169 Meet My New Friend Malcolm Muggeridge

The dead seem to be more alive than the living these days.

At least it seems to me that I'm finding more that I can wholeheartedly agree with among the writings of the deceased than among the ceaseless, ever more superficial and pseudo-intelligent babble of the large bulk of my contemporaries.

Well, as member of a group who never had a problem with life after death, and ever more evidence surging for it, including some refreshing accounts of how the dead seem to be alive and kicking and joyously communicating with those left behind on this side of the veil, I'm not too shocked. Although, who wouldn't wish he had a few more friends we can actually feel and see?

But then it's hard to come across minds even remotely comparable to some of those who dared to make a difference in the decades and centuries gone by - minds like that of Malcolm Muggeridge, whom I only recently discovered and find out I'm having more in common with than most of my living acquaintances.

I doubt, for instance, if I would find among the living anyone able to put into words as appropriately and eloquently my very own opinion on the topic of education as he did in his book "Jesus Rediscovered:"

"Education, the great mumbo-jumbo and fraud of the age, purports to equip us to live,

and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything, from juvenile delinquency to

premature senility. For the most part, it only serves to enlarge stupidity, inflate

conceit, enhance credulity and put those subjected to it, at the mercy of brain-washers

with printing presses, radio and television at their disposal."

"The most powerful instrument of all in bringing about the erosion of our civilization was none other than the public education system set up with such high hopes and at so great expense precisely to sustain it."

-- Or on the topic of science:

"We are perfectly capable of believing other things intrinsically as improbable as Christ's incarnation. Towards any kind of scientific mumbojumbo we display a credulity which must be the envy of African witch-doctors. While we shy away with contumely from the account of the creation in the Book of Genesis, we are probably ready to assent to any rigmarole by a Professor Hoyle about how matter came to be, provided it is dished up in the requisite jargon and associated, however obliquely, with what we conceive to be 'facts'.

I suppose every age has its own particular fantasy. Ours is science. A seventeenth-century man like Pascal, though himself a mathematician and scientist of genius, found it quite ridiculous that anyone should suppose that rational processes could lead to any ultimate conclusions about life, but easily accepted the authority of the Scriptures. With us it is the other way round."

--Or organized religion (aka "Churchianity"):

"Professing Christians and ostensibly Christian societies and institutions have by no means been true to the cross and what it signified, especially today when the nominally Christian part of the world is foremost in worship of the Gross National Product—our Golden Calf—and in pursuit of happiness in the guise of sensual pleasure. Yet there the cross still is, propounding its unmistakable denunciation of this world and of the things of this world."

The way I came across my new heavenly friend was by means of one of his quotes on evolution, to which, of course, I also couldn’t agree more:

“I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has. I think I spoke to you before about this age as one of the most credulous in history, and I would include evolution as an example.”

Since there are such wonderful aspects awaiting someone like me in the afterlife, of finally actually meeting folks on the same weird wavelength as mine, I can only agree with his following statement as well:

“As I do not believe that earthly life can bring any lasting satisfaction, the prospect of

death holds no terrors.“

To round off this train of thoughts, I’ll end this with a quote from wee little me:

When even that which is considered the worst that can possibly happen to a person – death – turns out to actually be the best that can possibly happen, then what is there to fear? What is there to lose? (April 20, 2008)

--

“That through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil;

and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:14, 15).

121 Den of Thieves

Someone called me up some time ago and said, "You're the only dude on the Internet who's giving his music away for free."

Well, maybe so. But I've got it from Someone Who I consider a greater and more reliable authority on happiness than those John Denver referred to as "them money-hungry fools."

You never read about Jesus charging an entrance fee for His sermon on the mount, nor did He charge for a single one of His fish sandwiches (although I'm sure He could have raked in a fortune). It just wasn't in Him.

His credo was, "Freely ye have received, freely give," and in my opinion one of the greatest disgraces about Christendom is the machine of commerce that it has been for more than 16 centuries, with no improvement in sight anywhere (at least not voluntarily).

Thank God the Antichrist is going to appear some time to put an end to all of that with his "mark of the Beast," which will divide the wheat from the chaff, anyway.

Jesus made it pretty plain what he thought of that commercialized hybrid of religion or spirituality when He chased the vendors out of the temple. Imagine Him coming to the Vatican or your average drive-in church nowadays, or the mega-temples of the star evangelists. He probably knows why he chose to appear 2000 years before things would get really sick.

Of course, nobody ever believes all that stuff He had to say about not being able to serve God and Mammon (the god of riches), and about the birds in the air and the lilies of the field, and that the heavenly father would supply all our needs, just as He does theirs, if we would only seek first His Kingdom.

"Seeking first" the Kingdom would mean that that's what you'd invest the majority of your time and efforts in, instead of raking in all the cash you can.

If you dedicate your time to serving Him and making sure that folks get His message (without having to pay a fortune for it), then, He says, He will also take care of your needs.

