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theparanormalperiodical · 4 years ago

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The Less-Than-Sweet TRUE Stories That Inspired Candyman (1992), And The Other 5 Scariest Urban Legends That Are Still Haunting The USA

In 1987, Ruthie Mae McCoy was found dead in her apartment.

As a mentally-unstable resident of the ABLA housing project - one of the most violent on the Chicago south side - her death is far from the only one to have taken place there. But her death is one of the most well documented.

So well documented, in fact, it’s legacy stretches back to the present day.

McCoy first reported strange occurrences taking place in her apartment when returning from the psychiatric unit at Mount Sinai Hospital. She claimed someone had threatened her life to a fellow passenger in the van next to her.

They urged her to seek help, but she chose to take shelter in her fear.

In April, the local police received a phone call from a frightened woman from the ABLA housing project who was claiming someone was trying to come through her bathroom cabinet. When the police finally entered the apartment, they discovered her on the floor of her bedroom with 4 gunshot wounds peppering her torso.

Her death would be just one of the threads that weaved the horror film icon, Candyman (1992).

Today we unpick the fabric, from the twisted history of the Jim Crow South, to America’s darkest urban legends.

Clive Barker never intended to create one of the most iconic Black horror films of all time.

In fact, Barker didn’t even create the feature length film that would change the face of cinema in 1992. What he did, however, was pen a short story about life on the breadline in Liverpool.

The Forbidden (1984) followed a graduate student in the UK who was studying graffiti. Among the garish curse words splashed on the walls of the run-down council estate she investigated, Helen discovered references to an urban legend that have been sprayed onto the concrete.

A legend called the Candyman.

As explained by the later films, Candyman is a pretty standard urban legend: you say his name into a mirror 5 times, and before you would appear a man sticky with sweet honey and with a hook for a hand.

Helen followed the trail back to reports and rumours mutilations and murders in the local area, failing to get any information out of the locals. She then became a victim of the Candyman himself.

Despite the short story closely mirroring the plotline of the film we know and love cower away from today, there is one crucial difference aside from the setting:

In the 1992 film, and in the upcoming 2021 reboot, the Candyman is African-american. Helen’s original encounter with the urban legend in Liverpool, however, was with a pale, waxy figure bearing all the traits of a dead white man.

When Clive Barker first conjured the Candyman from his imagination, he wanted to explore the theme of class in 1980s Britain. Bernard Rose, the director of the 1992 rendition of the tale, on the other hand, wanted to explore the theme of race in America, rewriting the characters on the other side of the pond and deepening the dark story Barker first put before horror fans.

Most importantly, he focused on developing the character of the Candyman.

Where he came from, what he did, and how he did it informed the entire plot, and would span 2 sequels shortly after.

The Candyman Of Cabrini-Green

Rose set the 1990 films in the Cabrini-Green public housing projects in Chicago’s North Side. Originally built in 1942 to home thousands of African-americans fleeing the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration, the housing project captured a snapshot of racial divides in America.

It doesn’t take a historian to understand that racism fuelled the neglect of the housing, and by the time the movie hit the theatres in the early 90s, only 9% living there were actually employed.

But Candyman didn’t just capture the poverty and racism inherent in American society; it pulled us through the mirror, and showed the viewers just one of the many origins fuelling the complex and corrupted history of the USA.

So Who Was The Candyman Based On?

Tony Todd was a pretty important part of the film.

Ok, aside from being one of the few black actors that managed to score a role in a horror movie that didn’t die in the opening credits, and yeah, as well as donning a prosthetic hook, he actually developed the character of the Candyman.

But most notably, he developed the backstory for the urban legend.

And the story starts in the 19th century.

Daniel Robitaille - an established painter - was commissioned to paint the portrait of a white woman. From there began an interracial relationship that was not accepted in this era.

When she fell pregnant, a lynch mob sought out Robitaille to make him pay for his alleged crime. They severed off his hand for touching a white woman, and covered him in honey, leaving him to die by being stung by bees.

What’s really striking of this tragic and terrifying image, however, is that this did happen.

Interracial relationships were scarce in the 19th and early 20th centuries in America and typically featured white men marrying black women (and consequently freeing them if they were slaves), and fed into deep-rooted racism that still haunts the country. One of the pillars of historic American racism and Western Imperial ideas of race was the ��protection’ of white women from the ‘lustful’, ‘violent, and ‘savage’ black man.

In fact, marriage and politics were both considered the most important arguments supporting segregation, linking the freeing of slaves and interracial relations.

This fear became especially prevalent in the US after the Civil War; the influx of freed slaves would result in an increase in the forbidden relationships, bringing us back to the era Daniel Robitaille’s life was set in.

This timeline is made ever more accurate by the manner of his death: lynch mob activity peaked in the 1830s, 40s and 50s, proving that Robitaille’s story is unfortunately far too common. Although being stung to by bees and insects probably was used as a form of torture and murder, I can only trace a form of this execution method to Persia (approx. 6BC).

But what’s really quite striking is the transformation of Daniel Robitaille, an innocent and very much alive black man, to the Candyman, an urban legend who is seeking vengeance for his murder.

It’s the racial terrorism committed against Robitaille which make him so terrifying. The crimes committed against the innocent black man still tailor him into the image of a ‘scary black man’, the image that we are still haunted by today.

Urban legends are so petrifying because of the outlandish, outrageous monsters at the centre of the story that appear in ordinary places. And that’s exactly what we find here. But here’s the twist: the Candyman charted the original racism that founded the Cabrini-Green housing projects, and the racism still inherent in it.

In fact, that’s the sub-plot of the movie: Helen Lyle discovers more of the everyday realities of being African-american in the US throughout the movie, witnessing poverty and police brutality as well as the garish image of a hooked man smothered in honey.

We, the viewer, are given brief snapshots of black history and the black present, even if only through a bathroom mirror.

And it’s horrifying.

So Daniel Robitaille Was Based On History - But What Was The Candyman Legend Inspired By?

To summon the Candyman - if you dare - you simply need to say his name into a mirror 5 times. This less-than-innovative manner of conjuring the Candyman is obviously based on Bloody Mary and the act of saying her name into a bathroom mirror a certain amount of times that no one actually agrees on.

It is said she will then appear to either show you the face of your future hubby, scratch your face off, or kill you. You can find out more about this legend here.

But she isn’t the only legendary beast weaved into this horror hit.

His Hook Hand is obviously an aesthetic inspiration:

A couple were busy being horror-movie-villian-bait and making out in a car when the radio suddenly blared out an emergency broadcast.

A serial killer (*gasp*) had escaped from the local mental institution (*eye-roll*) and he had a hook for a hand.

One of them heard something scrape on the car so they drove off. Believing it to be merely a tree branch they take a look and discover a hook in the side of the car.

(Their insurance premiums! Oh the horror!)

The final urban legend explicitly linked to Candyman is La Llorona, possibly the second most famous urban legend after Bloody Mary herself.

This hispanic urban legend is tragic but fiercely popular: a woman had two sons and a loving husband. However, after being convinced her partner was cheating on her or loved her children more, she drowned them. She then drowned herself in grief.

It is said she still roams Latin America, looking for her deceased children and taking those who aren’t hers before drowning them when she realises they are not her sons.

To summon her (not sure why you’d want to) all you have to do is light some red candles in a room full of mirrors and yell out her name.

Candyman is thus clearly inspired by these classic american urban legends that have struck fear into gullible children and drunk teenagers for decades. But they aren’t the only stories that gave inspiration to such a film. And they certainly aren’t the scariest.

So What Are The Scariest American Urban Legends?

*clicks torch on*

#1 - The Alaska Triangle

Did you know this frosty American state is home to something scarier than Sarah Palin?

Also known as Alaska’s Bermuda Triangle, this is an area of untouched wilderness stretching from Anchorage and Juneau to Barrow. It’s earned such a reputation as this is where a lot of people go missing.

Okay, fine, an unknown area of woodland where people go missing - this isn’t a mystery, this is a tragedy. But the thing is, it's the sheer volume of people that go missing here which is so concerning.

It started in October 1972, when US House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, a congressman, and a political aide went missing while flying to Juneau. 90 aircrafts and dozens of boats scaled the area to no avail. No trace of the boat, no evidence of human life - or death. It was truly a mystery.

When more planes went missing, when more hikers didn’t return from their adventures, and when more tourists failed to return to their budget hotels, fears grew. Since 1988, 16,000 have disappeared. The rate of missing people here is more than twice the national average.

The disappearances have been traced back to a number of theories including aliens, energy vortexes, and a Tlingit Native American demon known as Kushtaka. The most popular case, however, is for the swirling vortexes of energy which can cause audio and visual hallucinations and health problems. And this isn’t the only location that allegedly homes them.

Search and rescue workers often report the physical feelings associated with vortexes with magnetic anomalies spiking in certain locations.

Could these missing people be lost in the ferocious wilderness of Alaska? Or is something else at play?

#2 - Turnbull Canyon

We now turn to a sunny California, and the 4 mile loop in the Puente Hills reserve. Aside from being known for the majestic views of the Hsi Lai temple and the Rose Hills Memorial Park, it’s been home to a number of paranormal forces.

But the most interesting thing about this location is that it's been considered an evil location for centuries. Local Native American tribes called it Hutukgna, ‘the dark place’. It was forbidden ground, and they didn’t set foot there. So, when Spanish missionaries came to convert them to Christianity, they did it here.

“Now we are without hope. Now we remain for as long as the sun rises and sets in the sky”

To this day locals and tourists report feeling as if they are being watched, and legend has it Native Americans that were killed there remain as spirits, waiting for the final sunset.

The urban legend amassed a new reputation during the Great Depression. Large groups of men and women in dark robes would partake in strange rituals at night which few witnesses have seen.

One witness claims they saw a young boy strapped to a cross. He was surrounded by a circle of people who danced and chanted in unknown languages. The robed group then flipped the cross until it was upside down, and proceeded to beat the child until he was close to death. He was then taken away. We don’t know what became of the child. But we do know a flurry of disappearances and kidnappings haunted the area throughout the early 20th century.

And then it gets even worse.

In the 1930s, an insane asylum was built there. It mysteriously burnt to the ground 10 years later.

Psychic mediums and visitors report feeling unbearable at the location, from reporting classic paranormal activity such as the feeling of being watched or seeing orbs, to feeling as if someone is rummaging about in your own brain.

#3 - Vampire Comte de Saint Germain

New Orleans already has a paranormal reputation. Jacques Saint Germain only blended seamlessly with this historic location. But the thing is, it is said he would have witnessed most of the history for himself.

