Monday, April 23, 2012

UPON MEETING THE HOLY SPIRIT

You know, most people go through life hearing about the Holy Spirit — in church, in the entertainment media, and in some cases from direct contact with people touched by it — but they never understand what the Holy Spirit is or what it does, exactly.  Most people think it's just an internal thing, an epiphany of some kind, a part of the natural growth and expansion of the human mind.

In short, most people are deliberately ignorant on the subject of the Holy Spirit.

I mean, VERY FEW professed Christians actually have FAITH in the paranormal aspects of their religion.  If you announce to your "church family" that you've encountered the Holy Spirit in person, you'll see some eyebrows raise, I guarantee you...because, by and large, professed Christians don't have Faith in God and Christ and the Holy Spirit (which are all the same thing, actually).

If they DID have Faith, they wouldn't be the hypocritical, gossiping, frightened little country-clubbers they are.  Yeah, I have a piss-poor opinion of most Christians, those who wear the jersey and cheer on the sidelines once a week, but who never get in there and play the game, they never walk the path of Christ.

I grew up in a protestant Christian family in Southeast Texas.  My mother was from an English family that immigrated to New England in the 1890s; and she was, without question, the spiritual head of our family.  My father was straight out of the Piney Woods of East Texas by way of two world tours in the Merchant Marines, and he was as hard as a coffin nail.

My father was a righteous man who feared nothing.  You know the Texas Ranger motto, right?  "No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-comin'."

Well, that pretty much defines my father.  He was in the right and he knew it, his common sense was clear and pure, and he acted on it with certainty and without regret.

He did not hesitate.

That's important to note, because there are people and whole families alive today because my father did not hesitate.  My dad was proactive, he heroically saved lives from certain death on three occasions that I know; and I mean bashing out a window with his bare fists and reaching inside to save an infant from a blazing house (I saw him do it, it was jaw-dropping heroism); and I mean catching a 6'3", 250-lb man falling from an industrial catwalk 80 feet in the air — my dad was on the catwalk directly under him, grabbed the sonofabitch by the forearm as he fell past.  And I mean diving off the end of a dock in Rio de Janeiro to save a guy being eaten by barracudas.  Saved that drunk sailor's ass.

My dad did not hesitate.

He had a purity of discernment, he could rapidly assess situations and take measurements on sight — and I mean he literally could measure anything with his eyes alone to a high degree of precision.  I inherited that trait, fortunately, as well as his impulsive disposition and a few other characteristics.

And let me tell you something... That fearlessness, that righteousness was and is born of pure Faith.  Strangely, my father was NOT a church-going Christian, although my mother did everything she knew to persuade him.

Whenever I speak of Faith, I'm not talking about Belief.  Belief is making a wish that you hope will come true.  But in the back of your mind, you secretly acknowledge that your belief may be wrong, that your fondest wish won't come true, that you may have to question your belief, second-guess yourself.

In this life, you may even be compelled or impelled to take a stance that is diametrically opposed to your original belief.

Hell, politicians do it all the time.  Go back and review the collected speeches of the esteemed billionaire Senator John Kerry, for example, in which he starts virtually every sentence with "I BELIEVE..." and then he rolls off this litany of crap that he refutes two weeks later.  He turns his belief 180° with regularity, you see.

Belief is the sick distant cousin of Faith.  There's a definite distinction.

Faith is NOT Belief, and we shouldn't deliberately confuse the terms.

Look at it this way, Belief is humanity's firmware, which is malleable and is updated on a regular basis.  If Belief is firmware, then Faith is HARDWIRED CIRCUITRY.  No updates, no second-guessing, Faith only goes one way and without regret.  Faith is a transcendental certainty that blows Belief out of the water, Faith goes right to the heart of clear thinking, rapid assessment and decision-making and, ultimately, profound actions.

Accordingly, a person of Faith is a formidable individual.

Mother Theresa was such a person.  This diminutive woman was a bulldozer, an earth-mover, she got things done during her time on Earth — and she didn't own anything except the clothes on her back and her Bible and rosary.  Mohandas Gandhi was another one, you could beat and starve that scrawny bastard to the brink of death and he just kept comin' back.  He knew he was right, he had his hardwired Faith, and that's all you need in the world of Man.

See, Faith is your one-way circuit for bulldozing through the adversity in Life.  When you live in Faith, you cannot be attacked, although your enemies will come at you like locusts.  If you think you're living in Faith, but nobody is attacking you, you're NOT living in Faith, and you're not walking the path of Christ.

Allow me to establish a couple of controversial parameters here... First of all, Earth is Hell.   The world of living things is Hell.  Look at Nature — not in all its aesthetic beauty, but in the truth of its much more cruel and carnal horror — and tell me that this is not Hell.  In Nature, there is no equality, the weak stumble and bleed and are eaten by the strong, the most violent creatures dominate the passive, and cute little furry baby animals are eaten by ants and vultures and cold-blooded reptiles.  The Earth, and, indeed, the Universe, is SAVAGE.

