One liners can tell it all.....

A tree is known by its' fruit.  Everyone talks for their own benefit or injury. Of that I am certain, everyone. If one continually beat the bush about some evil or the other, then they are bringing their focus on some negative situation and thereby feeding it energy to harm anyone who takes it, especially oneself as well. Don't give tongue to the devil is the better course. I try hard never to take an offense, otherwise, having taken it, am now, by taking it, offensive myself.

Various Bible Translations

Jesus is Alive!

Up to now all Bible translation views were centered on the individual words themselves, one by one. But now there is a new translation available, parable by parable instead, by Sarah Young entitled Jesus Calling.

It has made her the single most successful religious writer in history. In my view, having previously tired of devotionals, she has cast for me, a startlingly effective translation, highlighting Jesus in an illumination of His teachings.

This means the emphasis on the dictionary is shifting from pure vocabulary to the integrated  power of Jesus' truths.

God is simple......

......we are complex.

Jesus and the idle world in a word?

I understood Milton Berle rejected a lot of good jokes from his writers simply  because they, altho very funny, were too complex.

Comedy depends on the short and the sudden combined with the unexpected.  One line comedians, in my mind for instance, from HennyYoungman to Rodney Dangerfield.

Jesus seemed to have been opposed to nonsense, all the way from the back forth film scenes of the banana and the whistling stroller. One remembers Laurel and Hardy. Guess it depends on the definition of nonsense?

 Then there is the attraction of being frightened. The victim running at tremendous speed to escape the pursuing mummy, one arm taped harmlessly to his chest, and dragging his useless leg laboriously behind him. But he manages to keep up. Only in a nightmare. Why are we so attracted?

For Jesus things seemed to be very serious. Can we have mountain moving faith and exist with nonsense?

Red letters calling

I am starting to become intensely interested in red letter Bibles. I want large print and just the red letter text by themselves. Why?

Jesus Calling by Sarah Young has given me an altogether different perspective. It is really much like a translation in that she says what Jesus is quoted as saying in the Bible but in her own words. 

I might call it a colloquial  translation. Instead of translating every individual word, she is translating every group of words comprising their ideas, the ideas of Jesus. 

The publication numbers has made the author the number one Christian writer of all time. It is the only devotional I ever read right thru. It's secret, I believe, is that it conveys the emotional atmosphere, sort of like a spiritual atmosphere engulfing me that I am listening to Jesus Himself myself.  

When answers reveal questions.....

.....there is that quiet lurking slide into the sense that because one knows everything that is known, they know everything known. However, greater knowledge rewards one of increasing ignorance was what I was trying to say in the previous post.

I keep coming back to my previous dead end. There is no way we will even eventually be assured we know everything. We can never stop because we can never catch up to God. 

This is because God has it rigged to force us into the question of faith. This is because, I figure, it is in faith where true power resides. This is because He is God and why He is God. And this is why, I suppose, it is so  impossible to be ones own God.

The unseen war from my foxhole.....

.....that is going on in my thought as to a longing, a  yearning, for a stronger belief,  a stronger faith. Peter walked on water as Jesus was doing. He believed in his passion of the moment, but when he realized what he was really and actually doing, lost the strength of that belief. 

And that caused him to begin to sink. Jesus then said, with respect to any of the many translations, why did you lose faith? Then Jesus kept Peter from sinking.

Whether the story is true or not, it's very existence proves it is a known projection of the human spirit and therefore a future possibility. As God observed centuries previous, man could do anything he set is mind to. Who knew then that men would walk on the moon!

Was it not reported that God said when He looked down knew that we would do anything we set our mind to? Now it does seem to be true that the planets and other bodies held up suspended in space, generate something we perhaps call  mass. This stronger mass attracts other bodies into the orbit of anything with a lesser mass.

It happens because it is a principle if there is no interference to change it. So I am projecting that there will someday eventually be those whose charisma will attract others into their orbit. 

There will be cultural tensions going on in a more clearly defined struggle then, perhaps of forces being born in what is said to be now as artificial intelligence. The ancients saw lights in the sky. Galileo was not the first to see them thru a glass all going somewhere.