Throughout history a man of similar stature and personality has been reported.

He was at a notable wedding in Cana where Jesus turned water into wine, he was an alchemist in the 1600s, and he was in high-society in 1742.

It was an encounter in 1760 with one Countess von Gregory which was really interesting: the Countess was convinced she knew him as the son of a man in 1710 - but he hadn’t aged a single day.

He joked, as he often did, that he was over 100 years old.

Fluent in 6 languages, his incredible abilities and knowledge made him an enviable man - and an impossible one, too.

We do know, however, that he came to New Orleans in 1902 from France and invited the elites for a special feast. He didn’t eat a single bite, but did drink dark, red ‘wine’. He then confirmed rumours of when he kidnapped a local woman, held her down, and bit into her neck.

When the police turned up to investigate, they found the room covered in blood stains. But Jacques was nowhere to be seen.

#4 - Nash Road

Like most titles of urban legends, the Three-Legged Lady gives away the story. But this tale fares just as tragic as the other legends that shape this list:

Just outside of Columbus, Mississippi is Nash Road.

Legend has it if you stop on the road, turn off the headlights, and honk the horn one, two, three times, she will appear. She will knock on the roof of your car to alert you of her presence, and race your car to the end of the road. She will slam her body - 3 legs n’ all - against the car the entire time.

There are many alleged origins of the three-legged lady. Some believe she killed a lover, severed off the leg and attached it to her body, whilst others believe she is holding what’s left of her daughter’s corpse. Alternate versions of the legend even claim she is the spirit of a human sacrifice of a nearby satanic cult.

#5 - The Watcher

The first letter was sent in the summer of 2015.

A family had just moved into a grand mansion in Westfield when they started receiving letters from a person who claimed to be watching over the house. They were eerie, they were menacing, and they were signed by someone only known as ‘The Watcher’.

Numerous former owners have all received other letters from the same person with the same sentiment.

“Who has the bedrooms facing the street?”

“Do you need to fill the house with the young blood I requested?”

“Did 657 Boulevard call to you with its force within?”

The Watcher often refers to the house as if it is an entity, even warning one unsuspecting family not to destroy the house when they brought in contractors.

There are many more details to this story, but what I find most intriguing is a paragraph from a letter welcoming a new family:

“657 Boulevard has been the subject of my family for decades now and as it approaches its 110th birthday, I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming. My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time. Do you know the history of the house? Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard? Why are you here? I will find out.”

The stalking is still under investigation.

***

I’ve written about enough ghosts, ghouls, and long-forgotten legends for just over a year now to know what true fear is.

And real life is always scarier.

If you liked this post and want to hear more then go on and hit follow!

Can’t wait to hear more real ghost stories? Check out the Peoples’ Paranormal Archive, the online ghost story collection that is chock-ful of real evidence of the supernatural just waiting to traumatise you.

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spookyspaghettisundae · 4 years ago

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Not Killing Him

Orion Crown sat in his big, mean-looking SUV in the old parking lot. The dry heat of Vegas had ripped up the asphalt here over the past years, leaving it pockmarked and littered with potholes. His own car and one other vehicle in the lot were the only ones parked there, immobile, like silent steel corpses, cooling in the shadow of some abandoned warehouse.

The thick windows shielded him from the noise of traffic in the distance, so Orion sat in a weirdly muffled silence. Staring at the entrance of the derelict warehouse with its crooked, ajar doors. He felt sick to his stomach because he had slept little more than a few hours per night and his forehead was burning up.

He picked up his phone from the passenger seat, snatching it from where it was resting next to a loaded semi-automatic pistol. He thumbed through the display, checking his recent direct messages on your social media platform of choice.

Orion Crown, social media darling and super-giant of the statusphere. He flipped through business proposal messages from other influencers, something marginally important from his YouTube video editor, and an array of annoyed passive-aggressive texts from his producer-slash-partner. He let the list slide to a stop, with this finger hovering over the display. Hovering just over the message from “The Glass King” with the preview field only saying that it contained a GIF.

The internet star dithered. He could refuse to walk into that warehouse and refuse to use that gun. His career and life would be over, though.

The alternative was sucking it up, gripping the cold metal of the pistol in his palm, walking in there, and blasting away. Didn’t matter who it was. Didn’t know, didn’t care.

Even though seeing the message’s contents disturbed him every time he reviewed it, his thumb descended in slow motion. Like time almost ground to a halt, like the universe was trying to stop him from watching it again.

He tapped the message and it flicked onto full display on his screen.

The animated GIF flashed with disturbing imagery, all of it cut so quickly and abruptly that it became impossible to take it all in. Words and symbols displayed for fractions of seconds so that the mind could not really grasp what it read, and video footage that may or may not contain clipped recordings of overt violence. Violence he, himself, had authored.

The glare of his phone reflected in Orion’s glassy eyes, pupils dilating with dread and disassociation. Knowing that he recognized some of the things presented here so subliminally and viscerally, feeling guilt even though he had always rationalized the terrible things he had done in the past.

How was anybody better? How could anybody be better?

I am not a bad person, Orion thought. Nobody is.

After watching the animated GIF loop countless times, glued to the phone’s display as if bound in a trance, he put the phone back down onto the passenger seat, a hand’s breadth away from the gun. He barely registered the words that followed far down below the window of animation.

The threats. The instructions.

The sentences that had brought him to the locker where he obtained the gun. The address of this warehouse. And his mission, to kill anybody he saw inside this place.

Why didn’t this “Glass King” person just ask for money? Why this? How did the Glass King even get that footage? It had been destroyed long ago.

None of it made any sense.

No matter how many times he mulled it over, Orion Crown—born with the more unglamorous name of Kyle Howard—his sense of self-preservation, greed, and existential dread always won out. Always looped him back to doing as he was told as long as it served his own purposes. To get this over with, and walk away, and never let anybody know of his dirty secrets.

If the Glass King put any of that out—if they aired out any of Orion Crown’s dirty laundry—then he would be out of the game. Done. Probably also in prison.

Orion looked over to the gun. Stared at it, taking in every hard and unforgiving edge and angle of its sleek industrial design.

He had before, and he pondered it again, now: to just pick it up and stick the nuzzle right into his own mouth. Pull the trigger and end it right now.

But his vanity and pride, masked with religious guilt and eclipsed by copious amounts of doublethink, led him to believe that this was the only way.

He grabbed the gun and weighed it in his hand. Orion licked his lips and they felt funny. Not chapped, but uneven. Slimy. He bit his lip and chewed without realizing it, while his gaze swept up and down the crumbling building of this damned warehouse.

In one fluid motion, he got out of his car, slammed the door shut, and walked towards the entrance of the warehouse. The heat outside his car, even here in the shade—combined with the inexplicable fever he was running—made his head swim as if he had been drinking nonstop for the past day and night.

He gripped that pistol in his fist like his life depended on it. And as far as Orion was concerned, it did.

The rusted hinges on the big metal double doors squealed and he cringed at the sound of it, freezing in place. His heart raced, his pulse thundering in his ears. Eyes darted back and forth, looking for a sign of anybody in there. Whoever had parked the other car had to be in here, and Orion’s job was to gun them down.

Something heavy, like a brick hitting a pile of rubble, echoed through the decrepit and dingy halls.

Orion’s hand jerked and he pointed the gun out in front of himself, aiming at every dark corner and little thing he could perceive. With nobody in sight, the adrenaline pumped through his body, suffusing him with a quiet rage and driving the sweat to erupt from his pores, clouding his senses and sapping his reason.

He sidled through the entrance and crept through the abandoned place, twitching at any possible sound he thought he heard and any shadow he saw in the corner of his eyes, expecting someone, anybody, to jump out at him.

Something chugged and sputtered, causing him to freeze once more. He continued sneaking on when he recognized those sounds to be coming from a gas-powered generator, hidden somewhere deeper within the warehouse’s bowels.

He kind of hoped that someone would jump out at him from a blind spot. Thinking it would be much easier to pull the trigger if it felt like self defense.

Instead, he found a large, wide, pillared hall, awaiting him at the end of a long twisting and turning through claustrophobia-inducing corridors.

Someone had arranged seven door frames in a perfect circle, bolted down with plywood feet to support their weight, sawdust and power tools littering the dirty floors, and that distinct smell of freshly cut wood hanging in the air.

Each door frame held a door, closed and looking far too new to fit into this warehouse. An array of four construction site spotlights illuminated the doors from their center, connected to a tangle of bright orange power cord extensions, leading his sweeping gaze to the generator he had been hearing chug away all this time.

The doors were just standing there, out in the open, connected to no walls. Leading nowhere.

Orion gripped the pistol in both hands, holding it outstretched far in front of himself. He had never fired a gun before in his life. Without realizing it, he both wanted the thing to be as far away as possible from himself, but also wanted to use it and for things to be over fast.

But nobody was here. Right?

Wrong.

Arriving in the center of the seven doors, he blinked and inspected a small pile of objects heaped up in between the four spotlights.

A bunch of broken smartphones, a black wig, a small cracked hand mirror, a pile of about twenty credit cards that had been sloppily cut in half, a bunch of different keys that looked far too old to fit the locks on the doors here, and all of the objects rested on top of a local city map that someone had drawn all over with a black magic marker.

A pebble crunched underneath a boot. But not Orion’s shoe. He swiveled, almost getting dizzy at his own speed as he pointed the gun at the source of the noise.

Standing only steps away from the other person, he held the pistol out and swallowed. No matter how many times he had tried to mentally prepare for this moment, he hesitated and his index finger trembled instead of squeezing around the trigger.

Nobody jumping out at him. Just standing there.

She stared into the barrel of his gun for a split second and then met his gaze. A woman in her twenties, dressed like a man. Or—at second glance—androgynous, like she was in some sort of getup for a rock or punk band from the 1990s. Clad in a ratty leather jacket and dark jeans; covered in studs on her clothing, a chain hanging from her belt, and spikes protruding from a choker around her neck; way too much makeup on her face; and a poorly-cut hair-do of shaved sides and long top that could constitute as a fashion crime.

More distracting, however, was the hand she held in her hand. Orion did a double take on that before he fully absorbed what he saw there. A waxen hand with candlewicks sticking out from the fingertips, gripped firmly in her slender hand.

“Who the fuck are you?” she asked Orion. She squinted at him.

He squeezed the trigger. It didn’t work. The fucking gun refused to work.

