Prophetic Warning

Prophecy is not the same thing as fortune telling.

I dare say that most people don't realize that.  They tend to conflate the two things more than not.

Fortune telling is like telling someone things in advance that the seer just really has no earthly way to know in advance.

But in most cases you can be prophetic just by paying attention to the details, using history and logic as a guide.

I suggest you go read the whole post that tells more about these two photos:

                                          An excerpt from the site:
In 1860, he was living in Norborne. He wrote to Lincoln and received an appointment as Republican Precinct Committee Man. He placed Lincoln’s name on the 1860 ballot. All of Natty’s neighbors were Southern sympathizers. He had been talking about electing Lincoln for president in town. One morning at about 2 or 3 a.m. a neighbor rode up and told Natty not to light any lights. The neighbor wanted to warn him that his neighbors were planning to murder him and if he wanted to live he should be on his way.

On another side of the above pictured headstone, he wanted to leave behind an enduring message:

Hat tip to Morgan at House of Eratosthenes.

Bordering On Insanity

I guess it should not be surprising that Albert Einstein is credited with the definition for insanity being: "Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

Einstein was brilliant when it came to theoretical physics since most of what he speculated on has turned out to be proven true.  However, when it came to politics and pretty much all human affairs, Einstein wasn't smart at all.  There is a valuable lesson there.  Any given person can be immensely talented in any given field, and yet be dumb as a bag of hammers in another given field.  To assume that a man who has been awarded the Nobel prize for physics because of his work in high energy lasers can somehow be expected to figure out how to solve a problem with building nuclear containment chambers in severe seismic locations is just plain stupid.

Believing that Western European or American values of democracy and Republican rule of law can be adopted by Middle Eastern muslim culture is just as stupid, if not worse.  I've heard enough discussion by diplomats and CIA operatives to know that such thinking is stupid.  Don't just sit there and ask about the expertise of this little blogger.  You can make fun of me all you want, but go ask the people who actually have real experience dealing with such foreign governments.  Go ahead.  Then come back here and explain to me how I'm wrong.

It is equally stupid to think that somehow the countries that surround Israel can be persuaded to voluntarily sit down and work out an agreement that allows for peaceful coexistence in the Middle East with Israel.  It's just not going to happen.  You would have better results teaching a pig to sing.  I don't have any kind of special insight or expertise to say that.  All anyone need do to prove that this is true is to listen to the religious and political leaders of all of those muslim countries.  They talk about it often and loudly.

More importantly is the mindset of Arab leaders when it comes to international relations.  Daniel Greenberg puts it best in this recent post on his blog.

Arab leaders don't understand the Western obsession with treaties. Nor do they consider them to be binding in any way. To them an accord or an agreement is nothing but a statement of their interests, which becomes obsolete the moment their interests change. There is no such thing as a permanent peace agreement that binds nations and peoples. All treaties with Arab leaders are signed with individuals and their families. They do not represent any permanent reconciliation or normalization. That can only be achieved through intermarriage and complete cultural blending.

Even if this were the only part of muslim Arab mindset that made the idea of peace agreements with mortal enemies idiotic, there is another facet that adds to the silliness of Western efforts for peace.  This is known by muslims as Taqiyya.

The word "Taqiyya" literally means: "Concealing, precaution, guarding.” It is employed in disguising one's beliefs, intentions, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions or strategies. In practical terms it is manifested as dissimulation, lying, deceiving, vexing and confounding with the intention of deflecting attention, foiling or pre-emptive blocking. It is currently employed in fending off and neutralising any criticism of Islam or Muslims.

Muslim belief is that the entire world must someday be in total subjection to Allah and Sh'ria law.  This is to be done by any means necessary.  Any means.  It is perfectly acceptable and honorable to enter into agreements and treaties in the full knowledge that you are lying to the enemy with whom you enter into such a pact.  Honesty is something only reserved for fellow muslims.

So why is it that president after president who gets elected to office in the United States insists on engaging in behavior that should certify him as being quite a few fries short of a happy meal?  Legacy building?  Or as Obama has revealed in his most recent calls for concessions by Israel on remaking the boundaries, the real goal is to make Israel vulnerable enough for the muslims to succeed in destroying them, which would indeed succeed in bringing peace to the region.  No Jews, no problem.  If the State of Israel was wiped off the map, the muslims could devote all their energy into taking over all of Europe a bit faster than they are right now.

