Category: Uncategorized

Not to the Wise

A wise and intelligent man
Often loses sight of faith.
An unwise and dull man must live by it.
For intelligent men rely
Upon their own faculties
More than dull men rely upon theirs.
Dull men must live by serendipity,
Therefore, they see the Law of God works.
They do not question it,
For by not questioning it---
For they cannot, for they are without the ability to---
They go through life happily.

Intelligent men, we must peer into every statute
And understand why it is written so.
It's why so very few of us ever attain
To Eternal life, as the Faith required
Is far less difficult than understanding God's eternal law.
Men cannot understand the law entirely...
Not even I. For, that is why Faith must be present
In a population, for if mankind judges
And is the sole determiner of what is right or wrong
I am afraid we find ourselves making perilous mistakes
Which lead to a rotting core and overall unhappiness.

The LORD Revealed Himself

The LORD revealed Himself
Through history.
First in Hammurabi's code
By Abraham.
Second by Moses
With the Law and Prophets.
Third through His Son Jesus Christ.

The first revelation of the Trinity
Was the Spirit
Through the Animism and Paganism;
Men accessed Him through the Paraclete.
They found Him in the waters,
In love, in the mountains, 
In the forests.
They first communed with the Holy Spirit.

Then, the Law came through Moses
And the Father was revealed.
Jehovah-Jyra.
The Law, first scattered abroad
To the four corners of the Universe,
Was codified by Moses.
And it was given to the Jews
To reveal the full nature of God
And His laws.

Then, came the Son---
He Who solidified the Law
And sealed its gaps.
He Who was the morder
Between the bricks
Which sealed it.
He also gave men the liberty
To be absolved from their sins.
For, the last revelation of God
Was Mercy.

The Native American Cinderella

There's a lot going on in this fairytale. For one thing, there's the animism, which is a cross cultural idea found in every continent of the Earth. Harkening probably back to the first awakening of intelligence in our ancestors. The Earth was alive, and the wind, rain, brooks and waterfalls were all living things. Then there's the Cinderella aspect of the story, the human element. The acknowledgment of a particular quality that identifies your true love. The interesting thing about this is how it's found in all cultures. It's personified in the gods and goddesses of Greece, Egypt and Germany. The sort of giving of the elements character. I can see it burgeons to the beginnings of thought, that the Earth was alive, too. These cultural traits that we share are across all humans. A sort of universal tapestry of thought, where we all share common themes.

A lot of people think these stories travel, and then are reinterpreted, but I find them to be quite organic and indicative of human psychology. The Animism of the Native Americans isn't much different than the Paganism of the Greeks. If you really think about it. And then you have the Morality of Virgil and Homer which parallels the morality of the Bible in many ways. Even St. Paul noticed it. I think this defeats the postmodern claim of phenomenology, the assumption that experiences are utterly different from one person to another. Rather, I feel humans have a pretty strong shared experience, and this story popping up in a completely different continent unconnected by Europe proves that. The elements of if, the logic, roots itself in concrete truths ubiquitous to human experience. I think the modern idea of throwing away the past because we know better is foolish, and stories like these show that humans have a set pattern of existence. Monogamy being a part of that, but also the logic of a token being unique to one's true bride. Maybe there is a Logos that unites us? I'd say there is, and when we discover patterns like this in completely alien stories unrelated to European, Asian or African culture, we can only assume it's the case.  

Stories to Grow By. "The Native American Cinderella Story from Canada." storiestogrowby.org. https://storiestogrowby.org/story/native-american-cinderella/comment-page-1/#comment-24725. 11/9/2021. Web.

Fairy Tale

Stories are universal
But men have finite minds.
It is no mystery 
Why the same story emerges
In several hundred places.
I do not believe it evolves 
From one singular tale
But rather, the tale emerges
Independently in multiplicities of places at once
At the time it is needed.

Why I Cannot Be

Why I can't be an Atheist
Is that I believe in good.
I believe in evil.
I believe in the supernatural.
I believe in truth.
I believe in a common shared experience.
I believe in a moral certainty.
I believe in sexual fidelity.
I believe in monogamy.
I believe in inherent values.

Why I cannot be a Muslim
Is because the religion teaches its adherents to lie.
Frankly, this one concept in Islam is so blasphemous to my ears
That in the face of persecution,
Muslims are allowed to lie.
To me, God's standard is truth.
If you were a Muslim, and that God were true
You'd almost be compelled to tell the truth.
Also, I cannot see myself bowing to a rock;
If not for the flawed laws in the Koran
The constant prostration to a rock in the middle of a desert
Shows to me, at least, that the religion is centered around idolatry
And is nothing more than statecraft.

Why I cannot be a Hindu---
Though there is no other religion I'd be
If not for Christianity, the only other one
Enticing to me is Hinduism.
But, its myths have bad ideas about charity.
It praises the prince who capriciously gives
Two mountains of gold to two passer yonders
Rather than to the prince who labors
For twenty-four hours to give based on the poor's needs.
It seems the religion advocates lazy charity;
And it also believes in a Manichaeism,
Making good equal to evil in strength.
Which, I cannot believe either.
And the very notion of becoming a god
Is petulant, self serving and dangerous.
I cannot believe in any religion
That would turn its adherents into gods.
Thereby, giving authority to men
What is unjust to give them
Due to our fallible and finite nature.
I also cannot stomach Dharma or Reincarnation
As if all life were, is about ending it,
I find this view horrible and immoral.
I think life ought to be celebrated,
And rewarded for a good one with eternal bliss.
I also find Dharma insufficient
And lazy, so as to excuse the suffering of the poor
And to excuse injustice, and so tidily chalk it up
With reincarnation, giving justice to pointless abuses.