Orion turned it over and looked at it and realized that it had a safety setting which he had forgotten to take care of before walking into the building.

Clink. Snap.

The woman flicked a lighter on and guided it to the waxen hand in her hand and he had flicked the safety and pointed the gun at her and the next thing Orion knew, his wrists hurt. And so did his neck. And his lower back.

Chafing against exposed skin, coarse rope and the smell of burnt candles still filled his nostrils. He began thrashing but found that his limbs did not obey his instinct to struggle against his bonds because of how tightly he was tied down. He scraped his skin against something like rough rock or rusty metal behind him.

Blinking and fighting the fever back down, the taste of iron clung to his tongue. His vision blurred here and there and reality caught back up to him with disjointed delay. She had tied him to something in sight of the circle of seven doors.

The woman crouched in front of one of the doors, her back turned to him.

With a loud PLOP, she opened something in her hands and whatever she was doing, it resulted in the door being splattered with something dark and red.

Hoarse, the words croaked out of his throat and left him sounding more like a toad. “Hey,” Orion emitted. “Let me go!��

The woman whispered something and it dawned on him that it was no response to him.

“What the fuck are you doing? You’re gonna get into so much trouble if you don’t let me go,” he said. But it really was just pathetic pleading, masquerading as feeble threats. “Police’ll be all over your ass, lady.”

She continued whispering and splashed more of the dark crimson liquid over the next door, to its left.

Something crunched. It drew both Orion’s attention, and that of the woman. They both stared at the thing crawling into the large hall, emerging from the corridors he had entered from. The way they paused, paralyzed with disbelief—and the failure of the human mind’s capability to process what they were looking at—took in the thing moving along the floor.

It looked like a pile of trash, like someone had kicked over a garbage can and the contents of four weeks of refuse had spilled out over the ground. With a stench to match. But parts of it looked fleshy, or sponge-like. Wobbling but staying whole, like a block of jello. Other bits, like stalks, or tentacles, tiny and too many to count, coiling and recoiling and almost like they were looking in every direction, but seeing without any discernible eyes.

Death and evil incarnate, crawling over the filthy floors. Hungry, but slow. Creeping. Part of the world’s abandoned things, coalesced and fused into something awful, something trapped in between the realm of the living and the realm of non-existence; a vessel to something worse, something spawned in the darkest recesses and the deepest abyss of human sin. Crawling, and more than one. Another pile of living muck and vomit-inducing presence followed. And another. And another.

Rejects.

They headed towards the seven doors with painful slowness. But one of them began veering away from the rest, inching closer towards Orion.

Thwuck. Shlack. Scrape.

Orion wanted to throw up. He started wriggling, thrashing, fighting against his bonds, but none of it helped. He looked back at the woman in desperation.

She breathed through her teeth, “Shit.”

Haste colored her every movement now and she haphazardly sprayed more liquid onto the doors. One by one. She whispered all the while, though the whispers had made way to hectic chanting. Orion had no chance in understanding it, for the words sounded nothing like any language he had ever heard before.

Almost matching the sounds made by the Rejects, creeping forth.

Scrape. Flesh. Shlef. Thwuck.

The Reject crawled closer. Ever closer to him.

Tears welled up in the corners of his eyes, first blurring his sight a little, and then a lot. Orion had no time or space to realize how that might have been better, he only felt the deep-rooted dread in his stomach. The certainty of death by this abomination, crawling up to him. Only an arm’s length away from his kicking feet.

The stench intensified as the thing got closer, robbing him of any speech, making him wretch.

Images of the GIF on his phone flashed in his mind. The violence he had inflicted, captured on camera—his own recordings, not meant for public consumption—sent to him by the Glass King.

Just like these monsters had been sent by the Glass King.

Orion screamed for help.

A figure in a long black duster emerged from the corridors, standing still at the edge of the large hall, staring at the seven doors. Orion screamed for help from him, now. But within just a few beats of his heart, pounding so hard that it wanted to burst from his chest, he knew deep down that this man was the master of the Rejects.

No—this man was the Glass King, and he cared nothing for Orion’s plight. Hell, he probably enjoyed it. Orion sensed that just much malice from the presence of his man, and his imagination ran wild in response to the evil emanating from his body, hitting his entire being like a truck.

“Will you even be you when you return from that place? If you return from the house?” asked the man, directing his words at the woman by the doors.

Cold and uncaring about Orion, who was now screaming at the top of his lungs. Because something cold and wet and slimy slapped against the bottom of his shoe. And slithered up it, tugging at shoe laces, wrapping around the leg of his pants by his ankle, and applying pressure. Pulling itself upwards.

Onto him.

The woman never stopped chanting, flinging blood at those doors and then sticking something white and misshapen into the keyhole of one of the brass knobs, exposed by the glaring cone of light from one of the spots. She stopped chanting.

“You can’t stop change. Everything changes. That’s all you’re really afraid of, isn’t it?” she shouted. Anger making her voice tremble. Also something insecure. Or fear.

She ripped the door open and ran through it and slammed it shut behind her, but she didn’t emerge from the other side.

Just gone. Vanished into thin air.

Orion had neither eyes nor mind for this phenomenon, however. He only felt the many tiny tendrils of trash touching, feeling, finding their way up his limbs. A path of disgusting discovery, exploring his body like an alien creature trying to figure out human anatomy, but in reality just so depraved and sinister that it pretended to be doing so when it fed on his festering dread and despair.

Was this what it was like to be helpless? To be used, and chewed out?

To cry for help, but be ignored?

He had no capacity left for clean, deep thoughts. Only terror filled his being. The Reject crawled up over him, exerting the weight of a full-grown person, pinning him down and amplifying his sense of helplessness.

Some part of him expected to feel tiny teeth from tiny mouths chewing away at him, but the slithering and worming motions only reflected the darkness in his own heart, mirroring the corruption that had always haunted him. His screaming died down, petering out into a hoarse unintelligible something that transformed into whimpering.

The man in the duster—the Glass King—clicked his tongue but ignored Orion, approaching the seven doors.

“You didn’t answer my question, Kimmy. You fear the answer, or you’d say it out loud,” muttered the Glass King.

Orion expected the sensation of cold metal to be cutting his flesh, but the wet something was more like saliva dispersed from tongues, oozing across his skin. He expected for those rubber bands and spongy stalks to wrap around his neck and choke the life out of him, but they only squeezed a little bit. Just enough to be uncomfortable, and just enough for the Reject to enjoy it.

It breathed on him. The Reject engulfed him, not killing him.

The man in the duster turned on his heels.

Eyes wide open, stricken with unnatural knowing accumulated from a thousand lives and a deep-seated and all-devouring madness—staring into Orion’s eyes. The Glass King’s stare reached deep inside, prying away at his secrets like a lunatic ripping away at the fabric padding lining the walls of a forgotten cell, for those crazy eyes had seen the same GIF as he had. Knew what he knew. Knew his every dirty secret.

Much worse was the grin plastered across his face. Toothy, sadistic, and stretched far too wide to look fun or what was natural for that human face.

“Oh, Kyle, my boy,” said the Glass King, with the grin never wiping itself off his face. “You had one job and you bungled it. But no worries, I still have use for you. Your name, your reputation—your face. Enough mojo there for me to milk for a far greater purpose. Good on you for at least coming here, huh?”

The Glass King took a few steps closer towards Orion. Neared. Menace echoing with each step of his boots thumping against the dirty floor.

Orion wasn’t even whimpering anymore. Before a sheet of paper with something cold and wet and fleshy clinging to its underside had fully crept up the side of his face and covered it—before he closed his eyes and lost sight—he wanted to protest.

But he had no words.

Some part of him, matched only by his urge to vomit, knew he deserved this. Every second of it.

The Reject breathed on him, hot and damp and unpleasant. It almost entirely engulfed him, satisfied with the almost.

Not killing him.

—Submitted by Wratts

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stonedandstudying · 5 years ago

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Was Lucifer Enthroned in the Vatican?

Written by: Tom Carroll

Just weeks before the transmission of the prophetic Third Secret by Our Lady of Fatima in 1917, Italian Freemasons celebrated the 200th anniversary of the founding of their order by marching in St. Peter’s Square. According to St. Maximilian Kolbe who attended the march, the participants carried signs which read, “Satan must reign in the Vatican. The Pope will be his slave.”

Were they successful?

In July 2019, Church Militant received documents from the Archdiocese of Chicago regarding credible rape allegations against their former Archbishop, which had been covered up by Vatican officials since 1993. The complaint even reached Pope John Paul II, and detailed a satanic ritual conducted in South Carolina in 1957. The rites of the ritual included the rape of the victim (then an 11-year-old girl) and the desecration of the Holy Eucharist.

This account is eerily similar to the appalling scenes in the prologue of the novel Windswept House, by Father Malachi Martin. It should be noted that Martin is shrouded in well-deserved controversy, especially for failing to live a priestly life in some instances. However, after some research, I discovered that the EXACT SAME WOMAN from the Church Militant report told Martin her story in 1990, which he used as the premise for the satanic ritual in the novel. Martin names her Agnes to protect her identity.

What Martin describes in Windswept House was no ordinary satanic ritual; it was THE satanic ritual, in which extremely high-ranking clergy summoned Lucifer himself up from Hell, and enthroned him in the sacred halls of the Vatican. In an interview with Bernard Janzen, Martin stated that the enthronement of Lucifer is an historical fact (20:25). He said that 85% of the characters in the novel are real people and 95% of the events are true, and that it’s “all cloaked in novelistic form to make it easier to digest” (03:42).

Martin’s full account of the enthronement in the novel can be found here (pg. 7-20). WARNING: It’s extremely disturbing. The following is a watered-down and more bearable summary of his account:

The Enthronement of the Fallen Angel Lucifer was planned on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. Satanist tradition had long predicted that the Time of the Prince would be ushered in at the moment when a Pope would take the name of the Apostle Paul, which had just happened eight days earlier. The ceremony would take place in the Chapel of St. Paul for good measure.

For the Enthronement to succeed, the unbloody representation of the Sacrifice of the Nameless Weakling on the Cross must be replaced by the supreme and bloody violation of the dignity of the Nameless One. Guilt must be accepted as innocence. Pain must give joy. Grace, repentance, pardon must all be drowned in an orgy of opposites – the ultimate ritual of treachery.

