This set of thoughts, which I hope everyone finds helpful, is more about human nature and God's relationship with humans, than a classic Bible study or commentary type of blogging.
Here's the problem. The Bible states that money is the root of all evil. First you need to understand there are two types of over fondness of money, and hence it's misuse. The first problem is to love money more than anything else, including believing in, fearing and obeying God. Thus many people love money for itself above all other relationships, both their human relationships and their relationship with God. The second problem is to love money for the power that it gives you over other people, or over elements of God's creation. For example, some people do not crave money and its luxuries, as do the first category of people, but they crave money because it buys power and control over others. So this is why St Paul and others trace just about every human evil back to its roots of money.
There is a third problem, whereby decent ordinary people do not love money, or crave its power, but will do evil things because they feel boxed into doing so in order to survive. This is a third category which is involuntary slavery to money or, rather, the people who control and dispense the money. People who dole out money to those who need it in return for making the people do unethical things are the second category of people (the money as power lovers) while those who accept the money out of either genuine or perceived need are this third category, those who are enslaved to money and its power.
Understanding that, you must recognize that there are three inevitabilities that each person with this unhealthy relationship (whether category 1, 2 or e) with money participate in. One is crime. Two is sin. Three is both crime and sin.
By the way, it is tempting to believe that all crime is also a sin. While that is usually true, I need to teach you all thoughtfulness, in order to see the shades of nuances correctly. It is not a sin, for example, to disobey a law or authority (and thus be branded a criminal) if that law or authority is not righteous toward God or fellow human beings. So one can be, like the early Christians, a "criminal" who breaks a "law" or "authority" when one refuses to worship idols. That, then, is a crime that is not a sin and, actually, in this example, a virtue.
The problem is that many people rationalize love of money as being kind of a "Robin Hood," and thus not criminal or sinful. They are wrong because the premise (love of money or its power) is not in service of God because one cannot use a human tool (money) to serve God, who is above and beyond all those things. God wants your attention and obedience; not your money, either to him or in his supposed "service." There is no way that a person can love money and then make rational decisions about "how God would 'want' the money spent." One has to be a good Christian, Jew or Muslim first, with a solid untarnished relationship with God, before one can even make baby steps in deciding "how Jesus" or "how God" would "want" money spent in his service. Remember, the Apostles observed first hand how Jesus taught them these things, yet one still fell, in part due to money, Judas Iscariot. If Judas Iscariot was troubled in deciding "how God would want the money spent," what makes any human alive think he or she is well equipped to know better? Especially a human who is far from being perfected in their relationship with God and God alone? Love of money and power (including the very seductive power to be a "do gooder") is by definition a BARRIER to understand God.
Now, here is something you need to understand about me personally. I have no interest in being a "crime buster," I never have and I never will. Part of my calling and my ministry is to tell everyone the same thing, which is the reality of God's word as it is in the Torah, in the Bible, and in the Qur'an. In other words, there is only one God, and His word is constant, the only truth, and irrefutable. So if I met the worst criminals in the world, I have no concern about their crimes or their sins. I have concern that they do not understand the consequences of those crimes and sins, the consequences that will be rendered by God, and not by human beings. I would sit down face to face with even the worst criminals and say, "Friend, you need more information before you continue, and that information is that God is real, judgment is real, and that hell is real and that, further, unlike jokes and cartoons, hell is un-endurable, and no one there is 'handling' it." I would not be interested in attempting to persuade them away from their crime or sin. I simply deliver God's truth and leave it up to them.
I hope that you have found this helpful.
Showing posts with label power brokers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label power brokers. Show all posts
Monday, May 3, 2010
Friday, January 23, 2009
Hamilton worries about those too fond of power
This paragraph is written by Alexander Hamilton, a Founding Father, in the collected "Federalist Papers." Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay wrote a series of papers that explained and supported the Constitution of the United States in 1787. These papers were published in newspapers and in a separate book. Anyway, here is the paragraph that caught my eye, about the problem of those who have power and are reluctant to surrender it when it is their time:
Would it promote the peace of the community, or the stability of the government, to have half a dozen men who had had credit enough to raise themselves to the seat of the supreme magistracy wandering among the people like discontented ghosts and sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess?