There is nothing we can imagine in Hell that is not exceeded in Nature, okay?

Another parameter is that Mankind is born into Hell on Earth, and we must walk a very disciplined path if we wish to escape it.  See, among all the savage beasts on Earth, Man has demonstrated an unparalleled aptitude for WASTE and GREED and CORRUPTION that eclipses the mundane terrors of Nature.  Not saying that we're more powerful or more terrifying than Nature, but that we're horribly wasteful and grotesque in our abuse of the resources.

We're really not a very nice species.  We're just barely aware of what makes Nature tick, and we seem intent on destroying it.

We kill senselessly, and I'm not talking about man's barbarity to man.  In reshaping the surface of the Earth we annihilate plant and animal Life like Hell won't have it.  We kill the EARTH for our own selfish ends.  We kill CREATION.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not an eco-tard envirochump.  I'm telling you how GOD sees us.

Yes, I'm qualified to speak on God's behalf.  So are you.  But if you decide to try your hand at speaking on behalf of God, you'd better be ready for a little visit from the Holy Spirit.

Make no mistake, it distresses God when Life is terminated for futile purposes.  That's because Life is God's window on the Universe.

As I've stated in earlier blogs, God did create the Universe, and there's no theoretical Scientific argument you can pose that provides a better explanation — Stephen Hawking's best guess is that the Universe JUST HAPPENED out of nothingness.  How is THAT better than the Creation theory, I ask you?

How God created the Universe is so far beyond our comprehension, we need to stop worrying about it and stop second-guessing.  We've wasted thousands of years pondering the imponderable and beating the shit out of each other because we can't arrive at a consensus regarding Creation, for Godsake.

At this primitive stage of our development, our priority should NOT be pondering shit that is completely beyond our neurological capacity— I mean, that's like single-celled parameciums staring up at the objective lens of a microscope and postulating on the complexity of Man.  Parameciums don't have the neurological capacity to comprehend anything so vast.

Just so, THAT is how far away we are from comprehending the complexity of God and Creation, okay?

Suffice to say that Life is God's surveillance mechanism into this Universe. Life is a molecule designed to chemically and electromagnetically sample and process his Creation and feed the information back to him.  For God's amusement, perhaps, or to satisfy his unfathomable curiosity.  When a corporeal lifeform dies, it's like one of God's myriad surveillance monitors going black.  Of course, for every lifeform that dies, there's a trillion more born all across the Universe, and God designed it that way.

But God really really hates it when we demolish his Creation for no good reason.

Thou Shalt Not Kill, right?

Nature, you see, doesn't do that.  Everything that is killed in Nature serves to rejuvenate the environment.  But Humans — created in the image of God (yep, we're the only ones), and kinda partially god-like in our awareness — DO NOT rejuvenate the environment.  In fact, we tend to poison the environment haphazardly, we DRAIN the energy out of the environment for our own purposes, and we do it so inefficiently that the living environment is diminished, even mortally wounded.

We KILL whole environments, exterminating countless species in the process.  When Jehova commanded Thou Shalt Not Kill, THAT is the killing he meant.  Don't Kill Creation.

God keeps an eye on Mankind, right, because he's had problems with us before.  In the very olden times, when humanity got out of hand in our arrogance and waste and corruption on Earth, God had to flood the property and start over.  Of course, that was a much smaller human population and much earlier in our development, when God had really extraordinary expectations of us.

Back then, God didn't mind erasing the blackboard and starting over.  Ask the Hopi tribe.  Ask the Hindus.  They'll tell you that God has destroyed the Earth multiple times.  Interestingly, Science tells us that the living environment of the Earth HAS been destroyed multiple times, but that devastation happened millions upon millions of years before Mankind even evolved, right?  So how do these primitive cultures have knowledge of it?

Anyway, about 2000 years ago, as Mankind was on the verge of setting a new precedent for waste and immorality and corruption, exploring the horrors of infanticide and shit like that, God decided to do a little reconnaissance down on Earth, and he dispatched a part of himself known as Christ The Son to actually walk among humanity, to experience Man's barbarity from the human perspective.

Predictably, it turned ugly.

Despite Christ's attempts to enlighten the masses as he made his path through Life, he was persecuted, arrested, and murdered in the most grisly fashion concocted by "civilized" Man.  His own people, the Jews, demanded Christ's execution, and the morally ambivalent Romans complied (to keep the peace) with a particularly brutal flogging and crucifixion.

Yet, Christ made a DECISION to SPARE Mankind, to assume the burden of all Mankind's sin and barbarity for all time.

