"I changed my mind"...

On the CNN website today, there's this post about a guy who is an ex-Christian, named Bart Ehrman. He is currently a textual critic of the biblical New Testament - as is the right thing to do if you are Christian and actually care about considering what is true. Really, why not criticize these things? Will Jesus toss you in the flames because you love seeking the truth? Will the Father cause you to spit up fireballs in hell because you love to research history?

Ehrman said to CNN concerning his leaving Christianity, "I changed my mind", and is now agnostic.

You see, this is a problem with idols, and is why all Gods in this place are idols.

This man boldly proclaimed a loving, all-knowing and all-powerful God, and all it took was for him to "change his mind", and God ceased to exist. Since he had been a Christian since his youth, he was certainly one of those folks (like many of you) who said, "God heals", and "God is good", and "God does this and that" - but at the end of it all, he realized that his all-powerful God was nothing short of his own imagination. He saw with his eyes that God did nothing, and that who he worshipped was an idol - since idols do nothing outside of what people believe they do ('forming your God with your own hands'). He also realized that he could never ask Jesus anything worthwhile like, "Will you heal my mother?" and actually get an answer. Besides, if she survived, then "praise God, the Lord healed her"; if she died, then "the Lord's ways are mysterious", and "everything happens for a reason."

He left Christianity because he could not reconcile in his mind how God can be loving and compassionate, and yet pay no heed to such a corrupt planet. It is typical of Christians to view a long pole, where Christianity sits on one end, and Agnosticism/Atheism sits on the other. And in the case of Ehrman, he left Christianity and slid down the pole to Agnosticism - since it's what made the most sense to him.

He makes the mistake of all Christians and all those who leave Christianity to embrace Agnosticism/Atheism, and that is to either view God as all-loving and all-powerful, or to have no view of God at all. There really is no sense in this.

So I have a question for the religious, agnostics, and atheists alike: Let's say you were all to assume there is a God. Put aside any philosophies, dogmas, and beliefs (besides the existence of God). Look at the universe, and this planet, and the people on this planet, and tell me, what do these things tell you about God?

Get a pen, and write up a list. "Loving and Compassionate" should not be there. "All-Powerful and All-Knowing" should not be there. "A Savior" should definitely not be there. Perhaps your list would say things like, "Bitter", "Angry", "Weirdly intelligent", "Strange", "Careless", "Heartless", or "Merciless". But I know, this is unacceptable to you. You have made up in your mind to either believe in the loving all-knowing bearded grandfather type God who pats children on the head, or to believe in no God at all. There is no sense in this, and perhaps it will take some other generation of people for it to finally click that there is no sense in this.

Now, there is a God, regardless of what goes around in your head or how emotional you become when the right beat comes across the church drums. And that list I created above is exactly how He shows Himself to you - bitter, angry, heartless, and merciless - isn't this what you see? Have you found the man that escaped sickness and the grave because of God? Where is the woman whose body slipped out of death's hands because of God's kindness? Are they among this generation? It is certainly because of God that you and your children suffer so tremendously and perish so easily. How horrible it will be for man when God actually visits the Earth. If God clearly shows a bitter and merciless character from a great distance, how terrible and destructive should we imagine God up close? The Earth will certainly piss and shit all over itself, and man will simply have to endure its violent stench.

I can see that all you (and your ancestors) have ever known is the unloving side of God, so the question that should come from your mouth is, "Why is God so merciless toward me and this place?" To answer that question, you would need to look at yourself and mankind altogether. Where would God find rest with you and others on this planet? Everyone tells lies about Him, and no one cares for the truth He would offer them from His own lips; People are totally self-destructive (because of how they use their minds) and often show no love with their actions, for generations; most importantly, no one seeks the face of God in curiosity and with a desire to know the truth. It is for these reasons that He covered the planet with a dark impenetrable veil, and it is for these reasons that God has been unloving and totally devastating to you.

Name Calling...

It has been the custom on this planet for people to claim another person's God as their own. People say that Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos, and Micah were prophets, and consider the God of those prophet's as their own. Even though people realize that they don't speak and teach what those prophets spoke and taught, they still say that they have the same God as those prophets.

