115 The Genesis of Advertisement

My mind still keeps rattling on the theme of my last thoughts on the "beginnings of advertisement" that I stumbled across via Yin & Yang (even though I should actually get to work...)

The first product ever advertised in history was, basically, evil.

It sort of reminds you of the scene in "Time Bandits" where the bandits arrive at the Castle of Perpetual Darkness and its evil tenant puts on this show and offers them "the most fabulous object in the world..." and they all wind up trapped in a cage hanging from the ceiling and swinging above everlasting darkness...

Isn't that what advertisement is? You're being offered something you didn't know you ever needed or wanted, but advertisement paints it so pretty that you simply can't resist it.

Well, that's what Satan did to Eve when he advertised the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil (adding the ingredient of evil to an already existing world in which all was good, thus creating the Yin/Yang system of duality I expounded on earlier...): nobody needed it. Nobody knew how much they were going to regret buying that crap. Nobody knew what it was supposed to be good for, but they did it anyway, just in order to have it.

Sounds just like any old regular afternoon at the mall...

No wonder I never liked advertisement. It has all the qualities of the first hoax in history that resulted in every catastrophe that ever happened since... Clothes. Lies. Murder... the shebang.

The difference between Satan's products and God's is that God doesn't need any advertisement for His:

Everybody knows you only get good stuff from Him. And best of all, it's always free, no strings attached.

Nobody ever asked for a re-reimbursement for the air they just inhaled because it wasn't their favorite flavor.

You get hungry and you eat the food that comes to your fridge via good ol' mother earth.

(Did you ever realize that with all the fancy stuff man created, they haven't managed to successfully reproduce food synthetically, I mean, starting from scratch with no ingredients from the Maker? After all, you can't eat plastic yet, and even that is based on a natural resource...)

So, next time you feel that urge to bust your credit card due to some 256 commercials you just watched while ironing your shirts: think again!

Or before you allow your kids' lives to become a non-stop repetition of the darkest hour of the Garden of Eden!

The Bible has something to say about greed: "Let your conversation be without covetousness and be content with such things as ye have" (Heb.13:5).

If Adam and Eve had known that, they would have saved themselves - and us - millennia worth of trouble.

The secret is just being happy with what we have, instead of ever craving what the Jones' have got.

Especially in the light of the fact that 10.000 people still starve each and every day because they haven't got anything, not even the barest of necessities...

So much on the beginnings of consumerism. It seemed good enough at first, but the end of it was wailing and gnashing of teeth that we haven't seen and heard the end of yet...

And if you really want to be happy, why not try to make somebody else happy and make a donation instead of buying yet another item you don't really need? Let's get back to the Garden!

114 What About Yin and Yang?

One philosophy that certainly seems to become more popular than the "We make ya dead" type of Christianity that has given the Cause of Christ a bitter by-taste ever since the crusades, and turned out specially bad latest since the Bush administration, is the Zen-Buddhist philosophy of Yin and Yang.

The symbol of Yin and Yang is rapidly becoming more popular than the cross, especially among young people.

After all, Buddhists aren't known for having caused a fraction of the damage "Christians" are still perpetrating worldwide every day.

So, who can blame them? Who can blame them for believing that good and evil must be equally strong, and that evil must necessarily stick around forever in order to keep the "proper balance" in nature and all things?

After all, it's plainly evident by looking all around us that there are 2 sides to nearly everything.

There is a good and a bad side to even all apparently bad things, as well as to seemingly purely good things.

Everything seems to have a shadow side to it, a dark side. Even sunshine: you get too much of it, and it can ruin crops, or your health, and cause whole lakes to evaporate...

Even water, as necessary as it is to make all life possible, can also drown you and bring death.

Too much air can pop the balloon or - in the form of a storm - tear down your house.

Even trees can fall over and kill you...

So, what's up with all that Yin and Yang, good and evil stuff, Jesus? Looks like You're pretty speechless now, huh? Could it be that we just ruined Your show and exposed Your dark little secret that evil is just as strong as You are, and that it's going to hang around forever?

Well, it may seem that way, because we've never seen anything else and never experienced anything different.

But according to the Bible, there was a couple of folks who did. And coincidentally, they introduced this whole good and evil stuff.

When God created Adam and Eve (a fairy tale, you say? Well, we'll see, won't we?), and the whole caboodle of creation was done, He saw that it was good! In fact, very good. Nothing evil or bad about it. Yet.

But wouldn't you know it? As much as we're always craving for something new to consume and try out, even the two happiest and most perfect folks who ever lived turned out not to be perfectly happy with what they had, even though it was perfectly good.