From Death, Christ arose and returned to the heavenly sphere, but not before he MADE IT PLAIN to his disciples that ALL MEN must walk a disciplined path through the adversities of Life, regardless of the barbarity, and to CONQUER DEATH just as he did.  Fearlessly.

See, Christ's little excursion on Earth WAS his descent into Hell.  And the whole point of his Life on Earth was to PROVE that, while we are born into Hell, we can each of us CHOOSE to walk a fearless path THROUGH Hell and return to the heavenly realm.

When you choose NOT to face Life and Hell fearlessly, then you remain in Hell until you DO walk a fearless path in Faith.  Cowards remain in Hell, okay?  I think Christ's admonition "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth" is the same as saying "Blessed are the cowards, for the cowards shall remain in Hell."


Because the Earth is Hell, and the meek are cowards.

Cowards, of all people, need all the blessing they can get.  Cowards die a thousand deaths.

You may construe this to mean that repeated reincarnation to the earthly realm equates to an eternity in Hell, that some people just keep coming back to this Hell on Earth — until, of course, they face Hell fearlessly, learn their lesson, and transcend to Heaven through Faith.  Maybe.  I'm not going into reincarnation right now because it's an entire blog in itself.

When I say these things, when I express such certainty and conviction in the existence of God and Christ and the meaning of Life and Creation and Heaven and Hell, I'm sometimes questioned as to the source of my knowledge.

Because, while I refute much of the nonsense you read in the Bible, people KNOW that what I say is the Truth.  They feel it, and it frightens them.  You can always tell when the Truth is at hand, because it scares the shit out of people.

Well, although I grew up in a Christian family of New England Protestant values (on my mother's side) and with impeccable East Texas Piney Woods common sense (on my father's side), and although I attended church from an early age, I did not learn what I know in church.

Make no mistake, I learned a lot of shit in church, but I never encountered the Truth there.

Rather, I encountered Satan in the church, the Father of all Liars, because THAT is where Satan resides.  I haven't seen anything up to the present to change my mind on that count.  As my mother always said, Satan is the first one through the door on Sunday morning, and he's the last to leave.

I would add to this observation that Satan is usually the one preaching from the pulpit, and my most recent experiences with the church have only reinforced these long-held views.

So, no, what I know about God and Christ and Creation and Life and Heaven and Hell derives from a much more reliable source, The Holy Spirit; and I encountered the Holy Spirit through the exercise of Faith.  I have the Faith of my dad, who could instantly assess situations and act upon them while others were vacillating and second-guessing and cowering in fear.

My dad, in his Faith, was closer to God than 98% of the self-professed Christians I've ever met.  My dad, who had disdain for the hypocrisy and cowardice and lies of the church, had DISCERNMENT, as do I.

I want you to look at your own life, your interaction with the church, and tell me that the church has nurtured your spiritual growth (whatever that means to you).

I'm willing to bet your church hasn't contributed to your spiritual growth in the least.  I've attended MANY churches, many churches and many denominations all across the country, and I found the same thing everywhere I've been — Country Clubs.  That's all.  Tight little knots of money and local power and gossip.  Injurious, insidious gossip, fomenting nothing less than domestic terrorism.

Let's call it what it is.

Now, as it happens, Discernment is something that cuts right through the Country Club mentality like a hot knife.  Discernment is the direct knowledge of things typically hidden behind veils of secrecy in the world of Man.  Discernment is a knowledge of matters beyond the highest knowledge of Mankind, a knowledge of whether spirits are divine or profane.

Discernment is a gift of The Holy Spirit.  It's direct knowledge of the Truth.

You can't fake Discernment.  It's not a parlor trick, okay, it's a power.  You use it in your life, it precedes you, and it protects you when you learn to heed it.  See, it's not something you wield like a weapon, it's something with which you coexist.

The one thing you must learn to suppress when you have Discernment is the urge to gloat or say "I told you so."  I mean, in exercising your discernment, you find yourself making very exacting observations on situations, relationships, et cetera; and that puts people on edge, it makes them wary of you.  A week later, when the truth of the situation or relationship unfolds EXACTLY as you foretold, the participants may be on the verge of respecting you, but they're also in a kind of reactionary DENIAL that you called the shot.  They're in awe.

You don't want to deflect that respect or repel them with a petty "I told you so.".

So don't say that.

Instead, admonish them to seek Discernment themselves through The Holy Spirit.

To be continued..........




Wednesday, April 18, 2012

MY MEETING WITH GEORGE TAKEI

I'd like to share a brief story of my only meeting with George Takei...

For you younglings out there, George Takei is the original Mr. Sulu from the 1960s Star Trek television series.  His distinctive, baritone voice is easily recognizable across many generations, his talent as an actor and director is widely acclaimed, and his sense of humor is infectious.  In more recent years, he has "come out" and married his lover and has been an outspoken advocate of Gay causes.

