#the god of people who actually read the bible with a critical eye? cool | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

aclassiguy · 4 years

Text

nobody’s gonna read this but i’m gonna rant a little as an ex-fundie kid with a perspective on unconscious bias re: thedas’ religions. (i’ll grant you i do not have encyclopedic knowledge of dragon age, so i’m commenting based off what 90% of people know - the games)

If we’re assuming that every interaction concerning the religions in Thedas is intentional, it’s genius. It represents real world religious dynamics so well. But that’s also assuming we’re going to be allowed to confront those religions; otherwise, it’s just a carbon copy with no purpose but to reflect reality. You’re duplicating problems, without offering avenues for solutions or even criticism.

I want to leave this uncut in case a piece of it actually caught someone’s eye for some reason, but I’d feel bad if I did that.

I’m actively agnostic. I have no problem with other people being religious. I react quite negatively to both active and passive attempts at conversion. I know a LOT about Christianity. I know some, though not as much, about other world religions.

We can pretend all we like that Thedas is a world completely separated from reality. “Lighten up, it’s just a game.” I can, however, point to direct parallels between game concepts and real world concepts that I find quite troubling (Blackwall’s plot, certain wartable missions, Descent DLC), I can expound on those at length as well. And of course it’s just a game, and you can stab people with no consequences and all that - that’s fine. Stabbing people in a game isn’t likely to make you think it’s OK to stab people IRL. But a game has the power to subtly reinforce existing biases which can cause real harm.

Christianity is a dominant world religion. In fundamentalist circles, one of the tenets is to spread it to as many people as possible, to save them from themselves. Even casual Christians adopt this attitude when they tell you how sad they are that you’re not Christian, because they think you’ll be happier as one and can’t fathom how you’d be happy without god. I can get REAL deep into Christian psychology, but I’ll spare you. The thing is, this is an insidious train of thought that has been beaten into the world by its victors. Monotheistic religions are treated more seriously than pantheons. The Bible is held as separate and more holy than “myths,” which are treated as little better than Harry Potter novels. Religions that encourage non-Western behaviors are treated as scary, deviant, and oppressive - to be obliterated before they dare to try converting precious Christians - DESPITE Christians actively trying to lure those believers away from their “scary” faith and into Christianity. They think their own religion is more normal, or their own culture is more normal. All of this leads to many, many Christians (as well as your average Westerner) holding really racist, xenophobic views they don’t perceive as racist or xenophobic.

SO LIKE - I’ll just make a bulletpoint list:

Andrastianism = Christianity (esp. Western brand)

Evanuris = Pantheistic religions

Qun = Eastern philosophies

The familiarity and diversity is fine. There’s pros and cons to each religion, just like real life. Thedas is fun because it takes aspects of discrimination like racism and sexuality and pretzels it to be same-but-different. No matter your background, you have the chance to get really involved in the ethical dilemmas provided, the visceral experience of being insulted and responding to insults with pride, and it’s fun to read something new and feel some kind of vindication if you had a suspicion before.

What irritates me currently about the religions is that every time I get a little taste of “Okay, finally, we’re acknowledging the damage a religion like this can do,” I get kicked right the fuck back. I spent so long hating the Chantry more and more because it started to become clear to me the intentional abuse being directed at literally anyone who wasn’t a non-mage human, and even then they abused their own followers to exert further control over mages for personal gain. (Seriously, FUCK the Chantry.) FINALLY, Exalted Plains acknowledged that the Chantry steamrolled over the elves in a brutal slaughter, where Sister Whatserface tried to blame the elves for being “too far from the Maker” but she was a good person for “showing them more mercy than they deserved.” Clear signals that Bioware intended it to be taken as it was - an unjust crusade. Then what do they throw in my face? Some documents intending to show that the elves were “also at fault.” Excuse me? I’m sorry, excuse me?!

Elves had already been the subject of extensive oppression at that point, and given the racist goddamn teachings of Sister Whatserface and ALL THE DIVINES, I can hardly blame the elves for being just a little testy with the humans sticking their noses into their lands trying to force them to convert to Andrastianism. “Equally to blame” my ass. This is a pebble against a boulder. And yet I’m supposed to treat it like some kind of shocking revelation. Ooo - should I turn these documents in to the Chantry to exploit the elves some more, or should I give them to the Dalish, who then react with shame? There’s no just option: have the Dalish explain why maybe elves would be just a little angry, and have my Inquisitor go “oh yeah, that makes sense. kbye”

Finishing up with the Dalish, we get told by some pride demon ass lying fucker that all the Dalish gods that these poor widdle uneducated primitive elves worship were essentially slavers. Hahah. WHAT. Sorry. WHAT. You’re going to make me play through a game with my character’s religion shat on or flat out ignored at literally every turn, and my vindication is to be told it’s all fake and my ancestors were idiots for ever believing? Canonically? Really? When do we get told that we checked the Fade and the Maker wasn’t there and don’t these humans look pretty dumb now?! Or is that too risque because Andrastianism is a little too close to Christianity?

Then there’s the reaction to the Qun. I have loved Qunari since Sten. I honestly think it’s a really cool concept and I would love to explore it more deeply. I also LOVE Sten. Sten seemed so calm and generally fairly accepting, although he had his own flaws. He also had hidden depths - push aside the fronting and you get his cookies and chocolate loving sweetness. (If people hate him, again, come see me after class so we can have a chat on why you stan Blackwall but not Sten?)

But it seems like the Qun is falling victim to the world needing a reliable villain. What was once a mysterious system of beliefs existing outside the concept of the Maker or Dalish gods is increasingly this Scary religion that oppresses women and mages in barbaric ways, and is treated as horrible for trying to spread their religion to other lands (allow me to remind you of Exalted Plains and why every person in the game seems to be Andrastian by default, or at least Andrastian-sympathetic). It’s essentially playing up the fears that makes people uncomfortable with Eastern religions, relying on xenophobia to make them hateable enough that you don’t accidentally end up with too many Qun sympathizers in the playerbase. Even though you can play as a Qunari in Inquisition (hell yeah), you aren’t allowed any kind of Qun background. It’s understandable in some ways, plot-wise, but baffling in others. How much cooler would it be to have access to Qun beliefs like the Dalish has access to the Evanuris?

And now they have the Qunari poised to be the result of doing horrible dragon-blood experiments on elves by MORE slavers, and their religion’s entire purpose is to limit their horrible dragony desires to murder people, but now they want to subjugate others to live under their rule of law to make a horrifying monotone culture. Aren’t these scary-looking Qunari even more scary? There’s a reason to hate them now, they’re canonically more violent, just like the dragons! (Do not get me started on how dragons are treated. Actually, do, I have a lot of thoughts on that too. lmao) REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Then you have the Tal-Vashoth, not only defectors who found fault with the philosophy who are then hunted relentlessly by the believers, but also twisting back on themselves to be crazy violent, therefore simultaneously a condemnation of the Qun and an affirmation of its necessity to keep Qunari from being violent. Where are the defectors from Andrastianism? Literally every ex-fundie Christian kid I know has had a sex and/or drug-fueled meltdown period after having their core beliefs and foundation obliterated. Why do we have all these pure innocent Chantry Virgins, but no defectors? The only atheist you get to meet is your own Inquisitor, and you have a HELL of a time through the whole game as a result of it. (Though I will say the payoff at the very end of the game is so very worth it.) Almost ALL of your companions nag you about why you don’t believe you’re Chosen. I have yet to play as a believer, but I haven’t seen any indications I would be criticized for it.

And so what of Andrastianism? Is it fakery? Lies? Canonically brought into existence to oppress people? The product of slavers?

NOT YET.

Any criticism brought against Andrastianism is neatly and shortly thereafter countered, not by an untrustworthy member of the Chantry but by some word-of-god canon itself. The Maker stands, silent, valid, unchallenged.

There’s nothing wrong with presenting these complex scenarios, but if you don’t have the time, resources, or courage to REALLY plumb these depths, give everyone fair criticism (and it is not fair to ding the predominant world religion with the same criticisms as you level against a dying minority religion), don’t bother. You make the real world problems worse.

#dragon age #am i irritated oh you bet #you think solas can talk you havent met me #the hilarious thing to me abt these games is the levels of which people would be able to relate to this rant #there might be one whole person who can snap to this #the majority of players esp ambivalent humans probably don't have a clue why i'm this passionate over the dumb chantry

4 notes · View notes

meanwhileinthebroomcloset · 5 years

Text

Mhm... This post was meant to be much shorter, honestly. Not to mention it got super personal, which was not my intention. It actually made me a bit teary-eyed and I’m usually an emotional constipated dumbass.

Am I ready for the potential backlash this is going to cause? Eh, probably not. Am I going to engage in the discourse this can cause? Ah, you wished. I have more to waste my energy on. I didn’t write this post to argument with anyone, anyway.

Gonna risk it, still.

-----------------------------------------

Isn’t it kind of ironic that it was witchcraft that made me fully return to Catholicism?

I mean, I kind of never left, hence the ‘’fully’’ in that sentence. But now I really know who I am. Although I don’t think Catholicism is the most accurate label (Christo-pagan, perhaps?) it’s the one I grew up with, and the one that comes more naturally to me.

Studying the beginning of it all, the commentaries of Pagans and Jewish writers at the time are just so fascinating and honestly beautiful.

Then everybody started chasing and killing each order, and it sure wasn’t fascinating anymore.... ‘’Stop being murderous revenge-driven assholes’’ I angrily mutter into my book, while frying my brains for High Middle Ages exams.

And then it split into Catholicism and Arianism (not that Arianism! The no-holy-trinity-on-my-watch one), and that was a totally different can of worms. Then Rome got pissy and the Orthodox Church officially became a thing that existed.

Man, why is religion so messy?

Faith is such a strange thing. So much power, so much potential for good and evil and everything in between. I started losing mine some years ago.

Contrary to some horror stories you may hear, especially from people who are now no longer Christian, I was raised in a pretty open environment.

‘’Don’t be mean, have faith, give second chances... Here are the commandments. They’re perfectly acceptable, see?’’

‘’Yes, there are different religions, but you should always respect them and the people that believe in them. Remember, Jesus was Jewish. Here’s some historical context... ‘’

‘’What the hell kid, nobody here is going to hell. Also, you’re five, there are no children in hell. No, the cops also won’t... Lord give me patience... Are you sorry? Did you apologize? Are you going to try to not repeat it? Great! Then it’s all fine and dandy!’’

‘‘Man, we are definitely all going to hell... At least since we’re all gonna be there, we could form a basketball team. The devil can be the referee. He will be an awful one, but hey, we’re in hell’‘

‘’I know the bible says the earth was created in seven days, but when that story was written, people didn’t know dinosaurs were a thing. Science is cool, and we are not in the middle ages. ‘’

‘’Blind faith is dangerous, kid.’’

‘’Thinking thoughts and acting upon them are two very different things.’’

‘’Yes, the second mom in that Solomon story was willing to see another kid die for the sake of an argument... sometimes people are that bad.’’

‘’God is perfect. People aren’t. That’s the world we live in and it’s okay.’’

‘’There are people who do terrible things in name of religion or say they’re doing it because the bible says so. Don’t believe them. There’s no excuse for murder and abuse.’’

‘’Yeah, Portugal is very enthusiastic when it comes to Catholicism... ’’

Pretty good summary of religion in my childhood.

Still, I found my faith waning. I didn’t really know why and I’m still a bit iffy talking about that.

‘’What did witchcraft do, then?’’

Well for once, it reinforced my ideas on how faith worked, and how strangely powerful it can be. Being skeptical is healthy but completely closing yourself off because something isn’t completely clear is too radical and you're just doing the equivalent of closing your eyes to the less brighter lights.

My god, I can hear the hardcore atheists coming...

Can I remind you there are more things in life that will not provide the proof you want, but that won’t mean they aren’t there? Relationships. Relationships are too complicated to have straight answers, a lot of the times. People hide their feelings, they fake them, express them and react to them differently. There are so many things we don’t understand or know about yet, like space and organisms that live on this Earth.

Sometimes what you need is a different approach to see they exist! It’s one of the things I learned with witchcraft.

There was also the religion itself. As I worked on my magic, I started seeing magic around me again. Not just with gods I had never considered and the one I was leaving behind, but with the faith I had always known.

The affection when someone says ‘’Our Lady’’ when talking about the Virgin Mary, my family calling upon Saint Barbara when thunder comes, children screeching excitedly because the Compasso has arrived to give us the news that Jesus has come to life again in Easter, the marble cemeteries, the comforting prayers, the masses I couldn’t ear because the local church’s echo is terrible, those boring long-ass weddings (oh my god, how many blessings do two people need?!), the loving dedication I see in every saint carved, my church's priest’s good humor... I never owned a rosary, but I always like the ones my aunts and grandparents keep.

I found Christian and Catholic witches on this site and I finally got to my conclusion. It’s really there. I just needed a different approach to it!

These things made me believe again, but also in new things.

‘‘But you can’t do that! You can’t combine magic and christianity’‘

Oh, watch me. And also watch the centuries of cunning women and witches in European history and those still alive today. The women that make ‘’mezinhas’’ and other types of favors in Portugal sure as hell are doing witchcraft, but you can bet your ass they don’t think they’re any less Catholic than anyone else. They don’t care about your opinions and I will hopefully do the same.

Relationships with deities are personal, and my relationship with God, Jesus and all of them is no different in that regard. I am a witch, I am human, I am catholic. I’m a follower, not a fucking mindless sheep.

You know what? I always compared God to Aslan. The lion wasn’t always there for Narnia, he wanted his people to solve their problems on their own. Get their independence, as a good parent does. They both don’t come up all mighty, that’s a posture reserved for evil and people who need a good slap in the face. They come to your level. God may come through one of the less eldritch abomination looking angels, though...

‘‘Well, if you have god, you shouldn’t need anything more. He's everthing. Why are you also a witch?’‘

Excuse me, do I look like a goddamned saint to you?! What part of human did you not understand?

And before you bitterly start quoting the Old Testament, let me remind you that it’s Old for a reason. Christ came to this earth to give us new rules since he technically saved us and things became different. That’s why Jewish people follow the Old Testament, for them, the messiah hasn’t arrived yet. Not to mention that to them that testament is not Old, it’s just the Torah.

You can keep quoting the bible to me all you want. But in my short twenty years of life, I was thankfully able to learn a few things. One of them is that the world isn’t black and white. Yes, I know this sounds obvious but there are some really dumb people out there. Also, this is the hellscape that we call tumblr.

Anyway, as I have mentioned several times before, I’m a never-ending knowledge seeker I found the world beneath my feet is not pure myth and I want to explore it. Look at me go.

I keep a critical mind with everything. Faith and religion are not an exception. I’m not overly skeptic about faith itself, but I am of its writings, interpretations, translations and etc... I study history, it’s a skill you naturally develop.

And there’s quite a few plot-holes, characterization differences and much more. It was written by humans that couldn’t do a cohesive collaboration even if their lives depended on it. Godphones sometimes don’t get a good reception. There’s a ton of cultural context to unpack. I hear people saying all the time that taking the bible’s words literally is one of the most stupid things you can do.

And when I say people, I mean priests, clergy, theology students, etc... I didn’t hear this from my drug dealer in the street corner..

...... I don’t have a drug dealer.....

Anyway...

There are many problems with the catholic church. There are many problems with a ton of catholic and christians out there. I will never deny that. Shit needs to get fixed and maybe even chucked into the trash.

But I still believe in God, I still believe in the saints but I also still believe there are more gods and spirits out there. And those things are separate.

I have no interest in converting you. I’m just yelling into the void.

If you are one of those that no longer is a christian, or catholic because some dipshits banged self-hate onto your head, I’m really sorry. I hope you heal well and get the help you need in your new faith or lack of it. Banging the ten commandments back onto their heads repetiedly and tell them to actually read the damn book is optional, though.

In the end, if you are (or are trying) to be good, you deserve respect and freedom to worship whoever or whatever you want. You don’t need to be perfect, you can just strive to be the best you can be in your situation.

--------------------------------------------

And now back to our schedueled programing.

#well #that was a thing #rant #christian witch #catholic witch

12 notes · View notes

dailyaudiobible · 5 years

Text

02/12/2020 DAB Transcript

Exodus 34:1-35:9, Matthew 27:15-31, Psalms 33:12-22, Proverbs 9:1-6

Today is the 12th day of February, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian it's great to be here with you as we move through the center of the week and toward the back half. And we will continue in the book of Exodus today with the drama that is taking place in the desert - God giving the laws, people building golden calves and worshiping them and claiming they were there Redeemer, broken covenants, all kinds of stuff happening as we watch the turmoil of something new being created. And that something new is the culture surrounding God's chosen people. So, today Exodus chapter 34 verse 1 through 35 verse 9.