Because of the extravagance of the ritual, many of the rites, with associated accoutrements, must be performed at a “Targeting Chapel” to avoid alerting Vatican security. This task would be carried out by a trusted bishop in South Carolina. Communicating by telephone, it would all be a matter of unanimity of hearts, identity of intention and perfect synchronization of words and actions between the Targeting Chapel and the Target Chapel. The living wills and the thinking minds of the Participants concentrated on the specific Aim of the Prince would transcend all distance.

Pentagrams and black candles appeared in both chapels. In the Chapel of St. Paul, a throne had been placed next to the Altar. The Tabernacle on the Altar was covered with a blood-red veil, and black cloths with satanic symbols covered the famous paintings of Jesus and Paul. In the much larger Targeting Chapel, the Snake Shield and the Bell of Infinity hung from red and black pillars. To the right of the Altar stood a cage with a sedated puppy and another with a dove, surrounded by vials of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Kneeler chairs aligned in a semi-circle around the alter were flanked by a bowl of bones.

The participants consisted of cardinals, bishops, priests and some of the most respectable lay people in society. Those in Rome wore their normal cassocks and suits. The American participants undressed completely before donning red, sleeveless, v-neck robes. They each grabbed fistfuls of bones out of the bowl, rattling them and humming a ritual din as they knelt at their places. One of red-robed participants held his daughter Agnes in his lap, who was also sedated and clothed in a long, white gown.

Agnes was injected with another dose of drugs and went limp as she was lifted out of her father’s lap and laid on the Altar. The Bell of Infinity rang and the participants rose to their feet and began to loudly chant an ancient chant, which was echoed in the Vatican.

Then, silence. The bishop took a crucifix and laid it upside down against the Altar. “Let us invoke!” he exclaimed, while making a goat sign with his hand. “I believe in One Power,” he began. The participants in both chapels responded, “and its name is Cosmos.” “I believe in the Only Begotten Son of the Cosmic Dawn,” he continued. “And his name is Lucifer,” the participants responded again.

The bishop then reached into the cage and pinned the puppy with one hand while he dissected its organs with the other, prolonging the poor creature’s agony and whipping the participants into a bloodthirsty frenzy. He brought the first part of the ceremony to a close with the words, “I believe that the Prince of This World will be Enthroned this night in the Ancient Citadel, and from there He will create a New Community.”

Next, blood was drawn from a finger of Agnes. The bishop, rubbing the blood on his hand said, “This, the Blood of our Victim, has been shed so that our service to the Prince may be complete. So that he may reign supreme in the House of Jacob, in the New Land of the Elect.” The priest, raising the Chalice and Host, responded, “I take You with me, All-Pure Victim. I take you to the unholy north. I take you to the Summit of the Prince.”

The wine in the Chalice and the Host were transubstantiated and the participants filed by the Altar to receive an unholy communion. Then the bishop and the priest raped Agnes on the Altar in a horrific act of sacrilege.

With the sacrifice complete, the bishop led the ceremony to its culmination:

“By the Power invested in me as Parallel Celebrant of the Sacrifice and the Parallel Fulfiller of the Enthronement, I lead all here and in Rome in invoking you, Prince of All Creatures! In the name of all gathered in this Chapel and of all the Brothers of the Roman Chapel, invoke you, O Prince!”

“Come, take possession of the enemy’s house. Enter into a place that has been prepared for you. Descend among your faithful servitors, who have prepared your bed, who have erected your Altar and blessed it with infamy.”

“Under Sacrosanct instructions from the Mountaintop, In the name of all the Brethren, I now adore you, Prince of Darkness. With the stole of all unholiness, I now place in your hands the Triple Crown of Peter according to the adamantine will of Lucifer, so that you reign here. So that there One Church be, One Church from Sea to Sea, One Vast and Mighty Congregation of Man and Woman, of animal and plant. So that our Cosmos again be one, unbound and free.”

In the target chapel, it was completed with the announcement: “By mandate of the Assembly and the Sacrosanct Elders, I do institute, authorize and recognize this Chapel, to be known henceforth as the Inner Chapel, as taken, possessed and appropriated wholly by him whom we have Enthroned as Lord and Master of our human fate.”

Finally, all participants in Rome and South Carolina swore an oath to serve Lucifer and the Universal Church of Man with their blood. A little silver bell rang three times in the Chapel of St. Paul, and was echoed by the Bell of Infinity in the Targeting Chapel. The ceremony was ended and the congregations adjourned.

The members in the Vatican emerged into the Court of St. Damasus in the small hours of the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul. Some of the cardinals and a few of the bishops acknowledged the salutes of the respectful security guards with an absentminded cross of priestly blessing traced in the air, as they entered their limousines. Within moments, the walls of St. Paul’s Chapel glowed with their lovely paintings and frescoes of Christ, and of the Apostle Paul whose name the latest Peter-in-the-Line had taken.

To conclude, here’s an actual quote from a homily delivered by Pope Paul VI on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul in 1972:

#conspiracy #vatican

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prevazilazenje · 6 years ago

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PERSONAL STORIES:

Propositioned By The Devil

[This is transcribed from a story my father told me on several occasions. He traveled to many places throughout Europe when I was a child. He would often be gone for months at a time. I do not know the exact date, but I believe it would have been in the early 1990’s. He recounted to me an experience that he had while visiting Notre Dame de Paris. He said that he had often seen the place in his dreams, and felt called to go there.]

“I was by myself, none of my [traveling companions] were with me. I’d been exploring Notre Dame all day. It’s huge. I decided to go up onto the roof. There’s a big walkway up there with a tower on each side. To get up there, you have to go around this pillar. The steps are built around the pillar. They’re all slanted and worn really badly because people have been going up there for a thousand years. They’re just stone. There are no lights in there. It’s pitch dark, so you have to buy a couple of candles and find your way by candlelight.

So I went up there, it was probably about 4:30 in the evening. I was walking around up there, and you can see all of Paris. It’s beautiful. There were a bunch of other tourists and people up there. I suddenly noticed that I was alone. Everyone had disappeared. I saw a woman, a blonde woman with a really nice powder blue dress suit and blue blazer standing there. She was just standing there looking out over the edge. She looked at me and said my name.

I said, “How do you know me?”

She said, “I just do.”

She spoke perfect English. She was extremely beautiful, but her eyes looked really strange. They were lifeless, like a doll’s eyes.

She said, “I’ve got a proposition for you.”

I said, “A proposition? I don’t even know you.”

“Well I know you. How would you like for all of your heart pain and troubles to go away for the rest of your life? You’ll never have any trouble with your heart, and never be sick again.”

“That’ll never happen.”

“I can fix it.”

“How can you do that, kill me?”

“No, I can’t kill you.”

[My father suffered a massive heart attack around ten years before, and was told that he could die at any time.]

“What is it you want with me?”

“I understand you’re a very good shot with a rifle. I want you to kill someone for me. I can guarantee you’ll get away, and I can guarantee you’ll never be caught.”

“Who are you...?”

“I can’t tell you that, but I’ll do whatever you ask while you’re here in Paris. I’ll stay with you.”

“No, I don’t want you with me. I’m afraid of you, but what is it you want me to do?”

“I want you to assassinate the Dalai Lama.”

“The Dalai Lama?? He’s halfway around the world.”

“Yes, but it will be your half.”

“What do you mean?”

“He will be in Chicago, very close. I’ll furnish the rifle, I’ll put you in position. All you have to do is take aim and pull the trigger. Kill the Dalai Lama, and I will cure everything.”

“How do I know you’ll keep your end of the bargain?”

“You don’t, but just think about it.”

She turned away from me but didn’t walk away, she just vanished into the wall. I thought I must have dreamed it, but I know I didn’t. I was wide awake. I told [my mother] about it and she just thought I was crazy, but I found out several months later that the Dalai Lama was actually going to be in Chicago. I had been there before and I knew I could get away with it, but I didn’t want to risk losing your mother.”

“Dalai Lama Visits Chicago - 1996”

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newstfionline · 7 years ago

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Portlanders respond to killings with prayer and eclectic spirituality

By Emily McFarlan Miller, Religion News Service, June 2, 2017

PORTLAND, Ore. (RNS) Beside the makeshift memorial that has sprung up outside the light-rail station where three men were stabbed on a train, Bernal Cruz knelt, holding a bunch of flowers and his toddler son.

“As I get older and as my kids get older, I feel a different impact as these things happen,” Cruz said, as he added his bouquet to the de facto secular altars that have sprung up in the form of candles, images of deities of Eastern religions and handwritten notes.

Portland may be the least religious city in the U.S. But its residents are drawing on a deep sense of personal spirituality and shared values to unite in the face of hate, for comfort in the wake of tragedy.

Cruz grew up Catholic but, like 42 percent of Portland residents, he no longer identifies with organized religion. That’s more “nones” than any other city in the United States, according to a 2015 PRRI survey of American cities.

“There’s a certain pride in how weird Portland can be, and I think that encompasses the feeling of inclusiveness--it’s like to each their own, try to live your life, don’t hurt anybody else and we’ll probably just love you the same,” Cruz said.

Cruz said the attack hit close to home for him as someone who works with immigrants and refugees, both as a social worker and as a volunteer, something he said brings him “full circle” as an immigrant and refugee who came to the U.S. from Guatemala in the 1990s.

Two of the men were killed and one was seriously wounded on May 26, when they approached a self-proclaimed white supremacist reportedly yelling racial and religious slurs at two young women, one black and one Muslim and wearing a hijab, riding on Portland’s MAX light-rail system.

The suspect, Jeremy Christian, has been charged with murder and other offenses.

Many people who paused to pay their respects this week outside the Hollywood/NE 42nd Avenue Station, where the attack occurred, talked about the spiritual, but not religious, values and practices helping them process the horrific event. They emphasized responding with love, echoing stabbing victim Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche’s last words, according to The Oregonian: “Tell everyone on this train I love them.”

Stephanie Kye, a certified nurse assistant who lives near the train station, said she came to the memorial to “unite with everybody.”

“I think that there’s evil, but there’s also goodness, and there are people who will put themselves on the line to help someone else. I don’t think those men expected that, but I feel like as a person of color, I go out into the world and I think that I am alone,” she said. “It was a reminder that people care enough to intervene and that hate’s not going to win.”

Kye said she said a prayer after the attack--not to any particular deity, but because it helped her overcome her fear and get her feelings out.

At the train station where the attack occurred, secular altars have sprung up reflecting a collection of spiritual traditions that Portlanders appear to draw on: a Virgin of Guadalupe candle alongside a candle depicting a feline-faced figure labeled “Pietro, faerie saint of passage”; bottles of water, considered sacred by many Native American tribes; pictures of Hindu deities; a letter written in purple crayon and a child’s handwriting illustrated with hearts, stars and smiley faces: “I am Muslim and I thank you.”

