Or should I say enslaved?
California has now become the second state in the confederacy to stop interfering with people’s liberties and choices when it comes to adult consented union. Hurrah! It is bad enough that government has been denying people liberty of union, but it is worse that it has arbitrarily prejudiced its injustice against certain people—homosexuals. Finally the bigoted individuals who use power for oppression are being overthrown. It wasn’t all that long ago that a black person DARED to sit in a white person’s seat. And now homosexuals have DARED to step into a room of heterosexual marital vow. Thank God for their holy defiance. But there is still a long way to go! There are a lot more tyrannical, anti-Constitutional decrees to throw down before there will ever be liberty and justice for all.
As psyched as I am about this event, I have to wonder exactly WHY so many homosexuals are clamoring for marriage. Is it simply because it has been denied them? Do they see it as a ritual of the privileged or elite to which they no longer want to be segregated? Are they hoping the fight will eventually enable them to come full circle so they can turn the tables on their oppressors in retribution? Is it simply symbolic to them of a goal achieved and a tyrant overthrown? If the last—what a price! To gain one’s freedom and liberty of union from someone who doesn’t and shouldn’t have any authority or say in the matter and then to willingly and even intently seek to surrender that freedom and liberty back is ludicrous! Marriage pales in comparison with domestic union (or partnership), which all homosexuals have been able to do without prejudice and without governmental encroachment. Why turn down such a great thing? Why turn your back on a union that allows you and your spouse to decide for yourselves exactly what is and isn’t appropriate for you, decide exactly what you do and don’t want for yourselves in that union and (if worse comes to worse) its dissolve? Why instead let someone else tell you what your marriage is and what it is not and decide for you how it will be and how things will be if worse comes to worse? Why should anyone else have authority over you and your union with someone else? Isn’t that the whole point of fighting against a government that denies you the ability to make your own choices of union?
Well, if injustice is being overthrown, I am glad. And if someone chooses to embrace marriage, then I say so be it. Do as you will—that is your liberty and right. I support you in making a choice out of your liberty and right. But don’t think I won’t also hold you responsible for the consequences of your choice just as strictly and without prejudice as I do heterosexuals who have put themselves into that situation, reneged on it, and ruined families and lives cruelly and unnecessarily because they were not able to sustain and prosper an institution that they signed up for.
See Premonitions And Extra-sensory Knowledge Part I.
The final example of my experiences combines the knowledge of what someone is going to say with what they are going to do AND secret things they’ve done that others wouldn’t know. It is so incredible that you might not believe it. I still have a hard time believing it myself except that as a man of science, I cannot deny the evidence even if I have no way of explaining it. Real knowledge about the future came to me from outside of me in exacting detail that puts psychics to shame. I’ve only told two or three people of this event. The anonymity of the internet provides an opportunity to be more open about the embarrassing situation.
My first car was cheap. It burned oil and overheated. Due to lack of trust in my own transportation, whenever I drove on long trips to visit my family, I would pull into rest stops and let it cool down. At one rest stop, I pulled in, inclined my seat, and prepared for a peaceful and uneventful half hour. As I scanned over the dozen or two people going about their business, my sight fell on a man in the far distance. He was an average adult male. Nothing at all should or would have marked him out from anyone else. But the instant my eyes fell on him, a bizarre and irrational bundle of thoughts flooded my mind in intimate and exacting detail. The man was a sexual predator. He liked to watch people and masturbate. And at this very moment, he was trying to do so. Never in my life had I ever looked at someone—whether a complete stranger or not—and had any such thoughts. Why on earth would I think such a thing? What possible reason was there to justify it? It was ridiculous. I shifted my position on the seat, turned on the radio, closed my eyes, and tried to forget it all.
After five or ten songs, I turned off the radio, opened my eyes, and looked about. The man was gone. And yet a thought in my head said he was still there–back behind a certain structured and shadowed area where he was trying to masturbate. It was too dark, far away, and protected by various structures for me to see much of anything, but the thought in my head said he was there. It then came to me that because the man was failing to get off on whatever subject he’d chosen, he was going to walk right up to my car and ask me if I would masturbate for him.