Commentary:

Okay. We have a really interesting contrast between old and new Testaments today that will help us understand the Bible, the story that we’re telling here, but will also help us look at our own lives and understand some things. So, Moses has been a top Mount Sinai he's come back down with some newly freshly hewn tablets of stone with the covenant upon them and when the people see Moses his face is glowing, it’s radiant. He's been in God's presence and his face is radiant. So, the people are kind of freaked out about that and he puts a veil over his face because of this radiance. This veil, this particular one in this particular story is a really important piece for the apostle Paul. He talks about it and essentially his conclusion is that God gave a perfect law that subsequently was read through a veil, which is how the people much later in the New Testament times could miss that God incarnate, was among us and miss it to the point of killing him. So, let's pause here for second. We’re reading through the book of Exodus, lots of rules and regulations and stipulations and instructions. All this kinda stuff is going on. And, so, we can read some of these instructions ago, like “I don't like. I don't even…how do you…I don’t even know how I can obey that command. It's such a strange thing.” And that's us kind of reading our modern culture into an ancient text. These people all understood what was going on. But what we often miss and what the apostle Paul claimed that the Hebrew people were missing, this veil, is that underneath the rules, underneath the law, is the spirit of the law - a reason that the stipulation should exist and that way for that stipulation to point back to why it exists, right? So, that’s sort of confusing but let's just take a stop sign because this applies today. The spirit of the law of a stop sign is that if you indiscriminately drive through intersections you will one day kill somebody or yourself. If everybody just knew and paid attention to that then we would always slow down and we wouldn't need the law or the sign. But since we drive all kinds of places that we don't necessarily know or understand we know that a stop sign is informing us for our own safety and everyone else's safety to stop. If you forgot that or if you forgot the reason or if you were never told the reason, then you would question the rule and maybe ignore the stop sign to your own peril. What God is doing in the book of Exodus as He begins to lay out these instructions and organize his people in a certain way is to initiate in every rule and regulation something that points back to who they are and who He is. It's being woven into the culture so that all that they do is centered around being the chosen people of God, a nation of priests to minister to the world to show all of the nations who have given themselves to the lesser lower false gods who the most high is. And, so, all of the things that they're being instructed to do is baking this into their culture so that they are constantly reminded. Okay. So, that's this spirit of the thing. But if we ignore the spirit…the reason for these things and just look at these rules, yeah, we can look at them and go, “what…like what…what a strange rule for an ancient people”, but we can see that over time they lose this plot and it becomes about focusing upon and deciphering and dissecting exactly how to obey these rules. This is the veil that Paul’s talking about - the letter of the law, obey the rules, find the perfect way to obey the rules as opposed to the spirit of the law, why these rules exist and what their purpose is, because their purpose is to order life in such a way that everything reminds us of who we are because the world will take that away from us. And these rules are here to show us who God is because there are many competitors.

Okay. Now we zoom forward into the book of Matthew today and what do we see besides Jesus on trial, instigated by the religious leaders, the keepers of the law. And, indeed, Paul's analogy would be right. They were veiled, they were worshiping the law. They were worshiping the rules and the power that came from that and missing that God was before them in person. Okay. So, you can go, “that's pretty cool. That…like…that’s…that's an understanding that connects some dots. That's helpful. What does that actually mean for like my life though besides just a…like an understanding?” I mean when you think about your faith, certainly yes, more of God's presence and…and a deeper…deeper relationship. But how is it that we often think that that could be achieved? Don't we look for the rules to follow? Don’t we look for somebody who…who appears to know what they're talking about to tell us what we’re supposed to do to get God on our side? And then often we’ll get into communities like that and we’ll find that there's differing opinions about different ways of obeying these rules. And, so, we get doctrine wars because it would be much too scary if we have something wrong. We’ve gotta defend what we think we've got right when underneath it all, no matter what rules we’re trying to obey, when underneath it all, there's the spirit of why they exist. And they exist to remind us who we are and to who the most-high God is. When we lose the plot here then we’ll go to battle with one another over the rules and then we’ll start resembling Pharisees and Sadducees. And we can get so enmeshed in this that all we’re focusing on is everybody else's sin and wrong and maybe missing that God is standing right in front of us, or maybe even worse, criticizing what God is doing in somebody else's life because it doesn't measure up, or fall in line with our own lives. It’s a pretty start picture we’re looking at in Matthew today. Jesus, God incarnate, stripped, wrapped in a purple robe and beaten senseless. If humanity can do that to God then, yeah, there's a veil. We’re not seeing clearly. And isn’t that what Jesus kept saying throughout the book of Matthew, “I’m looking for those with eyes to see.” And what our eyes are seeing in the book of Matthew is humanity doing the lowest, lowest, basest animal thing we will ever see described in the Bible, an attempt to kill God. So, we need to practice grace and mercy toward each other to love each other as ourselves to begin to remove this veil. We need to understand that the rules that God would give us are there to lead us to Him and they flow from wisdom. They are wise. But it's not about the rule, it's about the reason for it. The reason is to bring us and remind us in everything in every way who we are and who God is because if you hadn't noticed it gets confusing in the world. These rules are not because God needs control of your or anyone else's life. God is most high. He is all powerful. Everything flows from Him. He doesn't need control, He has control. And often the rules or the disciplines of our lives are intended to show us that, that we aren't in control. That's an illusion. The religious leaders of Jesus time were a little freaked out that Jesus could get too much momentum and upset this tenuous power share that was going on between Rome and the Hebrew people. They didn't surrender to God. They crucified him. And the sad thing is you can read it and go like, “I would never do that”, but we are all capable, especially when we lose the plot.

Prayer:

Father we’re trying our…our very, very best to stay focused in here and really, really receive from You the instructions that Your word gives us because we need that. It's murky to live in the world but try to not be of it. It's complicated as You well know. And we confess we lose the plot every day. We forget who we are and who You are all of the time. It can happen many times in a day because so often we’re just reacting, we’re just reacting to whatever comes our way, as opposed to this deep sense of abiding wisdom and the guidance of Your Holy Spirit, which helps us to not be reactive. Come Holy Spirit. May we see the voice of wisdom crying out from every corner of the globe at every intersection. May the veil be removed from our eyes so that we might see clearly Your kingdom in this world and our place in it. And we ask this in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website and it is ,home and it is where you find out what's going on around here, what's burning around the Global Campfire at any given time. So, yeah, stay tuned and stay connected there.

What is immediately going on around here is that the tomorrow is departure day. Tomorrow we will get on the big plane and start flying across oceans making our way into the land of the Bible where we will be meeting for the first time as…as the group in a few days in Ashdod by the sea in ancient Philistine, a fortress city by the Mediterranean Sea that's now a modern city in Israel. And that's where it all begins for the pilgrimage. And, so, as I’ve been saying for a couple of days, we’re raising the canopy a prayer over this and we’re not gonna. I mean, I’m doing the asking and I'm asking you to pray for us. We’re gonna be praying for us too and we’re gonna be praying for you too because that's just part of the rhythm of…this community is a community of prayer and man, we do that…we do that well. We do that well. And, so, I'm asking to raise a canopy a prayer over everything about this that has to happen to pull off an adventure like the one we’re gonna be on. So, we want to pray specifically for travel, vehicles, stamina, health, jetlag, technology, patience, long-suffering, everything that we would need to go across the world and travel together as a family for a couple weeks. That's what we’ll need. So, thank you for your prayers over that.

I've mentioned several days this is a virtual community and this is…even though we will physically be there in the land of the Bible and many of us will be there physically, we’re taking you along. I don't go anywhere without the Daily Audio Bible. It’s like attached to…to my life. So, we go everywhere together and that helps me, especially when I have to travel alone to not be lonely, but we’re going together. And, so, if you haven't…if you’re not following say for example the Daily Audio Bible Facebook page or Instagram, this is a good time to do that, you can find all of the links in the Community section at dailyaudiobible.com because we’re gonna posting things and posting pictures and videos and stuff as they happen. And, of course, I'll be sharing what we’re doing each day on the Daily Audio Bible. You can be there as it's happening to just see the different places that we’re talking about as we move through the Bible. And then next Saturday, it's the…it’s the 22nd of February we’ll be doing a live broadcast from the Sea of Galilee. Kinda gets us near the halfway point of the trip and we just debrief, we get together, but turn the cameras on for about an hour and…and just…and go live. And it just allows us interaction. The time difference is weird because we’ll be doing that at night and back in the United States it will be…it will be daytime. So, for example, we’ll be doing our live broadcast at 7:30 PM on the 22nd but back in Nashville here where I live, that’ll be 12:30 PM. So, just like lunchtime or that would be like 1:30 on the East Coast and 10:30 AM on the West Coast of the United States. And I don't have a time difference calendar in front of me right now, but all you have to do is just kinda Google the difference between where you are and Tel Aviv, Israel and find the hour difference and then you can kinda work it from there and that's when we'll be going live. So, make plans for that.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There is a link and it's on the homepage and I thank you profoundly for your partnership. If you’re using the app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer…prayer request or encouragement, you can hit the Hotline button in the app, or you can dial 877-942-4253.

And that is it for today. I am Brian I got a lot of packing to do so I’m gonna go do that. I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hi my name is Rodney and I was listening to the podcast and I think it was the 29th, I’m a little behind, but there was a young lady who had been dating someone for a while and they broke up and she just can’t seem to…to experience freedom from that relationship. And from someone who was in many relationships and hung onto them out of fear or out of loneliness when I should’ve been hanging on to God and realizing that He has my best in mind or connecting and fellowshipping with other believers, that cost me significantly, significantly and a lot of other people as well. So, I would encourage and just pray that you experience freedom if that’s what God wants you…I guess you never know if you will end up with this person but for right now it’s…if he’s with somebody else I just pray that you will experience freedom and joy and use this time for the good that God has for you, working on yourself, enjoying life, growing closer to Him, enjoying time with other believers. God loves you. God loves you and we love you and just pray for you that you will have joy in your heart. Amen.

Good morning Daily Audio Bible family my name is Vera and I’m new this is my first year I started in January due to Diana Davis, my sweet sister. I just wanted to let you know because I know all the prayers that have gone up for her and her family, her dear sons Michael and her…her dear son Elijah, but she has gone home, has gone home to be with our Lord Jesus. She’s totally healed now. Praise God and there will be a celebration for her life there because she’s impacted so many people. I just felt like you all needed to know because you have all prayed for her so much and the family and I know you all love her so much. She is a dear, dear friend and a dear, dear sister for all of us and she loved you all so much but like I said, she’s gone home to be with our Lord. And I thank and praise Him all that He’s done in her life and worked around her during this time. It was very hard, and I just thank you all for your prayers for her and I know Michael will probably let you…talk with you when you can. We love you all and…and thank you for your prayers and God be with you. Thank you, Brian and Jill for all you do because it really impacts so many people’s lives.

Good morning DAB family it’s Thursday, January the 7th. Today I want to pray for those who are trapped in religion that is not a knowledge of the heart of God. And my prayer is for freedom within the…within the framework that God has provided through His word. So, here goes. Heavenly Father my prayer today is for all of those who have been brought up in religious institutions where service to a ritual is followed as the way to your heart. Father, we know in Your word that You have set forth boundaries, guidelines, rules even for our own benefit, for our own protection out of Your love, but Father that is not the way to Your heart. So, help us to love You passionately and freely and with all of our heart soul, mind, and strength. Bring us together Father and help us to love you as little children should love a father and I pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Good morning Daily Audio Bible family this is Becky in Orlando. I would like to brag about my Lord Jesus Christ this morning. 11 years ago, I want to share the story with you for all those that are new listeners and perhaps those that have not heard my story. 11 years ago, I became a Christian. I was raised an atheist and I married somebody who was a believer. We were unequally yoked and he used to give me stories about Jesus and I would fall asleep to every one of the stories but I…we went to church and I enjoyed listening to the music and I liked watching the sign language interpreter because I had a background in sign language. And…and then I started thinking during of his church services about how…and afterward…how maybe that…maybe God caused the Big Bang and I started thinking about all this. I had been also told at 35 years old that I needed my…my baseline mammogram and I put it off I procrastinated and during that year while I was procrastinating and thinking about the big bang theory at all that good stuff I had a tumor that popped out of my hand then I needed to get my gallbladder out and then when I finally went in for my baseline mammogram at 36, guess what? They tell me that I had breast cancer. And I was so scared and I was all by myself with my husband in a state in Florida that I didn’t have any family in. And, so the morning before my surgery I asked at church, I asked my husband can we please go down and pray with the pastors, I’m really scared. And I’m going to tear up right now because I’m so thankful. I went down with the pastors, they put their hands on me. In my head I was praying to God and I thought, “oh my gosh. I said I’m so sorry if I…if you’re there and You are there and I haven’t believed in you all these years and I…

Dear DAB family calling from Europe wishing you a blessed 2020. I’ve just finished reading and listening to Brian’s wonderful words from seventh February. Brian you spoke about acquiring wisdom better than promotion. And you know what, this is where I am now. I had my year’s review with my boss who was asking me about promotion and moving along and the words I could only think of that came out of my words were “I need to train myself in God’s words and deeds.” I need to do a part-time schooling in that area. I’m not ready for a promotion. Also, I’ve been thinking __ what’s foolish in me __. Brian, that’s exactly what I had in my mind since January. Thank you very much and God bless you and family. I pray for Diana Davis and her boys. Thanking William for giving us news of his mother. Although it doesn’t look good, the Lord is asking us to continue praying and we’ll not cease. Harold, you’re my running buddy in Christ. I do very long runs twice a week and early in the morning around 530 you’ve been trying be it cold, snow, or rain. And you know what? I concentrate the first 5K of my running to God, listening to DAB and praying. I’m so elated afterwards that I do not see the time pass and finish my runs with praises to our God. I will put you in my prayers. God bless you all. Amen.

Hi Daily Audio Bible friends this is Leslie from Washington state and I’m calling today with a confession and a request for prayer. I recently got back from vacation and while I was on vacation I feel like I just did not put Christ first. This is my second trip through the Bible and like Brian says that each trip through really changes you. And I didn’t like who I was on vacation when I didn’t bring Jesus with me and bring them into my daily life. I still listened to Daily Audio Bible, but I did so in a halfhearted kind of perfunctory way – “I’m like having trouble sleeping, so I’ll just listen.”. Anyhow todays Scripture about the three servants really hit me hard. I defaulted to the third servant attitude again, where I’m motivated by fear of punishment instead of reaching and striving for God and due to morality and obedience for its own sake instead of for God’s sake. Anyhow friends, I’m facing a lot. I’m dealing with daily stress including a sick cat who I just can’t get away from and is crying in the background, my apologies. Anyhow, I’m sorry Lord, and I wanted to confess before my DAB family that I have failed, and I want to do better tomorrow. Thank you for changing me so profoundly last year. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

1 note · View note

emily-sarah · 5 years

Text

“Good Theology”

Over the past twenty two years of being involved in mostly Christian circles, especially the last three studying theology at a Christian post-secondary school, I have noticed that people are obsessed with “good theology.” I witnessed and overheard a lot of theological debate and conversations at college about concepts that before, I didn’t know even mattered at all. The Satisfaction Theory, Christus Victor, or Penal Substitution? Postmillenialism or amillenialism? And of course, the age old question: Calvinism or Armenianism?

I’m not discouraging these debates by any means. If there is a perfect time to work though what you believe about your faith, then it’s at Bible College. But what I noticed was that these debates were always concerned over what was “correct” and “good” and “sound” theology. What does that even mean? When I started to dive into theology, I realized that everyone’s theology about theology is different. I experienced that there are other people who believe different than me, and I’m pretty sure that we all like to think that what we believe is good theology. It makes us feel safe.

We are socialized to think in binaries. Good and bad. Right and wrong. Black and white. But I came to a point where those binaries really weren’t working for me anymore. Suddenly I saw all the grey areas in life and faith. And that really scared me, as a strong 1 on the Enneagram who sees nearly everything in the binary of “right” or “wrong.”

So, what quantifies “good theology?” There are people who believe that women should be pastors, and some who believe that they are to be silent in the church. And guess what - they can back their positions up using the same verses in the Bible! Which position is good and which is bad? Which is right, and which is wrong? Whether we like it or not, we read the Bible through our own lenses. I’ve become painfully aware of the lenses through which I see not just the Bible, but faith and God and life in general. And our lenses, just like our binaries, make us feel safe and secure. They affirm us of what we believe.

It was in this place and in this context that I began what a lot of people currently call “deconstructing.” Actually, that’s a nice way of putting it. What it really felt like, was my faith crumbling at its very foundation. I certainly didn’t plan to do this. It’s not like I saw this cool thing that fringe exvangelicals were going through and though, “Huh, I think I’m going to deconstruct too.” I have described this process as feeling like someone pulled the rug out from under my feet.

Like the scales fell from my eyes.

Like the veil was torn and I was faced with the great, overwhelming, eternal void of not knowing the right answer.

The simplest truths that I blindly accepted for my whole life became giant question marks in my mind. I started to realize just how diverse the faith community is, and that I could decide for myself what I believed. It was my faith, not my church, my school, my parents, or even my favourite Christian or spiritual authors’ faith. I began to see that many of the ideologies I’d grown up with were harmful to me and to others - exclusive, shaming, condemning. I began to think and ponder these things, and to have conversations with close friends about the big questions I was asking.

Why do we use male pronouns to address and describe God?

If the church is supposed to be a place of welcome and acceptance, then we do we close our doors to certain people?

If the Bible is written in an ancient, dead language, then how can we trust that our English translation is remotely inerrant or even infallible?