Why I cannot be a Buddhist 
Is because I find no meaning in suffering.
There can be no meaning in suffering.
To me, suffering is pointless, and is to be avoided.
I find the religion's founder to be gross;
As he would sit among battlefields
And meditate among the rotting corpses.
He would sit in graveyards and meditate.
He seemed, almost, so inured and disassociated from the world.
He, rather than help others, simply bore great grief
And I find that kind of inaction pointless
And even dangerous, and at the highest degree
Buddhism is self serving in every aspect as a religion.

Why I cannot be a Shinto or Zoroaster
Is the same reason. I cannot believe
In an ordering of spirits
To where evil ones are given equal weight to good.
I cannot believe it, because I believe good is strongest
And evil is simply a disfiguration of what is good.
Evil is a distortion of the good, or it's something
That distorts and therefore, is negative rather than something
Positive. I find evil must be destroyed one day
Fully, and that it cannot be dualistic
Giving equal weight to both good and evil.
I believe that good must be stronger than evil
And one day destroy it, otherwise, I cannot believe in 
God, if God is in part equally strong as evil.

Why I cannot be a Pagan
Is that it is banal to me to believe
That many gods and goddesses are warring
Among one another. That they are all benevolent
And thereby, each having its own aim
Wars with the other gods, giving license to one hero
And they all vote upon the virtues of man.
I find this contradicts the very spirit of Good
To say that good is compartmentalized
In metaphors about war, love, oceans or hell.
That is all Pagan gods and goddesses are
To me, are metaphors. And I cannot believe
Metaphors are powerful enough for me to believe
In and worship---as that's a kind of idolatry which I will never succumb to.

I cannot be a Mormon or Jehovah's Witness
Because I believe in the Trinity.
I find God must exist in Three Persons.
Thereby, if One God exists
And carries all the attributes of God
Commonly attributed to Him,
Then God must exist in three Persons.
Thereby, I cannot also worship Michael,
As both these Arian religions worship him.
I believe no angel deserves our worship
And that God the Father and God the Son
Are coeternal, uncreated
And existing for eterniy.

Why I cannot be agnostic is
Because I know a god exists.

Why I cannot be a gnostic
Is because I believe we must
Do good here upon the Earth.
I believe we must abstain from evil.
I do not believe we ought to
Simply live our lives however we want.
I believe we should,
Instead, be fruitful, give generously,
Abstain from sexual sin and violence.
I cannot, again, believe in Dualistic ideas
Of a demiurge and aeon.
Of a physical and spiritual world;
As my entire philosophy on life
Is that both the spiritual and physical
Exist intertwined, and mutually coexisting;
As intricately woven together
As God is in the Flesh of Jesus Christ,

Odes of Strangers XXII

Victor, you filled the Circus Maximus;
You put to judgment your brethren.
Then, you said, "Love is but chemicals
"Life is but bioelectricity
"The many waters of the rivers
"Are only sourced by the rains!
"There is nothing miraculous about it!
"How I hate sentiment
"How I hate the poets
"Who idly sing their heresies!
"How I hate the minstrels who tell their tales!
"Unless it is found in the book
"It is of no use to anyone!
"Burn everything to the ground
"Except our Holy Roman Empire!"

The Christians looked at you Constantine---
Within your empire---
You maximized your Circus' stables
You filled the country with many dreams.
Yet, the religion you dogmatized
And denied the evidence of God.
Rather, you said, "I hate it when these mundane things
"Are made into miracles!"

Thus, nobody had known God for a thousand years.

The Cult

A Westerner visits a Guru
And finds "Enlightenment."
I had experienced enlightenment while reading the Tao Te Tsing;
It is the very tapping into the ether of existence.
It is seeing the substrates,
The ether of our world.
And its invisible strings.

Cults, Rather than point to this objective phenomena,
Find it and then
Say, "I am its source."
Verily, cult leaders have pointed
To many objects in the past
And said "This is the source."
Pythagoras with Geometry.
Many malignant individuals, themselves.
Hindus cows.

Rather, there truly is something real
Which can be tapped into.
And only one of those leaders
Ever produced sanity in His followers.
Because he could satisfy 
By raising from the dead.
He could satisfy by healing the blind.
He could satisfy by being perfect and without a single stain of sin.

The danger is that something true exists...
We can, indeed, find it.
Easterners called it Tao.
Westerners called it Logos.
Jews call it Faith.

The experience is true.
But, when its source becomes conflated
With an idol, that is when there is spiritual abuse.

Low Content KDP

They make ruled notebooks.
They sell them.
Make twenty-thousand dollars a month.

It just shows how everyone wants to be heard---
Yet, nobody is listening.

They eat up Amazon's ISBNs---
Unethically, they use the service to no purpose.
Amazon makes more money from them than me,
Yet the product gets destroyed by influxes of ruled notebooks.

It reminds me of the Bolsheviks, 
Who would give the communist peasants 
Their little coloring books to paint.
And then, to satisfy their creativity,
They would sell it back to the state.
It's evil.

What of my KDP books? I spent years building them
Good content; strong material,
Using the service for what it's built for.
Yet, with all things comes abuse
As thousands look to make a quick buck
And slop up free ISBNs from Amazon.

It's a shallow world.
Cacophonies of guineas squawking
Yet none wish to wonder at the world
And understand it.
It truly is sad.