God forgave David because.....

....David was honest with God. I received some measure of relief when I realized that. I certainly was ignorantly honest with God. I even told God that I did not care if He existed or not, I did not want anything to do with Him if He was in with those deacons and the minister.

I was a child deciding at the time whether Santa Claus existed or not and when I heard the minister explain that the stories in the Bible were not true and that only the meaning was true, it set me off against pulpit-talk churches. I would hear it all over again when a teacher and other religious leaders, many who often mentioned for the sake of the children.

Even after I studied, with great interest, logic in college, and still was a college educated unbeliever. It never struck me for several years that I had been hooked on the fallacy of the misplaced authority.

I was starting an embarrassing process, feeling I had been a jackass. I was then, am now,  glad that Jesus was a forgiver. 

Reasons I love everyone....

...even those who differ with me, strengthen me and force me to firmly establish my reasons for everything I am thinking. I wish them the same.    

In the Foxhole

Dying is as big a mess as being born into this world. I do not like going into something, from where I am familiar, into something else where I have never actually been before.

Time Fools Us All.  I also feel somewhat betrayed by events that transpired so quickly, when I expected they were not only far off, but a long way off.

Things gradually get more unbearably difficult, and even decorated with pain. I know. But many of us still hold on until the organic mind becomes confused, continually remembering and forgetting. I call this being in the foxhole. We cannot tell when it will happen, but it is close. 

Now I will know if what I believed is true and whether I believed it.

There will come a time when we know what happens......

.....but then it may be too late to change matters. I personally think I will get what I truly believe. But nothing of these affairs was I aware at the time they happened to me. I was as well too young to arrive at such understandings.

I was walking home from our church's summer school, which was largely constructed to entertain us. We made ear rings out of fancy buttons. We watched western movies as the stage coach ran entirely over a cliff. But not so entirely the week following. 

It was boring and I was awarded perfect attendance novelties. I can still see it all now perfect in every dimension. Without any prior warning the words came into my awareness, God is Existence.

Existence however was not yet a word I was at all that familiar in any way. I can see still the details of the empty intersection and the names I knew went with the houses. God is Existence? 

Even so, I was not startled or impressed whatever. I forgot about it, but years later I, older,  came across the words in Exodus by random accident. I am that I am. Then, for the first time I realized what existence meant.

God spoke all that existed, that ever existed, or that ever will exist. Just as it is explained in the opening words in the Gospel John. All in unequaled dramatic fashion it reflects power. I love reading it every time.

Epipanies OR the Transcendal

Any individual's sudden revelation from out of the previously unknown, is generally described as an epiphany. I personally always assumed God would place compelling ideas in peoples hearts. These I would term prophetic or possibly transcendal. 

They could be an experience, but can also be a textual record of that experience. All my sudden revelations were unexpected and spoken, as unheard words known within thoughts. I can give no judgement over what these experiences that overcame me, gave me, particularly at the time of their occurrences. I think, however, they are more common than many would admit. 

       Since often only one person is the source of each one experience, they are ranked I believe, in the category of unidentified flying objects. This would explain the way such occurrences are reflected upon the public. That would be a small risk for me in view of the fact many think I am already a mysterious flying object.😒

Creation Indicates Prior Considerations

Things, entities, whatever, as a hard and fast rule, cannot up and create without there being a prior thought out consideration process. This means decisions had to have been made with a prior value construction behind it. There is a prominent view that God created the universe to reflect His glory and presence. 

I think He did it for me. He wanted my attention for a reason that would foster within me "attentions" for my good. I further strongly surmise it came from the unseen in order to be seen... again by me. 

It is hard for me to be anything but a sheer individually reflective fountainhead of gratitude in the presence of our universe as I perceive it. And all hung on nothing yet! No real estate whatever? 

God spoke, & there was light

Well, while I am impressed, there are quite a few individuals who ignore the complete presentation as far as they can appreciate it. That was probably their uninvolved decision at any rate. So anyway, that may be their decision but, hand it all, this is mine.