If you preach the Gospel and spread the Good News, then He'll make sure that you can also live off the Gospel. Of course, if you only preach to those who've heard the Gospel a thousand times or more, and they're willing to pay a fortune for your sedating sermons that will assure them they'll escape the wrath of God for our collective selfishness and greed, then you'll have good cards as far as the god of this world is concerned, and the game that he's playing, but God may think differently about that kingdom you have built for yourself.

It's called "modesty," a trait long forgotten and forlorn, and it has an even more recent hero than Jesus and His early followers, namely the Italian monk St. Francis, who bucked the tide of the religious supermarket of his day and decide to be content with little for a change.

He saw a lot of misery, but I also believe that he knew more true happiness than most other folks in his day.

One of the secrets of life is the art of not falling for every single temptation the Devil offers us along the way; it's the art of saying "No, thank you!" every once in a while, "I already have enough."

I guess some people are starting to reap the first repercussion of the "never enough" attitude that has been prevailing in our modern, enlightened Western society for the past decades. But will we really have learned the lesson when and IF the economy recovers?

089 Sample THIS!

If I were a preacher, I'd tell my congregation at every opportunity that just coming to listen to me and whatever I'd have to tell them would be no substitute for finding out what God has to tell them personally through His Word, both recorded and living. Let's be honest, how many people think that they don't have to read the Bible on their own, as long as they attend church on Sundays? And that's why you've got all those millions of Christians believing the false doctrines of "eternal insecurity" (that you can lose your Salvation at any moment you sin), the "Pre-Tribulation Rapture" (that Jesus will come to take them to Heaven before the Great Tribulation), and supporting political leaders in mass murder, pledging their allegiance to an earthly nation, instead of finding out personally how God really thinks about these things. They're putting their faith in the words of men, instead of the Words of God.

I'd tell them that their personal relationship with God is more important than going to church. Faith in God comes through hearing the Word of God (Romans 10:17), and if you want faith - the only thing that can save us by His Grace - then you'd better listen to what God has to say, and not anybody else, unless you can be 100% certain that what they're saying is inspired by God, and there is no way you can be 100% certain of that unless you personally know the Word of God, and know how and where to find the gifts of the Spirit, such as the gift of discernment.

In fact, if I were a preacher, I'd probably quit preaching, and rather tune in on one person or a handful of individuals at a time, instead of delighting in the sound of my own voice as it rang through the halls of my church, because neither Jesus, nor any of His closest followers were ever "preachers" nor into mass evangelism, if you carefully read the Bible. The so-called "Sermon on the Mount" wasn't a sermon at all. Jesus left the multitude behind, went into a mountain (not a hill!) and only His disciples came to Him to hear what He had to say. The "Sermon on the Mount" was a revolutionary instruction talk given by the greatest Revolutionary of all times to His closest followers only, and thankfully, one of them - Matthew - formerly of the utterly despised occupation of collecting taxes from the Jews for the Roman invaders - had the skill and brains to write it down!

There are a few occasions in the Book of Acts where Peter or Paul address a larger crowd of people, but those are exceptional. Most of the time they were too busy hiding from the authorities, because true believers were persecuted for 300 years before the Roman empire "converted" and "legalized" Christianity according to the motto, "If you can't lick'em, join'em!" The result was the death of Christianity and the birth of Churchianity, and God is calling His true believers today out of that mock-up, to get ready for the Real Thing. Most Christians today probably don't know that the only places where early Christians worshiped for 300 years - before they converted the pagan temples into Christian "churches" - were the houses of believers and the catacombs beneath Rome, and - weather permitting - the great wide open.

Most Christians probably don't even know the true meaning of the word "church" itself, coming from the Greek "ecclesia," meaning "the called out ones."

God is calling His believers to step out of the false religious Systems of their day, to trade in the Big Lie for the truth, and that simply doesn't (usually) happen in large scale "revivals" and "awakenings" which most preachers in the U.S. dream of happening. What they call revivals are usually short bouts of electric shocks infused into the dead body of the church, making it look alive for a few moments before it sinks back into its sepulchre, worse off than before.

I'd really make an effort to be more politically correct, just like your average preacher, if I thought there was enough time for that. But I don't. The Devil is rapidly taking over, and his flood of lies in which the vast majority is drowning certainly seems overwhelming, compared to the relatively few voices of truth out there. The neat thing is, that God doesn't rely on numbers. If one of His voices can chase a thousand of enemy forces, then 2 can chase ten thousand, His Word says, and He is not limited to save by many or by few.

See, there's really a lot of wonderful stuff the Bible has to say that you might not even beware of, because you're relying too much on what somebody else has to say about what God has to say.

If I were a preacher, I'd tell you today, tomorrow and everyday: "For God's sake, don't listen to me! Listen to God!" Perhaps I'd give each member of my congregation a Bible in their hands and tell them, "Read!" And perhaps after a while they could share with everyone what they discovered... That's what I'd call "church." A group of people obeying God's call to come out of the box of conventional worship and trying to find out what He has to say to each of them. And there'd be no way of stopping there, of course, until we had put into practice what He'd just shown us...