Some hinted at simmering tensions.

On the pillars of a neighboring sushi restaurant, “Respect Islam” was written in chalk. In a different color chalk, the word “Islam” had been crossed out and replaced with “including everyone.”

Betsy Toll returned to the memorial a few days after attending a large vigil for the victims outside the train station last weekend. Wearing a strand of mala prayer beads around her wrist, she described “a deep spirituality of my own” that she had come to after 40 years, after growing up Presbyterian, marrying a Jewish man, sitting with Quakers and studying Buddhism and Hinduism.

“It’s beautiful to see that these altars are still here and growing and changing,” Toll said.

“My hope is that, everyone whose heart was broken by this terrible event, if we reflect on the goodness and the decency and the kind and courageous impulse that motivated these guys--they were just everyday guys--that we let more of that shine in ourselves. We cannot keep hating each other.”

While fewer Portlanders are affiliated with organized religion, many who are have turned to those traditions in the aftermath of the attack.

An online fundraiser launched by the Muslim Educational Trust and CelebrateMercy, another Muslim group, collected nearly $600,000 to help the families of the victims.

“Muslims usually give overly and generously during the month of Ramadan, so now that I think about it, I’m not surprised that this fundraiser went really quickly, really fast,” said Rania Ayoub of the Muslim Educational Trust.

On a weekday evening, about two dozen people gathered inside the wood-paneled walls and geometric stained-glass windows of First Covenant Church, about a mile from the Hollywood station, where lead pastor Kent Place said the church hoped to give people “space and language for prayer.”

That included lighting candles, singing the old hymn “It Is Well With My Soul” and reading Scriptures such as Jesus’ words, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” It also included spoken prayers for the victims and their families, for the two girls the assailant had targeted--even for the assailant himself.

Lizabeth Norton of Portland, a nurse educator for a drug company and a member of the Madeleine Catholic Parish, said the church felt like a safe environment “to come and be hurt and angry and try to understand.”

“For me, the real takeaway is: Where can we have compassion and understanding? And it’s really through a faith-based understanding of forgiveness and mercy and understanding and love.”

#Portland stabbing #Portland Oregon #Portland spirituality

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y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff · 3 months ago

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BBW At Home Plumeria and Freesia Pillar Candles

1990-1998

Plumeria found on Ebay, user gramsandpopsvintage

Freesia found on Ebay, user Tarasthriftythreads

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toaster-fashion · 7 years ago

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Summer nights in the cemetery by void-witch featuring flameless candles ❤ liked on Polyvore

Louis Vuitton silk blouse, $235 / High-waisted denim shorts / Topshop knee hi socks, $6.52 / Dr. Martens black booties / Leather jewelry / White earrings, $3.06 / Chris Habana skull jewelry, $56 / Button jewelry / Humör pin brooch / Belt / Spitfire punk sunglasses, $48 / SKINNY PUPPY Logo Cloth Patch / PRONOUNS embroidered patch / Mens vest outerwear / Nearly Natural flower stem / Cathy's Concepts skull wine glasses / Flameless candle / Flameless pillar candle / CB2 home fragrance / Wooden incense burner / Canvas home decor / Joy Division Unknown Pleasures White Lighter Post Punk Nuclear Waste / Dog home decor / Bat-Gray Embroidered Iron On Patch-Facing Right / NINE INCH NAILS Logo Woven Patch / 6658 Ministry IRON ON PATCH American Industrial Metal Band 1990's... / Pins / Patches / Stickers | Gifts | Accessories

#polyvore #Louis Vuitton #Topshop #Dr. Martens #Chris Habana #Humör #Spitfire #Nearly Natural #Cathy's Concepts #CB2 #fashion #style #clothing

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burningarcadesandwich-6448f9e7 · 1 year ago

Link

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: Wood Hallmark Candle Holders and candles set.

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jawhip5 · 1 year ago

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Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: PartyLite 1990’s Vintage Retired La Rosetta Pillar Candle Holder P7494.

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jobsearchtips02 · 4 years ago

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Hong Kongers defy police order and collect for Tienanmen Square vigil

People collect at the Tiananmen Square vigil remembrance in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, on June 4,2020

Miguel Candela/Anadolu Firm via Getty Images.

Hong Kong prohibited locals from memorializing the Tiananmen Square massacre for the first time, but thousands of protesters collected on Thursday anyhow.

The Hong Kong federal government mentioned the coronavirus as the reason for the ban, however lots of believe it to be a direct act of suppression, after China passed a national security law to squash Hong Kong dissent.

See Service Insider’s homepage for more stories

Lighting candle lights and shouting mottos, residents came out in numbers to defy a cops restriction that made it illegal to gather in groups of more than 8 individuals amidst the coronavirus pandemic.

This was the first time the vigil to memorialize victims of Tienanmen Square has actually been banned given that it began in 1990.

The Chinese federal government signed the national security legislation into law on May 28, and it ought to severly limit the capability for Hong Kongers to reveal dissent.

These pictures show how people defied the federal government’s orders and collected to memorialize victims of the Tienanmen Square Massacre.

Every year on June 4, Hong Kong hosts gatherings to honor the hundreds of demonstrators who were killed by the Chinese government throughout a pro-democracy demonstration in Beijing’s Tienanmen Square in 1989.

Participants were seen holding up candle lights which checks out “fact” on them during the memorial vigil in Victoria Park. Thousands gathered for the annual memorial vigil in Victoria Park to mark the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre regardless of a cops ban mentioning coronavirus social distancing limitations.

Geovien So/SOPA Images/LightRocket through Getty Images.

Source: Company Insider

However on Monday, the area revealed it would ban locals from collecting for the annual vigil for the very first time considering that1990 Citing the coronavirus pandemic, the city forbade groups of 8 people or more.

People wearing protective face masks hold up their phones as they attend a candlelight vigil ahead of the 31 st anniversary of the crackdown of pro-democracy demonstrations at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, after authorities rejects a mass yearly vigil on public health grounds, in Hong Kong, China June 3,2020

REUTERS/Tyrone Siu.

Sources: Business Expert, The New York Times

But that didn’t stop Hong Kongers from going out. Ahead of the demonstrations, people were seen hosting candlelight vigils.

Individuals go to a candlelight vigil ahead of the 31 st anniversary of the crackdown of pro-democracy demonstrations at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, after authorities rejects a mass annual vigil on public health premises, in Hong Kong, China June 3,2020

REUTERS/Tyrone Siu.

Source: Company Insider

One prominent anti-China lawmaker, Eddie Chu, composed on Facebook previously in the day on Thursday, “See you at Victoria Park tonight.”

Law enforcement officers stand guard at a candlelight vigil ahead of the 31 st anniversary of the crackdown of pro-democracy protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, after cops turns down a mass yearly vigil on public health premises, in Hong Kong, China June 3,2020

REUTERS/Tyrone Siu.

Source: Business Expert

And he was. Countless people hopped over fences and barriers to collect in the park and defy police orders, according to the New York Times.

Individuals taking part at the Tiananmen Square vigil remembrance in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong on June 04,2020 Thousands of individuals allover Hong Kong lit candle lights on June 4 to celebrate Tiananmen massacre despite federal government ban versus gatherings.

Miguel Candela/Anadolu Company by means of Getty Images.

Source: The New York City Times

— Daniel Victor (@bydanielvictor) June 4, 2020

Throughout the park, lots of people sat quietly and lit candle lights. Some played tunes that were utilized throughout the 1989 demonstrations.

A participant was seen showing a poster which reads “Down with the Chinese Communist Celebration”, as well as another poster which checks out “let the candlelight ignites the fight; let the grieving becomes power” in the memorial vigil in Victoria Park.

Alda Tsang/SOPA Images/LightRocket by means of Getty Images.

Source: The New York Times

Statements were made over a loudspeaker encouraging people to preserve social distancing, and numerous protesters were seen doing so.

People are sitting at Victoria Park while appreciating the social distancing guidelines throughout the Tiananmen Square vigil remembrance in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong on June 04,2020

Miguel Candela/Anadolu Company via Getty Images.

Source: The New York City Times

Others gathered in a closer range to shout mottos and wave pro-democracy signs.

Protesters wave Hong Kong self-reliance flags as they take part in a candlelight vigil to mark the 31 st anniversary of the crackdown of pro-democracy demonstrations at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, after police rejects a mass yearly vigil on public health premises, at Victoria Park, in Hong Kong, China June 4,2020

REUTERS/Tyrone Siu.

Numerous viewed the attempted restriction on the presentation as a way to additional suppress the voices of Hong Kongers.

Individuals were seen holding up a banner which reads “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times” along with candles in the memorial vigil in Victoria Park.

Alda Tsang/SOPA Images/LightRocket through Getty Images.

Source: Company Insider

On May 28, the Chinese federal government passed a nationwide security law that will successfully crush protest motions and criticism against the government.

Protesters wearing protective face masks take part in a candlelight vigil to mark the 31 st anniversary of the crackdown of pro-democracy demonstrations at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, after police turns down a mass yearly vigil on public health premises, at Victoria Park, in Hong Kong, China June 4,2020

REUTERS/Tyrone Siu.

Source: Service Expert

Though individuals collected in many locations to defy the police, numerous fear this might be the last Tienanmen Square vigil.

Locals light candle lights during the Tiananmen Square vigil in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, China on June 4,2020

Tommy Walker/NurPhoto through Getty Images.

Source: Company Insider

” It will be the last candlelight vigil prior to the national security act,” chairman Lee Cheuk-yan stated, according to The New York Times.

A guy wearing a protective face mask searches as protesters participate in a candlelight vigil to mark the 31 st anniversary of the crackdown of pro-democracy protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, after authorities turns down a mass annual vigil on public health premises, at Victoria Park, in Hong Kong, China June 4,2020

REUTERS/Tyrone Siu.

Source: Business Insider

Nevertheless, Hong Kongers came out in numbers to fight against the new laws. In this image, protesters are seen doing a hand gesture that implies “5 demands, not one less” that was established last year during widespread pro-democracy protests.

Individuals gesture the popular protest slogan ‘Five demands, not one less’ as they go to a vigil in Victoria Park in Hong Kong on June 4,2020

YAN ZHAO/AFP through Getty Images.

At the University of Hong Kong, trainees were seen taking a moment of silence in front of a statue honoring the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

College student observe a minute of silence in front of the Pillar of Shame, a statue by Danish artist Jens Galschiot to celebrate the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing, at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in Hong Kong, China June 4,2020

REUTERS/Jessie Pang.

