Sheep and Goats

Author: tomsheepandgoats

  • Getting in the Last Word

    How many arguments would choke off were it not for people who must get the last word?

    David the King was the target of hurtful talk over a long time. But he held his tongue and endured.

    But those seeking my soul …….deceptions they keep muttering all day long. As for me, like someone deaf, I would not listen; And like someone speechless, I would not open my mouth. And I came to be like a man that was not hearing, And in my mouth there were no counterarguments. Ps 38:12-14

    There is something refreshing in this course. You don’t have to answer every mean remark people say.

    They told Joseph Rutherford, 2nd WBTS president, that a coworker had said rotten things about him.

    Well, Karl talks a lot, and he says things he doesn’t mean.

    He wasn't enraged. He wasn't outraged. He didn’t even know if it was true, (it wasn’t) and didn’t care. He just let it slide past him.

    Going back one president, Charles Russell (1rst WBTS pres) observed: If you stop to kick every dog that barks at you, you’ll never get very far.

    We do want to get very far, usually. Best if we get some thick skin to absorb insults without loosing our cookies.

    **********************

    Tom Irregardless and Me             No Fake News but Plenty of Hogwash

  • Danes insult the Prophet

    A pure delight was to watch Danish reaction when one of their newspapers slandered the Prophet and the Islamic world went ballistic. Not delight at the mayhem, of course, in which some people even died. Not even delight, because, for a rare change, the target of fury was someone other than the United States. But mostly delight at watching the Dane’s genuine astonishment. How could anybody dislike us? they agonized. We’re so nice!

    It must be a misunderstanding! Yes, that’s it. Patiently, as if speaking to a slightly dull child, they explained: You see, in our country there is freedom of expression. Here we allow different points of view, even if we don’t agree with them! Surely, once the Arabs understand this, their anger will dissolve and they’ll marvel at our tolerance and broadmindedness.

    Trouble is, they understand it very well, and want no part of it. Western culture and values to them means moral rot. It means family breakup, out-of-wedlock births, open prostitution, (sex workers, the West calls them) drug use through the roof. Who needs it?

    And that may not be a misunderstanding at all. Hotheads get the upper hand, as they always do, and the reaction is more violent than anyone would have imagined.

  • The Flag: Salute/Respect

    Driving home one night, I saw a flag flying upside down. I did a double-take. Maybe the wind had caught it some odd way and wrapped it around the pole. But no, here was another one! And I’ve seen a few since. Turns out it represents some protest, if not about Iraq, then about Patriot Act restrictions of rights we’ve grown accustomed to.

    Still, it’s jolting to see, even when we’ve grown used to flags serving as jackets, bandanas, patches, underwear, and even fuel at the occasional flag-burning.

    Jehovah’s Witnesses would never do any of the above to the flag. At all times, we treat it with respect. And yet we do something which, to many people, is worse. We decline to salute it.

    This is a hot button issue for many. If, in your mind’s eye, you can see troops hoisting the flag at Iwo Jima, then you may not take kindly to people who won’t salute. Maybe they should find another country in which to live, you might fume.

    It might help to realize that JWs refrain from saluting any flag in any land, not just that of a particular country. Thus, whatever their reasoning may be, it is obviously not one of disrespect, much less subversion, toward any nation. The obedience of Jehovah’s Witnesses to civil authorities is well known.

    Their stand can best be summarized by reading the ten commandments. Found in Exodus chapter 20, here is the second commandment: 

    Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them; for I, the LORD thy God, am a jealous God…  (Exodus 20:4,5 bold type mine, 21st Century King James Version

    Thus the flag salute is seen as an act of worship, an act of idolatry, and if there’s one thing that God makes clear he doesn’t like, it’s idolatry.

    One might suppose that flag salutes go back to antiquity. In fact, it’s a relatively modern trend. The present hand-on-heart salute dates back only to 1942. It replaced what was known as the Bellamy salute (named for Francis Bellamy, who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance) instituted in 1892. The Hitler salute of the 1930’s so closely resembled the Bellamy salute that the latter was modified to its present form. Thus, while flags are old, flag saluting is not.

