“Be wise as serpents,” exhorted Jesus a couple years ago. Many of us are only now wising up to the adage, “History is written by the victors.” We call our current era a “Great Awakening” because we finally see though the psy-ops and trauma-based mind control orchestrated by our demonic rulers. We see now their agenda to reduce God’s image to godless materialism and hubris. That nightmare is broken by a new dawn of morality. As we examine earthly powers afresh, we’re inclined to cleanse Christianity of mortal corruptions that amount to millenia of “fake news.”
Even in the presence of God Incarnate, men like Peter and Judas displayed human frailties to the point of utter evil. So I refuse to kowtow to anything religious that’s tainted by influences that are less than celestial. Human error is an unavoidable feature of free will.
Do you elevate a book over, say, your own lived experience? Who else made that mistake? Jewish captivity to the Torah’s expectations for the Messiah blinded them to the living, breathing Christ performing miracles for their own eyes to witness.
Of course many folks are fine with whatever their pastor says. Never mind if he may be a Mason who obediently closes your church for the scamdemic and fortifies other bulwarks of mass hysteria. Who cares if communism is built into sermons as with, say, the Methodists? Conform, and preen.
Failures of the church through two millenia call me to exercise my God-given instincts. For starters, I take proximity to Jesus into consideration. Thus I give more weight to Mark’s original Gospel and confirmed quotations of Jesus than to, for instance, the latter psychedelic visions of John. That the Bible was collated centuries late does undermine its infallibility. Christianity had accumulated enough power by then to tempt even better men than the consummate evangelist Paul. Paul’s disparaging of marriage, women and gays was just the kernel of what modernity can consider grounds for reassessing our beliefs. Don’t you wonder why the Bible elevates Paul above Jesus’s own brother James and the other acknowledged founding fathers?
In direct opposition, Paul focused on appealing to gentiles, peddling to them “justification by faith alone,” salvation ensured only by a belief in Jesus as divine.
I’ve only been a Christian for three years. I enter God’s Kingdom like a little child, bringing a freshness of perspective that isn’t worthless. I see that from the backwater of Nazareth has spread a worldwide worship, what I consider more than a metaphor for the Kingdom of God. Our hearts are the Kingdom! And many Biblical scholars recognize Romans’ seige of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple around 70 AD amounted to the apocalypse. So I believe Jesus is alive right now. Though I regret my secular upbringing, I’m lucky to have avoided indoctrination into farces such as the Pope’s infallibility. I’ve never had Rapture dangled as a distraction from my civic duties and other worldly obligations. I’m free from a bias toward the “Pauline tradition.” I prefer giving allegiance to the actual apostles whom Paul slandered contemptuously, including Jesus’s brother James and that most indispensable protagonist of the gospels, Peter. Their Jerusalem Assembly’s emphasis on helping the poor clashed with Paul’s spiel that faith alone can buy your ticket to Heaven. Can you see how the Vatican’s vaults of ostentatious treasures resulted from the elevation of Paul?
Paul didn’t even know Jesus personally. His prolific writing, while excellent and instructive, reminds me of today’s mainstream media in that its narrative distracts from more essential truths.
(Or maybe you’re comfortable that Christians are reduced in many minds to gay bashers?)
I get why early Christians wanted to distance themselves from Jews. Need I explain that the Old Testes-ment is off-putting to an ex-liberal feminist* cat lady? Commanding Abraham to murder his child Isaac, for instance: even when you know the parallel to the sacrifice of Jesus, sensibilities are offended.
Please click the hyperlinks embedded above to learn more. May the Living God fill you with hope and gratitude’s grace.
The author VC Bestor is Director of the
non-profit FangedWilds.org,
a project encouraging women to engage constructively with apex predators.
I could go on about Jesus forever. Good thing my soul is immortal!*** 
Paul didn’t even know Jesus personally. His prolific writing, while excellent and instructive, reminds me of today’s mainstream media in that its narrative distracts from more essential truths.
(Or maybe you’re comfortable that Christians are reduced in many minds to gay bashers?)
I get why early Christians wanted to distance themselves from Jews. Need I explain that the Old Testes-ment is off-putting to an ex-liberal feminist* cat lady? Commanding Abraham to murder his child Isaac, for instance: even when you know the parallel to the sacrifice of Jesus, sensibilities are offended.
