The New Religion: Right and Truth as the Will to Power

 Once upon a time, even most thieves knew the answer as to whether it was right to steal. No, it isn't and they didn't care that it wasn't right. Or at least they didn't think it was virtuous. What's the point of being a criminal if you have to be virtuous in doing it?

But now stealing can be a virtue. Or not. Entirely depending, not on the action itself, but on the PERSON WHO COMMITS IT. Are you a rich white capitalist? Stealing is wrong for you. Black man in the 'hood looting a Target? Then stealing is not simply okay but it is REDISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE. It is not the act itself that matters, but the presumed power position of the one who commits it. Black man in the 'hood is presumed to be a helpless victim of forces beyond his control.

Is murder wrong, according to the New Religion? Depends. Are you bombing Palestinians? Bad. Mother murdering the little freeloader in her womb that is trying to keep her from getting ahead in life? Good. It is not mother's fault she has a womb, this cancer on her body that is trying to keep her oppressed. She needs to keep that crap cleaned out.

Spray painting grafitti all over everything? The righteous cry of the have-nots against the haves. Even if the haves only have because they worked for it and were thrifty and avoided personal vices like drug addiction. If they worked hard and didn't have a crack habit, it is clearly because they started out higher on the power pyramid.

The New Religion is atheistic and deterministic. If you loot stores and spray paint walls, or even rape and murder, it is not because of your lack of virtue but because of your environment. You are a simple input-output system. Input privileged environment, output "good" behavior. Input underprivileged environment, output looting and vandalism.

In the New Religion, all things are right and wrong depending on the PERSON who commits those acts. And what is important about that person, that determines if their actions are right or wrong? Their position in the "power structure." White man? Everything you do is wrong, white man, because you are a white man. Black tranny? You are virtuous no matter what you do, because you are at the bottom of the power structure. Because of who you are, not what you do. This is how violent drug addict and counterfeiter George Floyd, who once held a gun to a pregnant woman's belly, is now Saint Floyd. Someone who, in terms of their behavior was the lowest scum of the Earth, is now a holy saint of the New Religion.

It is not merely morality that has undergone a change in the New Order. And make no mistake, this is the order that is going to be at least trying to run our lives in the years to come. TRUTH itself is merely a manifestation of the Will to Power. How can a man be a woman and a woman be a man? Because we say so, oppressor. The fact that there is an actual objective fact of the matter is not only irrelevant, it is in fact oppression. Facts are oppression. Men can be women and women can be men IF WE SAY SO. And they do say so. Your objective truth focus is a weapon of white cisgender supremacy.

Do you say that communism is, fairly objectively, a bad way of doing things? Crushes individual initiative, innovation and indeed freedom and individual rights? Well, you don't say that because it's true, you say that because you are currently benefiting from a higher position on the power structure. You, sir, are a White Supremacist, even if you are black or brown or red or yellow.

Again, it is not a matter of WHAT IS TRUE, it is a matter of WHO YOU ARE.

It may seem strange at first that the major corporations are not just playing along with this whole thing, but fervent boosters of it. There are two possible explanations. One is that the people who run these corporations went to liberal universities and drank the truth relativity, cultural relativity, and moral relativity Kool Aid. In other words, they are sincerely deluded. In place of White Superiority, they embraced Intellectual Superiority: the idea that if you believe in moral relativism, cultural relativism, evolution solely and only as the explanation of life, materialism and atheism, you are as a consequence SMARTER than those rubes who believe in absolute morality and G-d. You can feel better about yourself that you are not one of them. You may secretly look down on the blacks and the gays and the trannies, while assuring them that you are firmly in "ally" status. You have the luxury of bending the knee to Woke because you know you are superior. You think Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, thinks of himself as having anything whatsoever in common with a black tranny from the ghetto? No, but they have all his sympathy, and that's what matters.

The other, more sinister explanation is that they know EXACTLY what they are doing and it has everything to do with corporate power and nothing to do with social justice. Eliminating competition is the name of the game.

How do they keep some innovative upstart from overturning their business model? Tell everybody they are weak victims of the system. Weaken them. Make people passive and dependent. Damage their thinking power. Make them chattel of the corporations.

Don't want to lose your valuable chattel to pregnancy? Pro-abortion all the way baby. Don't want any competing interests for your chattel's time and energies? No families. Do not want competing deities? The corporation is your deity. Your synthetic god. No G-d. Anti-religion.

In order to OWN you, they must first make you weak. Physically weak, morally weak, and they must make your mind weak. Public school education helps. They must keep your animosities directed at something besides them, besides their real power. They don't care if they will destroy civilization, they are the only civilization that matters now.

And moral and truth relativism WILL destroy society and make life more violent, more depressing, and increase mental illnesses to epidemic levels.

Quite aside from theological concerns (that there is a G-d and He does command things,) there are two power-related perils for any society: the tyranny of one or a few men over the mass of men, and the tyranny of the individual. In other words, kings and criminals. A powerful arbitrary ruler, or a tyrannical individual who rapes and pillages and does whatever he wants to. Evil tyrannical order or evil arbitrary anarchy. King makes right or might makes right.

There is one and only one third road between those two evils. That people come together and covenant, that they will submit themselves to something higher than themselves. To a Law that no human king created and no human king or arbitrary will can change. They covenant to submit themselves, internally in their heart and externally in their behavior, to the will of G-d as expressed in G-d's Law.

This, internal and external submission to G-d's Law, empowers human beings to transcend themselves. To transcend the lusts and wills and desires that might otherwise consume and control them. In G-d's Law, in contrast to the New Religion, who you are matters not at all. All human beings are equal. What is right is what matters: if you do what is right you are justified, and if you do what is wrong you are guilty, quite aside from who you are. King or pauper, it makes no difference. As it says in the Tanakh, G-d is no respecter of persons. If you do what is right and love G-d, you have His approval and not otherwise.

This path not only helps us to transcends ourselves and our limitations, but it leads to a peaceful and prosperous society. It leads to uplift and good, not selfishness madness and destruction. It replaces the Tyranny of Man (either the State or the individual selfish agent, or the tyranny of our own selfish impulses over ourselves) with the Kingdom of G-d (in which we all adhere to and swear absolute loyalty, internally and externally, to just rules that existed long before us and which none of us can change through arbitrary will.)


The road we are on, is a road that leads to violence, illness, despair, madness and death.



"All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you if you obey the LORD your God:

You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country.

The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock--the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.

Your basket and your kneading trough will be blessed.

You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out.

The LORD will grant that the enemies who rise up against you will be defeated before you. They will come at you from one direction but flee from you in seven.

The LORD will send a blessing on your barns and on everything you put your hand to. The LORD your God will bless you in the land he is giving you.

The LORD will establish you as his holy people, as he promised you on oath, if you keep the commands of the LORD your God and walk in his ways.

Then all the peoples on earth will see that you are called by the name of the LORD, and they will fear you.

The LORD will grant you abundant prosperity--in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock and the crops of your ground--in the land he swore to your forefathers to give you.

The LORD will open the heavens, the storehouse of his bounty, to send rain on your land in season and to bless all the work of your hands. You will lend to many nations but will borrow from none.

The LORD will make you the head, not the tail. If you pay attention to the commands of the LORD your God that I give you this day and carefully follow them, you will always be at the top, never at the bottom.

Do not turn aside from any of the commands I give you today, to the right or to the left, following other gods and serving them.

However, if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:

You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.

Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed.

The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.

You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out.

The LORD will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him.

The LORD will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess.

The LORD will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which will plague you until you perish.

The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron.

The LORD will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from the skies until you are destroyed.

The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth.

Your carcasses will be food for all the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and there will be no one to frighten them away.

The LORD will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, festering sores and the itch, from which you cannot be cured.

The LORD will afflict you with madness, blindness and confusion of mind.

At midday you will grope about like a blind man in the dark. You will be unsuccessful in everything you do; day after day you will be oppressed and robbed, with no one to rescue you.

You will be pledged to be married to a woman, but another will take her and ravish her. You will build a house, but you will not live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit.

Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, but you will eat none of it. Your donkey will be forcibly taken from you and will not be returned. Your sheep will be given to your enemies, and no one will rescue them.

Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after day, powerless to lift a hand.

A people that you do not know will eat what your land and labor produce, and you will have nothing but cruel oppression all your days.

The sights you see will drive you mad.