    The 1990 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses tells of a Canadian Witness child who they tested with regard to flag decorum. She and another child were summoned separately to the principal’s office, where they found a Canadian flag draped across his desk.  The non-Witness child was told to spit on the flag, and she did so, notwithstanding that she saluted it every day. Spitting must be okay….her teacher had told her to do it.  The Witness child was brought in and told to do the same. She would not do it. They tried to coax her. Since she didn’t salute, there’s no reason not to spit, they suggested. She held her ground. No, spitting would be desecrating the national symbol, she explained. Jehovah’s Witnesses respect the flag, though they do not worship it. Results were announced in class, hopefully not with the other child’s name. Apparently, it was part of some civics lesson.

    So what is in a gesture, anyway? If a child who salutes the flag can just as readily spit on it, how meaningful is the salute?

    The well known

    English historian Arnold Toynbee warned of the development in our time of the “grim shape of a pagan worship of sovereign national states,” describing this also as “a sour ferment of the new wine of democracy in the old bottles of tribalism.” Those who claim that their own nation is superior to all others, even to the point of worshiping the State, have been manipulated by rulers and regimented in order to carry out their policies, whether good or bad…..[This results in occasional trials for Jehovah’s Witnesses]….who love the land of their birth but decline to worship the State and its symbols.
    Watchtower  1989 1/1 p 22, par 17, brackets mine

  • New Year, New Goal, Same as Last Year

    Once a year, we’re all encouraged to set goals. Goals are good, and we may languish without them.

    A fine goal might be to read the entire Bible through in a year. Or to study this or that theocratic publication. Or to improve the quality, or quantity, of our ministry. Or to conduct a Bible study with someone. Or to improve in commenting at meetings. Or to better manifest some Christian quality that has, thus far, proved elusive. Or……well, you get the idea.

    Me, my goals are more modest. It is my goal, come Sunday, to reach for the Watchtower magazine that will be used during that day’s meeting, and instantly lay hold of it. I don’t want to sift through every other issue that’s ever been published, finding them all except the one that I want! I want to grab the correct one, right away, without fanfare.

    When I confided my goal to Derrick, he, as elders do, tried to be encouraging, but didn’t want to see me disappointed. Well, he said, the goal has to be attainable.

  • Charles Darwin and Annie

    Two spiritual events can be traced in the life of Charles Darwin, originator of the natural selection evolution theory. Had those events turned out differently, one wonders what effect it might have had on science interpretation.

    The first…..the second will be dealt with in another post…..came with the death of Darwin’s favorite child, his daughter Annie. At age 10, the child contracted scarlet fever, and agonized for 6 weeks before dying. Also a casualty was Darwin’s faith in a beneficent Creator. The book Evolution: Triumph of an Idea, by Carl Zimmer, tells us that Darwin “lost faith in angels.” That’s an odd expression. Why would it be used?

    They probably told him that God was picking flowers.

    Is there any analogy more slanderous to God than the one in which God is picking flowers? Up there in heaven He has the most beautiful garden imaginable. But it is not enough! He is always on the watch for pretty flowers, the very best, and if He spots one in your garden, He helps himself, even though it may be your only one. Yes, He needs more angels, and if your child is the most pure, the most beautiful, happy, innocent child that can be, well….watch out! He or she may become next new angel. Sappy preachers give this illustration all the time, apparently thinking it gives comfort.

    Not surprisingly, the picking flowers analogy is nowhere found in the Bible. However, a close parallel analogy is found in 2 Samuel, where it is used to make exactly the opposite point: that the flower picker should be executed. The setting is when King David took the pretty wife of one of his subjects, and had that subject killed.

    The LORD sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor.  The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle,  but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.
    “Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him.”
    David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, “As surely as the LORD lives, the man who did this deserves to die!  He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.”
    Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man!                 2 Samuel 12:1-7, NIV

    Now, this analogy appeals to us. This is just. The man is not expected to take comfort that the king stole his wife. No, he deserves execution! So how is it that when we’re told God has done the same, we’re expected to feel all warm and fuzzy?

    Wasn’t it Abraham Lincoln who said that he was not smart enough to lie? His meaning was that if you lie, you have to adjust every subsequent statement to be consistent with that lie, otherwise you will get caught. Telling the truth presents no such challenge.