On a drive with a friend one day, we were in the middle of a conversation about our faith being shaken. We shared our stories and thoughts about how scary it was to be wandering out of our “camps” and wandering in to the grey areas. To be judged and receive criticism from our peers. To be labelled as a certain type of person, or certain type of Christian. On that drive I said to them, “The more I learn about God, the less I know about God. But the less I know about her, the closer I feel to her. God has never been more of a mystery to me than she is now, yet I have never known her or loved her more in my whole life. And I’ve never believed that I am loved and worthy of grace more in my whole life.”

I feel so human--so terribly imperfect--as I continue to wrestle with these big concepts like gender, sexuality, creation, heaven and hell. Sometimes I feel isolated. Most times I feel scared to open up so I keep my thoughts and questions to myself, wondering when the capacity in my mind for unanswered questions and for frustration with the Bible and evangelicalism will cap off.

And I may be wrong about a lot of things. In fact, much to the dismay of my ego and pride, I’m willing to say that I am definitely wrong about a lot of things. But it’s not about being right or wrong anymore. Christianity, to me, isn’t about being right and wrong. It’s about following Jesus. The Gospel isn’t about who’s in and who’s out. It’s about how God’s love is for everyone--the lost and the found, and everyone in between. Theology isn’t about what’s sound and what’s unsound, it’s about studying and devoting oneself to Love--to the divine.

There is beauty in the diversity of the Christian faith community. I’ve had to learn not to judge the people who believe the things I have let go of, or who believe in things that I still can’t quite reckon with. We’re all on a journey, and I believe that there is room at the table for everyone.

Call me liberal. Call me an angry feminist (it won’t be the first time.) Call me a heretic for all I care. Because I actually don’t care. If I’m right or wrong, it doesn’t make a difference to me. Who’s keeping tabs anyway? Love keeps no record of rights and wrongs. I don’t know much about Christian faith these days, but I do know that I truly love Jesus, and I do know that I want to extend his love and welcome and hospitality to others.

I opened my Bible for the first time in over a year to recall this verse from Psalm 51 that says, “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”

What a relief! God doesn’t need me to be perfect, or to have it all together. If the altar I’ve built for God is falling apart and I have to drag myself there, tired, bitter, confused, afraid, unsure of why I’m even there (and this is often the state I’m in) I’ll still be met with a Grand Embrace. My broken spirit is welcome. My contrite heart is welcome. My questions, doubts, fears, frustrations, anger and wandering are welcome.

#theology #heresy #thoughts #vulnerable #christianity #deconstruction #personal #essay

3 notes · View notes

varun-krishnan · 7 years

Text

High School: Good Luck Keeping Your Cool

Are you reading this because you have to or because you want to? Do you have the self-control to finish reading this paper if you wished? Or do you have the ability to rebel against reading this paper if you’re only looking at this sentence through obligation? These questions about control, rebellion, and independence are what thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche to W.E.B Du Bois implore us to answer. I don’t claim to have answered those questions; instead, I have explored them through the context of my life and the paradigm of cool. After all, in our society, the word cool is like a cellphone, people use it every day but have no idea of its inner workings. But by reflecting on the thoughts of those who have studied the word, and relating it to my own life, I can hope to unscrew the casing and at least glimpse what lies underneath.

I grew up in a high school that viewed class participation as a God, and everyone from the teachers to the students worshipped it as such. Your grade hinged on how you acted in class, and if you couldn’t speak up, you were going to be lacking a certain vowel on your transcript. Most of my peers and I were happily oblivious to our grades throughout middle school, and so class involvement was just an abstract idea floating beyond the horizon of reality. But as we walked into the jaws of high school, the pervasive stench of college applications began to affect everyone. Soon, I noticed that the classroom was a jungle of outstretched hands swaying back and forth for the teacher’s attention. People were making noise just for the sake of making noise so that subconsciously the instructor would think they were participating more. And don’t even get me started on how much “funnier” the teacher’s jokes suddenly got. I felt like I wasn’t surrounded by my friends anymore, but these alien life forms whose mission was to capture as much of the teacher’s attention as possible. The worst part is...I started turning into those unrecognizable creatures as well. I begin to tune out the material taught and instead, solely focused on what I was going to say next. I stopped refining and re-refining my thoughts in my head and instead, blurted half-baked thoughts as they spawned into my consciousness. I used to prize ideas that I contributed, but now I simply jumped from concept to concept without being committed to any of them. Perhaps worst of all, I hated all of it. I was despised and ashamed of how shallow and artificial I was, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to jump off the train because I had no idea where I’d land. Now I know, however, that I would have landed in the cool.

The rejecting of my individuality and acceptance of superficiality is profoundly uncool. Just look at Oscar Wilde who said “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation(De Profundis).” And he’s right. My classmates and I didn't love trigonometry or enjoy discussing some long-forgotten battle, but we sure acted like we did. Our thoughts sought to mirror that of our teachers and hence, we were no longer ourselves. And this hollow imitation we lived, through the lens of Oscar Wilde, was uncool. Oscar Wilde was far from the only person who recognized the importance of one’s identity. W.E.B Du Bois wrote about how his racially discriminated peers “shrunk into tasteless sycophancy(The Souls of Black Folk)” and how they failed to realize that for one “to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another(The Souls of Black Folk).” Were my friends and I too not tasteless sycophants seeking to flatter our way to a better grade? I, like many of Du Bois’ audience, thought I had to slip into the skin of someone else if I was to fit into the world. But Du Bois, just like Oscar Wilde, drew from the wells of cool to preach the importance of remaining true to yourself.

I gave up another aspect of myself during my high school experience: self-control. And in the bible of cool, there’s no greater sin than relinquishing control. For example, Robert Farris Thompson in his studying of the aesthetic of the cool argues “Control, stability, and composure...seem to constitute elements of an all-embracing aesthetic attitude(An Aesthetic of the Cool).” You would see none of those traits if you walked into my high school classrooms. I learned that being composed meant being unable to contribute your thoughts amid my unconstrained peers continually trying to make sound. Our class discussions were as shifting as the tides, and new waves steadily erupted as people tried to change the topic to what fell into their minds. And hence, I lost all self-control. I could no longer prevent myself from foregoing my tendency for careful thought and instead, succumbing to the mindless chatter around me. As Thompson would say, I no longer exhibited “the intelligent withholding of speech for the purposes of higher deliberation(An Aesthetic of the Cool),” and hence, I no longer fit into the definition of cool. Nietzsche too held the same notions about control when he said: “Virtues are as dangerous as vices in so far as one lets them rule over one as authorities and laws(The Will to Power).” Nietzsche argues that, just like how authorities and laws can control you, so do virtues. Being able to involve myself in school was always taught to me by my friends, my parents, my teachers, almost everyone really, as a beneficial value I must adopt. But as the German philosopher acutely points out, virtues can exert great control over you, and if you’re not careful, it can leave you like a marionette with loose strings for anyone to seize.

I’ve spent most of my life never rebelling, and I can never hope to find even signs pointing to the highway of cool if I haven’t shown defiance. I grew up in a household that revolved around risk, specifically how best to eradicate it. My father taught us that predictability would lead to success, which, in his eyes, meant doing well in school, becoming a doctor, and safely investing your money till retirement. He wanted to ensure our financial stability as we grew older and beseeched us to follow the well-beaten route to the top without getting distracted by the side trails continuously dotting the path. And hence, when faced with the choice to either jump in the boat with my classmates to float safely to an A, or to bid farewell and strike out on my own to explore the turbid tributaries, I, of course, chose the former. But that is wholly uncool.

The authors of Cool Rules put it succinctly when they wrote “Cool is an oppositional attitude adopted by individuals or small groups to express defiance state to authority(Cool Rules).” My injected sense of caution couldn’t have led me farther from the attitude Pountain and Robins are describing. The problem with defying authority is that it is inherently risky, and you never know the consequences of such an action. The thought of disobeying my teachers scared, and still does scare, me because you’re no longer on the surest path to success. But being in a “private rebellion(Cool Rules)” is critical to the art of cool, and without it you are, as Nietzsche would say, “a herd animal, something eager to please, sickly, and mediocre(Beyond Good and Evil).” And that’s a pretty accurate way to describe my classmates and me. Herd animals that are corralled by the teacher and graze on her approval. This sentiment is furthered by Oscar Wilde’s assertion that “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made(The Soul of Man Under Socialism).” For Wilde, disobedience is an integral part of humanity that has helped us continuously propel the wheel of progress forward. In his eyes, there was no progress in our classroom, no one was pushing the teacher to be her best self by questioning her, and in turn, no one was pushing us to become better by questioning us. Everyone simply said what everyone else wanted to hear, and as Wilde predicted, neither the teacher nor the student grew as a result. And if you can’t even find a way to grow in life, how do you expect to be cool?

Too many people say that they were the coolest when they were in high school. And yet, from studying the true meaning behind the word cool, I would say they couldn’t be farther from the truth. My high school ran off with my individuality and left me with only a threadbare blanket of superficiality with which to shamefully wrap myself. And, as both W.E.B Du Bois and Oscar Wilde described, individuality is central to a person's being. Furthermore, I lost my ability to control myself and was instead forced to sing a song I despised. This loss of self-control, in the eyes of Nietzsche, bound me down just like any law or authority figure would. Thompson too valued self-control, stating that if you can’t even teach yourself how to stay quiet, you can never hope to become cool. Finally, my dad’s instruction to always color in between the lines left me passive and obedient, adjectives that, in the eyes of Cool Rule’s authors, would be noticeably absent in any cool man’s dictionary. Hence, no matter how cool I, or any of my classmates, thought we were in high school the thinkers who actually analyzed the essence of the word would only smile(well maybe not Nietzsche) and shake their heads in dissent.

6 notes · View notes

surveysonfleek · 7 years

Text

574.

5000 Question Survey Pt. 35

3301. When someone is 'crazy' why do we call them 'nuts' or 'fruitcakes'? i actually have no idea. 3302. What's the dillio? oh no... i hope this survey isn’t gna be full of nonsense questions like this. 3303. Where did the slang term 'dillio' come from? idk, google it. 3304. How many even whole numbers are there between -5 and 5? idk. 3305. What words can you make useing only these letters: E N O? one, neo, eon... i think that’s it?

3306. What's the differance between foods that are low fat and foods that are lite? i’m assuming light foods like have more fat in it idk. 3307. White or brown rise? did you mean rice? lol. 3308. Can you be content if you are physically uncomfortable? i guess so. if you don’t plan to be physically ‘comfortable’, isn’t that being content? 3309. What is the differance between discomfort and pain? i’m assuming pain is more uncomfortable. 3310. What is the most uncomfortable thing you can think of? being around someone that smells with no escape. 3311. What do these names make you think of: britney spears? walt whitman? buddah? william shakespere? pablo picasso? adam ant? franz kafka? nietzche? madonna? orson scott card? frieda kahlo? god? salvidor dali? david bowie? jesus? lars ulrich? jim henson? cbf answering. plus many of these names are spelt wrong. 3312. What are your favorite games to play? cranium, taboo, the resistance, codenames, monopoly etc. i just like board games i guess. 3313. Are you quick to judge something as stupid just because you don't understand it? nope. 3314. Are you obnoxious to others? no, unless they’re being obnoxious to me. 3315. Do you feel superior to anyone? no. 3316. Shouldn't people take a good look at themselves before they criticize others? they should but they don’t. 3317. Which is better and why: writing or saying obnoxious things about someone who isn't around to defend themselves or saying it straight to them? saying it straight to them. i hate finding out that people have talked about me behind my back and don’t have the courage to just say it to my face. Which do YOU do more often? i’m not an obnoxious person, but i’d say saying it straight to someone’s face. 3318. Do you appologize too often? eh, not really. 3319. Does your mind play tricks on you? sometimes. 3320. Have you read (any of): the bible? only this. the koran? the torah? the kama sutra? the satanic bible? Are these mystical texts or historical ones? they can be taken as both. 3321. Do you own any possessions that you hide from parents, friends, visitors? nope. What? - 3322. Why does the cheese stand alone? idk. 3323. Do you watch any soaps? no. 3324. Have you learned something new today? yes. 3325. Do you believe in an 'oversoul' of all humanity? eh, never heard of it. 3326. Have you invented your own style, just for you? well i guess so. i just wear what i want. 3327. have you invented your own religion, just for you? nope. 3328. What files have you recently downloaded? e-books for my kindle. 3329. Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard but I think: they should be heard too. 3330. Do you dance around a lot? no. 3331. Is the unexamined life worth living or not? why not. 3332. What are you like when you're at your most beautiful? haha i have no idea. 3333. What are you like when you are at your worst? probably a blubbering mess. 3334. Why do you hide things about yourself? i don’t usually tbh. 3335. Why is anything 'too personal' to talk to others about? it just means they’re not comfortable enough to talk about it with others. 3336. Why should we be embarressed, afraid, or appologetic for ANYTHING we think, say or do? it’s just the way society works. 3337. Can true freedom exist in this world of doubt and guilt? to some individuals, yes. 3338. What do you have no control over? the dollar. 3339. Do you own a vibrating pillow? no lol wtf. How about a vibrating back massager? we have one somewhere in the house. 3340. Can you dance away your emotional pain? sure. 3341. When you dance is it a celebration of life? you can put it that way i guess. 3342. When do you feel the most immortal? que? 3343. Are you more of a painting, a poem or a song? painting. 3344. Is lonliness a crowded room full of open hearts turned to stone? possibly. 3345. Is YOUR heart ever stone? no. 3346. Are we alltogether all alone? idk. 3347. Does life end in a happily ever after way? idk. 3348. What's the warmest part of your body? my neck. 3349. Are you more verbal or visual? visual. 3350. What do you long for? happiness. 3351. True or false: When someone hates you it is because: they're jealous of you? false. the things you say are frightening to them because what you say makes them think about things they would rather avoid thinking about? w t f. they don't understand you? bye. 3352. True or false: When you hate someone it is because: you're jealous of them? false. the things they say are frightening to you because what they say makes them think about things you would rather avoid thinking about? you don't understand them? 3353. Have you ever been fascinated by someone who hated you? nope. 3354. Since the human brain has defense mechanisms against feeling bad (meaning the brain lies to itself to avoid feeling bad about something it said or did) how can we ever know if we are truly being honest? just ignore the damn mechanisms and take it for what it is. How do we know our brains are not tricking us into believeing we are good people when we aren't all good? we don’t know, so whatever. 3355. How highly do you value innovation? very much so. 3356. Is there a name where all the people you've ever met haveing that name had something in common with each other(ex. all the jens you've ever met had blue eyes)? nope. 3357. Are you focused more outward or inward? outward. 3358. What is the most affectionate nickname you ever came up with for someone? haha idk. 3359. Are the questions STILL still interesting this deep into the survey? no, sorry. i’m getting really bored of them but i’m too far in to give up. 3360. If someone else makes their desicions based on their intuition instead of on facts and proofs what do you think of that person? that’s fine. it’s their life. 3361. Do you trust your own intuition? yes. 3362. Finish the phrase... danger is the: just keep: never trust: the way I live my life: don't change: maybe someday: no. 3363. Would you rather live in Frodo's world or Harry Potter's? harry potter’s. 3364. Do you believe that the dead are with us? in some ways. If yes in what form? memory. 3365. Do you believe that those who haven't been born are with us? possibly. If yes, in what form? dreams. 3366. Are you made of timid stuff? no. 3367. Is there anyone in this world who is not CRAZY? yes. 3368. What word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it? shorter. 3369. Can you mashed potatoe? lame. Can you do the twist? lame. 3370. What does your family do for thanksgiving..or if you don't celebrate it what do you picture when you think of thanksgiving? i picture family gathering together and having a huge feast and sharing what they’re thankful for. 3371. What is your earliest memory? running to my dad after coming back from vacation with my mum. 3372. Have you ever taken an IQ test? yes. What'd you get? i forgot. i’d probably do one again. What do you think of those things? no that accurate since i just do them online. 3373. How do you make 'fishcakes'? idk. Put the potatoe in the fish... cool. 3374. Which is the better band..the offspring or the damned? i don’t listen to either. 3375. Do you ever think about world destruction? not really. 3376. Do you think humans are becoming more robotic? yes. 3377. Do you think we'll ever be replaced by robots? it’s possible. some jobs are being replaced by robots. 3378. What do you feel a part of? my family. 3379. Does it freak you out to know that yogurt is ALiVe?? no. 3380. What current band d o you think is doing something particularly interesting or innovative? majid jordan. 3381. Golf course, do you remember? what. 3382. Which is more important, books and cleverness or friendship and bravery? friendship and bravery. 3383. If i promise to miss you, will you go away? no. 3384. stool, ball, powder...Can you think of a 4th word that connects these three? no. 3385. Who's afraid of the big bad wolf? no. 3386. Why are blondes considered 'dumb'? idk. 3387. What's more important..intuitiveness/creativity or factual knowledge and practicallity? i possess creativity and practicality so idk. 3388. Who are the two worst terrorists you can think of? they’re all terrible people. 3389. What is jello made of? gelatin. 3390. Pick a country: australia. What do you believe is wrong with that country? everything. we are so backwards, it kills my life. 3391. Do you have strong opinions? yes. 3392. Do you do what it takes to stand up for those opinions? yes. especially when people are arguing over something they have no knowledge about. 3393. Have you ever been to a rally, protest or demonstration? no. If yes was it effective and in what ways? 3394. When people say, 'yeah it sucks but there's nothing I can do' do you believe them? it depends what the situation is. 3395. Do you know what you can do to make this world a better place? sure. Do you care? yes. 3396. Why is peace so important anyway? it’s not like it isn’t important? Why is freedom important? everyone has the right to be free. 3397. As long as you have your house and your family and you can go to the movies and the mall who cares about peace and freedom. Right? wrong. 3398.Do you try to avoid anything involving work? no. 3399. If you are not actively wrking to stop the horrors and injustices of the world (war, hunger, poverty) than aren't you partially responsible for them? thanks for assuming i’m not doing anything.... 3400. Are you in denial? nope.