I brushed these fanatical thoughts away, turned the radio back on, and let time flow over me. About fifteen minutes passed before I noticed the man walking from the area where I thought he had hidden himself in a direction toward where my car and others were parked. I watched him out of the corner of my eye while pretending to have no notice of anything or anybody at the rest stop. When he was close, he beelined toward my car. I fiddled with the radio thinking that if I pretended not to notice him, he wouldn’t take notice of me and just continue on his way. Unfortunately, he stopped right outside my door, leaned down, and knocked on the glass.
Maybe it was all just coincidence. I had no reason to think he was doing or would do any such things as I had. Perhaps all he wanted was to ask for a smoke. I cracked my window and tried to be civil. I said hello and asked how I could help him. He looked around nervously and began to recount a short story about something or other he was looking for. He stumbled over his words and stuttered a bit. After a few moments, he must’ve realized I didn’t understand what he was trying to say. He then took a breath and said, You are very pretty.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to believe. All I managed to get out was, Thank you.
He then asked me whether I masturbated. How was I supposed to respond to something like that? I thought, well, if everything I thought is true, I could try to subvert his impulses with a check to his conscience. I told him that I believed there was a God and therefore there were morally right and morally wrong things to do and that masturbation was wrong in many situations. He paused, licked his lips, and then asked me if I would masturbate for him. He quickly followed up the request by saying he would pay me $25 or $35. I told him no. He tried to convince me it was okay by saying we could go someplace where no one could see, that he wouldn’t touch me, that he only wanted to watch, and then increased his offer to something like $55 or $65. I said no, rolled up my window, started the engine, and pulled out without looking back. As I drove, I could feel my heart trying to beat through my chest. My body was quivering. For awhile, my mind raced with images of the event. I felt violated, humiliated, angered, and then began wondering if maybe I should have done something to report the man. It wasn’t until long after the event that I was able to marvel at the foreknowledge instead of the circumstances of it.
Addendum: While preparing the rough draft of these posts, I flew off to Chicago for vacation and family reunion. During dinner, out of nowhere and completely without suggestion or influence from me, an aunt on my father’s side raised the subject of having had premonitions. The conversation immediately caught my attention since I had decided to write on the subject of my premonitions two days earlier. I didn’t know that she had these experiences as well. She mentioned my dad’s premonition and jokingly suggested it ran in the family. Laughter faded as I recounted one of my own. Suddenly her suggestion didn’t seem so far-fetched.
Sometimes I see or know or dream things before they happen. When I was little, I called it deja vu. Since my youth, it’s happened often enough that I no longer take much notice and just shrug them off. The strange feeling of deja vu that accompanied the occurrences in the beginning is now long gone.
My premonition or dream experiences range all along the spectrum from small and insignificant to large and disturbing. Yet even the smaller ones have remained in the memories of my friends and loved ones. So far, I’ve had four different kinds of foreknowledge: dreams of future places or events, knowledge of what a person is going to say, knowledge of something that is going to happen, and knowledge of details in a person’s life that I have never met before and have no reason for knowing.
The premonition dreams are no different than any other dream. They come, go, and are instantly forgotten. They seem to have no correlation at all with reality. There’s never reason to single one out from another until I will suddenly realize that I have already been to the place I’m at or seen the event unfolding before me. The more recent the dream to the occurrence, the clearer my remembrance.
For instance, I once took a vacation with a girlfriend and her family to Lake Arrowhead. I had never been there before. When we arrived at the lake, we parked in front of a large lodge. As we walked the stretch of concrete between wooden pillars toward the doors of the building, I suddenly took notice of my surroundings. When we walked in and I looked around, I recognized the interior from a dream several months prior. The dream was fresh enough in my memory to recall significant details. I grabbed my girl’s hand and excitedly announced how I had dreamed of this place. I told her that in my dream there was a grand curving staircase that went one level up and one level down around the far corner where the building bent. We walked the length and when we turned the bend, there was the staircase. Of course, she couldn’t see that it was the same grand curving staircase from my dream—only A staircase. I then told her that in my dream, I had gone down the stairs and played on a pinball machine on the right across from the stairs. I was eager to see if what was down there. After all, it was a pretty decadent place–not one in which you would expect a pinball machine! What were the chances that a pinball machine was sitting in the exact place as I had seen it in my dream? My girlfriend didn’t seem as eager as I to find out. We approached the stairs, looked over the rim, and there was a pinball machine sitting up against the wall exactly where I described it. I wanted to go down and play, but my girl pulled me away and told me I was scaring her.