That's what advertisement will do to you. Some legged serpent came strutting along, obviously possessed by the greatest advertiser of all times, and broke the news to Eve that there was a product around that she hadn't consumed yet: the notorious fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil! The price: one tiny little disobedience, since God had made one single little rule in order to keep happiness in Eden afloat: No munching off that one tree!

The reason - retrospectively - becomes obvious: If you already know good, and it's perfectly perfect and good, who the heck would want to know evil?

Well, Eve did. And so we all probably would have. After all, who's ever been able to resist advertisement?

It had a fairly attractive slogan, too: Promises of godhood ("Ye shall be as gods,") and - cunningly effective - the spicy ingredient of suspicion by making God sound like a liar: "Hath God said...? Not really so! Ye shall not surely die!"

Well, they probably wished they had, after they ate that darn piece of forbidden fruit (which by the way was NOT an apple)! But that wasn't God plan. Adam and Eve were still supposed to become Mama and Papa and Grandma and Gramps of us all.

But life wasn't half the fun it used to be before the knowledge of good and evil had entered the land! The knowledge of good had perfectly sufficed, as far as happiness goes, but then, God had a little lesson to teach the universe, and it wouldn't last billions of years, either. Just - roughly - 7,000.

And thus were born - roughly around the same time as Cain and Abel, coincidentally - the twin bros Yin and Yang, who have been wreaking havoc around this place ever since. But - and that's where some folks are mistaken - not forever!

Just as life was perfectly possible and enjoyable without evil, so it will be again, and next time without any interruptions (except for a minor hiccup a little further on in history, but that's another story)!

While the current laws of nature and the dog eat dog scenario of the "survival of the fittest" may seem to tell a different story, and even lead us to believe that man isn't much more than a slightly overly mutated animal himself, it takes a little bit of faith in a shred of information from outside the Yin and Yang matrix (namely the Word of God), to reveal to us that circumstances haven't been and won't be always the same.

There have been "changes in the Matrix" before, introducing the Yin and Yang program (aka Good and Evil), after the first human couple rejected the original "All Is Good" System, bringing into our reality all the deficiencies riding along on evil's coattail, such as death, suffering, wars, etc.

But God (- the Architect with better intentions than the one we know from the "Matrix" trilogy -) has promised to push the "reset" button in the near future, which will restore the original operating system, which will make evil - once again -obsolete.

Because mankind will have (believe it or not!) learned its lesson from evil, which is, life's much more fun without it, and thus we will also be able to wave a cheerful farewell to the Yang Bros., and add, only faintly audible, (the same way most of us would to the former US president:) "Please don't come 'round again!"

113 Would You like to Receive Jesus in Your Heart?

I've been ranting and raving a lot about and against a lot of evils in this world for the past few years, and I have sort of felt that it was my God-given duty to do so, and maybe it was.

But the Lord recently reminded me that when it all comes down to it, all the exposes of the Devil's workings in the world won't make as much of a difference, nor pose as much of a threat to Satan's kingdom and the establishment of his final world order as one single soul saved.

We can rant and rave on and on about this scheme of the enemy to take over the world, or that one, or how he has managed to deceive this fraction of the world population with this scheme, and another with that one, but in the end, nothing is ever going to cause as much loss to his cause as the simple, childlike question, "Would you like to receive Jesus in your heart?"

After all, hearing that question at the age of 13 was the miracle that changed my life, and the spark that would ignite a fire in my life that still hasn't gone out.

Even more miraculous in some ways was my own answer to that question, since it didn't make any sense to that thing between my ears when I heard it. But it came from a deeper spot within me, crawling up from within the core of my heart into my mouth and inexplicably causing me to utter the word "yes" for no other reason than that's what I was meant to do.

So, if you really want to help change the world for good and make a difference for the better, would you like to receive Jesus in your heart?

And if you have, would you like to ask someone else that question, in fact, anyone else? Anyone you come across on the path of your journey through life?

Don't be afraid to do it. Some of them - those who were meant to become God's children - will answer "yes" for no particular reason than the fact that that's what they will fell they were meant to say, often perfectly contrary to what their rational mind may tell them.

Receiving Jesus is what makes the difference. Anyone receiving Jesus is what the Devil's really scared of, and if you really want to lick the old punk, that's what you've got to do: receive Jesus and help others do the same.

It's a simple, childlike prayer that changed my life and that of millions of others, and it has the power to change yours, and those of the people you come across, too:

Jesus, please come into my heart!

Forgive me for all the wrongs I've committed.

Thank You for Your sacrifice on the cross

and Your gift of eternal life!

Fill me with Your holy Spirit of love

so that I may share Your love with others, too,

in Jesus' name I pray, Amen.