Here, a protester holds up an image from June 4, 1989, when 200 to 10,000 were approximated to have died, fighting for more political liberties.

A man shows an image on his smart device of the Tiananmen crackdown throughout the Tiananmen Square vigil remembrance in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong on June 04,2020

Miguel Candela/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.

Source: BBC

Protesters collected to reveal support in Taipei, Taiwan, on Thursday, too.

Hong Kong anti-government demonstrators collect at Liberty Square in Taipei to mark the 31 st anniversary of the crackdown of pro-democracy protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, Taiwan, June 4,2020

REUTERS/Ann Wang.

Those who did not go to the protests personally were motivated to stand in uniformity by lighting candle lights in their windows.

Individuals go to a candlelight vigil along the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront in Hong Kong on June 4, 2020, to mark the 31 st anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing.

RICHARD A. BROOKS/AFP by means of Getty Images.

Source: Service Expert

The gathering has actually historically been a way for Hong Kongers to memorialize the dead, advocate for democracy, and teach the youth about the brutal Tiananmen Square protests.

2 siblings search as candles are lit throughout the Tiananmen Square vigil in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, June 4th2020

Tommy Walker/NurPhoto through Getty Images.

Source: The New York City Times

” What we are combating for is the very same: freedom and democracy. And they did so dealing with the risk of death,” Mary Li, a 23- year-old university student, told The New York Times about honoring the victims of Tiananmen Square.

Individuals wave banners and flags of self-reliance and in assistance of the pro-democracy movement during the Tiananmen Square vigil remembrance in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong on June 04,2020

Miguel Candela/Anadolu Firm by means of Getty Images.

Source: The New York Times

Though the protests were serene, authorities jailed and pepper-sprayed some protesters after some tried to block the roadway, Reuters reported.

Undercover cops jailed attendees during a memorial vigil in Mongkok on June 4, 2020 in Hong Kong, China.

Billy H.C. Kwok/Getty Images.

— Eileen Chang ( @Hongkon 84458416) June 4, 2020

Source: Reuters

Functions Politics Slideshow Hong Kong Demonstrations

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from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/hong-kongers-defy-police-order-and-collect-for-tienanmen-square-vigil/

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mideastsoccer · 6 years ago

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The fallacy of soccer’s magical bridge-building qualities

By James M. Dorsey

Edited remarks at Brookings seminar in Doha: Lessons from the 2019 Asian Cup: Sports, Globalization, and Politics in the Arab World

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn and Tumblr

Imagining himself as a peacemaker in a conflict-ridden part of the world, FIFA President Gianni Infantino sees a 2022 World Cup shared by Qatar with its Gulf detractors, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as the magic wand that would turn bitter foes into brothers.

It may be a nice idea, but it is grounded in the fiction that soccer can play an independent role in bringing nations together or developing national identity.

The fiction is that soccer has the potential to be a driver of events, that it can spark or shape developments. It is also the fiction that sports in general and soccer in particular has the power to build bridges.

Mr. Infantino’s assertion that if foes play soccer, bridges are built is but the latest iteration of a long-standing myth.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Soccer is an aggressive sport. It is about conquering the other half of a pitch. It evokes passions and allegiances that are tribal in nature and that more often than not divide rather than unite.

In conflict situations, soccer tends to provide an additional battlefield. Examples abound.

The 2022 World Cup; this year’s Qatari Asian Cup victory against the backdrop of the Gulf state’s rift with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt; the imprint the Palestinian-Israeli conflict puts on the two nations’ soccer; or the rise of racist, discriminatory attitudes among fans in Europe.

The Bad Blue Boys, hardcore fans of Dinamo Zagreb’s hardcore fans, light candles each May and lay wreaths at a monument to their comrades who were killed in the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. They mark the anniversary of a riot during the 1990 match against Serbia’s Red Star Belgrade, their club’s most controversial match, as the first clash in the wars that erupted a year later and sparked the collapse of former Yugoslavia.

Fact of the matter is that sports like ping pong in Richard Nixon’s 1972 rapprochement with China or the improvement of ties between North and South Korea in the most recent Summer Olympics served as a useful tool, not a driver of events.

Sports is a useful tool in an environment in which key political players seek to build bridges and narrow differences.

The impact of soccer in the absence of a conducive environment created by political not sports players, is at best temporary relief, a blip on an otherwise bleak landscape.

The proof is in the pudding. Legend has it that British and German soldiers played soccer in no-man’s lands on Christmas Day in 2014, only to return to fighting World War One for another four years. Millions died in the war.

Similarly, Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites poured into the streets of Iraqi cities hugging each other in celebration of Iraq’s winning in 2007 of the Asia Cup at the height of the country’s sectarian violence only to return to killing each other a day later.

Soccer’s ability to shape or cement national identity is no different. In other words. football can be a rallying point for national identity but only if there is an environment that is conducive.

The problem is that soccer and the formation of national identity have one complicating trait in common: both often involve opposition to the other.

That is nowhere truer than in the Middle East and North Africa where soccer has played and plays an important role in identity formation since it was first introduced to the region in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Qatar has been in some ways the exception that proves the rule by plotting its sports strategy not only as a soft power tool or a pillar of public health policy but also as a component of national identity. That element has been strengthened by the rift in the Gulf and bolstered by this year’s Asian Cup victory.

Qatar’s efforts to strengthen its national identity benefits from the fact that the Gulf state no longer operates on the notion that Gulf states have to hang together. Today its hanging on its own in a conflict with three of its neighbours.

Soccer’s role in identity formation in the Middle East and North Africa was often because it was a battlefield, a battlefield for identity that was part of larger political struggles.

Clubs were often formed for that very reason. Attitudes towards the country’s monarchy in the early 20th century loomed large in the founding of Egypt’s Al Ahli SC and Al Zamalek SC, two of the Middle East and North Africa’s most storied clubs.

Clubs in Algeria were established as part of the anti-colonial struggle against the French. Ottoman and Iranian rulers used sports and soccer to foster national identity and take a first step towards incorporating youth in the development of a modern defense force.

Zionists saw sports and soccer as an important way of developing the New Jew, the muscular Jew. To Palestinians, it was a tool in their opposition to Zionist immigration. And finally, soccer was important in the shaping of ethnic or sub-national identities among Berbers, Kurds, East Bank Jordanians and Jordanian Palestinians.

In other words, soccer was inclusive in the sense of contributing to the formation of a collective identity. But it was also divisive because that identity was at the same time exclusionary and opposed to an other.

The long and short of this is that soccer is malleable. Its impact and fallout depend on forces beyond its control. Soccer is dependent on the environment shaped by political and social forces. It is a tool that is agnostic to purpose, not a driver or an independent actor.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa and recently published China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom

#soccer #Sports #worldcup #FIFA #FIFA World Cup 2022 #qatar #uae #saudi arabia #saudi #Egypt #bahrain #Israel #Palestine #jordan #kurds #berbers #algeria #iraq #asian cup

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almightygodismydependence-blog · 6 years ago

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The Experience of Growth of a Christian Born in the 1990s

Wei Chen, Fujian Province

I’m a Christian who was born in the 1990s. I was once a student in one of those famous schools that all parents want their kids to study at and will go to extreme lengths to get them in. In China, they are known as key schools, and I studied in one for 10 years. In China, parents have very high expectations of such schools, and rack their brains for ways to improve their children’s chances of going to these high-quality places of learning. They think that their kids will thus gain a first-class education that will put them head and shoulders above the rest and bring glory to their family and ancestors. In order to get me into a key school, my mother pulled out all the stops to develop relationships with the right people and also spent a considerable sum of money. But the schools run by the C.C.P. have already lost all their purity of purpose and have become dens of lies and falsehoods. The teachers and staff—who should have been upstanding models of fairness, humanity and morality—have become treacherous, cunning and immoral hypocrites who are cultivating batch after batch of similarly hypocritical students, the so-called “pillars of the nation.”

When talking about teachers in China, it’s common to use a line from an ancient poem to describe their diligence: “The silkworm doesn’t stop producing silk thread until it dies; the candle doesn’t stop dripping wax until it turns to ash.” But after 10 years in that school witnessing the actions and behaviors of my teachers, I feel that I have to repudiate this. I remember the second semester in my first year. The music teacher announced that our class had been selected for a music class inspection by some senior figures, and that we had to continually rehearse the content that she’d prepared for the inspection exactly as she wanted. During one of the rehearsals, one of the classmates was being a bit uncooperative and repeatedly failed to do what the teacher said. Suddenly, the classroom went very quiet, and when I looked up I saw the music teacher staring furiously at that classmate. She stood up with a crash, threw her musical textbook down onto the piano with all her strength, and strode angrily toward the classmate. She grabbed him and dragged him to the back of the classroom to stand against the wall as punishment. When we saw this, all 30 0r so of us became petrified, and immediately began to carefully do exactly what the teacher wanted so that we didn’t meet the same fate. Later on, our head teacher and the music teacher also had one-to-one talks with all of the naughty students to warn them to shape up. So when the senior officials came they saw a well-ordered classroom with a friendly and welcoming teacher who had a voice so soft it gave you goose bumps. It seemed that we students and the teachers had entered into an unspoken agreement to cooperate to achieve the common objective of seeing satisfied smiles on the faces of the senior officials. After the inspection was over, I got together with a few classmates. The question we all asked was: “Why has our teacher taught us how to deceive people?” When we reached the third year we were told that some people were coming to listen in on our math class. The math teacher told us: “In class tomorrow we’ll be doing the same stuff that we did a few days ago. So I hope you’ll all go home and revise it well.” After class, the teacher asked the class monitor and class cadres to join her in her office. The next day, the back row of seats in the classroom was all taken up by teachers and officials who had come to observe us. The class started, and the teacher asked the pre-arranged questions and allowed the class monitor and class cadres to answer. Their flawless answers brought a satisfied smile to the teacher’s face. This open class came to a successful conclusion after fooling the government officials all the way, and was definitely a case of “For every policy the senior leadership create the lower levels create one to deal with it.” Inspections and evaluations by the Bureau of Education always put the teachers on the defensive: They would make us memorize all the possible questions and answers and would repeatedly and sternly warn us. They’d say things like: “The Bureau of Education inspectors are coming today so you’ve all got to stay in this classroom. Stay in here and be good. If you mess up I’ll make sure you all suffer the consequences!” They even threatened to deduct points from our end-of-semester exam scores! We also had a full school assembly so that the teachers could lay down the law and drill into us everything we needed to remember. We were so well-trained that an inspector could have grabbed the most unruly kid in any class and asked them any relevant question and they would have got a concise and fluent answer guaranteed to bring a smile to their face. Even more ironic was the fact that the usually smelly toilets were cleaned and the trash heaps were tidied up. Then there was the time when the bell for class rang but my classmates kept on making a terrible din no matter how loudly the teacher banged on the desk. So the teacher shouted at us angrily: “You were all so good during the inspections, but now that they’re over you’ve gone back to being how you were originally.” When I heard this I had a quiet laugh to myself, as I thought that this was certainly an instance of “A strict teacher produces outstanding students!” Six years of elementary school life had helped our performing arts skills progress greatly: Whenever we heard that there was going to be an open class, or that some officials were coming to observe us, we all knew just how to work hand-in-glove with the teacher to put on a good show to fool them.