The LORD will afflict your knees and legs with painful boils that cannot be cured, spreading from the soles of your feet to the top of your head.

The LORD will drive you and the king you set over you to a nation unknown to you or your fathers. There you will worship other gods, gods of wood and stone.

You will become a thing of horror and an object of scorn and ridicule to all the nations where the LORD will drive you.

You will sow much seed in the field but you will harvest little, because locusts will devour it.

You will plant vineyards and cultivate them but you will not drink the wine or gather the grapes, because worms will eat them.

You will have olive trees throughout your country but you will not use the oil, because the olives will drop off.

You will have sons and daughters but you will not keep them, because they will go into captivity.

Swarms of locusts will take over all your trees and the crops of your land.

The alien who lives among you will rise above you higher and higher, but you will sink lower and lower.

He will lend to you, but you will not lend to him. He will be the head, but you will be the tail.

All these curses will come upon you. They will pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the LORD your God and observe the commands and decrees he gave you.

They will be a sign and a wonder to you and your descendants forever.

Because you did not serve the LORD your God joyfully and gladly in the time of prosperity,

therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire poverty, you will serve the enemies the LORD sends against you. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you.

The LORD will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will not understand,

a fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young.

They will devour the young of your livestock and the crops of your land until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine or oil, nor any calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks until you are ruined.

They will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will besiege all the cities throughout the land the LORD your God is giving you.

Because of the suffering that your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the LORD your God has given you.

Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children,

and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of all your cities.

The most gentle and sensitive woman among you--so sensitive and gentle that she would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot--will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter

the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For she intends to eat them secretly during the siege and in the distress that your enemy will inflict on you in your cities.

If you do not carefully follow all the words of this law, which are written in this book, and do not revere this glorious and awesome name--the LORD your God--

the LORD will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh and prolonged disasters, and severe and lingering illnesses.

He will bring upon you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you.

The LORD will also bring on you every kind of sickness and disaster not recorded in this Book of the Law, until you are destroyed.

You who were as numerous as the stars in the sky will be left but few in number, because you did not obey the LORD your God.

Just as it pleased the LORD to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess.

Then the LORD will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods--gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your fathers have known.

Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the LORD will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart.

You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life.

In the morning you will say, "If only it were evening!" and in the evening, "If only it were morning!"--because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see.

The LORD will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you should never make again. There you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you."

~Deuteronomy 28:2-68

The Danger of Being Happy

 When times are rough, when our backs are against the wall; yes sir, we believers are wearing out the rug talking to G-d about it. If G-d's halls had floor wax on the floors, we would be rubbing those floors straight down to the marble. We would be eroding holes in the marble with our tears.

When times are good, when we are happy, maybe not so much.

This is a dangerous paradox that is woven all through the Tanakh, what Christians call the Old Testament: G-d wants us to be happy and prosperous. He is delighted in our delight. But being happy and successful tends to make the mind wander to other things besides G-d. Being interested and involved in stuff is not itself the problem, but if this tends to make us neglect our relationship with G-d, that's where the problem lies.

This is a warning that is repeated throughout the Tanakh. Be mindful after you are happy and prosperous and G-d has blessed you, that you do not forget Him and His Laws. Especially do not imagine that it is because of any special merit in yourself that you are doing so well: you are doing well because G-d has blessed you and made you prosperous and for no other reason.

So do be happy. G-d loves a joyful heart. But don't forget where that came from.

"When the Lord your God brings you into the land
he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
to give you — a land with large, flourishing cities
you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of
good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig,
and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant—
then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that
you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt,
out of the land of slavery."

~Deuteronomy 6:10-12

Clarity

 There are some things in the Bible that are quite clear. Do not murder or steal, those are pretty clear. There are other things that are not completely clear. In Judaism in contrast to Christianity, understanding all the fine print is important, and that is why Judaism has a vigorous tradition of study and debate and dialogue. The Talmud for instance is a book where rabbis of different time periods are quoted together in commentary on the Mishnah, which is itself intended to flesh out the troublesome bits of the Torah. So it is in essence a time spanning debate on a commentary on the Torah, layers upon layers. 

All in pursuit of clarity! ;) This is one reason why I tend to favor the attitude of Karaite Judaism, which is that there is no one authoritative rabbinical commentary on the Torah. You can read and seek to understand such commentaries, but only the Torah is authoritative and sometimes the Torah is hard to interpret. The interpretation of it is each person's responsibility and that responsibility cannot be deferred to rabbis.

This debate concerning what the Torah means about certain things for me comes to a head on the topic of the Sabbath. You do not work on the Sabbath.

BUT EVERYTHING IS WORK! Breathing is working. Standing up is working. Thinking burns energy, so it is also work. Living beings labor in some form continually. If my heart would stop pumping blood for the Sabbath, that would be it for me. The old rabbis had their interpretations, but those interpretations are hard to reconcile with the modern world too. It says not to light a fire: is turning on a lightbulb lighting a fire? Yes and no.

So with the Sabbath as with other puzzling things in the Torah, I go to the core meaning. What is the core meaning of the Sabbath? There is some mention of the Sabbath being connected with the seventh day of Creation, but the core meaning that rings true for me is connected to the Exodus itself. What were the Israelites in Egypt? Slaves. Well the Sabbath is a day when no one is a slave, not even slaves are to be slaves on that day according to the Torah. So the core meaning is, you don't engage in any economic activity on that day. You don't work, you don't make your employees work, you don't make other people work. You don't order delivery pizza, for instance, because that would be making the person that makes the pizza and the person who delivers it work. Anything that relates to whatever you normally do for a living, you don't do that and you don't make anyone else do it either. You do not buy or sell.

There are other deeper meanings to the Sabbath, but in terms of your conduct that is what you should not be doing. Is that the complete meaning of the Sabbath? No! But it is the external observation of it.

Another one, and one in which I disagree with the rabbis, is the passage about not boiling a kid in its mother's milk. For the sake of this one sentence, observant Jewish households have two complete sets of cooking utensils and in some cases (Jewish schools for instance) actually two completely separate kitchens! Imagine how much ink has been spilled, and how much the ironmongers have profited, off this one sentence!

For me, the sentence is clear and has more to do with the value of all life than the contamination of dishes. Don't kill a baby animal until it has weaned. Let the baby goat or sheep or cattle finish up its babyhood. Don't be so selfish with the mother's milk that you kill her offspring before it has even finished infancy. It has nothing to do with ritual contamination. Don't boil a kid in its OWN mother's milk.

Now the Christian approach to such things is to just throw the Jesus blanket over it. "Jesus, And It's All Good." Problem is, we don't do that with the Ten Commandments (or 9 of them anyway) and we don't do that with proscriptions against homosexuality and cross dressing. What defines the difference between the Law that you get to be picky about and the Law you can shrug off? Christians are involved in interpreting the Law too, or else they are forced into some sort of New Age Christianity where there is no Law and EVERYTHING is okay. So you can't not interpret the Law and interpretations involve uncertainty.

I think this is actually kind of deep. It is like we are on a stationary bicycle of holiness, where we have to keep working on getting there but we never quite get there in this life, but in the meantime we build our muscles. The effort itself is part of the Law then: we are meant to try to struggle to understand the mind of G-d, but we can't quite. Christians throw the blood of Jesus on the struggle and Jews or Rabbinical Jews anyway just refer to their rabbis for definitive interpretations. Both approaches foreclose our inquiry, they foreclose something that shouldn't be completely foreclosed in all situations. The Talmud is like photos taken of a hologram: the thing itself contains much more information than our snapshots of it. We engage in the reasoning and questioning and debate in order to conform ourselves to the hologram, not because any judgment or decision or word we will ever say is perfect.

On the one hand G-d wants a Law for us that is clear and easily interpreted and obeyed; on the other hand the world is always changing and the Torah is very old, so we have to interpret some. On the whole, the Law of G-d is very clear and is meant to be. That is my governing principle in interpreting the Torah: what is the clearest most essential core meaning? But there is a lot of stuff there and in the Tanakh as a whole, so we must always be inquiring. Not as the World would inquire, not skeptically, but knowing there is meaning there and that it is our own shortcomings that separate us from understanding that meaning better.

And then we pray that the spirit of G-d, which alone can enlighten minds and hearts, will shed its light on us.