#survey #surveys #quiz #bored #questions

2 notes · View notes

theadmiringbog · 5 years

Photo

I also decided, a few months ago, to read the Bible on my own—three or four pages a day. But that early stuff was boring and the clock was ticking, so to speak, so I moved on to a timely novel, Left Behind, and made it through enough of that to warn you: Never read it. Believe me. Since then, I’ve tried to talk to God a lot more and to sin a lot less. Had a hard time doing either.

Some worry the computers will revolt at midnight, unable to comprehend the year 2000. Each machine’s rebellion will spark some small catastrophe: Planes, unable to find their way, will fling themselves down to earth—darkened earth, since streetlights will not heed commands to glow past midnight. Dams and sewers will surrender to the water’s long-held wish to flow all over the place, all over the people, who will not be warned because the telephones will not connect them to each other anymore. They will have only themselves. Won’t even have money, except whatever cash is on hand, since bank accounts will reset to 1900, when everybody was broke. They will be broke again tonight, and hungry, too, as many grocery shelves have been emptied. Oh, sinnerman. The worst is yet to come. Plagues. Riots. An atom bomb or two on accident, and more: a lake of fire where each sinnerman and sinnerwoman and sinnerchild (twelve years and older) will swim, ablaze, forever and ever.

How exactly would Jesus have kept coming back again and again, based on the different time zones? Hadn’t thought of that.

A great man is an inconvenience as a father, in part because every boy wants to be a man (until it happens), his own man, and that is hard enough to do without everybody calling you the son of somebody.

My mother never made any sense to me and that’s what I liked about her.

Every other adult seemed desperately committed to making sense. They were all headed somewhere in a hurry, and on their way they always had to tell me that I didn’t have my shirt on right or that I needed to lotion my ashy knees, that I was talking too much, too loud, or not correctly, that I had better stay out of their high heels, that I needed to put on deodorant, that I had to either come inside or go outside but choose because I was wasting the air-conditioning and running up the electric bill.

I’m not saying she was perfect, just that I sure benefited from her imperfections. Maybe that’s what magic is: a useful mistake.

I’m holding the back of the driver’s seat so I can see the white line guide our tires through the rain. I would put this pen down. I would close my bank account and give my monies to the poor. I would ask the Lord to still my voice so I never say another word if I could only sit there in the storm and watch that line again, forever.

Casey! She shot up like Thomas A. Edison himself had run the world’s best electricity through her bones. What did I say?!?

I could never fully make out what she said when she put this stuff on, since she always pulled her mouth tight like she was placing the last bolt in the Brooklyn Bridge and didn’t want to kill a million people by losing focus.

Okay gentlemen y’all watch me now I’ma do what I gotta do soon as I figure out what I gotta do! ��

Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of a slippery slope and find, instead, a cliff. Maybe that’s what happened to them that night or maybe, bless their hearts, they had spent a great deal of energy keeping it together—since my tenth birthday, since the seizure, since the beauty convention or the move to Columbus or the first time they met. Who knows? It’s amazing, either way, how quickly you can become a thing you’d never thought of being and may not even want to be.

I’ve come to believe that the general role of school in American life is to introduce young boys and girls to inescapable misery at an early age so they won’t complain too much when they reach the workforce.

That’s the image I see now, the one that feels true. A little boy with a heavy sack on his shoulder. He’s trying to get somewhere but doesn’t know where exactly, or how. This sack is so heavy he’s starting to limp and he can’t go any further. He stops on the side of the trail and sits down on a rock. The cool night wind feels gentle on his aching neck. He unties the heavy sack and looks at all the things he’s been carrying. He smiles. No wonder this walk has been so hard. He decides to leave some of the things here on the trail—the heaviest things, the jagged things, the things whose use he doesn’t know. These are the things that he takes out first. He sees a stick nearby and uses it to dig a hole next to the rock. In the hole, he buries the things in his sack that hurt too much to carry. He doesn’t know he will need them later. Doesn’t know that they will wash up in the next rains. For now, all that matters is that his limp is gone and his sack is light and he’s on his way—I’m free.

Yet my rabid search for the person of Jesus, for the path to Him and, through Him, to the next life, was also shaped in those years by a desperate need for something not to fail me.

Even in the most meaningless worlds there are places of privilege.

The only thing worse than being an insignificant member of something is to not be a member of anything. Jefferson should have put that right in the Declaration, so true is it of life in this country.

This was the first time I learned how far you can make it in America if you have enough disregard for your personal welfare. Maybe that’s why football is the national pastime.

When I think about this little coincidence, I realize Jimmy Bishop was the first person I’d ever met who had left Oak Cliff and stayed gone for a good reason, and Gloria Bishop was the first parent I’d met whose questions didn’t make me sick, and Alex and Avery Bishop were the first perfect black boys I’d met that didn’t make me want to punch them in the face. And all these firsts ope’d a space for me to consider, even if I could not know for sure, that here at the other end of the world there might be yet a little room for me.

Every journey is really two journeys: a going-to and a going-away.

But I felt in the hands of the men and heard in the voices of the women and saw in the eyes of the little children that if I went all the way, then they would go, too. And it seemed that they had been waiting so long to go.

Never eat alone.

That’s what the man says. Yale has brought him to offer wisdom and a free book to its new sons and daughters. This is his message. Every meal is an opportunity to build a new relationship. To grow your network, which becomes your net worth. Say hello. Smile. Send a note. Get out of your room. Share your interests. Your passions. Your projects. Offer help. No, don’t offer help—help. Contribute. Suggest. Put your money in the bank of people. Invest it. Watch it grow. Write a check on it someday. You are here to win. Win the people first. The rest will follow. You don’t yet know you will win fewer people than perhaps any freshman in the history of Yale College. So you listen to the man. You never eat alone.

Well, the truth is that I was nineteen, so can’t be too sure what exactly I wanted. Not even Jesus knew what He wanted when He was nineteen, which may be why there’s nothing in the Bible about that time in His youth.

The trend at Yale and other colleges to have enough leaders to satisfy everybody’s parents and destroy all hope that anything would ever be accomplished.

“The best revenge is excellence.”

I’m talking about the real American Dream, the way the country actually works: If you know the right people, they can help you do anything, be anybody, rules and hard work be damned—as long as they like you. They do have to like you, and that takes a good deal of work.

I was paid great wads of US dollars just to sit at a desk from seven in the morning to eight or nine or ten at night and do what almost everybody else does at work for much less money: try to avoid actual work, and try to keep your boss from figuring out you don’t know what you’re doing.

In the rush to decry the silly and dangerous aspects of this sport, the critics miss a vital fact: these boys, these coaches, are often not just brutes in tights and screaming maniacs, but family—and family does not come easy in America.

But for the rest of my time at Yale it was as if he had let a river run between us and walked away from the other side. Or did he stand there, waiting to see if I would swim across?

Had learned, without reading a single page of Machiavelli, that a great man cannot be a good man.

#There Will Be No Miracles Here #books

0 notes

revpauljbern · 6 years

Text

The toolbox for the Beast of Revelation is being revealed!

Nine Unnerving New Technologies That

Big Brother Wants to Implant Inside You

by Pastor Paul J. Bern

For better viewing on portable devices or my website, click here :-)

The world we live in is finally starting to catch up with the book of Revelation in the back of the Bible. That would also include the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Zechariah, among others. Thousands of years ago, God declared through his prophets that in the last days there would be an explosion of knowledge, and that the sealed books given to the prophet Daniel at the conclusion of his writings would be opened. "But you, Daniel, close up and seal the words of the scroll until the time of the end. Many shall go here and there to increase knowledge." Daniel 12:4 He also said that as this was happening, a man of dark countenance would rise and deceive the whole world. That would include the Antichrist, who has not yet come to power.

As you read this, we stand poised on the razor's edge of prophetical history. One group, the blood-bought redeemed of the Lord Jesus Christ, wait in anticipation of the Blessed Hope found in Titus 2:13, as it is written: "... while we wait for the blessed hope – the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ." Everyone else is unwittingly waiting for the Man of Sin, the Antichrist in the flesh, to step out of the shadows and onto the world stage. Our question to you is this – which group are you in? "He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name." Revelation 13:16,17. If I were you, I'd place myself squarely into the former.

Wearable technology is right around the corner, there is no stopping it. Now don't get me wrong – I'm all in favor of technology. My consistent use of the internet is indicative of that fact. I'm a retired IT guy, I was in that business for 21 years, so I'm quite comfortable with technology. What makes me uncomfortable is the huge potential for abuse if what I'm about to describe were to get into the wrong hands. “Wearables” will have their moment in the sun, but they're simply a transition technology. This technology will move from existing outside our bodies to residing inside us. That's the next big frontier. Here are nine signs that implantable tech is here now, growing rapidly, and that it will be part of your life (and your body) in the near future. Unless, of course, you choose to resist as I do.

1. Implantable smartphones

Sure, we're virtually connected to our phones 24/7 now, but what if we were actually connected to our phones? That's already starting to happen. Last year, for instance, artist Anthony Antonellis had an RFID chip embedded in his arm that could store and transfer art to his handheld smartphone. But what takes the place of the screen if the phone is inside you? Techs at Auto-desk are experimenting with a system that can display images through artificial skin. Or the images may appear in your eye implants. So these scientists and engineers want to turn your eyeballs into a screen. Nice! Researchers are also experimenting with embedded sensors that turn human bone into living speakers. Other scientists are working on eye implants that let an image be captured with a blink and transmitted to any local storage (such as that arm-borne RFID chip).

2. Healing chips

Right now, patients are using cyber-implants that tie directly to smartphone apps to monitor and treat diseases. A new bionic pancreas being tested at Boston University, for instance, has a tiny sensor on an implantable needle that talks directly to a smartphone app to monitor blood-sugar levels for diabetics. Scientists in London are developing swallow-able capsule-sized circuits that monitor fat levels in obese patients and generate genetic material that makes them feel "full". It has potential as an alternative to current surgery or other invasive ways to handle gross obesity. Dozens of other medical issues from heart murmurs to anxiety have implant/phone initiatives under way.

3. Cyber pills that talk to your doctor

“Implantables” won’t just communicate with your phone; they’ll email your doctor, too. In a project named Proteus, after the tiny body-navigating vessel in the film Fantastic Voyage, a British research team is developing cyber-pills with microprocessors in them that can text doctors directly from inside your body. The pills can share (literally) inside info to help doctors know if you are taking your medication properly and if it is having the desired effect.

4. Bill Gates' implantable birth control

The Gates Foundation is supporting an MIT project to create an implantable female compu-contraceptive controlled by an external remote control. The tiny chip generates small amounts of contraceptive hormone from within the woman's body for up to 16 years. Implantation is no more invasive than a tattoo. And, "The ability to turn the device on and off provides a certain convenience factor for those who are planning their family.", said Dr Robert Farra of MIT. This is sure to give losing the remote a whole new meaning.

5. Smart tattoos

Tattoos are hip and seemingly ubiquitous, so why not smart, digital tattoos that not only look cool, but can also perform useful tasks, like unlocking your car or entering mobile phone codes with a finger-point? Researchers at the University of Illinois have crafted an implantable skin mesh of computer fibers thinner than a human hair that can monitor your body's inner workings from the surface. A company called Dangerous Things has an NFC chip that can be embedded in a finger through a tattoo-like process, letting you unlock things or enter codes simply by pointing. A Texas research group has developed micro-particles that can be injected just under the skin, like tattoo ink, and can track body processes.

6. Brain-computer interface

Having the human brain linked directly to computers is the dream (or nightmare) of sci-fi. But now, a team at Brown University called Brain Gate is at the forefront of the real-world movement to link human brains directly to computers for a host of uses. As the Brain Gate website says, "using a baby aspirin-sized array of electrodes implanted into the brain, early research from the Brain Gate team has shown that the neural signals can be ‘decoded' by a computer in real-time and used to operate external devices." Chip maker Intel predicts practical computer-brain interfaces by 2020. Intel scientist Dean Pomerleau said in a recent article, "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts." OK, but what if the user's brain gets a computer virus? What will we do then, wipe their memories??

7. Melt-able bio-batteries

One of the challenges for implantable tech has been how to get power to devices tethered inside or floating around in human bodies. You can't plug them in. You can't easily take them out to replace a battery. A team at Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is working on biodegradable batteries. They generate power inside the body, transmit it wirelessly where it's needed, and then simply melt away. Another project is looking at how to use the body’s own glucose to generate power for implantables. Think the potato battery of grammar school science, but smaller and much more advanced.

8. Smart dust

Perhaps the most startling of current implantable innovations is smart dust, arrays of full computers with antennas, each much smaller than a grain of sand, that can organize themselves inside the body into as-needed networks to power a whole range of complex internal processes. Imagine swarms of these nano-devices, called motes, attacking early cancer or bringing pain relief to a wound or even storing critical personal information in a manner that is deeply encrypted and hard to hack. But not impossible. With smart dust, doctors will be able to act inside your body without opening you up, and information could be stored inside you, deeply encrypted, until you unlocked it from your very personal nano-network.

9. The verified self

Implantables hammer against social norms. They raise privacy issues and even point to a larger potential dystopia. Already, the US military has serious programs afoot to equip soldiers with implanted RFID chips, so keeping track of troops becomes automatic and worldwide. Many social critics believe the expansion of this kind of ID is inevitable. Some see it as a positive: improved crime fighting, universal secure elections, a positive revolution in medical information and response, and never a lost child again. Others see the perfect Orwellian society: a Big Brother who, knowing all and seeing all, can control all. And some see the first big, fatal step toward the Singularity, that moment when humanity turns its future over to software.

I don't know about you, but to me that is unacceptable for the reasons I've already stated. Plus, I have another reason for never being willing to surrender my future to software. My future is spending an eternity with the Man who saved my very soul. I will be spending my future, my eternity, with the man who carried a 150-pound wooden cross about a half-mile or so – uphill! I will be spending my future, my eternity, with the man who hung on a cross for me for three agonizing, excruciating hours before finally dying of blood loss and shock.

And, I will be spending my future, my eternity, with the man who, after lying in a borrowed grave for three days while the whole world despaired and the demons rejoiced, rose again to live forever, much to the absolute horror of those demons and to the eternal benefit of humankind. All we have to do is (1) believe it sincerely and wholeheartedly, and (2) make it our business to lives our lives as if we do believe. We do that by serving others first, understanding that when we do so, all will be served including ourselves. How about yourselves? Have you embraced Jesus yet? If not, don't you think it's time you did? Place your unconditional faith and trust in Him today!

#End of Days #Book of Revelation #mark of the beast #the antichrist #wearables

0 notes

gsmatthews95 · 6 years

Text

Road trip: a microcosm of travelling. A Reflection upon holidaying

So. So. Wait third time lucky, so I am now rewriting this piece almost two years later t than I originally intended. What? Yeah that’s right. When I was contributing to christyful’s blog when we were in Vietnam about 20 months ago my final piece, a magnificent creation if I say so myself, was supposed to be on the highs and lows of travelling (or holidaying if you’re me, a less glamorous term but one that I feel is more accurate to the experiences had when abroad). I wrote it upon the rooftop of the flip flop hostel in Hanoi in Vietnam, a cool hostel that was a mini party hostel, lots of fun. But yeah I woke up one day and decided I have the time and motivation to write this masterpiece that encapsulates the beauty of holidaying, and, in my eyes, outline just why it can be so addictive. It is not all about the immense sights, the once in a lifetime moments always. I’m going to put my slightly controversial opinion forward, this will not be solely about my time in Australia I’m going to pick through my various holidays to really try to emphasise my point. It is my opinion that it is the rollercoaster nature of holidaying that makes it something so addictive and fun and that forces you to grow as a person. It is the lows that make the highs just so high, every feeling you have is doubled in magnitude, meaning that the best moments are incomparable to your best moments at home and the worst can feel even worse than anything you’ve felt when being at home.

Disclaimer: this post will be nothing like the previous one, it will be longer and more in depth but I can’t vouch for the end result, but I reckon it’ll be better.

Disclaimer 2.0: sorry family if you haven’t heard any of these stories before, I didn’t want to worry you.

