AW! Epistles
From P Cohen of Harvest Haven 4
Abstract
Abstract
It is going on 3 months since you wrote to me, but I did not forget you! Your letter provoked us to look into the matter of John Calvin and Michael Servetus, which led to the writing of *The Fruit of Cain Multiplied: The Murderer John Calvin
It is going on 3 months since you wrote to me, but I did not forget you! Your letter provoked us to look into the matter of John Calvin and Michael Servetus, which led to the writing of *The Fruit of Cain Multiplied: The Murderer John Calvin
We thank you greatly, Mike, for bringing this situation to our attention. Much good is coming of it. Presently, three of these correspondences are linked at the bottom of the Calvin paper, and we plan to post others as we are able. Please have a look.
There are several common themes in your objections to our experience of God’s grace and the preaching of the gospel of Christ. These objections appear to be ones that many atheists would have or make. Therefore I am answering them not only for you, but for all that would like or need to hear these things.
You begin by saying that because God’s thoughts are not man’s thoughts, therefore no man can know them, as we claim we do. That is not, however, what God meant by the words of Isaiah: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, or your ways My ways, says the Lord”, Isaiah 55:8 BBE.
God is not saying no one can know His thoughts or ways. Why would He bother sharing them if people could not know? That makes no sense whatsoever! Why would God even tell us this particular thing about Himself unless He was desirous to communicate to human beings? What He is saying is that you cannot know Him by depending on your human powers of observation, which is exactly what you do, though you deny He exists! Talk about confusion!
Well, it is nice to know I have stimulated you to do some reading outside the bible, but it does not seem to be doing you much good. All of you Christian kooks think they are God, as I have said repeatedly, and it is no different from thinking you are Napoleon. Rather worse, in fact. Here you know what God meant as reported in the ancient writings called Isaiah. This ancient book is around 2,400 years old, and pretends to be 300 years older, ie it pretended to be ancient then! No one seriously thinks it was written by God, and it does not claim to be. It declares itself to be a vision! I can envision all sorts of things, and no doubt you can too, but neither of us, I imagine, thinks these are visions given us by God. Visions are imaginary, and if I write them down, they are called fiction. The same applies to this ancient author. He was writing fiction. If he thought his vision was some sort of reality, then he was deluded. You might think God was guiding his mind and his hand, that is a measure of your own gullibility, but even if it were true, the author was human and subject to human error in every respect, one of which is thinking God was speaking to him when he was just thinking his own thoughts. Many people have the same delusion today, including important ones like Bush and Blair, but we do not consider them to be correct.
I do not consider these ancient books to be anything other than ancient government propaganda meant to keep the population docile for fear of God. All of this I have said before, and it is getting tedious to repeat it. Your incessant citing of ancient works of imagination as the unquestioned thoughts of God, when I have said many times that I am unimpressed, is perverse. Even those of you who believe them as God’s word cannot agree on their meaning, and you are no different from Calvin in being certain your own interpretation is right. I am glad to know that you do not regard them as valid motives for murdering your fellow humans, but the Christian moral restraints that have applied in the past have proved to be tissue thin. Calvin is proof. I have spent some time with you discussing some of the words in the bible, whether they purport to be God’s or Paul’s or whoever, but it is little different from discussing the words of Rabelais or J K Rowling. Yes these ancient writers had a moral purpose, but it was based on ancient morality. Much of it is still valid, but to imagine that it is God’s own truth is ridiculous. And you show your own dishonesty, and, indeed, acceptance of the need for interpretion of these texts by citing different biblical versions, according to what best suits your own arguments.
Disproving your conclusion that God is unknowable according to His own words, elsewhere He speaks of those who do know Him, as we do:
If any want to boast, they should boast that they know and understand Me, because My love is constant, and I do what is just and right. These are the things that please Me. I, the LORD, have spoken”Jeremiah 9:24 GNB
Whatever you say, in the next verse after the verse of Isaiah you cited, “God” explains that His thoughts are as far above a man’s as the heavens are above the earth. In those days it was an unspannable gap. Contradictions like these simply show that we are not dealing with anything absolute, such as an absolute God would ordain, but a mish mash of ancient opinion.
You accuse me of being boastful, but, as you can see, God commends our boasting when it is about Him, about what He is like and what He has done for us, because we have no credit coming to us. We would not know Him except that He revealed Himself to us, giving us a new heart to understand Him.
God, in the so-called New Testament, actually appeared on the earth, Christians believe, and a point He forcefully made while here was that those who follow Him, believe in Him, had to be humble. There is nothing humble about boasting. Why should you believe Jeremy rather than Christ?
That is really the only difference between us. I have a new heart and know God and you do not. That is why the Scriptures are an open book to me, and a closed one to you. You do not know God, so how can you know what He means when He says His mind and ways are not the same as yours? On the other hand, we know God, so how can we not know what He means?
And Calvin did not know God. He thought he did. How do you differ?
When we say we know Him, we are not boasting about ourselves but are reporting the truth:
For who among men knows the things of a man except the spirit of man within him? So also no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. But we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit from God, *so that we might know the things that are freely given to us by God*. These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned_/*. But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is judged by no one. For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct Him? */_But we have the mind of Christ. 1 Corinthians 2:11-16 MKJV
More tedious citations of ancient words that you have no idea are God’s, or are even inspired by God, and not the devil. Indeed, as I have said before, inasmuch as Paul teaches the opposite of Christ, and Christ is considered to be God, you are opposing God every time you cite Paul.
You ask where our faith came from. It came from God; it is a gift. You say it came from reading the Bible, because God does not exist. But I began to believe before I ever touched the Bible. I had red portions of the Old Testament in Hebrew school, and it meant nothing to me. What was the difference several years later? Here it is: God began to reveal Himself to me through Jesus Christ. */_He came to me._/* Then, as I began to read the Bible, I understood it. So, faith in God came first.
How then did you ever hear of this Jesus Christ? Did his name appear to you in a vision? Plainly it came from somewhere, so you had already experienced Christian teaching. You were indoctrinated and obviously you already had a mind receptive to Christian propaganda.