This blogger has learned from experience and much study that the Bible can be trusted because of all the past fulfilled prophecy.  Therefore, I have enough of the script to know how this movie plays out.

In case you are interested, Ezekiel 38 & 39 have yet to be fulfilled.  That means those events are on their way.  Far from anything peaceful, the world is in store for a terrifying show.  Whether or not it happens before a really bad treaty with the guy who is going to turn out to be the Antichrist, I don't know.  But it will happen. There will be no real peace except a peace that is enforced with the power of death.

Camping's Doomsday Fail

Yes, I know the book was written by Robert Fitzpatrick.  Read on.

If time were not an issue, I would really like to take this "Doomsday Code" book and debunk each and every issue one at a time. There is so much wrong with the book that explains how someone can come up with such egregious nonsense about prophecy, that it could not all possibly be dealt with in a single post or even a three part series.  It would take nearly the same number of pages as the book (about 380) to explain all the error.  This post is going to have to stay narrower in scope than that.  It's still a very long post.

First, I don't expect anyone who is not interested in Biblical prophecy to understand much of what I'm going to explain because many of the concepts, references, and language will be foreign to the average Christian, let alone a non-believer.  If you are not familiar with terms like pre-tribulational, post-millennial, dispensation, preterist, eschatology, replacement theology, and the like, you will be lost in this essay. For this essay to be an easy read, you would need to be familiar with the arguments surrounding these terms.

Second, one would need to know the history of end-time prophecy failures going back to 1988.  Amazingly, the author of the Doomsday Code defends the failures of those predictions.  Robert Fitzpatrick is not an original thinker.  It has become obvious to everyone who follows heretical teaching, and especially heretical teaching about prophecy, that Fitzpatrick is nothing more than a hired pen for Harold Camping.  I may simply refer to the false doctrine of this book from here on out as belonging to Camping.

Thirdly, I would like to make the main issue of this essay to be understanding how such bad doctrine comes about and thrives. How does the believer rightly discern truth from Scripture and avoid looking stupid and carrying the Lord's name in vain. That is where the focus of the believer ought to be.  And yes, that really is the meaning of the third of the ten commandments

Let's start with an amazing quote from Fitzpatrick's book:

"For one thing, we need to understand that every word of the Bible, in the original language in which it was written, is the word of God. In 2 Timothy 3:16, we read: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:"
The original Greek, translated in this scripture as “given by inspiration of God,” carries the idea that scripture is “God breathed.” It's as if each word came from the mouth of God. God also took care to be sure that the Bible was preserved in tact [sic]- every word of it - down through the ages. He raised up a class of Jewish scribes who faithfully and accurately copied out the exact words, checking and rechecking so that there would be no error. If we come across a scripture that appears to contradict something else we have read in the Bible, we need to dig (and pray!) a bit deeper for understanding. . . .  By examining the way a word is used elsewhere in the Bible, you may be better able to understand the sense in which it is used in a scripture you are studying. This approach to the Bible works because the Bible is a cohesive whole, all coming from a single source.  [from page xxii of the Introduction]

The problem is, Fitzpatrick proceeded to ignore all of that advice in writing the rest of the book.  In reading the book I discover that "Replacement Theology" and worse abounds.  This is the idea that the "Christian" church has replaced Israel in God's plan throughout the pages of the Bible and history.  This is a direct denial of what Paul wrote to Timothy in the above quote, it denies the clear teaching of Paul in his letter to the Romans, and denies the prophecies of Scripture about Israel that have yet to be fulfilled, such as Ezekiel 38, and of what was just quoted from the book.  An important rule of proper Biblical interpretation is that you cannot interpret the meaning of one verse to be in direct opposition to the meaning of any other verse.  For clarification's sake, we are talking about the understanding of meaning, and not interpretation of translation.

