Eric Metaxas' Book Letter to the American Church

 I still think along the line of printing out flyers for distribtion to cars in shopping malls and under apartment doors and that sort of thing, because all the electronic avenues of speech are shyut down by evil forces these days, including even the postoffice although I wouldn't want to add the cost of postage to the project anyway.    Flyers under windshield wipres isn't perfect either of course since one can esily enough imagine zealous liberals running round ripping them off cars and tearing them up, but it at least it would tire them out in a way just canceeeling a you tube channel wouldn't.

The idea, again, is to try to get the truth to the half of the population who won't uotherwise get it because of all those blocked eavenues as well as the ingrained prejudice that keeps them from looking for the truth where it might be found.    

I did think of a way it could be done without needing billions of dollards, and that would be to distribute them in small barches, being sure to get them first to conservative sources who could make more copies and also distribute them in small batches, just a dozen or a hundred cars in the shopping mall lot by each participant.  The more people the better, the less strain on any one source and the less easy it would be for the enemy to tear it all done wisince it wouldn't be focused in any one place.  One parking lot might only get a dozen scattered here and there for instance at any one time.  Nobody can afford to get thousands of copies, let alone gather others to help with the work, but if it's donw by volunteers in amsmall batches and sporadic efforts it could accomplish quite a lot with less oranization.  Each person culd send a few to freidns across the country so that the same pattern would be getting repeated everywhere.

The truth about the political situation, exposing all the lies put out by the Democrats, against Trump for instance, and also how they are pretending to support the auses that the right is promoting these days, although they will just take them back when they have the power again.  Every lie to be corrected that you can think of.  I suppose there shoudl be a main text for the flyer, but then maybe that too could be just whatever people come up with.  

But I was just listening again to an interview Jordan Peterson did a while back with the Christian writer Eric Metaxas and was reminded that the Church is where turth should start.  The Church is the watchdog of society if it's doing what it should be doing, the salt and light.  And the Church is not doing what it should be doing, it has capitulated to the government manadate to shut down for the pandemic for instance, or most of them did.  As Metaxas points out in the interview that is to abandone the whole point of being the Church.  If we believe what we say we believe wesshould have th courage of lions in the face of every kind of threat to our ewellbeing, our livelihood, our reputation, our survival ofor that matter, becuase we should have the faith that God will protject us whenever we act according to what He would want us to do , which is always to put our own wellbieing on the line when truth fis at stake.  In this case the survival of western society is at stagke.  And Metaxas wrote his most recent book to the Church in response to what he strongly felt to be a call from God, to inspire the Church to be the Church and confront these forces of fevil.

I heard about his book some months ago but there's no point in my getting it since I can't read it, unless I have people to give it away to who would read it and frankly I can't think of any.  I haven't learned how to do the audio bversion of new books and the free audio versions aren't available for new books, only those past the date when they becomine public property.  

But I wanted a friend to take a copy to his pastor and he didn't do it.  That was months ago.  Metaxas saiys in this interview that it has been read and made a difference for many pastors alreayd so I'm happy to hear that at least.

I didn't give the title, did I?  Letter to the American Church is the book.  We need a huge upridsing of Christians to face down this tsunami of evil and such a book shouold be helpful but I'm aware of too many even now who say no we're just for teaching the gospel, not to get plitical.  Metaxas makes it very clear that that is anabandom ent of what the Church is supposed to be in thie world.

I don't understand why she denies cetainty about the persistence of her soul after death, becaue what Jesus promises us is eternal life.

The Tone of Evangelicalism

 I am often promoting Protestant or evangelical Christianity over catholicism , which of course I have to do because that's where the truth is, BUT even as I do so I'm uncomfortable with what I think of as the imageage it has in the public eye.  The telebvangelists of course who are a huge embarrassment, but even just the everyday average evangelical congregation behaves in ways that make me cringe.  

Whyu do they always have to sound like they are at a football game when something is said up front that they approve of, erupting into whistles and yhells and whoops.  God grief.  WAnd ehwn a speaker they like is brought onstage you get the same reception for him or her a Hollywood celebrity might get, all hyped up by the introducer of the person, put em together for  so and so and all that.  It couldn't be sounding more like a worldly event of the worst kind.  