You ask: “Isn’t God an almighty being? If He had an important message why wouldn’t He send it in a way that would impress upon people that this is God speaking, and not via a series of lunatics?” Here we are back again to the words of Isaiah, saying to you that God does not do things the way men think they should be done. Paul the apostle put it this way:
For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not in eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ should be deprived of its power. For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the understanding of the prudent I will annul. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, God was well pleased, through the foolishness of our preaching, to save those that believe. For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.1 Corinthians 1:17-24 EMTV
God has made His message very clearly known to those whom He chooses to reveal it, as He has done with us. What I preach is foolishness to you, but to those who believe, it is the power of God. This explains how hearts are transformed and believers give praise and thanks to Him Who is invisible to men, but now seen in Christ by them.
The citation of Isaiah here is a reference to those who professed to be wise and prudent in religious matters but were really being hypocritical or ignorant about religion. It is not a criticism of wisdom generally. Whole sections of the bible are called wisdom literature, as you know. So Paul is either fooling you, or you are misreading Paul. You decide.
*Threats of Eternal Punishment Are Nonsense * Men are not transformed by threats of eternal punishment, as you incorrectly ascribe to God, to us, and to the Bible: “The reason is that your guess is tied in with a threat that obliges you to believe it, the threat that you have been making to me already in this exchange. Do not believe in this guess and you will be roasted forever in a boiling lake of sulphur.” And: “...if your God is indeed God, He is quite capable of punishing me Himself without people like you who think you are God doing it for him.”
This is calumny, an unfounded and scandalous accusation without proof or merit. Nothing of the sort was said by us or is found in Scripture, and, indeed, this gets us back to the initial point: You have no conception of, or connection to, the mind of God (or ours), as demonstrated by such erroneous perceptions of what we are saying and doing and the central message of the Bible—reconciliation through Jesus Christ.
So nothing of the sort was found in the scriptures, and I have no conception of the mind of God, but at least I have read the bible and therein I clearly read, “And death and hell were thrown into the Lake of Fire. This is the second death. And if anyone was not found having been written in the Book of Life, he was thrown into the Lake of Fire”, Rev 20:14.
I was never threatened by God when He revealed Himself to me in Christ. Victor, whose testimony you said you did not read because you have heard so many like it, saw the Lord’s coming in a dream before he began to believe, which he describes here: Victor’s First Three Dreams from the Lord
The Lake of Fire is for purification. It is not a physical place. Yes, there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. We see it here in this life, because it is describing something that happens within, spiritually—you are gnashing your teeth, for example, with great acrimony. The Bible is a spiritual Book, about the spiritual realm and the journey from darkness to Light of the sons and daughters of God. That is why you do not understand it, as a son of man whose mind is no different from that of a beast. Does that insult you? It shouldn’t, because that is the state of every man until God does something to change it: “So foolish was I, and I did not know; I was like a beast before You”, Psalms 73:22 MKJV.
Well, just in case you missed it, “But for the cowardly and unbelieving, and those having become foul, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all the lying ones, their part will be in the Lake burning with fire and brimstone, which is the second death,” Rev 21:8. If you wish to argue that this second death is not an eternal punishment, then I would agree with you, but it is a final extinction of the personality that is meant, like the actual nature of the first death that most of us call death. Why otherwise is it called death? But that is not how most Christians have seen it, because they refuse to accept that any death is final, otherwise why not believe that plain ordinary death is? But Rev 10:10 describes the punishment as eternal in a lake of fire and brimstone, ie sulphur. You have your own inadequate conception of the bible based on your own inadequate interpretations, and your own, not God’s, assessment of yourselves as worthy, when you are, as you admit, just a boaster, a spouter, like your real God, Paul.
*Lack of the Spirit of God and Discernment* We call your ways foolish and hypocritical because they are demonstrably so, and someday you will know it and repent, your eyes opened to see Him Whom you have spurned, mocked, and hated, and you will be very sorrowful for all you have done in your bitterness towards Him. The hate and rage you see coming from me, or God, is really what is inside you, manifesting itself to you in the mirror of the Light of God. In your sin and darkness, you project what you see on those who show it to you. This bitterness and rage has blinded you to the difference between friends of God and servants of Satan. You do not know the right hand from the left, light from dark, truth from error. You write: “I do not distinguish between false and true religion because there is no such distinction, except in your own faulty assumptions. Religion pertains to some unnecessary salvation in a dream world. All of it is false, and requires belief in what is to be established, it is unreasonableness.” The faith of Christ is the evidence of things not seen, some of those I have already brought up in this letter, like God Himself and His attributes. Mankind, in his carnal, fleshly nature, no matter how refined, genteel, erudite and spiritual he thinks himself to be, does not know or see God. It becomes tricky when men, under the influence of their lower nature, aspire, through their knowledge, to be like God, or, to accrue the benefits they perceive they can get to themselves in the Name of God, which is the heart of what constitutes false religion.
What counts as a "thing not seen"? A fairy? Mother Goose? An alien from outer space? A demon? Santa Claus? Should I believe in anything not seen? The whole point about imagination is that it is visible only to the person whose imagination it is. Yet, if anyone is sufficiently foolish, credulous and uncritical, they can be persuaded to see something in someone else’s imagination. That is what God is, and religion has always, and still is, all about, whether old religion or new sects and cults.
True religion is to know and walk with God, having no confidence whatsoever in corrupt flesh and minds (the ones that do not perceive or agree with God). True religion is not about what one can get from God, or what one can get by claiming to know Him, but about how we conduct ourselves towards Him and our fellow man in reality and truth: “He has shown you, O man, what is good. What does the LORD require of you, but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” Micah 6:8 HNV.
More of your interminable quotations from thousands of years ago. I agree with justice, mercy and humility, but do not need God to make me do it. Why don’t you try it yourself?
Jesus Christ exemplified true religion in all its fullness, which was given to mankind by God so that we might see Him as He is in truth through the demonstration of His Nature in another human being. Jesus Christ acted as God on our behalves, as one of us, Who, instead of condemning us for not meeting His standards, laid down His life for us so that we might know the love of God through the forgiveness of our sins and the receiving of His Spirit, in order that we may become like Him. So why do you not believe what he is reported to have said, instead of a virtually self confessed charlatan. The dream world you speak of is the religious one of hypocrites who praise Christ with their lips, but their hearts are far from Him. You have no right to condemn them, however, since Christ died for them as well as for you, and you are essentially no different. They are dishonest atheists, and you are at least honest in your confession that you do not believe or follow God.
*Deceived about Yourself* However, you are dishonest in that you discount the real because of the existence and influence of the false. As a man who would throw away good currency because someone produced something apparently similar and is known as a counterfeiter, so you throw away good because of bad. Thus, you condemn yourself, unwittingly so.