Another indispensible rule of interpretation is exegesis versus eisegesis.  Eisegesis is essentially reading the meaning that you want into the text.  Fitzpatrick actually prepares us for the fact that he is going to commit this crime in chapter two on page 15:

"The intended meaning of a scripture will be its spiritual meaning: that's what God is teaching us. Sometimes the spiritual meaning is extremely difficult to understand, especially because the apparent meaning ontradicts it."

Whenever somebody claiming to be a Bible teacher starts in with something like that, he had better have lots and lots of scholarship, reason, and logic to back up what he's trying to prove.  Even the most respected Jewish sages and Bible scholars in the Christian world know that a basic rule of interpretation is that any deeper, or "spiritual" meaning should never, never contradict the plain meaning of the text.

 Torah scholars going back centuries believe that there are four levels of meaning embedded in the Torah. Jewish scholars use the word PaRDeS, the Hebrew word for orchard,  to remember these four levels. The first is Peshat; the plain, literal reading of the text. It is most often understood to be "simple" or the simple path.  The idea is that while you can enjoy all the other stuff along the path, the path keeps you from getting lost.  If you stray too far out into the weeds, you lose the correct way.  When you start coming up with interpretations where you change words or redefine them from their plain meaning, you can make the text say anything you want to and devolve into a bunch of nonsense.  The following three levels of exegesis must follow from the first level and not contradict it.  This is the heart of exegesis, the meaning of which is to draw out the meaning that the author intended.  All proper Biblical understanding flows from the idea that we are to avoid reading into the text what we would like for it to mean, and instead, we search out to understand the meaning as God Himself intended.

The next level of understanding is Remez. This refers to "hints" or more deep and allegorical meaning of the text without changing the plain meaning of the text.  For example; many of the events of Joseph's life directly hint at the events of Yeshua's (Jesus') life.  That doesn't mean that Joseph or the events that happened to him or Egypt, or Jacob and his sons are to be taken as anything other than literal events, but those events were a foreshadowing of the coming, suffering, Messiah.  The same applies to Moses.

The third level of understanding is called the Derash, which means "to dig", and a teaching on this level is referred to as a "midrash." Most of what we know to be the Jewish religious traditions are the result of midrashic explanation of the Torah.  Yeshua agreed with the vast majority of the midrashic teaching that was followed by the pharisees of His day.  Only where it departed from the plain meaning of the text of Torah did He correct them.  Most midrashic teaching is based on broad understanding of quite a few texts of Scripture and not some extrapolated conjecture based on just one or two verses.  Midrashic teachings on Scripture are always considered debatable and never carry the weight of infallible dogma.  However, some of it has become so well accepted as truth over the centuries that nobody has a reason to question it.

The fourth and last level is called Sod (rhymes with "mode") and is the esoteric level,  really deep meaning that the sages derive.  An example could be the belief that women are just naturally more spiritual than men and that is why they are exempt from many of the rules such as wearing tzitzit and praying three times a day at specific times as the orthodox do.  This is where the Qabbalistic writings come from and they are not intended for those who are not deeply grounded in basic Torah study, even though they too, are never supposed to violate the Peshat understanding of Scripture.

There is so much wrong with Camping's interpretations of Scripture because he so blatantly violates the rules of exegesis.  In a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black we have this quote from page 210:

"These false apostles, deceitful workers, are church leaders who appear to be ministers of righteousness but who are actually ministers of Satan! Just as the early church was being “seeded” with tares - people who looked like true believers but were not - the early church was also being infiltrated by false apostles. Now you may be wondering if this situation which occurred ages ago may have been corrected, so that the church could go on to a glorious future until the end of time. Sadly, that is not the case."

Then, incredibly, on page 211, he quotes the passage from 2 Thess. 2:1-4 which explains why he is wrong about the Doomsday prediction.  I will come back to that passage in a moment, because that is the passage which I will use to prove why Camping is wrong and how badly he departs from exegesis.

See this quote from page 229:

"Incredibly, the entire focus of these annual feasts is on the Lord Jesus. It is so sad that, even today, many Jews all around the world are so careful to keep these feast days but are unaware of their significance."