    The picking flowers analogy is an attempt to cover a lie, and as we have seen, it doesn’t satisfy. The lie is that, when we die, we don’t really die because the soul lives on, going straight to heaven if we’ve been good. Thus, death is a friend. It is a chance for promotion, and we are all happy to see good people promoted.

    In this context, the Bible’s hope of a resurrection is meaningless. (Acts 24:15) How can someone be resurrected if they never actually died?

    Better to tell the truth from the start, and then you don’t have to invent ridiculous stories to cover your tracks. Death is not a friend, it’s an enemy. Nor is it God’s purpose for humans; it came upon us due to rebellion. Nor does it bring us into a new state of consciousness; instead we become nonexistent, and can be likened to unconscious or asleep. Nor does God purpose to leave us in this sad predicament, but he’s taken steps to eliminate death.

    Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned—  Rom 5:12

    For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.    1 Cor 15:25

    For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten……Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave,  where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.     Eccles 9:5,10

    After he had said this, he went on to tell them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.”
    His disciples replied, “Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better.” Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep.
    So then he told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead…         John 11:11-14

    (all verses from the New International Version)

    How different history might have been had Darwin known the truth about death. Not just Darwin, of course, but everyone of his time, as well as before and after. Instead, fed a diet of phony pieties….junk food, if you will…..he and others of inquisitive minds searched elsewhere in an attempt to make sense of life.

    [combine with: picking flowers in heaven’s garden]

    *********************

    The bookstore

  • Telomeres and Old Folks

    Every decade or so, Awake! magazine looks at the research of aging scientists, that is, scientists who investigate aging, gerontologists. The picture changes dramatically. Twenty years ago, they hadn’t a clue about aging. But with success in mapping the genome, some began to think aging itself could be halted, or at least slowed. They got downright cocky, some of them, and there is still much optimism.

    We all accept death as a finality. But there are things about it that don’t quite square. For instance, who hasn’t heard that we use one tenth of one percent of our brain? The exact percentage doesn’t matter. The question that matters is…..how did that come to be? There’s no way evolution can account for it. Mutations survive to be passed on to succeeding generations only if they give one an edge to survival. But we’ve just stated that we never use the 99.9% extra capacity. So where’s the necessary edge to ensure such excess brainpower is passed on? It’s as if you own a house as big a New York State, yet you only use a few hundred square feet for living.

    Our immune system is also curious. Cut your flesh and your body repairs itself. Organs of the body continually replace cells with new ones so that, every few years, you are physically, an entirely different person. Imagine if your Buick did that. Would you ever need to replace it? With life, however, the repair process itself gradually slows down and stops. But why should that be?

    Frankly, the picture corresponds with the Bible account that man was created to live forever, death coming about only through disobedience. Of course, this would require us to accept…..gasp…Adam and Eve, and painfully few, if any self-respecting scientists would ever make such a pathetic mistake. Still, many have come to view aging as a not inevitable human condition.

    Our chromosomes have segments of repeating DNA at both ends that act much like tips on our shoelaces. Without them, the chromosomes would unravel and become unstable. Named telomeres, some scientists view them as key to aging.

    Every time a chromosome divides to form a new cell, the telomere ends shorten. When they whittle down to nubs, after 50 or so divisions, the cell divides no more and soon dies. But a certain enzyme, called telomerase, prevents that shortening. With that enzyme present, cells in the lab divide indefinitely….they do not die. Unfortunately, they also tend to become cancerous. But it offers intriguing possibilities and consumes much energy from the gerontologists.

    Will scientists figure it out, or will it remain always e beyond their grasp?

    *************************  The bookstore

     

     

  • Farewell to Mickey Spillane

    Here’s a bit of writing to brighten your day!

    Caution:  graphic (not sexual) stuff ahead. Feel free to skip the next paragraph. You can always come back to it if you want.

    I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the flesh open to the bone. I pounded his teeth back into his mouth with the end of the barrel … and I took my own damn time about kicking him in the face. He smashed into the door and lay there bubbling. So I kicked him again and he stopped bubbling.