Yom Kippur 2021

 This is a troubled year and these are troubled times. Personally I am doing fine, but many aren't. Yom Kippur is a time of personal repentance, but it is also a time of collective repentance so in addition to praying for correction for my own shortcomings I will pray that the people of G-d will seek atonement with Him and in so doing find safety, adequate sustenance and peace.

Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, At-One-Ment. The holiest day in Judaism. Basically a day for seeking to bury the hatchet with G-d. The sins that separate you from G-d, you seek to make penance for. It's kind of a prefigurement of the Day of Judgment.

The Bible actually says that Yom Kippur is to be a day when you voluntarily "afflict" yourself. Generally that has been taken to mean that you fast from sundown to sundown. You like that coffee in the morning? Don't have it. Like your food? On this day you aren't eating it. Sex is also abstained from. It's a Sabbath, even though it doesn't fall on the Sabbath Day, so no work.

This will be the first year that I am attempting to do Yom Kippur right. That means I will be fasting, I won't be drinking coffee or anything but plain water. My track record with fasting isn't great, but nevertheless I am going to undertake it.

Repentance is very unfashionable these days. Atonement is unfashionable. The modern idea is that we are all peachy keen just the way we are. Self-esteem first and foremost. Unconditional self-acceptance is practically a modern commandment.

I look around the world: is this what peachy keen looks like? This is NOT what peachy keen looks like. And we will never get there in this world or even close until we conform our lives to G-d first and foremost.

Now, and I am not proud to say this, one thing I will probably not be abstaining from this Yom Kippur is tobacco. I go quite crazy when I can't smoke, and I think being crazy will make this already somber occasion unmanageable. For people with medical issues and the elderly, not going full out on Yom Kippur is acceptable. But while my condition may prohibit me from putting down the smokes, nothing prevents me from not eating so I will do that.

I was born and raised a Gentile, so there may be aspects of Yom Kippur that I may not get. Also among the Jews it is almost always a collective event, Jews gather together and suffer together and repent together. I am alone, I do not ascribe to Rabbinical Judaism exactly and even if I did, there is likely not an orthodox community within 80 miles of me. So that is also different from the typical Jewish experience of Yom Kippur.

Nevertheless, I will do it the best I can, and I hope it will be acceptable to G-d.

May your name be written in the Book of Life.

Maurycy Gottlieb - Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur

Why Wear Tzitzit?

 

 First, what ARE tzitzit? They are the fringes on the corners of a garment referred to in the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy. They are most often worn in the edges of a tallit or prayer shawl, but as I live in a hot humid climate I have clip-on tzitzit that clip onto my belt loops.

Why do I wear them? Well the most typical answer would be to say "because G-d said so!" There are reasons however, as there are reasons to all things that G-d commands.

The LORD said to Moses as follows: Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout the ages: let them attach a cord of blue to the fringe at each corner. That shall be your fringe; look at it and recall all the commandments of the LORD and observe them, so that you do not follow your heart and eyes in your lustful urge. Thus you will be reminded to observe all My commandments and to be holy to your God. I the Lord am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God: I the Lord your God.

~Numbers 15:37-41 JPS Tanakh

So the tzitzit is a visible reminder of G-d's commandments. Something that, if temptation comes your way you have a visible reminder of what the commandments are. Clearly though the tzitzit is also a visible marker of G-d's people, a sign that sets them aside as a holy people.

As far as being a visible reminder of the Commandments, I personally am barely conscious of wearing them these days so I am not sure how well that works on a conscious level. Unconsciously, you know you are wearing a sign that says "I belong to G-d" so your mind understands that certain things are incompatible with that even if you don't consciously think about the tzitzit.

Now probably most of the people who might read this blog, to the extent that I have readers, are Christian and they might ask why they would want to wear tzitzit. I cannot answer that, I can only give my answer which is that I definitely want to feel included in G-d's own and I want to do what He says. Even if you think that a lot of the legalese in the OT was wiped out in Jesus' death, well, did G-d ever command anything superfluous? Were there good reasons for the tzitzit once? Might there still be good reasons?

Also, while I don't generally get involved in matters of specifically Christian theology, for Christians what outward sign do you present that you are a member of G-d's people? A cross? Lots of people wear crosses, some for fashion and some for some sort of goth sensibility and some just to be perverse and wear a symbol of something they definitely do not believe in. Almost nobody wears a tzitzit for fashion, thank goodness. People hardly know that tzitzit are a thing. It is an outward sign of your inward membership in G-d's community.

Also if someone ever asks what those things are on your belt loops, that's an opportunity to talk about the Bible. My long hair (also biblical) is also such a sign. The commandment that applies to everyone in the Bible is not to cut the corners of your hair. Well my head has no corners. ;) I don't know how to apply that for certain, I just know how Jews historically interpreted it. We also know that some people chosen by G-d do not cut their hair at all, either as part of a temporary commitment or permanently in the case of people like Samson and the prophet Samuel. So I don't cut mine at all.

So I wear tzitzit, an outward sign of my inward membership in G-d's kingdom.

 

 

 

Renunciation

 Much as I do not ascribe to a central tenet of Christianity, that someone besides G-d was also G-d -

- at heart I am at least as much a Christian as a Jew. More so, since while I was never a bona fide (Rabbinical) Jew, I once was a bona fide Christian. Christian concepts work their way into my thinking all the time, for which I have to go back to the Tanakh sometimes and sort out how much they are justified based on it.

Renunciation of the World, in the sense that it is a concept in the writings of St. John, does not have an exact translation into the terms of the Tanakh. The best and most evocative parallel in the Tanakh is circumcision, both literal and metaphorical. In Leviticus, Jeremiah and Ezekiel it speaks of uncircumcised hearts, which is the most relevant form of uncircumcision. Your willingness to deal with the physical issue is merely a token of your willingness to deal with the spiritual issue.

What does circumcision symbolize? That you are willing to part with something near and dear (albeit useless) and endure pain, for the sake of G-d. For the sake of holiness. The visible passes away in a flash of steel and blood: the invisible is affirmed. Of course for most people that decision is taken at an age when you have no involvement in whether you are circumcised or not; but as with many things in Judaism physical circumcision is a pact the community and family makes, not just the individual. Long story short, St. John's "do not love the world" does not translate perfectly into Jewish, but there are connections.

Complicating matters further is that Judaism as it originally existed was in many ways legitimately a warlike and confrontational religion, while Christianity (originally) is not. On this topic the child is not very much like its parent. Judaism's response to evil is "sweep out the evil from among you." Capital punishment, albeit with an early form of due process, is a frequent response to evil within, whereas absolute destruction is the usual response to evil outside the community (the Canaanites.) Christianity says "turn the other cheek" and "do not resist an evil person."

Paradoxically it seems rather hard to renounce the "World" while you are making war on it. We find it much harder to synthesize godliness AND violence than perhaps Joshua and the Judges did. There is no doubt however that according to the Tanakh, people like Joshua were able to harmonize both godliness and ultraviolence somehow. Better men than you and me, perhaps.

There is some debate about the degree to which Christianity is a "world-denying" religion, or a religion which tends to think of the world as evil. I would say there is a bit of both: the physical world itself is good or at least originally good: the powers of the "World" are evil. The real neutral or originally benevolent world is a stage on which "The World" plays itself out, powers of spiritual darkness in high places. There is less debate about Judaism: Judaism seems to say eat, drink, have sex, enjoy yourself but keep the law and love G-d.

Of course, those things can come into conflict. Perhaps good food, wine, women and jollity are not bad in themselves, but love of the same can lead you astray.

I have to confess though, I am very sympathetic to St. John's more ascetic worldview. This topic arises for me because while I was out and about today in the "World" (physical and otherwise,) quotes from the New Testament came to mind repeatedly. This presents a problem in that I don't believe any man was ever G-d and so the NT, in so far as it asserts that a man was G-d, is not scripture for me. I feel myself pulled however towards John's gospel; perhaps that is a symptom of weakness rather than wisdom, but it is there nonetheless. I would like to check out of the whole ball game honestly. Stop posting confrontational content online, stop getting in debates with and trying to pwn the libs (who are genuinely lost in evil, but I'm not going to save them,) stop fighting the "World" at all. Attend to the Kingdom within.

Resign from "The World." Stop fighting it and focus on the only thing I can change. Me.


