality was somehow a form of self-hatred. It's only recently that I've come to this understanding of why.

The things of God, however, are usually pretty straight forward. This in fact is one of the things that draws us most to him. We're bombarded with irrational impulses day after day, and if we give in to them, we know that irrationality is only a step away from insanity. But there is sanity in God. I often think this is what's being referred to by that "peace that surpasses understanding". It is simply sanity. A devotion to God is a devotion to all that is rational. It makes sense of the world and gives clarity to the mind.

If you ever try to talk rationally with a homosexual you will immediately find his world is full of irrationalities. I recently found myself having just such a discussion with one. The first thing he did was to say that I hated homosexuals. I of course said no such thing. He had instantaneously drawn the conclusion that if I thought homosexuality was wrong that I must hate anyone who does it. When I informed him that it was only the act that was the object of my scorn, he quickly replied, "The old hate the sin, love the sinner nonsense, eh? That's just a copout. Nobody buys that."

He then went on to say that since I had never tried homosexuality that I couldn't make an informed decision about it. I replied that I had also never tried murder, torture, rape, incest, biting off an ear, or poking out someone's eye with a stick either, but that all rational people realize such things are wrong.

Next he trotted out the old standby of how I was being "intolerant" and that he was promoting "openness and acceptance." I replied that he was being "permissive" that he was promoting openness and acceptance to something that most of the world considers to be a vice.

I also pointed out to him that, without fail, every single homosexual person I had ever encountered had been extremely self-centered and incredibly childish. Well of course he was just aghast at such a comment, but I was simply telling the truth. The fact is that every homosexual man I've ever met, or ever saw on TV, acted much more like a child than a woman. Richard Simmons is probably a pretty good example. I asked him how I could think of homosexual men as being "normal" well-balanced adults when they acted like children?

His only answer was that I must be bigoted. I said that I certainly was not but was only relating my impressions. I said that I had never known a homosexual that I felt comfortable being around but that I didn't see that as bigotry. There are in fact all kinds of people we don't like being around such as those who are childish, selfish, foolish, loud, obnoxious, rude etc. If I don't like being around a fool, does that make me a fool-bigot? Isn't it just common sense not wanting to be around a fool?

His last argument was perhaps the least sound of all and one I've heard many times before, and that was the fact that there are some animals that engage in homosexual acts. This in his mind made it all right for humans too. Actually, he went on to mention some studies done on rats which showed that they became more prone toward homosexual behaviors when their populations were increased within the same small area. The idea behind this argument is that homosexuality may in some cases be nature's way of population control.

First I mentioned that we humans are in dire straights when we start to use the criteria of other animals to judge our own behaviors. Some insects eat their mates after sex. Some eat their children too. Does that make it okay for us to do these things? Does it really imply that homosexual behavior in humans is just a part of nature if other animals do it? Or could it possibly imply that animals simply have no moral conscience? No real sense of right and wrong? I once saw a cat play with a snake and basically torture it to death. I'm no fan of snakes, but the cat never ate the snake. What purpose did it serve to torture it to death like that? Once again, could it be that other animals have no conscience and have no qualms about doing anything irrational that comes into their feeble minds?

The entire conversation with this man felt very strange. It was almost like I was conversing with an animal rather than a human. His arguments made no rational sense at all. They were the types of arguments I would have expected from someone below the age of ten. But the man wasn't stupid. He was irrational. There's a difference. I couldn't help but think that this is what a lifetime of willful sin will do to an intellect. There's no sanity away from God. There's only confusion, selfishness, and inner strife.

By the way, I recently had a chance to look up that study on controlled rat populations. It had the following to say:

"Males became aggressive, some moving in groups, attacking females and the young. Mating behaviors were disrupted. Some males became exclusively homosexual. Others became pansexual and hypersexual, attempting to mount any rat they encountered. Mothers neglected their infants, first failing to construct proper nests, and then carelessly abandoning and even attacking their pups. ... The crowded rodents had lost the ability to co-exist harmoniously, even after the population numbers once again fell to low levels. At a certain density, they had ceased to act like rats and mice, and the change was permanent."

It almost sounds as though homosexual behavior and mental devolution go hand in hand. The whole point in his bringing up the rat studies was to offer evidence that physical environments cause homosexual behaviors in some rats, and thus, that their behavior is not their own fault--the implication being that humans can't help their own behavior either. It's basically a determinist view of the world. That to me is absurd.

That humans may find themselves in situations that tempt bad behavior is a given. It's not even interesting. What's interesting is the way some people fight that same temptation and don't allow it to control them. It's our ability to go against these outside influences (or at least give it our best try) and remain in control of our natures that makes humans interesting compared to all other creatures on earth. The very fact that some of us remain loyal to a higher standard (what the ancients called first precepts, the Tao, or the laws of nature) in the face of adversity is truly astounding and goes against all science since science by its nature is deterministic. Call me crazy, but that a rat chooses to make poor choices doesn't matter to me.

The End of a Perfect Tale

2010-05-23T23:16:00.005-05:00

I just watched the final episode of Lost. I wasn't at all prepared for it. I went into it wanting to have all my questions answered about the ancient mythology and science. Well I didn't get what I wanted. Instead I got what I needed. I've always felt (especially lately though) that feeling Jack had going through his death throes--that I live a sort of false life behind a false face. I see glimpses of the real world now and then, sometimes quite vivid, but it always exceeds my grasp. Maybe that's what Heaven is--a person, a thing, or a place that's more familiar than anything on earth, but a thing that's always just a bit out of reach. Some people are scared of it because they've allowed themselves to become too accustomed to this sham reality we live in.

This is the secret thread that runs through the works of CS Lewis, Charles Williams, GK Chesterton, and George MacDonald. They glimpsed the real world and had no fear of it--only a great longing to be there.

I pity those people who are afraid of death. They think it will be full of the unfamiliar and will take some getting used to. The opposite is the truth of things. It will be like opening the door to your home after having been on a long journey through an alien land.

Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream

2010-04-18T09:26:00.004-05:00

Putting aside any allusions you are now having toward all things Mason Proffit, let me tell you about it.

I dreamed I was in a house with CS Lewis, a woman I know named Ann from an online Charles Williams group, and a man who seemed to be something like a butler. It was a very simple dream and was the last thing I remember upon awakening this morning.

I don't know where this house was. I don't recall seeing Jack (I can call him that since we're old drinking buddies), but I think he was inside the house while I was in the front yard. The home was old and brick--the front yard a bit small and sparse of vegetation except for the grass. The yard was fenced in by an iron fence like the ones they made in the old days. Iron in fact played a big role in this dream. On the other side of the fence everything you saw was rather rundown. Not terrible, but certainly the other properties had been let go for a number of years. There was also a shop where a man (who I didn't see) made things from iron. He had made an outside chair for Jack and an odd piece of "poetry" for Charles Williams. Both objects now sat in Lewis' front yard. The butler had just brought them out, and I was afraid they would get stolen.

There's no point in trying to describe the chair, it having no distinguishing characteristics from other iron chairs except to say it had a lot of open spaces instead of tons of bars going around it like some chairs do. The more intriguing object was this piece made for Williams. I don't know if Williams was still alive or not, but I believe the object was made to his specifications. Ann came out of the house and looked it up and down for a while before declaring that the "poetry was too dense" to figure out. The odd thing was that the object seemed to be nothing but a hurdle bar--the kind people jump over when running hurdles. It was different from other hurdle bars I had seen in that it was made from iron and had no wood on it. It was completely iron, and instead of having a flat wood piece on the top that you were to jump over, it had an iron bar that was shaped like a half moon with the curved side facing up making it more difficult to clear.

The butler moved one of the pieces (I can't remember which now, but I think it was the chair) over against the fence. This really worried me, because I could see how easy it was to steal from there. Sure enough a boy grabbed it and ran off with it in just a few minutes. I was chasing him when I woke up.

Whatever could it mean?

The Beginning of Wisdom

2010-03-23T12:39:00.010-05:00

The summer of 1968 would have probably been a bland summer. There was a nine year old boy named Billy who lived on Michigan Avenue in East St Louis, the oldest of five (or was it six?) siblings, all of them mentally disabled to a degree except for the oldest daughter whom nobody liked. They were close in age to myself, but I wasn't allowed to play with them, and only watched them from afar.

They weren't so different from other boys and girls really with the same predilection for games and laughter as any other children. They always said their father worked for the state, but mom explained to me one day that this meant he was on public aid, and they required people to work for the state in some small capacity to get the money. There were no totally free rides in those days. East St Louis used to be a big railroad town where people could always find work, but over-the-road trucking brought an end to all that, and times were getting hard. Most folks lived in houses they had built themselves with whatever used wood they could find and wrapped their homes in cheap, but very flammable, shingle siding that always made for a quick fire, and there were plenty of those during the race riots.

Billy was appointed king of his clan. He was to keep an eye on all his brothers and sisters to keep them safe, and this he did with great pride. Mostly he was just a good boy. I don't remember Billy ever telling a lie, and when you're nine years old, telling lies is your measuring stick where goodness is concerned. But while he had his siblings to play with, they were too young to be much fun for him. There was no one to catch him when playing tag, no one to beat him at shooting targets with slingshots, no one to catch his fastball without dropping it. Yes, it would have been a bland summer.

One day to Billy's great delight, a new family moved in a few houses down on the other side of the street, and they too had a nine year old boy named Billy. And even though the new Billy was above average in the brains department they became quick friends. People found it difficult to call them by name though since they had the same moniker, so it was decided that the former Billy who had been there the longest would be called Willy.

Life during hard times doesn't seem hard at all when you have a friend to go through them with. The two Billys did everything together. Willy wasn't normally supposed to go far from home, but as long as he was with Billy his mother didn't care. He also didn't have a bike, but Billy would gladly cart Willy on the handlebars all over town. East St Louis is an odd town, shaped like a football field, several miles long, but only a mile or two wide, and there wasn't much of any part of it they hadn't traveled. Still, they found the most pleasure close to home playing on the canal behind Billy's house where they shot off bottle rockets, tossed cats in the quick moving water, or captured cottonmouths in jars only to torture the "evil varmints" to death later as nine year old boys are want to do. There was also a boy over on Minnesota Ave who had an actual car! It was a tiny French car that sat two people and looked like a glorified go-cart. It had no motor and was very light, so the two Billys and the other neighborhood kids took turns pushing each other down the hill in it. The summer of 68 was turning out not to be so bland after all.

Willy had blond hair and very fair skin with the bluest eyes I ever saw. He had posture that was so good you would have thought he was brought up in a military school, but that's just the way he was. One day after some testing at his "special" school, it was decided that he would be able to go to regular school, although he would always be in remedial classes. I remember him that first morning walking to the bus stop by himself for the first time to go to a normal school. He looked so proud.

Billy was a dark haired boy and a little husky. His grandfather had once been a minister in this town, and his home was full of religious pictures and statues. There was even a painting of Jesus surrounded by children that hung in his bedroom. Billy though, like most kids, never thought too much about religion. His parents sent him to a school in another all-white town where he had gone before they moved to East St Louis. He wanted to go to school with Willy, but there was no talking his mother out of it. She wanted her boy to have a good education and was afraid of the riots, and in truth, was probably not wrong to feel that way. There were lots of killings in those days by blacks and whites both. There were also the old-time gangsters who still ran the town behind the scenes, and you sure wanted to stay clear of them. That lady was just about the most scared women I ever did see. But she had no fear of other women, and once I saw her threaten to knock the teeth right out of some neighbor lady's face during a dispute about a parking space. I realized then that women fight over the silliest things only to make up again before supper. That's why we don’t let them run the Army.

One day Billy's cousin, Brenda, went to see Gypsy about her warts. Gypsy was an old woman who lived on Minnesota next door to those Wells boys who had the little car. I never knew what her real name was, but she knew some old remedies to heal people of various ailments, and so we always just called her Gypsy. She wrapped Brenda's finger in some gauze, said a few words, and then rubbed the finger this way and that. When she pulled the gauze away, the warts fell to the ground. She was an amazing woman that Gypsy.

Another time, Willy had lost his dad's car keys. He used them to unlock the shed and somehow managed to misplace them and was afraid he'd get whooped when his dad got home. Billy had heard of an old woman downtown though who could find lost things if you gave her a little money. So off they went on Billy's bike.

They had to ask several people before they found someone who could tell them where she lived. It was a very rundown house not far from the bridge traffic. She sat outside on the porch in a rocker fanning herself in the summer heat. The boys thought she looked a bit crazy, but they got their courage up and walked to the steps. "Warm night isn't it boys?" she said.

"Yes ma'am," both Billys replied in unison. "Are you the lady that helps people find lost things?" said Willy.

"Well, I help folks when I can. And did you lose something?"

"He lost his dad's car keys," said Billy. "Can you help us find them? We have some money." They used to hunt down soda bottles and turn them in for the deposits. Together they had nearly two dollars worth.

"Well let me see what ya'all got there honey," she said as he placed the money in her hand. She smiled and gave the money back. "You keep this. You might need it one day." Then she laid her head back and seemed to go to sleep.

The boys weren't sure what to do now. They were too polite to wake the old woman. Finally they were starting to walk away when she bolted upright and said, "You'll find those keys in the creek behind the shed."

The boys looked startled at one another.

"You better head on back home now. It'll be dark soon, and it ain't safe here after dark," she told them.

They both thanked her and headed back home on the bike. By the time they got there it was already dark, and their mothers were beginning to get worried. Billy said a quick greeting to his folks and then ran out again with his small penlight in his pocket saying he'd be right back. Willy's dad said nothing about the keys. It was a Sunday, and Willy hoped his parents hadn't tried to go anywhere. People weren't on the go all the time in those days like they are now.

The two Billys searched the creek behind the shed, which thankfully, was dried up in the summer heat. Willy let out a gasp, "There they are!" he exclaimed. Sure enough, there were the car keys just as the old woman had said. He went to put them in his pocket and found a gaping hole there. He carried them into the house instead and laid them on his mom and dad's dresser without anyone noticing.

Both boys were quite exhausted and slept well that night. Before drifting off to sleep, Willy thought about going to college one day even though he knew the odds were against him. Billy, on the other hand, for the first time took a serious glance at the painting on his wall, thought of how much fun it was to be a boy in East St Louis during the summer of 1968, and wished he never had to grow-up. And he never did.

Fundie Dumpty Sat on a Wall

2010-02-21T23:07:00.007-06:00

I've watched fundamentalism turn otherwise normal functioning humans into hate filled mechanisms of destruction all my life. There are also a ton of equally crazed crackpots out there who believe with all their hearts that churches, particularly the Catholic Church, are about nothing but mind control and money. That the gods were an invention to kowtow the people, and religions--just a scheme to collect money from them in the process.

But then we have the atheists who seem to grasp both groups and their problems really well... at first. But a well oiled human will quickly see that the atheists have also committed brain felo-de-se on the way to the rally.

The thing none of our cerebrally unhinged groups can seem to comprehend is where the truth lies or how to get there. In all three cases it's literally like trying to communicate with a brick. Or a... well, a really dumb cat. If they were taking drugs I could take their drugs away. If they were the victims of brain frequency altering sound waves or optical sensory manipulation to achieve a hypnotic effect, I could close their eyes and stop up their ears or shut the machines down. But how do you wake people from a hypnotic trance which has been self induced and habitually maintained? After Pavlov's dog has already been drooling for a couple of decades, or since birth, can you ever stop him from doing so with each and every bell that rings?

This is why I can't agree with the Universalists. There are just a small handful of people walking the Earth who haven't flown into intellectual flypaper. Can a man be taught truth when his mind has been locked away, and only he holds the key?

I am reminded of CS Lewis' story about a bus ride through purgatory where those who were the farthest from Heaven were also the ones whose minds had been closed around both selfishness and self deception. Where Hitler for instance, and those like him, could be found far away on a distant star because their selfish nature kept pushing them further and further away from other humans and from the Creator of life. Fundamentalists, conspiracy theorists, and atheists are also wrapped up in a closed cocoon of thought where nothing can penetrate their trance. They all see a completely different version of the great dance of life, all with different figures stepping to different tunes, each of them out of key because they've fired the conductor.

I suspect all of mankind has wrestled with these same parasites of mind manipulation. What is it that keeps some from falling prey to them? It has nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence; some of the finest minds, the most erudite thinkers, come under the spell of the perverted dance, and yet, some of the feeblest of intellects seem able to avoid the pitfalls as the fly evades the horse's tail. One thing is for sure; if the mind is to be able, it must first be free.

A good Christian must always be as skeptical of his bible as he is fond of it.

A good conspiracy theorist must be willing to test both sides of his theory with equal and complete impartiality.

A good atheist must be skeptical even of his own skepticism. (In other words, the only good atheist is an agnostic).

All honest men are capable of pleasing a God who is truth itself. But where is the honest man?