The situation is the complete opposite of what you are describing, and illustrates your complete estrangement from reality. The "things not seen" you speak of are not seen because they are not real. You think they are, proving you are certifiable.
You still believe and speak lies, though you do not present yourself as a Christian. You are yet in your sins, though you claim you are not. The reason you judge yourself pure is because you judge yourself by your own yardstick, not God’s: “I have not had any need to change my nature. I am a normal human being living in a normal human society … I have not mugged old ladies, buggered kids or raped women, and take a dim view of those who do, often Christians, or they claim to be Christians when they are caught.” Your sights are set extremely low. Have you not heard what Jesus said? You lecture me on His words, yet you do not consider or apply them to yourself. Of what use, then, are they to you? He said that if you look on a woman with lust you have already committed adultery with her in your heart. He said that if you are angry with your brother without cause you are liable to the judgment of God as a murderer. Forget what you think about others; where do you stand according to the measure of Christ?
Well, if my sights are low, so be it, but I am happy that human beings do not want to rape women and do not want to kill others, even if they sometimes think of it. The evidence of history, not just Calvin by far, is that Christians think they are justified by God in doing these criminal acts, and others even worse, yet continue to think they are saved, because it is what God wanted. And you spout about people having a nasty thought. I’ll believe you when Christians stop killing others.
Of course, your argument is that you do not use His Words because you believe them but because we claim to believe them and follow Him. Firstly, don’t quote unless you know what you are talking about, and secondly, don’t accuse us of things without first finding out what indeed we do believe. Thirdly, are you saying you find no value in anything He is recorded to have said? If so, what?
You might be short of a few brain cells, but I assume you understand that I am arguing with what you say here, in this discussion, and this is proving tedious enough without having to read more of your insane justifications for calling reality unreal and imaginary beings real, truth falsehood, and anything demonstrably false true. I have repeatedly said, though you brain is hard to engage to receive it, that old manuscripts can and sometimes do contain sense and morality, especially when they are addressing morality as much of the bible is, in its ancient and inadequate way. The recorded words of Christ are capable of being moral, and equally capable of being insane. You prefer the insane interpretations. To suggest tearing out an eye to stop you from lusting is insane if understood literally today. It was meant as a serious warning coming from a man who expected the world to end "soon", and then the kingdom of God to begin. He really believed it, then, and so did Paul. It has still not happened. They were wrong, and so they were false prophets on God’s own criterion. Why do you not get it? Are you led by the nose by the smelly fellow with horns and hooves?
Jesus Christ, as we have presented Him to you, is the real Mouth you ask for, by which we answer you: “And, if God did not want us to live except by words coming out of His imaginary mouth, why did He not create a real mouth that could speak for Him, clearly and for all time?” But you say: “If Christ is it, why invent a half baked scheme that broke all the rules he had already said mankind should follow?” Christ said He came to fulfill the whole Law, and He did. He proved it by raising His own body from the grave, and then raising us out of the death state, which all men are in, to be with Him. Therefore I believe His testimony more than yours.
So what is it that persuades you that this tale is true? All Christians say they believe it without anything like an adequate reason, other than they are scared that if it is true, they will lose out. If it is true, how is it that the raising of a physical body from natural death proves we can all be raised spiritually after we have started to decay? Isn’t this logic, if it is God’s certainly, more than half baked. God can do better, surely. If Christ was raised into eternal life, where is he now? His body was allegedly in need of sustenance, so he must be still around, isn’t he? What too of the numberless saints who were raised with him. You never answer these points because they cannot be answered. You have to attribute them to a mystery of God, but truly it is evidence of a half baked scheme. It is especially half baked that God should appear as a man claiming to be God, or so Christians say. You are fond of citing Isaiah, but you ought to read in it what God had to say about who saved. The name “Isaiah” is testament to the subject of the book. Indeed it is probably the title of the book not the name of the author. it means Yehouah Saves!
There is no half-baked scheme that allows us to break all His rules. He summarized the whole of the Law in two commandments—love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. This He has wonderfully fulfilled in us, just as He promised: “Do not think that I have come to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to destroy but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17 MKJV). But you think your philosophy and ability are sufficient: “I am no lost sheep, but have been pretty well confined to the sheep pen, if that is what society is. That is what I would ask of other people. That is what the purpose of love is—to be helpful to others in society to fit in properly and make the most of it.” The problem is one already alluded to—men’s standards are very low and, furthermore, slanted selfishly towards themselves, so that they cannot see clearly to judge what is right and beneficial for others. That is why no society since the beginning of the world has achieved an environment of mutual care that has flourished and endured. The first commandment of loving the Lord our God with all our hearts has not been upheld, and therefore the second has been botched up as well. The results are everywhere to be seen, with the religious and non-religious alike.
God was invented to get people to be moral, personally, without the need for enforcement by police and the state. Once, it was a good idea, when people really believed it, and it took away much of the need for physical enforcement of the law. Now, we do not generally believe, none more so than professional Christians like crooked pastors, greedy televangelists and millionaire used car salesmen and gambling casino owners, who payroll much Christian sectarian effort. Belief is a way of extracting money from people who don’t have much of it. It is a confidence trick, and the shepherds and their kind are the benefactors. You are supporting the same effort, so you are either a cynical pastor type or a gullible sheep.
*The Source of Goodness and Why We Are Here * What good there *has* been has come from the leaven of the saints of God, which is to say, God gave it to mankind through those whom He chose to do so. Of such are those who brought the Ten Commandments and all the words of God to mankind, which teach the way of life. How do we come to have what is good? All of us are here to learn by experience that the wrong way does not work, which prepares us to learn the right way. You ask: “And if God did not want us to live with or without these mysterious words emanating from an imaginary mouth, why did He breath life into us in the first place? Is God omniscient? He is? Then why bother with a life for sinners at all. He knows what they will do, and He knows what His judgement on them will be, so why bother? Another mystery of the idiot God, I suppose.” It is not incompatible with omniscience that people are created and made subject to the uselessness of everything except being connected to God. These are the needful Laws of Opposites and Relativity in process. How can you know what life is unless you experience death and disconnection from the Source of life? I thought Christians did not experience death. Is that why they never value life, especially the life of others? “For the creation was not willingly subjected to vanity, but through Him subjecting it, on hope; that also the creation will be freed from the slavery of corruption to the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:20-21 LITV). You are fond of citing your true God. Why not worship him and be more honest with yourselves. *No Looking Down on Anyone* You say, “…you despise everyone who will not accept your own brand of lunacy.” We despise no one and are not lunatics. We are here to liberate, not condemn, and we succeed by the power of God Who lives in us through Christ. Because we believe in the Creator, Whose work you attribute to nothingness and to self-sustaining random accidents of nature, which have never been seen since the beginning of time, you call */_us_/* lunatics? If we are for you, and you are against us, then you are against yourself. That is lunacy. You say that pointing out the speck in our brother’s eye should apply only to our fellow believers, not to you, but you have no problem pointing out beams in everyone else’s eyes, believers or not. Whether you profess faith in God or not, you have a beam in your eye, and for your own good and the good of others we point it out. Because you attack the credibility of the faithful recorders of Scripture and believers in Jesus Christ, we have every right and duty to answer your charges.