Verses on Salvation: Rev.3:20, John 1:12, 3:16, Eph.2:8,9

Salvation Songs:

112 The Giant Clockwork of Chronos

The New Testament teaches us that currently this world is under the rule of Satan, the "god of this world (or age)," along with his "rulers of the darkness of this world."

What is it that rulers do? They determine by what laws and standards their realm will be governed.

Two of those standards by which the "powers that be" have determined to rule this present world are time and money. Both will apparently come to an end, in contrast to the values that God wants to convey to those who are governed by His standards, and consider their Home His eternal Kingdom, where His rules and standards are what count.

The big disadvantage - as far as we're concerned - about God's standards and values is that we can't see them nor touch them. They require faith in order to be perceived, which is one of the rules He established for the members of His club, those who want to play the game according to His rules, and on His side. Some people are simply incapable of that, or at least not willing to adhere to that rule of faith. They totally and exclusively rely on the visible and tangible stuff around them.

Now it so happens that God has placed enough information in the visible things He made all around us, so that we can still perceive the fingerprints and evidence of His existence in His creation, but those who deny the existence of the invisible also refuse to acknowledge that evidence. In order to successfully convince themselves and others of their dogma of denial, they come up with concoctions of their own imagination such as the widely taught theory of Evolution, which, coincidentally, is being fed, nourished and upheld by nothing else but those same two major values that distinguish the rule and government of this present world: time and money.

According to the theory of Evolution, the one factor that makes it possible for the innumerable miracles to have happened that brought forth every species from nothing via mutation is an unfathomable amount of time: "billions of years." And the one factor that makes millions, if not billions of people acknowledge that teaching as fact, is an unfathomable amount of money that flows into the science apparatus in order to create more "evidence" from virtually nothing: a jawbone here, and thighbone there, and lots of elaborate words and articles in National Geographic or Der Spiegel, along with the televised versions of the same for an increasingly illiterate public; and a whole new reality has been created, a mental conditioning with its own set of laws of "the survival of the fittest" that has been governing most of our globe for the past century and a half, consequently showering it with unprecedented amounts of suffering and violence.

The giant clockwork of Chronos is keeping the enslaved massed in check and dancing according to its tune: "Welcome to the Machine!"

For those who don't feel as comfortable or at home with that construct as evidently a large part of Civilization does, there is, thankfully, an alternative. You see, time and money haven't always been the yardstick that measures everything. There was - and still is, in the presently unseen world which envelops our physical realm - a time in which people would not have to rush through their lives chasing after paper money. In fact, some people on this planet still manage to live by that time in spite of the rat race going on around them.

God's time, the stuff of which Eternity is made, is a different scope than the clock-ticking pace and rhythm that the slaves of Mammon dance to.

And there's that other shred of news about this whole issue:

According to the Book of Revelation, the time we're currently living under is going to come to an end.

Oh, and so will money, by the way, most unfortunately for some.

Like all fairy-tales, illusions, or faulty operating systems, the gospel of time and money must also come to an end.

Only the Real Thing is going to last.

111 Some Things Will Never Change

If there are two peoples in history who show that the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from it, it's the Germans and the Jews.

Not many people seem to share my personal sentiments toward the soon to be relieved from office President of the United States George Bush. At least not many seem to have the guts to openly admit it, except for, perhaps, the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, for which he will always have my admiration, a few Canadians, and the guys from Counterpunch, bless their hearts.

Of course there are millions of Arabs whose sentiments toward G.W. are even far less benign than mine, including those of the Iraqi population, even if they are not in a position in which they can freely admit so.

Then there are the Germans, thousands, probably tens of thousands of whom are quite daring to share their sentiments about the probably worst dictator the United States ever had, anonymously somewhere on Youtube or elsewhere when they've had a beer or two to many, but one thing hasn't changed about the Germans since the Hitler regime: they're still a bunch of cowards. Maybe rightly so, since cowards tend to live longer... But what sort of a life?

And cowards seem to breed ever more cowards.

That's why there isn't much to be seen or heard from the German public about what's happening in Palestine right now. Just as their ancestors did 75 or 80 years ago, they prefer to watch and say nothing. They neatly swallow the government propaganda of today the same as it was then. "The Palestinians have brought this upon themselves, just as much as the Jews brought the 3rd Reich Holocaust upon themselves."

It's the great indifference that is killing the innocent, now, as it did then.

The Davids of the past have become today's Goliaths, the persecuted of yesterday have become the persecutors, and the one thing that hasn't changed at all is the indifferent stupor of the masses that just stands by and watches the slaughter.
Worst and most sickening of all, some Christian outfits think they need to publicly sympathize with the Israelis, perhaps in order to rectify some guilt of the past. They didn't learn anything at all. They just swallow the same propaganda their parents or grandparents did, only from different sources.