Let me tell you what is sad.  That people who claim to be followers of the Messiah have abandoned God's appointed feasts on His designated calendar and cannot begin to understand their true significance because they have trashed thousands of years of hard earned Jewish wisdom and understanding and bought into some idea that Yeshua came and created a whole new religion.  But Camping's doctrine gets even worse.

In spite of what he wrote in the introduction, Fitzpatrick goes on to say the following on pages 266-267:

"Many people read Mark 13:32 and understand it to mean that the timing - the day and the hour of the rapture - cannot possibly be known because not even the Son of God knows it; but the scripture can't have that meaning.  [Warning! - Warning! - Warning! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!  Where's the html code that let's me make this insert flash?]  The Lord Jesus must know the timing. Remember, it was He who wrote the Bible. He is the Word of God and He is God. It was He who told Daniel to “seal the book” to the time of the end; and it was He who unsealed that book (the Bible), as we read in Revelation 5. It was only after the book was unsealed in these latter days that we learned the timing of God's plan. The Lord Jesus, therefore, must have known the timing; but if that is so, we must search to understand the meaning of the scripture telling us the Son does not know of “that day and that hour.”

I've been in the world of Christendom long enough to understand most all of the doctrinal positions from original sin to transubstantiation in the eucharist.  I understand the trinitarian doctrine, but when you carry it to an extreme that causes you to contradict direct statements of Scripture, such as the one above, then there is a serious problem with your doctrine.  You don't search to understand (read re-interpret) the Scripture to make it work with your doctrine and your desire to know something that God has repeatedly made clear that you cannot know.

While we cannot know the day or the hour, we can pay attention to the signs.  Yeshua did give us the signs to look for so as to know that the time is getting closer.  He told us to watch and pray.  I could go through a list of things, but many of them could be considered vague or ambiguous.  I don't need many or even a few to demonstrate why Camping's prediction was doomed to failure.  My example also proves pre-tribulationalist doctrine wrong as well.  There isn't going to be two second comings of Messiah as required by pre-trib doctrine; some secret catching away and then some months or days or years later Messiah comes back to administer justice.

Paul made it clear that there was one event that the believers could look for that had to happen before the "catching away of the saints" (in Greek it is called the harpazo).  It helps to make sure that we understand the full context of Paul's statement.  In Paul's first letter to the Thessolonians, he is explaining how the new believers need not worry about the fate of those who have died.  He does this by giving the details of what will happen when the Lord comes back for his own and brings about the resurrection of the dead.  The key details make it clear that everyone can know that the event is happening.  "For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God; . . ."  This statement is in agreement with the angels who spoke to the disciples at Messiah's ascension. That Yeshua would come down the same way he went up.  Other Scripture confirms that the conquering King Messiah would touch down on the Mount of Olives.  The point here is that Paul is talking about the triumphal return of Messiah at the "end days."  Paul continues: "and the dead in Messiah shall rise first.  Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord." (1 Thess. 4:16-17)

We can surmise from the text that someone or some group was causing the believers in Thessolonica to worry that they had missed the return of Messiah.  By this time in the first century, there were already heretics who were teaching all sorts of bizarre doctrines about Messiah and the way of salvation.  People who tried to blend beliefs from the pagan religions or that you had to prove complete adherence to all the Jewish traditions in order to earn salvation.  The problem is, it didn't stop even after Paul's first letter.  Therefore, he had to write a second letter, reasserting his authority and warning that those who taught false doctrine about the return of Messiah would suffer judgment "on that day, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, . . ."  And continuing in his second letter on this very same subject, he now gives the Thessalonicans more details about the second coming so that they can rest assured what to look for and how not to be fooled by false prophets.  Here is the text:

"Now we request you, brethren, with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together to Him, that you may not be quickly shaken from your composure or be disturbed either by a spirit or a message or a letter as if from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come."

Let's be perfectly clear in our understanding  of the subject.  Paul uses three distinct features to make sure that we are talking about one, single event.  The coming of Messiah; or in Greek the parousia.  The gathering together to Him; which is in Greek the harpazo, or "catching away."  Both of these features being part of "the day of the Lord" which is a very specific phrase repeated throughout prophetic Scripture to describe when God comes to earth in final judgment.  Bear in mind that Paul spent time with these people as he described in the first letter, teaching them and building them up as a congregation.  He expected them to understand what he was saying.  He chose his words carefully (or you could say the Holy Spirit was choosing the words carefully since this was meant to be Scripture for all believers into the future and we were all supposed to learn from it.).  Paul continues:

"Let no one in any way deceive you, for *it* will not come unless the apostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction."