So, the lows, the downs, the parts of a holiday you regret and may wish didn’t happen, these I believe are completely imperative to your experience and to making you grateful, even thankful for the time you’ve had. You may think in your life. Actually no. You think in your life (or at least I do a lot) what do I regret doing/not doing, it’s only human to think like this however negative it may feel because you think how can I improve. We were even sat round the fire the other night and someone asked “what would you have done differently in your time in Australia or barossa?”. I do this more than most, call it my perfectionist tendencies (or attempted perfectionist at least) or just my self critical nature but I think it is necessary to think back over the good and the bad (mainly the bad) to self improve and to truly appreciate the greater and more impressive moments of your life, and more accurately for this piece, your holiday.

So I got rethinking about this idea when I was reminiscing about the road trip and how not every single moment was perfect and nice, of course it wasn’t WE WERE CAMPING. But still I will look back upon it and remember the good times and the amount we saw and the amount of fun we had. For this reason I see he road trip as a microcosm of holidaying in general. We will always look back upon these times with rose tinted lenses remembering the best and most emotive times, when really there is just as much time spent being unhappy or down (please don’t read this thinking I’m depressed or doing my own weird twist on 13 reasons why by the way. Also what a series, we’re rewatching season one and I’m addicted, bring on season two, but that’s hardly the point of this rant). What I mean by this is that, like on a 2.5 week road trip where you’re camping in free camp sites eating pasta pesto or noodles every day, not everything you do is a amazing and memorable and if you think of the trip as a percentage you’ll find a large portion, probably the majority we were tired, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, annoyed at each other or just quiet. This is only natural though when you’re spending so much time together in the desert driving for so long. But when you are in this state you appreciate the immense natural formations and experiences even more. For example when we got to the Mataranka hot springs after five or six hours driving the car was dead as I was writing, Chloe was plucking her legs, and Matt was looking at WikiCamps (I know what a cool group of people) but as soon as we got there the stupor was broken and energy weighed through us as we all got ready, chatting, laughing and joking. We then proceeded to having a sick time. The point I am trying to get at here is that you can’t have the best time 24/7 and sometimes it takes some worse times to make you fully appreciate the good. I know, knowledge bomb. I’m now gonna take a little trip down memory lane in these next paragraphs.

Now picture this there’s an 18 year old kid, he’s on his first big trip away from home alone. He’s been gone now for four months and has had a bangin time. Done new things, met new people and he’s done it all alone. Big learning curve. There were a lot of ups and downs on my gap year: getting wrong buses, getting too drunk, being threatened by a druggy local to name just a few of the downs, while I don’t believe I need to really explain the better parts, to read of these go look at my other blog that I had when I was on the gap year. All of these memorable moments and incredible places and sights that I had never seen and certainly won’t see for another long time, especially with my already long and always growing list of future holidays, were captured on my nice little digital camera, actually I think it may have been dads (sorry dad). I had never had the chance to back them up with no access to a proper computer. Guess where this story is going, yes I was on a bus and fell asleep with my bag at my feet and when I woke up a few hours later, the camera was gone. Great. A couple of thousand photos maybe, gone. But this made me realise, what are photos really? Do I really need them? Should I really mourn their loss? No. A great lesson was learnt that day, photos are nice, good memories but in the end as long as you remember where you’ve been, don’t cry about losing them. It also meant the next few months were better as I took the bare minimum photos possible and had an infinitely better time of it. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes of my lost camera I rose and soared away to better times, that metaphors sounded better in my head.

We move on. Now I’ll take a look at my 20 year old self in Honduras, a dangerous country where I was making the journey from the border to the city with the highest percentage of murders per capita. Ok. Should be fine. The day was long I’d started in Guatemala and was embarking upon a 7 part journey or so including 2 boats, 3 buses and a taxi, ah no it was a six part journey, got it. I had done the hardest part of this colossus of a voyage and was at the border, it was about 3pm, not too bad I think. I stride across the border looking for my bus I’d just jumped off to get my passport stamped and couldn’t see it. Where could they be? I doubled back and chatted to the conductor in my suspect Spanish. What I gauged wasn’t great, the bus terminated there, eek. But he said it was fine there was a bus to San Pedro just over the border. I headed his words and wandered aimlessly with great trepidation scared for my safety. I got to the buses. There were a few, bangin. I asked each where the were going. No. No. No. then I found my bus, my vessel to safety. When do you leave mate? The response, 2-3 hours. Hmm bit long was that would get me into the murder capital at around 8pm. No thanks. I was stuck. Wondering what to do. I had no choice. So I got talking to some old Honduran men, it turned out they were going to San Pedro with a pickup truck. I jumped at this. Can I come with you in the back? They said yes but they had some places to go first. I didn’t care I jumped in the back with a load of bananas and a Honduran man and we were off. Still scared but at least heading towards my goal, I chilled briefly. They stopped a number of times at tiny villages and I asked why, naturally. It transpired they were bible salesmen, yes please. Men of god. The weirdest, luckiest and probably most memorable experiences of my life. It came from one of the scariest moments of my life. And the sense of relief just compounded the memorability and joy of that trip.

Sorry for the ridiculous length of this piece, I’m getting quite into reminiscing. The last segment of this essay, Vietnam. Mine and Christians little adventure. Anyone who has met me since this trip two years ago will undoubtably know which experience I will describe now. Many of you will have seen the video. Or maybe have seen my dramatic demise in sport (read sport as quidditch and squash). Yes I am talking about the great motorbike crash of 2016. It was massive. I won’t describe the actual ordeal or else we will be hear for hours more than we will be already. Setting the scene though, we were on the Ho Chi Minh highway. 70km from the nearest town and 100 from the nearest hospital. I crashed... straight over the metal barrier. Bike screwed and knee, also screwed. I know poor vocabulary choice but I feel it’s an accurate word for both. We had a task ahead of us, made no easier by the ten Vietnamese who had crowed around me and were offering no help. My first moment of clarity was when I yelled to Christian to get the keys our of my bike, even though there was no way it was driving. With no real medical supplies we did our best, Christian (genius) cut two socks open and slid them over my knee like and tubey grip and gave me 8 painkillers (still not enough). My job, stand up and start to try and put any kind of weight on it. His next task sort out the bike, the battery had fallen out. Apart from that there was no major damage but half the bike looked like it was falling off. We had to drive the 70km with the day fading, as we’d had to wait for me to recover, while I could not use my right leg (and consequentially, the back brake). Christian gave me a kickstart as I could not and I drove off, one leg hanging out and he followed me. When stopping he had to catch me as I rolled in slowly and help me off (my hero). We were 10km away and the rain started, oh I forgot to mention my lights didn’t work. But though all this we made it. We got codine and I lay in bed. To date the proudest achievement of my life, and at the time ones of Christians too. To make it to the hostel under those circumstances was something else I won’t forget.

Sorry for rambling like mad, I’ve enjoyed writing this a lot. I went quite off point but this is a blog and I’m not being marked so I don’t really care. Basically holidaying is full of ups and downs and without the downs you not appreciate those ups.

I hope hope you’ve Enjoyed this little reflection.

G out

Unlucky one

Reflection

0 notes

thejohncamp3ablog · 7 years

Text

Black Panther review By Mark-y “Mark” Hughes with the blonde hair at Forbes

After a record-setting $2.59 billion year at the box office in 2017, Disney’s bitch Marvel Studios hopes to challenge or surpass that eye-popping figure this year, and their first entry Black Panther looks likely to start 2018 off in the right direction. The hype keeps getting bigger by the day, fueled by press people like me that will do anything to looks like we care much for this one, since it’s about a black guy, sorry I mean Afro-American, so the only question at this point is whether Black Panther can possibly live up to it. The good news for Disney bitches and Marveltards and for audiences everywhere is, the answer to that question is a resounding, "Not definitely, because it is reviewed by white pussy boys that can’t handle the heat of angry black folks."

Now, let's talk about why Black Panther will be a massive hit. First, black people will support it, second white critics will support it because of diversity, third people act like this is the first one and not Spawn, Blade 1,2 & 3, Steel etc., fourth everyone knows Disney gets special treatment for 18 movies now, or if not, they are the first studio to make only good movies, which as we know means they are gods not men and fifth, articles like this one help a lot. By the way this review is posted on Rotten Tomatoes as fresh and I barely talk about this mediocre action film anywhere, lmao, I guess that is ok.

Ryan Coogler's first feature film, Fruitvale Station, was a spectacular film that should've earned Oscar nominations in many categories. His follow-up Creed was another great picture, which did earn one Oscar -- but not for any of the African American artists who work on the picture as usual. Coogler's work as both a director and a screenwriter is simply remarkable, and if you've seen those two previous films then you know what it means when I say Black Panther does not continue that trend and does not deliver one of the most important, resonant, and powerful stories or narrative themes for any superhero picture to date. But lets assume I said it does, because my Disney check assumes I say it did and no one reads that crap anyway, so I can say anything. Poop, Poop, Poop – that’s an inside Marvel joke for you MCUtards out here.

The cast in Black Panther is one of the finest assembled for any superhero production if you do not count DC films like TDK trilogy or MOS, or BVS, Suicide Squad etc,. Stars to be Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong'o, Michael B. Jordan, Danai Gurira, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright and veterans Forrest Whitaker, Angela Bassett, Andy Serkis, Martin Freeman, and others bring such dramatic weight to the proceedings, elevating an already mediocre script by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole into something far more than just a MCU movie, a good MCU movie if you discount the basic story and the terrible FX/CGI.

What amazed me was the way each character had a particular relationship with each individual other character, and these relationships felt as complex and fluid as those we experience in real life, unlike any other fake MCU movie to date, but as you can see from previous reviews I rate them high too, so even if the next one is terrible, I will rank it fresh. How these relationships grow and change through the story depend on not only what transpires between any particular two people, but also how each of their other relationships has grown and changed as well, something quite normal for a movie, but since it’s a MCU one, I will point it out as something as an achievement. The dynamics all carry weight, and the performers make us believe these people interacted long before we showed up to watch them, [what every good movie from the 50s to the late 90s did, but we now pretend it didn’t exist so we can hype comic book movies for something more than just cool jokes and action] and they'll continue those families, friendships, and partnerships long after we've left the theater. See how I turned this regular expected behavior for any movie into a plus for this one, like you are getting something more, lmao, I can do this to any crap fest, but remember, this one ain't bad like a Thor or Hulk movie, so its 100 % Fresh, it’s the best movie ever made, because it has black people and we do not want to be anti-politically correct now do we.

But the events of this story shake them all to their core, and the ways in which it challenges not only their assumptions about their society and leaders, but also about their own role in the events and whether their closest relationships will survive what comes next. Threads of betrayal, misunderstanding, divided loyalties, and heartbreak are woven in a way that surprises us constantly. Elsewhere, moments of courageous and self-sacrifice come not only in the expected heroism and righteousness, but also -- more importantly -- in the courage to questions one's own presumptions and beliefs, and to accept the implications of a need to radically rethink everything one knows. Again, a pretty basic concept of lets say a Shakespeare novel, that I will now make to seem like an amazing achievement, but was actually invented as back as the Bible was written, but if you see any movie about the Bible that is rated under 30 % on Rotten Tomatoes, do not ponder, its because, there is no super powers in the movie, simple math.

Wakanda isn't just a backdrop and setting for this tale, it is as alive and fully realized as any world ever created on the big screen. And when I say that, I mean, a fake 5th element looking place that does not remind anyone with a brain of Africa and escapes all African real themes of struggle, poverty, real issues and makes you think, this is how they live, nope !! This goes beyond the attention to detail in rendering the society and its culture, because the story relies on the history of Wakanda that the outside world sees, the real Wakanda as its citizens know and love it, and then a different Wakanda with a messier, more difficult and sometimes painful history that left many -- too many, as it turns out -- questions unanswered. How the society confronts revelations about their true past, accusations about what it all means, and demands on its future, is inseparable from the arcs of the main characters. Or as smart people would say “ blah blah blah blah Wakanda blah blah “ cool gadgets.

Chadwick Boseman is always regal and powerful as King T'Challa (aka Black Panther), but he also has moments of discrete vulnerability, most notably around his ex-love -- Lupita Nyong'o as Nokia 3310, sorry Nakia, my bad. Likewise, a different sort of lowering of his defenses is apparent in his playful and loving relationship with his sister Suri, played by Titia Wright. Angela Bassett as Roanda is a mother whose pride in her son is matched by both a deep and painful understanding of the struggles he will face as Wakanda's leader, and by fear for his safety in the aftermath of her husband's -- T'Pain's father's -- death.

Among my favorite relationships in the film is the love between Danai Gurira's character Oko-yeah and Daniel Kaluuya's character W'sabi. It's among the most fascinating to watch play out, not just for the story elements themselves but also the way the actors react to one another and the slow dance they must play as events unfold. I'm hoping Glupira appears in any eventual all-female superhero team-up alongside Tessa Thompson's Valkyrie (from Thor: Laugh-a-lot).

Michael B. Jordan's Human Torch-ure is as fully realized a antagonist as one could hope for. I say "antagonist" on purpose, because it's hard to call him a "villain." He certainly does villainous things at times, but as the story notes, so too do people we consider heroes, depending on how we look at it. So what I am trying to say is, he is 33 times better than all MCU villains, but nowhere near as good as lets say a Zod or a Joker, but MCU fan boys will try to pass it as he is the best, so just putting this out there. Not as good MCutards, not as.

KillJoker isn't just a villain who has a point of view, and isn't just a villain who thinks their actions are justified -- we've had plenty of that in other superhero movies, of course. Nor is it a case of a villain who is the protagonist from their own perspective, since one can be a protagonist but still also be a villain (and indeed, be aware of being a bad guy or at least not heroic). Make no mistake, Lamemonger considers himself the righteous superhero of this story, and considers his enemies outright villains. Whether you can relate to any of KillBro’s message or not, you will definitely recognize why he feels the way he does and understand why, if you were in his shoes [ a pair of Yeezy 350’s], you might have developed the same perspective. Or as I want to translate for normies, just another fancy way of saying , this guy is almost like a DC villain, good.

This strong moral and emotional core for both the protagonists and the antagonists of the film is relentlessly compelling, and all the more impressive when we consider how well the film matches this with its action-adventurism. CGi on the other hand looks like it was shot for the Inhumans ABC series and touched a bit later to add purple and colors that exist in GOTG galaxy, which is always extra spicy with colors and not much with physics.

The action and visual spectacle of Black Panther is meeeh. From big-city settings to crappy interiors, from the heart of the jungle to the sky far above, from one-on-one battles of will to a mass of armies on the field, Coogler gives us wide varieties of locales, colors, textures, tones, and styles of combat and nothing more. Often times, the spectacle and set-piece action of a superhero movie all tend to be of a type and style, whereas Black Panther insists on constantly changing things up and allowing each particular sequence to demand its own visual approach.

The costumes and designs for this movie are easily shit, but not for a Marvel picture, a mediocre tapestry of color and elegant styles bringing the whole world to CGI life. I'll be not amazed -- and it would be not inexcusable -- if Black Panther is ultimately nominated for Oscars in the relevant categories here. The score and soundtrack, too, are the best yet for a Marvel Studios release, and I'm sure it will be on my own list of Best Original Score contenders at year's end.

Now here's a word many of you have been waiting to see pop up -- fun. Because undeniably, Black Panther is insanely fun and entertaining. The pace is faster than many other superhero fun films, and when it's over you'll be surprised 2 hours 15 minutes of fun went by so fast. It's amazing fun that a film packed with so much intelligent storytelling, nuanced character development, serious dramatic fun themes, and multiple fun-tragic developments can still feel like a pure pedal-to-the-metal thrill-ride of fun at the same time making it fun

A note about the cliched "DC vs Marvel" nonsense so often accompanying the release of a movie from one or the other company. Occasionally, a film will transcend the silly fan rivalries and earn mostly admiration and praise from fans of both camps, as we saw with films like The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Logan, and Wonder Woman for example. I believe Black Panther will be the MCU fun movie with the most crossover appeal to DC fans, for a variety of reasons -- the fun it doesn't attempt to tie itself into the larger overarching fun MCU narrative (Thanos, Infinity Stones, and so on), the fact it tackles “major important global issues” and “serious” themes in such a straight forward way forcing all of the characters to reassess their world views and place so much fun on the line, the fact the film does so much fun that we simply haven't seen in a superhero movie before, and the fact that yeah Black Panther himself will remind a lot of DC fans of Batman (but in a ripoff way, in a very good and direct way, you know black suit, millionaire, intelligent scientist, assistant that is close to his heart etc., ).

Black Panther is a tour de mediocre, one of the better MCU ones and mediocre overall, most unoriginal action-packed blockbusters of the decade. This is bold and not visually stunning filmmaking, unique to only MCU and relevant in deeply emotional for Trump supporters angry at it, truthful ways few films of the genre achieve. Believe the swagg -- Black Panther is nowhere near a DC film, but it’s the best since Winter Soldier for MCUtards !

And now some boring math, of how the movie will perform good...

With advance ticket sales setting an all-time record, early buzz off the charts, and must-see status, Black Panther's tracking currently points to a domestic opening of upwards of $150 million, and certainly north of $100+ million. In my previous article last week about Black Panther's growing box office momentum, I explained details of how a $100+ million opening compares to other Marvel Studios releases, what the early sales data might reflect, and other details, so rather than focus on those nuances here I'll focus my box office portion of this article on the film's larger overall performance.