Yes, the beam in my eye is that I refuse to believe a load of codswallop. Those who do believe it must do out of ignorance or lunacy. By judging that it is lunacy in your case, I am flattering your intellect.
*True Science Is Never Denied* It is not correct to say, as you do, that we reject science because we reject the “rational scientific philosophy” you champion in lieu of the Scriptural teachings about God and how we are to live. We are simply rejecting your intellectual philosophy that analyzes and dismisses the wisdom and truth from God. “In thousands of years of biblical belief, the bible has not recorded anything revealed by God that has benefited mankind.” That is truly an astoundingly ignorant statement. What makes it astounding is your confidence in its veracity. Surely you mock and are not as stupid and ignorant as all that! The foundation of the worthwhile elements of the society you live in comes from the Bible and those who received these things from God, starting at the beginning. But if you dismiss God, the Creator, as non-existent and irrelevant, except as a force of evil in the imaginations of evil men (which He is not), how can you appreciate what He has given to mankind through those sent by Him? And vice-versa; if you dismiss those sent by God, how can you appreciate Him, the Sender? Of course you cannot and do not.
Are you saying that societies had no worthwhile elements in them until Christ appeared on earth? They plainly had essentially the same worthwhile elements that societies have today. Societies have elements that characterize societies, and humanity is a social animal. We are social because it is an advantage to us to be social. If societies ceased to be social, then society would collapse, and on occasions it has done, but because it is our nature to be social we rebuild a new society. God has nothing to do with it, and proof is that for a thousand years under the rule of the Christian God, society was poor, squalid, diseased and miserable for most people in the dark ages. Christianity caused over a millennium of horror that we have only recently escaped, and people like you want to take us back there. People like me find that disgusting, and Christian ignorance of it is the most disgusting, and inexcusable part of it.
The Bible is not a science book or a guide to better living through inventions of various sorts. Nor is it against those things; it all depends on the motives in the application of knowledge that determines whether something is good or evil. The Bible is about the most fundamental aspects of our existence—why we are here and our responsibility to fulfill our God-given purpose that will bring us life in the most satisfying manner. The way the Bible says it is, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Deuteronomy 8:3). Stop being stubborn and stupid—read *Victor’s testimony
You speak utter bullshit. Deuteronomy was written by the Persians as the foundation book of the bible. They wanted a peaceful populace, but had a gigantic empire of hundreds of diverse people. Far better to rule it through God, than through a conquering army. And where did this whole notion of clean and unclean come from? Judaism has no basis for it, and hygiene had little, if anything, to do with it. It came from Persia too, because the Persians saw the world as divided into warring camps, and clean items were on the good side while unclean items were demonic, the dual gods being Ahuramazda and Ahriman. The name of the Persian good god is probably the source of the name and the legend of Moses (Mazda, pronounced similarly), brought from Persia and imposed by Ezra, as the bible correctly explains.
How did the ancient Israelites know so much more than the scientists of recent centuries? Did they have better labs and more refined analytic processes? No, */_God told them_/*. He exists; this is but one in a multitude of proofs. In fact, one must keep his head between his knees, face down, hands over ears, to altogether avoid them, which, manifestly, is what you do.
Since when did they? If the recent centuries you speak of were the ones I just mentioned in the dark ages, not so recent but more recent than the Persian conquest of Judah, you have to explain where all this God given knowledge went in Christendom. Christians destroyed what knowledge the ancient world had, God given or discovered by natural curiosity and invention. Only recently has natural curiosity and invention surpassed ancient knowledge, no thanks to bishops, popes and saints.
*Man’s Religion Denies Reality with Disastrous Results* That is precisely what the false religion of Rome has been about. The disastrous results of her doing away with the “Judaizing” portion of the Word of God and substituting all kinds of superstition and heathen notions are well documented. Collier’s Encyclopedia states: “The superstition and dogmatism that marked the rise of Christianity in Europe continued to flourish throughout the Middle Ages. As in Babylon, astrology ruled the prognosis…Hygiene and sanitation were at a very low level, since the human body was held in contempt. St. Jerome saw no reason for any baths after the baptism.”
You are speaking about Christianity, my friend, even if it is a branch of it you do not like. What you cannot deny, though, is that what we have of Christianity, however it began, is what the Catholic church has allowed to be transmitted to us. You are a Catholic as much as anyone because without Catholicism there would have been no Christianity. What the Catholics did, supported by the Roman state, was to preserve the Hellenistic notions of Paul, the man you revere more than any Catholic does. These notions were to do with salvation by the magical resurrection of a God, just like the ancient Pagan deities.
Christ, in the synoptic gospels told you how to be saved, and sacraments had nothing to do with it. If faith in God came into it, it was to buttress God’s purpose expressed in practical terms. You had to love your neighbour, as you agree, and live frugally and humbly. Whole schools of Christians have tried to do these things, not least under Catholic rule, but always succumbed to corruption. The reason is that the practical measures have never been uppermost in Christianity, and Paul is the reason. He diverted attention from the practice of love and poverty to magic, faith in a rising God—paganism—and magical sacraments like holy communion. The beginning of the change from darkness happened when the millennium did not bring back Christ to cure the world, as Christians were promised. Poor Christians turned to alternatives, and the Catholic Church turned to butchery and cookery, murdering and roasting their enemies for seven or eight hundred years. Protestantism came out of it as a mix of Catholicism and heresy, and that is what you follow. You are a diluted Catholic, not the pure Christian you think you are.