When I got into key high schools, both junior and senior, I discovered that the practice of faking things was even more prevalent and developed. Our physics classes were nearly all theory, with very few practical experiments involved. When the school inspectors were about to visit, our teacher told us to do all of the experiments in the few classes beforehand. But we all knew that we had to be ready for the inspection, so we didn’t actually do them but just went to the lab and waited for the teacher to read out the correct results, which we then copied down. The senior staff of our school was also always looking for ways to bring our school up to Grade 1 standard, because doing so would mean more recognition, better equipment and facilities—both hardware and software—and more funding from the government. But this was a challenging task that needed the teachers and students to work together closely to complete. In order to pass the inspection and evaluation, we began all the fakery again. A few of the strongest students in the class were sent to the office to get all of the boxes of reports, experiment material, tables and charts—all the stuff that we usually never heard of or looked at. Then the teacher wrote all of the standard answers and results up on the blackboard and we copied the information into the tables, charts, etc. Then we handed them over to the teachers (and then they were hidden away until the time of the next inspection.) After that, I went with a few classmates to the school canteen to buy something to eat for breakfast. One of classmates wanted a chicken leg, but the canteen staff told him: “Today’s inspection day, so we’re not allowed to sell cooked food.” We looked at each other in bemusement, because we’d never have thought that the canteen—which made piles of money through selling cooked food every day—would also have a rest day. Ha-ha! They really were putting on a good show of singing from the same song sheet as the school’s senior management! Eventually, the combined deceit of all of the staff and students ensured that the school was promoted from a provincial Grade 2 school to a provincial Grade 1 school. The senior staff was naturally delighted, and grinned from ear to ear all day long. When the news was excitedly announced at a special school assembly, the gathered students were also very happy to hear it, because we knew that if we hadn’t passed the inspection then we would have had to carry on wracking our brains to think of ways to trick the inspectors next time.

As a result of the diligent cultivation from an early age at the hands of our teachers—those “engineers of the human soul”—we matured into students well-prepared to pass exams. Our ability to fake things and deceive people also progressed nicely. In our school, the rules didn’t permit students to have girlfriends or boyfriends or smoke. So we got round this by continuing our teachers’ tradition of “For every policy the senior leadership create the lower levels create one to deal with it”—we didn’t hold hands or hug or smoke in public areas of the school but instead snuck into dark corners or waited until we were outside of the school gates before having our fun. Anyway, as long as we weren’t caught in the act then there wouldn’t be any evidence. Also, bullying and robbing other students of their money were common occurrences. And so I sunk lower and lower into this great vat of sin, learning all the time how to be two-faced and sly. In the eyes of most of my relatives and classmates I was a good boy: I didn’t have a girlfriend, nor did I drink or smoke. When guests came to our house, even though I just wanted to play computer games, I would instead bring up the learning Web site—a site I visited so infrequently that I’d almost forgotten my account details—on the screen in order to win the guests’ approval. It was only when I was totally sure that the guests wouldn’t come into my room again that I’d start browsing the Web and playing games. Whenever I was feeling upset or troubled, I’d call up a few of my close friends and we’d go to a bar near to my house to get completely drunk. Once we’d drowned our sorrows and maybe acted a bit crazy, we’d calculate what time each of our respective parents would go to bed so that we could sneak in without them smelling the alcohol on us. Then we’d stumble and weave back home and sleep the rest of the night away snoring loudly. I remember one time when I finished off half a bottle of 56° sorghum liquor in three swallows. Walking home I could barely control my arms and legs, but when I got to the door of my house I slapped my face a few times, steadied myself as best I could, took off my shoes as quickly as possible, covered my mouth with my hand, and walked straight into my room, locking the door behind me. In my room I was king of my own domain, and so no matter how hard my mother knocked on the door I didn’t open it. The next day before opening my bedroom door, I didn’t forget to open the window to let some fresh air in. When I could smell that there was no stench of alcohol in the air, I took my clothes—which did still have smell of liquor—out onto the balcony to soak them in water. And that’s how I got rid of all the evidence. Ha-ha!

Occasionally, I would think about how the Lord Jesus had said that we must all be honest and always tell it as it really is. I was very dissatisfied with my various behaviors, and felt that I was totally phony and fake. I even felt that I wasn’t a real Christian, as I didn’t even have the courage to admit to my own faith in case I was mocked for claiming to be a Christian when my morals were so bad. Sometimes I’d pray and confess my sins, but my lifestyle didn’t change and I continued to feel lost, confused, and helpless. I knew that I wasn’t a good Christian, but I felt that the pastors and the deacons in the church all knew the Bible very well and could all discuss doctrines and teachings at length, so at least they were all good Christians, all apples of the Lord’s eye. But the reality once again struck back against my way of looking at things: It was during an election for church deacons, and as an impartial observer I was able to clearly witness just how absurd the whole process was. There were 13 deacons to begin with, and when the pastor announced the results of the election it turned out that the same 13 had been re-elected. There hadn’t even been any other candidates! I couldn’t help but shout out: “Cheats!” and then stormed angrily out of the church. I pondered over this event, but whichever way I thought about it I always came to the conclusion that religious elections were just as fake as the practice I had witnessed in school or the elections the local government held for village cadres. On another occasion, I was child minding for the pastor and struck up a conversation with her 7-year old daughter: “I bet your mother reads Bible stories to you pretty much every day.” She replied: “No, my mom said there’s no point in reading that stuff!” I was stunned, and asked her again, to make sure. But the little girl replied with certainty: “Mom doesn’t let me read the Bible and told me not to believe any of it. She said that only scientific knowledge has any use.” The truth left me dumbfounded: This pastor was a total hypocrite who was teaching her child to ignore Christian teachings! I would never have imagined that the senior figures in my church were all deceitful atheists who were just putting on a show to further their own interests. I was terribly disappointed in them, and vowed never to go to any church meetings again. I felt that listening to them preaching was no different from listening to those falsely just and righteous senior school staff who got up on the stage and tried to fool us with their trickery. At a later date, my mother became one of the church deacons, which gave me even more of an insider’s view of how this so-called holy, God-worshiping “temple” had developed in the same way as modern society. The pastor and deacons had formed factions, and of course there were lots of differing opinions, so the dozen or so of them were frequently quarreling until they were red in the face. They also had the habit of finding spurious reasons for spending the congregation’s donations on trips and dining out. They once announced, in all earnest, that they were going to give 500 yuan to poor families to subsidize their children’s school fees. In fact, the parents who applied for the subsidies were all close to the pastor and deacons on a daily basis. One of these “poor parents” actually owned a 3-storey house and had a monthly income of over 1,000 yuan. As for the parents who everyone actually knew to be living with hardship, not one of them got the subsidy. Through personally witnessing all this, I became extremely disappointed and didn’t know what to do about the whole situation. I felt that only the return of the Lord Jesus could put an end to these filthy and despicable affairs. I couldn’t help from calling out: “Lord, please, please, come soon!”