Stop and be sure  you understand what the pronoun *it* is referring to.  One should not need an advanced degree in language to comprehend that *it* is referring to the event described in verses one and two of the second chapter of 2nd Thessalonians.  Any reader who does not understand that, needs to seek remedial reading instruction as soon as possible.

Verse three also tells us what the two things are that must occur before the parousia, harpazo, and the "day of the Lord" can happen.  While the apostasy might not be something that everyone can agree on in easily definable terms, the "man of lawlessness" is pretty much understood by all believers to be THE anti-Christ, or the final archtype Antichrist.  He wasn't the first of his kind.  Paul wrote those verses being fully aware of Antiochus Epiphanes and what he did in the Temple at Jerusalem.  Such was considered an "abomination of desolation" which required the cleansing and re-dedication of the Temple.  The miracle of that re-dedication is why we celebrate Channukah today.   But this Antichrist is defined by Paul in verse nine as having all the power of Satan, being able to perform miracles and wonders.
In verse four, Paul explains that this Antichrist, this man, will exalt himself above all gods and will take his seat in the Temple, declaring himself to be the only god.  Such an event would be another "abomination of desolation" and fitting the description given by Messiah Himself in Matthew 24:15 as part of the answer to the direct questions of the disciples about the sign of His coming and the end of the age.  Read the whole 24th chapter of Matthew.

Paul thus exhorts the believers at Thessalonica that unless this event of another evil man, the final evil man with the power of Satan, coming into the Temple and desecrating it happens for all to see, keeping with the prophecy of Messiah Himself, there would be no return of Messiah.  End of story.

In wrapping this whole issue up, I can state with the utmost confidence that I don't need to re-define any plain readings of Scripture to make it say what it doesn't say. I  come to the clear conclusion that while "no man can know the day nor the hour" of the return of Messiah or the actual moment that begins the "day of the Lord," I not only can, but I am exhorted by Scripture to know and watch for the signs that must take place before Messiah returns.  So, all you pre-tribbers out there reading this: you have been warned.  You see, the Scripture teaches that Messiah's return, and our "catching away" or rapture, and the beginning of the "day of the Lord" cannot happen until the events that Paul and the Messiah described.  Those events cannot happen until a Temple has been built and is in service in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount.  The "Holy place" is the Holy of Holies.  You can allegorize it away as being or representing something else, but you do so to your own detriment.

The biggest problem with this whole mess is that it gives skeptics of the Bible something to laugh at.  They won't say that Harold Camping and Robert Fitzpatrick were wrong about what the Bible teaches.  They'll say that all of those Christians who believe in that silly Bible are all a bunch of idiots.  They will mock God and ridicule the Bible.

All those who claim allegiance to Messiah are called upon to study and show themselves to be faithful disciples, understanding the Word of God properly and leading others to salvation, not creating opportunities for evil to seem successful.

If you can't understand how to use the comments feature, you can email me with your questions, comments, or criticisms at the address in the sidebar.

Shalom Y'all

Doomsday Debacle

I could have waited until May 22nd and posted on this subject, but I want to take a stand now and make sure everybody who reads my blog knows that I think Mr. Fitzpatrick is an embarrassment to Christianity.  He is doing the very thing that Scripture warns not to do.

Oh, I don't mean predicting Messiah's return.  That's just part of it. He is teaching a bunch of false doctrine with his book.  His biggest problem is that he is causing the Bible and The Creator to be mocked.  Granted that pagans will mock the Bible anyway, but "Christians" are not supposed to give them the reason and ammunition to do so.

I'm not ready to post a full expose on Mr. Fitzpatrick's egregious theory.  I downloaded the PDF file of his book and have only made my way to page 148 of a 384 page book.  I've already found so many errors I can't stand it.  It will not be easy limiting myself to just explaining why his doomsday prediction alone is wrong.

Stay tuned.    Shalom Y'all.