By universally rejecting the sanitary and hygienic rules of the law of Moses, Medieval Europe invited disaster, and it came. In the fourteenth century A.D., calamity struck Europe in the form of a pandemic known as the Black Death. The Encyclopedia Americana records: “The Black Death was bubonic plague or its more virulent relative, pneumonic plague…The plague bacillus was transmitted either by the fleas of black rats (bubonic) or by the infected wastes of its victims (pneumonic)…When the Black Death struck, Europe was completely helpless to combat it…standards of public health and personal hygiene were nearly non-existent …it is estimated that somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of Europe’s population died in the years 1347-1350…Jews were accused of spreading the plague by poisoning wells [they were not getting ill as much because they kept the Laws of Moses], and pogroms directed against them occurred in the Rhineland and Switzerland.”
Now just how does the law of Moses protect Jews against the plague? Why did some places suffer and other places escape? Were they the good ones? Or maybe they were villages of Jews. No doubt modern doctors have taken up the remarkable nostrums of the Mosaic law and incorporated them into modern medicine. But if the law of Moses was such a protection against fleas, why did Christ have to drive out devils to cure people? I suppose what is effective against fleas is useless against devils. Why didn’t Asia and Africa suffer from plague, even though they did not have all these Judaio-Christian measures?
Collier’s Encyclopedia adds: “By the end of 1350, two-thirds of all Europeans had been attacked, of whom about one-half died, a total of 25,000,000 deaths…More than half the population of London, and perhaps of all England, died…Plague ships drifted idly about with whole crews stricken.” Only because the scientifically-proven principles of the Bible have been instituted to some degree are you here today. But that is nothing to you, because all you are is an accident anyway, right? Don’t be deceived—there is much higher than your scientific knowledge, Mike, and that is what God has demonstrated all along. As I said at the beginning of this paper, man’s wisdom is far below His. That is how He uses foolish things like us to confound the mighty of this world: “But God chose the foolish things of the world in order that He might humiliate the wise, and God chose the weak things of the world in order that He might humiliate the mighty. And the base things of the world, and the things having been despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, in order that He might nullify the things which are, so that no flesh may boast before God” (1 Corinthians 1:27-29 EMTV). Well, he certainly picked the right man in you. Read a book called /None of These Diseases/, written by medical doctors who discovered that following the injunctions in the Bible brought cures and health to their patients who were not being healed by conventional protocols. The doctors describe scientific discoveries relative to infectious diseases and point out that God had Moses record guidelines to protect people against microorganisms long before these discoveries by scientists. They identify specific Scriptures that address hand washing, quarantine, circumcision, proper treatment of dead bodies, and proper disposal of human feces (Numbers 19, Leviticus 13:46, Genesis 17:12, Deuteronomy 23:12-13), all of which are recognized today as measures significant in the prevention and/or control of infectious diseases.
Tell me first who the authors and publishers of this book are. Let me guess that they are people like yourself. It is certainly possible that the Persian distinction of clean and unclean based on the criteria of whether they were with God or Satan could have reflected a long period of civilization in the ANE in which certain things were condemned as evil because of experience. The sensible ones among us are willing to learn by experience, but not the ones who think everything worthwhile has been written into some ancient tome. Ancient people obviously discovered things. What is remarkable is how Christianity abandoned all of this, not the fact that before Christianity some people had noticed certain associations. In any case, you seem to be arguing now for Judaism, though you have opted for the Hellenists.
*How Great the Difference when Looking to God*
The long anecdote that you cite next and omitted here is simply an anecdote. You believe it as the truth, and maybe some of it is, but it is an anecdote based on one man’s impressions. It is like the "evidence" of the bible, you take it or leave it, and I’ll leave it, having read about such camps in the war, and known some friends of my father who actually experienced it themselves. Men in such situations have to draw on personal resources of determination and will to live, and they will do it under whatever spiritual guise they have been taught as juniors, if they have been thus indoctrinated. Their captors were godless Japs, of course, but what of the millions of people who suffered torture and imprisonment for the centuries of the inquisition and the witch hunts. In case you need reminding their torturers were Christians, like you, certain they knew what God wanted. What too of the Moslems who have been imprisoned and tortured by the pious Christian leader of the free world. The Christian story has it that Christ suffered on the cross, but he suffered only for a few hours when crucifixion normally took days to kill a man, the reason why they piked them in this story, to make sure they were dead so that they could be removed before the sabbath. If God is behind this story, it is not that He suffered on the cross and we all must learn to endure it as He did, but that humans must learn that they are willing to torture God, when they should be torturing no one. Needless to say, Christians interpret everything the way that suits them, and they have decided that God is authorising torture. Why otherwise do Christians persist in doing it, and in far more cruel and continuously agonizing ways? I have said before, you ought to be removing the beams from Christian eyes, then we shall be impressed when you notice them in other people’s.
*The Harmony of the Children of God and Nature* Are we against the study of nature, as you charge? How could we be as organic farmers? Neither do we refuse all medical care out of hand, as you conjecture, building another straw man to mock the Lord: “You will, naturally be joining the Christian Science Church and refuse any medical care at all…. Cure illness by exorcism. That is what your hero did, and he is THE TRUTH.” You are not rational in your mocking, because the Lord did not cure all those with afflictions by exorcism. There are many examples. Here are two: “And Jesus put out His hand and touched him, saying, I will; be clean! And immediately his leprosy was cleansed” (Matthew 8:3 MKJV). “And when He had spoken these things, He spat on the ground and made clay from the spittle. And He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay. And He said to him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (which translated is ‘Sent’). Therefore he went and washed and came seeing” (John 9:6-7 MKJV).
So you will cure people with a word or by spitting on them, as well as by exorcism. What then is your success rate with these advanced spiritual methods that you Christians use? The UK Christian leaders, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, have for ten years been destroying the British National Health Service, I always imagined it was because they would get huge rewards for doing it from private medical companies, especially US based ones who really know how to make money out of people’s misery. Now you are leading me to think they wanted to cure us by spit and charms. You think I call you lunatics out of spite, but almost everything you believe is quite literally insane. Proof is that you just do not get it. Christ allegedly drove demons into pigs from a mad man. Did you ever try doing that to yourselves?