I don't hear the Holy Spirit in any of that and it makes me wish I didn't have only evengelicalism to offer when I talk about the problems with other religions.  There doesn't even seem to be a particular denomination I could prefer either, mmy own favorites often carry on in the same tone, not always but enought hat the recommendation is muddied.

Catholic discussions I've herd online end to be quiet and serious and respectful and although they are rpomoting a pagan monstrosity of a religion I have to say I much prefer their general tone to that of evangelicalism.  

 

Meannwhile the World Godes Careening On

 I feel a need to apologize for not addressing either the poltiical situation or the prophetic much lately, and getting off on what must seem to be peripheral concerns at best  considering the sire straits the world is in at the moment.  I just want to say I'm not ignoring it in my own mind, just don't have anything very useful to say about it right now.  There's either too much or too little to say.  I feel hopeless and yet I keep hoping.  Maybe I'll have something more to say soon, I don't know, but I just had to get this much said for now.

Cheers.

Oh not that I think anyone is waiting for my pronouncmenets on these things, just that I'm remiss not to bring them up.

Diet, Religion, Philsophy, COnfusion

 After listening to so many different opinions on so many different subjects over the last few weeks, or even months by now, I lose track, It can become a sort of congested wad of stuff in my head that needs sorting out.   I'm talking about the interviews with Dawkins and Musk and Peterson, especially the carnivore diet and of course religion.  Tammy Peterson becdame a Catholic during her bout with cancer and her discovery of the diet practices that made the biggest difference for her health.  Dawkins grumbles about religion all the time, Musk kind of evades the topic, Peterson likes it but more as a pschological exercise or therapy, the diet the diet the dieit seems to work miraculously and I'm pondering it still.  Where do I start with this blob of stuff.

Well, the first thing I thought after writing that was how I can't afford this carnivore diet.  It's all well and good to say yes it's expensive but sickness is expensive too when you happen to be literlaly not able to afford it, period, whih is my situation.  I wouldnm't want to start out cold turkey anyway, as they say, I'd want to ease into it which would takene the edge off the expense as well as the dietary shock so its affordability may be in the end inconsequential anyway.  But it's a fact, and I'm not thinking of trying to eat steaks, or even steak at all ever, just fatty hamburder chicken, hotdogs perhaps and so on, and I still can't figure out how I could manage an entire month of eating nothing but those things .  But again , at the moment it's not a crucial element in myh decision as I'm going to start with the simple stuff, the ketogenic basics, uctting out the really bad carbs and going from there.  

I just heard an interview of tammy Peterson, Jordan Peterson's wife, about how she arrived at her carnivorous diet and the specific eaways she's adapted it to her own particular needs.  She and her huasband and daughter together have quite a collection of immune deficiency problems that the carnivore diet turns out to be the best way of eating for all of them.  Very convincing testimony it seems to me, and inspiring.  as far as I know the only genetic disease I have is my maculary degeneration and although I think it might be helped in some ways by the right diet I'm not expecting a cure for that.  It's other conditions I have I hope would benefit, and I don't think I need the drastic solution of all meat, but I don'tr relaly know.  I'll have to give it a serious try, easing into it birt by bit and see what I find out.

Tammy's becoing a Catholic of course bothers me.  How did she choose that particular route?  She prays the rosary in the mornings, that's what Catholics think prayer its.  It's very distressing to a protestant to think Catholics think that.  At the intd of the interveiw her friend who is also a Ctholi prayerd ten times the prayer fromj the Orthodox Church that is familiar tro me from the time I was reading up on the mystics of that traitions.  Lord jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.  Ten times.  Repetition of these rote prayers is not prayer to me, but it had effects on the mystics, visions and clairvoandce experiences and that sort of thing.  Is that from God?  