Here are a few examples of what I mean:
Isaiah 8:11-13 "Yahweh spoke to me with mighty power and instructed me not to walk in the way of this people, saying, "You are not to say, 'It is a conspiracy!' In regard to all that this people call a conspiracy, and you are not to fear what they fear or be in dread of it."
Jeremiah 8:8 "How can you say, 'We are wise, and the law of Yahweh is with us'? But behold, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie."
Hosea 10:13 "You have plowed wickedness, you have reaped injustice, you have eaten the fruit of lies because you have trusted in your way, in your numerous warriors."
Amos 5:21-24 "Even though you offer up to Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings, I will not accept them; and I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fatlings. Take away from Me the noise of your songs; I will not even listen to the sound of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."
Micah 6: "With what shall I come to Yahweh and bow myself before the God on high? Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings, with yearling calves? Does Yahweh take delight in thousands of rams, in ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does Yahweh require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"

You quote these things, and repeat these sayings for your own heart's content, but they truly are meaningless words to you. There is much that you fear and are in dread of; you call the 'Torah' the word of God; you trust in the salvation of your military; you waste time by singing a thousand songs of praise instead of working for peace and justice in the Earth; and you do not seek God with simplicity. The reasons being that you are religious and have no living God walking ahead of you - and since you say "there is a God", then know and understand that your God exists solely in your mind and in the minds of your children.

You say to yourself, "My God is Jehovah" or "My God is Yahweh", yet you do not know why those Hebrew prophets spoke and taught like they did. You say, "Their God is my God", yet you never say the things they said nor do the things they did. The prophets said, "Yahweh is my refuge" and "Yahweh is my salvation", and they said such things for many obvious reasons - but you have no reasons to say such things because there is no salvation for you in life other than what your police offices, doctors, and military provide for you. It was Hosea who said that people like you have no salvation from God, and you never turn your head upward to seek it - and yet still, you say, "The Lord is my savior" with ignorant repetition.

If I were to call a tree stump "Jesus", you would disagree with me and say, "That is not Jesus". If I bowed before a chubby man carved in stone and said, "Thank you Jesus", you would contend with me. You call your God "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" and say that your God is the God who spoke to those prophets, but you are incorrect, because you neither say nor do as they said and did - nor does Yahweh their God interact with you as He did with them. You are simply name calling for your own heart's content, and for no other reason.

I Made Fire...

A few weekends ago, my friend and I sat down to smoke a cigarette. The lighter I had was one of those free ones you get with a pack of cigarettes, and the flame was very low. So my friend took it apart, did something, and the fire was great. I asked him to show me how he did it. So he took the lighter apart, showed me what to adjust inside, then attempted to put the lighter back together. But as he attempted to put it back together, the lighter pretty much fell apart in his hands, and he was unable to fix it. This past weekend, I used a very small lighter that was sitting in my car. This lighter ran out of butane very quickly (since a couple of people used it).

So I've tried and tried and tried again to make a spark with the lighter my friend broke, but the spark wheel wouldn't turn. And I tried and tried and tried again to get the small lighter to make a flame, but it simply threw out sparks.

Then I thought about things. I depressed the lever on the broken lighter and sniffed it to see if I could smell any butane, and I could. So I held the lever down for a few seconds to let more butane come out. Then I threw on it some sparks from the small lighter, and like a dream come true, there was fire! Fire appeared on the heads of both lighters!

The point of this is that I've been going about things all the wrong way. I've tried too hard to make fire out of broken things thinking that they would work as they should if I just kept trying the same pointless shit over and over. But neither lighter worked as they should - even if I tried the same thing a thousand times. And if I had used my intelligence in the matter from the beginning, understanding that a broken lighter is a broken lighter, rather than try and try and try to simply make a broken lighter work, I probably could have had an effective fire long ago.

Googling God...

I've noticed the 'new' Google feature where it shows the number of times a search item has been googled. Whenever I've googled something, at least 10,000 other people have googled the exact same thing. It immediately let me know that my thoughts and questions are the thoughts and questions of thousands and millions of other people. Even when I went apartment searching for a specific apartment complex in a specific city, there were thousands of other similar searches every time.

So I figured that maybe I could Google God, and Google those who know God or those who are at least seeking God, and I always come up with nothing. 0 similar searches is what is always returned - and it amazes me that no one seeks God. God made sure that no one on this planet would see 'His' face or know anything about 'His' character unless they seek Him - and I suppose Google proves it. It reminds me that God's intelligence is amazing and incomparable - I even say to this day that God is not a magician, God is a scientist.