While Hamilton was writing about a specific aspect of succession it is a very useful image in general to think about people who just will not let go of power when it is past their time.
Would it promote the peace of the community, or the stability of the government, to have half a dozen men who had had credit enough to raise themselves to the seat of the supreme magistracy wandering among the people like discontented ghosts and sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess?
While Hamilton was writing about a specific aspect of succession it is a very useful image in general to think about people who just will not let go of power when it is past their time.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Part One: How I tried to handle astrologers
How I tried to handle astrologers
Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s it was obvious that humanity had veered terribly off course. At least it was obvious to me. I could tell both as a silent observer who was totally in synchronization with God’s will, and also how people were treating me as an individual. It’s like the British Airways advertisement that ran during the 1990’s where a cartoon guy finds he is alone and says, “Where is everybody?” I could tell that a false isolation had taken place around me. I’m old enough (and obviously have much ancestral wisdom, you could call it) to know how normal people act normally (both good and bad). The entire 1990’s was a period where I could detect a distressing and counterproductive false plastic façade hiding secret agendas virtually everywhere I looked, whether close to me or in society as a whole. I had to find out what was going on. The way to do it is to find out where everyone is hiding and doing their secret business, whatever it was, and join in. Not because I would come to believe whatever they were doing, but so that I could at least nudge them back to a more wholesome, normal and humane mindset and behavior. So I decided to accept the few social hints and nudges that I had been receiving and start hanging around an astrology message board that had been “recommended” to me (one of those dropped hints by a cultist, as I’ve explained in previous blog postings). This would have been around 1997-8 as best as I can recall.
The way I am, I must explain, is that I never want to hurt anyone. That is why I’ve only reluctantly and as a desperate last measure have taken on the fire and brimstone approach to the truth. Even people who have harmed me most egregiously, and I don’t mean just hurt my feelings, but I mean assault and battery, I do not wish ill on in return. Sadly I’ve had to come to take satisfaction in knowing that God will pour extreme wrath and chastisement, and for some this will be for all eternity, when it is their time. But I do not have bad feelings toward anyone because it is not my nature. I’ve blogged before that if I could think of one person I most “hate the sin” of, it’s Joseph Kony of the LRA in Uganda, whose followers killed, mutilated and enslaved tens of thousands of adults and children and has the nerve to do so claiming he is something of a “reincarnated Jesus” and living according to the Ten Commandments. But about the person I still hold out hope for his conversion, and I honestly would not even wish a dose of diarrhea on him, or a bad head cold. It is the same for Osama bin Laden because as much as the attack on the USA wounded my heart (and was only a few miles from my home where I was present at the time), I still hold out belief that he can see the error in his devotion to God, where he views himself as having a role as one of God’s smitters of the infidel. It is always best for God to decide when, how and who he will smite. People who decide they “know” who God “disapproves of” and how to “smite” them instead cause great harm and interfere with the continual work of the Holy Spirit to convert hearts of the infidel. And so we come to astrologers.
I certainly did not enter among them looking for enemies; in fact, I was astonished (but not surprised) when I found them in abundance. I was astonished because I go into every relationship assuming good will and charity, so I was amazed when some people seemed to loathe or at best “manipulate” me when I was just trying to “hang out” and be helpful and make some friends. I was not surprised because like I said, something had obviously become very wrong in humanity, and so while I was astonished when I found the source of much personal dislike toward me, I was not surprised that I found what I was seeking, which was an explanation for some of the extremely un-human and inhumane skewing in mindset and behavior that I had puzzled over for decades. Having said this, though, I explain all of this because to this day I still dislike hurting a person, as I know that publicizing and condemning their sin is doing to some (at least those who still have feelings and a conscience). Many of these people I thought were my friends, even as they were stabbing me in the back, both figuratively and yes, literally. I still mourn their loss (or rather, their never being) my friends and I do not enjoy any chastisement that I’ve had to deliver. It is the intransience and refusal to make things right that compels me to continue doing the only thing that has been left to me in my life, since I’ve been robbed of all else, which is to repeatedly transmit God’s will and his assurance of the most dire chastisement if things do not change. Notice that I continue to explain both physical and spiritual reality and principles in order to educate, rather than just threaten or to curse them. I continue to try to rectify their errors for them with the only thing remaining to me, which is a laptop computer and a blog on a folding table in my apartment which I pay for on credit, since my home, my livelihood, my income and my savings have all been taken from me by the cultists. Yet I still try to save souls, and I still dislike hurting the feelings of even people who have defamed and humiliated me in the worst ways possible.