    Isn’t that a bit…..um….violent?

    Yes, it is, and it was penned by Mickey Spillane, who died last week at 88 years of age.  He was the most selling author of the twentieth century. But I’ve never heard of him, complain the twenty-somethings. That’s because his monster-sellers were written late 40’s and early 50’s, starting with I, the Jury, in which tough private eye Mike Hammer set out to avenge his pal’s murder. He’s gonna plug the sadistic creep when he finds him, instead of arresting him for trial, because…..well….the title says it all!

    Spillane wrote it quickly, in just nine days, because he needed a down payment for a home. Within two years, he had achieved superstar-author status.

    And then he became one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

    The guy who brought broads and blood to the reading masses is a Jehovah's Witness, a fundamentalist [group] that preaches the imminent end of the world. "There's nothing phony about them. Everything they say is true," says Spillane, a one-time "nominal" Protestant converted years ago by a Jehovah's Witness who knocked on his door.

    [We would never characterize ourselves as a fundamentalist group…..indeed, we maintain a certain distance from those folks. But, alas, sometimes people confuse us with them……Sheepandgoats]

    This posed a problem for Mike Hammer, because Jehovah’s Witnesses are not blood and guts people. Of course, Mike Hammer didn’t become a JW, Mickey Spillane did, but Mike, as an invented person, can’t do squat without Mickey’s okay. In 1952 he (Mickey) told Life magazine: There are more books on the way, but they won't contain the things that bolster the excuses for the moral breakdown of this present generation. I've changed my work and course of action to be in harmony with Jehovah's Kingdom. Spillane didn’t write again for 10 years.

    When he did, Mike Hammer was somewhat tamer, though hardly domesticated. The bad guys, after all, are bad, and you can only be so nice in dealing with them. New characters appeared as well: Tiger Mann, (not Woods) a James Bond wannabe of the 1970’s. Spillane also wrote a couple of children’s books, The Day the Sea Rolled Back (1979) and The Ship That Never Was (1982).

    I wrote those books as an exercise, they sold, they won the Junior Literary Guild Award, which made all the guys who write kids books very aggravated, 'how can you win that award?', but you know what that does, it gets you into all the school libraries, which is a lot of sales.

    For about twenty years, he did Miller Lite TV commercials…. we made Miller Lite the second largest selling beer in the world and everybody said 'no one'll drink that stuff'.

    High-brow authors thought his writing stunk to high heaven, but Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) loved it. She examines a passage of his writing:

    "The rain was misty enough to be almost foglike, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy yellow lights off in the distance" — and then compares it to a passage by Thomas Wolfe — "The city had never seemed as beautiful as it looked that night. For the first time he saw that New York was supremely, among the cities of the world, a city of night. There had been achieved here a loveliness that was astounding and incomparable, a kind of modern beauty, inherent to its place and time, that no other place nor time could match."

    To Rand, "there is not a single emotional word or adjective in Spillane's description; he presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create a mood of desolate loneliness." Wolfe, she argued, used only estimates, "and in the absence of any indication of what aroused these estimates, they are arbitrary assertions and meaningless generalities."

    I’ve only read three of Mickey Spillane’s novels: his first, and his last two. So I have a few to catch up on. I wrote to him, but he never replied. However it was only a few months ago, and I guess he’d been in bad health. He was 88, after all. And I had to go through his publisher; my letter to his googled address came back undeliverable.

    In his 80's, he knew he wouldn't write too much longer.

    I'm going to write my last Mike Hammer novel…I used to write fast, but I can't now, my rear end gets tired…I can't put in 12 hours a day sitting in a chair.

  • A Fraud that Has to Go

    So we have answers to two of the most pressing questions ever raised. Why is there suffering? and Why do people die? The answers are complete, straightforward, concise… yet not difficult to understand. The only objection one might have is that they are somehow too simple, that we have become too sophisticated, that science has pegged such accounts as stories, not facts. This is why the evolution teaching has to go…it is the one obstacle blocking answers to life’s most puzzling mysteries.