Well, no.  Thanks to Watchman Nee's book on Soul Power I can now recognize that phenomena as psychic phenomena , not psirutual phenomena.  Ther is a big difference.  We are body, soul and spirit, and we are only fully spirit if we are born again, but people who are not born again can have experiences that they regard as spiritual thorugh "soul power" or psychic power.  Psyche is the word for soul, as pneuma is the word for spirit.  These are spcyhic powers.  Visions and claiboyance and the lieke.   If the person is not born again they are not coming from God at all, thoughj people who are born again sometimes have such experiences and may mistake them for spiritual also.  Spiritual means they are connected to God, through the quickened or regenerated spirutal faculty given to us at salvation.

Catholics don't talk about salvation or if they do it's not the way Protestants do.  Jesus is a spiritual guide more than He is a savior, even if He's called the Savior.  It's rather disturbing to think that there may be healings that are not coming from God, messages that seem to come from God or Jesus that are really coming from some other source.  I want to say hororay for Tammy that she's healed, but then I get the heebiejeebies thinking about her being a Catholic.

Salvtion comes from recognizing thta Jesus died on the cross to pay for your sins in your place, Jesus the Son of God and perfect Man who alone could perform such a feat.  We are fiorgiven our sins because He is able to forgive sins.  Our sins are all paid for by His death and if we don't reckon ourselves dead and buried with Him we are not saved, we are still "in our sins" as scripture puts it, and not saved from Hell.  Which is of course a far more important blessing than any healing of our physical bodies in this life.

BBut so many people of the educated classes particularly consider the true Christianity to be intellectually untenable, and someone who chooses Catholicism is probably in that camp.  Jordan Petersonj is prbably influenced by such thinking, considering his Jungian views mor eintellectually defensible than the simpleminded tuff of evangelicalism or something like that.  Dawkins can go on and on about how stupid Christianity seems to him although he likes the morality.  As a truth claim he thinks it ridiculous.  Well, scripture has his nmber of course, decribing the gospel s a tubling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks.  In that frame of rejference Dawkins in a Greek,k which is the New Testametn equivalent of "Gentiles" in the Old Testament.  You are a Jew or a Gentile, a Christian or a "Greek".  Dawkins ins a Greek.  And so is Peterson.   The Greeks were very proud of their intellectual prowelss, their Athenian ponderings of the big questions , their eillusrtrious philosophers.   They considered the apostle Paul to be a puny little contender on Mars Hill as he tried to teach them about their "uinkhown God."

It's all such a perfet picture of the mentality that is the exact opposite of what jesus preaches to us, about how we must become as little children in order to inhertie the kingdom of God.  You must become as a little child even to believe that Jesus died for our sins of course, that that being born again which is the result of that self humbling to a little child is given onlyh when you give up all that pretense to sophsitication and intellectual highmindedness.  Yes, they think you very silly when you choose the true gospel, they think you stupid, intellecutally deficient.  Even if you had before that choisdce always enjoyed a respet for your mind, as I had, when you choose the lowely simple gospel you become an idiot in their eyes.  I had tht experience.  I lost a lot of friendss.  But I'd rather be a small child for jesus.

Dawkins goes on and on about a friend of his who can't possibly be a real Christian because she's too intelligent for tht.  She doesn't really believe all that foolishenss, that there is a an old man in the sky who hears prayers, that Jesus died for our sins and rose from the death.  And she probably doesn't, she just lieks the cultural forms of Christiansity as heeven Dawkins himself does, but to believe it, no, that's just beneath him, and possibly beneath her too, but I haen't heard her side of it, just his.  He's quite contemptuous of what CHristians elieve.  It's just too too silly to be believed.   The earth only six thousand hyearrs old?  Pretty silly I agree.  It made me laugh when I first heard it

Byt But I was laughing happilty ebecause I believed it and thought it very funny that we've been taught it's really billions of years old and how silly six thousand looks next sto such a n august number as billions.  

And by the eway we don't believe in a n old man in the sky, we believe that God is Spirit and pervades all creation, is everywhere at once.  Sometimes scripture pictures an "ancient of days" on a throne in the visions of a prophet int he OT, but that's because scripture isn't snobbish, it aims to save everybody from the very bright to the very intellecutally challenged.  Thew very bright are the elast amenable unfortunately.

Where was I?  Have I unraveled that intlelectual sticky mess I started out with ?

Oh I don't know, but I'm getting tired.