"Be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves." 
~ Matthew 10:16


Joshua, Elijah, King Josiah and many others in the Tanakh, even Moses, were not at all harmless! They didn't hesitate to kill a b*tch, more frequently than most men. In fact, Moses starts out the story of Exodus killing a dude, the Egyptian. Terminate, with extreme prejudice.

They were ass-kickers. Judaism, is an ass-kicking religion, a fact that has tended to fade from view as the Hebrews sadly got their own behinds booted on repeatedly since Biblical times.

This is not a resolvable conflict. Either the Tanakh is right, or the New Testament is. Christians all the time state that Christianity is not a pacifistic religion, but they state that on the basis of the Tanakh, which is scripture for them too. If you take what Jesus literally says as primary, ignoring the Tanakh, it absolutely is a pacifistic religion. "Don't resist an evil person," how do you reason your way out of that? Turn the other cheek. "If someone takes away your shirt, give them your coat as well."

Christianity and Judaism cannot be easily reconciled on this, and that is a real problem for me because right now I am uncharacteristically feeling more on Jesus' side. Maybe that will pass, maybe this is as I suggested previously, a moment of weakness. I am feeling fatigued from constantly being in inward and outward turmoil against the evil of this world. 

It is no coincidence however that the same Jesus who said "do not resist an evil person" also said "take up your cross." The one follows kind of logically from the other. If you do not comply with the World and do not resist the World either, you can find yourself a lamb to the slaughter. It was no coincidence they crucified the man. If you renounce and hate the World but aren't prepared to make war on it too if need be, you are a crucifixion magnet. If you renounce the World AND are prepared to kill to defend yourself doing it, at least the World's agents will think twice. The World's people are very scared of death. If they are not afraid of you, well, the minions of the World are just creaming themselves thinking of all they could do to you. That is our reality. We are cattle to them, unless we resist them.

How do you inwardly have the heart of Jesus, and outwardly have the heart of Joshua, King Josiah and Elijah? Can you be both? Saint AND warrior? Or is it only Saint OR warrior?

This is the question that haunts me today.


EDIT: And a voice came saying:
"You cannot have the perfect peace you seek on Earth. Only in Heaven."

And so on Earth we can never be altogether done with war, and other strife. However much we wish to be.

Abundant Providence

 I was outside, doing an activity that probably a lot of people would consider barbaric. I was washing out my poop bucket. ;) There is no plumbing inside my house, so while I do have a toilet that I made myself and it works very nicely, the thing that receives the excreta is a bucket with a lid. I take it out and put it on the compost pile.

Anyway, I was there after rinsing out the bucket and setting it out to dry in the sun, and there were huge butterflies everywhere. At least two giant swallowtails that I saw, and some Gulf Fritillarys which are beautiful big orange butterflies. One giant swallowtail hovered right over me, and it was like looking up through a stained glass window. It was a flying stained glass window, not just flying but fluttering so delicately, like a flag in the wind.

How can you look at such a thing and not believe in G-d?

And I knew that at that moment 90 miles away, thousands of people were fighting Dallas traffic through a man-made landscape with no butterflies. No shy snakes. No sweet country smell in the air. No steampunk-looking grasshoppers, looking like they were made of bronze. No Snow-on-the-Prairie. No fish. No sunflowers. None of the little blue flowers that the butterflies love so much and which last so long in the summer heat that they can feed on them all summer long. No guardian spiders like I have over my front steps lol. None of the little red-striped Phidippus jumping spiders who eye me so warily with their many eyes.

And I praised G-d for his abundant grace to his wretched servant. This is HIS land: I am just graced to live on it. Praise his holy Name, for He is truly good.

Now I do live a life free of many of the luxuries, so-called necessities, of modern life. No flush toilet. I do dishes in a wash tub and have to haul water for that and for baths. No washer dryer. No dishwasher. The nearest restaurant and the nearest convenience store are both about 10 miles away. Nearest hospital is 20 miles away. Most of my food aside from what I grow are things that are dry-storable. I drink canned condensed milk in my coffee.

But I would rather haul a hundred gallons of water in buckets in this blessed place, HIS land, than spend 10 minutes in Dallas traffic.

Praise His Name, for He is GOOD. <3

Giant Swallowtail

Gulf Fritillary

Snow-on-the-Prairie

It's not my land, it's G-d's land. I just live here.

Generational Failure

 If someone imagines that the world of the Bible is old news, dead and buried: you're just not paying attention.


The world of the Bible is very much alive and well and working its dynamics on us here in America just as it did on the ancient Israelites. There is nothing new under the Sun. It is the same story, and has been from the beginning. The story of sin and spiritual decay and death. And sometimes, grace and redemption.

The generational aspects of the Bible are unavoidable, as inconvenient as they may be to a modern reader. The spiritual destiny of the individual is still between them and G-d alone, but generational sin will color the pain, unpleasantness, injury and even persecution of the journey to that destiny. We are not islands: each one of us carries our part of the generational burden of sin.

You can pretty well say that if anything is said in Exodus 20, right in and alongside the Ten Commandments G-d spoke from Mt. Sinai, it is really really really important. And right at the beginning of those Commandments, G-d says this:

"For I the Lord your G-d am an impassioned G-d, visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments."

~Exodus 20:5-6

I am living in the very midst of massive generational failure. Our grandparents failed, our parents failed, we failed, our children failed, and now a new generation of further failure. This is a spiritual cascade failure. Like a house made of dominoes, falling in on itself.

My paternal grandfather was a drunkard, which was often blamed on him having part Indian blood. While my grandfather did look a little Native American, as far as I know the Native American blood in the Dodd family line is only a myth. Genetic analysis reveals overwhelmingly Scots-Irish ancestry. And the Celts were always a bloody violent chaotic and often self-destructive people. Anyway, he pretty much drank himself to death, spending the end of his life in an insane asylum.

My maternal grandfather I knew much less of, though paradoxically he seemed much more stable. On my mother's side people tended to disown or distance their own family a lot. His father, Salvatore, was a womanizer who the family essentially disowned. I know nothing of him except his name, that he was Italian, and that he had relationships with women that caused his family to disown him. But that was Salvatore. Larry,  my grandfather, was a barber and aside from marrying my wild drunken grandmother seemed to have a stable life. What I never heard from his lips is anything about G-d. RIP.

My paternal grandmother, Mildred, was a rock of stability, and did seem to be a woman of faith, a faith that she more or less completely failed to communicate to her own sons. She, despite her own (perhaps lukewarm) beliefs, never spoke to me about G-d at all. I know she believed and later in life I think she deepened that faith, but while her conduct might have spoken of her beliefs her mouth essentially never did. Perhaps one reason why I cannot stop talking about G-d is that I fear one day having the kind of unassertive faith she had. She believed, I know she did, but she didn't bring it home when it mattered. Maybe she still had that "women should be silent and in the kitchen" thing of past ages going on. She could definitely speak up, but usually long after the horse fled the corral. I remember one time her accidentally revealing the truth of my bastard birth to me in an argument with my mother. Perhaps she imagined that her son was blameless in that event. Fortunately nobody cares if you are a bastard anymore. I was wild in my youth, and when once I came home stinking drunk she read me the riot act - but the proper time for her to have inculcated moral fiber and fear of G-d in me was long before that. As usual, she acted after the horse had bolted the corral.

There is no point lecturing an intoxicated person while they are intoxicated. Catch them first thing the next morning, when they are already in a mood to repent. ;)

My maternal grandmother was... surprise! A drunkard and a loose woman. Ah, drink and sex: how the love of you has ravaged my family. Vera Pecella. In my mother's childhood she brought a series of men and bottles home to the boarding house that her mother ran. And then came the DT's which traumatized my mother. Vera drank herself to death, so early that I do not really remember much of her at all. She saw me, but I do not really remember seeing her. How she hooked up with the seemingly stable Lawrence Pecella, my maternal grandfather, I do not know, but it didn't last long. My mother's memories of home were of being an only child in her grandmother's boarding house, where her grandmother read fortunes for the Depression-era suckers. Wow, I have witches in my background, and unscrupulous money-motivated witches besides! ;) Meanwhile her mother trotted men back and forth, and drank.

Perhaps she imagined she was cool and liberated.