Other times, dreams are far removed from their real world counterpart. Recently, for instance, I attended an anniversary showing of a movie we’ll call 1968. Nothing about the place brought any recollection to mind like the lodge at Arrowhead. But after the film, circumstances changed. Several men who had worked on the film were sitting on stage being interviewed. I was sitting behind a man taller than myself. This was fine during the movie, since I had to look either up or straight ahead. But when people were sitting down on stage, this became a bit of a problem. Since I had an aisle seat, however, I merely leaned out to the side into the aisle. This gave me a somewhat distorted viewpoint, but an unobstructed one nonetheless. Suddenly I knew this was not a unique viewing. I had seen this same number of aged men men sitting in these exact same positions in that same kind of lighting before and from the same kind of skewed viewpoint. Unfortunately, the dream was too old to remember anything more than the sight of it. A similar occurrence happened when I was in Ireland with my brother last year. I was in a whole new world for two weeks (I had never been to Europe before that time). And yet in the middle of this grand adventure over the emerald isle, I suddenly stumbled upon a bit of the island that was more than familiar—I had been see it before in a dream. There was nothing about the place that would stand out to anybody except me. I told my brother I had seen that place before in a dream. I don’t think he paid it any mind and neither did I. We went about our adventure.
My father told me a story when I was young about how he had dreamed of an event before it occurred. In his dream, he was riding his bicycle down an incline not far from home. For one reason or another, he lost control of the bike and crashed. A lady who was driving down the hill saw the incident, pulled over, and helped him up. She opened the door to her car and ushered my father in. Although Dad doesn’t remember her face, he vividly remembers her car and the bottles of soda that were on the floor. He had to step over them to get inside the vehicle. The lady then drove him home. The events happened exactly as he had seen it. He was riding down the same hill in his dream. He lost control and crashed. A lady pulled up in the same car of the same color. And he had to step over the same bottles of soda on the same side of the car to get in as he had dreamed.
The amount a person is going to say does somehow relate to how early or late I know it. If someone is going to say a few words, it usually comes to me within a matter of seconds before they say it. If more is involved, it comes to me at an earlier time. For instance, I was visiting an aunt and uncle on my mother’s side in Fresno. I mentioned that I was thinking of going back to school for a Masters and was currently studying Hebrew. My aunt told me she attended seminary (where she met my uncle) and had taken Greek. She then said she couldn’t remember Greek anymore except for one thing… I couldn’t hold my tongue. I blurted out anthropos!
before she could take a breath. Her jaw dropped. She just stared at me, dumbfounded, then asked how I knew she was going to say that very word. I admitted that I sometimes just know what someone is going to say. She looked at me for a moment then asked me what she was thinking. I said it didn’t work like that. It came and went on its own. Over the course of the night and into the next morning, she continued to bring it up either to ask me again how I knew out of all the Greek words in the language which one she was going to say or to simply proclaim her amazement at the fact of it. It was no big deal to me. Just one instance of many.
See Premonitions And Extra-sensory Knowledge Part II.
Wow. I have received a lot of spam in my time. But I have never received a wantonly illegal phishing scam dressed in the name of God. And the interesting thing is that whoever is perpetuating this was specifically looking for people with a Christian faith who might be taken in by the false spiritual declaration and, naively, respond. Someone actually took the time to conjure all this up. If I ever meet the person who did this, I will kick them in the nuts so hard that they will have their first vision of God.
From Sister(Mrs).Mary Saleh
Abidjan Cote d Ivoire West Africa.
