Who Rejects Christ the Most

 I just saw a video in which a famous apologist was debating with Ben Shapiro, well known conservative commentator and religious Jew.

The  one who posted this  video asked we pray for Shapiro.

One of my replies (I made three) was as follows:

It must be understood that the ones who reject Jesus most are the Christians. and no i am not going the cultist who says that all the professed doctrines of the churches are false. THat was Joseph Smith et al and not myself. They, church doctrines that is, ARE mostly true, but simply not believed as is seen by our lives .

To put it simply if we ignore the Holy Spirit we ignore Jesus for the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ

For we prefer the doctrinal construct, the mental image, the sacrament, the church tradition (oh yes we ALL have them not just those catholics we despise); we all prefer our own human forced effort which we call obedience (it is not) and the forced emotion called faith, or the emotional repression we also call faith (it depends on what emotion we are talking about as to whether it be forced or crushed) . . we christians seek ANYTHING but one on one with the life giving Sprit who is Christ IN PERSON. for Him we cannot control and our own control of things is that which we will never give up, unless we give it to the wrong person, ie a church leader. so you will pardon me for not being impressed by the empty albeit true words of an apologist "empty but true"?? that is my point.

just as faith without works is empty, so assent to truth without faith (ie personal trust in a living Being encountered and responded t personally, is also empty. ESPECIALLY, I must add, when the propositons we tout are objectively TRUE

in this instance our commitmtent to propositional truth (not the same thing as believing them, not by a longshot, is acutally a snare for it conceals our real unbelief and thus we are never cleansed of it.

and if we reject Him, prefering the Law to Him in person , which as a rule we do, as we attempt to keep the Law of God we will hate Him all themore.

more than any atheist

On the rise of "Free Speech Absolutism"

 That some "woke," like spoiled infants , get very nasty when disagreed with and want to curtail free speech in the name of protecting their feelings has, in my opnion encouraged a reaction that is extreme and myopic, the opposite error, if you will, which is the usual response to error in this fallen world.

Those reacting to "woke" censoriousness and oftime actual censorship  call themselves free speech purist or free speech absolutists.

But i submit that there is no such thing as total free speeech and neither should there be in a free society.

Does free speech permit libel and slander whereby  a reputation and thus a life can be destroyed by lies? I am not talking about "hurt feelings" here, but deliberate and malicious  character assassination.  So I would say to the so called self styled free speech purist that  if you are prepared to have your life wrecked by malicious lies, permitting it with good heart for it was  free speech, a fundamental principle your would die for, even if you suffered from it then you may  indeed be  a free speech purist. 

But if you have forgotten the distinction between hurting feelings and wrecking lives as explained above maybe your purism is based on ignorance.

And maybe you have simply reacted, not rationally responded,  to those "woke" babies  who themselves cannot tell the difference.

Let me give an example of what i mean.

So someone calls you an *sshole in debate. Fine!  Just brush it off. Only a spoiled brat like a "woke" would get petulant and want to destroy you because it hurt their feelings.

But what  if someone simply took a dislike to you? Assume   you were a tradesman or business owner, and this person destroyed your reputaiton, and your wife believed the lies, and you had a mortgage.

And you lost ALL OF THESE because no one would use your professional service nor buy your wares, your wife left you and the bank  foreclosed after you could no longer keep up the mortgage payments

and in the name of total free speech, being a free speech purist or free speech absolutist  you would be quite happy  with this?

there is far to much myopic ultra narrow focus in this issue.

total licentiousness of speech, a term i coin myself for i am not aware of it being used elsewhere, is no more permissiable  in this instance than when a person shouts "fire!!" in a crowded theatre

free speech has never been an absolute

More in reply to Naomi Wolfe

 

I also posted these on her substack in reply to the essay i linked to previously

Have the Ancient Gods returned?

in a word, no. there is no evidence for this. For I contend there is a far better explanation for the madness than that

that "the devl made me do it" is the oldest excuse in history. literally. Eve tried it in Eden and the Holy One was not in the least impressed

God has left us to drink the cup of evil to its bitterest dregs, the evil being that of our own rebellion against Him.

No supernatural devil required here for we are evil as the Bible says countless times yet to be ignored by all of us.

what is happening nowadays is that humaniy is reverting to type, becoming more authentically au naturel. tis is te cup of our own rebellon drank to the dregs, and it get worse

FWD 1

some will rejoice in this. some will despair and die because of this. others will invoke demons to explain or shift the blame. some will blame God for allowing it though i submit that His doing so is about the toughest love there is,

for there is a final category:

a few, tragically a VERY FEW wil seek God because of this and discover repentance of sin as a gift of his counsel in one on one persuasion

covid never shocked my world view. it in fact confirmed it

for though people want to talk about evil these days it is in order to blame the devil. for everyone wants the evil to be in some other fellow.