I spoke of my paternal grandmother, Mildred. As to her sons - I cannot speak to my uncle's faith, but my father Robert Sr. (I am a Jr.,) had a deep hatred of Christianity, which was the only Abrahimic religion he had any real contact with. When I first started my walk with G-d I was a Christian (having later accepted the religion of the sole only G-d of Sinai and His Law,) and he could barely conceal his disgust at it. He used to happily gloat at how he terribly abused the religious students at Baylor University where he went to school on a football scholarship. He was a weak cowardly man in many ways, a bully when it suited him, thanks to his football-playing muscles. That said, compared to his own father he was a paragon. His vices, while not particularly restrained, were restrained enough to mostly keep him out of trouble. He handled his drink pretty responsibly and moderately, even more so than my mother who could down a few too many on occasion. I don't even remember ever seeing him drunk. Perhaps the lesson of his own father was enough to keep him clear of that. He had a few sexual flings, but kept within bounds. He seemed to have adopted the Playboy philosophy of a man of the world: enjoy a lot, but under control. His least moderated sin was gluttony, but at least that had cultural benefits. I learned of the exotic foods of foreign lands at an age and time when my peers were still firmly in meatloaf-and-potatoes territory. This vice like all vices bore its ultimate fruit: a series of gastric disorders that ultimately along with diabetes contributed to his death. True, he did not die YOUNG: he was old enough to be called old, but he died in his seventies. Compared to many in the family history, he didn't get off too badly. Not compared to the DT's and early death of alcoholism. But he had a deep revulsion for G-d. He loved to ridicule preachers, which granted many are worthy of ridicule, but he enjoyed ridiculing them too much not to have a bit of special personal bile in the ridicule.

Now we come to my mother, Mary. My feelings of reverence make me want to just go, "Mom was a saint" and move on. Mom was not a saint though. She believed in Christianity, but not enough to try to instill it in us, and she belonged to the most archetypally lukewarm of denominations, the Episcopalians. She did try to force us wayward children to go to church, but in my own case not successfully for long. Like many, I think she was comfortable with God in a box. As long as G-d stayed in his God box, which of course would be infinitely too narrow for the real G-d, she was happy being nominally religious. G-d does not stay in a box, of course. G-d is way bigger than any of us OR our boxes. She was especially happy with the religious holidays, when she could build a sense of home life in her home with her children that she never had in her childhood.

And it was, no mistaking, HER home. She was the boss though not initially. I have a memory of my father coming home from road trips and reading her the riot act on not keeping the home clean and fulfilling all her wifely duties as well as her career. But soon my dad bowed to the one with the stronger will and the most strings to pull, and that was my mom. Most of the time she made more money; almost always she HAD more money. She was not as prone to the luxuries that my dad was weak to. She was stronger. Money is might, and might makes right far more in the economic realm than in the realm of Dad's muscles. And he did love her, and she did love him, though their fights were enough to make me swear off marriage. That was the background noise of my childhood: them fighting.

Any other shortcomings my mother had are private. She loved us, her children, though she did not understand us and did not teach us to be God-fearing people. She just kind of assumed we would follow in her mold, which in some ways we did.

Now we come to me. What was my part in this multigenerational saga?

I think that at a very early age I came to realize that I was 1. very different from the people around me and 2. I was haunted by the feeling that something was not quite right in all this. It was like that scene from the original Matrix movie, the scene that the rest of the movie never quite lived up to:

"Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad."

So, naturally, being a Dodd, I tried to drown that feeling in drink and drugs. After alcohol lost its appeal, I turned to pot and psychedelics. Ultimately, I hoped that LSD would free me from the Matrix. It did not, though the hundred or so trips I took were very interesting. Not ultimately meaningful, more full of questions than answers. A few bad trips in a row disabused me of the notion of following that path any further. What the world was offering was not enough, and I knew that, but I did not know what to do with what I knew. So like the world, I too was broken.

Since this is a confessional of sorts, I won't go into the path from there. This is a post about intergenerational sin, not grace. I was a deeply dysfunctional person in my youth, and in many ways still am. My people skills range from poor to downright autistic. I anger easily, though I am not violent. It is no mystery why I am a lifelong bachelor: I push people away very readily. Get off my lawn. I used my nerdy interests like a drug: for a long time it was computer games, but it was always something nerdy that I used to escape from the real broken world. That wasn't entirely negative, sometimes it could dovetail nicely with building a constructive life, but often not.

And now we get to the point of this whole thing, if it has a point. It has slammed home so very hard to me how I am in the midst of this generational sin. My grandparents failed, my parents failed, I failed, and now I see the wreckage of our collective failure as a people all around me, coming home to roost. The way you live your life does not only affect you. It affects everyone around you. How would my mother have been different, if her mother had been a sober and G-d - fearing woman? How would my dad have been different if his dad had not been an abusive drunkard? Can we even imagine a world that isn't dysfunctional anymore? Can we imagine getting on the right path as a people, as a family, as a nation?

I like to imagine it, but that's not what is. Instead we are burdened with this intergenerational intersocial, collective guilt. Because we turned our back on the Only G-d and HIS truth. We sought our own interests only. G-d have mercy on us.

G-d is telling us, up front and center, that if you do not love Him and keep His law, you are not the only one who will suffer. Your kids will suffer. Their kids will suffer. Their kids kids will suffer. This is not through the special vindictiveness of G-d. It is inherent in the nature of things. Evil, in the Tanakh, is a contagion that permeates a whole society like a disease. It is communicable. Evil is like a virus. You will suffer, your kids will suffer, ultimately the whole world will suffer and grow darker and darker.

There is one and only one way to heal from this mortal wound. Turn to G-d with your whole heart and strive to keep His law. That is the one and only one way.

The Architecture of the End

 
Written in the middle of a 3 day Facebook bän, so I am writing it here for later posting there.

I am using character replacement so that computer algorithms won't easily be able to use what I write to bän me or target me for scrûtiny. Hopefully this blog entry will be up and not messed with for a long time.

Here are the clear signs of how the world ends. I do not know if this means it is ending now or if it is irreversible now, I just know that these are the signs.

1. A group takes power that believes in bäby mûrder, glorifying përversion, häting G-d, and glorifying the power of the human State. Stateolatry. Since they view humans as basically glorified lab rats, they will use lab-rat like controls on us: controlling what is in the mëdia, on TV, on the ïnternet. Using peer pressure. Silencing opposing voices. They deny the Spirit of G-d and so they deny that any other influences are acting besides prõpaganda and counter-prõpaganda. The cõunter-prõpaganda is silenced.

2. The gõdless for whom the State is god, will go along with them. The mäjority will have reservations, but lacking fäith they will not resist.

3. The State, the synthetic god, will need hard control. It has been using soft control up until now, this has had unforeseen complications. Many people are wäking up. We are developing äntibodies as it were to this invasion of our minds. So they are going to bypass our minds. The next step is hard control. Øbey or get a knock on your door or a jäckboot on your neck. Or ultimately, just dëad.

We are currently seeing the test bed for that hard control in Australia. They are scientifically minded in a false sense, sciënceolatry, so they will want to experiment first. Based on experimental results, they will decide whether to progress to the next stage. Australia, NZ, the UK and Canada are their experimental testing grounds. First they took away their gûns so they cannot resist. Then they used the ¢ovïd to justify lõckdõwns and penalize resistance to ɣ䢢ïnätion. The point is not the ɣ䢢ïne, though it is very nasty stuff and the technology to make it was created using the stõlen flesh of mûrdered bäbies. Ëvil by design. But the point is control: THEIR control over YOUR body.

It is not "my bõdy my choice" when it comes to THEM.

4. The ¢ovïd ɣ䢢ïne is not the Mark spoken of in Revelation. The Mark is common sense by the way, I am not deferring to the authority of the New Testament which I do not generally take as scripture. The Tanakh alone is scripture. I am in fact deferring to logic. The dominion of Evïl requires control: the Mark is control. They have been using soft control up until now: that is insufficient. The Dëvil's whole plan is control in fact. Submïssion to him.

The ¢ovïd ɣ䢢ïne is TRAINING for the Mark. They will run their experiments to see how far they can push the regïme of control in Australia, NZ, the UK and Canada. Pretty far, as it happens.

5. Gûn$ in America are still a big problem. They will need comprehensive ĝûn control and then gûñ cõnfiscation in order for their next plans to work well. If they fail, they will begin to destroy America. Whatever economic, social, mïlitary or other devästation they can throw at us. They won't have a choice: without gûn confiscation the next phase cannot go forward in America.

