DOOMSDAY-The Covid-19 episode has prompted me to explore the concept of doomsday from a scientific and philosophical viewpoint. During the last thirty to forty years of recent memory, I suspect I have heard suggestions of imminent doomsday hundreds, maybe thousands of times. Each and every natural disaster has brought the Armageddon predictors out of hiding a-likened to termites swarming out of a piece of rotten wood.
Just who are these soothsayers anyhow? In my experience they are always preachers who cling to each and every word of the bible, both Old and New Testaments. So what prompts those predictions made with such absolute certainty and directly in the face of total erroneousness of all such previous predictions? My observations tell me the prompts are twofold—a brainwashed audience and a cunning predictor.
I remember well several years ago, our local schools were closed on a certain day because someone had predicted a major earthquake along the New Madrid Fault line—such was the certainty of the prediction. Even I considered there was nothing to lose by clamping a vise-grip tool onto the turn-off valve of the natural gas supply to my house—its still there—may come in handy some day, but not by prediction. Of course, no earthquake occurred—everyone was so relieved. As I recall, he wasn’t even a preacher—a real soothsayer who was ‘super-believable’ however. Nostradamus was ‘alive and well’ at that time.
So why should millions of people have the wits scared out of them because of the prediction of some idiot with no scientific data. Unless you just crawled from under a rock, everyone who lives along the New Madrid Fault is keenly aware of the major quakes of 1811-12 which, in addition to changing dramatically the flow-path of the Mississippi river, also formed Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee, and Murphy’s Pond in northeast Hickman county , Kentucky. Scientists tell us, that the likelihood of another major quake(s) is a certainty, the exact date cannot be predicted—not as of now, at least.
So what gives most of those prognosticators the belief that they are interpreting world events in appropriate terms?—the ‘absolute certainty’ of God’s inerrant word, the Bible, of course.
Now let’s examine that philosophy from just ‘simpleminded logic’. If the Bible truly is the absolute inerrant word of God, then how can all those predictions be wrong? The answer to that very simple question, I believe, has a very simple answer. Either God is stupid and ignorant and doesn’t know what he’s doing or saying, or the biblical interpreters are ignorant and stupid and don’t ‘have a clue’—far be it from me to call God stupid and ignorant. You are now free to decide which it is—I’ve already decided.
All one has to do is investigate a teensy-weensy bit to understand that the bible was written, rearranged and rewritten dozens, maybe hundreds of times by people who ‘had an axe to grind’. They were all astrologers at heart—the celestial bodies controlled everything—even the ‘star of Bethlehem’ led the astrologers (magi, wise men) to King Herod in search of baby Jesus. That made a great story for those who knew that the ‘earth was flat’, who knew that the earth was the ‘center of the universe, who knew that God was a grizzled old man sitting in the clouds ready and willing to ‘crack the whip’ on anybody or anything that crossed him. They had absolutely no idea of science which is knowledge, which is truth.
But that didn’t stop the money-changers—the fleecing must go on and ‘go on’ it did and does. Jesus tried to stop it—he was a ‘total failure’—they hung him on a tree—and the fleecing beat goes on, and on, and on.
All of that ‘fleecing’ comes in the form of religion.
So what is the truth? Knowledgeable scientists tell us that habitability of earth will likely cease in ten million years—that, of course, assumes that mankind doesn’t kill everything before then. The earth itself will come to a planetary demise in about 7.5 billion years when it is adsorbed by an ever expanding sun (red giant). In the meantime, natural disasters of all sorts and kinds will occur—any one of them could potentially ‘wipe out life on earth’ but not likely and certainly not as the result of any prediction from the bible.
Guess who is continually making those predictions and interpretations—the ‘money-changers, of course. Some of them even fall into the category of snake-handlers—you be the judge.
If you’d like a more complete explanation of these and many, many, more points, you might try reading my two little books, Wilderness Cry, and Peace in Spirituality.
906242_Press Release for Wilderness Cry
Press Release for Peace in Spiritiality
ESATER-What a glorious day—so most of us have been taught to think and believe. So, what’s so glorious about Easter? If someone ask you to explain the significance of Easter, what would you tell them?—would you have a definitive answer? I truly would like to hear a few of those answers.