    Now, if evolution was an absolute proven, consistent, can’t-get-around-it fact, then we would all simply have to adjust and tell Adam and Eve to take a hike. But, in fact, it is simply nonsense masquerading as science. There! That ought to make some people mad. But stay with us a bit. Maybe we can partly persuade you. Not completely, of course, but maybe partly.

    Some try to blend the two, religion and evolution. How can one state that there is an ALLpowerful being who could not create the system known as evolution? they ask. The answer is that one cannot state it. He could create such a system. But, it’s the wrong question. The question is not could he, but did he, especially when such an action blows to smithereens the explanations of death and suffering already alluded to.

    When I first came across this thinking 35 years ago, I was staggered that I had found people who actually believed in Adam and Eve! They did not look stupid….well, maybe a few of them, just like everywhere else….. yet all my life I had believed…I had been schooled that way…that only the dumbest of the rednecks didn’t believe in evolution. One fellow in the congregation loaned me a book, a predecessor to today’s Life….How Did It Get Here, By Evolution or Creation. I didn’t like it. I thought it was poorly written and took some cheap shots I did not resolve this subject for a long time. Instead, I decided to shelve it for the time being, since everything else made so much sense.

    Many decisions we make that we think are purely rational are, in fact, tainted with more emotion than we at first recognize. I resisted this conclusion for a long time, because it is not the way I would like things to be…it makes people vulnerable to manipulation. The smarter we are, the worse the manipulation can be, since we convince ourselves that it is our mind, not our emotion, telling us to do this or that. Pride comes into the picture, since we tend to be proud of ideas we have reasoned out for ourselves. Pride ‘hardens’ us in our position. Max Planck, the physicist, said: People think new truths are accepted when the proponents are able to convince the opponents. Instead, the opponents of the truth gradually die, and a new generation comes along who is familiar with the idea.   Isn’t it emotion and pride that’s to blame? 

    The evolution teaching, in both origin and endurance, has strong emotional appeal.

    The clergy have fallen far from what they once were. There was a time when they called all the shots…not just in religious life, but in all life. People deferred to the local minister/priest. If you spoke against them, you did so behind their backs, never openly. They enjoyed the highest status and wide respect. And yet they did nothing but abuse the power they had. Especially in Europe, (where Darwin was from) the Church amassed phenomenal wealth, at the expense of the locals. While the clergy lived in luxury, the people lived in squalor. Many Popes were astoundingly immoral/perverted, not merely by pious religious standards, but by any standards. The clergy brought the inquisition, torturing those who challenged their authority. Any notion of science perceived to threaten their status was firmly crushed: for example Copernicus and later Galileo, stating that the earth revolved around the sun, and not vice versa.

    The clergy were the chief opponents Bible translation, preferring the Bible to be calcified into long-dead languages that no commoners could understand. Early translators were harassed, sometimes tortured and killed. At times, even those possessing  such a Bible were punished. The clergy had good reason to oppose Bible understanding, since the Bible condemned their manner of living…indeed, even the notion of a separate class, who commandeer and make a living off Christian activity, runs counter to the Bible.

    The printing press was their undoing. It gave those who opposed church tyranny a voice. Countless new brands of clergy came into existance. But what better way to cut these guys down to size then to remove the very basis of their authority. If it could be shown that life came about spontaneously, without any divine intervention, then the clergy would become, not the guardians of Ultimate Truth, but the guardians of Children’s Stories and Nonsense.

    This was the emotional appeal of the evolution theory: letting the air out of a pompous, abusive group of people. Of course, this does not prove that evolution is false, only that it is an idea with a strong emotional appeal, something quite apart from its intellectual merits.

    It’s the emotional reasons that must keep the theory firmly in place, because the intellectual merits really aren’t that compelling. And, much evidence that is claimed to support evolution can just as easily support creation. For example:

    Similarity between life forms….limbs, organs, cellular structure, and so forth. This is claimed as evidence of evolution. Why should it be? Lots of manufactured things share similar design. Automobiles, for instance. If you find a prototype that works, you duplicate it again and again, with variations, in other created things. How does that prove evolution?