6. They will then design a new more dëadly ɣïrû$, or one that they can manipulate the reporting on to make it look much more dëadly. It's not that they are afraid of a high bõdy count, they're not, as long as it isn't THEM. For the gõdless their own lives and survival are all that matter, so they won't want something that can kïll THEM. Maybe they will design a ɣ䢢ïne first and give it to all the elites first before they release it.

The new ɣïrû$ will allow them to release a new mandate: get ɣ䢢ïnäted or die. They will release a new cõntact träcing mechanism, something implanted in your skin that can record and upload everywhere you go, everyone you come in contact with, everything you buy or sell, and everything you do. You will not be able to buy or sell without it. If you do not get it, they will kill you in the name of pûblic såfety. They will be able to do so, because by then no one will own ĝûn$ (or very few.)

THIS is the Mark.

This is how the total dõminïõn of ëvil happens. When it is no longer possible to be born free, then comes the end because the Earth will no longer serve a useful purpose. According to many Jëws, the continued existence of the planet is for the sake of the Tzaddikim, the few rïghteous ones, for whose sake G-d does not destrõy the world. A world no longer capable of allowing Tzaddikim to exist is a world that no longer serves its purpose, and will be dëstrõyed.

Psalm 23

 Many years ago, long before I believed, I was in the car I think with my mother driving, and she wanted to stop in somewhere briefly and I stayed in the car.

My eyes fell idly on a row of cypress trees waving in the wind, and I fell into a trance. I had an encounter with G-d, and the 23rd Psalm came to me. Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, this did not immediately make me believe in G-d but I did latch on to the 23rd Psalm somehow.

Later in a class in culinary school, a fellow student decided that he wanted to verbally harass me. Before the next time that class met, I recited the 23rd Psalm. That same person shut up, he was polite to me.

First day on a new job cooking at a restaurant, one of the cooks did the same thing, just hazed the crap out of me for no reason. It's a back of the house thing, I guess. ;) Kitchen staff are largely emotional retards; being a former cook, I know from experience. Anyway prior to the next day on the job, I recited the 23rd Psalm. That same person was very polite and respectful.

It is not that I believed in G-d then, I really didn't. But what I knew was that praying this before a potential conflict made a difference. It made ME different. It made me stand taller. I wasn't convinced of G-d yet, but I was convinced of the 23rd Psalm.

And yet I eventually mostly forgot about praying the 23rd Psalm. It was quite some time after when I first truly came to G-d.

This is G-d's great mercy: that when I did not know Him and disbelieved the Bible, he left signposts and a sort of trail of breadcrumbs to lead me to Him. I did not know Him, but He knew me. And He intended better things for me. I just had to start listening and keep listening.

23 A psalm of David.

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.

He makes me lie down in green pastures,
He leads me to waters in places of repose

He renews my life.
He guides me in right paths
as befits His name.

Though I walk through a valley of deepest darkness
I fear no harm, for You are with me;
your rod and your staff - they comfort me.

You spread a table for me in full view of my enemies;
You anoint my head with oil;
my drink is abundant.

Only goodness and steadfast love shall pursue me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
for many long years.

The Lord Whose Name Is Impassioned

 There is some weird stuff going on in Exodus 34. Which, the last thing I want is to imagine that I understand EVERYTHING going on with Moses in Sinai in the 4th Millennium BC, because there is no possible way. So it is rewarding to look at something and go, "wow, what the heck is going on there? Lets try to find out."

Exodus 34 starts with Moses being told to carve new tablets and bring them up to the top of Sinai where G-d will carve them anew. He must go alone, and not even sheep should graze at the foot of the mountain.

So Moses does this.

The cloud descends on the mountain and the Lord stands with Moses. It then says that the Lord "proclaimed the name Lord."

The Lord proclaimed His own Name, in other words.

Actually it was "proclaimed the Name YHWH" but in the Hebrew Tanakh and probably in the Christian version of the Bible too, it says "Lord" in place of The Name.

Now it is worth noting at this point, and I might do a post on just that, but it is important to quickly note that G-d has a specific name. G-d's name is not "God" though you could say that is one of His names. Various things are worthy of note in relation to the fact that G-d has a name, but we may get to that later. The vowels in The Name have been lost, but it is generally been interpreted as YAHWEH.

G-d thereupon does a very very curious thing!

You may have seen in movies about ancient Egypt or perhaps other monarchic eras, when the Pharoah or king walks into the room there is a herald. So for instance in a movie about ancient Egypt, the herald might walk in front of the Pharaoh and say, "Pharoah Aten-Joe-Bob, blessed of the Nile, Pharaoh of the Two Egypts, beloved of Ra, conquerer of Shamesh-mahbooty..." and so on.

Well, on top of Mount Sinai, in front of Moses, G-d proceeds to herald... HIMSELF. He proceeds to say, of HIMSELF,

"The Lord! The Lord!" or to probably be more precise, "YHWH! YHWH!" (we are going to assume that YHWH is used in place of Lord from now on.)

"The Lord! The Lord! a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He does not remit all punishment, but visits the iniquity of parents upon children and children's children, upon the third and fourth generations." ~Exodus 34:6-7

And G-d Himself is being the herald FOR Himself here. Basically, THIS is my Name and THIS is what I am about. Now, you would have to assume that G-d could have called upon myriad angels to say all this, but He says it Himself. He could have had infinite angels say stuff like "Creator of the Universe, molder of the plasma of supernovas, crafter of the atom" and stuff like that and had Moses quivering into jello. He does not mention any of this, but He is clearly heralding Himself.

It's very very queer, is what it is. One possible takeaway is that G-d does not need angels to be intermediaries. Even though at this point, granted, He is only talking to a single human being on the entire planet, he talks to that one directly. Intentionally not being heralded by anyone else.

This is one of the weirdest parts of Exodus 34, but not the part that really blows my mind. So lets move on.

So Moses asks for blessing for his people Israel and G-d covenants with them. He then tells Moses that the Israelites are going to go into Canaan and displace all the people there. And the part that is emphasized is that the various Canaanite tribes should not be left in the land to have any relationship with the Israelites, lest they be led astray and follow other gods. The Israelites must make no covenant whatsoever with these people. It says:

"No, you must tear down their altars, smash their pillars, and cut down their sacred posts; for you must not worship any other god, because the Lord, whose name is Impassioned, is an impassioned God."

Now you might pass over the last half of that (emphasis mine) without thinking much of it, and that would be a mistake. G-d already directly intentionally told us His name!

It's not "Impassioned," right? It's YHWH! So what gives?

The Name YHWH is believed to be derived indirectly somehow from the name G-d gave Moses at the Burning Bush. When Moses asked G-d for His name, He said "ehyeh asher ehyeh" which means "I am that I am" or "I will be what I will be" or more generally, "I exist that I exist.

Or maybe...

"I live that I live."

Why do I say that? It is normally interpreted "I am that I am."

I interpret it that way because that would tie into His name also being "Impassioned."

The difference between living and existing, is being impassioned.

Caring, in other words. If you don't care about anything, you may be existing but you are not living. G-d does not just exist, He LIVES. There are a large number of words that connect into the same thing, which I all put under the umbrella of "care." G-d is impassioned. G-d is in some sense emotional, or at least the closest parallel to our human understanding is emotion. G-d is jealous. In several other places "impassioned" is interpreted "jealous."

So you could say that care has a light side and a dark side. G-d brings down evildoers, that is sort of the dark side of "care." He cares about the innocent being unjustly afflicted, so the wicked are undone. All of the bright and dark implications of caring, He has. If you want a human parallel, a man cares about his family so he makes sure they are well taken care of and loved and has things that would be good for them. He also shoots the home invader who breaks in trying to do them harm.

G-d Cares.

And He is saying so loud and clear, for those who have ears to hear. His Name, implies caring. He is not an indifferent G-d.

This is a huge difference between Him and the god of the deists and the like, or Buddhist conceptions among many others. G-d caring is an uncomfortable thought for intellectuals and rationalists and the like. "G-d has this whole enormous universe to think about! Why would He worry about what little people on a little planet do? What these tiny hairless apes do! G-d does not look or mind."

This is a common justification for their ethical relativism and disobedience. There are even Psalms that refer to this philosophy, parts of Psalms 10 and 94.Well, the G-d of Sinai definitively disagrees.