Religion and the Govinda Principle

2010-02-18T19:48:00.003-06:00

I read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha not long ago. Don't get me wrong concerning what I'm about to say. I mentioned to someone just this past week that Hesse along with most of the ballyhooed novel writers of the 20th century such as Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Norman Mailer etc. were really a bunch of lightweights both in style and substance. Siddhartha isn't terrible or anything, although it is very sappy in some places, but when it comes right down to it, Hesse brings nothing new to the table that every writer of Hinduism and Buddhism hadn't already said. (By the way, have you ever noticed that Hindu writers almost never write without showing some Buddhist influence, but Buddhist writers seldom show any Hindu leanings?) There is, however, at least one passage in Siddhartha worth mentioning:

"I am indeed old," said Govinda, "but I have never ceased seeking. I will never cease seeking. That seems to be my destiny. It seems to me that you also have sought. Will you talk to me a little about it, my friend?"

Siddhartha said:[sic] "What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find anything, ... Seeking means to have a goal; but finding means to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal."

I won't go into all the places the book went wrong. Suffice to say that Chesterton has already outlined what's wrong with the philosophies of the east better than I could in his popular book, The Everlasting Man. My only concern is with the above quotation because, from it, we can easily deduce the ways in which so many spiritually minded people get hung-up.

The Govinda Principle says that people who seek too much will never find. This is of course true. Yes, "knock and the door will be opened", but once you're in the reception area you can, and should, quit knocking. You simply wait to be seated. And then you learn, but the lessons come a little at a time, and the more impatient you are, the slower the lessons come. So lesson number one means learning patience, and learning patience is what John of the Cross meant by "the dark night of the soul", although I don't think even he recognized it for what it truly was. The teacher leaves the classroom now and then for extended periods of time. Each time he does, the students get antsy. Antsy is best described as a nervous inability to relax. Now the students are free to come and go as they wish. The most antsy among them may even decide the teacher isn't coming back and will get up, go back through the front door, and look for another teacher. I'd like to say this represents the golden calf incident in Genesis, but if it does, it does so very poorly.

Other students will leave the classroom and head for the library thinking that the teacher expects them to learn on their own when he isn't around. They study all the world's great mystical texts and religious doctrines. Some, a little at a time, will find themselves enticed by the words in these books and may eventually go off to find other kinds of schools where the teachers are always around and always willing to fill their heads with nonsense... usually for a price.

Still other students will use the free time for play and nothing more. They go fishing, but not for men.

A few students will remain seated. They are extremely curious and yet very quiet, blanking their minds and senses, expecting to find their teacher in an astral world waiting for them with open arms to say, "Well done thou good and faithful students."

But there are still a couple of students left. They aren't seekers. They aren't antsy. They aren't even curious. For themselves they are content. Their only concern is for the people who haven't yet made it to the classroom at all. While the teacher is away they go out into the world, to its highways and byways, to care for the sick; clothe the naked; feed the hungry; build homes for the poor; and talk of their teacher. These are the students the teacher is most pleased with. In doing these things they learn the greatest lessons of all about God, their fellow man, and the meaning of life for the teacher whispers into the students' ears while they're working. It is in fact only during work that the great vistas of learning are opened to them. They never return to the great teacher's door because the world has become their classroom now, and the teacher goes where they go because he resides within each of them.

I'm not looking for fellow seekers. I'm not seeking anything except for like-minded people of the same Spirit to fellowship with and nothing more. This is what church is to me. Christ left no commands about organizing our thoughts into a religious system. If that's what he wanted then I believe he would have done it himself, and we'd still be in the classroom on the other side of that door closed away from the world. It appears that he belonged to no sects of Judaism. At least nothing is mentioned of him being a Pharisee, Sadducee, Samaritan etc. When he spoke to the crowds about ancient Jews he always addressed them as "your" forefathers, never "our" forefathers. It seems to me that he did this deliberately, perhaps to show us that he had no part in religion. In fact, he spent most of his time arguing against various teachings in all sects of Judaism. Maybe there's something to be learned from that. It could be that religion, like faith, is meant to be personal, and that each of us must truly work out his own salvation.

People are usually too impatient for that though. They want a systematic learning regiment with detailed class courses. They want a predictable teacher and a class motto/creed. Most important to them though is having a structured philosophical outline of the world and the God who governs it... even if they have to make it up themselves. And damned to hell be anyone who steps out of line with their manmade religion, for thus speaketh the church, and their authority is next only to God himself. Why? Because they say so. And only their system is the orthodox system. Why? Because they say so.

I pay no heed to church authority. I have no regard for biblical cannons. I take what I can and disregard the rest, especially anything that puts an evil face on a God of love whether in the bible or out. The bible is a great book collection, but in the end, it's still just a book collection. God never sanctioned it, never commanded its existence as a whole, and never even predicted it should ever come into being. Both the bible and organized religion are just an aid for the most part, good for fellowship and seeing what great men in ancient days who claimed to have known our savior had to say about him. But there's a point where these things can hurt instead of help. When the bible starts being a rule book sent by God (no matter what despicable things it may have to say about him in places here and there) to represent his very words and thoughts, then we do both the bible and God a disservice. And when we try to make religions and doctrines a means of salvation when churches are only supposed to be about fellowship, we do our fellows a disservice.

Seek, find, work, and fellowship--that's the path to God and no other.

Sally Forth Oh Man Of Honorificabilitudinitatibus

2010-02-02T17:41:00.008-06:00

I just wonder if it's as hard for other people as it has been for me when it comes to church-going. I grew-up in an Evangelical setting. By the time I was in my early 20s I knew I needed to get out, but for some reason I didn't completely break free until I was nearly 40. I think that I had never met anyone who attended a big mainstream church before, and my conception of them was that the congregations tended to just show up and go home--that there was no real sense of family or excitement about being in church. Actually I did know a couple of Catholic girls, and this is exactly what church was like for them.

Evangelical church services are like a big party. Everything is very festive and lively most of the time. And when they're somber, they're really somber. Evangelicals wear their emotions on their sleeves. They're very passionate in everything they do. They look forward to going to church. For most it's the highlight of their week. Many in fact go several times throughout the week. Besides Sunday morning services there are usually Sunday night services and one midweek. I would say that around 65% of all Evangelicals attend all those services and more besides. There's usually a youth night on Friday or Saturday. And then there are bible studies and home get-togethers. Some churches are also involved in a sports program such as a church softball league. And then there are often times the Evangelical version of the Boy Scouts called the Royal Rangers.

I think it's fair to say that, for Evangelicals, their whole world revolves around their church and church friends. I've always maintained that if you were to ask the first 10 Evangelicals you saw on the street who their best friend was, at least 8 of them would name someone from their church. Many in fact have no friends outside of their church whatsoever.

Evangelicals are extremely bible oriented. In fact many of them refer to their churches as "bible churches". I'm reminded of a passage in CS Lewis' novel, That Hideous Strength, where MacPhee is talking about how his uncle used to slap his big bible down on the table and say, "Show it to me in the world of God", whenever people came to him "blathering about religious experiences." Most Evangelicals are extremely well-versed in the bible and many have large portions of it memorized. And I've never seen an Evangelical (besides myself) that didn't believe in some form of biblical inerrancy. They just shrug off biblical difficulties and think that God will answer all their questions in Heaven. There's a certain absurdity that goes with that kind of reasoning (or lack thereof), and this is one of many reasons I felt a need to leave.

Leaving is easy; finding a direction in which to travel is hard. I feel torn between so many paths, and all of them wrong. There's the rub in all this. Not one of them feels right. Finding a church that doesn't have biblical infallibility in their doctrine begins and ends with the Episcopalians. That's fine, but many of them have gotten so liberal about their bible and religion that Christianity for them has become more an ideology of ethics than a religious belief system. When you start ordaining homosexual ministers to lead your flocks I think it's safe to say you're playing very fast with the rules. It makes me very uncomfortable being in such churches. This is definitely not something I desire in a place of worship, and it's one of the main reasons I've never officially joined them.

But where else to go? This is something true Christians (few and far between though they may be) ought to be in constant prayer about. There simply is no denomination that has its act together. Either they're bible worshipping, creed loving heretics, or they're sin infested dens of... well, you know. More often than not it seems that what we find behind Christian pulpits are people who want you subservient to their personal desires while pocketing your cash; or they're blathering some mystagogical idiocy like a Whirling Dervish with all the pretenses of losing the self on the outside, but with a narcissistic desire within for power and adoration.

I'm tired of being torn in-between. God needs someone to build him a true church. Not a house--a church. He won't do it for us. We'll have to work for it. But we need a leader to sally forth and take on the task. For once, wouldn't it be nice if it was someone who actually deserved to be in leadership? I haven't seen him yet, but I know he's out there. Say your prayers kids.

"The Offence" (Movie Review)

2010-01-24T21:30:00.004-06:00

I've seen many movies that undertook the subject of evil. They come and they go year in and year out. Some do it reasonably well like Hitchcock's 1960 thriller, "Psycho", for instance. However, if anything, "Psycho" tried a little too hard to be frightening, so that, in the end we came away feeling that the subject was one of fear itself more than of the thing that made us fearful. Michael Powell also released "Peeping Tom" in 1960, a movie about a psychopathic photographer/cinematographer who kills women and films them as they're dying. "Peeping Tom" was certainly creepy and disturbing, but in all the wrong ways. The murderer was treated as a poor, misunderstood man whose upbringing molded him into the villain he became instead of recognizing and acknowledging the self-will that must always be involved in the transgressions of man. The treatment of evil in most other films is either too underplayed to make us think hard about what evil really is, or is a typical Saturday afternoon cinema thriller like "The Exorcist" and its myriad of clones which are generally steeped in outward physical manifestations that all too often seem more of an excuse for showing off their latest special effects arsenal than anything.

There are few films which try to show us that "subtle suggestion" that evil plays within all mankind, that essence of a presence which can be felt in your marrow trying to work its way to the outward physical universe as though it's in need of a host to do any real damage to the world. (I'll never forget reading Charles Williams' book "Witchcraft" and his line about how demons "pine for matter", something which still chills me). 1972 brought us, however, what may be the two most notable and praiseworthy treatments of that subtle suggestion of evil within. One was "The Other" about a young boy who seems truly tormented by his own psychopathic inner twin (actually he had a real life twin who had died and which his mind has turned into an inward dwelling entity of destruction).

"The Offence" is the other great film on the subject of evil from the same year. The offence mentioned in the title is that of child molestation. There is a molester loose who not only rapes little girls, he does his best to make it hurt, to make them feel some of his own anguish for childhood traumas inflicted on him early in life. But we'll find nothing of "Peeping Tom" and its misplaced sympathy for the villain. Sean Connery is a police officer/detective who, by God, will have none of that! However, the movie takes a very strange turn during the interrogation, and in the second half of the film we get a real honest to goodness glimpse of what God must have meant when he said to Cain just before he killed Abel, "...sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it." Let me also echo what many film critics have said before me: Anyone who claims Sean Connery can't act hasn't seen this film! He is nothing short of brilliant in this movie. Having said that however, Ian Bannen very nearly steals the show with his performance as the suspected villain. I can't recommend this one enough.

This can presently be seen for free at hulu.com if you live in the USA.

Slowing Down Drastically

2010-01-06T12:43:00.010-06:00

From here on out I will only post an article once in a while instead of every Sunday. I've only got so much serious stuff to say. All I wanted to do was write a book, make a movie, and record a decent CD. I did all three (although I'm still not crazy about the music CD and would like to do an all acoustic one utilizing my live setup with my Boomerang looper). I also made what I think is a pretty good and useful website about George MacDonald in what free time I had. In short, I think I did everything the good Lord asked of me, so from here on out my posting articles will probably be much less often.

Also, for those who liked last Sunday's post where I went into Stephen Oppenheimer's Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia, a good book that goes well with that is by geologist Robert M. Schoch called Voyages of the Pyramid Builders.

The Religion of Adam

2010-01-03T16:20:00.011-06:00

Something that has always fascinated me is the way everyone from historians to anthropologists scrutinize ancient peoples, especially as pertains to old tales and legends, and how they draw the conclusions they do. C. S. Lewis once made mention of how historians for many years believed the city-state of Troy to be nothing but a legend--that perhaps it was an invention to aid in the telling of Greek myths now lost to us. Almost nobody believed it to be an actual city. But there was one German archeologist who went against convention and determined to find what he believed to be a true city buried somewhere beneath the surface of earthen rubble. Of course we all know he succeeded, and you may visit the ruins of Troy today.

Something else that most people, even many Christian people, tend to think of as part of a creation myth is the Garden of Eden story. It may well be that the story is mythic in nature and was embellished upon to tell a moral fable of sorts, but that doesn't mean it can't be loosely based on a real place with real people somewhere.

For reasons that are unfathomable to me, historians like to point to ancient stories as having influenced one another simply because of their dating. We have numerous stories of flood accounts around the world that bear certain similarities, the oldest of which is probably the story of Gilgamesh in Sumer. Thus, we have copies of, and/or mentions of, the story in ancient commentaries as being very old--older than any other flood tale we can currently date. This means only three things to modern historians and the like:

1) The story of Gilgamesh is the oldest, so it must have been first.

2) This means that all other flood accounts are based on that of Gilgamesh, at least in some trickle down fashion, because of its antiquity.

3) Since all of the flood accounts have fantastical elements within them, all are relegated to mythic status.

Of course these are all erroneous conclusions and for obvious reasons. First, the story of Gilgamesh probably is the oldest written account of a flood narrative, but that does not mean it could not be based on much older oral legends, and in fact it probably is. Second, there have no doubt been a large number of massive floods throughout the world during the history of man. Some of these men must have seen these floods coming and road them out in a boat of some kind along with their families and at least some livestock. To think this has only happened once in the history of man is naïve. Third, many stories that have some fantastic elements in them have turned out still to be based on real people, places, or events in some way. Homer's fantastical accounts of things that took place in the very real city of Troy should be proof enough of this.

If we think hard about it, we can find certain correlations between several varieties of ancient legends which on the surface seem to have nothing in common at all. Plato's tale of Atlantis may have some correspondence with the Garden of Eden, and both may have a connection to the flood stories of Manu, Gilgamesh, and Noah. The connecting agent in all these stories is water.

I've always thought it probable that the account of Eden was based on a real place somewhere, but that the names of the rivers had been changed over the years and the story itself a fable to explain, if not the creation of the world, at least some great sweeping change that took place in history--a real paradigm shift, possibly just a metamorphosis of man's self awareness. Stephen Oppenheimer in his book, Eden in the East, leaves my own thinking in the dust. Oppenheimer is a geneticist originally from England who worked as a pediatrician for many years. He also happened to live in Southeast Asia for a long time. One thing he noticed while living there is that there are a great deal of stories in that area pertaining to a paradisiacal garden and a giant snake or dragon. (Most of you probably know about the correlation between the great snake tales and the stories of flying snake-shaped dragons in Asia). There are in fact more such tales to be found in Southeast Asia than anywhere else in the world. A good rule of thumb among historians is that, wherever you find the most of a certain kind of story, and in the most dialects, there's a good chance that this is where it originated.

I had intended to go through Oppenheimer's book in order to create a sort of synopsis, but to my surprise Wikipedia's (the encyclopedia we all like to make fun of) description is actually quite good, so I'm going to copy it here for you:

In his book Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia, published in 1998, Oppenheimer hypothesizes that Eurasians have southeast Asian origins, citing evidence from a variety of disciplines to make his case: geology, archaeology, genetics, linguistics, and folklore. Using geological evidence, he writes about the rise in ocean levels that accompanied the waning of the ice age—as much as 500 feet—during the period 14,000-7,000 years ago and says that this submerged the continental shelf off the coast of southeast Asia. He, and others, calls this submerged continent Sundaland and cites archaeological evidence for an original culture in this region. The rising ocean levels caused this culture to disperse, and Oppenheimer supports this idea with the above-mentioned evidence from genetics, linguistics, and folklore. He notes, for example, that those cultures in regions whose geology would have led to their being submerged have flood myths, whereas there are no flood myths in Africa, which because of its lack of a continental shelf, was relatively unaffected by the rising ocean level.

Let me sort of re-surmise things a bit if I can. Oppenheimer has given direct proof through genetic testing which shows Eurasians in general have ancient Asian origins. He also points to several linguists who believe that there was at one time a worldwide language from which all others descended because we can see shared traits for instance in the languages throughout Europe, India, and Asia. He shows how many of the traits we think of as pertaining to civilized man began to spring up in very odd and unconnected places during the same 3,000 year period all over the planet. And he details geological evidence showing where vast flooding appeared toward the end of the last Ice Age--flooding that forced people to flee their lands for new ones. One of the places that ancient texts point to as having been the place of a large, lost civilization is now buried off the southern coast of Southeast Asia and is known as Sundaland. We find pyramids and mounds on every continent except Australia and the Antarctic. Where did they originate, and why do we find this large dispersion of similar traits in the customs, architecture, and stories of people the world over during this period after the Ice Age? Oppenheimer believes that most of the marks of civilization began in Sundaland, and when the waters rose from the melting ice of the Ice Age, Sundaland became buried under the ocean off the coast of Cambodia/Vietnam. The people who lived there, according to Oppenheimer, were likely the cradle of civilized man, and when the people fled, they took their way of life with them the world over. Thus his views are decidedly diffusionistic.