    Vestigial organs, for example: our appendix, wisdom teeth. These are things we once needed but no longer do, say the evolutionists. Yes, I suppose, but can’t they just as easily be explained in our gradual deteriorating? Having lost perfection, with lifespans plunging from 1000 years to 80, every generation is a little sicker and more fragile then the one before. We can read and accumulate knowledge at a quicker pace then ever before, so human accomplishments increase, but as individuals, every generation is farther from that original perfection.

    Variation within a species, such as the differences in finches that Darwin observed on the islands….changes in colors, feet, beaks & so forth. So? Nobody denies that happens. That’s why people look different in different parts of the world. Take a population, isolate them so they can only breed among themselves, and in time, characteristics emerge that are unique to that population. But they always remain people. The evolutionists would claim that, since Darwin observed changes in generations of finches, it means entirely separate life forms evolve? That is a ridiculous leap of faith, on par with any of the religious ideas it would challenge.

    The fossil record. This is claimed as the most convincing proof of evolution, as if created beings would not leave behind fossils when they died. The record is not at all convincing. We’ve all heard of the missing link between primates and humans. In fact, there are missing links between all species…it is only the vaguest guesswork and wishful thinking that allows any connection between them. For decades, there was a nice chain of pictures showing the so-called evolution of the horse. (it may still be used, as these notions are slow to be discarded, even after they have been demonstrated to be false) It’s now acknowledged that the ancestors are not ancestors at all…they are different animals, a different species, still alive today. The fossil record does not show one species gradually evolving into another, but rather, species that always remains separate and distinct, although there will be variation within them, as in the finches. I wonder what would happen if evolutionists of the distant future found the fossils of a Dinka human (very tall) and a Pygmy human (very short) Would they recognize it as extreme variation within the human family? I am not convinced. I can envision statements that “all the books on human evolution will have to be rewritten…we must re-examine everything we thought was true,” and that the evolution trail would go from very short to very tall creatures or vice versa.

    If a person believes in God, yet is unaware of the Bible’s specific answers on suffering and old age, and if they also are under the impression that evolution is true science (why would anyone not be?), a done deal, then the only reasonable position is to believe God is guiding the evolution process to produce life. But by taking this position, you get the worst of both worlds. It becomes impossible to understand the Bible’s answers to serious questions. And you do not even please true evolutionists, who will sniff that you are a weakling and must use belief in God as a crutch.

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    The bookstore

  • The First and the Last Adam

    Adam was the biggest letdown, and his rebellion doomed all of us to imperfection and death. Jesus was as good as Adam was bad, and then some. How is it, then,  that he can be called the last Adam?

    And so it is written; the first Adam was made a living soul; The last Adam was made a quickening spirit.  1 Cor 15:45   

    If you have been conditioned to believe in the Trinity, you will never understand that scripture. Jesus, say the Trinitarians, is equal to God. He is God, only in a different form. So how can he be termed the last Adam?

    Set aside the Trinity belief, and the picture clears instantly.

    The key is to recognize that Jesus was a perfect man. That’s why he was born of a virgin, with Joseph merely the foster father. Had he been born in the usual manner, he would have been imperfect, same as all the rest of Adam’s descendants. He would not have corresponded in any way to Adam. It would have been apples and oranges.

    And if Jesus is God, again we have apples and oranges. Adam and Jesus only correspond if we recognize that they were both perfect men, the only two perfect men that have ever been.

    This is a huge point to recognize, because it enables understanding of a central Christian teaching: how does Jesus’ death benefit mankind. Without this one-to-one correspondence, all you can get is a touchy-feely answer to that question, one that pulls at the heart but does nothing for the head.

    God sent his son to die, Trinitarians say, to show his love for humans. Yeah, okay, but why that and not something else?

    Because God wanted to give the most precious thing he had, is the answer. Yeah, but….why not throw in all the angels as well, and the stars? Wouldn’t that show even more love?

    No, that explanation may tug at the heart, but it does nothing for the head. It contributes to the John Coffey (J.C.)…like the drink, but spelled differently….image of Christianity: Christians are big on heart, with lots of hope, and boundless good will….but they’re really not too smart. 

    The Trinity teaching seriously interferes, even prevents, understanding this key Bible point. But if you make Jesus a perfect man, you get a result that satisfies the heart and the mind.