So I joined a chat board and learned the culture. I learned that the message board tended to have “experts” and “fans.” So there were people who asked for “readings” and people who gave them. Sometimes the experts would “teach” or do some general “forecasting.” But I was surprised to learn a few things about the culture. One is that astrologers take the reality of reincarnation for granted, which was a huge surprise to me, and not just because I know for a fact that reincarnation does not exist. The surprise was that I thought humans mostly had either a theological belief in reincarnation or a secular interest in astrology. I had not realized that humans had combined the two inextricably during the past several decades in the mainstream. The same is also true of being “a psychic.” I was surprised to find that “psychics” and “astrologers” were indistinguishable. This was also very troubling because while of course humans have extrasensory facilities, most psychics are gushing crap from their personal and the collective human subconscious. So this triumvirate of reincarnation-astrology-psychic was a surprise to me, but also an immediate very large answer to my question about what the heck has happened to humans, their humanity and their basic survival instincts. Astrology was no longer the silly column in the newspaper, or a fun way to do “personality quizzes.” Through its linkage with false “reincarnation” and false “psychic powers” it has become a dark and depressive force hidden behind the New Age pixie dust of sugary words that coats the popular messages and messengers. A dark and depressive view of life, one that is firmly anti-God and highly pagan, is behind astrology, and astrology is behind many of the “movers and shakers” in the world today, including politics, the financial markets, health care and the media. And you wonder why there are so many depressive illnesses, incredibly deranged crimes, inexplicable disappearance of much of the world’s wealth and self destructive “entertainment.”
My dear children, there is something that you need to understand. Astrology did not come into being because the little people gazed up at the stars and tried to explain the world the best way they could. Astrology came about as the tool of the ancient oligarchs and despots, and its very origin is in the desire to get an edge over one’s enemies and plunder even more than you have already done so. It is a dark art that comes from the upper class of ancient societies who sought to further their coveting of worldly goods. The farther back you go, if you could actually do so, the darker it would be, not the lighter. It’s not like if you go far enough back you find happy peasants who sought to sow their crops while dancing under the light of the moon, and hence being happy farmers “discovered” astrology. Astrology did not “occur” to people who lived a subsistence life of scratching out a living from meal to meal or who were slaves, treated as short lived property. Reality was more than enough for them, and none of those early people had access to any scholarly impulse or tools to invent unseen philosophies. Only those who ruled others had the time or motivation to invent a way to oppress people and covet power and goods. That is the dark origin of astrology. As Christianity spread people cleaned astrology up, regarding their purposes in using it, as people looked more for social relationship information and as a middle class “diversion.” But the “rules” and “motivations” of astrology are still dark, dirty and profane.
Here is what astrology is like, and this matches quite a bit of what I experienced as I immersed myself in the culture in order to figure out “where is everybody?” Astrology is like you are from your native land and you go to a country on the other side of the earth. You sign up for the local language lessons because you can’t understand what they are saying, and you cannot speak it yourself. So you go to the language lessons class in “the land of astrology” and these are samples of what you learn.
You want to learn to say, “How are you doing?” You learn that the way to ask this in astrology land language is “How much of the shit that you are doomed to do have you accomplished today?” [You can make this sample my quote for the day. It says it all.]
You want to learn to say, “I am doing fine, thank you.” You learn that the way to ask this is “I realize that I am blind spiritually and not as wise as to the ‘reality’ of the karma of this dump of a world as you are, and thus I am doing alright but am of course a total dumb putz.”
You want to ask, “What are your plans for tomorrow?” You learn that in astrology speak that you must say, “What of your secret activities do you want to tell me, and be sure to drop hints about what I should be doing tomorrow since that is part of your string pulling and manipulative plans for me.”