Something else Oppenheimer points to is the story of creation at the beginning of Genesis where it talks a great deal about "water" and the separating of waters and dry land. The Babylonians tell us that the Sumerians before them came to the Mesopotamia by way of ships from a distant land. They were far advanced from anyone else before them. They irrigated, farmed, raised livestock, built the earliest pyramids/ziggurats, had great art compared to others around them, and even had the earliest known form of writing. Could they have come from Southeast Asia? Oppenheimer believes so. He suggests that we learn to view the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis as more of a re-creation story that is actually dealing with a group of people who are forced from their lands by massive floods and settle in the Mesopotamian Valley, and as the flood waters begin to recede we find the separating of waters and dry land. Thus, for our foreign travelers the world is made anew. When you think about it, after the settling of waters directly after the Ice Age when virtually every coastline on the planet changed, it must have been very much like a new world to the people who lived then. It really was a re-creation of sorts.

Unfortunately, we'll probably never know for sure what existed under the ocean waters of Southeast Asia. There are several rock formations that appear to have been pyramids at one time, but the erosion is so complete that we'll never know for sure if they were or not. There are excavations in remote areas of Cambodia that are already bringing to light civilizations that go back as far as 5,000 B.C., and they're only just beginning to do archeological work there. If this is where the Genesis creation story comes from, and if Sundaland was the land where pyramid building began, we have to wonder if pyramids were originally altars erected by early man. I use "early man" and "Adam" interchangeably. Could pyramids have played a part of the religious ceremonies carried out by Adam? One thing I always thought was strange is that the Jewish historian, Josephus, mentions that during his time there stood somewhere an obelisk that was made by Adam's son Seth. It was supposed to have had a lot of writing on it which he never described. Maybe he didn't tell us what it said because it was in such an old language that no one knew how to translate it. But it's hard to think of obelisks without thinking of pyramids as well. Based on what we know of ancient Egypt, the two just seem to go together. Well... who knows. It's interesting, that's for sure.

Here's a picture showing where the Mekong River splits into four separate waters before dumping into the South China Sea. This is the general area where I believe the Garden of Eden story originated from. Sundaland would be located underwater just off this entire southern coast. Also keep in mind that if people migrated from there to the Mesopotamia and became the nation of Sumer, these may well have been the ancestors of the Jews.

I hope this has been instructive, and if nothing else, maybe it will be food for thought.

Saved (the Desire Behind Desire)

2009-12-27T12:52:00.008-06:00

Next week I'll be posting my last article. It will be quite short and will include some thoughts about the religion of Adam. I'll also be giving some book recommendations.

Romans 2: 28-29, “A man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man’s praise is not from men, but from God.”

The Apostle Paul seems to state in several places that he believed in all of humanity having something along the lines of what the ancients called the "laws of nature". Some cultures call them "first precepts" or "the Tao" etc. It’s basically the notion of a universal conscience common to all men at all times everywhere throughout creation. For instance, as C. S. Lewis once said, no one has ever admired cowardice or selfishness. We're always amazed when we hear of somebody committing inhumane acts of extreme torture and the like, and say, "How could somebody do that to someone else?", as if they've done something that goes against nature itself--and they have. A materialist would like to think this proves there is no Tao, and men create their own conscience, but this is not so. These are men who have simply chosen not to follow their God given consciences. I had a friend many years ago whose cousin was jumped in a bar by some bikers; they held him down while one of them cut out one of his eyes with a pocketknife. They were following their own design of moral conscience while choosing to ignore the one God gave them at birth. I stated in a previous article that if you ignore your God given conscience it would begin to leave you, and eventually there would be hardly a trace of it left. Men can replace this conscience with one of their own making, and men that do this are capable of any detestable act that comes into their heads.

Another example of this Tao would be its presence in very young children who are molested. Almost every one of them will say on a witness stand that they knew/felt that what was being done to them was wrong even though they were too young to even know what sex was, but that didn't stop them from knowing a universal wrong when it was done to them.

Let's look at the following comment by Paul:

Romans 2:13-16 For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.) This will take place on the day when God will judge men's secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.

As for Paul's later reference in Romans to being "justified by faith", I don't see this as being a self-conflicting argument against his earlier statement about gentiles being saved by obeying the laws on their hearts, i.e.—conscience. I believe he reasons that the very fact that a man chooses to follow his God given conscience creates a turning point for him. That he has chosen God because God is a part of his conscience in some way.

Nobody can find friendship with God through obeying either the Deuteronomical laws or the laws of nature either one because nobody keeps them all the time. This is true. We all mess up now and then. Neither can anyone aspire to divine favor through faith alone. Paul also states that, even if we prophecy and have faith, we are worthless if we don't love others.

Nor do I think holy friendship is attainable through the magic invocation of names. No one gets points simply for saying they believe in Jesus. You might as well tell someone, "Say abracadabra and click your heels three times; there now, you get to go to heaven!" When Christ talked of separating the sheep from the goats, he was talking about people, all of whom, believed in him and weren't shy in saying his name. Those who were called the "goats" were called so because they didn't do, or didn't want to do, the good works they should have.

We can point to biblical passages that seem to contradict each other concerning the names/works/faith route to heaven all day. Therefore whatever brings us into the presence of Holiness must be something that concerns all of these things, but yet is something a little beyond them--something that is a bit of a mystery. Paul even spoke about "the mystery of faith". I don't pretend to know the mind of God, and I'm no mystic, but I think I may be able to shed a tiny bit of light on this mystery. Paul alludes to it when he speaks of the way the mind (or will of the body) wants to do one thing while the will (of his spirit) attains to something holier. CS Lewis said in The Weight of Glory that he believed the human conscience to be composed of both the Tao (something he likened to moral instincts) and the choices the mind makes between right and wrong where the Tao is unclear. I think Lewis is right. Paul separates the mind from the conscience in Titus 1:15 where he says "…both their minds and their consciences are corrupted", and I think he was right to completely separate the two here. The conscience for Paul seemed to hold a certain reverence. It was God himself, a glimmer of divine light, within mankind. It was like the first precept of all reason, because it was reason without cause. It was simply there, as a gift, just as the formulae of pi exists within all circles. We find that 3.14 keeps coming up in many geometrical measurements. It’s a sort of first precept of geometry, and it exists on its own whether we realize its existence or not. Yet Paul also talked of the conscience in other places where he admits that it's at least partially developed by our choices. So I tend to think he thought of the God given conscience as something like a big dam with Satan on the other side, where the biggest part of the structure was made by God, but where we have the ability to add to it and strengthen it, or to tear away at it until it comes tumbling down altogether. A man who has torn down that dam is the kind of man who can do unspeakable acts. The dam that would have kept the evil out of him is gone, and he's floating in the filth he let in.

Now this is a hard subject to grasp, and I believe that's why Paul thought of it as a mystery, but the body seems to have a mind of its own. It not only has physical desires but also mental desires that are not healthy. We all have thoughts that flood our heads now and then that we wish were not there, yet we find getting rid of them is not so easy as just wishing them to be gone. Yet we do wish them to be gone. How can it be that the minds of our bodies wish one thing, and yet we possess something behind that mind which would wish another thing altogether? It's as though we have a physical will and a spiritual will, and often they are at odds with one another. The closer we grow to Christ, the more at odds they will become. At this point you may think that winning this Olympics of wills is what sets good men apart from bad men, but you would be wrong. Here a third oddity comes into the fray that’s even more difficult to take in.

We may wish to be good and to follow our God-given consciences. Sometimes this involves heavy lifting (both physically and of the will). I may know through my conscience that God is telling me to do a certain good work, perhaps to cut my neighbors grass because they're sick in bed. However, what if cutting grass is my least favorite activity? For that matter, what if feeding the poor is one of my least favorite activities as well? Not only does my physical mind lack a desire to do a certain good work but even my spiritual mind seems to have no will do to the thing. Yet, I know it is a thing worth doing and a thing that will somehow do me good as well as those who are being done for. Therefore, I have a desire to desire that I would do these things. That is, I wish I would desire to do certain things that I have no desire to do--that they would become a part of my spiritual will. They may never be part of my physical will because it's always at odds with my spiritual will, but I at least wish that my spiritual will would be in step with the desires that the Tao is telling me are good and proper to have. I don't want to cut my neighbors grass, but I really wish I could make myself want to.

If we wish to have a desire to do good things, often that wish is fulfilled at some point. That wish can only be fulfilled by another kind of Will, one that is foreign to our own. Only God can convert our "desire to desire" into being a part of our own will. The bible says to love our enemies, but no one in the history of man ever wanted to love his enemies, and you can't make yourself want to. However, as long as you at least desire to want to then God will step in and convert that desire to a want to. (This is very hard to express verbally; I can only hope the reader will understand the mental imagery I am trying so hard, and yet so poorly, to convey). Before long you'll find that you really do want to love your enemies or cut your neighbors grass etc. It came by no power of your own, and it usually came after you gave up on it ever coming. One day you suddenly realize that you have a kind of love for people that you never had before, and this is what Paul meant by transforming our minds. It also happens to be what salvation (for lack of a better term) is. It's not the acts that we do, or the words we say, or opinions about God that we express. It’s the desire to desire goodness in all things. I know of no word or phrase for that desire behind desire, but the thing surely exists, and it’s the most important thing a man must take heed of within all of creation.

A man may choose to desire goodness in all things without ever having heard of Christ. He still chooses Christ, because Christ is the voice calling him to that desire behind desire. Or as Lewis once said, a man can be saved from drowning and never find out who it was that saved him. That's just my opinion, but it comes from something so deep within that it's without.

There's so very much more to this earthly existence than the tidbit I've tried to express here. There are things that Christ did and changed just by coming into the world that I haven't even begun to touch upon--things that changed all of humanity whether they realize it or not. For instance, people no longer build pyramids and mounds; no one builds them today at all. Worshipping in the high places is all but over for the most part. Magic, if it ever existed, no longer does. Mass human sacrifice is no longer a part of everyday culture throughout the world as it once was. The coming of Christ had a lot to do with that. There are ways in which Christ changed the world that even the bible itself doesn't go into. It doesn't matter if we know what all those changes are. We can still be grateful for them.

The Great War (CS Lewis, Owen Barfield, and—Anthroposophy)

2009-12-19T17:38:00.007-06:00

The following first appeared in my old blog a few years ago. I've always considered the letter by CS Lewis quoted here to be among the best and most significant he ever wrote, and it seemed important enough to me to merit posting it once again.

The Great War (CS Lewis, Owen Barfield, and—Anthroposophy)

CS Lewis, when speaking about Owen Barfield, once said that there are two kinds of best friends a person can have. One was the type of friend Lewis had during his younger years in Arthur Greeves, and this was the kind of person with whom you had everything in common. The other was the kind of friend he had in Owen Barfield, and this was the type of friend with whom you disagree about everything: "He has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one... How can he be so nearly right and yet, invariably, just not right? He is as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman."

Owen Barfield was a lifelong friend to CS Lewis despite their differences in opinion. They were introduced during their days as students at Oxford by another student, Leo Baker. Baker was a priest with the Anthroposophical Christian Community and taught at one of the early schools started by the Anthroposophical Society to promote the spiritual philosophy of Rudolf Steiner widely referred to as Anthroposophy.

Anthroposophy itself would become a lifelong point of contention between Jack and Owen. Barfield was enticed into joining the Anthroposophical Society in the early 1920's after hearing Steiner lecture on the subject.

Steiner's spiritual philosophy was based on mankind being a part of the creative thought behind the development of the world, both spiritually and materially, that man's will was there from creation, and that will took part in all decisions that would influence the evolution of the whole world and man's place in it. Like many spiritualists groups of the day, Steiner introduced meditative techniques involving visualization and concentration of the will in bringing man back into a conscious state whereby he could regain his lost knowledge of those latent creative forces which a devotion to materialism had made him to forget. He believed that when enough people had regained this knowledge of themselves and their capabilities that mankind would enter a new evolutionary stage of consciousness. Anthroposophical teaching, along with various apocalyptical prophecies from the Mayan; the Hopi Indians; and several other sources including the Bible itself, were the basis for the New Age movement of the early 1970's. Steiner was careful not to espouse a pantheistic philosophy that replaced God with a super-consciousness that encompassed every living thing. In his mind, God was still the chief architect, but he allowed man to have a much larger part in running the world than traditional Christianity had taught.

Lewis, however, was not convinced and once described Anthroposophy as "a kind of Gnosticism". The Catholic Church agreed and denounced Anthroposophy condemning it as far back as 1919.

Barfield and Baker would not be the only members of the Anthroposophical Society to come into Lewis' life. While attending Oxford, Barfield would meet another lifelong friend in Cecil Harwood. Harwood and his wife Daphne would later be at the forefront in the development of the Rudolf Steiner Schools. Daphne taught in the schools throughout much of her life while Cecil would give lectures promoting them. These schools would eventually become the basis for the Waldorf Schools still in existence today. Owen Barfield and his wife Maud would stay close friends to the Harwood's throughout all their years. Any friend of the Barfield's was a friend of Lewis.

Jack would engage in lively debates with his Anthroposophical friends during the 1920's even writing a long paper detailing his arguments against Anthroposophy and delivering it to Owen by mail. They jokingly referred to the paper as "The Summa", and it was just a small part of on ongoing debate that would last for years which they called "The Great War". It was a friendly war, however, and by the 1930's Lewis declined debating the subject any further. Instead, he would often focus on the things they had in common and the points in Anthroposophy that he agreed on. His disagreement with Anthroposophy was well-summed up in a short letter to Cecil Harwood in 1926:

No one is more convinced than I that reason is utterly inadequate to the richness and spirituality of real things: indeed this is itself a deliverance of reason. Nor do I doubt the presence, even in us, of faculties embryonic or atrophied, that lie in an indefinite margin around the little finite bit of focus which is intelligence—faculties anticipating or remembering the possession of huge tracts of reality that slip through the meshes of the intellect. And, to be sure, I believe that the symbols presented by imagination at its height are the workings of that fringe and present to us as much of the super-intelligible reality as we can get while we retain our present form of consciousness.

My scepticism begins when people offer me explicit accounts of the super-intelligible and in so doing use all the categories of the intellect. If the higher worlds have to be represented in terms of number, subject and attribute, time, space, causation etc (and thus they always are represented by occultists and illuminati), the fact that knowledge of them had to come through the fringe remains inexplicable. It is more natural to suppose in such cases that the illuminati have done what all of us are tempted to do:—allowed their intellect to fasten on those hints that come from the fringe, and squeezing them, has made a hint (that was full of truth) into a mere false hard statement. Seeking to know (in the only way we can know) more, we know less. I, at any rate, am at present inclined to believe that we must be content to feel the highest truths 'in our bones': if we try to make them explicit, we really make them untruth.

At all events if more knowledge is to come, it must be the wordless and thoughtless knowledge of the mystic: not the celestial statistics of Swedenborg, the Lemurian history of Steiner, or the demonology of the Platonists. All this seems to me merely an attempt to know the super-intelligible as if it were a new slice of the intelligible: as though a man with a bad cold tried to get back smells with a microscope.

This letter, written five years before Jack would proclaim himself a Christian, and at the young age of twenty eight, already shows an admiration for the mystical and a disdain for unrealistic ideologies turned dogma which would become the hallmark of his conversion process.

That men can disagree on religious and theological ideologies to such a degree as did Lewis and his Anthroposophical friends and still remain full of admiration and brotherly love for many decades, is a testament to level headedness, the likes of which one seldom encounters in any religious circle. Lewis dedicated his book, The Allegory of Love, to Owen Barfield, (Lewis sometimes signed his letters to Owen, as—The Alligator of Love). The Barfield's had three adopted children. Lewis was godfather to the second one, Lucy, and dedicated The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to her. He dedicated The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to the third child, Jeffrey. Lewis dedicated his book, Miracles, to the Harwood's, and was godfather to their son Laurence. And Lewis openly praised Barfield's first book, a novel called, The Silver Trumpet, as did Tolkien. Friendships such as these are rare indeed.