This is the part of Exodus 34 that blows my mind if I think about it. G-d's Name is Impassioned. G-d's Name is Care. The difference between living and just existing, is care. And G-d is a living G-d, as it also states elsewhere in the Tanakh. He cares.

Mind = Blown

However, we are not done with the weirdness in Exodus 34.

When Moses comes back down from Mount Sinai, it says "the skin of his face was radiant." Now it does not elaborate, whether he was just beaming from being near G-d or whether it was literally emitting light. Everybody was scared of him when he came down, so it must have been impressive. So after that point, when he spoke to G-d, he would show his face all lit up and then covered his face with a veil so they wouldn't see it until the next time he came down from the mountain.

Now when you think of religious leaders in this day, guys with slicked back hair and $5000 suits and $500 manicures, it might be worth thinking about a guy in dusty robes who went around with his face in a veil. All the time, pretty much. So he was there hanging out with the people of Israel, doin stuff, and his face was covered. It's kind of a surreal thought.

The traditional Christian interpretation of this is that Moses was vain, and didn't want people to see the glow fade from his face and him become just another human. You might be able to quote me something in the Tanakh that shows this, but I don't think so. I think he should have thought up the veil even if his face didn't glow like a Christmas tree.

Ever see a statue representing Justice? Usually a female statue with scales. And it is usually blindfolded. Well Moses was the highest judge, the Supreme Court basically, of the people of Israel. They took all the tough cases to him, and easy cases were decided by lesser judges.

What do you think when you see Moses deciding a case with a veil over his face, just a piece of cloth in a hood? I have touched on this in other posts: Moses did not have the luxury of representing himself, or even representing the People of Israel. He, and Aaron and other priests, represented G-d. They were ambassadors for G-d. As such, they needed to represent G-d's interests above anything else. The person of Moses was not relevant, the person of Moses might have personally liked or loved the defendant in a case he was hearing. That Moses has to be put on a shelf.

This is the representative of G-d Almighty on Earth. The person is entirely subordinated to the role. This is not Moses the man anymore. Moses is not here.

THAT is why Moses wore a veil.

The Problem with Islam

 Back in University I studied logic. It was part of getting my basically useless Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy. Let me set up a logical argument for you:

Premise 1: If something is the Word of G-d, you should study it.
Premise 2: The Torah is the Word of G-d

Therefore: You should NOT study the Torah.

Does not compute, right? The conclusion here should that you SHOULD study it. However, Islam bases its claims on the teachings of Judaism and Christianity in the Bible, states that the Quran is the continuation of that, and then says not to read the Bible.

That only makes sense if you are trying to get some cred for being in the lineage of the Abrahimic religions but simultaneously want to discredit them and say that yours is the only reliable version of that teaching. Muhammad actually scolded one of his disciples for carrying a copy of the Torah. The moral of that story: I will tell you what to think. Only I will tell you what the religion of Abraham and Moses is.

So Islam paradoxically says the Torah is the word of G-d and NOT to read it.

Islam is a plagiarism of the Abrahimic religions. You can almost see Muhammad thinking: "this One G-d thing is great, but those stinking Jews seem to have cornered that market. We need a version for us Arabs."

And then: "but if they read the originals, my version has less credibility. So I will claim authority from the Bible, but not allow them to read it."

And oh, for the Christians: Jesus was a prophet, and you shouldn't read the New Testament. Whut?

As I mentioned in my post "History of Monotheism Up Until Now," there are all kinds of other absurdities and weirdness in Islam. The One G-d YHWH did not mention any such thing as jinn, probably because they do not exist and are silly. He did not mention that the shooting stars are His projectile weapons, probably because they are actually space rocks. And I think that if Moses had sex with a NINE YEAR OLD GIRL, he would probably keep it to himself. Or better yet, not do it. Muhammad, on the other hand, both had sex with a 9 year old and didn't avoid mentioning it.

I think that should be a general rule from now on: if you have sex with children, in other words if you are a PEDOPHILE, your religious advice should be ignored. Just a thought.

Arguably, Islam is not really an Abrahimic religion. Of course, only Judaism has an ironclad claim to that name. But at least Christians admit YHWH is G-d, even if they don't like to say the name.

Jews: YHWH alone is G-d

Christians: JESUS is G-d (and um, YHWH of course too. We like to say "God the Father")

Muslims: Allah is G-d (but we claim it is the same G-d as you Jews. But we never say YHWH.)

***

I have been studying Islam of late, though I cannot claim to be any sort of expert on it. Reading the Quran kills me of boredom. I find many things about Islam admirable however. Their emphasis on the singularity and unity of G-d. Avoiding the whole Jesusolatry thing. Lā ilāha illā allāh, there is no god but G-d. All admirable. All present in the Torah, and you don't have to get the Made-in-Arabia substitute. You can get the real deal.

The level of commitment of a very large number of people to Islam is also commendable, though I wish that commitment was aimed at a religion that was not a plagiarism founded by a pedo. If you compare it to the severely lukewarm level of commitment to Christianity in the West, or even of most ethnic Jews towards Judaism, it is clear that the Muslims for all their faults are definitely putting it out there on their religious commitment. Their level of commitment is an indictment of lukewarm Western religion.

This also leads to people blowing themselves up in shopping malls, but I consider that a failure in reasoning ability more than anything. There is no way that people blowing themselves to giblets in shopping malls will somehow do a miraculous job at converting people to Islam or overthrowing corrupt Middle Eastern regimes. It does the inverse of that. It's bad salesmanship on the Islam side, and strengthens despotic regimes. It puts people on the side of the corrupt regimes out of fear of the Islamists. That's exactly what happened after the Luxor massacre in 1997. It strengthened the authority of Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian regime. The Egyptian people overwhelmingly denounced it. But I am not equating Islam with terrorism: as I said that is a failure of simple reason and conscience more than anything.

Whatever commendable there is about Islam, and there are a number of things commendable about it, those things do not overcome the one most important thing: it's a fake. The Quran was not dictated by G-d, or even an angel.

Moses didn't have an angel supposedly whispering secretly into his ear in a cave. G-d brought down fire on the mountain in front of thousands of people and spoke the Ten Commandments to them all.

The Absurd Triumph of Liberalism

 First things first: yes, there may have been irregularities, but I truly believe Biden won the 2020 election.

THAT he did, should be messing with your head right now. I believe it is more of an earthquake in American politics even than Trump's election in 2016.

I genuinely don't believe that love of government programs per se powered the success of the Democratic Party in 2020. And I believe this goes far deeper than 2020. Used to be, even if a political philosophy was cockamamie, it was an intellectual proposition. You propose a philosophy of government, you try it out, if it works that's great. If it fails, well there is no shortage of political ideas.

Even Karl Marx, as messed up as he was, proposed Marxism as an intellectual proposition. Description: The worker masses are oppressed by the capitalists. Prescription: We put them in charge and take everything away from the capitalists, and Result: voila! Problem solved. Or not. But that is at least a description-prescription relationship. 1.) This is how things are, 2.) this is what we can do about it, 3.) this is what we hope are the results.

This kind of rational political decision making is not what is powering what is happening in America right now. But in order to show the real causes of why Liberalism continues to both fail horribly and yet succeed in sticking around, we need to delve into a little history.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: THE GREAT SOCIETY

In the period of 1964 to about 1968, Lyndon Johnson had the support to enact The Great Society, basically every liberal program that existed in the mind of the Democratic Party at that time:

Economic Opportunity Act of 1964
Job Corps 1964
Food Stamps 1964
Head Start 1964
Upward Bound 1965
Teacher Corps 1965
Higher Education Act of 1965
Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965
VISTA 1965
Model Cities Program 1965
Medicare 1965

To name just a few. If you had asked any liberal whether these programs would, in the period between 1964 and 1974,  have decreased Black (and underprivileged) overall crime, drug abuse, drug violence, children out of wedlock, rates of incarceration, and on and on, or increased them, every liberal would have said that all these things would decrease as a result of the intervention of these programs.

And every one of them would have been dead wrong. Overall crime, drug related crime, drug overdoses, violent crime, children born out of wedlock and rates of incarceration all increased.

How liberalism avoided being totally discredited by this is part of its puzzling and enduring habit of survival, but it had been at least partially discredited for a few decades.

Intellectually, liberalism was dead and still is. It doesn't work.