    Adam was not created to die. Endless life was before him. When he rebelled, he pulled the plug on himself. But not just himself, also all his offspring….all of us. No longer would anyone look forward to endless life, now their certain destiny was old age and death. He sold them, Adam did. He sold them into the slavery of sin and death. And there they must stay, unless someone can buy them back.

    A perfect man sold them into slavery, another perfect man will be needed as the repurchase price. Not another disobedient one like Adam, but a faithful perfect man, as Jesus proved to be.

    You can’t find any perfect men among Adam’s offspring, they’re all imperfect. Only if God sends a heavenly son, his first born, to be born as a human, of a virgin, and so free from Adam’s imperfect heritage, can that perfect man be found. And that’s what God did.

    When you free a kidnapped victim, the price you pay is called the ransom. The ransom price paid to release all of us from bondage to sin and death is a perfect human life, exactly corresponding to the perfect human life Adam threw away. Offering his own perfect life, Jesus bought back what Adam lost, he died for our sins. Now the expression died for our sins makes some sense. Jesus’ life is the ransom price needed to redeem enslaved mankind, and it is the exact price required, thus ransom carries the sense of completely covering….not too much and not too little.

    When it comes to righting the greatest wrong ever, God plays by the same rules he made for us: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a soul for a soul…..in this case, a perfect soul for a perfect soul. (Deut 19:21) Thus, the “legal” framework is in place to restore everlasting life on earth to those who desire it.

    The Son Of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many. Matt 20:28

    For there is one god, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; who gave himself a ransom for all.  1 Tim 2:5,6

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    Tom Irregardless and Me    No Fake News but Plenty of Hogwash

  • Acts of the Pioneers: an Important New Find

    When the National Geographic Society announced the discovery of the Book of Judas, folks at the Whitepebble Research Institute were not happy. Religious studies, along with government studies, constitute their bread and butter, and they get nervous when someone else makes a big splash in the pool they would like to own. Thus, the Whitepebble outfit put its own manuscript sniffing operation in high gear, and shortly came up with an important find, (if you’re not fussy) the Book of Howard.

    The institute is now pleased to announce a 2nd  manuscript, one-upping the National Geographic Society, entitled Acts of the Pioneers. Eminent archeologist Tom Wheatandweeds presented his find at the last Institute meeting, where it was quite a hit, let me tell you. While perhaps not as important as the book of Judas, it certainly has the stature of the book of Howard.

                                                    Acts of the Pioneers               

    Now in Rochester there were dwelling pioneers, reverent men and women, about thirty in number, having been gathered for the purpose of attending the pioneer service school. At the ninth hour of the day the disciples Richard and Andrew stood up before them all and said: Brothers, above all things, let us go and publish the word of Jehovah throughout all the district of Greece." And they gave them further instructions, saying: "As you go, preach, saying "I have a message from outer space." And if anyone demands of you a reason for your call, say to them "C. O. D." which means when translated "Come On Down." Moreover, if anyone does not take you in or listen to your words, on going out of that house, say "How do you feel about the Bible?"

    However, some of those gathered began to say "Who will give us coffee to drink?" and "How we remember the donuts that we had yesterday and, in fact, every other day." So after having refreshments downstairs, they departed into the field.

    And the thirty returned with joy and began to related to each other the many wonderful experiences that had been worked by means of them. And the place in which they were gathered was shaken, so that letters fell from the year text, and the screens fell out of the windows, and the fluorescent lights would flicker on and off all afternoon. Moreover the disciples named Peter and Kathern and Herb and Erna began to rejoice more than the others because they knew who would wind up with all those return visits.

    However, while they were yet rejoicing, it became the twelfth hour. And immediately, the disciple named Herb stood up and began proclaiming loudly and repeatedly before them all, "What's for lunch?" So they all paid attention to his voice and went down to see.

    And by day, they would relate to each other how they came to be disciples. And by night, they would carefully examine the scriptures to make sure of all things they were learning. But the disciple named Richard would go over to Remley's and watch television till dawn.

    Now all that remains is to get those finicky authorities to stuff this new manuscript into the Bible cannon….um, I mean canon.