Bad Scholarship - The Root of Much Evil

2009-12-13T18:06:00.006-06:00

Perhaps you've heard about a website called Conservapedia founded by Andrew Schlafly, son of conservative radio commentator Phyllis Schlafly. It proposes to be something along the lines (the wrong lines) of an encyclopedia for conservatives, particularly conservative Christians. It was in the news recently when the owner announced that he's also attempting to use the device to construct a new bible geared toward conservatives. He complains that most modern bibles have been liberalized to the point of being inaccurate (he seems to especially despise gender neutral words), or that they've been dumbed down to a grade school reading level (a criticism decidedly aimed at the NIV Bible).

I'm no theologian. Even at my finest I'm just a man who does the best he can with what little common sense God has seen fit to give him. I recently mentioned that I also believe God has given me a fair amount of discernment/intuition. In addition, my father once paid me a great compliment in saying that he thought I should have been a policeman or in some other way involved with justice because he thought I would have been "fair". Common sense, discernment, and fairness may seem the tiniest and humblest of gifts to you. To me prophecy, healing, and miracles pale by comparison. I will endeavor to illustrate to you why I feel this way.

I find it increasingly rare to come across individuals today who are, in my estimation, fair in their reasoning. People tend to be jaded by circumstances. There's an old saying that hard times will either make you or break you. They seem to break most, and one of the things that gets broken more often than not is our sense of fairness. A young man dates a French girl who treats him badly; suddenly all French people are now second class and to be distrusted. Perhaps you were once passed over for a job by a factory that makes a certain brand of watches, and the man they hired instead of you is your worst enemy, so now this is a lousy brand of watch. It may have been something as simple as someone cutting you off in traffic, and now you even loathe the type of car they were driving, and nothing will ever convince you that it's a well-made vehicle. Topping it off are all the cultural prejudices we're taught growing up from our parents, our teachers, our clergymen and so on--prejudices that aren't always beneficial and which may not even represent accurate details of the various situations. I had a friend across the street in the 3rd grade who I distinctly recall telling me that Catholics like him were supposed to hate Protestants like me after he found out I was one. Of course it was just childhood gibberish. He made a poor stab at saying something he had heard an adult say and probably didn't get it exactly right. At any rate, we both quickly forgot what we were talking about and went on playing. But who's to say this conception which was already beginning to bud in him wouldn't flower into something greater later in life without his even thinking about it? You might be surprised how many unjust prejudices we pick up in childhood without realizing it.

If there's one area in which I constantly see people acting in an unfair manner it's the political arena. This is especially troublesome in the USA specifically because we're primarily a 2-party system, and these two parties, more often than not, act like two warring mafia families. I don't find liberals in America so much as I find haters of conservatives. And conversely I find many more haters of liberals than people who are truly practicing conservatism. Mr. Schlafly of Conservapedia, I believe, falls into this latter camp. Most people probably couldn't even tell you what liberal or conservative mean. I'm going to quote someone who does, but you may be shocked to find out that the quote is from a very well-known Hollywood actor:

My reputation as a conservative is valid in a lot of ways," he says, "but what disturbs me is what people think conservatives are. What conservatism represents to me is civil libertarian thought. To me, it's as simple as this: We all agree we need to solve social problems. My leanings tend toward individualist solutions. I don't like to characterize anybody, but I think liberals tend to have collectivist solutions. The twentieth century has been a collectivist century. Most of our solutions to social problems--even the term social problems--are collectivist. We've had this global experiment, and we're starting to see the end of the chain letter. I say let's try new things. I can't guarantee you they'll all work. If thirty percent of them work, I'll be happy. It's just time to reassess things and say that maybe this idea of the common good has to be translated through the individual.

I've learned by hanging out in Hollywood, where I disagree politically with most people, that most people's hearts are in the right place, and the only thing we have to argue about is the way to solve the problems. So I don't like it if the conservative philosophy becomes an 'anti' philosophy, just sheer negative thought.

If that's conservatism, I don't want to be labeled a conservative. If I can be an advocate of individualist solutions to our society's problems that are affirmative solutions, that to me is what conservatism means.

Those were the words of Tom Selleck in an interview some fourteen years ago. It's heartening to hear someone talk politics with no animosity toward others who may own antithetical viewpoints. Mr. Schlafly could learn a lot from Mr. Selleck. A cursory glance at Conservapedia easily shows conservatism gone wrong. There is properly placed prejudice and improper. There is fair and just bias and unfair. Mr. Schlafly represents to me someone whose biases have clouded his judgment to appalling ends. But I really have no wish to talk any further about his political demeanor. It's there for all the world to see. What interests me is his Conservative Bible Project.

The term liberal often means something different among theologians than it does when speaking of politics, although in Mr. Schlafly's mind it appears the two often get intermingled. Bibles that purposely change words from their original gender specific expressions such as he to something like they are no doubt using liberal ideologies when doing so. We often use the word man alone when speaking of all humans, as in mankind. We've all come across feminists who dislike this broad terminology and would rather see a text read humankind. Most of us probably aren't concerned whether a writer uses one or the other in most instances. But what if a feminist placating bible translator decides it's more decorous to use vague terms when speaking about God's own gender and chooses to use it instead of he or him? Then things start sounding convoluted. They may also be inaccurate because, for all we know, God may have more manly traits about him than feminine ones. Schlafly dislikes this treatment of God. I don't blame him. But does he dislike it because it's an inaccurate translation of the original texts, or because of his aversion for liberals and feminists? A theologian, like a scientist, or a school teacher, has got to be fair-minded. If he allows for the faintest hint of prejudice in his work he will have tainted all of it. People will then be able to point out the blemished parts and easily form a bias against the whole. Mr. Schlafly has caused a bias against his own work before he has even gotten past the opening stages.

Schlafly hardly stops there. If modern bible translators show any progressive leanings in their theology (whether these leanings are come by honestly or not) they're to be rejected on the spot. This basically comes down to the fundamentalist (biblical inerrancy) verses non-fundamentalist camps. Schlafly will have no part of the latter.

More importantly though, I find his reasoning often void of any substance or precision. For instance, he gives several reasons why he believes modern translations such as the NIV are frequently incorrect. One example he cites is the following:

At Luke 16:8, the NIV describes an enigmatic parable in which the 'master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.' But is 'shrewdly', which has connotations of dishonesty, the best term here? Being dishonestly shrewd is not an admirable trait.

Go and read Luke 16, and I think you will quickly see the problem with Schlafly's argument. The parable never says that the rich master is himself a good man or any better than his servant. In fact, that the master "commended" the dishonest actions of his servant shows us a great deal about the master's own lack of morality. There's also the fact that Jesus is painting a picture of a man he calls a "rich master", and we all know how hard it is for the rich to enter Heaven according to Jesus. If he were going to tell a story about a good businessman and a dishonest servant, he probably wouldn't have prefaced it by indicating that the businessman was rich. What disturbs me even more, however, is the fact that Schlafly depicts the word shrewd as having something in common with dishonesty. It does not. Shrewd simply means wise. In every text of Luke I know of (and of course all are in Greek), the Greek word used is "pronimos" which does indeed mean shrewd, wise, astute etc. The word Schlafly suggests using is resourceful which isn't necessarily incorrect, but it's not as accurate as shrewd either. Resourceful denotes a certain kind of creativity at work. There used to be a TV show called MacGyver about a man who was very resourceful indeed. If you needed a way to listen in on satellite telephone conversations, Angus MacGyver could probably tear apart an old radio and use the parts, with the aid of his ever present Swiss army knife, to build a working cell phone interceptor in less than ten minutes. His exploits often reminded me of the Professor on Gilligan's Island who could build just about any modern convenience from two coconuts and a hairpin. If the rich man's servant in Luke showed any resourcefulness at all, it certainly wasn't much. But he could unquestionably be described as being shrewd.

Another disconcerting aspect to Schlafly's translation efforts has to do with the fact that he's using the King James as a source to start from. Actually, what he's trying to give us is not so much a translation of a new bible as it is a paraphrase of an old one. He suggests to his helpers that they use the KJV as a starting point and then look up words in a Strong's Concordance for further assistance when needed. Part of his reasoning for doing this is because the KJV is in public domain, so they can use it freely. There is a great problem with this approach however. The translators of the KJV used Hebrew texts exclusively when translating the Old Testament because they assumed that the Jews would have more accurate copies even though they are considerably later than the Greek Septuagint and Theodotion copies we have. This assumption turned out to be incorrect. If you ignore the older Greek copies you will never have as accurate a translation because there are some passages the later Hebrew copies simply got wrong. An example I've always used is that of King Saul's daughters. The KJV says the following:

II Samuel 6:23 Therefore Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death.

II Samuel 21:8 But the king took the two sons of Rizpah . . . and the five sons of Michal the daughter of Saul.

Obviously the two verses cannot both be right. If Michal can die barren and yet have five sons she would have one-up'd the virgin Mary considerably. Why does the KJV read this way? Actually 21:8 should read Saul's other daughter Merab as having those five sons. We know this because I Samuel 18:19 correctly tells us Merab was married to Adriel.

1 Samuel 18:19 But it came to pass at the time when Merab Saul's daughter should have been given to David, that she was given unto Adriel the Meholathite to wife.

In II Samuel 21:8 the KJV again uses the wrong name for Saul's daughter:

But the king took the two sons of Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, whom she bare unto Saul, Armoni and Mephibosheth; and the five sons of Michal the daughter of Saul, whom she brought up for Adriel the son of Barzillai the Meholathite....

So, now here it is saying that Michal was married to Adriel when it just got done telling us that Merab was married to him instead. If you read through the two books of Samuel you will come to realize that it had to be Michal who was barren and Merab who had the five sons. The problem with the KJV in this instance is that there are only two Hebrew fragments of II Samuel which show the correct names, and to the best of my knowledge neither of these were known of until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s. However, even though most of the Greek Old Testament copies got the name jumbled too, there were some that got it right. If the KJV translators had bothered to use the Greek manuscripts they could have easily figured out the correct name to use in each verse. In using the KJV as a starting point for the Conservative Bible, Schlafly will be making many of the same mistakes they did. It's simply bad scholarship corrupted by a combination of poor thinking skills and a bias that favored the Hebrew text over the Greek.

Schlafly also talks about trying to get the "precision in the original language" accurate with his new version. The problem is that we don't know how the original Hebrew Old Testament texts read since there are no extant copies from the B.C. era. There aren't even many fragments until much later. If you follow Schlafly's logic, he seems to think there must have been something majestic about it which explains why he's so fond of the KJV. There are two problems here. I'm not fluent in it, but I know that ancient Hebrew was actually a very simple language, especially compared with Greek. The Greeks had amassed a huge vocabulary by the time the Septuagint came into being while the Jews still had a very small one by comparison. Ancient Hebrew had very little by way of conjunctions and connecting words that we take for granted today. For instance they didn't have a word for that. I've always likened the language in those days to something very similar to various native American Indians. If you can recall Indians speaking in the old cowboy movies, they might give directions by saying, "Go north two moons, look great oak, valley down many buffalo." In other words, travel north two days until you get to a big oak tree, and in the valley below you will find large buffalo herds. While ancient Hebrew may have been slightly more sophisticated, it wasn't by much. There was nothing majestic about it. The Greeks made it look more majestic than it really was, but the KJV translators did even more so. When the original KJV first came out in 1611, it was negatively criticized in its own day for being in an archaic form of English that was no longer used even then. People had stopped using words like thee and thine at least two or three centuries earlier. Critics of the KJV at that time accused the translators of trying to pretty it up and make it sound grandiose. Apparently Mr. Schlafly will be doing the same. If the NIV translation is written at a grade school reading level (which I judge to be a false claim) it's only because the bible was written at one. There's nothing difficult in the words themselves. The more important truths don't need difficult words to express them. They're inexpressible anyway.

My hope is that you are beginning to see why I consider common sense, discernment, and fairness of such great importance. Without them, truth and accuracy are unachievable. This is why most books are bad books. I don't want to single out Mr. Schlafly though. let me give you another example of bad scholarship. I made a short film a while back on beauty not being in the eye of the beholder. In other words, that it's not subjective at all, and I showed where this ungodly notion came from. If you search on the internet you can find several websites devoted to showing the origins of words, phrases, and sayings. Of course there are several books that do this as well. One of the more popular websites for this type of thing is called The Phrase Finder. I will post below the information they give for the origins of the phrase, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Keep in mind that other similar websites give almost identical information.

Origin

This saying first appeared in the 3rd century BC in Greek. It didn't appear in its current form in print until the 19th century, but in the meantime there were various written forms that expressed much the same thought. In 1588, the English dramatist John Lyly, in his Euphues and his England, wrote:

"...as neere is Fancie to Beautie, as the pricke to the Rose, as the stalke to the rynde, as the earth to the roote."

Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment in Love's Labours Lost, 1588:

Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:
Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,
Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues

Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanack, 1741, wrote:

Beauty, like supreme dominion
Is but supported by opinion

David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political, 1742, include:

"Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them."

The person who is widely credited with coining the saying in its current form is Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (née Hamilton), who wrote many books, often under the pseudonym of 'The Duchess'. In Molly Bawn, 1878, there's the line "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", which is the earliest citation of it that I can find in print.

I agree that Hume was the first to suggest this concept, and Ms. Hungerford only rewords his thoughts slightly. This isn't to say that no one had the thought before Hume. I'd be very surprised if someone hadn't said similar things before Plato was ever born. But so far I've not found it in writing. More importantly though, is the fact that every listing this website gives prior to Hume is incorrect.

The 3rd century Greek writer they refer to is Theocritus. What he says is, "...for in the eyes of love that which is not beautiful often seems beautiful." He does not say beauty is in the eye of the beholder but merely says things sometimes seem beautiful whether they are or not. But he never for a moment suggests that this beauty is a realty.

This website quotes Shakespeare without realizing that his wicked queen is saying exactly what Shakespeare, like all just men, disapprove of. Elsewhere in the poem it says:

O, who can give an oath? where is a book?
That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack,
If that she learn not of her eye to look:
No face is fair that is not full so black.

These are the words he gives to a very ignoble character. He gives her wicked words to say because she is wicked. Shakespeare makes plain his dislike for any nonsense involving subjective beauty in Sonnet 127:

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name.
But now is black beauty’s successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame.
For since each hand hath put on nature’s pow'r,
Fairing the foul with art’s false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bow'r,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland'ring creation with a false esteem.
Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.

What he's saying is that once women with fair complexions were considered beautiful, but in his day people had begun saying that it was the women with dark complexions who were accounted beautiful. He goes on to say that it was becoming fashionable for women to paint themselves up and use powders to feign the look of beauty. He laments that beauty has been so mistreated because if everything can be beautiful then nothing is beautiful. And there lies the sophistry of the subjective argument. If beauty is not universal then beauty does not exist.

Lyly is quoted from, but let me quote the entire line:

And as rare it is to see the Sunne with-out a light, as a fayre woeman with-out a lover, and as neere is Fancie to Beautie, as the pricke to the Rose, as the stalke to the rynde, as the earth to the roote.

Fancie here does not mean imagination. It means desire as in, "She fancied going to the opera". Therefore it has nothing to do with beauty being in the imagination, and if it did, the line would make no sense.

Franklin is also quoted, but he did not say this. He was quoting Jonathan Swift who wrote the line ten years earlier in his poem Strephon And Chloe:

For Beauty, like supreme dominion,
Is best supported by Opinion:
If Decency bring no supplies,
Opinion falls, and Beauty dies.

The poem is about a married couple who realize after marriage that, though initially attracted by physical beauty, they are still human and have to "poop and fart" (Swift's very words) like everyone else. They try to put a pleasant face on it as though it's still part of the beauty, but clearly Swift toward the end of the poem says they are wrong to do so. Also, if you read the above lines carefully you'll see that he isn't saying what this website seems to think he does. He in fact is saying just the opposite. He is not talking about individual opinion, but is simply saying that the more people who can agree on a thing being beautiful, the more likely it is to be so. This attests to beauty being universal rather than subjective.

Other websites mention Plato as being the first to suggest beauty as being subjective in the following.

Plato ~ Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.

They're completely misinterpreting what Plato said. He's simply saying that beauty is transcendent from God, and that when the mind taps into this beauty, it is tapping into a real place within the mind of the creator. Had they read The Republic in school, they would have realized right off that this is an element in his Theory of Forms.

It was the atheist (or at least agnostic) philosopher David Hume who actually came up with the notion of beauty being a matter of taste. He says in 1742: "Beauty, properly speaking, lyes in the Sentiment or Taste of the Reader", and "Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them." Again I must say that if everything can be beautiful then nothing is beautiful. What Hume has actually managed is the abolition of beauty (as C. S. Lewis might say).

Speaking of Lewis, let me close with some choice words he has to say about poor scholarship. From his essay, Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism, later titled Fern-seed and Elephants:

First then, whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgment, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading. It sounds a strange charge to bring against men who have been steeped in those books all their lives. But that might be just the trouble. A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of New Testament texts and of other people's studies of them, whose literary experience of those texts lacks any standard of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genial experience of literature in general, is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious thing about them. If he tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour; not how many years he has spent on that Gospel. But I had better turn to examples.