Now, none of this explains why people believe what they do about God - because you could simply go by what you see and say, "People live and die, and no God(s) does anything about it all" - but it isn't what people say. And since people don't state the obvious, no one goes further and says to the sky, "Whoever you are, if you are there, why don't you do anything about it all." This is seeking God, this is questioning God - and no one does it, and I suppose Google proves it. Who has looked up and asked, "Who are you?" - those people certainly see the messengers of Yahweh in those well lit spacecrafts who act on Yahweh's behalf, they may even see the liars above who deceive.

People insist on telling God who God is - and saying a whole bunch of bullshit about God helping them pay their debts or being one with God, or whatever else people feel the emotional need to say about the God they have never seen. It is obvious when they open their eyes that there is nothing but bitterness all around them. Sure, people have their good days, but at the end of it all is the grave - and God has never been found in death. If you don't believe me, you could simply ask God - it is, after all, how I found out myself. You could stretch out your hand to an oppressor, and the oppressor will chop it off, and God will do nothing to stop them or save you. So instead of people saying, "I don't know who you are, but will you help us?" they say instead, "It was God's will that my hand was chopped off" or "Everything happens for a reason" or whatever else they can come up with to explain away God's absence in the matter. And since it's philosophy and religion that people want, it's what God gives them over to.

"Who", "What", "Where", "When", "Why", and "How" are wonderful things to say to God, even "Perhaps you can" and "Perhaps you will" are just as beautiful - and if you see a truthful response back above, I suppose that would make you a true prophet.

I've recently moved from out of Beltsville, MD and reminisced the years that those moving stars appeared for me the last few nights of my stay. I'm in New Carrollton, MD now and am quite curious as to what the next few years will bring - as I'm not sure what I'll request of Yahweh for this place, since no one seems to really give a shit. I am confident in a few things I will be doing, but these are things for people to see when they happen, not read beforehand like everything else.

Waking up in hell...

I remember when I was younger I would go to sleep at night and have dreams that life was very pleasant. In those dreams, I had everything I thought I needed, I didn't feel bullied by people older than me, I wasn't forced to do what I hated, and there were only feelings of joy. But then I woke up and realized that I was in hell to stay. This, with the eager help of my elders, easily lead me into the open arms of religion and her idol that people call 'God'. Religion was the way for me to have a little bit of inner peace while physically roasting in the fire.

I knew what everyone knew, whether they were religious or not, in that the only way out of hell's fiery furnace was to either get rich quick, or drop dead - the first doing nothing more than lessening the intensity of the heat, and the latter being the only true way out. And since no one wanted to die (save religious nut-cases or those in terrible anguish), getting rich was the best alternative.

But in these days, where I don't have religion, and I don't know atheism or agnosticism, I still wake up in hell, but I don't feel any heat from the flames. I was lifted out of the fire by those I call 'messengers' - I even remember the very day... January 2, 2006, when I was told what to call God - it wasn't as extravagant or lengthy as the reported flaming bush incident, but I was certainly afraid, just for a moment.

I suppose I could relate this to the story of "Abraham's Bosom" that some ancient Jews used to tell. It was reported that there are 2 sides of hell, one where most people burned because of God, and the other where a very few lived in safety and were not burned. If I were to compare that place to this place, then it would seem that I am on the "Abraham's Bosom" side of hell. And since I'm on the "Abraham's Bosom" side of hell, as it seems, I have no desires of wealth or fears of darkness - only because I am safe (according to the messengers above who speak to those in "Abraham's Bosom").

When you live on the "Abraham's Bosom" side of hell, your perceptions change, your experiences change - and this has been impossible for me to get through to people. I pointed my finger and said, "Look at this", I even stated the obvious so that they could only believe what they plainly see with their own eyes, but none of it ever mattered. People clearly see that they wake up in hell every single day, and they don't expect the next day to be any different - they simply beg and pray to their idols that hell won't be as hot tomorrow - because they certainly don't pray for that idol of theirs to hurl their asses into that dark pit of death... even though it's where they end up anyway.

I thought that if those burning would see us standing over here in "Abraham's Bosom" unscathed by the flames and see us speaking strong downpours of rain throughout hell to perhaps ease the fire, and even make vegetation blossom in the dry places, then they would say to themselves, "What's going on? Why doesn't such goodness happen to me as well? Why do they see everything, but I see nothing? Why does God act on their behalf, but not mine?" but I was wrong. I learned that people don't work things out in their heads this way.