I wish I was kidding and exaggerating, but I am not. Because the language of astrology was invented for the personal delusion and oppression of the dark ancient power brokers of the world, and not meant for real God fearing normal human discourse, it is a sickening and dark mindset that renders even a casual conversation into words and feelings that are depressive, promote nihilism and suicide, and put out an unbearable pressure that makes many people crack into drugs, violence or breakdowns.
If you leaf through an Arabic astrology book you’ll see a sample of what I mean. Just about everything in it is about an angry and pissed off star or planet that causes woe, illness, death and ruin. And people wonder why early Islamic believers slaughtered infidels around them. While Arabic people have a wonderful scholarly contribution of mathematics, astronomy and other sciences, when the word of God arrived to the Muslims through the Prophet (PBUH), people realized the horror of the occult and pagan ways. So once the word of God came to the Muslims they were in just as much of a hurry to purge occult practices which are forbidden by God because they are erroneous, depressive and oppressive from among their very own people who refused to convert. This is one reason people need to be a little more scholarly before they condemn early Islam as being “violent.”
So even though modern astrologers deliberately publish silly and light hearted sounding columns and pixie dust forecasts, they are doing so while still using in the background a tool that is dark, occult and erroneous. And power goes to people’s heads, as it always has. It’s not like these are housewives who suddenly had a calling to be the happy lady in pink who does love match astrology readings. Most of these are people who learned astrology in secret from their coveting and power hungry parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents and their associates. It is a family business, though they hide it, for the most part. They have “front people,” like the astrologers to the famous. They even sometimes make outrageous and knowingly “wrong” forecasts in the paper so that the populace will not realize that they are not just silly astrologers, but also participants in power broker cabals behind the scenes. For example, throughout my time with that astrology board, certain people just HAD to post the occasional message about , oh poor me, if astrology was really working I should be rich via the stock market, ha ha ha. Every time I saw that I knew that these were people who were stock market manipulators and wealthy people in truth. People can’t resist bragging, so they do so via a reverse brag. “Gosh, if I was really a good astrologer and connected, I’d be rich and a stock market manipulator.” And, of course, they are. They giggled behind the scenes (I could hear them, actually) thinking I’m a stupid putz who didn’t see right through them. Every time they made a “poor astrologer” joke, I figured they were rolling in their shit stash of dollar bills and laughing at me. But I was there to learn what was going on, and why people were so lost, not to hate, even though I was just a joke punching bag to them. So I’ve known about this as a fact for about ten years now.
(to be continued)
Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s it was obvious that humanity had veered terribly off course. At least it was obvious to me. I could tell both as a silent observer who was totally in synchronization with God’s will, and also how people were treating me as an individual. It’s like the British Airways advertisement that ran during the 1990’s where a cartoon guy finds he is alone and says, “Where is everybody?” I could tell that a false isolation had taken place around me. I’m old enough (and obviously have much ancestral wisdom, you could call it) to know how normal people act normally (both good and bad). The entire 1990’s was a period where I could detect a distressing and counterproductive false plastic façade hiding secret agendas virtually everywhere I looked, whether close to me or in society as a whole. I had to find out what was going on. The way to do it is to find out where everyone is hiding and doing their secret business, whatever it was, and join in. Not because I would come to believe whatever they were doing, but so that I could at least nudge them back to a more wholesome, normal and humane mindset and behavior. So I decided to accept the few social hints and nudges that I had been receiving and start hanging around an astrology message board that had been “recommended” to me (one of those dropped hints by a cultist, as I’ve explained in previous blog postings). This would have been around 1997-8 as best as I can recall.
The way I am, I must explain, is that I never want to hurt anyone. That is why I’ve only reluctantly and as a desperate last measure have taken on the fire and brimstone approach to the truth. Even people who have harmed me most egregiously, and I don’t mean just hurt my feelings, but I mean assault and battery, I do not wish ill on in return. Sadly I’ve had to come to take satisfaction in knowing that God will pour extreme wrath and chastisement, and for some this will be for all eternity, when it is their time. But I do not have bad feelings toward anyone because it is not my nature. I’ve blogged before that if I could think of one person I most “hate the sin” of, it’s Joseph Kony of the LRA in Uganda, whose followers killed, mutilated and enslaved tens of thousands of adults and children and has the nerve to do so claiming he is something of a “reincarnated Jesus” and living according to the Ten Commandments. But about the person I still hold out hope for his conversion, and I honestly would not even wish a dose of diarrhea on him, or a bad head cold. It is the same for Osama bin Laden because as much as the attack on the USA wounded my heart (and was only a few miles from my home where I was present at the time), I still hold out belief that he can see the error in his devotion to God, where he views himself as having a role as one of God’s smitters of the infidel. It is always best for God to decide when, how and who he will smite. People who decide they “know” who God “disapproves of” and how to “smite” them instead cause great harm and interfere with the continual work of the Holy Spirit to convert hearts of the infidel. And so we come to astrologers.