When Jesus began speaking and teaching of an ‘all loving God’, the Jews mind-set just was not ready nor capable of accepting such a philosophy. Jesus was quite aware of their attitude—he recognized that his task was severe, but he accepted the challenge. Knowing full well that his message would not be well accepted by the Jewish hierarchy, Jesus stayed in the shadows trying desperately to educate his apostles and followers to his ‘new commandments of love’—God and neighbor. It seems very doubtful that he ever succeeded—-We’ll never know.
But what about the ‘Resurrection’?—Jesus had told his followers he ‘first had to die’. In their greed and exclusionary demeanor, they had to have a recreation of Paradise and they had to have it now. They could see plainly that Jesus was dead—-he had to come right back to finish the job. That meant he had to ‘raise from the dead’ and ‘ascend into heaven’—the ‘second coming ‘ was both mandatory and immanent. Therein lies Paul’s injunction to his followers to ‘abandon their usual lifestyles of marriage, family, children, etc.; put on a holy face and prepare for Jesus immanent return—maybe tomorrow’ (paraphrased).
What did happen is this—through his teaching and death, Jesus ‘turned on the lights of God’s truth and love’. He became the Christ—the light of the universe. He demonstrated for all to see the perfect love of God.
What I see in all of this rationalizing is the continued attempt (and I might add a successful attempt) to meld Judaism with Jesus—that is the Church which eventuated. But what did Jesus say? I recall him saying ‘I’ll give you two commandments. You shall love your God with your all and you shall love your neighbor as yourself’ (paraphrased). In fact, he seemed to despise rituals and religion. He said the love of God is personal and not based on hierarchies and buildings. He attempted to tell his biased comrades that God was in everything and that everything was/is in God—seemingly, they didn’t comprehend (we’ll never really know for sure whether or not they did, so distorted and corrupted is the written word we have).
Now lets get to the nitty-gritty. The Jews and early Christians were ignorant but they weren’t stupid They knew no science but they knew how to fleece and control each other—in fact they were experts—they could bargain with God down to the last penny. I recall Jesus ‘calling them out’ for it—they killed him. Maybe that’s the reason Jesus has never gotten his ‘just due’ from religion. They didn’t know much—the earth was flat, and teetered on five crooked, wobbly legs (it was always in danger of falling into the netherworld below—everyone knew that). The sun, moon and stars controlled pretty much everything—so they thought. The religion they finally formulated (an extension of Judaism) put them in absolute control enforced by the Roman army.
TRINITY GOD-Most Likely, whether or not you are a so-called Christian, you have heard of Trinity God. More than likely, if you are Christian, you have used some version of that expression hundreds, maybe thousands of times. Most of us have been so inculcated with the term that we use it without even thinking about what we’re really saying—as a matter of fact, we can’t realistically think about what we’re saying—we’ve been told emphatically that its a mystery and is unintelligible to us mere mortals. In spite of that fact, priests and preachers alike world-wide spit out that term or those terms with such voracious rapidity as to make it seem like common everyday horse-sense knowledge. Everybody knows what the Trinity is—its the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, right? Oh yes, but just wait a minute……
Are you a child of God , and if so, how does that work for you? I’m 86 years old and I suspect that during those 86 years, I’ve heard that expression at least fifty thousand times. If you profess to be a Christian, the likelihood is that you’ve heard it many, many times also. Every priest, deacon, preacher, Sunday school teacher and religion instructor of any kind has thrown that statement at us on a continual basis. Like so many things we hear in the religion sphere, we are lectured to and ask to believe assertions with implicit faith, but with no suitable explanation as a basis for our faith—we call that blind faith.
It is quite obvious to me, that while the majority of people are extremely busy creating discord by peddling disinformation about God and Jesus, the real thinkers who have divorced themselves from that nonsense, are busy discovering truth. Little by little, we are gradually gaining a glimpse into the workings of that Perfect Intellect which we call God. Its a beautiful thing.
WILDERNESS CRY by Hilary L Hunt MD 