People don't put 2 and 2 together - which should be the logical response when they see God plainly saying to them, "Fuck you and drop dead". For some reason, it makes more sense for people to believe in a 'loving fatherly God' that shows partiality and is just in doing so, speaking to some and not others, than for them to think that those burning in hell are there for a reason. It never crosses their mind to say, "Maybe I should be doing something. Perhaps I should try looking for something. Maybe I'll find something if I start digging." But when those people do begin to ask questions, they prefer to look for a new philosophy and say, "Which new belief should I take hold of today?", and they do not dig for the obvious truth.

But such are those roasting in the fires of hell, as it seems.

I suppose the only 'good' thing about all of this is that no one stays in hell forever. Those burning end up having the same fate as all animals, and those in "Abraham's Bosom" are removed.

E - Prayer and Hurricanes

As we all know, the hurricanes have been beating the shit out of the US recently, especially in the south. I am 100% sure that people throughout the country have been praying to their gods for these hurricanes to go away or pray that homes aren't destroyed. The result of their prayers - a terrible hurricane that hovered over Florida for days. So people prayed again, but then another hurricane came. So people prayed again, and another hurricane came.

Why don't people use common sense when it comes to God?

I am 100% sure that the ministers have made up some philosophy as to why God didn't do shit for help - it's what they always do. If they couldn't explain away God's silence in these matters, then they wouldn't have the job. On the other hand, if God did help people, then why would they need ministers? The acts of God would be ministry enough.

The word of God is this, "I do some really fucked up shit to mankind, and I allow every evil thing to happen to them." But then the ministers and prophets come along to contradict the word of God and say to you, "God is full of loving compassion. He may not come when you want him, but he'll be there right on time. You are kings and queens, and no weapon formed against you shall prosper." Now, honestly, doesn't it make more sense to believe the simple word of God? It is most reasonable and quite easy to understand - even for children. Actions are everything in this universe, and God's actions are quite obvious, are they not?

If God were to give a message to mankind through those terrible hurricanes, it would be this, "No one ever asks, 'Where is God?' They prefer to pray to quiet idols and make up philosophies rather than pay attention to the obvious truth. So I give them ministers and prophets, and I give them violence and hurricanes."

C - Truth

There was once an archaeologist who went digging in the desert. He didn't know what he was looking for, but he knew that the truth would come to him in time. While digging, he found a treasure chest. So he pulled it out of the ground, opened it and saw that it was filled with gold of all shapes and sizes. He was so surprised that he went and told everyone else what he found. One or two people came and looked at that ancient chest from afar but they were not amazed, others didn't care enough to come out in the desert with him, and some simply didn't believe him. He said to himself, "Surely they will care if I show them gold", so he grabbed a few small gold nuggets - but still, no one sought the truth of the treasure. The man went back to the desert, grabbed some gold from the chest, and was never heard from again - he was presumed dead. There was a violent earthquake, and the chest was buried under dirt and sand.

Hundreds of years passed. There was another man who became an archaeologist. He heard about the story of the man digging, not knowing what he was looking for, but found a treasure chest full of gold in the desert. Some people told the man the story was a fable, others said there are only riches in a days work, some said the story was a philosophical one and nothing more. So the archaeologist went to the desert and began digging and searching for the treasure chest full of gold. He found the chest and the gold and became ecstatic - but then depressed because no one cared enough to come to the desert with him. So he grabbed some of the gold and was never heard from again - he was presumed dead. There was a violent earthquake and the chest was buried.

Both archaeologist went digging for truth - one had no idea what he was looking for, the other did - but they both found the same thing, and they were both astonished because of what they found. They both gained the same truth, but only because they went looking.

The truth must always be looked for, it must always be searched for - because eventually you're going to stumble on something you didn't expect to find.

Even more concerning truth, people will always say what they want to say to you, but watch them - watch their actions - pay attention to what they do. Look around you and look at yourself - because many of you lie to yourselves more than anyone else lies to you - then you cover up a lie with a philosophy as a way to appease your curious mind. Tell the truth to yourself. There are liars everywhere, here and everywhere, there are liars - so pay attention to what you see, especially in the days you seek truth and go digging in the desert (if in fact you decide to go digging in the desert).

If you find the truth - make it useful to others. If others refuse to use it, then keep it for yourself, which is all you'd be able to do with it.