I certainly did not enter among them looking for enemies; in fact, I was astonished (but not surprised) when I found them in abundance. I was astonished because I go into every relationship assuming good will and charity, so I was amazed when some people seemed to loathe or at best “manipulate” me when I was just trying to “hang out” and be helpful and make some friends. I was not surprised because like I said, something had obviously become very wrong in humanity, and so while I was astonished when I found the source of much personal dislike toward me, I was not surprised that I found what I was seeking, which was an explanation for some of the extremely un-human and inhumane skewing in mindset and behavior that I had puzzled over for decades. Having said this, though, I explain all of this because to this day I still dislike hurting a person, as I know that publicizing and condemning their sin is doing to some (at least those who still have feelings and a conscience). Many of these people I thought were my friends, even as they were stabbing me in the back, both figuratively and yes, literally. I still mourn their loss (or rather, their never being) my friends and I do not enjoy any chastisement that I’ve had to deliver. It is the intransience and refusal to make things right that compels me to continue doing the only thing that has been left to me in my life, since I’ve been robbed of all else, which is to repeatedly transmit God’s will and his assurance of the most dire chastisement if things do not change. Notice that I continue to explain both physical and spiritual reality and principles in order to educate, rather than just threaten or to curse them. I continue to try to rectify their errors for them with the only thing remaining to me, which is a laptop computer and a blog on a folding table in my apartment which I pay for on credit, since my home, my livelihood, my income and my savings have all been taken from me by the cultists. Yet I still try to save souls, and I still dislike hurting the feelings of even people who have defamed and humiliated me in the worst ways possible.
So I joined a chat board and learned the culture. I learned that the message board tended to have “experts” and “fans.” So there were people who asked for “readings” and people who gave them. Sometimes the experts would “teach” or do some general “forecasting.” But I was surprised to learn a few things about the culture. One is that astrologers take the reality of reincarnation for granted, which was a huge surprise to me, and not just because I know for a fact that reincarnation does not exist. The surprise was that I thought humans mostly had either a theological belief in reincarnation or a secular interest in astrology. I had not realized that humans had combined the two inextricably during the past several decades in the mainstream. The same is also true of being “a psychic.” I was surprised to find that “psychics” and “astrologers” were indistinguishable. This was also very troubling because while of course humans have extrasensory facilities, most psychics are gushing crap from their personal and the collective human subconscious. So this triumvirate of reincarnation-astrology-psychic was a surprise to me, but also an immediate very large answer to my question about what the heck has happened to humans, their humanity and their basic survival instincts. Astrology was no longer the silly column in the newspaper, or a fun way to do “personality quizzes.” Through its linkage with false “reincarnation” and false “psychic powers” it has become a dark and depressive force hidden behind the New Age pixie dust of sugary words that coats the popular messages and messengers. A dark and depressive view of life, one that is firmly anti-God and highly pagan, is behind astrology, and astrology is behind many of the “movers and shakers” in the world today, including politics, the financial markets, health care and the media. And you wonder why there are so many depressive illnesses, incredibly deranged crimes, inexplicable disappearance of much of the world’s wealth and self destructive “entertainment.”