Some Things Don't Change

You would have to be a die-hard serious political geek to know that Ronald Reagan was not supposed to ever win the nomination, let alone the presidency of the United States.  He did it in spite of the Republican establishment who thought he was unelectable because he was such a radical conservative.

In the video below, he is speaking on behalf of Barry Goldwater, who was also depicted as a crazy, right-wing nut job by the dominant liberals or leftists of the day.

Most politicians today can't give a speech as Reagan did, speaking plainly to an audience as though they have intelligence and are aware of what's really going on in the world.  Oh, and he did it without a teleprompter.

Except for some of the data points, it is amazing how many of the situations parallel all that we see around us today.

Tail Wags Dog

Couldn't really come up with the cleverest title for this post, but I might write about it again sometime.

There is an ongoing lecture series called TED and I stumbled upon it in a couple of other blogs.  The one I saw today, over at Theo Spark, hits on something that Twyla and I discuss occasionally.  Our relationship to the internet.

The young lady in the video says she studies something called cyborg anthropology.  She has some good insights and observations about this phenomenon.  Mainly, that there is a lot less personal introspection going on now. However, I don't agree with her conclusions because, as is typical, she comes from a humanist, materialistic perspective that isn't going to end well.  I know that it is an irony of ironies that I sit here typing about this problem on a blog, knowing full well that I'm publishing to the world wide web.  Trying to spread my opinion about something because I think it's important.

Obviously, I like the internet. It's like having far more than all the world's libraries at your fingertips.  It is a tool.  It can be incredibly useful, or it can be badly abused.  I have to wade or slog through a lot of garbage some days to find information that is worthy or useful, because most of what fills the web is just crap.  It's hardly any different than television in that regard.  I haven't seen any regular TV, broadcast or cable since early 2007, and I really don't miss it.  There are only so many hours in a day, and there just isn't much of anything I can see in what is supposed to pass for entertainment that is worth watching there.  Sure, we have Netflix, but we watch it when it doesn't interfere with whatever else is more important.  But we also find ourselves hitting the delete button a lot sooner and more often than we might have years ago.

The great advantage of the web is that I can scan through the crap a lot faster to get to the good stuff. There is some really excellent stuff if you know what to look for.  Just as a library is totally useless to someone who's never been taught to read, the internet is just a wasteland to someone who has never been taught how to think critically.  If you don't understand epistemology, you can fill your head with all kinds of junk that can cause more harm than good. For instance: I didn't fall for the global warming hoax as it was getting started years ago, because I had a solid understanding about physics and the scientific method, and I asked meteorologists who actually studied climate and weather what they thought, rather than asking sociologists or economists what they thought about climate.

I will admit that part of why I think the way I think could be attributed to my age and the technology I grew up without.  But because I do spend a lot more time thinking, I don't think so.  The reason I say that is because I observe people.  There are many clichés or sayings.  Some are almost always true, but some are just generalizations that have to be taken in context.  For a couple of generations at least, there has been a war on wisdom.  You can no longer say that if someone has lived to be seventy or eighty or older that they must be wise.  I know and have known some very wise old people, but I've met and talked to some old folks that stunned me with their willful ignorance, which I call real stupidity.  And now that I think about it, I might have said the same thing had I lived a couple of hundred years ago.  I just know that back before people bought into the idea of trading their freedom for nanny state government, it would make sense that if you didn't make wise decisions every day, you weren't likely to live long.  Yep, we creationists understand and agree with the concept of natural selection, in spite of what you may have heard from evolutionists.

We do find some great nuggets of gold in the internet from time to time.  Twyla and I spent three hours this past Shabbat watching Walid Shoebat teaching at a prophecy conference somewhere.  It was absolutely wonderful.  Here was a former Arab muslim terrorist, turned Christian, who was explaining the prophetic passages regarding eschatology because he had the right background knowledge.  Of course he is fluent in Arabic, and because he grew up in Bethlehem, he knows Hebrew.  More importantly, he knows and understand not only the geography and the ancient names of the places in Scripture, he understands the Eastern mindset and culture of the Bible.  In three hours, we had many misconceptions corrected, and gained tremendous new insights we couldn't have gotten any other way.  And that was just scratching the surface.  Yes, I like the benefits of the internet.  But I've got a little farm to run.  There are never enough hours in the day.  There is always wood to gather and cut, composting to do, soil preparation, planting and nurturing seeds, and much more. I'm actually glad that it's hard to impossible to get a cell phone signal up here in the mountains. Our lifestyle is such that we have plenty of opportunity to think and think deeply about everything.