Ponjdering the Carnivore Diet

 Coming off some interviews of Jordan Peterson I got interested in the carnivore diet, because he's been on it for some time and says it's helped him with many medical problems, and also his daughter who has had serious medical problems since childhood, specficially rheumatoid arthritis from age two.  After trying many things and finally eliminating various foods she arrived at eating nothing but mea and found that it cleared up her problems.  then her father tried it and found the same thing.  Then I found other people online giving similarly dramatic stories about how they cured verious problems with nothing but meat.    Beef in particular but any kind of meat including chidken and fish and other kinds of seafood are included in this diet.  But nother other than meat and eggs, which is also a protein of course,  Meat and eggs with plenty of animal fat and salt and water and that's it in most of the cases though some people add some amounts of other things.  

I'm surious enough to want to give it a try but I don't think I can ever n afford the thirty day trial.  Meat is very expensive especially in these days of Biden inflation.  Nevertheless I'm trying to work out a way to do it.  Cheap meats of course, going to see what I can amanage.  Besides macular degeneration, which notoby is promising to cure with this though they think it can be stopped from egetting worse.  I don't know but I have other tinggs wrong with me I'd like to see cured.  I made a list of all my ailments and it came to sixteen.  There are probably more but that's what I'm aware of.  It insludes minor skin problems and other small things but also some problsmes that are more serious though not lethal.  

But some of these advocates say some pretty silly things.  The idea that plants are tring to kill you for instance.  They make toxins to kill you because they want to go on surviving and don't want to be eaten.  A pretty laughable verison of evolutionary thinking there.  Utter stupidity.  No, in fact I know of some people who have cured some pretty serious conditions with plant based eating.  I think it's possible that different people need dirfferent approaches to diet for different reasons.  My brother absolutely curfed cured his Meuniere's disease with a plant based diet that includes small amounts of chicken and fish.  Menier'es seems incurable and the idea that food could affect it that much is really hard to believe, but ti did.  He sufefered with it for years before he found a little book by a former sufferer that got him onto the diet and has nhad nomore dizzy spells since then.   Meniere's is a condition of the ear or balacnce related to the ear with tinnities and dizzy spells that make it nearly impossible to live your life since it can hit any time.  If you are driving you have to stop becaues of dizziness.  It's not a disease it's easy to live with at all.  So it was amazing that he was able to find a cure for it that involved food.  Nand not the carnivore diet.  

Wvewrybody mayay have eheard of Annette Larkins too, the lady in Florida swho looks forty years younger and is lean and trim in her mid eighteies, who gave up metat altogehter about forty years ago, started a garden in her yeard and eats almost entirely raw vegetables and fruits from that agardern.  She wasn't trying to cure any particular condition but she's a model of vigratn youtherful heatlth.    Not a carnivore.

Nevertheless I think the testimonies to this all meat regimen are pretty convincing, and since it seems to cure a great variety of medical problems it's the sort of thing I'd want to try.  I don't know if I caould stand it, eating just one food forgever just seems intolerable but they do it, or some p;eople do it so who knows.  

Speaking of evolutionary thinking gone berserk, it is annoying that people are always coming up with some evo type explanation for this or that reason to eat or not eat somethin or do or not do sometihng .  It's all made up of course because nobody knows anything, you can just fantasize to your heart's content with everything evolutionary because it's all made up.   Plants are given to us by God, so are grains so there's nothing poisonous about what or corn.  After the Flood God told Noah that they were now to start eating meat, meaning animal food, whereas before the flood both man and animal were vegetarians.  So animal food is also good for us.  

The way I think about all this is that we are living in a fallen world in which diseases of all kinds attack us, and it stand st to reas that this sort of thing would increase as time goes on, as for instance carriers of a disease on one allele would pair up with each other and then the disease would manifest in the offspring.  That's what happened in my family with macular degeneration.  A lot of that is going to be ahhappening so when people try to explain the fact that dsisesase of this sort are increasing I think this is the more likelyh reason than that it's something in our diets as I've heard sggested.  it's a genetic disease.