My dear children, there is something that you need to understand. Astrology did not come into being because the little people gazed up at the stars and tried to explain the world the best way they could. Astrology came about as the tool of the ancient oligarchs and despots, and its very origin is in the desire to get an edge over one’s enemies and plunder even more than you have already done so. It is a dark art that comes from the upper class of ancient societies who sought to further their coveting of worldly goods. The farther back you go, if you could actually do so, the darker it would be, not the lighter. It’s not like if you go far enough back you find happy peasants who sought to sow their crops while dancing under the light of the moon, and hence being happy farmers “discovered” astrology. Astrology did not “occur” to people who lived a subsistence life of scratching out a living from meal to meal or who were slaves, treated as short lived property. Reality was more than enough for them, and none of those early people had access to any scholarly impulse or tools to invent unseen philosophies. Only those who ruled others had the time or motivation to invent a way to oppress people and covet power and goods. That is the dark origin of astrology. As Christianity spread people cleaned astrology up, regarding their purposes in using it, as people looked more for social relationship information and as a middle class “diversion.” But the “rules” and “motivations” of astrology are still dark, dirty and profane.
Here is what astrology is like, and this matches quite a bit of what I experienced as I immersed myself in the culture in order to figure out “where is everybody?” Astrology is like you are from your native land and you go to a country on the other side of the earth. You sign up for the local language lessons because you can’t understand what they are saying, and you cannot speak it yourself. So you go to the language lessons class in “the land of astrology” and these are samples of what you learn.
You want to learn to say, “How are you doing?” You learn that the way to ask this in astrology land language is “How much of the shit that you are doomed to do have you accomplished today?” [You can make this sample my quote for the day. It says it all.]
You want to learn to say, “I am doing fine, thank you.” You learn that the way to ask this is “I realize that I am blind spiritually and not as wise as to the ‘reality’ of the karma of this dump of a world as you are, and thus I am doing alright but am of course a total dumb putz.”
You want to ask, “What are your plans for tomorrow?” You learn that in astrology speak that you must say, “What of your secret activities do you want to tell me, and be sure to drop hints about what I should be doing tomorrow since that is part of your string pulling and manipulative plans for me.”
I wish I was kidding and exaggerating, but I am not. Because the language of astrology was invented for the personal delusion and oppression of the dark ancient power brokers of the world, and not meant for real God fearing normal human discourse, it is a sickening and dark mindset that renders even a casual conversation into words and feelings that are depressive, promote nihilism and suicide, and put out an unbearable pressure that makes many people crack into drugs, violence or breakdowns.
If you leaf through an Arabic astrology book you’ll see a sample of what I mean. Just about everything in it is about an angry and pissed off star or planet that causes woe, illness, death and ruin. And people wonder why early Islamic believers slaughtered infidels around them. While Arabic people have a wonderful scholarly contribution of mathematics, astronomy and other sciences, when the word of God arrived to the Muslims through the Prophet (PBUH), people realized the horror of the occult and pagan ways. So once the word of God came to the Muslims they were in just as much of a hurry to purge occult practices which are forbidden by God because they are erroneous, depressive and oppressive from among their very own people who refused to convert. This is one reason people need to be a little more scholarly before they condemn early Islam as being “violent.”
So even though modern astrologers deliberately publish silly and light hearted sounding columns and pixie dust forecasts, they are doing so while still using in the background a tool that is dark, occult and erroneous. And power goes to people’s heads, as it always has. It’s not like these are housewives who suddenly had a calling to be the happy lady in pink who does love match astrology readings. Most of these are people who learned astrology in secret from their coveting and power hungry parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents and their associates. It is a family business, though they hide it, for the most part. They have “front people,” like the astrologers to the famous. They even sometimes make outrageous and knowingly “wrong” forecasts in the paper so that the populace will not realize that they are not just silly astrologers, but also participants in power broker cabals behind the scenes. For example, throughout my time with that astrology board, certain people just HAD to post the occasional message about , oh poor me, if astrology was really working I should be rich via the stock market, ha ha ha. Every time I saw that I knew that these were people who were stock market manipulators and wealthy people in truth. People can’t resist bragging, so they do so via a reverse brag. “Gosh, if I was really a good astrologer and connected, I’d be rich and a stock market manipulator.” And, of course, they are. They giggled behind the scenes (I could hear them, actually) thinking I’m a stupid putz who didn’t see right through them. Every time they made a “poor astrologer” joke, I figured they were rolling in their shit stash of dollar bills and laughing at me. But I was there to learn what was going on, and why people were so lost, not to hate, even though I was just a joke punching bag to them. So I’ve known about this as a fact for about ten years now.
(to be continued)
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