I’m so grateful to our Lord for taking pity on me and listening to my pleas. After about 2 months, one of the brothers came to my home. At the time, I was the only one at home, and out of politeness I sat with him for a while, chatting about this and that. But during our chat the brother bore witness to Almighty God’s work of the last days for me. He said that the Lord Jesus has already returned and is called Almighty God, and that He is already expressing truths to do His work of judgment starting with God’s house in the last days. The brother also said that Almighty God is going to save mankind, which has been deeply corrupted and harmed by Satan, from its sins, free mankind from Satan’s influence and take us into His kingdom, thus ending this evil age. The more I listened, the more extraordinary and stranger it seemed. I had believed in the Lord Jesus for all these years but had never heard any of this. In particular, the parts where the brother dissected the various evil phenomena now prevalent in society, schools, and religious circles and revealed their substance and true situation were all issues that I had long puzzled over. I ended up fellowshiping about all of the things that I’d seen and heard over many years with the brother. I expressed my bemusement over why schools—that were supposed to be places of innocent learning—had become dens of lies, and why churches—that were supposed to be holy places—had become dens of fakery and in-fighting. Moreover, I wanted to be an honest person, as the Lord Jesus demanded, but it was just a pipe dream, as every day my life was lived from behind a mask. With regard to my puzzlement, the brother read some passages of God’s words to me: “Satan corrupts people through the education and influence of the national governments and the famous and great. Their lies and nonsense have become man’s life and nature. ‘Everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost’ is a well-known satanic saying that has been instilled into everyone and become the human life. There are some other words of life philosophy that are also like this” (“How to Know Man’s Nature” in Records of Christ’s Talks). “Cruel, brutal mankind! The conniving and intrigue, the jostling with each other, the scramble for reputation and fortune, the mutual slaughter—when will it ever end? God has spoken hundreds of thousands of words, yet no one has come to their senses. They act for the sake of their families, and sons and daughters, for their careers, prospects, status, vanity, and money, for the sake of clothes, for food and the flesh—whose actions are truly for the sake of God? Even among those whose actions are for the sake of God, there are but few who know God. How many do not act for the sake of their own interests? How many do not oppress and discriminate against others for the sake of maintaining their own status? Thus, God has been forcibly condemned to death innumerable times, countless barbaric judges have condemned God and once more nailed Him to the cross. How many can be called righteous because they truly act for the sake of God?” (“The Wicked Must Be Punished” in The Word Appears in the Flesh). “Why do people engage in such deceit? To achieve their own aims, and to achieve the objectives they desire. And so they adopt certain methods, which shows that they are not upstanding, and that they are not honest. At such times, people’s insidiousness and cunning is revealed, or else their maliciousness and ignobility. With these things, you feel that it is especially hard to be honest; without them, you would feel that being honest is easy. The greatest obstacles to being honest are people’s insidiousness, their deceitfulness, their maliciousness, and their ignoble motivations” (“To Be Honest, You Should Lay Yourself Open to Others” in Records of Christ’s Talks). After reading these words of God the brother continued to fellowship more with me and that was when I had a sudden flash of realization: The root of all of our problems is that Satan has power over mankind and is corrupting us! Satan the Devil has filled us with poisonous ideas such as “Everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost,” “Money is first,” and “Power is above all else.” These poisons have taken root in the deepest recesses of our hearts and have become our lives; these concepts control our every word and action. So regardless of whether people are in a school or in a religious community, they will be unable to stop themselves from furthering their own interests, and will compete and struggle against others to do so. When the pastors put up a sign saying: “Work for the Lord and serve His flock,” they still intend to fill their own pockets, and when the school hangs up a banner with the slogan “Impart knowledge and educate students to benefit the nation and the people,” it’s all just a charade. In fact, teachers use the slogan “Be diligent and industrious to serve as role models for others” as a cover to grab as much for themselves as they can. I’ve even heard of teachers losing all their humanity and humiliating or viciously beating students in order to further their own interests. This sort of thing is now so common that it’s no longer news. Satan the Devil uses power and money to control our hearts and spirits, which causes us to become more and more evil and sinister. In order to get what we want we will stop at nothing, and as our treacherous and cunning methods get more accomplished the profit they bring gets bigger and bigger. As a result, we just get more evil and corrupt and become capable of committing the most heinous of sins. It is just like the Chinese saying, “If the upper beams aren’t straight the lower beams will be crooked too”: Under the evil governance of the CCP all government officials are embezzling large amounts of money, and so senior staff and teachers in China’s schools naturally copy them as best they can. Concepts such as morality and justice get cast to one side and the word “profit” takes center stage, and that’s how schools become a microcosm of the evil society that they exist in. And once the eyes and ears of the students have been exposed to this evil contamination they will naturally become more and more evil themselves, just like blotting paper soaking up black ink. Some examples of this include students flirting with each other in the dark corners of the school and students smoking and getting really drunk in bars. I also saw young lovers hugging and holding hands in public places, and these days it’s even common for elementary school students to have a boyfriend or girlfriend. Some students will deceive their parents or make life difficult for them in order to get more pocket money, and there have even been cases of children attacking their parents with knives after being refused of more money. Heaven knows how many parents have spent every dollar they have and pulled out all the stops in order to send their innocent little darlings to a high-quality school, only to see them not only not learn much or develop good characters but actually become more debased and evil and eventually turn into accomplished cheats or even murderers. People are always complaining that students are getting worse by the year, but this is the rotten fruit of the CCP’s rule. The brother also told me that the Age of Grace was when the Lord Jesus was doing the work of redemption—forgiving mankind’s sins—which isn’t the same as the work of the last days to judge, cleanse and transform mankind’s corrupt disposition. In other words, although believers in the Lord can gain redemption for their sins, their sinful nature is still firmly rooted inside of them, and they still cannot help but be corrupted by Satan to do evil and resist God. Such people live in a vicious cycle of committing sins in the daytime and admitting to their sins at night: Even the pastors are unable to extricate themselves from their sinful ways. For the last days, God expresses truths and does the work of judging and purifying mankind through His incarnation in order to thoroughly cleanse and transform mankind’s satanic disposition and resolve the issue of the source of their tendency to sin, so that they can be completely saved from Satan’s domain and be able to live in the light. As I listened to the brother talking it was like dark clouds were dispersing to reveal a clear blue sky: All of the doubts and bemusement of many years disappeared and I there and then accepted the gospel of the last days of Almighty God.

The brother then read another passage of God’s words: “The vast and hazy world has made many of you, unflinching and dauntless in filling the different roles of this world. It has formed many ‘warriors’ that do not fear death at all. More than that, it has created batches of desensitized and paralyzed humans who do not understand the purpose of their creation.” “Mankind, who left the supply of life from the Almighty, does not know why they exist, and yet fears death. There is no support, no help, but mankind is still reluctant to close their eyes, braving it all, drags out an ignoble existence in this world in bodies without the consciousness of souls. You live like such, with no hope; he exists like such, with no aim. There is only the Holy One in the legend who will come to save those who moan in suffering and long desperately for His arrival. This belief cannot be realized so far in the people who are unconscious. However, the people still yearn for it so. The Almighty has mercy on these people who suffer deeply. At the same time, He is fed up with these people who have no consciousness, because He has to wait too long for the answer from humans. He desires to seek, seek your heart and your spirit. He wants to bring you food and water and to awaken you, so you are no longer thirsty, no longer hungry. When you are weary and when you begin to feel the desolation of this world, do not be perplexed, do not cry. Almighty God, the Watcher, will embrace your arrival any time” (“The Sighing of the Almighty” in The Word Appears in the Flesh). I was very moved by these words. In the past, in my confusion and pain, I had shed many bitter tears, but no one had ever been able to so clearly penetrate the secrets in my heart with their words or describe the true state of my heart and mind. And there had certainly been no one to tell me how to walk the path of my life in the future. But a few short sentences of Almighty God’s words were able to fully express what was hidden deep in my heart, and, more importantly, were able to show me a way forward. Now I not only know that the source of mankind’s degeneracy and corruption is because mankind has moved away from God’s life sustenance and fallen under the domain of Satan, but I also know that God always hopes that we—people who have been tricked and harmed by Satan—can return to Him as soon as possible and receive His salvation. God’s words brought me illumination and hope, and brought an end to many years of living in darkness. From then on, I started to devour God’s words and to participate enthusiastically in church life. I began to hate those dimly-lit bars where I used to get falling down drunk, and gave up drinking for good. Whenever my drinking buddies tried to get me to go out with them I’d find a good reason not to go. If I couldn’t think of an excuse, I would go with them, but not a drop of liquor ever passed my lips again. I watched them drink bottle after bottle, and when they were totally loaded they started acting crazy as usual. Out of the blue, I felt an unexplainable sadness. I felt that they were truly pitiful and I remembered that I too once behaved like that, getting drunk time and time again in order to numb myself and temporarily forget my worries and the emptiness inside of me. But drinking just caused the suffering and emptiness to last even longer. Now that I have something that I can really rely on, my heart feels full and joyous, and I’m truly grateful for Almighty God’s immense salvation!

What makes me even more grateful is that Almighty God not only relieved me of my spiritual emptiness but also led me away from all the filth and contamination. Every time I met up with the brothers and sisters I always felt totally liberated, because among them there is no fakery, no bravado, no empty talk, and neither is there any deception or suppression. The brothers and sisters seek to be honest people who are always ready to say what is on their minds because they know that the more honest they are the more God will approve of them and grant His blessings and the more they are liked by others. After seeing how each one of the brothers and sisters was living in a simple, open and liberated way, I decided to rebel against my own ego and vanity and tell one of the sisters about how I’d been under the influence of evil trends and fashions and just how degenerate and useless I’d become. The sister not only didn’t look askance of me but even told me about all of her own transgressions and the process of how God had saved her. And she was someone who I’d only known for fewer than 10 days! With my good friends who I’d known for years I rarely heard anything that really came from the heart, but here at The Church of Almighty God everyone is like this—everyone is making honesty into a practice. God’s house is a place of purity and piety that is completely different than the outside world! In the church there is no differentiating between high and low, rich and poor, or automatic seniority of the more qualified over the less qualified. The speech and actions of all of the church members is in accordance with God’s words, and these words are the rules and standards by which they behave. In God’s house I saw the true future and the true destination, and I started to hate my dry and monotonous school life where I was learning nothing of value and was just becoming more and more treacherous and cunning. In a society where good educational qualifications mean a bright future, I firmly and resolutely decided to abandon my schooling and to plan instead how I was going to remake myself. A lot of people didn’t understand my decision, and some even called me a fool who was destroying his own future. My relatives and classmates didn’t understand either, and when our pastor—the one who was full of fake kindness and fairness—heard the news that my mother and I had accepted Eastern Lightning, she spouted: “You’re both wrong! You’re both putting your faith in a person! Eastern Lightning has already been designated an evil cult by the government! If you keep on believing in it, you’ll be abandoned by the Lord. You’d be wise to study hard while you’re still young….” But I knew that I was absolutely on the right path, and I never regretted my decision because I knew that I have no future worth mentioning in a school that is full of lies and fakery. In fact, staying in such a place will only bring about the complete annihilation of my conscience and the loss of my humanity. Furthermore, how could those pastors and elders in the religious community, who don’t have a bit of the reality of truth and are tainted with the filth and corruption of the world, clearly understand my spiritual decision?

In The Church of Almighty God I have personally experienced how the truth and Christ rule in God’s house. Whoever practices truths gains respect and support, while those who promote dishonest practices or do evil are stonewalled, and if they don’t repent after being warned a few times then they are expelled. Because I have been too deeply corrupted by Satan and love status and prestige too much, during the period when I was a church leader I used my power to protect and fortify my position by attacking and taking revenge on a sister who disagreed with me. It got to the point where I demanded that she be expelled, and if she weren’t then I would leave, and anybody who tried to fellowship with me became my enemy. Even after multiple attempts by the brothers and sisters to support me and help me, I still stubbornly insisted that I was in the right. In the end, the sister wasn’t expelled and I was stripped of my leadership position for not accepting truths and not treating people fairly. This was God’s righteousness in action, and was also an example of God’s love and salvation. Even more so, it clearly showed me that God’s house and the outside world are very different: In God’s house it is truth and righteousness that rule, and they treat everyone equally and fairly. After I was removed from the leadership position, my corruption led me to misunderstand and complain about God, and I even considered betraying God and going back to my old life of uncontrolled drinking and debauchery with my school pals. But God didn’t give up on my salvation, and the enlightenment of God’s words and the fellowshiping of the brothers and sisters were able to pull me back from the brink of danger once again. Although I’m now just an ordinary believer in The Church of Almighty God, here I know what it means to be a real human and I understand that if people leave God then they will inevitably be trampled on and harmed by Satan. Almighty God allowed me to find true direction in life, and it was God that saved me from the dark and evil trends of this material world. I have no way of expressing the depth of God’s love and compassion, but can only dedicate the rest of my life to Him by pursuing truths and fulfilling my duties to repay His love!

#incarnation #Lord Jesus #gospel #the truth #God's word

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