Furthermore, while the Lord has miraculously healed us of many things without exorcism, He has taught us that we must take proper care of all things if we can ever expect to prosper in health. He has graciously shown us how to do this, as any father would teach his children the right way to live. If we therefore go against His teachings of the laws of nature, which are His laws, we cannot expect to do well if we do not repent of our waywardness. Why should He continually bail us out if we are not willing to listen to Him, use good reason He freely gives, and avoid the consequences of sin altogether?
What is the law of Nature that determines demonic possession, or the power of spittle and charms? If you believe God has made Nature, then Nature should be your bible because no man could have done it. Plenty of men, even in the olden days, could write books, and they had the motives for doing it, yet you prefer the book to Nature as your bible. Insane! For my own part, I can see and experience Nature as something far beyond me and indeed encompassing me, so it has the qualities of a god, but I can see no reason for inventing another imaginary being pulling Nature’s strings. Moreover, the important way my God differs from yours is that mine gives birth but yours manufactures. The natural process is birth not moulding in clay.
*Christ the Creator the Opposite of Man’s Phantasms* When I tell you that Santa Claus, to whom you compare Jesus Christ, has not led anyone to know these things, or to discover or employ the secrets of nature, you ask me in reply: “Has Jesus Christ?” Not only has Jesus Christ revealed these things to many throughout the ages, but He is the very Essence of all life at all times: “For all things were created in Him, the things in the heavens, and the things on the earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, all things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and by Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:16-17 MKJV).
You are citing Paul, your own god, again, but Christ himself was absolutely clear that he was not God and so could not have been a creator. If, indeed, he was a man, the whole notion is absurd. You believe what you read like gullible morons not what is blooming and breeding around you. This is what feeds you, to bring you back to one of your stupid assertions. Christ might say it, but who has ever actually relied on this rule of God, if Christ is God. You say you are organic farmers, so you know you have to put in effort to grow the foods you want. Since we ceased to be hunters and gatherers, God has never fed us. We feed ourselves, and most US Christians, despite the exhortations to love, hate the notion of welfare for the poor. If they cannot feed themselves, then it is God’s will, right?
Being God over all, He gives many to know things who do not know Him personally, which sabotages your charge that we, the Bible, and the author of the following words, Paul the apostle, are exclusive of the rest of mankind. “The God Who made the world and all the things in it, Him being Lord of Heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, nor by the hands of men is He served, as though He needed anything, for He gives to all life, and breath, with respect to all things. And He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell upon all the face of the earth, and He ordained their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, in order for them to seek the Lord, if perhaps indeed they might grope for Him and find Him, and yet being indeed not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ’For we are also His offspring’” (Acts 17:24-28 EMTV).
You are citing your god, Paul, again, but you will notice here that Paul seems to tell you that services to God are not what He requires of men, so why do you continue to attend services to God? If we are to believe anything of Paul’s works, and the works of the man who you are supposed to believe is God, Christ, what He wants is men to love each other. That is clear, and it is just as clear that Christians overwhelmingly have ignored this injunction in favour of believing that they can go to heaven just by believing. As James—a man who knew God personally, and in the flesh, if He was Christ, not just in daydreams—wrote, faith alone is dead, and the reason is that it is only demonstrated by love. Few Christians have been able to demonstrate it, and the ones who have succeeded have done it by practical demonstrations not by empty theologizing.
Because we reject evolution as the most ridiculous, asinine, far-fetched explanation of our existence ever concocted does not mean we do not consider scientific discoveries, as you charge. Just as there is true and false currency, true and false religion, so there is true and false science. The creation is full of meaning from our Creator, and as part of it, we look to Him for understanding. That is why, for example, we employ scientifically-proven techniques of microbial biology for soil health on our farm, rather than N-P-K fertilization technology, which is crude and destructive to the soil ecology and biosphere.
Quite right too, but how did the little microbes learn how to fix the N, P and K in forms that were useful to life? Did God teach them? Evolution is the way He did it, if God did anything in the world, which naturally I dispute. You pretend to understand Nature, but put your idiotic and old fashioned book first. You are on a loser. Evolution is irrefutable, and, if God made Nature, it is irrefutable that He made it work by evolution. If He did not, then tell me why He has made the world seem to evolve. Are you saying God is a liar? a trickster, because, if so, you are again confessing your god is really the devil. In your simple adherence to an ancient book, you make God into a liar. Nature cannot deceive because it is always there to be tested, and millions of tests have upheld evoution. Only madmen could deny it, and, if they are concerned with Nature but continue to deny it, then they are quite deranged. Yet books can quite simply be wrong, and old ones usually are!
In other words, looking to God is not backwards at all. It is mankind, in his backwards approach of forgetting the Inventor, and thinking he can do it better himself, that is doing a bang up job of destroying everything. That includes nominal Christians whose fruits do not match their profession. Most professing Christ do not believe in God or know Him any more than you do. He may as well be Santa Claus to them, and is.
So God is merely an inventor. Think Goddess and you get closer to the truth, albeit metaphorically perhaps. Why does an immortal being have a sex? Why is God a man, and why does He appear on earth as a man, His own son? If Christ is God, he told you that angels are not sexual beings, so why is God? You fundamentalists are simple to believe such nonsense, despite clear statements by God Himself, if Christ is He.
*Christ Not of this World—Communist or Capitalist* There are some (though not many, as you note) who say that Christ was the consummate communist, preaching shared poverty as the way to salvation. They are as wrong as you are. Here is the way you put it: “You might hate socialism, but I repeat that Christ held all his goods in common, and the man who held the purse was Judas. That is not just socialism, it is communism. ‘My God, that just will not do.’ God was a communist. Now you really expose your rightwing credentials. You want God to be a fascist like you.” While Christ and the apostles had a common purse, so do corporations. So what is wrong with communism as a philosophy? The same thing that is wrong with capitalism. The human heart is not reformed by systems of men. It is not having money, or not having it, that makes one right with God or man. I have given you Scriptures that prove Jesus did not make an issue of money, except where it was the issue, like with the rich young ruler who was too attached to his possessions. With Zacchaeus money was not an issue, and he was not required to give up his business or his assets. Yet salvation came to his house the day he repented of his sins and determined to make things right. Jesus said so: “And Jesus said to him, This day salvation has come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham” (Luke 19:9 MKJV). And to the fellow asking Jesus to enforce the communistic outcome of shared goods that you claim He taught and sought, Jesus replied: “Man, who appointed Me a judge or a divider over you?” (Luke 12:14 LITV) The Record is clear: Christ did not come to settle our economic differences. He also said those would continue: “For you have the poor with you always, and whenever you desire you may do them good” (Mark 14:7 MKJV). If there are always poor, there are also always those rich in comparison. God has made both, along with great variety in all things. Certainly the communists have proven themselves no better at making a utopia on earth than the capitalists, and worse, because capitalists, by and large, have not declared, “There is no God and we will live like there is none.” There has been some measure of conscience and acknowledgement of God’s laws in the West. However, it has become all sham and hypocrisy, where it is not blatant lawlessness, and so destruction comes. You behave as if you have the upper ground in your argument for shared poverty, surmising that I must certainly be speaking from avarice as a greedy Republican, your stereotype of a Christian living in the United States: “You do not want to be humble as you have repeatedly shown, and neither do you want to be poor….You refuse to do what he [Jesus] told you to do, not what Paul told you to do, but the man you say you consider to be God! You want to be saved without the trouble. That is why you treat your own God as an idiot. You hope He will not notice.”