Some of the worst effects that I see in this technological age are counter intuitive.  I've seen people glued to their cell phones.  You've seen them.  They need a couple of extra batteries on standby.  There may be some examples of businesspeople who really do need that kind of constant communication, but they tend to keep it brief and to the point.  You can tell by overhearing them that they see it as a necessary evil.  But we've all been somewhere in public where we had to listen to some idiot talking loud enough  to be heard across a football field about the most inane things. Then texting came out, and teenagers turned it into an olympic sport.  Don't get me started on the idiot parents who let their non-income producing progeny run up hundreds of dollars of cell phone bills.

You would think with all of this "connectedness" that people would be, well, connected.  Just the opposite.  This kind of stuff is what has led to a lack of intimacy.  Some people have 500 names in their cell phone or PDA/cell phone combo, but they don't have one really good, intimate friend.  And the people you meet through the internet?  They are just virtual people.  You might have found their pattern of electrons interesting for a while and thought you had enough things in common with them to be good friends, but the minute they express enough opinions you don't like or start harshing your mellow, you can just cut them off with the click of a mouse.  But even if you don't delete them from your list, they can just get lost in the sea of contacts.

Because something inside us longs for real connection to other people, we keep the communication at a place where we won't offend anybody, even when we never intended to be offensive.  The problem is, nobody really gets to know anybody else.  Somehow the whole backwards, upside-down concept of self-esteem has created a whole class of people who think they have a right to never be offended, or have their beliefs challenged.  Modern technology makes it way to easy to abandon conversation.

Do I cut people off?  You betcha.  Look at some of my past posts.  Once I discover someone has Peterson Syndrome, my interaction with them is likely to end quite soon.  And there are plenty of people that you run across on the web that you know pretty quickly are not going to be worth attempting to engage.  Not because I don't think the person is worth my time or effort, but because the moment they are offended by my challenge, they will cut me off, dismissing me as an idiot.  It doesn't keep me from trying occasionally.

I will readily admit that I'm in a very small minority.  As you can tell from my previous posts on Knowing God, I'm a total believer in the Bible.  I actually love the moniker, "People of the Book," which the Muslims use to describe Christians and Jews, but not for the reasons they do.  I like the phrase because the vast majority of Christians and Jews are NOT people of the Book in the sense that they really don't believe that it is the inspired Word of God.  Such a phrase separates the wheat from the chaff.

Even if I wasn't a Bible believer, I can look around and see the writing on the wall.  The technological bubble that 90% of us live in or have access to is about to burst. Our debt is way past sustainable. Cities and States are about to declare their bankruptcy.  It won't matter how good the technology is, because hardly anyone will be able to afford it, even if the price is cut in half, or down to a quarter.  I'm reading now where gasoline could be over $5 a gallon in the next twelve months.  The Feds have stopped all offshore drilling and even shut down one of the largest coal mines and we produce about 50% of our electricity with coal.  We haven't built a nuclear reactor in over 30 years.  Every sane and logical economic analyst that I can read is pointing to a coming catastrophe that will make the "Great Depression" of the 1930s look like a minor setback.

We are about to experience being forced back to a lifestyle of dealing with people face to face as neighbors, that is, if we can survive through the riots and other societal breakdown. We will go from cyborgs to savages and the lucky and prepared might get to live to tell about it.

I don't expect to have an easy time of it at all.  But I can look forward to a complete collapse because I also expect to see some additional signs that God has had enough of all this as well, and that He's coming back.  If I see a third Temple being built in Jerusalem, I will be full of hope, because that means it won't be long.  There can also be much blessing in the hard times, because a lot of people who had previously been oblivious to the signs and the message, will start taking it seriously.  Hunger and difficulty has an amazing way of focusing your attention.