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.