You simply do not know what you are talking about, as anyone that knows the facts here could attest. Obviously you have no facts, so this kind of conjecturing does not help your cause, except to expose it as baseless, which is a good thing, especially for you. Someday Reality will prevail, and already the cracks in your self-imposed cocoon are appearing. We are certainly not here for this world and to amass its riches or we would not be spending our days writing to you and many others, preaching Christ and contending for the faith of God to a world that is at enmity with Him. Only those who, by the grace of God, are dead to this world can do such a thing. The dead cannot take anything with them: “We didn’t bring anything into the world, and we can’t take anything out of it” (1 Timothy 6:7 GW). We are not of those of which you speak Mike, but are as, and with, brother Paul: “For there are a lot of rebels out there, full of loose, confusing, and deceiving talk. Those who were brought up religious and ought to know better are the worst. They’ve got to be shut up. They’re disrupting entire families with their teaching, and all for the sake of a fast buck” (Titus 1:10-11 MSG). Paul was not there for the money (reading about his life who could ever propose such an absurdity?); none of God’s people ever are, whether rich or poor. Wisdom is justified of all her children.
You make lots of assertions but with little evidence, except your selective and misunderstood readings mainly from Paul. I imagine that you know the New Testament was a product of the Church, not of Christ, and it was written a long time after the crucifixion. Christians were originally Jews, and they knew what had happened, and knew Christ’s aphorisms and experiences. His failure to return meant the pious Jewish Christians reverted to Judaism while the Hellenized Jews and the gentiles revised the message. That was what Paul had taken on board. The early gentile church did not reflect accurately the teaching of Christ. The context of Christ is now clear. Once it was not, and his references to "the poor" were not to the poor in general, but to his own Jewish sect, the Ebionites, The Poor, or the Poor Ones. "The Poor will always be with us" was an expression of confidence in his own sect. Again he was wrong, but it was easy for gentiles to pretend The Poor really meant "the poor". You ought to know all this but you prefer ignorance. Contemporary Christian historians like Hippolytus, Eusebius and Epiphanius knew all this, but not you! I accept, though, that the Church intended to deceive, and it succeeded, you simply being a victim, but you boast that you are returning to proper Christianity, that of Christ, as opposed to the Catholics, yet you stick to obvious Catholic deceptions. Christ certainly saw greed as a problem in society, and the answer of The Poor was to eschew wealth. If you cannot see that in your gospels, then you are truly blind. Try spitting on your eyes. It has a chance of curing metaphorical blindness.
*Bitterness Blinds to God and Reality* Mike, what has made you so bitter that you throw out irresponsible, unsubstantiated statements? You have a serious problem with anger and frustration, which finds no remedy in baseless accusations. All you do is throw gasoline on the fire you started. Listen to you go on about how I am wrong when I say that the “poor in spirit” are not the economically deprived: “Your whole argument is a deluded personal justification of your own bigoted position. You have no wish and make no attempt to read the bible and learn from it.” Because I do not agree with you means I have not learned from the Bible and from God Who has given me to understand It because I live It by His grace? Who is the bigot here? The point of this matter of riches is that one cannot serve God and money, as Jesus said (Luke 16:13). It is not only the rich that can be found serving money. Anyone who is not putting his or her trust in God is putting it in the created things, those which money controls: “Laughter and bread go together, And wine gives sparkle to life-- But it’s money that makes the world go around” (Ecclesiastes 10:19 MSG) That includes communists and atheists. Not having spiritual life or fulfillment, you find your value and self worth in the things of this world, which ultimately leads to disillusionment and bitterness. Surely you have been disappointed in your lot and have taken it personally because of pride and selfishness. It is no wonder that you manifest what you do. You speak from “the abundance of your heart,” which tells us that you are angry and envious. When you speak of what you see in the Bible, you reflect your internal state. It is a fine mirror. Surely you would like to see rich people suffer in Hell, because you compare yourself to them and blame them for your poor showing. You write: “He [Christ] is saying here that a rich man will not get into heaven without God having an impossibly gracious day. Only self-serving fools can read it any other way.” You seem to be unwittingly granting credibility or value to Jesus Christ here. However, what you say is disproven by other things Jesus said, which I have already provided here and elsewhere. And have not the facts borne out what the Bible says, that God has made both the rich and poor, and that He is Lord of both? Calling Him a fool for what He is and has done makes you the greatest of fools.
I have just said again what I said in these citations you give. You are the one distorting the message, and all of your crypto-psychology does not alter it. It simply serves to distract attention from the plain fact. Christ was a Poor Man, an Ebionite. Ebionites valued the spiritual benefits of poverty whence "blessed are The Poor, in spirit"—I insert punctuation to make the meaning clearer to you—the Poor were the Ebionites, and poverty was necessary. Quite apart from the plain fact that someone gets rich by accumulating an unfair proportion of the communal product, we can now see that the planet itself is threatened by it. All of us can live well without the gross excesses of resources we use up on trivial and unnecessary products. It will have to stop sometime, and Christ thought it ought to stop then. The Church made it stop for a thousand years except for professional Christians who were often richer than kings. As for the psychology, I am not envious of the rich. I live quite well on what I have, and, obviously wrongly, I think others can too. Greed remains a serious problem of humanity, but no one, least of all Christians, seek to address it.