Please click the hyperlinks embedded above to learn more. May the Living God fill you with hope and gratitude’s grace.
The author VC Bestor is Director of the
non-profit FangedWilds.org,
a project encouraging women to engage constructively with apex predators.
"Find the meat of the matter"
If you’re gluttonous for punishment, there’s more of my babbling below… 
Our Father (we are all brothers and sisters, created in His image)
Who art in Heaven (He’s got a nice home)
Hallowed be Thy name (Don’t disrespect divinity. His name means “I AM,” so that statement is holy and indicates that existence is sacred. Is it a divine version of Buddhists’ worship of Self?)
Thy kingdom come (may humans worldwide worship God)
Thy will be done (may we obey God’s laws)
On Earth as it is in Heaven (ah, if only we were angels!)
Give us this day our daily bread (may God allow our survival, not including extra snacks)
and forgive us our trespasses [or debts] as we forgive those who trespass against us. (Forgiveness is sublime.)
Lead us not into temptation (WELL, THIS OPENS UP A CAN OF WORMS.)
[Modern translation, “Don’t let us yield to temptation.” Luke 11 ends it here! Matt 6 proceeds...]
...but deliver us from evil. (That’s more upbeat, and probably the most basic prayer ever: Dear God, protect me from evil!)
[And now for the Protestant, non-Biblical ending of the prayer, probably from 90 AD:]
For Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.
I prefer scholarship over church expediencies, so I’m interested that some Biblical scholars say the Lord’s Prayer is a collection of Jesus’ phrases that He never presented as a single entity. I learned the prayer as a child, and it struck me as inconsistent with Jesus’ personality: the mention of forgiveness fits, but the rest is not warm with love nor bubbling with the Living Water. I wish it said something uplifting like, “Let me embody Your grace!” But maybe that’s the New-Ager in me.
I studied Chinese in college and am an acupuncturist so long-indoctrinated in Eastern philosophies. I can’t stop seeing the world as a sort of Manichean yin/yang balance. So I don’t imagine Satan as completely separate from God. Indeed, we love our enemies, precluding absolute separation. A thought about being created in God’s image: doesn’t that indicate that God has an asshole? What if Satan is God’s asshole, and evil is shit? (Sorry but I see satanists as manure, a useful fertilizer.) The Lord’s Prayer does incriminate Him, when the translation is “lead us not into temptation.” Certainly the Old Testament is full of atrocities that God spurs for His own reasons. When Jesus says “be wise as serpents,” it implies that Satan sets a useful standard of attentiveness.
Full disclosure: Even before this commie Pope, I was wary of Catholicism, with all the pedophile priests. And why elevate Mary at the expense of our intimacy with Jesus? As a feminist I’d love Mary to deserve such adulation but honestly, she hardly figures in the original story. Even Jesus is dismissive toward her on occasion, like when she prods him to do a miracle at the wedding. And Mark 3 reads: ‘A crowd was sitting around Him, and they said to Him, "Behold, Your mother and Your brothers are outside looking for You." Answering them, He said, "Who are My mother and My brothers?" Looking about at those who were sitting around Him, He said, "Behold My mother and My brothers!"’ He elevated spiritual kinship to blood.
* I’m rebranding feminism as “honoring God-given femininity” in opposition to canceling womanhood with transgender appropriations of pregnancy, etc. I actually have nothing against transgender people if they stay out of our sports and restrooms! (Or at least leave the seat down!) Whatever your reflexes to feminism, please consider Christian feminists like me as ambassadors to the innocent dupes of satanic perversions. And maybe you feel enough chivalry to be disturbed by the misogyny spurred by modern phenomena such as Karens. Have mercy on us ladies. Identity politics is reprehensible, but no more than any other dogma.
* Why did Paul say women shouldn’t speak up in church? Mark 6:3 reads, "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Are not His sisters here with us?" Two thousand years later, are sisters worthy of being named? I think maybe we’re even worthy of including modern medicine in our personal hygiene. Some of us even have aspirations in life that we don’t subsume to whatever any passing rapist does to us. Why don’t Christians rant against rape the way they do against abortion (mentioned nowhere in the Bible)? Answer: misogyny.
*** I think our soul becomes immortal when it qualifies as an archetype. I never follow the herd because our Creator made us creatures in His image: to create creatively. Be yourself fully, in a unique form, and you too can become an abstract template. Well, it sounds cool to a nerd like me.