What did Jesus say when a tower fell on some people killing them?

4 Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? 5 I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” Luke 13:4-5

BTW I am not advocvating hysterical breast beating or emotional flaggelation, wallowing in guilt like pigs in mud in response to our own sins. that too is self rightous claptrap

FWD 2

Many here have cited passages [mostly new testament] about spiritual warfare, meaing battle with demons

I am well aware of these passeges. But i assert they have been flagrantly abused by superstitious mindsets to blame the devil and excuse themselves.

The question remains, how many demons are there and how powerful are they?

put it this way, if you think that every lustful greedy or or angry thought in your head is a demon then there must be vast hordes of them to afflict the billions alive now (what WERE they doing when the human population was no more than 200 million in roman times)

and of course you have to believe they are powerful enough to be able to get in your head at any time'

for myself i know that i am tempted by my own lusts as the letter of James says. no demons applicable here

and i am also protected by the power of God - the petrine letters say so. but this really does offend the demon chasers one of whom told me to my face that the passage i quoted was not in the bible

so, my being a born again believer, no demon can touch me but by special permission of God.

therefore all my evil thougts and impulses are none but my own. and when i seriously tried to keep the law of God i not only forsook Christ to do this ( see Paul to the Galatians) but the effort stirred my sin up and made me far worse than i ever was an an atheist unbeliever. (Paul's letter to the church in rome

so where is the devil in all this?

to me the clincher is this. who or what is the restrainer? (2 Thessalonians 2:6-8) if he or it is still here the demons are severely limited in what they can do, and if the restrainer stil works we aint seen nuthin' yet!!!!! (but God willingwe will not live long enough to witness it for i do not believe the time is yet ripe

who or what is the restrainer? i do not know. as i completely reject the pre tribulation rapture it cannot IMO be the church, which never resrained anything in a godly manner in its history, nor the Holy Spirit who will still be with us as we the born again believers are massacred by the Beast in the Tribulation that God has not seen fit to spare us from

as always there are more scriptural verses than the ones quoted by people on any issue.

and always they change everything about the issue in question

On Naomi Wolfe's "Have the Ancient Gods Returned?"

 Some insist that there is no real evil involved  in the covid business,

Others insist that the evil there  is real and so therefore supernatural agencies must be involved

Naomi Wolfe is one of them. she calls these malign spirits the Ancient Gods

https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/have-the-ancient-gods-returned

I wrote this in reply to her post

It seems to me that you are committing the fallacy of the false dichotomy - that things are either based on human decency, OR are influenced supernatural agencies of evil, ie demons.

but neither is true. For though you have looked at the issue from a classical humanist worldview you have not looked it it from a proper biblcal perspective.

And i do not mean appeal to demons, even though i hold they exist. the true source of evil is far closer to home and scripture, without my having to quote the New Testament, spells this out

Jesus Christ rebuked the Pharisees for adulterating biblical faith with the traditions of men. and it was the Pharisees who held the jews together as a people by founding rabbincal judaism after the Exile of AD 70.

thus judaism as is known since then has fatal blindspots as regards its own hebrew scriptures. and this can be seen in the passages in tanakh that i have seen religious jews routinely ignore

Tanakh ( theJewish name for te Hebrew OldTEstament) tell us that "the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and who can know it"

also that "man is evil from youth up"

also that our righteousness is filthy rags for there is none righteous.

the Psalmist tells us that "in sin my mother conceived me.". This cannot mean that the sexual act is sin in itself, for this is gnostic heresy. therefore can only mean that David, like the rest of us, was conceived as a sinner, ie in christian language born in original sin

I know that Original Sin is a christian term. but it is thoroughly biblical even though the term does not appear in scripture.

if WE are evil because the bible says so then all it takes is a time of crisis to provoke what is already in us, hence the hate divisiveness etc you complain of

and if we are evil then all our talk about human rights was empty hypocrisy from the outset, easily set aside when panic sets in.

There is an old roman saying, in times of war morals are silent. Cicero said this I think. But i owuld expand on it and say in times of PASSION moralis are silent. that passion can be the madness of an adulterous couple, or the passion of panic as in thecovid business.

and when morals are silent all manner of evil results. Not that morals restrains evil. They only restrain action by making hypocrites of all of us

and all this of courese without recourse to invoking demons

for there is no need to invoke demons , the devil, or supernatural agents of evil, ie the old gods.