...

Finally, from the same Bultmann: 'the personality of Jesus has no importance for the kerygma either of Paul or John... Indeed, the tradition of the earliest Church did not even unconsciously preserve a picture of his personality. Every attempt to reconstruct one remains a play of subjective imagination.'

So there is no personality of our Lord presented in the New Testament. Through what strange process has this learned German gone in order to make himself blind to what all men except him see? What evidence have we that he would recognize a personality if it were there? For it is Bultmann contra mundum. If anything whatever is common to all believers, and even to many unbelievers, it is the sense that in the Gospels they have met a personality.

That then is my first bleat. These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards way in broad daylight.

Don't think for a moment that because someone has a PHD and many years of education or even a high IQ that this qualifies them as good scholars even if they are well-read. As Lewis once pointed out, a man can read all the right books and still get the wrong things out of them. He also mentioned that John Bunyan, with less than four years of formal education, went on to write a book which has astonished the world. Common sense, discernment, and fairness can take some men a very long way indeed.

Demystifying the Mystagogues

2009-12-05T18:20:00.006-06:00

I saw this on another blog a few days ago: "Both you and God are ultimately absorbed in the One ... For this is the ultimate goal of traditional yogic practice: to throw oneself under the cosmic bus, and merge with the Infinite. No self, no problem."

It made me ponder my own position in accordance to the proximity of the Almighty. Many Christians, starting with the earliest Gnostics, have taken up this Hindu concept of oneness with the divine. Of the 31,000 verses in the bible, there are only three or four that on the surface sound as though they might have anything at all to do with this concept of merging with that hypostasis we call the trinity.

John 10:30 "I and the Father are one."

John 17:11 "I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name—the name you gave me—so that they may be one as we are one."

John 17:20-22 My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

But are these scriptures actually talking about our being sucked up into the Godhead, a sort of reversal of the Big Bang where all goes back to its original state of primordial substance before the fall? That is indeed very similar to the Hindu concept of nirvana where man loses his individual consciousness in God. This, however, has nothing in common with the teachings of Christ or the character of a creator. God's greatest triumph was being able to do the very opposite of this. The connectedness of all things isn't a particularly tricky subject. That all beings are within the whole yet can still remain quite separate, take divergent paths, and act with extreme variance is the more interesting and inexplicable phenomenon. To create beings apart from himself, each with their own personality and awareness, in essence--a soul--was an act of excogitation no man can begin to comprehend.

Being drawn into the divine and losing our individuality in the process is the last thing on God's mind.

What Jesus was talking about in the above verses was something very much like what we're told his followers took to heart and did: Acts 4:32 "All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had."

God wants us to have a common sense of right and wrong that comes from him, to live in a mutual attitude of love and respect for one another, to share each other's physical and emotional troubles. He has no intentions of un-creating our individuality even when we're in Heaven. What he wants for us is to be creators ourselves and to go on creating throughout eternity. He didn't tell Noah to have no children and live in a state of constant meditation in an attempt to become one with God. Far from it, he told him to go out and replicate, to fill the world with more souls. That's what creators do--they create. There's no talk of "less is more" in Heaven. Scientists tell us they now believe the universe will expand forever. There are billions of stars in the universe, billions of people on this one planet, billions of photons passing through your body this very instant. God is about more, more, more! He can be nothing less. A dog barks because it's his nature. God creates because that is his.

The Mystagogues talk in lofty words full of air like a poem with no subject. They love the mere mention of words like eternity, infinity, timelessness, intangible, ineffable. They live for the mystery of things. They have little use for either hard answers or the hard work of a life well-lived. Theirs is a wistful world of imponderable bliss without end. And if they're not careful they may get it. I loved what G. K. Chesterton had to say in his essay entitled The Mystagogues.

Whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable and impalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable, then elevate your aristocratic nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay. It is perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond all speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in all good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment; and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is always made. If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances are that it is an evil idea. If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word.

Thus Giotto or Fra Angelieo would have at once admitted theologically that God was too good to be painted; but they would always try to paint Him. ... The trend of good is always towards Incarnation. ...those refined thinkers who worship the Devil ... always insist upon the shapelessness, the wordlessness, the unutterable character of the abomination. ... they worship him as the unspeakable name; as the unbearable silence. ... It was the Christians who gave the Devil a grotesque and energetic outline, with sharp horns and spiked tail. It was the saints who drew Satan as comic and even lively. The Satanists never drew him at all.

... The man who really thinks he has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained. ... The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it. [my emphasis]

There is a proper longing that every Christian has to be with God in something like a physical way although we may not realize what that longing is initially--that Sehnsucht which C. S. Lewis spoke of so often where there seems to be joy in the longing itself. But the mature Christian, in time, learns that this feeling is not a love for mystery, nor a desire to be drawn in to God's own self. God allows us our "selves" and instead causes his light to shine on everything we experience no matter where we go in the world. Lewis figured this out after reading MacDonald's story--Phantastes.

There was no temptation to confuse the scenes of the tale with the light that rested upon them, or to suppose that they were put forward as realities, or even to dream that if they had been realities and I could reach the woods where Anodos Journeyed I should thereby come a step nearer to my desire. ... Thus, when the great moments [Sehnsucht] came I did not break away from the woods and cottages that I read of to seek some bodiless light shining beyond them. ... For I now perceived that while the air of the new region made all my erotic and magical perversions of Joy look like sordid trumpery, it had no such disenchanting power over the bread on the table or the coals in the grate. That was the marvel. Up till now each visitation of Joy had left the common world momentarily a desert.... Even when real clouds or trees had been the material of the vision, they had been so only by reminding me of another world; and I did not like the return to ours. But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the books into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged.

Our objective is not to live in mystery (although it may start as such). It is to live in the embodiment of divine grace.

Sin And The Art Of Telecaster Maintenance

2009-11-29T01:21:00.011-06:00

[I thought I'd take a breather this week from anything deeply spiritual or theological and allow you the great pleasure of just hearing me gripe about our sinful world. But beware that next week we'll be getting into some pretty heady stuff.]

Sin And The Art Of Telecaster Maintenance

(Apologies to Robert Pirsig)

I haven't played the electric guitar very much the past few years, opting to fingerpick an acoustic most days instead, at least on the rare days that I play at all. My favorite electric guitar is the Fender Telecaster--the first commercially available solid body guitar ever made. People snickered at their arrival in the world. A "plank" with strings they thought it was. And for Pete's sake...a bolt-on neck! Whoever heard of such a thing or saw such a sight? But Leo Fender apparently either had no fear or no shame. While developing the prototype around 1949 or so, he and partner George Fullerton drove out to a little dive called the Riverside Rancho one night where Jimmy Bryant, a brilliant country-swing guitarist, was playing. They got Jimmy to come over to the table while Leo unveiled his new invention. Rather than snicker, Bryant was curious. He plugged it in and began to wail. For the next two hours, you could hear a pin drop (if it was a really big'un) as the folks in this joint forgot about their drinking and came up around the stage, clearly amazed at what they were hearing.

Millions of divers kinds of solid body guitars have been sold since then, but this is still the one that does it for me. Not because it was the first, but because it has the most human-like quality in tone. It almost literally can laugh, scream, and moan the blues or twang away in a country pickers hands. When you find a good one, they just sing.

I haven't owned a tele since the early 90s. While I love the guitars, they're kind of smallish, and I'm kind of biggish. I always felt a little strange strapping one across my chest. They can look darn near like a mandolin on a 6'5" man. But as fate would have it, I came across an old, beat up tele in a music store a couple of months ago. I seldom pick one up I like anymore because they just don't seem to build them like they used to, but this old junker sounded and felt almost too good to be true. The price was right, and I simply couldn't resist.

My first thought was to restore my new acquisition to its former glory. A tele is probably the easiest guitar to work on that was ever made. Swapping pickups, necks, pots and so forth couldn't be easier. As a result, guys like to soup them up, and you'll see all kinds of them out there. You can't hardly hurt them either. I don't want to say they're indestructible, but you could probably toss one down a flight of stairs, and not only wouldn't it break, it would likely still be in tune when you picked it up. The design is a real testament to simplicity, durability, and functionality--three of the best things in life when found together.

The Fender Telecaster reminds me very much of the Ford Model T. The Model T has the same elegant simplicity and easy to maintain functionality, yet it's also easy to hot-rod and do all kinds of customizing with. Over 15-million were made between 1908 and 1927, and there are still tons of them on the road. You can pick up a phone and have any part delivered for them in a single day.

It is almost without a doubt the best automobile ever made when it comes to simplicity, durability, and functionality. I once actually saw three guys put one together from parts in about 30-minutes! Literally, the chassis, body, tires, motor, all the interior parts, windows, everything in 30-minutes. The Model T was capable of running on gasoline, kerosene or ethanol and got better than 20 mpg. Sure its little 4-cylinder motor only produced a top speed of 45 mph, but it was a remarkable achievement in many ways. It had no oil pump, no fuel pump, no water pump, no distributor cap--almost nothing to go wrong. And nearly every metal part on the vehicle was made of vanadium steel, so it was extremely resistant to rust (which is part of the reason there are still so many of them around). It would also go over nearly any kind of terrain and had a reputation for starting right up in all kinds of weather. If I had to drive across the continent tomorrow and wanted to buy the most reliable vehicle for the job, after a century of automobiles to choose from, I would still pick Ford's old Tin Lizzie for dependability.

After bringing home my new tele, I began to search the internet for parts to see what was available, the wait time, prices and so on. There are a lot of aftermarket parts made for teles, and sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish the ones worth having from the ones you wouldn't wish on your enemies or even your girlfriend's cat. The only way to determine the quality of workmanship is to handle everything yourself or to rely on a reviewer to do that for you. Many of these parts aren't available in stores and come from distant states, so I have no choice but to rely on the latter.

One thing you quickly learn about the internet, and I learned it long ago, is that the vast majority of what you read on it comes under the heading of misinformation (to put it kindly) or disinformation (to put it more accurately). It's hard to trust anything you read online. First there are these things in cyberland called user reviews. They're as useless as...what's that old line?...a screen door on a submarine. Half of them are written by kids, generally trying to pass as adults, and to them everything is either great or terrible. Most kids, devils that they are, are infatuated with their possessions. They own it, so it must be fantastic. Any similar product is inferior whether they've actually laid eyes on it or not. Or they find some little thing wrong and decide the company that makes the product produces nothing but trash. I think a lot of this has to do with a new American ethos. A couple of decades ago we saw some strange trends beginning with the children in this country. They started insisting on the best of everything. A pair of tennis shoes had to cost a hundred dollars or they weren't good enough. Kids suddenly had to wear a different pair of pants to school every day rather than make the same pair of blue jeans last out the week the way we did when I was growing up. Where do they come up with these notions? Who is it that wants them (or their parents) to spend money so frivolously?

Unfortunately, the adults here at the weird wide web are nearly as bad. I laugh every time I read that somebody has made some very slight modification to a guitar or amplifier, and the difference is now "night and day". Maybe all they did was change the tuning pegs. A night and day difference in the way a guitar sounds after just swapping out the tuners? I don't think so.... In fact, it probably had no effect on the tone of the instrument at all, and I could prove it to them in a blindfold test most of the time, but they probably wouldn't stand for it. Common sense is the evil enemy in cyberland. Here are four cases to make my point. There's really no need to read all four unless you just want to:

1) In the old days we used to record sound to big reel to reel magnetic tape machines. They were insanely expensive and cumbersome. Then someone came up with the idea of recording digitally, first to magnetic tape, but about ten years ago software came in vogue for multitrack recording digitally to a computer. Several software engineers came up with their own apps for this, so you had several to choose from. They all recorded what are called "wave" (or .wav) audio files. You used to see hundreds of messages at user reviews or music forums claiming that this editor recorded better sounding wave files than that one. It seemed that almost everyone had an opinion about it. But truth be known, all wave apps record wave files exactly the same. There is absolutely no difference in the recording process. A wave is a wave is a wave. Either there are a lot of people in the world who can't hear what they think they can, or a lot of people are liars.

2) There are these things called amplifier simulators that guitarists often use to record with called amp sims for short. They're small desktop boxes that you plug your axe into that sound remarkably like a regular cranked up guitar amp but without the volume problems that make your neighbors call the police. Normally you run a line out of them into your mixing board and then on into the computer soundcard etc. You can monitor through a set of headphones without disturbing anybody. There were two main amp sims for a few years: the Line 6 POD and the Behringer V-Amp. And again you could find user reviews and message boards awash with opinions as to which was the best. Most people said the POD sounded better...no..."night and day" better. Why? Probably because it cost twice as much. Fact is, both use the exact same IC architecture, and get identical amp/speaker sounds. There was one guy who eventually realized this and came up with a program that could take user presets from one amp sim and transfer them to the other.

3) A microphone in general is just a speaker in reverse. Condenser mics are the most popular for recording. They're simple to make (for the most part), and most are extremely similar in design given the same capsule size, polar pattern, etc. Actually, there are many little things that go into the way sound is captured in them such as the thickness of the diaphragm, the material it's made from, and the tension on it; the distance between the diaphragm and the back plate and so on. The electronics are generally very similar with only small differences mostly having to do with capacitance.

The Chinese have gotten very good at reverse engineering expensive microphones from the West and then building inexpensive knockoffs. They may use cheaper electrical components, but this generally effects the noise specs more than the tonal aspects. The diaphragm material may also be slightly different. I don't know of a microphone made that has more than twenty or thirty dollars worth of electronics in it. As to the other materials, again there isn't much there by way of cost. Nearly all condenser mics have around fifty or sixty dollars worth of parts in total. Yet some of the more expensive mics retail for over $2,000. Can labor alone justify that price? The Chinese knockoffs run anywhere between $100 and $300, and they can, and usually do, sound a whole lot like the more expensive originals. The differences in sound are pretty subtle. The biggest difference is the price. But again, if you go by what people are saying at user reviews and message boards, you'd think the Chinese mics weren't worth a plug nickel. Here's a link to a website that gives sound samples of a couple dozen different mics, all recording the same voices in the same context. Some of the mics are very expensive, and some are very cheap. It's a blindfold test, but there's a key at the bottom of the page that pops up to tell you which mic is which and what they typically cost. I think it's painfully obvious that some of the cheap mics here actually sound better than others costing 2 to 3 times as much.

4) I'm also a bit of a video buff. Film has been the touchstone medium for capturing moving images since the 1800s. But good 35mm film cameras, the film to go in them, and especially the cost to develop that film is incredibly expensive. When videotape was introduced a few decades ago, it wasn't taken seriously as a tool for features. It had a hard look that was too much like real life. It managed to find a home for Network News as an ENG (electronic news gathering) device though, and soaps adopted it for their poor quality daytime dramas where cost was an issue. In recent years, however, manufacturers of miniDV camcorders found ways to record in progressive frames as apposed to the hard look of interlacing and also developed camcorders that could record at 24 frames per second just like film cameras instead of the 30 fps they had been using over the years. These two developments went a long way toward making videotape take on a film look. Really the only thing missing was a 35mm lens for getting the same depth of field. But traditional manufacturers of 35mm lenses sold them for around $10,000 to fit expensive film cameras. Why are the lenses so expensive? Because the traditional film market would pay it. A set of glass lenses is nothing but a nickel's worth of sand. Making it into glass, grinding it, and polishing it are hardly rocket science. But who would pay $5,000 for a top flight miniDV camcorder only to shell out another ten grand for a 35mm lens for the front end? Well, sure enough, some enterprising young guys started making their own 35mm lenses about a year ago and selling them as aftermarket add-ons to fit various camcorder filter threads for not much more less than $200. They're also selling them to fit the newer HDV units as well. Now you can buy something like a Canon XH-A1 and fit it with a 35mm lens for a total cost of around $3500 and shoot video that looks remarkably like film even when spread out on a 30' screen. How did the internet audience react? Do I even have to tell you? They started a typical smear campaign. "Film will never die!", "Videotape will never look like film!", "These cheap lenses are blurry!". In protest of this I put together a presentation of stills taken from movies that had been shot on both film and videotape and put it on the internet challenging people to guess which stills came from which recording medium. No one as yet has ever come close to being able to tell one from the other. Apparently people's eyes are as bad as their ears, or...they're lying.

We can, and should, assume that your average Joe on the internet has no earthly idea what he or she is talking about. Thus the misinformation aspect of things. But, now for the main course in this essay, and that has to do with the disinformation facet.