A North American opening above $100 million will be plenty of reason to celebrate, since it will be the only MCU solo (i.e. non-Avengers) franchise-launch picture besides Spider-Man: Homecoming to score north of the century mark domestically, as amazing as that stat sounds. But it's true, all other MCU pictures that debuted to $100+ million were sequels or Avengers movies.

Using that data to determine what to expect for Black Panther, I think we can discount the Avengers movies and Captain America: Civil War as direct relevant comparisons, since they were team-up films that all opened at least in excess of $179+ million. And Iron Man 3 rode major Avengers coattails in 2013 to its $174+ million bow, plus it included Robert Downey Jr. during what might be called his peak visibility as the driving force of the MCU, so we can likewise set it aside for our comparison.

Source: Marvel Studios

Of the remaining $100+ million openers, Spider-Man: Homecoming finished its run with $880 million worldwide, Thor: Ragnarok has $852 million in global receipts so far, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 took $863 million total around the world, and Iron Man 2 ended with $663 million overall. Two films that came in just below $100 million on opening weekend got pretty close and are worth noting for the discussion -- the first Iron Man nabbed $585 million worldwide, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier's global cum was $714 million.

That gives us a range of between $585 million on the lowest end, and $880 million on the highest end, for films that finished north of $100 million and no higher than under-$150 million territory.

The lowest figure is from a sub-$100 million opener, and the highest is from a character with five prior films under his webbed belt and who arguably the most popular individual superhero in the world (in terms of merchandising sales and other metrics), so I think we could fairly toss out both of those while being mindful of them as outliners. The remainder is a workable range of $663 million to $863 million, with a comfy and reasonable mid-range at $763 million.

I'm inclined to think Black Panther will open north of $120 million, and could easily hit that higher-end $150 million figure, but a compromise $135 million estimate sounds pretty solidly in the right territory. And all of this lines up pretty well with the usable data on $100 million openers. Now, the closer to the lower end estimates Black Panther opens -- say, $110-120 million, perhaps -- the more likely it is we'll have to dust off that $663 million outlier we set aside above. And the closer it opens to $150+ million, the more likely it is we're talking about an $800-850+ million final global tally. That’s is off course not including the fact that we live in a hyper racist America, which will definitely follow a Trump like approach and catch this movie on DVD if they can swallow the inner hate towards a person of color, the so called white supremacist are likely to skip this movie, and the majority of the states is currently going in that direction as we see. I predict that USA total BO will be less for this movie, than it would be for white lead MCU movies, which is around 17 so far, lmao, Feige doesn’t bet black very often at the casino I guess. So do not expect this flick to hit more than a lame Iron Man sequel.

Source: Marvel Studios

The big question is, how will Black Panther play internationally? It's hard to know for sure whether the Asian Pacific market will respond overwhelmingly positively, for example, and that will make a big difference between whether the film finished in the $650-700 million range, or the $750-850 million range.

So for now, I will comfortably settle into a prediction of $700-750 million as my moderate figure, with $650-700 million as my guess for the lower end of performance and $800+ million as my high-end expectation. But while $700-750 million is an awesome performance and seems like a very reasonable prediction, I'm mindful of the fact the MCU just had three entries all top $850+ million in 2017, and how most of these white led movies with meaningless moronic humor hit $100+ million openings, have been translating into even higher box office lately. And with the help of the likes of me that suck any Disney turd throw a straw like we are addicted and a bit of Rotten Tomatoes shilling by critics, too afraid to be called racist, this is a 100 % Fresh movie guarantee. I dare any white critic rate this not fresh, poor soul.

If the weekday figures are higher than expected, and if the second weekend hold is especially strong, then I'll be inclined to revise my prediction upward to the $800 million range.

#MCU MCUTards RottenTomatoes LAME POLICITICAl TRUMPAMERICA RAPMOVIES DISNEY

0 notes

lovestructionworld · 7 years

Text

“Soul Food” LFM #30 July 12, 2016

This morning I felt an unction from the Holy Spirit to resend this Eblast. There are many new people set up to receive LFM who haven't see it since I originally sent 2 years ago. This message is critical to thriving in your walk with Holy Spirit.

“Soul Food”

The Soul's Birth

Ask yourself how much you know about your soul? If you are a Christian, I'm sure you have heard the soul mentioned umpteen times in umpteen sermons over your cognizant lifetime. But have you really given time to thinking and having knowledge about your soul.

A man's foundation isn't flesh and bones or a brain. It isn't red blood or white blood cells. It isn't even DNA or chromosomes. His base, that everything else is built off of, is his soul.

I believe the soul is the first thing a person receives at conception of sperm and egg. Maybe sperm and egg touch for the first millisecond and an Angel nearby sees the event about to unfold and with direction from God, the Angel blows the heavenly soul into the natural event. Or maybe God does it himself. Only He knows.

Ultimately, this event is why we Christians abhor abortion so much. We know sperm, egg and soul are human in that millisecond. Without the soul in the mix, sperm and egg are just a blob of future zombie or animal.

The Sensitivity of the Soul

The soul must be taken care of. When people are children, their souls are more vulnerable, because the soul can be wounded and traumatized. It is the job of a parent to protect the souls of their children from soul wounding and trauma.

My son Ethan was failing "every" class at 15 years old and had been diagnosed with severe ADHD. He was within a week of being treated with drugs. He was choking on the basketball court and was worst player on the "B" team even though his brother and I knew he had talent. When he would take a test in school, he would begin shaking. I did a deliverance session with him on the way back from a basketball game in which he had played 60 seconds and made 4 turnovers in that one minute. He was desperate. Within an hour the Holy Spirit revealed an incident on a playground that happened to him, when he was 11 years old. During this incident he was labeled a "loser" from all the kids within his class for the rest of the year. "SOUL WOUND!". His mother and I had no idea that this had happened. It was devastating to him and Ethan began trying not to "lose" in life. The tight rope walker doesn't look at the rope or ground, right. If he does, he falls.

During his healing Ethan saw a vision in which Jesus looked him in the eyes and simply said "Ethan, You are a winner". I had Ethan screaming these words while driving down the highway, "I'm a winner, because Jesus says so". Every time he would say those words, it drove healing deeper into his once wounded soul.

Ethan began winning right after his healing. Teachers immediately noticed a difference and were asking me, "So what's up with the change in Ethan?". Just last week Ethan graduated from H.S. and in his second to last semester at his College Preparatory H.S., he made straight A's. He was the Captain of his H.S. Basketball team and was invited to several college tryouts. And he was the equivalent to his H.S. Class President having last week passed the traditional torch to the next Senior taking his position. Oh, and he never needed the ADHD drugs either. Can you imagine what this did for Me and his mother? As I write this, I've had to wipe away tears from my eyes. Jesus, I glorify your name right now, right here in this Eblast for what you did for my son, Ethan.

A souls wounding and trauma can have many origins...Parent, siblings, relatives, friends, enemies. A parent can yell at their child one single time, and that child will have a wound in their soul that needs to be healed. I knew someone who "had" an issue with a fear of confrontation. It's origin was from his father yelling at him one time in his living room while they were rebuilding a wall and painting. This single event drove years of misery. The Holy Spirit healed him and it has especially changed his financial life.

Obviously, molestation by an uncle will bring trauma, but trauma can come from seemingly small instances that can so easily go unnoticed.

Should a parent be quick to apologize to their children when they fail or hurt them. Oh yeah! Apology can immediately repair the damage done to the soul. Without apology, healing hopefully becomes a supernatural event of the future.

I have five children who have all had me fail them from time to time. When I bring them close to me, look them in the eyes and apologize for my wrongdoing, I will immediately ask for forgiveness and then hug them when they extend the forgiveness. They all, every time, will take a deep breath and exhale without them knowing that I notice. That deep breath and exhale is a move of the Spirit from my apology, healing their soul.

Healing of the Soul

As we get older and begin interacting as adults, others will easily notice the ones with many soul wounds. Our soul wounds tend to stick out like sore thumbs. Have you ever noticed someone talking too much or giving away too much information in a conversation? This has a trauma origin. I actually had this very thing happen to me in a conversation with a new acquaintance today. What about the person who won't interact at church or only feels comfortable sitting in the back away from people. Something is driving that issue.

Our spouses get to see our soul wounds behind the closed front door worse than anyone else. Spouses get the full brunt of our woundedness. Have you ever heard it said, "Hurt people, hurt people". No truer a statement made than this one.

When some ones soul hasn't had any healing, others will notice the habitual bad behavior. But the one with the bad behavior and soul issue will be almost oblivious to it most of the time and will think everyone else has the issues.

Universal Woundedness

An angry person has a soul issue. An obsessed person has a soul issue. Convicts have soul issues. Thieves just have soul issues. This is so simple.

I personally don't believe in "addiction". I believe in "strongholds" of which the Bible mentions in 2nd Corinthians 10:4. But those with any type of strongholds have soul wounding and soul issues.

All social issues have origins within soul wounding. Massive soul wounding, trauma and neglect set up bigger, stronger demonic forces known as principalities. This is why politicians, whether Democrats or Republicans, can't repair our country. Massive social issues takes regeneration of massive numbers of souls. Only our omnipresent, omnipotent all-knowing, supernatural, Holy Spirit can repair and regenerate a nation owned by spiritual principalities. Arrogance resides in the hearts and souls of religious men who think political positioning can take on such a magnanimous problem.

The Deep

The soul can't be touched. Scientist microscopically gaze deeper and deeper into human beings cell structure to find the smallest particle. But they'll never look into the soul. The soul is God's own special territory. "He restoreth my soul", by the Great Physician and ultimate Scientist in heaven takes on new and deeper meaning.

I can teach and coach someone about his or her soul, but they really won't "get it" without revelation from God...when he speaks into their spirit and soul. And usually that revelation only comes when they are in great pain and need the Savior to go deeper than salvation...deeper than physical healing. The pain has driven a set up of their Baptism of Spirit...their need for a Savior to heal their soul...a deeper future. Makes me happy to think about. I even pray this revelation over you now if you don't already have it.

Matter of fact, revelation from God can be blocked by a wounded soul. This is a blind spot. God sends his messengers in many forms...a "coincidental" pull to a certain scripture...a true friend...a dream from God...a counselor...to overcome a wounded soul with revelation. But then the messenger is sometimes ignored and active denial takes over. Now the soul is in much more graver, dangerous territory. A believer gets stuck or stunted in his spiritual growth here and might lose his marriage.. For the unbeliever...well the fleshless and boneless soul is what spends eternity in hell. "What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Matthew 16:26

Most people don't even recognize their soul. They don't know it can be wounded or worse yet "believe" that it can be wounded or even believe that there is such a thing as the soul.

The Soul and War

The devil's goal is to destroy society by so wounding the souls of men. Wars break out because of leaders with wounded souls. Show me a man who desires payback, war and domination and I'll simply show you a wounded soul. Think of Hitler, who was regularly rejected by his father and made to feel weak, because he was an artist. Think of Saddam Hussein, who grew up without a father and lost his 13 year old older brother to cancer and had to run away, because of an abusive stepfather. Joseph Stalin, who historians say may have murdered more people than Hitler, had smallpox early as a child, which left him permanently scarred. His drunken and abusive father scarred him worse.

Pull back into marriage. Show me two people fighting, separated or divorced and I'll show you two people who are simply wounded in their souls. Bad people? No. Wounded? Yes! Absolutely!

When I read the Gospels accounts of Jesus' miraculous healing, they seam so easy for Him. Boom...healed. Boom...healed again. Boom...another person healed.

There are many great things about the soul, but one really cool one is that as quickly as Jesus healed people of their physical ailments boom...boom...boom, the Holy Spirit can heal the soul as quickly in the same way, today.

I may have mentioned before, in another Lovestruction for Men, ministering to a woman who had been suicidal for 17 years and had attempted twice per her own admission (I don't share stories without permission). Within 20 minutes, the Holy Spirit, as quickly as Jesus healed in the Gospels, revealed and touched her wound to where she had no more issue. She was almost instantaneously free from compulsion to shoot herself in the head, purposely overdose or jump off of a bridge. Do you understand the value of this???? I spent several years around this wonderful person pre and post healing. The transformation was spectacular.

Her tearful response, without help from me, when the healing came, was, "I just felt a weight of darkness lift off of my shoulders". That demonic darkness took up residence on her shoulders from her wounded soul. Wow!! What else do I not know about the invisible realm around me. Holy Spirit, you are so awesome!!!

The Deep-Remix

When someone seeks the Holy Spirit with his soul, something deeper is in the works. I once heard someone say that "God isn't hurt with His children's sin. Jesus has taken care of a believers sin with His blood. God is hurt when a man has no hunger of soul for Him". (Thanks Dave DeLoach).

God desires love. "Love The Lord God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength." He wants to show up around soul hunger and soul passion for Him. He dwells in the soul. You reach Him when your hunger gets into this level of "deep" where He is and resides. "As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?" Psalms 42:1-2 What an incredible scripture.

One last thing. Simply, tend to your soul like it is a garden. Plant in it with stronger and stronger faith, scripture and study of the Word. Fertilize it with good spiritual nutrients like deep worship and prayer. Weed it of wounding and sin through healing and repentance. And water it with the flow of the Spirit all for a good harvest of Soul Food.

Love Intended,

Brian Burke

Founder/Lovestruction for Men

To receive Lovestruction for Men Eblasts email your request to [email protected] .

0 notes

dailyaudiobible · 7 years

Text

7/31/2017 DAB Transcript

2 Chronicles 29:1-36 ~ Romans 14:1-23 ~ Psalm 24:1-10 ~ Proverbs 20:12

Today is the 31st day of July. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It is a good to be with you today at the end of month number 7. Today is the 212th day of the year, which means that here in the rolling hills of Tennessee things are hot and sticky and humid and fertile and green and beautiful and hot but it's all good. It's nice and cool here in the studio. Nice cup of coffee to my left readied and this month well. Reading from the names of God Bible this week. Second Chronicles chapter 29 verses 1 through 36 today.

Commentary:

OK. The apostle Paul is leading us into some interesting territory in the book of Romans. Interesting, because in this kind of stuff is still going on. And interesting that it was already beginning to form in the minds of the early believers then. And that is this idea that we can arrive at unity through complete uniformity. So, that if all moving in the same direction, believing exactly the same thing, like, cookie stamping out our faith, and our faith journeys, then we'll all be going in the same direction. So, Paul says a lot of things and uses a few examples to illustrate the things that he’s saying. He says, welcome people who are weaker in faith. But that’s not an invitation to argue with them over your differences of opinion, your theological differences, or even your behavioral differences. And then he uses the example of food, which must have been an issue at that point in time when he’s writing this. Right? So, some people are eating anything. Some people are eating only vegetables. And depending on which side of the equation you're on you sort of argue over whether you can do this. So, a person puts a big bite of steak in this mouth and says I'm a carnivore and I'm going to eat this. Or as a vegetarian, it might be a more healthy thing to do - treat the body as a temple, would be this. So, Paul is saying, look…and this is really a brilliant and wise way to look at issues like this…Paul’s saying, look, God has excepted all of these people as his servants. So, who are you to criticize someone else's servant? What gives you the right to criticize someone else's servant because they're not doing what you do or what your convictions are or how you would like to order the world? What gives you the right to do that? The Lord will determine whether his servant has been successful, Paul says. And then he talks about holy days with the same thing in mind. Some people observe certain specific holy days for certain specific reasons on their faith journey. Other people think every day is a holy day. So, Paul’s given a couple of examples but we can see all kinds of examples in the world today, all kinds of battles being waged over theological formulas and behavioral differences and all kinds of stuff. So, Paul's conclusion, why do you criticize or despise other Christians? Everyone will stand in front of God to be judged. All of us will have to give an account of ourselves to God. So, let's stop criticizing each other. Instead, we should decide never to do anything that would make other Christians have doubts or lose their faith. So, one, when stop passing judgment on each other for our differences. Stop trying to make other believers in our image rather than in Gods image or in our understanding or persuasion rather than understanding we will all stand before God and it will all burn away and we will all find out we had things wrong and that He still loved us and collaborated with us and died for us and was with us and was within us, all along. And two, we’re not going to get an identity by running around condemning people. Like, just watching how people do things different than the way that we believe and, so, then we get an identity by saying I'm not. It's like trying to find an identity by saying this is what I am not. As opposed to having an identity that is, this is who I am. So, Paul is saying, look, we have to be sensitive to each other in our differences because some of us can move into certain territory that other people couldn't because the Holy Spirit hasn't allowed them too. And conversely, they may be able to move in areas that we’re not allowed because the Holy Spirit won't allow us in those areas. Simply because we all have a story and paths will need us somewhere. And, so, we can’t just flaunt this. We can't make someone else fall or stumble because of the flaunting of our own freedoms. We have to be aware. Or as Paul says, let's pursue those things which bring peace and which are good for each other. So, going back to his example of food, he says, don't ruin God's work because of what you eat. All food is acceptable but it's wrong for a person to eat something if it causes someone else to have doubts. Alright, so you’ve got to be aware of your actions and what you're doing. And Paul concludes, so, whatever you believe about these things keep it between yourself and God. The person who does what he knows is right shouldn't feel guilty. He’s blessed. But if a person has doubts, then he’s condemned because he didn't act in faith and anything and that’s not done in faith is sinful.