Despite all this, even Republican leaders like Nixon and Ford continued to practice a sort of "conservativism lite," because while liberals had been discredited by events, Republicans lacked a coherent ideology other than "like them, but less." Even after Reagan took the bull by the horns and made conservativism great again, immediately after we had Bush Sr. who was functionally another liberal at least on social issues.

And Bill Clinton. While Clinton was not a raging liberal (though he would be happy for the leftist Democratic base to think so,) the event that should have told us everything we needed to know about the true State of the Union happened on his watch. You see, Billy Boy Clinton had zero impulse control. If he wanted a cheeseburger in the middle of the night, he got it. Whatever impulses he had, he got. Instant gratification was his thing.

If he wanted to diddle an Intern, one of his EMPLOYEES, in the Oval Fucking Office, with a cigar, he damned well was gonna do it. Zero impulse control.

And the American people responded to this revelation of adultery, sexual immorality and the abuse of office in the highest chambers of the government with a collective yawn. The economy was good, he had high approval, who cared who Bill Clinton diddled. Keep on keeping on there, Bill. Adultery away. Just keep the good times rolling.

THAT should have told us all we needed to know about the moral decrepitude of America.

Skipping ahead to Trump, Trump was an accident. If the powers that be had any idea that he could actually win, they would have made sure he couldn't. Trump went on to have a singularly successful Presidency, despite the repeated attempts by the Establishment to correct their mistake. He gained control over the borders, made America energy-independent, the economy was great until Covid came along, gas prices were low, America's adversaries were largely afraid to stir up trouble. He was very very successful, according to his standards and those of the people who voted for him.

And then America voted into office a man who has great difficulty in stitching together complete sentences. What happened? That in a minute, but first what has been happening in 2019 thru 2021 in the liberal cities?

Antifa and BLM happened in Democratic cities, tearing them apart. Normalizing looting, defacing property including historic landmarks and often assault and murder. Democratic leadership in these cities either did absolutely nothing or actually justified the rampant crimes going on in their cities.


And then they defunded the police.


As anyone with two living brain cells to rub together can tell you, the result was skyrocketing crime rates. Crime in Portland Oregon is up 300%.

WHAT DO YOU THINK WILL HAPPEN when you take cops off the streets? The wannabe Jokers will play. Is anyone still living in urban Chicago who WANTS to be living there?

And what do you call this creature?

Chicagoans call it "Her(?) Honor the Mayor." Did they just get a meth head off the street and shove her into the Mayor's office? Might as well have. The meth head would probably do a better job.

How is it that this meth head keeps her job? Probably because everyone with a lick of sense has long left Chicago, leaving damaged people who cannot escape this hell as the only voters. And then Hell voted in one of its own.

How should the poor bastards who are still stuck in Chicago feel about this piece of crap ruining the remaining ruins of their city? This creature is, of course, in the vanguard of the "defund the police" bandwagon. She had the horseshit for brains to say that police cannot stop the summer crime wave without "community support." From who, her fellow meth addicts? That's where we are at: no rule of law, if the gangbangers and the drug addicts don't approve of the cops, they can't enforce the law in THEIR part of town.

And yet... LIBERALISM KEEPS WINNING IN CITIES!

WHY???

We shall see!

Now let us return to the man drooling into his pudding cup in the Oval Office. Why did he get elected (and I truly believe he was elected) President?

The reason why Biden won, the reason why Liberals keep winning in cities, is the moral decay of America. The American people are no longer even remotely a moral people. They vote for the person most likely to give them stuff, and the person that is least likely to rock their emotional boat or most likely to stroke them emotionally. Trump was never going to be that person. If he runs again, even though he should on the basis of his job performance as President win in a landslide, it would take a miracle for him to win.

A moral person takes a look at Critical Race Theory, for instance, and asks: Is it ethical to single out white people alone as the force of evil in the whole world, and then to continue singling out their children and their children's children forever? Meanwhile looking at people of color as helpless victims purely because of their skin tone?

An average American goes: is it good for me? And since the majority of Americans now fall into one or another intersectional triangle, the majority are going to say "yes, it's good for me. Finally I am on top!"

This is because while jealousy of other's belongings and success is immoral (thou shalt not covet,) they are also people with no moral principles whatsoever. The majority of all Americans, white black yellow straight gay and otherwise, are people with no moral principles or conscience whatsoever.

This is the single most important fact that we have to assimilate in this era.

An American with morals and a conscience and a sincere belief in G-d is an aberration. A throwback.

I have heard successful white people tell me, they want to vote Democratic because they want the Democrats to take money from the very rich and give it to them. Because they have no morals, no honor, no principles, no self-respect. Just give me money. Take from others what you have no right to take, and give it to me who has no right to have it. Steal from other people for me, Government, and give me the money.

It is not the thoroughly discredited Liberal political stance that they care about. They neither know nor remotely care if liberalism will build a better America. If they gave it any thought whatsoever, they would know that it will not and never has. It's what it can do for them personally. The country can burn as long as they get theirs.

Also, people care way more about what others will think about them, than about what is right. The grandmother whose daughter had a few abortions - she's not going to vote for a pro-life candidate even if her conscience pricks her a little, because her daughter is pro-choice and has demonstrated that in deed. The grandmother cares more for the love and esteem of her daughter than for what's right.

Even if her daughter killed a few of her grandkids along the way.

And people make decisions like this all the time. Not what's right, but what people - especially people they love - will think.

And how many people have a family member who is gay? How many have a family member who is trans? How many have a family member who has had abortions? How many have a family member who has blamed Whitey for all his or her problems? How many have family members who do drugs? How many have family members who are liberals? Well you got the whole liberal platform sold right there. EVERYONE has someone like this in their family or circle of friends. And for the sake of those they love, they will go along with what is wrong.

Going along with those you love may be "nice" in the eyes of the World, but it is not ethical. Doing what is right is what is ethical. The overwhelming majority of Americans lack the basic spine to do that. They are functionally godless, so why should they care about right and wrong? Yes, the majority of Americans are godless: if they say they are not, it is probably because people will think the wrong thing of them if they abandon their church group or social circle to yell on the streetcorners, "God is Dead!" Most people are not that honest. Almost nobody is. Honesty, again, being one of those moral principles that nobody cares about anymore.

While the Islamic terrorists were wrong about violence, and about religion in general, they were right about one thing: America really is decadent, materialistic, sexually deviant, spiritually degenerate, godless, evil and morally rotten to the core, contaminating everything it touches. Khomeini was right: America is the Great Satan.

Can anyone deny that at this point?

This is why Liberals win.
And FAIL.
And WIN SOME MORE ANYWAY.

And we should honestly be prepared for them to do that more and more often. The moral decrepitude of America and pretty much the whole Western world is the most important fact of this generation.

Those few people who are genuinely moral and God-fearing subconsciously make the mistake of thinking that everyone really operates like they do. That's why there were so many conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, saying that there is no way that a mental vegetable could have won the 2020 election fairly. Because the American people are not evil and irrational.

BUT HE DID. AND THEY ARE.

This is our failure of imagination. No, people aren't basically decent and moral. They are basically crooked and corrupt and decadent and have the moral fiber of unflavored Jello. UNDERSTAND THIS FIRST, before you understand anything else.

Furries exposing their anus and dildoes to children? Not a problem, for this people. "Hey, my cousin is a furry and the other one is a drag queen. She did a Story Hour last week. Shut your mouth, you bigot." Indoctrinating children with poisonous ideologies like CRT? "Not a problem, the little brats deserve to feel inadequate, as long as they shut up at home."

Media companies censoring conservatives? "They deserve to be censored, bigots. As long as I can still watch my furry porn, we're cool."

Parents persuading their children to be LGBTQ+? Not just allowing, persuading? Hey, they don't want their kids (or they themselves) to be considered uncool. Every parent needs to have at least one trans child or they get kicked out of the club.

Burning down churches? If they aren't cool with that yet, they will be.

Burning the Bible in large piles Nazi-style? I would say 60% of Americans are okay with that now.

Burning theists themselves? Coming, children. It's coming.

Consider the German Jews in the 1930's who could not possibly imagine or visualize that their neighbors and their government would want to take their lives. They are good people, their neighbors. The government just wants to serve the people. Surely nobody wants to murder me and my family just for being Jews, right?

Don't be them.

At least know what is happening.