Dearest in the lord,
I am Mrs Mary A.Saleh ,from Kuwait.I am married to late Mr Jacob Saleh, who worked with Kuwait Embassy in Ivory Coast for Twenty-Six years before he died in the year 2003,after a brief illness that lasted for only five days…[more bullshit]…When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of (US$2.5M )Two Million,Five hundred Thousand United States Dollars) in a General Trust Account with a prime bank in Abidjan Cote d Ivoire. Presently,this money is still with the bank. Following my ill health, being a victim to cancer , I have decided to donate this fund to a Christain organizations (Church) that will utilize this fund the way I am going to instruct herein,according to the desire of my late husband. I want this fund to be used in Christain Activities like,Orphanages, Christain schools, and Churches for propagating the word of God and to endeavour that the house of God is maintained…[even more bullshit]…Please always be prayerful all through your life as well commit me into your daily prayers. Contact me on this e-mail address (DELETED), any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing another Church for this same purpose. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I stated herein. Hoping to receive your reply immediately .
Remain blessed in the Lord.
Yours in Christ,
Sister Mary Saleh.
-some spammer/computer fraud
In specifically New Testament terms, my top favorites are:
- Matthew
- John
- 1 Peter
- Hebrews
- 1 John
In terms of the Hebrew Bible, my top favorites are:
- Genesis
- Exodus
- 1 Samuel
- 2 Samuel
- Ezekiel
- Isaiah
- Psalms
Favorite associated extra-biblical texts are:
- 1 Enoch
- Odes of Solomon
- The War Scroll
I thought this was a pretty cool animation that could be representative of the pillar of cloud and fire that went before and after the Israelites in the wilderness…
I am no Republican. I have never voted Republican. But Ron Paul has my support. If you Republicans can get him on the next ballot, he will get my vote.
He who cherishes the value of culture cannot fail to be a pacifist.
Albert Einstein, 1914, Jeremy Bernstein’s Einstein
But I say to you who are listening: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you…then you will be sons of the Most High.
Luke 6:27-8, 35 NET
I do think Jesus one-ups poor Albert… After all, what is doing good instead of harm for the love of culture compared to doing good instead of harm for the love of God and human life? And as far as I know, Albert never offered up his own life to destruction rather than destroy someone else’s as an example of how we should live.
Beware any person who claims to speak truth and carries a sword.
Well, I thought I’d end 2007 with a doom and gloom prophecy for the U.S. economy. If you aren’t aware of what’s being going on, you’ve been living in a hole in Pakistan. The biggest housing bubble in U.S. history has popped. The banking system is going down in flames. The Fed is trying desperately to bail banks out by injecting billions into the system and lowering interest rates. This is devaluating the U.S. dollar at an incredible rate and sending inflation soaring. And since all this destruction of the dollar hasn’t helped a bit, the Fed has now promised to unload $40 billion more and will probably lower interest rates further. California had a large hand in boosting the economy as the center of the housing bubble buildup. But now California is the center of the mortgage and housing meltdown and is facing a projected $14 billion dollar budget shortfall next year because of it. The Governator recently said he will declare a fiscal emergency
in January. California, the biggest economic player in the U.S. economy, will bring down the rest of the nation’s economy just as it propped it up previously. The transportation industry is facing a crisis. Oil prices have shot to astronomical levels. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars more than we ever have before in the history of our nation to police and wage war against other countries. Foreign nations who might have otherwise helped support our economy from outside are being scared away as the dollar decreases in value and interest rates fall.
If this continues, I predict a stock market crash and an economic recession sometime between 2008 and 2011 that will make the dot-com fallout seem like a sniffle and the Great Depression like a bit of a cough. Peter Spence, a leading economist in Britain agrees with me: The Government must suspend a set of key banking regulations at the heart of the current financial crisis or risk seeing the economy spiral towards a future that could make 1929 look like a walk in the park.
The economist Ludwig von Mises has this to say: There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought on by credit expansion. The question is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
My advice: Invest whatever money you’d like to keep in foreign currencies and stocks ASAP. Not only will it be there when the economy rights itself, but it will yield returns you couldn’t dream of. And don’t even think about purchasing a home in the next three years.