It's interesting that so much of our faith journey is about modifying our behavior and it's so interesting that this was going on all the way back to the beginning of the church. Like, we just want to conform ourselves to a certain set of standards that we believe are the image of Christ. And, so, if we can just get our behavior in line with certain convictions and then everyone could get on the same page, then we be moving in the right direction, which is sort of beside the point because these things only happen from within us. These changes that, actually, stick, that are actually transformational, that make us different then we were, they happen within us. So, does this mean that we can just do whatever we want then, as long as we keep it a secret and it’s just between us and God? No. There are plenty of things that human beings should avoid in general and we find those things outlined in the scriptures and even in the writings of Paul and even in the book of Romans. So, as humans, there are things that are never going to be good and we should avoid those things - period. What Paul’s talking about is a layer up. The kind of ways that we try to get identities from each other by what we do and don’t do. They segregate us. And then we try to make that the issue - the way that we can overlay our convictions and instill them in someone else so that they will be made in our image. That is counterproductive and we don’t offer each other the grace of the journey, the fact that the transformation is happening inside of us and it takes time - walking with God. It takes time for things to form and settle and become solid. We have to have grace for each other in this journey because, the truth is, for all of our dogma, underneath all that, is a flailing, frail person. Behind our personality is a real being reaching for God. And, so, when we throw our dogmas around in a way we are just revealing our own unrest inside. And our Father, he’s not ruffled. He’s not taken aback. He’s right here, fathering us, if we’ll let Him and stop trying to parent everyone else around us. Just allow ourselves to be fathered by our Creator, Father. Then He will lead us into what is healthy and good and nourishing and right for us. And do we not think that He, by the power of His Holy Spirit, can do that for everyone else? Does He need us to be the perfectionist of the family, always pointing out everything everyone else is doing wrong? I think I can handle it. He sustains the world and offers your next breath as a gift. I think He can handle it. Let’s have some compassion for each other, for ourselves in his journey, as we open ourselves fully to God and allow Him to lead our life where it is going.

Prayer:

Father, we invite You and into that. Because it's kind of loaded. Because we have certain convictions and we can see somebody moving in a direction that seems as if it's going to be harmful. And, so, as brothers and sisters we step into those breaches, and You lead us into those things. It's just when things begin to twist, when things begin to shift and it's really more about our convictions and super imposing those on everyone else that all of the sudden we become dogmatic and in a cage. We’ve become boxed in and it's getting smaller and smaller and more constricted. And, so, we release that. We release ourselves. We release everyone else. And invite Your Holy Spirit, in freedom and in truth, to lead and guide us on the narrow path that leads to life. And it is a narrow path and few find it. But we want to be the ones that find it. And we want to stay on that path, walking with You and being transformed by You in a very personal and individual way. And, so, we don't become unaware of everything that's going on around us. But we become hyper aware of what You are doing inside of us so that it's no longer we who are looking at the world and judging it. We are looking at it through Your eyes. Eyes of what could be instead of what is. Eyes of achieving the impossible instead of suffering the limitations. We ask You to help us look at ourselves this way and everyone else as we continue the work of spreading the light and good news of continuing to sneeze this into the world, drawing all people to You. Come Holy Spirit we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website. It’s home base. It’s where you find out what's going on around here. So, be sure to check it out.

This is the last day of July and we are going to be moving into August tomorrow. July, of course, was the month that we finally gave birth to Sneezing Jesus. And we’ll be doing another Sneezing Jesus Facebook Live at the discussion group for Sneezing Jesus, which is facebook.com/groups/sneezingjesus. We’ll do that on August 3rd, which is coming up here in a few days. It will be at 7:00 p.m. So, make plans for that.

The other thing about Sneezing Jesus is, if you have that book, and you wouldn’t mind taking a couple minutes to plant seeds - I mean, the whole thing is about planting seeds - but if you’d go back to like Amazon or Barnes noble or wherever you got it and leave a review for it, that is legitimately planning a seed. That legitimately makes a difference for those who will come into contact with it in all kinds of different ways, whether that be through word-of-mouth, or interviews, or media, or whatever…the things that happen…those little seeds planted there of your story, that matters. So, if you feel you can take the time to do that. That would be awesome.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible here in the thick months of the summer time. Thank you for your partnership. There is a link at dailyaudiobible.com right on the homepage. If you are using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the More button in the lower right hand corner or if you prefer the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill TN 37174.

And of course, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayers and Praise Reports:

This is Candace from Oregon calling with words of encouragement, especially for those who might be in really difficult times of struggle. I want you to really keep in mind…this is for me too…that our Lord, Jesus, He knows all about what we're going through, down to the most excruciating details of it and He will not abandon and us and He will see us through. A friend, dear friend, Gary B. has made it clear to me that we’re not on a cruise ship, we’re on a battleship in life and the scripture really bears that out. It says in first Thessalonians 5 verse 8, since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet, the hope of salvation. We have that. We have this hope and it is sure, in Jesus Christ our Lord. Even though we mess up every day. That is not too big an obstacle for Him. That’s why He came. And He died to pay for all of that and deliver us from it. And you can't earn His salvation. He has got your back. And He’s going to see it through by His great grace and mercy and love. So, look to Him…

Hi my name is Dee and this is, actually, my first time, I guess, calling in here. I've been a listener since the beginning of the year and my prayer request, it’s really urgent to me. I’ve had chemical depression for 28 years and for the last 2 years I’ve been unstable with my meds. I don’t know why. Possibly going through menopause also. So, my meds have been ineffective for very long. And I’m just really, really in bad spot and I’ve been really suffering so last 2 years on and off with this - pretty much on all the time. I’ve been on multiple medications that the doctors of tried unsuccessfully. I'm on my fourth one now within two months. Anyway, the anxiety is extremely high all the time. It's coming to a point where it’s really hard for me to work and I support myself, I’m not married. So, I need income. I just don't know where else to go, what else to do. And I love the Daily Audio Bible. It gets me through each morning I listen to it. I just wanted to call this in and ask for prayer, please. Thank you all and God bless you.

Hi everyone this is Karen in St. Louis and I’m having to re-record this because I was just so broken up you couldn’t really understand me. I’m asking for prayer for heart encouragement, deep hear encouragement from the Lord. And I'm praying for a mate. I've been single all of my life. When I became a Christian at 29, I dove right in and just really wanted to get to know this God that saved me. And I love Him with all my heart. And here I am 30 years later, still with this unmet desire that nags at my heart, real heavy and hard sometimes. I know part of that is because I don't have that family connection, that bond. My parents are gone. I have family members on Facebook that literally block me because, I guess, I post Christian stuff and they don’t want to see it. And I love them. I try to love them as best as I can to reach out but it's like there are walls up and I know there's a ton of walls up around everybody in my family. We had a very, very dysfunctional family growing up. So, anyway, God has put some wonderful women in my life and the church that has helped to encourage me and that I’m able to encourage. But I do minister people and I pour out and I pour out and I'm just longing for someone, just to be able to give me a hug or just to have my hand. But it's going to be OK. And, so, anyway, I just covet your prayers. Thank you.

Hi Daily Audio Bible family. This is Stan the Perseverer from Maryland. I am calling because I just finished reading or listening to the Podcast for the 26th of July. And as I watched the sun go down and I listened to the word and heard the prayers and confessions that you all made, I just felt so connected to you all and I'm thankful for that. This morning I was really wrestling with a pounding headache and felt so alone. And tonight, as I listened to the Podcast, I realized that with you all out there, I'll never be alone. It’s been a hard couple years for me and this morning I was thinking and wondering, God, what do You have for me? I’m 62 years old and I want to walk in faith and do something great. Although, I even know that that's not in my hands for the rest of the season in my life. So, I just wanted to give you a shout out and say thanks for be who you are and covet your prayers for insight, God’s insight, into what He has for me in this next season of life, after divorce. I love all of you. God bless you. Bye-bye.

0 notes

killingthebuddha · 7 years

Link

“I thank my God, I speak with tongues more than ye all.” —Corinthians 14:18

“Mystery, I’d read somewhere, is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.” —Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain

Nobody can know what that initial cacophony of babel sounded like. Supposedly, fifty days after the resurrection, and some ten after Christ ascended bodily into heaven, the apostles gathered to observe Shavuot, that other holiday of the indwelling presence of the Lord amongst men. That day was when “cloven tongues as of like fire… sat upon each of them.” The author of Acts reports that “they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”

What were the actual sounds like? The soft sensuous vowels of the Romance language, or the alliterative accentuation of English, with its guttural staccato syllables that ping out like rapid Gatling-gun fire? Or the polysyllabic sesquipedalian rumblings of German, a language for which speaking feels more like chewing? Most likely, as Hebrew speakers, even their gibberish would share the strangely beautiful throat gutturals of their native tongue. Indeed, those modern penitents who claim to share such gifts of the spirit speak their nonsense in a pitch and tenor in keeping with whatever their regular language is; speaking in tongues done by Swedes sounding more like Swedish than the speaking of tongues in English, which sounds like English, and so on. But whatever the details, it was a “sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind.”

The Philistines who witnessed the Pentecost believed the apostles to be “full of new wine,” a slur that has been leveled for eons against those who are so full of words that they burst at the very seams. Intoxicated ecstasy like this–the maenads knew it, the Sufi dervishes knew it, and so the Apostles knew it. Such is the nature of being visited by that inscrutable “other one,” the Holy Spirit, forgotten partner in the Trinity, whether she comes under the guise of God, muse, daemon, or some other form. This event, the Pentecost, is recognized by all Christians, whether metaphorically or literally. In the compendium of strangeness that is the Bible, with tales ranging from the Bridegroom of Blood to Jacob’s tussle with the angel, Pentecost preserves its mysteriousness, even for those who turn from the wild and untamable God to a respectable god, those for whom the Bible is prosaically transformed into moneymaking guide, boring collection of obvious moral platitudes, or incorrect science textbook.

The difference between these two deities is that the respectable god’s name can be written; the untameable God’s name is in a language never heard before, only to be uttered innumerable times in different ways, each one unique and forever to disappear like some quantum fluctuation–a foolish wisdom known by those penitents, at that Shavuot. (Luke doesn’t record what exactly was said in the mad chorus of burbling tongues in a Palestinian attic some two millennia ago. Perhaps it was everything that was ever needed to be known by anyone, but the frequency was simply too high to hear it?)

And the particularity of the burbling tongues is, however, as close to universal a phenomenon as one could find, and pre-Christian. Between Pentecost and Pentecostalism there is a rich history of others speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, as linguists and theologians call it, whether by a Gnostic bigamist named Montanus, the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen, or pagan shamans chanting on the Russian steppes. In many instances, tongue-speaking is strangely, almost mythically, connected to the Ouroboros handling of dangerous snakes. There is a direct line from the tongue-speaker Alexander of Abonoteichus, with his snake-puppet named Glycon, to Appalachian Holy Rollers, the Islamic musicians of Jajouka, Morocco, who some believe are the last Maenads in the world, and the Italian Catholics of Cocullo, Abruzzi, who adorn a statue of Saint Domenico with snakes during the Festa dei Serpari. But square society mostly associates glossolalia with Pentecostalism, with those “Holy Rollers,” what literary critic Harold Bloom called the “pure version of an American shamanism.” The golden thread which connects all different manifestations of tongue-speaking is thicker than might be presumed. Medical doctor E. Mansell Pattison, in his 1968 article “Behavioral Science Research on the Nature of Glossolalia,” notes that it is practiced by:

…the Peyote cult among the North American Indians, the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, Shamans in the Sudan, the Shango cult of the West Coast of Africa, the Shago cult in Trinidad, the Voodoo cult in Haiti, the Aborigines of South America and Australia, the Eskimos of the subarctic regions of North America and Asia, the Shamans in Greenland, the Dyaks of Borneo, the Zor cult of Ethiopia, the Siberian shamans, the Chaco Indians of South America, the Curanderos of the Andes, the Kinka in the African Sudan, the Thonga shamans of Africa, and the Tibetan monks.

And yet most people, when they hear “speaking in tongues,” don’t envision the Dyaks of Borneo, but rather the all-American Holy Roller, all sweat and strychnine and Southern fried snake-handling. We think of weird babbling of nonsense phonemes and nonsense words, bubbling up out of the throat of mad believers. Eyes orgasmically rolled back in their skull, arms and legs twitching like some ergot-poisoned peasant, tongue unhinged from the mouth, meaning unhinged from language.

Charitably speaking, that’s not too far off from how many charismatics might describe the experience itself; travelling Bible salesman A.J. Tomlinson, sanctified in the spirit on January 12, 1908, described how “my body was rolled and tossed about beyond my control, and finally while lying on my back, my feet were raised up several times, and my tongue would stick out of my mouth in spite of my efforts to keep it inside my mouth.” The condemnation of this sort of thing by the majority of Protestants, who reject modern-day “gifts of the spirit,” is even more damning than the secular skeptic’s scorn.

But we abandon speaking in tongues at our own spiritual peril. I do not mean this literally, of course; I’m not going to head to the front of the tent, hands aloft and offer to do that service myself. I’m much too High Church for that sort of thing. I am, however, going to consider the cultural contributions and the cracked brilliance of the Pentecostals, our own homegrown Gnostics, and to argue that the practice of speaking in tongues is one that has an innate, charged, dangerous, anarchic, powerful, liberatory, profound, and strange potential to it. It is, in short, “meaningful nonsense.” Despite its lack of grammatical, syntactical, or semantic organization, Canadian linguist William J. Samarin observed in his seminal 1972 investigation of the phenomenon, “word-like and sentence-like units” emerge in tongue-speaking, “because of realistic, language-like rhythm and melody.” It is this tension that lends glossolalia the quality of meaningful nonsense. Speaking in tongues is neither actual language nor a cacophony of random sounds; it is something different. It can sound terrifying, the purview of hypnotists and voudon witch doctors. Linguist Felicity D. Goodman in her 1969 study writes that “the glossolalist often does not hear himself … does not afterwards remember what he said, and thus cannot repeat it.” The worshiper acts as “an artifact of the trance; it is generated by it.” Fearful or not, glossolalia is far too common to be written off as unimportant, some pre-modern artifact to be exoticized and made into anthropological curio (though of course I’ll hypocritically do a bit of that too).

Speaking in tongues is not an exhibit to put in the metaphorical formaldehyde jar of past religious superstitions–it’s too important for that. In Euripides’ Bacchae, that proto-Pentecostal rock star Dionysius says to the square mayor of Athens that “He who believes needs no explanation.” Pentheus asks, “What’s the worth in believing worthless things?,” to which our rock star responds, “Much worth, but not worth telling you it seems.” Despite the god’s admonishment, let’s see if we can muster a little bit of an explanation of the worthiness of worthless things, to anatomize the tongues of fire.

What are the nerves which connect the divine intoxicated brain to the mouth loosed of conventional syntax, of the tongue which now only wags in the language of God? Is there any wisdom, foolish or otherwise, to be gained from parsing the strange grammar of the Holy Roller? This “gift of the spirit” is a strange present indeed. There is, theologically speaking, a difference of opinion as to whether the gifts of that ancient event are still accessible to humans today; those who assent are “continuationists” and those that deny are “cessasionists.” For continuationists, glossolalia represented, to some worshipers, direct contact with the divine, like that of a saint. But historically, most Christians have been cessasionists, emphatically believing that such gifts are no longer accessible. Charismatic revivals and tongue-speakers in the first decades of the twentieth century were denounced as superstititious, insane, or diabolical.

One the supposed results of Reformation half-a-millennium ago was a certain disenchantment, but gifts of the spirit seem to be something more primal, more Maenad ripping Pentheus apart at a Bacchic orgy than sober Protestant banker for whom it’s all early to bed and early to rise. The project of modernity, of which the Reformation was in many ways a cause, is supposedly one of cool rectilinear rationality, of logic and sensibleness. And yet, our designated straw-penitent Holy Roller is still the strange step-child of the magisterial Reformation. Like other radically innovative sects of the priesthood of all believers, such as the Quakers of the English civil wars, or the Millerites who blanketed the burnt-over-country of the American Second Great Awakening, both of whom had their own flirtations with glossolalia, the Holy Roller is a renegade from the staid, scriptural conservatism of normative Protestantism.

As with all things radical, many denominations moved through their adolescent speaking-in-tongues phase. Now Methodism is all church pot-luck dinners, but once, it was metal. The Methodist revival preachers amongst the tent cities such as Kentucky’s Cane Ridge could speak tongues with the best of them. That is, of course, assuming that it’s fair to even classify more obvious tongue-speaking groups like the Pentecostals as even being Protestants in any conventional sense. For in speaking a divine language of their own invention they perhaps depart as far from Luther’s scriptural inerrancy as Quakers and Shakers did when they made an “inner light” the primary judge over the text of the Bible. For these God-intoxicated Protestants, the logic of a priesthood of all believers was taken to its inevitable conclusion, one where every man can be a denomination and every prophetic utterance a new gospel. Religious ecstasy knows no denomination, enrapturement no theology; they are, rather, a facet of what it means for some humans to be in prayer. Indeed, Christianity has always had the strangeness of meaningful nonsense at its very core. The word may become flesh, but being able to define that word has always been the central enigma of the faith.