It's not just consumers that have access to the internet, to user reviews, or message boards. The manufacturers, company employees, salespeople, even folks at home who have stock in companies all have equal playing time, and there are almost no rules to play by. You can see where I'm going with this. Many of the message boards and user review sites that are out there, probably most if truth be told, have been set up by these same people. One of the more popular musical instrument store outlets is G...C... I once overheard two sales employees from there talking about downplaying certain products because they made very little money on them. The commission on a $1000 microphone is much greater than that on a $100 one. Obviously they want you to spend as much as you can afford even if the more expensive item isn't worth the extra money. People like this will purposely leave user reviews saying that inexpensive products are pure junk and that you're wasting your money on them. They'll routinely get together and set up their own message boards and then go on to create several usernames each. Of course the talk of the day will always focus on how only more expensive items are good for anything. If you take the names of these various dotcoms and search them at sites like the Whois database you'll quickly find that many of them are privately registered and give absolutely no contact information. A veil of secrecy is crucial to them doing what they do.

Could it be possible that most people are like this in the real world too, and you just never saw it before? I pity the question. No, I pity the questioner! Fact is that this is the type of dirty pool that has been going on since the beginning of civilization and the trading of goods and services. Before there was an internet people still did the same kinds of things with newspapers, magazines--even word of mouth rumors. There are precious few people in the business world that follow the golden rule.

This is a true story. My paternal grandfather for many years worked in a small shop that made batteries in East St. Louis back in the 30s/40s. After the shop closed, he went to work for a brake shop in the same area. While he was there, he and a friend at the shop got together and invented a car battery that they thought would last a lifetime. Grandpa died before I was born, and he never left any papers about his idea that I'm aware of, so I don't know what the details were. At any rate, they knew they couldn't afford to have the design patented, so they decided to pay a visit to the largest manufacturer of batteries in those days (probably Willard or Delco) to see if they could sell them on the idea. When they got there, the man they talked to actually laughed at them. Turns out his company already had the same idea and had a patent on it. They had no intension of ever making the battery though. The last thing they wanted was a battery that people only had to buy once.

My dad was a great baseball player. He dropped out of school to go to work when he was fifteen, so he never played on the school team. He didn't want to anyway because he had already been playing on a men's team since the age of twelve. The Jaycees baseball league was actually started in East St. Louis by Ray Rice back in the 40s. Dad started playing on one of the teams in the 50s', and in 1952 they won the state championship and then went on to defeat the Missouri champs at an exhibition game at Sportsman's Park where the St. Louis Cardinals then played. Dad's batting average that year was 667. (Yes, he was really that good). Actually, the whole team was great. They won every game on the way to state by no less than seven runs and won the state final by ten runs. A lot of the Cardinal players used to come out to watch these kids play--that's how much they were respected. They're still the only Jaycees team I ever heard of that actually had players drafted by major league teams. The Dodgers came after dad. He promptly turned them down saying, "I play for fun, not for money." Other guys on the team turned down offers too. If you ask around, you'll find that it was probably more common for players to turn down major league contracts than to accept them in those days. They turned them down because major league teams had a reputation for snapping up good young players they didn't really need and then sticking them in the minors at low pay forever just so nobody else could get them.

Lies and deception are the tools of trade around the world when it comes to big business. Politics is even worse. I'm a registered republican. I have to tell you though, that I'm ashamed of our leaders and this idiotic nonsense propagated about universal health care being a product of socialism. It's complete and utter horse hockey from A to Z. Under this new, absurd definition of socialism even the military is a form of socialism. Police departments, fire departments, Medicare, public water systems, social security--all ingredients of a socialist government. Either the leaders of the Tea Party Movement are so stupid they don't even know the difference between civilization and socialism or they're simply a lying propaganda machine for the health and drug industry. I'm all for a reasonable debate about universal health care, but lying is not an attribute of reason.

I've decided to keep my beat up old Telecaster pretty much the same after swapping out the font pickup. There's just something special about this old tele just the way it is, warts and all. It reminds me that you can't hardly buy quality goods anymore. Even guitar amplifiers are increasingly going digital and this spells disposable technology. There aren't many parts inside most kinds of electronic gear you can fix anymore. The prices are getting so cheap that the manufacturers figure you can afford to just buy a new one when something breaks. I'm glad for the cheap prices, but I'm also saddened that even expensive things aren't usually made of truly great quality anymore.

Buying this old guitar, and working on her, gave me a lot to think about. They were mostly unpleasant thoughts as you've just witnessed. I understand all to well how the seedy side of business works. And I understand how it is that so many people in the world are immersed in conspiracy theories. Lord knows they see enough real life examples of it in business and politics every day. My only question is the same one that's been asked for thousands of years. It's commonly called Jeremiah's Complaint:

Jeremiah 12:1 You are always righteous, O LORD,
when I bring a case before you.
Yet I would speak with you about your justice:
Why does the way of the wicked prosper?
Why do all the faithless live at ease?

Of course we know it won't always be that way for them. But still the question remains, why does God let them go on so long? The only answer I can come up with is this: that they will only prosper as long as I need them to. Maybe when I can learn to love the wicked, to stop saying nasty things about them, to stop envying their prosperity, maybe then God won't need them around. Just a thought.

A Study in the Changing Face of Evil Part 3

2009-11-22T01:18:00.008-06:00

[If you'll go back and refresh your memory as to where Part 2 of this series ended, I said, "And this leads us back to the subject of astral projection which we'll pick up on next week."]

A Study in the Changing Face of Evil Part 3

Edgar Allen Poe ~ "The boundaries between life and death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where one ends and where the other begins?"

What happened to me would, in my opinion, best be described as an OBE (out of body experience), and this was something that only happened very rarely. I think of an astral projection as an OBE also, but something a person causes to happen through meditation etc., and it's not the type of thing I normally approve of. The only reason I even brought the OBE subject up was because of that feeling I had of an evil presence near me during some of those times. When I entered a couple of sleep studies, I found that, while it's not common, there are certainly many other people who have these spontaneous OBEs, and many of them also mention the feeling of something evil in the room with them. I've felt that same evil presence during vivid dreams now and then also. I would like very much to know what that presence is. Science has not been able to account for it. Sure you can cause the brain to bring on states of fear, even panic, by electrically stimulating certain sections of it, but this feeling of an evil being was very different. If you see a lion coming at you, you may be quite afraid, but the lion feels scary--not evil. The difference is obvious to anyone who has felt that presence. And for some strange reason, the only people I've ever personally met who've had that same overwhelming feeling were others who had an OBE or who had become self-aware during a deep sleep state that brought about night terrors. It may only happen to 5% of the world's population, but this is something that happens to people from every part of the world and apparently always has if we can trust history at all.

There's another class of people who have seen these evil beings though, and that would be those who have what are generally called hallucinations. These aren't necessarily people with bent brains either. Sometimes they're just regular folks who see something they can't account for. It may only happen once in their life. Is it fair to call it a hallucination in this case? That's another word I don't like because it always denotes something that is unreal, and I don't know that what they've seen is imagined or not. And who's to say that this place our minds go to called imagination isn't a real place in some way we can't yet know?

There is still one more particularly disturbing faction of people who see evil beings during wakefulness, and that would be young children. I heard a woman sobbing a couple of weeks ago because her daughter had been seeing what she at first thought was an imaginary black goat in her bedroom. Even when the girl reported that the goat had begun speaking to her, the mother thought it was normal pretending. But when the goat started telling the child to kill her parents…alarm set in.

Every language throughout history has a word for demonic-like inhuman entities just as every language has a word for spirit. The Sumerians had the earliest known form of writing, and their stories are rife with tales of demonic forces as far back as nearly 5,000 years ago:

"In the hands of the fate demon my appearance has been altered, my breath of life carried away. The asag demon, the evil one, bathes in my body."

"The demons go hither and thither searching for Dumuzid. The small demons say to the big demons: 'Demons have no mother; they have no father or mother, sister or brother, wife or children. When ... [unintelligible] were established on heaven and earth, you demons were there, at a man's side like a reed enclosure. Demons are never kind, they do not know good from evil.'"

"Jectin-ana had barely finished that lament when the demons arrived at her dwelling. "Show us where your brother is," they said to her. But she spoke not a word to them. They afflicted her loins with a skin disease, but she spoke not a word to them."

"A small demon opened his mouth and said to the big demon, 'Come on, let's go to the lap of holy Inana.' The demons entered Unug and seized holy Inana. "Come on, Inana, go on that journey which is yours alone -- descend to the underworld."

Absolutely every race of people on the Earth have reported encountering demonic-like beings. Whether those stories come from people who saw them while in the body or out is difficult to say since the ancients weren't always clear. I find it disturbing that almost no one acknowledges their presence today. Christian songwriter, Keith Green, had a song called "No One Believes in Me Anymore" which was sung from Satan's point of view:

Oh, my job keeps getting easier
As time keeps slipping away
I can imitate your brightest light
And make your night look just like day
I put some truth in every lie
To tickle itching ears
You know I'm drawing people just like flies
'Cause they like what they hear
I'm gaining power by the hour
they're falling by the score
You know, it's getting very simple now
'Cause no one believe in me anymore
Oh, heaven's just a state of mind
My books read on your shelf
And have you heard that God is dead
I made that one up myself
They dabble in magic spells
They get their fortunes read
You know they heard the truth
But turned away and followed me instead
I used to have to sneak around
But now they just open their doors
You know, no ones watching for my tricks
Because no one believes in me anymore
Everyone likes a winner
With my help, you're guaranteed to win
And hey man, you're ain't no sinner
You've got the truth within
And as your life slips by
You believe the lie that you did it on your own
But don't worry
I'll be there to help you share our dark eternal home
Oh, my job keeps getting easier
As day slips into day
The magazines, the newspapers
Print every word I say
This world is just my spinning top
It's all like childs-play
You know, I dream that it will never stop
But I know it's not that way
Still my work goes on and on
Always stronger than before
I'm gonna make it dark before the dawn
Since no one believes in me anymore
Well now I used to have to sneak around
But now they just open their doors
You know, no one watches for my tricks
Since no one believes in me anymore
Well I'm gaining power by the hour
They're falling by the score
You know, it's getting very easy now
Since no one believes in me anymore

The song's title couldn't be more apt even where the church is concerned. The Catholic Church in particular has made an admitted attempt to downplay the role of demonic forces. Actually, this is probably true of most churches today. Isn't it strange that the OBE and astral projection crowd has much more to say on the subject of demonic entities than the church? Even projectors that have little or no interest in religion tell tales of evil beings they've encountered seemingly out of nowhere and for no reason. Robert Monroe, the guy who coined the term "out-of-body-experience", mentions several encounters with them coming in many forms. Monroe was a businessman who started having OBEs out of the blue in middle-age. Today he's often mentioned in connection with the new age crowd, and judging by his last book, I'd have to say that he certainly seemed to join their ranks at the end. But if we can look past that for a moment, I believe there are some important things we can learn from his story. He's one of the few that have had these experiences that has also had the wherewithal to perform hundreds, if not thousands, of experiments, many of them assisted by medical personal with EEG machines etc. He had no interest in religion whatsoever in the beginning, yet he routinely encountered both evil beings and sometimes benevolent ones (he referred to the latter as "helpers") during OBEs. He also described seeing them trying to influence the behavior of humans.

There are two things about Robert Monroe's out-of-body journeys that should be of great interest to anyone. One is that he sometimes was able to locate people he knew around the earth no matter where they were and tell them later what he had seen them doing, so his OBEs were sometimes more like remote viewing. (I'm reminded of the time Christ demonstrated this ability, telling Nathaniel that he saw him standing under a fig tree before he met him--it caused Nathaniel to become a believer). There was one incident I thought was quite striking. Monroe had an unnamed female acquaintance who had left for vacation. All he knew was that she was somewhere on the east coast. During a self induced OBE (which I would call an astral projection) he purposely tried to locate her and found her in a New Jersey hotel. With her were two young women. All three had drinks in their hands and were just sitting and chatting. Monroe made a deliberate attempt to make the lady feel his presence. Anytime he had tried to touch anyone in the physical plane previously he found that his hand always went right through them. This time he concentrated all his will though and managed to pinch the woman very hard in the ribs. When she returned from her trip the following week she confirmed everything he saw. She mentioned nothing of the pinch however. Finally he asked her if she had felt him pinch her, and she exclaimed, "That was you!" She then lifted her blouse slightly to display the bruise marks he had left on her.

I think the evidence that OBEs are a real state of a spirit leaving the body to travel either in this world or another world is remarkable and plentiful for those who bother to look into it. I've made several videos about evidence for other worlds and otherworldly activity. Truly, the evidence is there. Whether they're worlds or dimensions is anyone's guess, but there is more to this life than what the material senses can alone gather.

If mankind has always known about evil, nonhuman beings whether they were called devils or something else, it seems curious to me that we're trying so hard to forget about them today and act as though the spirit world(s) itself no longer exists. In the Keith Green song mentioned above, Satan literally basks in the darkness of man's forgetfulness. In his novel, Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis says the following:

Of the things that I followed I cannot at all say whether they were what men call real or what men call dream. And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.

And later in the same book: "One thread ran through all my delusions. Now mark yet again the cruelty of the gods. There is no escape from them into sleep or madness, for they can pursue you into them with dreams. Indeed you are then most at their mercy."

In C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, we find a chief demon instructing his young apprentice to make sure to keep the attention of humans on, "the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it 'real life' and don't let him ask what he means by 'real'."

Lewis mentions something else of great value in this book. He gives us a rationale for demonic beings doing what they do. He says:

They're second motive is a kind of hunger. I feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another, and us. Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one's fellow; to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one's own....

... There [in Hell], I suggest, the strongest spirit--there are perhaps no bodies to impede the operation--can really and irrevocably suck the weaker into itself and permanently gorge its own being on the weaker's outraged individuality. It is (I feign) for this that devils desire human souls and the souls of one another, It is for this that Satan desires all his own followers and all the sons of Eve and all the host of Heaven. His dream is of the day when all shall be inside him....

Interestingly, although I believe Monroe misinterpreted many things he witnessed during his astral journeys, I find it disturbing that when he once consulted one of these helpers (angels?) he encountered, asking why humans were at the top of the food chain more or less and why there shouldn't be anyone to eat us, the helper retorted that some of the evil beings Monroe encountered actually fed on certain human emotions, and fear in particular. Perhaps Lewis was on to something.

What does the bible say about this OBE phenomenon? Monroe referred to his astral body simply as a second body. The Egyptians called it Ka. Even Plato and Aristotle believed in a second sort of nonphysical body that resided in juxtaposition with the physical. Certainly the earliest Christians and Jews knew about the second body. I believe the Jews simply termed the second body as spirit. In the bible, only Paul directly refers to someone possibly moving "out" of the physical body before death though:

2 Corinthians 12:1 I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to be gained, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. 2 I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. 3 And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows—4 was caught up to paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.

You may recall that my own first experience as a teenager was accompanied by a pressure that felt like an immense hand pushing me down into the bed. Many who go through an OBE incident mention that same feeling of something like a hand--a heaviness on the chest area. Many times I've wondered whether the bible, at least in a few instances, may have been referring to the same feeling taking place when it says the "hand of the Lord" was on someone during a vision such as Elisha's in 2 Kings 3:15-16 "'But now bring me a harpist.' While the harpist was playing, the hand of the LORD came upon Elisha and he said, 'This is what the LORD says....'"

And here are three more interesting instances mentioned by Ezekiel.

Ezekiel 3:14 The Spirit then lifted me up and took me away, and I went in bitterness and in the anger of my spirit, with the strong hand of the LORD upon me.

Ezekiel 37:1 The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.

Ezekiel 40:1 In the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning of the year, on the tenth of the month, in the fourteenth year after the fall of the city—on that very day the hand of the LORD was upon me and he took me there. 2 In visions of God he took me to the land of Israel and set me on a very high mountain, on whose south side were some buildings that looked like a city. 3 He took me there, and I saw a man whose appearance was like bronze; he was standing in the gateway with a linen cord and a measuring rod in his hand.

These all sound like OBEs to me, and all are accompanied by the "hand of God" being upon someone.

Many people who have had an OBE talk about being able to see a cord at times that is attached between the back of the head/neck area on their physical body and to that of their second state body which is very thin and generally white or silver in color. This cord stretches to go wherever they go and never breaks. It's generally thought that at the time of physical death the cord does in fact break though and a person lives in the spiritual plane forever onward. Ezekiel mentions a similar cord:

Ecclesiastes 12:6-7
Remember him--before the silver cord is severed,
or the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
or the wheel broken at the well,
and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

There is much more we could discuss on this topic of the out of body experience, but primary I just wanted to point out that it's something that man has always known about and that even some biblical figures may have been engaged in. And many biblical prophets (while quite possibly in an OBE state) also mention evil entities around the world. The story of Job goes into detail about Satan himself trying to influence the behavior of Job. And this is the core of what I meant to lecture on all along in this series. I first wanted to get the point across to you that many, many people from every corner of the globe, from every race and religion, and from every point in history, have had firsthand encounters with that dark spiritual agency. Lewis and Monroe each gave us a reason for them doing what they do--that they somehow feed off us or at least our emotions in some way that's unclear at present. If Monroe's "helper" (angel?) was correct, and it's the negative emotions they feed upon, this might explain why they should try so desperately to induce bad behavior in humans. Yes, I'm aware that it sounds like a bad episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and perhaps Lewis' argument may sound more rational to you (it does to me). But, whatever their reasons, let's consider for a moment that demonic forces do indeed try to induce bad behavior, at least in humans (and possibly other creatures as well).

Of the many unexplainable oddities in nature none is more irregular than unnatural behavior in both humans and other animals. We often find ourselves tempted to do, not only evil things, but things that simply make no sense, even behavior we normally wouldn't think of doing, and then afterwards we say to ourselves, "Why on earth did I do that?", or "I don't know what came over me!"

Now I'm not talking about character traits because those are things habitual in nature. What I'm talking about are behaviors that are decidedly uncharacteristic. What I'm trying to convey here are those behaviors that appear out of nowhere and for no reason. Children are especially bad at this. Your son is twenty feet up in a tree and for some ungodly (literally) reason decides to jump down. My father's older brother did this when they were young, except it was more like thirty feet. Not only did he miraculously walk away unscathed, but dad jumped right behind him and also was uninjured. Dad tells me he still doesn't know why either of them did it. This unnatural desire to jump just came over them all the sudden. I heard a story from a woman the other day who mentioned going to summer camp one year as a young teen, and for some reason that she still can't comprehend, pulled the zipper down the front of her friend's top (who was braless) exposing her to the other kids. After all these years she's still stymied as to why she did this. It was almost like an instinct, some inner drive seemed to command it of her. I know of a man who, while he was in college, was walking down the street one day, and decided on the spur of the moment to walk out into oncoming traffic and kneel down in front of a car. He got lucky, and the car was able to avoid him. Nothing was troubling this young man; he was relatively carefree and happy, yet something drove him without hesitation to do this foolish thing, and he couldn't begin to tell you why.

If it's the prodding of devils acting on our psyches, it would seem to have little in common with Lewis' notion about the way demons feed upon us. If Monroe was right, however, this behavior would make sense since they would all bring about extreme emotions in all the people involved. You may feel no emotion at all in climbing a tree and jumping, but a few feet before you hit the ground, great anxiety and fear are bound to set in. And even if you felt no anxiety or fear when walking out in front of traffic, it could still be that the driver you step in front of may feel a great deal of it.

One of the strangest things in all of the animal world has got to be the way parasites act on their hosts causing them to act out all kinds of seemingly irrational behavior. There is a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii which is thought to produce low intelligence and hyperactivity in human children. It's also been linked to Schizophrenia. One particularly interesting parasite to me is the gordian worm. As a juvenile it enters into various kinds of insects and then grows into adulthood feeding on the insides of the insect. After it reaches adulthood, the parasite can only breed in water, so it appears to somehow act on the brain of the host causing it to go into a pond, lake, or other body of water, and quite often this host cannot swim, and so it basically commits suicide at the prodding of the parasite. Afterwards the parasite emerges from the corpse. Here is a thirty second video (without sound) showing an infected cricket jumping into a swimming pool and drowning, and the parasite subsequently emerging from the body. What's even odder with this host is that crickets can normally navigate around on water pretty well. It seems as though this cricket purposely drowns itself.

I'm reminded of the man at the tombs whom Jesus healed who was demon possessed. The strangest thing about that healing was that the demons, through the man, asked to be sent into a herd of pigs. The pigs subsequently ran off a cliff and drowned in the water below. Coincidence? I'm not necessarily saying demons and parasites are one and the same. But isn't it odd the way God so very often uses real life examples that are symbols of the spiritual world from which ours takes its existence. Demons in this case represent the macrocosm while parasites are the earthly symbolic microcosm.

On the other hand, who's to say that devils don't work through creatures like parasites or bacteria? If they would live in a pig, why not a parasite? Charles Williams once said that demons "pine for matter". They can never have an existence outside of the spirit world. The closest they can come is to live through us, or through other of God's creatures. Perhaps when we figuratively refer to a man with cancer as "fighting his demons" we aren't speaking as figuratively as we think. We might rather be unconsciously tapping into yet another example of the macrocosm/microcosm of devils at work in some way. Satan set the ultimate example of effecting human behavior in the Garden of Eden while in a spiritual paradise. Parasites, bacteria, and other fungi have been copying the behavior on the microcosmic material world of human flesh ever since. Parasites are essentially agents of evil.

Of all his accomplishments, I think Satan must take greatest pride in changing the human view of morality. Remember the incident with Michael Jackson and child molestation we talked about? While things like parasites mostly try to affect the way we treat ourselves, Satan is more concerned with how we treat others. He's made great use of language toward this end. If you call a thing by another name long enough, people will begin to believe it. All the devils in hell would like to see each and every child molester left free to roam the world so they can keep on doing what they do. But of course if anyone were to stand up and say exactly that, he would be scorned by the masses. So instead Satan takes the more subtle route of changing our perception of evil itself while taking the focus off the child and putting it on society as a whole. The child molester is misunderstood. He was mistreated growing up because he was different, maybe a little effeminate and weak. And who was he mistreated by? Us of course. It's our fault he's the way he is. We didn't show him enough love and respect before he started molesting, and that's what set him off. We should have been more tolerant. We should always be tolerant of others no matter how different they are. And when they finally do go wrong and molest, we should be both tolerant and lenient of their wrongdoings because there before the grace of God go you and I. Thus today we have school teachers talking a great deal about tolerance. But where's the faintest bit of talk about permissiveness in all this? We're ready to tolerate any and all sin today because we're taking the high road in doing so. It proves we're better people for doing it. But you can no more make the world a better place by being tolerant of criminals than you can make your house fly by drawing wings on it.

If the prophets of old were alive today they would in all likelihood be run out of any Christian Church they entered. King David surrounded himself with prophets and seers. And it sure looks to me like they were often in trance states. Today it's somehow all come to be viewed as the work of the devil and occult practices. Even meditation has come under ridicule although one has to wonder exactly what the Sabbath's "rest" was for if not meditative purposes? Transcendence used to mean focusing one's attention on the world of spirit. Now it too has come under that all inclusive cloak of occultism. Christians today don't have enough on the ball to even realize that all spiritual power comes through transcending the material world whether they be powers used for good or for evil. Mysticism has become the evil deed of a witch when it used to be the opening of the heavens to the spiritual eyes of the faithful Christian. And yet Christians today complain that we don't see miracles like those in the bible anymore. Is it any wonder? We've closed off every avenue to the world of spirit, that land where angels tread, and actually did it in the name of God. This is what the devil focuses on doing. He wants us to call good evil and evil good. And he's succeeded. He has changed the face of evil.

I'm going to close this series out on evil with a prayer written by Bob Russell while he was the pastor of Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. (He may still be for all I know). He read it at the Kentucky Governor's Prayer Breakfast in 1995. It later caused quite a stir among democrats when Pastor Joe Wright read the prayer at the Kansas House floor a year later. One democrat walked out during the prayer. Three others got up and protested Wright's prayer as a message of--you guessed it--intolerance.

Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and seek your direction and guidance.

We know your Word says, "Woe to those who call evil good," but that's exactly what we've done.

We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and inverted our values.

We confess that we have ridiculed the absolute truth of your Word and called it moral pluralism.

We have worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism.

We have endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.

We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.

We have neglected the needy and called it self-preservation.

We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.

We have killed our unborn and called it choice.

We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.

We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building esteem.

We have abused power and called it political savvy.

We have coveted our neighbors' possessions and called it ambition.

We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.

We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.

Search us O God and know our hearts today; try us and see if there be some wicked way in us; cleanse us from every sin and set us free.

Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent here by the people of Kansas, and who have been ordained by you, to govern this great state.

Grant them your wisdom to rule and may their decisions direct us to the center of your will. I ask it in the name of your son, the living savior, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

The Documentary Hypothesis

2009-11-15T09:10:00.004-06:00

[I'm not at all happy with what I wrote this week for the Changing Face of Evil series, so I'm going to redo it and post it next week. In the meantime, I know several people have asked me about the documentary hypothesis I did a video for, so today I'm posting the script for that particular movie. This will make it much easier for those wishing to share it with their friends without having to show them a movie.]

The Documentary Hypothesis

When I was in Jr. High School during the early 70's, I used to always read one chapter in my bible every night before bed. One night I noticed something very odd. I was reading Genesis 20, and it told about how Abraham and his wife, Sarah, were traveling through a land called Gerar, and Abraham instructed Sarah to tell the people in this place that she was his sister. He did this because she was a beautiful woman, and he feared that some man might murder him in order to take his wife. The strange thing was, that I had just read something very similar a few nights earlier in Genesis 12, only that time they had been traveling through Egypt, but once again Sarah had said she was the sister of Abraham, and for the same reason. However, in Genesis 20 Abraham explains that when they had first left his father's house way back when and begun to wander, that he had already asked Sarah then to say everywhere they went that they were brother and sister. So apparently this was to be a regular motif during their wanderings. However, a few chapters later in Genesis 26 we find Abraham's son, Isaac, traveling with his wife through the exact same land of Gerar, and it is still ruled by the same king, Abimelech, or a son of the king who took on his father's name, and Isaac pulls the exact same stunt asking his beautiful wife to tell the people that she is his sister.

One might conclude that Isaac had simply learned from his father's ways. However, it seemed very strange indeed to read what seemed like the same story, only slightly changed, three times in the span of 16 chapters in the same book. I was too young to know it at the time, but I later learned that this repetition of the same story in the bible is known as a triplet, or a doublet if told twice, and that doublets and triplets appear quite often in the bible. Now this triplet seems harmless enough, and fairly explainable, but others can often be very contradictory. We have two creation stories in different chapters that are a little off, two flood stories intertwined that are very much at odds, two stories of the ten commandments (actually more like three) that are again, similar, but different in small details. The famous 19th century bible scholar, Julius Wellhausen, noticed something very surprising when he began to study the doublets and triplets in detail. The separate stories more often than not, referred to God by a different name and had a slightly differently writing style. This led him to conclude that the stories, though very similar, came from different sources, and were later woven together by a skillful editor which he referred to as a redactor.

In Genesis 1 we find a story of the creation of the world. Genesis 2 and 3 retell it, only slightly different. In Genesis 1 God created all the vegetation on the 3rd day, and then he created both men and women on the 6th day after everything else. In Genesis 2:4 it starts out recounting everything saying:

4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created. When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens-- 5 and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the ground, 6 but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground--7 the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

So man is created before the vegetation and even before the animals. Woman, however, is not created until much later in verse 21.

Further, and perhaps more importantly, the story in Genesis 1 always refers to the creator as Elohim or the shortened version--El, 35 times in fact. In the Genesis 2 creation story, all eleven times the creator is mentioned, he is named as Yahweh. So right away we have this bit of mystery. We for some strange reason have an account of the creation of the world, and immediately thereafter have another account of the creation of the world which is slightly different and which calls God by a different name. What could the purpose of this be?

In Genesis 6 we find a very odd account of the story of Noah and the flood. It starts out in verse 5 with God lamenting over all the evil that humans had done the Earth over.

5 The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. 6 The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. 7 So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals....

Then starting in verse 11 God repeats himself in slightly different terms:

11 Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, "I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.

It's very redundant, but the redundancy hardly ends there. Between verses 9 and 22 we get what seems a complete account of God grieving over creation, him telling Noah to build an ark and what creatures to take into it, and how he will destroy the whole Earth in a flood. Verse 22 sounds like the end of the story saying:

22 Noah did everything just as God commanded him.

However, Genesis 7 seems to begin the story all over, once again telling Noah what kind of animals to take into the ark. Then in verse 6 it says:

6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth. 7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. 8 Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, 9 male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah. 10 And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.

But, beginning in verse 11 it restates everything it just said, again slightly different:

11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. 12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. 13 On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark. 14 They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds....

If you read through the entire flood account, you will quickly see how redundant the entire flood story is, constantly saying everything twice, but each time a little differently. In fact, it is very easy to separate the verses in such a way as to have two entire accounts of the flood. They would be as follows:

Account One: Genesis chapter 6 verses 5-7; chapter 7 verses 1-5, verse 7, verse 10, verse 12, the last sentence from verse 16 through verse 20, verses 22-23; chapter 8 verse 6, verses 8-12, the last sentence of verse 13, and verses 20-22.

Account two: Genesis chapter 6 verses 9-22; chapter 7 verse 6, verses 8-9, verse 11, verse 13-16 (except the last sentence of verse 16), verse 21, verse 24; chapter 8 verses 1-2 (except the last sentence of verse 2), the last half of verse 3 through verse 5, verse 7, the first sentence of verse 13, and verses 14-19.

Here is how the two passages read after separating them:

First Account:

Genesis 6
5 The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. 6 The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. 7 So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them." 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.

Genesis 7
1 The LORD then said to Noah, "Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. 2 Take with you seven [a] of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, 3 and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth. 4 Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made."

5 And Noah did all that the LORD commanded him.

7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood.

10 And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.

12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.

16... Then the LORD shut him in. 17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. 18 The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. 19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. 20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.

22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. 23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.

Genesis 8
2... and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. 3 The water receded steadily from the earth....

6 After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark...

8 Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. 9 But the dove could find no place to set its feet because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. 10 He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. 11 When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. 12 He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.

13... Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry.

20 Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. 21 The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.

22 "As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease."

Second Account:

Genesis 6
9 This is the account of Noah: Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God. 10 Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth. 11 Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, "I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. 14 So make yourself an ark of cypress [c] wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. 15 This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. [d] 16 Make a roof for it and finish [e] the ark to within 18 inches [f] of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. 17 I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons' wives with you. 19 You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. 21 You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them." 22 Noah did everything just as God commanded him.

Genesis 7
6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth.

8 Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, 9 male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah.

11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.

13 On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark. 14 They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings. 15 Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark. 16 The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah....

21 Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind.

24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.

Genesis 8
1 But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. 2 Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed....

3... At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, 4 and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.

7 And he sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.

13 By the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth....

14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.

15 Then God said to Noah, 16 "Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. 17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number upon it."

18 So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons' wives. 19 All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on the earth—came out of the ark, one kind after another.

As you can see, you get two narratives that are fairly complete. You'd be very hard pressed to do that with any book outside of the bible. And again, we have two stories that are each written in very different styles and each using their own name for God. The first narrative uses the name Yahweh while the second uses Elohim. The first has seven pairs of clean animals and one pair of unclean. The second has simply one of each kind. The first story has a 40 day flood--the second a 370 flood. In the first Noah sends out a dove--in the second a raven. The second writer is very concerned about ages, dates, and measurements in cubits while the first writer shows no such concern for details like that.

Most scholars think there are at least four writers of the Torah whose works were later combined and interwoven. These are commonly known as the J, E, P, and D authors. The J stands for Yahweh (originally discovered by the German scholar, Julius Wellhausen, who wrote in German where the Yahweh is written as a Jahweh). E is for Elohim. P stands for Priestly. And D is for Deuteronomist. The J writer used the term Yahweh for God almost exclusively. The E writer nearly always referred to God as Elohim. The P writer was likely a priest who was very concerned with rules and regulations, and this was the writer of the second flood story. And the Deuteronomist wrote just about all of Deuteronomy only.

If we ask ourselves why anyone would bother to merge together separate stories about the same events to make one compilation story, there is one quick answer which will become apparent. The Jewish nation had a civil war which lasted about 200 years shortly after the death of Solomon. During this time you had a divided nation with Judah in the south and Israel in the north. Most scholars believe they each had their own versions of the Torah, and quite possibly these were simply oral versions. These versions differed slightly because of the attitudes and dislike the two kingdoms had for one another. We can plainly see that the J writer came from Judah and the E writer from Israel because the J stories are nearly always concerned with Israel and the E stories are concerned with Judah. When we untangle the various stories we can see that the two writers are often trying to place one another in a bad light. For instance, both the J and E writers each tell a story of how the Israelites acquired the city of Shechem. Jeroboam would then make Shechem the capital of Israel. Remember now that the J writer is from Judah. In his version of the story, it says that the prince of the city fell in love with Jacob's daughter--Dinah and sleeps with her. He then asks for her hand in marriage. Jacob's sons, however, reply that they could not approve of such a thing because the prince and the other men of the city are not circumcised. The prince then has himself and all the men of the city circumcised. While they were still sore and recuperating from this surgery, two of Jacob's sons charge into the city and kill them all. So the Israelites acquired the city by way of flat-out treachery.

Keeping in mind that the E writer is from Israel in the north where this city is the capital, his version of the story is that Jacob simply buys the land.