The Lord’s Priors
Forthwith, my breakdown of the
Lord’s Prayer:
Our Father (we are all brothers and sisters, created in His image)
Who art in Heaven (He’s got a nice home)
Hallowed be Thy name (Don’t disrespect divinity. His name means “I AM,” so that statement is holy and indicates that existence is sacred. Is it a divine version of Buddhists’ worship of Self?)
Thy kingdom come (may humans worldwide worship God)
Thy will be done (may we obey God’s laws)
On Earth as it is in Heaven (ah, if only we were angels!)
Give us this day our daily bread (may God allow our survival, not including extra snacks)
and forgive us our trespasses [or debts] as we forgive those who trespass against us. (Forgiveness is sublime.)
Lead us not into temptation (WELL, THIS OPENS UP A CAN OF WORMS.)
[Modern translation, “Don’t let us yield to temptation.” Luke 11 ends it here! Matt 6 proceeds...]
...but deliver us from evil. (That’s more upbeat, and probably the most basic prayer ever: Dear God, protect me from evil!)
[And now for the Protestant, non-Biblical ending of the prayer, probably from 90 AD:]
For Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.
I prefer scholarship over church expediencies, so I’m interested that some Biblical scholars say the Lord’s Prayer is a collection of Jesus’ phrases that He never presented as a single entity. I learned the prayer as a child, and it struck me as inconsistent with Jesus’ personality: the mention of forgiveness fits, but the rest is not warm with love nor bubbling with the Living Water. I wish it said something uplifting like, “Let me embody Your grace!” But maybe that’s the New-Ager in me.
I studied Chinese in college and am an acupuncturist so long-indoctrinated in Eastern philosophies. I can’t stop seeing the world as a sort of Manichean yin/yang balance. So I don’t imagine Satan as completely separate from God. Indeed, we love our enemies, precluding absolute separation. A thought about being created in God’s image: doesn’t that indicate that God has an asshole? What if Satan is God’s asshole, and evil is shit? (Sorry but I see satanists as manure, a useful fertilizer.) The Lord’s Prayer does incriminate Him, when the translation is “lead us not into temptation.” Certainly the Old Testament is full of atrocities that God spurs for His own reasons. When Jesus says “be wise as serpents,” it implies that Satan sets a useful standard of attentiveness.
____________
Full disclosure: Even before this commie Pope, I was wary of Catholicism, with all the pedophile priests. And why elevate Mary at the expense of our intimacy with Jesus? As a feminist I’d love Mary to deserve such adulation but honestly, she hardly figures in the original story. Even Jesus is dismissive toward her on occasion, like when she prods him to do a miracle at the wedding. And Mark 3 reads: ‘A crowd was sitting around Him, and they said to Him, "Behold, Your mother and Your brothers are outside looking for You." Answering them, He said, "Who are My mother and My brothers?" Looking about at those who were sitting around Him, He said, "Behold My mother and My brothers!"’ He elevated spiritual kinship to blood.
_____________
* I’m rebranding feminism as “honoring God-given femininity” in opposition to canceling womanhood with transgender appropriations of pregnancy, etc. I actually have nothing against transgender people if they stay out of our sports and restrooms! (Or at least leave the seat down!) Whatever your reflexes to feminism, please consider Christian feminists like me as ambassadors to the innocent dupes of satanic perversions. And maybe you feel enough chivalry to be disturbed by the misogyny spurred by modern phenomena such as Karens. Have mercy on us ladies. Identity politics is reprehensible, but no more than any other dogma.
* Why did Paul say women shouldn’t speak up in church? Mark 6:3 reads, "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Are not His sisters here with us?" Two thousand years later, are sisters worthy of being named? I think maybe we’re even worthy of including modern medicine in our personal hygiene. Some of us even have aspirations in life that we don’t subsume to whatever any passing rapist does to us. Why don’t Christians rant against rape the way they do against abortion (mentioned nowhere in the Bible)? Answer: misogyny.
Take your hatred and shove it (unless you’re a lady: then glove it.)
*** I think our soul becomes immortal when it qualifies as an archetype. I never follow the herd because our Creator made us creatures in His image: to create creatively. Be yourself fully, in a unique form, and you too can become an abstract template. Well, it sounds cool to a nerd like me.