*What Is Important According to God* Men trying to make all equal in this one dimension of economic equality has proven to be a great farce. Some are and will be much more “equal” than others, by nature and the powers they are given to exercise. Look at “communist” China today! They found they could not produce a true and pure communism that you preach, so they have now gravitated to the worst of both worlds—communistic poverty and capitalistic rape of the environment in a greedy, incendiary mixture that is sure to end badly. How can it be otherwise, when their official position is that there is no God, and therefore they have no hope of an answer to the infernal mess they are creating? The Soviet experiment lasted a God-ordained 70 years with the motto, “There is no God.” God had said, “Okay, I’ll let you have at it. There will be no God.” And there was no God. He withdrew His mercy and governance, though never entirely. Every sort of evil imaginable took place. Small nations like Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for the sin of wanting freedom, were brutally subdued. Environmental degradation was appalling, alcoholism was pandemic, abortions were rampant, and fear and depression were wanton plagues in many a heart. One of thousands of shocking reports was Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago.” Stalin imprisoned, starved and slaughtered his own people by the millions. All lived behind an iron curtain lowered to not only keep outsiders out but insiders in. “No God,” they said, and God said, “No God.” And all got equal pay and equal poverty, no matter if capable or productive or not. Incentive was diminished, production faltered, and people suffered the truth that forced socialism and cooperation are but vain myths ignoring the true nature of man. Men just do not make good gods or willing pawns. The whole system collapsed, bringing Gorbachev and the Soviet hierarchy to a humble end. Now organized crime rules Russia.
Your political economic observations might be right, but you are correcting God, if God is Christ, because Christ thought and evidently taught otherwise. You cannot correct God, so instead you say God did not mean what he plainly said, if correctly reported, and his disciples were wrong to attempt to live as they did. You are the hypocrite as ever. Christ might well have been wrong on this as he was wrong on the coming kingdom, but you cannot admit he was. Nothing could be clearer from his teachings than that the rich could not get into heaven and The Poor did automatically. The rich Jews at the time were the priests of the temple. These supposedly pious men took from the poor but would get no heavenly reward for their earthly greed, according to Christ. At the time of Christ, the priests collaborated with the Romans, an occupying power that also extracted wealth from the poor peasants, just as the "Coalition"—the US is the modern Rome—is doing in Iraq. The oppressors were part of the problem in Christ’s view, and the odd addition (obviously additions) making Roman centurions into Christians is farcical, but you naturally believe what Rome tells you, despite yourself.
Back to what God wants. Jesus Christ, once again, never said one should not build a business or own anything (or that one should). He did not condemn Solomon for his riches. He put things into the proper perspective from above: “And He said to His disciples, For this reason I say to you, Take no thought for your life, about what food you will take, or for your body, how it may be clothed. Is not life more than food, and the body than its clothing? Give thought to the ravens; they do not put seeds into the earth, or get together grain; they have no store-houses or buildings; and God gives them their food: of how much greater value are you than the birds! And which of you by taking thought is able to make himself any taller? If, then, you are not able to do even that which is least, why are you troubled about the rest? Give thought to the flowers: they do no work, they make no thread; and still I say to you, Even Solomon, in all his glory, was not clothed like one of these. But if God gives such clothing to the grass in the field, which today is living, and tomorrow will be burned in the oven, how much more will He give clothing to you, O men of little faith?” (Luke 12:22-28 BBE)
This is precisely what I referred to above that no one sane accepts at all. It is utterly mad, and gains credence only because Christ thought the world was about to end, and working was pointless. Paul had to attempt to stop converts from stopping working. But genuine repentance was the way to get rewards from God, then even sinners, if repentant, would be clothed like lilies in heaven. You always fail to recognize, through your false conviction that Christ is God, that Jesus expected the world to end, and, in such circumstances, the rules of living are rather different from the norm. There is a lot that you do not get and cannot get because you already accept what you profess to reject, Roman Christianity. As I have said, it is the only Christianity to have come down to us, and you accept it, even though it is wrong. Now, if Christ was an Ebionite, a sect rejected as heretical by Rome, will it make no difference to your beliefs. It ought to make a profound difference, but there is no chance. You are already too bigotted.
God is our sole purpose for being here and should be the reason for what we do with our lives and with everything we possess. No person is here to live for him or herself and the things of this world. When the heart is turned from living selfishly on this animal level to believing on and receiving the Truth, then the Kingdom of Heaven begins to bloom on earth. When that happens at large, none will go without or be lacking in any good thing. How can there be any lack when everyone truly has each other’s interests at heart and God is with them? Let’s face it; God would have to be schizophrenic to despise prosperity. He owns the cattle of a thousand hills. All things are His; He made them for us to enjoy richly, though we do not find life in them. The apostle Paul put it this way: “Not that I am speaking with respect to need, for I have learned to be content in whatever state I am. I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. In every place and in all circumstances I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to be in need. I can do all things through Christ Who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:11-13 EMTV).
Praise be to our God, Paul! Here is an example of your faulty logic, your presumptions and bigotry. God, you assume as a belief, owns Nature, and therefore He would be schizophrenic to denounce riches if He appeared on earth as Christ, another belief assumed. I called you a sophist once before, but this is not sophistry, it is ignorance.
*Perfection by Christ, Not the Law * But you have a real problem with Paul, dismissing all he says out of hand as perverse. You accuse him of being the enemy of rational thought, “the agent of Satan,” who forbids us to use our minds. How then are we able to write these letters to you while in agreement with him? Eh? Are you missing something here? These are not regurgitations of organizational doctrine or recitations of the Bible or channeled through us as necromancers and sorcerers with evil spirits, but these letters contain the Essence of living application of Truth that comes from the mind of Christ, Who lives within us. He is us and we are Him. We therefore do not take credit. God has done this, just as He has with the apostle Paul. That is how we can and will answer these charges against Paul, the gross misunderstandings and slanders you present, because we have the same Mind of Christ that Paul does.
Why must you assume that you would know which was which. I thought we had agreed ages ago that the devil is subtle, yet now you think he is a dolt. You are the dolts. You are convinced that something within you motivates you in goodness, but in so doing you contradict much of what your supposed God obviously believed Himself, right or wrong. Whatever is motivating you is not the spirit of Christ. Why would the spirit of Christ encourage you to believe falsehoods? Paul taught an utterly different system from Christ. The supposed Judaizers were the disciples of Christ trying to stop Paul teaching blasphemy. But you believe what you have been taught—Catholicism! Paul laid the foundations of it.