So, when we separate the various E and J stories we find this type of sniping at one another's nation more often than not. This is usually done by taking pot shots at various leaders.

We also find certain discrepancies within the separate J, E, P, and D stories. These are sometimes as simple as differences in numbers and years. But this sometimes can be important. For instance, according to Genesis 11:26, Abraham was born when his father, Terah, was 70 years old. Genesis 12:1 says that Abraham is told to leave by God after the death of his father. Now according to Genesis 11:32 Terah died at the age of 205. This would have made Abraham 135 years old when he left. However, it says in Genesis 12:4 that Abraham was 75 when he left. Obviously there is a discrepancy here. When we realize, however, that there are two or more points of view being expressed and merged together, we begin to realize just why the text is so convoluted in places like this.

Imagine if someone had taken the four gospels and tried to merge them together into one version. If that editor was trying to show respect for all of the versions, then he might well try to keep all their points of view. This would make for discrepancies. And of course there are several disagreements within the gospels. One of the more obvious ones is the account of the men appearing at the tomb of the risen savior. When the women arrive there, Mark says they saw one man, Luke says they saw two, Mathew says they saw a single angel. John says nothing of them seeing anyone initially, but after the women leave to tell the disciples what they had seen (an empty tomb), and then after Peter and John went to look for themselves and also leave, then it says Mary went back to the tomb alone and saw two angels. Obviously we would have a very convoluted account of the empty tomb episode if we tried to combine them, and this is exactly the kind of thing we see in the old testament, particularly the first five books, over and over, but the difference is that the old testament writers are so often taking pot shots at each other's version of the stories. Both the P and E writers are mostly associated with the southern kingdom of Judah. Jeremiah, who is from the northern kingdom of Israel during the civil war, sometimes can be seen lashing out against the P writer. The P writer said in Leviticus: "This is the Torah of offering, grain offering, sin offering, trespass offering, installation offerings, sacrifice, and peace offerings which Yahweh commanded Moses in Mount Sinai in the day that he commanded the Israelites to offer their sacrifices to Yahweh in the wilderness of Sinai." Then during the Jewish civil war Jeremiah wrote: "For I did not speak with your fathers and I did not command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt about matters of offering and sacrifice." He disparages the P writer often enough that it shows that he knew exactly what parts of the Torah were written by the P writer, and this is very significant to the documentary hypothesis.

After the two kingdoms were eventually merged back together, one might ask what the actual impetus was that would make anyone bother to take the various religious writings from both kingdoms and try to merge them? Theologian Joseph Blenkinsopp came up with an interesting idea pertaining to this. The Jews during the Babylonian diaspora suddenly found themselves under Iranian rule when the Persians defeated the Babylonians. One aspect of the imperial policy was the insistence on local self-definition inscribed primarily in a codified and standardized corpus of traditional law backed by the central government and its regional representatives. Blenkinsopp suggests that redaction may have served a political purpose for the Persians, to provide for the regional law that Judah would have been required to have. Having two or more versions of their history and laws is not very standardized.

This has been only a brief glimpse at the documentary hypothesis. If we were to take the very old and outdated notion of Moses having written the entire Torah, then the idea of different writers with different points of view concerning old testament events having their writings later interwoven by a redactor would be without merit. However, we know that Moses didn't write all of the Torah, if much at all. I gave several reasons for this in my 2-part video on fundamentalism. One of the reasons I gave was that there were several kings and kingdoms mentioned throughout the Torah that didn't exist until well after Moses was dead. Someone recently asked me for details on that. Genesis 11:31 describes Abraham as living in Ur of the Chaldeans, but the Chaldeans did not exist at the time of Abraham. There are eight Edomite Kings listed in Genesis 36, all of which lived between 1152-995 B.C. hundreds of years after Moses was dead. Some of them are actually mentioned again later in the bible during the reigns of David and Solomon. They are also referenced by peoples groups outside of Israel, so it is well corroborated.

The documentary hypothesis makes sense of things like the doublets and triplets along with many of the discrepancies within the old testament that never made sense before. Almost every major theologian in the world today excepts some form of the hypothesis. The Vatican itself estimates that probably 90% of them do. The hypothesis is as well accepted among theologians as the theory of relativity is among cosmologists.

If we try to make out the bible to be the very words of God, we're always going to be disappointed at its clumsiness and inherent contradictions. When we come to realize that it's a collection of books that simply gets the gist of things, we actually come closer to whatever truths are to be found in it.

From George MacDonald~~~

“Human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God’s science, works with its back to Him, and is always leaving Him.”

“The truth of the flower is, not the facts about it, the idea of God is the flower. Its botany is but a thing of ways and means—of canvas and color and brush in relation to the picture in the Painter’s brain.”

“We must not wonder things away into nonentity.”

“The appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them. For their show is the face of far deeper things. It is through their show, not through their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths. To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it—just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about His person, or babbled about His work. The body of man does not exist for the sake of its hidden secrets; its hidden secrets exist for the sake of its outside—for the face and the form in which dwells revelation: its outside is the deepest of it.”

A Study in the Changing Face of Evil Part 2

2009-11-08T00:05:00.005-06:00

[I'm a little worn out from shoveling 7-tons of 3/4" gravel every night after work during the past week to fill the hole left by the septic tank I mentioned last Sunday and to spread on two driveways. Hopefully this message will still be coherent.]

From Perelandra by CS Lewis: "To think that the spectre you see is an illusion does not rob him of his terrors: it simply adds the further terror of madness itself--and then on top of that the horrible surmise that those whom the rest call mad have, all along, been the only people who see the world as it really is."

I'm as curious about the world as the next person, but at the same time, I don't get easily excited about much of anything. I'm actually very pragmatic about spirituality. Things have to make sense to me and be of practical use. When you start looking into all the alternate belief systems out there you will quickly find that 90% of it is pure nonsense if your BS detector is working at all. The problem is that the vast majority of people in this world have zero discernment skills. Discernment in human behavior is something you can learn. Discernment in spiritual matters, however, is a gift. It's something everyone should pray for daily. I have since I was a little boy, and it's just about the only spiritual gift I can truly say that I have. I've always been very good at separating the wheat from the chaff. We talked about integrity in the last lecture, and it comes into play here just as it does in nearly everything you do and every thought you will ever have. Even discernment in human behavior is going to be wide of the mark without it. Witness the sensationalism focused on Michael Jackson the past few months. Is it not astonishing the way his fans somehow manage to either look past, or rationalize away, his obvious sexual attraction toward children? Mention it to them, and they'll say he was never convicted, that those who brought charges against him were lying and only after his money, and they will in all likelihood accuse you of being racist just for saying it if you're white. It pays to be suspicious however. The prosecution in Jackson's last court case introduced a nine page document the police compiled from a raid at his house stating all the pornography they found in his master bedroom--the same bedroom children stayed in with him. I don't know everything that was in it, but I do know that there were some magazines and videos (perhaps the majority of it) by a company called Barely Legal that specializes in publishing pornographic material spotlighting teenagers who are just barely of legal age, but who look like much, much younger adolescents. He also had enough booze in both his bedroom and master bath to start a liquor store. (Remember the Jesus juice)? If this guy was not a child molester, I think it's very obvious that he desperately wanted to be one. And there's the rub in all this--the fact that something can be so very plain, so incredibly apparent, and yet be rationalized away by so many. It's enough to give any rational person grounds for believing something very evil is afoot--some unseen force. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Surely you must have noticed by now the way a writer can make any spiritual topic credible by simply piling on the psychobabble and pure gibberish. It's not acceptable to say that your mad uncle Henry is out wandering through the desert waiting for the mother ship to come swooping out of the skies and send out a traveler from a distant galaxy to show him the future of mankind. No, he's out on a hermitage taking consolation from a clandestine vaticinator. Likewise no one talks about trance states anymore. It's all an exploration of the super conscious now. Writers who still use terms like parapsychology are destined to publish on the internet. But if you can talk about changing your reality by "inner transformations" and focusing on the "divine source that flows through all", then you can walk around barefoot with a shaved head on a PBS stage making millions from people who have no idea what you just said, which is okay with our bald headed guru because he probably has no idea what he just said either.

At the heart of most modern spiritual mumbo jumbo is the notion that all things are connected. I like the way Chesterton said it in his first Father Brown detective series: "There is in the world a very aged rioter and demagogue who breaks into the most refined retreats with the dreadful information that all men are brothers." You'll find this to some degree in the ancient traditions as well, particularly in many sects of Hinduism. But while some ancient religions may teach an interconnectedness of creation, most will leave room for a kind of inexplicable separateness too. Even Paul taught the Greek maxim that in God we live and move and have our being. Yet Paul, Jesus, and several other biblical figures also taught about a separation between the articles of creation. Even the earliest portion of Genesis speaks of the Creator separating his creation by parting waters. I believe this is the inspiration for John of the Cross' idea of a "great sea that is God". I think he saw the waters as a metaphor of the mind of God and the separation of them as the mind of God at work imagining the world into being. And the Spirit of God resting on those waters was the primordial élan vital, the only true force there is, the force behind every other force. Some Christians see everything as existing within the mind of God. This I think of as the mystical interpretation of the world because so many Christians, such as John of the Cross, who have claimed to have a mystical life believed this. Others tend to think of creation as being separate from God and a thing he stands outside of. If creation is God's imagination at work, then he is constantly at work sustaining it, thus the tarot card of the magician is also often called the juggler for we see vegetation all around him representing creation, and the sign of infinity is above his head denoting sustaining abilities such as those of a juggler who keeps balls moving in constant motion. (I only mention the tarot card as an interesting aside because many people think the images on tarot cards have a Christian origin even though they're often used for very un-Christian reasons today. I have no opinion on the topic).

I would say that the majority of Christians are afraid of the very mention of the word mystical because they've never really been taught what it means, and because they have a very distorted view of spirituality both in and out of the bible. Today it's more confusing than ever. The invention of the printing press mixed with the freedom of the press in so many countries brought about an enormous slush pile of poorly written and feebly conceived books on how the spirit world works. In modern times we also have the internet to deal with, and it is a virtual madhouse of spiritual nonsense. Regardless of its merits, I believe the world would be better off by far without it.

Divination is one term that seems a bit confusing when found in the bible. Here is how Word Web defines divination:

1. Successful conjecture by unusual insight or good luck
2. A prediction uttered under divine inspiration
3. The art or gift of prophecy (or the pretense of prophecy) by supernatural means

The first may also be speaking of omens. Often the word divination in the bible can be interpreted as "omen". (Omens are something else the bible speaks of in both favorable and unfavorable terms). But are not the second and third definitions harmless enough on the surface? Do not all God's prophets offer predictions "uttered under divine inspiration"? Isn't prophecy listed by Paul as a supernatural "gift" of the Spirit? We find certain biblical writers condemning divination in some instances, yet far from it in others. Joseph boasts to his brothers when they come to Egypt saying, "Don't you know that a man like me can find things out by divination?" Ezekiel 13 talks of divination quite a bit. It mostly discourages the use of a false kind of divination brought about by using charms.

Ezekiel 13:9 My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and utter lying divinations. ... 17 "Now, son of man, set your face against the daughters of your people who prophesy out of their own imagination. Prophesy against them 18 and say, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Woe to the women who sew magic charms on all their wrists and make veils of various lengths for their heads in order to ensnare people. ... I am against your magic charms with which you ensnare people.... Because you disheartened the righteous with your lies, when I had brought them no grief, and because you encouraged the wicked not to turn from their evil ways and so save their lives, 23 therefore you will no longer see false visions or practice divination.

It says in the previous chapter:

12:21 The word of the LORD came to me: 22 "Son of man, what is this proverb you have in the land of Israel: 'The days go by and every vision comes to nothing'? 23 Say to them, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am going to put an end to this proverb, and they will no longer quote it in Israel.' Say to them, 'The days are near when every vision will be fulfilled. 24 For there will be no more false visions or flattering divinations among the people of Israel. 25 But I the LORD will speak what I will, and it shall be fulfilled without delay.

When we go through the bible looking at the word divination, we find that when it's used derogatively that it generally is a sort of divination using magical means such as looking through an animals entrails or using charms to call on the favor of a false god which generally ends with a false vision that is not from the creator-God. We also find divination used with other nations in conjunction with detestable acts such as sacrificing children by burning them along with casting spells. In such cases people are looking for some kind of personal gain out of the practice. This, however, is a far cry from praying for guidance into the future by seeking the face of God which is generally what prophets did. Even prophets from outside Jerusalem were not condemned when they earnestly sought guidance from the "Creator". There are two good examples.

The first would be the "wise men" who traveled from distant lands following a star and a prophecy that led them to the baby Jesus. By all accounts they appear to have been people gifted in interpreting omens among the stars. Not only are they not condemned for doing this, they were actually fulfilling an Israelite prophecy in doing so. Also, the bible, including the New Testament, is loaded with references to stars and constellations during various stages that would be historic. (I strongly recommend a recent film called "The Star of Bethlehem" by Rick Larson for further information).

The second example is the account of a man from Moab called Balaam. His story is a brief one that covers all of Numbers 22 through Numbers 24. It unfortunately appears to be one of the half dozen or so places in biblical texts where some of the manuscript is missing. Balaam is a prophet/seer, but while not a Jew, he appears to have a relationship with God that is much like that of Israel's prophets although he has been known to resort to sorcery at times (probably never having been taught not to). When the Moabite king comes to him asking for a curse to be put on Israel, Balaam seeks out God for guidance and will only say the words God gives him to say. Further, his method of divination is exactly the same as that used by the Israelite prophets of preparing a sacrifice and laying prostrate in stillness, or getting away from the crowd, often to a hilltop, to be alone to talk with God like Moses or Elijah.

Numbers 21:3 Then Balaam said to Balak [the Moabite king], "Stay here beside your offering while I go aside. Perhaps the LORD will come to meet with me. Whatever he reveals to me I will tell you." Then he went off to a barren height. 4 God met with him, and Balaam said, "I have prepared seven altars, and on each altar I have offered a bull and a ram." 5 The LORD put a message in Balaam's mouth and said...

And a little later:

Numbers 24:1 Now when Balaam saw that it pleased the LORD to bless Israel, he did not resort to sorcery as at other times, but turned his face toward the desert. 2 When Balaam looked out and saw Israel encamped tribe by tribe, the Spirit of God came upon him 3 and he uttered his oracle:

"The oracle of Balaam son of Beor,
the oracle of one whose eye sees clearly,

4 the oracle of one who hears the words of God,
who sees a vision from the Almighty,
who falls prostrate, and whose eyes are opened:

5 "How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob,
your dwelling places, O Israel!

His story rivals that of Moses in another way. There is a passage in Exodus 4 where Moses is talking with God while beginning a journey back to Egypt with his wife and sons. God tells him what to say to Pharaoh when he gets there in verses 21-23. Then in verse 24 seemingly out of the blue it says: "At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him."

It seems evident that there is a piece of missing text there. Obviously Moses must have done something wrong. People have tried to resolve the story a number of different ways, but it always rings hollow.

We see the same sort of thing in the story of Balaam. It says in Numbers:

22:20 That night God came to Balaam and said, "Since these men have come to summon you, go with them, but do only what I tell you."

The very next two verses say: 21 Balaam got up in the morning, saddled his donkey and went with the princes of Moab. 22 But God was very angry when he went, and the angel of the LORD stood in the road to oppose him.

God actually sends an angel to kill Balaam if he travels the path with these people, telling him that he is on a reckless path. But later once again he says to Balaam that he should continue on with the men from Moab. It makes no sense whatsoever. Obviously we have a piece of missing text. Something happened sometime between the time during the night when God told Balaam to go with the men originally and the time in the morning when he began the journey (or perhaps during the journey itself). As near as we can tell from the text, Balaam does nothing else wrong and only speaks the words God gives him to say to his king, basically telling him to leave Israel alone. Chapter 24 ends saying, "Then Balaam got up and returned home and Balak went his own way."

This is all we have of Balaam's story. Yet for some inexplicable reason we're told in Numbers 31 that the Israelites killed Balaam along with several other Moabites. It says in 31:16 "They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the Lord's people."

But when did he ever give such advice?

2 Peter 2:15 says, "They have left the straight way and wandered off to follow the way of Balaam son of Beor, who loved the wages of wickedness."

And Jude says, "They have taken the way of Cain; they have rushed for profit into Balaam's error...."

Again, it's rather obvious we're missing something from the story. Apparently Balaam at some point must have given in to the king's bribes and tried to put a curse on Israel. We simply don't know what happened. But we do know that his approach to prophecy was very much like the prophets of Israel, and this consisted largely of laying down and being still while listening for the voice of God. And this leads us back to the subject of astral projection which we'll pick up on next week.

[Be patient; I know the first two parts in this lecture seem discordant, but we will pull everything together eventually.]