George is just an all around cool guy.

I attended a MysteryCon, I think it was, back in 1978 in Houston, Texas, where I was fortunate enough to meet a few screen celebs wandering around the hotel.  I remember that I futilely accosted Spanky McFarland (of Little Rascals fame) in an empty corridor, which probably scared the poor man to death, because I couldn't think of anything meaningful to say to the guy.

I mean, Spanky was about 50 years old at the time, was still only about 4-1/2 feet tall, his fame had fizzled 40 years earlier, he had tried every profession you can name, and he was essentially making a little extra cash by touring these conventions, talking about the old days and autographing 8x10s.

What was I gonna say to him?  "You sure were cute 45 years ago!"  How does that sound coming from an 18-year-old kid?  Words failed me, so I shook his hand, shrugged and walked away.

By far, the biggest celebs at the convention were Roy Rogers and his wife Dale Evans, and I qualify that statement with the fact that his appearance and gunslinging demonstration had PACKED a large conference room beyond its capacity. I haven't seen too many celebs create such a stir. Elbow-to-elbow, standing room only, I'm guessing there were over 300 people jammed into a room meant to accommodate 100. Definitely a fire code violation.

So Roy was wowing the crowd, twirling his six-guns (he was definitely still on top of his game), and I was standing near the back of the chamber, just drinking it in. The whole room was IN LOVE with Roy Rogers.

As I was focused on the show, this guy comes squeezing his way into the mass of humanity, steps in front of me, and almost pushes me off balance trying to get a gander of Roy and Dale. I was a little miffed, okay, and was about to say something confrontational, when the guy turns to me with this big grin across his face and exclaims like an overgrown kid, "HE'S GREAT, ISN'T HE?!"

Well, yes, it was George Takei, who for a few moments was as anonymous as all the other Roy Rogers fans in the crowd. I was astounded. Nobody noticed George Takei sneaking into the room, except me, and I was having heart palpitations — I mean, like, here are two of my all-time favorite celebrities in the same room, and one of them was standing on my foot.



(Incidentally, George Takei LIKED this blast from the past.  I'm more than honored.)

Saturday, April 7, 2012

DAWN OF THE MASTER RACE?

Are you aware that the total human population of the Earth in 1900 was only 900 million?  For tens of thousands of years, our species survived and thrived JUST FINE with a sparse population.  

But, in the brief space of 100 years, we have ARTIFICIALLY accelerated our population growth with the introduction of vaccines and antibiotics and advanced agriculture processing & distribution technologies.

You see where this is going now, don't you?

We've cultivated a fine, fat, foundering population of 7 BILLION WEAKLINGS who are utterly dependent on medicines and technology and the agriculture of a tiny handful of farmers and scientists to keep everybody alive.

Do you realize how extraordinarily FRAGILE is this arrangement?

Honey, if we are to survive as a species, we're gonna hafta LOSE SOME WEIGHT.

Make no mistake, we need to pull the plug  on Technology and Medicine right now, and allow NATURAL SELECTION to thin out this herd.

No, we don't need a "Master Race" of genetically-engineered drones to solve our problems.  We need to STOP TAMPERING with Nature, stop medicating it, stop trying to "FIX" it.  

Because we're NOT intelligent enough to sort out the mess we've made thus far, are we?  No, we're only making things worse.

Scientists are about to request a licence from the UK fertility watchdog to fertilise the eggs as part of a series of tests to generate an unlimited supply of human eggs, a breakthrough that could help infertile women to have babies as well as making women as fertile in later life as men.
The first human egg cells that have been grown entirely in the laboratory from stem cells could be fertilised later this year in a development that will revolutionise fertility treatment and might even lead to a reversal of the menopause in older women.
Producing human eggs from stem cells would also open up the possibility of replenishing the ovaries of older women so that they do not suffer the age-related health problems associated with the menopause, from osteoporosis to heart disease.
Some scientists are even suggesting the possibility of producing an “elixir of youth” for women, where the menopause is eradicated and older women will retain the health they enjoyed when younger.
Researchers at Edinburgh University are working with a team from Harvard Medical School in Boston to be the first in the world to produce mature human eggs from stem cells isolated from human ovarian tissue.
Let's see, if they're using "anonymous" stem-cell-synthesized human eggs to remove the burden of reproduction-related illness from women, then who is ultimately in charge of the genetic characteristics of the laboratory-bred offspring?

I hope you people out there understand and appreciate JUST HOW GROTESQUE and DANGEROUS this technology is.

I mean, we're talking about a very tiny handful of scientists basically TAKING CHARGE of the genetic destiny of humankind.

Can you say Master Race?  Eugenics?

Well, we know how well THAT worked out last time.