Genetic diseases are now occurring in the thousands.  Chrisitians at least sohould be thinking in terms of the Fall when we talk about these things but I don't hear any of that, all we hear is stupid evolutionary explanations for everything.  If you think in terms of the Fall then the increase in genetic diseases seems to me to go along with the fact that mutations are a disease, an aberration, a mistake.  Evolutionary thinkers try to make mutations into this evolved metchanism for evolutionj, but that flies in the face of the known fact that it's a mistake in replication of the DNA.  They know this and yet they go on fantasizing about how it's the cfcause of evolution.   I think it's far more likely it's the cause of all that Junk DNA.  Yes I think Junk DNA is a very likely result of the disease factors we face because of the Fall.

When it comes to diet it makes sense in a fallen world that different people might be genetically disposed to different dietary problems and need different kinds of solutions.  Overall we may all need to be strickter and more careful about what we eat because of our vulenerabilities due to the Fall.  It would help if the Fall were recognized so we'd stop thinking of our conditon as normal.

The Meaning of Life

 Yes, i seems we re very cose to the end and the lord could come back very soon, and yes the world seems to be coming apart at the seams, well no, not at the seams , just coming papart, being ripped apart, and it doesn't look like there's any way aback barring an intervention from God, and yes I think I put my finger on a major reason for our continuing deterioration in our failure to put the Christian God above all other gods, and es I think smashing the theory of evolution would go a long way to restoration if God would be so mwerciful as to grant us tht great victory over the forces of darkness.  

All that and then things keep turning up on the You Tuve page I get into watching so now it's Jordan Peterson interviewing Elon Musk.  It's come up before but I got intrigued by Musk's talkinga bout how he read all the religions texts and some of the philosophers at the age of eleven or twelve because he was having an existential crisis, a feeling that there is no meaning in life.  Somehow he got it answered sufficientyly for him when he read A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and realized there are still too many unanswered questions to be expecting ansers right how and our job is really just to keep looking for the answers, or something like tht.  

I'm not happy with his answer, in a way I suppoose I'd prefer it if he hadn'tg come to an answer becaue I'd like to hear more about the existential crisis.  And especially about what on earth he made of the Bible at somuch a young age.  I don't think fallen humanity can understand the Bible, let alone a twelve year old, so that's why I'm interested.  Both he and Peterson are fallen men groping around in the dark for answers to the big questions that theyh have no chance of answering at all, so think I from my advantageous position as a born again Chrtistin.

It's interesting to me now for some reason to be thinking about how fallen      Of course I was subjected to all of that before I became a believer and all of it was incredibly frustrating.    

Especialoly the evolutionistic stuff, that delusion of all delusions based on the physicalistic experience of fallen humanity.  Fallen humanity is tsuck in the physicalistic universe.  They are looking to answers about that universe.  They have no sense of any other universe, or any other form of consciousness than the consciousness of that universe.  Evolution is the physicalistic way of accounting for origins of course.  We're primarily physical beings in this fallen world.  And truly we are because we lack the ppsiritual sense god created us with that would open us up to a different order of eveing and of consciosunsness.   

but even as a mere physicalistically bound human being we can know there is something missing because somewhow we never do bget to the answers we want.  Consciousness as a mere bproduct of the physical universe?  Ridiculous.   I more or less believed in evlution before I became a believer but it frustrated me too and I was always raising questions about it.  

Dawkins loves poetry and music and it seems to be just fine with him to think iof it as a byproduct of billions of years of physicalistic evolution.  I remember crying over a Mozart symphasy once  because there is nothing in this world that deserves such music.   There is something just brutally uninteresting about the physicalistic answers to the big questions.  Because we're supposed to take them as most interesting since that's the highest we can get in our fallen condition.  And it gets us owhere.  Don't we just know we are more than that?  Why doesn't Dawkins know it?   I wasn't thinking of God when I had such thoguhts, I was just thinking how amazing the human being is and how we aren't just physical beings and how brutally reductinistic it is to make us try to accept the physical world as all there is.  All there is and ever can be or whatever it was that Carl Sagan so sonoroudsly intoned.  A big  idea bout a little fact.  Liek Darwin's puffery about how there is grandeur in the evolutinistic view of things.  Yeah a cold grandeur, ultimately unhuman, inhuman.    I wasn't thinking of God at all, just the nature of umanityh which does seem to me to be deserving sosf some grand words beyond the physiclism of the fallen condition.