No wonder Jesus vowed that he would vomit some of His supposed followers out of His mouth because of their lukewarmness...

As for those who claim to be the heirs of Abraham, the day will reveal all that is being concealed.

110 We Haven't Even Yet Begun

One of the biggest killers of progress and moving forward is the notion to have arrived. People who think they already know don't seek any further knowledge, their hunger to learn is stifled. They stop absorbing, soaking up the new, and so they stagnate and stop growing.

This applies to so many aspects of our lives:

We think we've already seen it all, and so we stop looking for new things, for new possibilties.

We let the TV do its job and fill our craving for new visual input, and close the door to the possibility of whole new worlds in existence that we might yet discover, would we only lay aside the remote control long enough, or the joystick or computer mouse, for that matter.

We think we've already heard it all and trust the radio and blaring noises & Satan's sirens to fill our vacuum for new audio input, and have unlearned the art of listening to our hearts and the whispers of our Maker.

We think we already know it all, and trust the institutions of education and the mass media to supply us with whatever they think we ought to "know," and have perhaps come further away from true knowledge than mankind has ever been.

We think we already give so much, when we will not be judged by how much we give, but by how much we still have left, and how much more we could have given. (Remember the lesson from "Schindler's List.")

Indeed, our self-image is an utterly deceptive one. We say, "I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing," and know not that we are "wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked" (Rev.3:17). We behave like spiritual primadonnas and "sit like a queen," convinced that we "shall see no sorrow" (Rev.18:7).

That's why Jesus said you can't fill new wine into old wine skins.

Someone special once compared faith to a vacuum of the sort that a baby creates in its mouth in order to suck the milk from its mother's breast (if you take any offense in that idea, get real, dude!).

So, what is it that hinders our growth? A lack of vacuum, a lack of desire, of yearning, of a need for more, new spiritual food.

What's causing the lack of desire? The abundant supply of junk-food we're not only being offered, but virtually flooded with from all sides.

We haven't learned the art of saying "no" to the wrong kind of voices, the wrong kind of input, the wrong kind of spiritual drugs. But before we learn that, we'll never be able to say truly "yes" to our Creator, the only One Who can truly satisfy us and fill our needs.

So, next time you feel tempted to say, "I've seen it all," or "I've heard that," or "I know all that," be still and listen to the knock and the whisper at your heart, which may tell you just the opposite: "You ain't seen nuthin' yet!"

We may feel pretty much defeated by the circumstances of life and surrender to our fate & say, "That's just the way it is," or we can say - as John Paul Jones is supposed to have said when it looked as if he was defeated - "We haven't even yet begun to fight."

We haven't even yet begun to love, to live, to give, to see, to know...

We haven't even yet begun.

109 "Left," "Right," - Where Should a True Christian Stand, Politically?

As a Christian, (as in follower of Christ's teachings) who chooses not to ignore what my true Commander-in-Chief has to say and who won't allow any man-made, government puppet to usurp that position of leadership and souverignty over my life, either, I cannot subscribe to the political choice of most of my supposed fellow-Christians, who presently seem to believe that problems are solved with guns and granades, and think a weekly hour of pew-warming will do to hide the fact that the gods they're worshiping in reality are Mammon (god of wealth) and Mars (the god of war).

I'm speaking of the political right, as in Bush-ites or McCainians, the kind who would love to put a bullet into the man they call the "antichrist," just because he has a different color of skin than they do, and because he doesn't bend over backwards to kiss their flag-waving and pew-warming butts as much as his predecessor did for no other reason than convenience, because he didn't want to make the same mistake his daddy made earlier by failing to please the Bible belt during a time when most of the colored U.S. population wouldn't have cared to drag themselves to a voting booth, because they rightly figured it wouldn't have much of a difference, anyhow.

On the other hand, I can't subscribe to anyone advocating the mass-murder of innocent, howbeit unborn babies, nor to the notion that man is smart enough to solve his own problems without any help from God, not even if I'm as smart as Barack Obama...

I won't deny that I consider Obama the lesser of two evils, but that doesn't mean I subscribe to his politics. I'm happy for the Afro-American population to have for once received a chance to be liberated from the yoke of stupid white men, but I'm afraid their relief will only be temporary.

Call me a conspiracy freak, but I believe that the true powers that be (howbeit well hidden from public view by having bought the media and thus making sure they'll stay out of them) have always mastered the art of creating two opposing forces - be it fascism or communism in the thirties, or liberalism and conservatives in the nineties - that the broad masses are led to choose sides from, in order to create the illusion of democracy and freedom.

In reality, G.W.Bush has only fulfilled his part in the advance of the New World Order by making the world yet sicker of his supposed type of government and religion, and prepared his country for Obama, who will take it yet another step further toward the goal of replacing religion with the NWO'S universal ideology.

Those who call Obama the antichrist are the same type of wishful thinkers who believe that Jesus will whisk them into the sky before the coming leader of the New World Order ever reveals his true face. Barack Obama is a puppie compared to what the Antichrist will be, and he sure as heck won't be American, either.
America is a world power in its decline that's turning out a whole lot less smart than it managed to make the rest of the world believe for some time. The Antichrist will emerge from the resurrected parts of an empire the world presumed dead and will "liberate" the world from the show that the clowns in Washington and their stooges in Europe are putting on.


So, where should a true Christian stand, politically? Left or right? Well, if you listen to what Jesus had to say, you won't really fall for that whole left-or-right charade in the first place. He made it clear that just as He wasn't from this world, so His disciples wouldn't be, either. While we're supposed to subject ourselves to the powers that be as long as they don't interfere with the commandments God gave us to keep, that doesn't mean that there will never come a time when we will have to prove that we are to obey God rather than men and show on whose side we really stand.

Politicians are always bigshots and popularity hunters, and Jesus certainly wasn't a politician. While there may have been a time that a true Christian could also be a politician, if you look around, those days are pretty much over. Those in politics who call themselves Christians are like the guys who dressed up like Indians in the Boston Tea Party scam in order to get into war with England. They may even think they're doing whatever they do for a just cause, but so did the Nazis who were condemned at Nuremberg.

When the people of Israel in the Old Testament were asking for a king, they weren't doing themselves a favor, and God even warned them of this. It's because people - and especially politicians, it seems - are bound to disappoint you. They simply don't have the same qualities that our Maker does.

I'd vote for Him Who gave His own life for us any day before I'd put my money on any government-paid mass murderers, be their victims either innocent Iraquis or innocent unborn children.

108 Thoughts of Bono & Mammon...

Apart from the short line in my song "Donut" about Bono's desire to bring an end to world poverty, which was based on a piece of Yahoo news that had caught my eye around the time I wrote the song, I never really did waste another thought on the vocal frontman of the 80s band U2.

Of course, I have done my obligatory U2 covers in my time, even though I was never much of a U2 fan myself. I was surprised when in the early 90s an English friend told me that U2 was supposedly a Christian band. Never noticed. After that, whenever I saw Bono on MTV with his larger than life and blacker than death sunglasses, looking a bit like a man-sized insect, I just thought, "Christian, huh!"

Oh, and I read the Rolling Stone article in which he claimed to read the Bible every day, sort of like General Patton.

To be honest, for the longest time, I didn't know what to think. Good guy, bad guy?

He definitely outed himself for me, as far as "Christian" goes, with his live performance of "Sympathy for the Devil," strutting across the stage like someone with the same type of inflated-ego problems that you'd expect Lucifer himself to have. You just can't sing that song the way he did and afterwards run to Jesus, telling Him you're His friend.

But then, we've all had our compromises.

Some Christians view Bono and U2 among the avant guarde of Christian song writing. In an Interview with Christianity Today, Bethany Dillon quoted Bono on one of his secrets of writing smash hits (I guess the secret lies in camouflaging the message to an extent that even Stalin wouldn't have considered it "politically incorrect").

I don't deny that U2 have had a few big hits in their day.

Like the one, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," in which the singer practically tells the Lord, that he believes that He bore the cross of his shame and all, but - so what? "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." In other words, "Jesus, you may be sort of cool & all, but you don't really cut the cake..."

If you haven't found what you were looking for in Jesus, then what the hell are you looking for? Or perhaps it's safer to put it this way: If you haven't found yet what you're looking for, I doubt that you've really found Jesus! Unless what you're really looking for is the same old temporal counterfeit thrills & satisfactions that everyone else is chasing...

There's an adjective for that type of Christianity in the Bible, from Jesus' own mouth: "Lukewarm." The same type of Christianity that's being observed by the majority of Christians, by the way, who basically live their lives in the feverish attempt to prove Jesus wrong when He said, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon."

Well, the news about Mammon is, that his days are just about up. What you see unfolding in the economy right now is just the beginning of sorrows, and when the tale is told, and our "economy" is reduced to the value of what it's actually based on - paper - then there will only be one other alternative left, besides serving God, and if you're not going to feel too comfortable with that one, you'll wish you'll have found what you've been looking for by then.