But, as I say, these sort of things usually don't happen on a large scale. We can be happy if they happen at all. Even if once in a single life-time.

If I were a preacher, I'd ask you to tell me to "Shut up and let's get down to business getting the real job done for Jesus & win those who don't want to go to church because what they need in their life is not a sermon but a sample of the real thing." - Just give'em Jesus & tell'em to "Sample this!"

086 The Gospel of Acquisition

The other night, after having read 2 recent articles on American warmongerism by Charley Reese from Antiwar.com, I wrote a rap about Babylon the Great, consisting mainly of verses from Revelation 17 and 18. And it got me into wondering, what exactly is the "wine of her fornication" that she makes the nations of the world drunk with? It's obvious that the globe is being affected by a bug, and most churches seem to have the tendency to blame it all on sex and make people's natural sex drive the true culprit. After all, "fornication" does sound as if it's supposed to have sexual implications.

But if the Lord is our Husband, and we're not supposed to have any other gods before Him, or other lovers, I'd say that sexuality - as much as it may be promoted in the media - is not the bigger culprit, but materialism is. After all, what's supposedly the one thing that makes everybody happy - even those who are not the least bit interested in sex, and if they are, what can get them any amount of it they like? Money.

The primary Gospel of the American media since its beginnings has been the gospel of acquisition, prosperity, gain, financial success, affluenza, as some have started to call it, in short: MONEY.

After all, Jesus never said, "You cannot be a slave to God and your own penis at the same time," (sorry for once again being so terribly blunt here, but, after all, let's not forget, it's just a body part He created, knowing fully well what He was doing, like with all the rest of them), nor does the Bible refer to that as the "root of all evil," as much as some preachers make it sound like that. But what the Bible does refer to as the root of all evil is the love of money, and Jesus did say, "You cannot serve God and Mammon (the god of wealth)."

And yet that is what millions of people try or pretend to do, and probably one of the reasons why the Devil has just been contentedly standing by, watching the growth of American churches over the past decades. As long as they preach the Gospel of Affluence, it doesn't matter to him if they sneak in a bit of the Jesus stuff. After all, as long as Jesus is just one of the "products" they're trying to sell, their god is still money.

Incidentally, the One everybody tends to leave out of the equation doesn't seem to be all too thrilled about this development, and as it so happens, the plug is being pulled. - Quietly, in the background, since the real crisis going on right now is the one neither one of the two presidential candidates would dream of addressing, and the god in whom Americans really trust, the once almighty dollar, is going down, like that old song by the 70s pop band Status Quo I never particularly liked, "Down, down, deeper and down..."

If you still don't have a clue what I'm talking about, maybe here's an illustration you can relate to: During our recent movie night we watched "Singing In the Rain" as a feature to watch with our daughter (partly exposing the deceit Hollywood has made a business of, and yet at the same time being another parade example of it), and afterwards we saw "Freedom Land," a somewhat depressing, yet ultimately much more realistic show of the real America, as millions of not-so-blessed real people know it. There's a definite, deep contrast between what we're made to believe and reality.

The nations of the earth are drunk with the desire to have the pretty fake world that's being portrayed to them in American TV shows from Timbuktu to Moose Jaw.

The "wine of fornication" that makes God really sick (when we swallow it) is the stuff we've been brainwashed with for so long that it's extremely hard to get out of our system. The god of wine is having a heyday, because he's getting us addicted to more things than we and our children have ever had to get addicted to. The wine of fornication is making a junkie out of you, even if you live in a slum in India or in a beduin tent in a desert somewhere, as long as you have a satellite dish and an i-pod. And it doesn't have as much to do with your natural sex drive (although, admittedly, people can get addicted to sex, too), as it does with making sure you take your part in the machine to keep the show rolling.

As for Charley Reese's call for "pulling the plug on the war state", I hate to be the one busting such idealistic illusions, and breaking the news to such fine patriots, but I'm afraid this isn't going to happen on behalf of any of the inmates of the greatest rehab camp on earth (most of whom haven't even grasped yet that they're addicted and need help), but the "pulling of the plug" is going to have to be done by the one to whom it is given to do the dirty work, aided by the ten mysterious kings described in Revelation and elsewhere who "hate the whore" and are tired of her selfish and destructive ways of getting what she wants and sucking the life out of the rest of the planet in the process. We may not be quite there yet, but as long as American leadership keeps following its current course, we're headed in that direction, and when it's going to happen, it's going to happen very quickly. In 60 minutes, to be precise. One hour (Rev.18:10, 17, 19).

And down with her will go her pimps: the preachers of a christ who'll buy you affluence in return for your tithes, and the very god everybody's been worshiping all along, as cash will be replaced by the mark in your right hand or forehead that will enable you to buy or sell from then on, eliminating the root of all evil... or not?

We'll see. In the meantime, if anyone has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says unto the churches and get ready for one heck of a withdrawal period on the horizon...