So it took God's opening my eyes to give me the answers I was looking for.   And when I discoverfed creationism I hoped it would lead me to demolishing all those physicalistic notions.  I think it did.  I'm sure it did.  Now if only I could convince others. humanity tries to answer these questions without any reference to the true God.

They ekeep trying to derive consciousness from the phsycial.  but consciousness precedes the physical.  God is Spirit, he precedes it all.

The Genesis Flood and Saving America

"The Genesis Flood" the book by Henry Morris and John Whitcomeb that came out in nineteen sixty one had a pround effect on evangelicalism which had pretty much capitulated to the supposed scientifc evidence for evolution.   They had tried to adapt to it in various ways while holding on to the inerrancy of scritupture, but that is not an easy thing to do.  I just found the Genesis Flood as an audio book and want to listen to it again, or some of it at least just to reorient myself, because I too was proundly affected by it alhtough I didn't ecome a Christian until the late eighteeies and the book had already been out almost thirty years by then.   

A

Although creationism certainly inspired me I soon found that they get into scientifc areas I just can't follow and some of them didn't even seem to me to get to any really important points from which to try to make the cast to unbelievers.  I haven't looked at a creationis t website for many years by now, and of course by now my eyes are so bad I couldn't read any of it anyway.  For the last twenty or so years I was approachinjg various problems from angles I could grasp more clearly  and a lot of it was posted at EvC forum.  Of course nobody there, all being committed evolutionists, did anything but try to find ways to get rid of everything I tryed to argue.  I never found any of their arguments convincing although I do have to admit that over the years enough got said to get me to reassess parts of what i was thinking about.  I learned new termoinology fromt ime to time, learned different facets of the sciences involved insofar as I could follow them and did built up my own thinking from their arguments over time.

The Genesis Flood at least established in my mind that the flood of Noah was a historical fact that I've never doubted since, if I'd doubted it at all before.  They aruge that the strata are the evidence for it and that the fossils were killed by the Flood.  That much is incontrovertible it seems to me.  how they made their arguments I'm going to have to review, it involved scientific work in hydraulogy for one thing to establish how the flood could have created the column of layers.  All that is important of course but at some point I just stood back and thought how obvious it is that the strata couldn't possibly represent time periods, it made me laugh and although I've gone into a lot more than that in various arguments over the years I'm straging with that here.  All you have to do is THINK about the strata, what they really are in phyiscal reality, and hoyou have to admit they could not possibly represent time periods.  Really.

The history of the earh cannhjot be made up of layers of sedimentary rocks, straight and flat for thousands upon thousands of square miles.  Cannot.  And try as you might you aren't oing to be able to made ake a cast e for their existence that supposeorts such a belief in them as time periods.  How did they get there?  Every time period of millions of years somehow got reduced down to a layer of rock?  Really?  is our own period going to have that same fate?  Really?  What would be the physical stages it would have to go through tot get to that point?  What did the other time periods go through tot get to the point of being tnothing but a flat layer of frock with dead things in it?  

Go on, try it.  the whole idea is insane and when you really do try to think it through you have to wonder how anyone manged to overlook these simple physical facts.

Go on, try it.

I went on to work out what I think is the true historical path of the strata and in doing that I chad to contradict some strongly accepted ideas that even the creationists who believe in the Flood had adccepted.  I've spelled it out in many places but I don't ahve the means to do it any more from scratch because it takes visuals I can't make use of any more without help which I on't have.

Of course everybody laughs at it all but who cares, I expect people to laugh,.  I nevertheless thingk I've come up with some good stuff, and it's suff the creationists haven't come up with unless they've done so sicne I did.

I'm going back to this in this post although the previous post was about how America is going to go under as a nation unless we correct certain things and bring back our Christian heritabge.  I know we aren't going to do that.  The forces of evil are too strong and it just isn't going to happen.  But if evolution could be killed as it so richly deserves to be it might open some yeeyhes.  

Soli Deo Gloria