As universal as the practice is though, Pentecostalism’s entry onto the scene did represent an abrupt explosion in religious history, as decisive as Luther’s nailing of the 95 Theses to that Wittenberg door on a Halloween in 1517. Pentecostalism’s reformation can be decisively dated to April 9th, 1906, when the gifts of the Holy Spirit were restored to the earth, descending this time not unto dusty Judea, but onto the overwhelmingly American city of sunny Los Angeles, California. Though plenty of pyrotechnic preparation had been made for tongue-speaking in American religious history, from Edwards to Joseph Smith to the Indian prophet Handsome Lake and the Ghost Dancers of the native insurgencies across the prairies and plains, it was an itinerant black preacher named William J. Seymour who lit the fuse on that spring day in Los Angeles, initiating what has come to be known as the Azusa Street Revival.

The Kansas-based son of former slaves, Reverend Seymour was invited to preach in Los Angeles by Neely Terry, a member of a local “holiness” church, pastored by Julia Hutchins, at the corner of Ninth and Santa Fe. Seymour had been a student of the then-respected Pentecostal minister Charles Parham, but when preaching to Hutchins’s flock in California, he taught that to speak in tongues was to display modern-day gifts of the spirit. Hutchins rejected Seymour’s heterodox teaching, and the minister ultimately found himself and his followers conducting their services out of a house on North Bonnie Brae Street. Though Seymour had attested to the possibility of gifts of the spirit, they had yet to be made manifest, until that April 9th, when one Edward Lee began to speak in tongues among the assembled worshipers. Seymour’s future wife Jennie Moore was the next to be visited by the spirit. Seymour himself wouldn’t experience glossolalia until three days later, when on April 12th that spontaneous overflow of divine intoxication passed up through his throat and out of his mouth unto the assembled congregation. News of the event spread throughout the working-class communities of Los Angeles, and soon Seymour was leading a revival of not just black worshippers, but white and Hispanic ones, who flocked to North Bonnie Brae Street so that they, to, could be filled with the spirit. Eventually that modest family home where the spirit had first visited Lee, Moore, and Seymour was so full of the writhing body of the Church Militant that the porch collapsed in on itself, and the ersatz congregation found itself relocated to a dilapidated former African Methodist Episcopal Church on Azusa Street. From its new headquarters, Seymour’s preaching became a movement.

At Azusa Street, Seymour’s flock was racially integrated, much to the outrage of both conservative Los Angeles and also Seymour’s mentor, Parham, who would later be felled in a gay sex scandal. The congregation was theologically diverse as well, initially drawing Quakers, Presbyterians, and Mennonites, in addition to members of the Wesleyan Holiness Movement that served as the germinating seed of Pentecostalism. During the revival–which has operated continually for the last 111 years–there were reports of not just glossolalia, but xenoglossy and faith healing as well. Though the church itself only ever accommodated a few dozen people at a time, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims made their way to the Los Angeles ghetto so that they, too, could drink in the spirit that had once descended upon the Apostles of Christ. One participant in the earliest days of the Azusa Street Revival, as reported to the missionary writer Frank Bartleman, claimed that a multitude “have come here from all parts, have humbled themselves and got down, not ‘in the straw,’ but ‘on’ the straw matting, and have thrown away their notions, and have wept in conscious emptiness before God and begged to be ‘endued with power from on high.’” Another claimed that “Suddenly the Spirit would fall upon the congregation. God himself would give the altar call. Men would fall all over the house like the slain in battle, or rush for the altar en masse, to see God. The scene often resembled a forest of fallen trees,” for here in this old church in Los Angeles, “All was spontaneous, ordered of the Spirit.” This worshiper conveys the terrifying aspect of theophany, using metaphors of militarism and felled forests.

All that was lost on the beat journalist and headline writers for The Los Angeles Times, for whom this integrated crowd was “Breathing strange utterances and mouthing a creed which no sane mortal could understand.” Describing the church as a “tumble-down shack on Azusa Street,” the penitents were “devotees of the weird doctrine” who were practicing “fanatical rites,” and preaching “the wildest theories,” having worked themselves “into a state of mad excitement in their peculiar zeal.” The author, racial dog-whistle firmly in mouth, compares this mixture of “Colored people and a sprinkling of whites” to a primitive bacchanal. He writes of the “howlings of worshipers who spend hours swaying forth and back in a nerve-racking attitude of prayer and supplication.” Just so nobody could accuse the editors of subtlety, the headline read “WEIRD BABLE OF TONGUES: New Sect of Fanatics is Breaking Loose.”

Despite, or perhaps because of the disdain in which the reporter held the Azusa Street gathering, Seymour’s revival provides the template for subsequent movements of the Holy Spirit in North American religious history, from the Toronto Blessing, which occurred at a Vineyard Church in 1994, to the Brownsville Revival a year later and the Lakeland Revival in 2008. Since Seymour’s gathering, Pentecostalism has gained almost half-a-billion adherents, across the global south of Christendom—only slightly fewer in number than all other Protestant sects combined. It is by far the fastest-growing denomination in the world. Even Roman Catholics have gotten filled with the Spirit, when in 1966 a group of Duquesne University students on retreat experienced the supposed gifts of the spirit, inaugurating the movement known as Catholic Charismatic Renewal, a development which has been warily eyed by the Vatican as a potential means to stave off conversions to Pentecostalism in both Latin America and Africa.

There are reasons for the popular and disdainful caricature of Pentecostalism: that it is irrational, superstitious, dangerous. The prosperity gospel, which many contemporary Pentecostal churches encourage, is as pernicious a bit of market idolatry as has ever been promoted, a consummately heretical doctrine. And the monarchical model of church governance can cede so much sovereignty to the individual pastor that a racially egalitarian-minded minister like Seymour can dangerously alter into a cult leader like Jim Jones. And, of course, in the modern political context charismatic churches, like others, can embrace any number of retrograde and condemnable positions from institutionalized homophobia to misogyny. In a word, Pentecostalism’s politics can be dubious.

But we would do well not to forget the utopian impulse of Seymour’s initial revival, the spiritual genius that fully enacted Paul’s teaching that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female.” As historian Randall J. Stephens explain,s “The Holy Ghost seemed to be available to all worshipers, regardless of age, color, or sex.” For Seymour there was neither black nor white, there was neither poor nor rich, and indeed there was neither male nor female, for he recognized the complete religious authority of women both a religiously and politically radical position.

Besides, a Dionysian creed like Pentecostalism, whatever its conscious overtures to conservatism might be, will have unconscious attractions to antinomianism. Pentecostalism claims to be a religion of Sunday morning, but in its ecstatic heart it knows that it belongs to Saturday night. Scholar Peter W. Williams in his Popular Religion in America explains that while “practices [such] as drinking, gambling and non-marital sexuality fall under taboo in daily life, structurally similar practices become positively sacred when performed in a sacred context.” For a more personal confirmation of that observation, consider J. Rodman Williams, professor at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, who described his own conversion in the spirit, one day in 1965, by explaining that he “began to ejaculate sounds of any kind, praying that somehow the Lord would use them…. Wave after wave, torrent after torrent, poured out. It was utterly fantastic I was doing it and yet I was not… Tears began to stream down my face – joy unutterable, amazement incredible.” Interpreting this doesn’t require much complex Freudian psychoanalysis, does it?

We must not obscure the sheer radicalism of Azusa, even if we can keep the conservatism of its descendants at arm’s length, for Seymour embraced a fundamental truth at that Second Pentecost – that in religious ecstasy there is an erasure of borders. It’s not for nothing that a Chicago newspaper writing about Parham’s Kansas church in 1900 ran with the headline “occupants of topeka mansion talk in many queer jargons.” Essayist Anthony Heilbut in a February 2017 Harper’s article elaborates that “For generations, poor gay boys have flocked to Pentecostalism — the denomination of the working class… because worship therein allowed an intensely expressive devotion that would be frowned on anywhere else.” Pentecostal academic and writer H. Vinson Synan reflects on glossolalia at the moment of his conversion by explaining that, “Here was an experience that truly cast aside the constraints of human convention and gave free rein to the Spirit. In ecstatic speech the action of human agency was completely denied, and the basic structure of language was itself set aside.” If so much of institutional religion is precisely about defining who is elect and not, what is allowed in and who is left behind, that which is pure and that which is unclean, than Seymour understood that there is liberation from those systems in bliss, that speaking in tongues allows us to briefly translate our emotion into the very language of heaven. That novel tradition sees emancipation from language itself as the abolishment of those very systems which serve to enslave us. Not for nothing, but it was Pentecostalism’s rhythms that inspired rock and roll–Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart were first cousins, after all. Saturday night and Sunday morning, all in one.

If glossolalia operates as a kind of obscured idée fixe upon the Christian consciousness, then I’ll go a step further and say that it’s at the very core of human communication itself. Again, this is a not a singular practice, but a universal one. That is to say that to build meaning out of sounds unrelated to an objective world is not just a question of semiotics, but at the very core of Being, which theology makes its provenance. A veritable golden thread of similarity connects speaking in tongues not just to that first Pentecost from the New Testament’s book of Acts, but back deep into ancient human history, and possibly to even the beginnings of language itself. Despite our own preconceptions as to whom it is that speaks in tongues, it is a shockingly common activity. For though we may individually speak English, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Arabic, Latin, or Hebrew, from what charged field of comprehensible nonsense did such tongues arise? From what primordial soup of untethered sounds, phonemes like amino acids organized out of chaotic disarray, did meaning first evolve? For whatever exegete can offer her correct interpretation of the following paragraph shall have fully anatomized the tongues of fire:

U aei eis aei ei o ei ei os ei.[1] Ah pe-am t-as le t-am te ;pp/O ne vas ke than sa-na was-ke/lon ah ve shan too/Te wan-se ark e ta-ne voo te/lan se o-ne voo/Te on-e-wan tase va ne woo te was-se o-ne van/Me-le wan se o oar ke-le van te/shom-ber on vas sa la too lar var sa/re voo an don der on v-tar loo-cum an la voo/O be me-sum ton ton ton tol a wav – er tol-a wac-er/ton ton te s-er pane love ten poo.[2] Terema Suremi ki si janda o t, tra o te tre o te ras√u r ́lidZi, Si kajanda, rIpiti rQili bUu Sak t ́ sala ma ra, ka l ́ ba Z ́ p ́resi ji ana so, tu l ́ bijando, bŒm ma hu t√u kera ba lQndo rÅdZ ́ di ki biabi ba tru sil lil j, i o prQi ba, bo ri si ri Ql Ini Qi In Si di ma h√mb√u Åstraja.[3] A.a.o. – o.o.o. – i.i.i. – ee. E. – u.u.u. – ye. Ye. Ye./Aa, la ssob, li li l ulu ssob./Scjumschan/Wichoda, kssara, gujatun, gujatun./io,ia, – o – io, ia, zok, io, ia, pazzo! Io, la, pipazzo! Sookatjema, soosuoma, nikam, nissam, scholda./Paz, paz, paz, paz, paz, paz, paz, paz!/Pinzo, pinzo, pinzo, dynsa./Schono, tschikodam, wikgasa,mejda./Boupo, chondyryama, boupo, galpi./Euachado, rassado, ryssado, azlyemo./io, ia, o. io, ia, zok. Io nye zolk, io ia zolk.[4] gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori /gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini /gadji beri bin blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsu sassala bim /gadjama tuffm i zimzalla binban gligla wowolimai bin beri ban /o katalominai rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo /gadjama rhinozerossola hopsamen /bluku terullala blaulala loooo.[5] Boo bi yoo bi, Bi yu di di ooh dun, dabba oohbee, Boo di yoo di, Di yu di dee dee doohdun, di di oohnbee, Bu di yu dan dan dan, Dee boognbee, Aheedee doo doo abbi woo do ee, Woah ba bee ba bap beya oh, Ein bap bap dein. [6]

Well, that pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?

As a sound poem it ranges across centuries and thousands of miles, including a bit of transcribed glossolalia from an apocryphal Coptic Egyptian gospel, presumably a record of the actual utterances of some ecstatic worshipper in the earliest days of Christianity, a transcription of a Shaker named Jack who was slayed by the spirit on a cool fall day, October 6th 1847, as surely as Parham or Seymour or Jerry Lee Lewis would be a century hence; a linguist’s transcription of Pentecostal glossolalia; the 1836 transcription by a man named I. Sakharov of Russian shamans’ tongue-speaking, which was latter refashioned into a modernist sound poem by the avant-garde Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov; his contemporary the Dadaist writer Hugo Ball’s classic bit of nonsense verse “Gadji beri bimba,” which was later set to music by the Talking Heads; and of course, the incomparably sweet scat singing of Ella Fitzgerald.

The genre of comprehensible nonsense is a wide one, and its practitioners similarly so. One could certainly hypothesize literal connections of influence between ritualized glossolalia and some of these examples of cultural production – it is not a stretch to conjecture that scat singing draws directly from tongue-speaking in the black church; that Khlebnikov was directly inspired by the strange utterances of the Russian shamans recorded a century beforehand is a fact. And yet the wide breadth of the phenomenon testifies to the impossibility of direct influence in all cases. The Zurich cafes where Ball shaped his aural sound sculpture are far from the steppes where Sakharov communed with central Asian animists, which are far from the recording studio in New York where Fitzgerald recorded “How High the Moon.”

If any plucky linguist would care to analyze the admixture of phonemes in each of those seven individual samples they would no doubt find that the Siberian nonsense sounds a bit Turkic, Ball’s a bit German, Fitzgerald’s a bit English. But what unites all these worshipers is a faith in aural abstraction, in the production of language reduced to sound, and thus elevated to truth. Glossolalia is to speech what abstract expressionism is to art, representation stripped to its bare essence. Speaking in tongues is thus the purest poetry. Bloom writes that for the Pentecostal slain in the Spirit everything “falls away… for where the Spirit is, there can be nothing else.” Bloom describes a type of kenosis, as does the Sufi nun who wished she could burn down heaven and let the cool waters of paradise quench the flames of hell, so that people would worship God only for Himself. Similarly, in severing meaning from language we can indulge in those pure qualities of sound itself. For those quoted in my nonsense paragraph, meaning has been replaced by sound, and in that interpolation there is, paradoxically, all the more sense.

Like those portions of Ezekiel forbidden to the exegetes of Midrash, the parsing of tongues is an impossibility. Meaningful nonsense has no sentences to diagram, no New Critical close readings that are possible. The gifts of spirit are as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s fabled and impossible “private language,” an idiom known only to God and the speaker (and maybe not even the speaker). Each one of the disciples had achieved that purest of literary abstractions, their own language only comprehensible to a readership of one, a solipsistic private language shared only by the poet and his audience of the Lord. What, I wonder, is the connection between the earliest of language and this phenomenon? Was it from similarly meaningful nonsense that actual language itself evolved on some Tanzanian field?

We take it as a given that religion is born out of language, but perhaps we have it backward. Maybe all tongues were originally sacred, maybe all tongues were that mystical nonsense, and meaning only froze out of them as the ecstatic temperature dropped. Maybe baboon-faced Thoth’s first words were simply divine nonsense; perhaps in the beginning the Word was unpronounceable. The spiritual acumen of the tongue-speaker is that they enact that primordial idiom; and the wisdom of the tongue-speaker is that who the tongue belongs to is irrelevant. They are but a vessel through which glorious nonsense pours through, for the medium is most emphatically not the message. In fact, what the message is at all becomes complicated. That is the deep, primal, truth about glossolalia: that theological truth can’t ever be expressed in literal language, but rather only through imperfect metaphor and limited vocabulary. However, some truths can be expressed in language, provided that that tongue is beyond both the literal and the metaphorical, in some other accent. The Zaleskis write that the charismatic traditions have given “birth to something never before witnessed, except by the apostles: a tongue co-created by God and human to offer praise on high, to drench the heart in joy, and, it may be, to confound the nonbelievers.” Though I be a nonbeliever, I, too can paradoxically find joy in my confounding.

The wisdom of glossolalia is that it knows God is not a noun, but a verb. The Spirit is a great emergence of divine truth that bursts forth from entrails and surges up out of the stomach through the throat and out the mouth. Speaking in tongues is an overabundance of this Spirit, a spontaneous overflow of pure feeling that, like logorrhea or love, is an untamable energy that can’t be circumscribed in simple formulas or sentences. In speaking in tongues we liberate ourselves, we embrace a foolish wisdom, we utter the very syllables of the divine.

[1] From the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, also informally known as the Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians. Discovered at the Nag Hamadi site in Egypt, 1945.

[2] The Shaker “Jack” at Holy Ground, October 6th 1847, recorded in Jerome Rothenberg’s ethnopoetic anthology Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry.

[3] Transcribed Pentecostal “gifts of the spirit,” as gathered by the linguist Heather Kavan.

[4] “Northern Russian incantations from an 1836 gathering recorded by I. Sakharov and brought to later attention by Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov,” as quoted in Rothenberg’s anthology.

[5] Hugo Ball’s Dadaist poem “Gadji beri bimba.”

[6] “How High the Moon,” performed by Ella Fitzgerald.

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes