“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.”
Jim Morrison.
Me, Jimi, and my Homies Tom and Terry.
West Auckland.
1987.
Brian Welch: From Korn to Jesus
She’s the intelligent, gorgeous, Democratic commentator at Fox News who has been an atheist for much of her life until she says she had a personal encounter with Jesus.
It was in 2006 during an overseas trip that Kirsten Powers says, “I woke up in what felt like a strange cross between a dream and reality. Jesus came to me and said, ‘Here I am.’”
“It felt so real. I didn’t know what to make of it,” Powers explains in Christianity Today. “I called my boyfriend, but before I had time to tell him about it, he told me he had been praying the night before and felt we were supposed to break up. So we did. Honestly, while I was upset, I was more traumatized by Jesus visiting me.
“I tried to write off the experience as misfiring synapses, but I couldn’t shake it. When I returned to New York a few days later, I was lost. I suddenly felt God everywhere and it was terrifying. More important, it was unwelcome. It felt like an invasion. I started to fear I was going crazy.”
In a Fox News Channel interview with Howard Kurtz, Powers explained the revelation to her “wasn’t a one-moment-kind-of-thing. It was something that over a year probably of going to church and studying the Bible and a lot of different things.
“And I had this experience where I had a dream that sort of up-ended my world a little bit and that I, at first, just thought was just a dream, you know, because I didn’t really believe in things like that. And maybe it was just a dream, I don’t know, but it put me on a path of then sort of seeking out to learn more about it. I ended up in a Bible study and the rest is sort of history.”
Read more >>>Here<<<
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^^^^ This story grabbed my attention because of it's description of a 'vision'/ visitation which challenges Materialist Naturalism, and is an example of the sorts of real life experiences which must then be 'dealt with'... in one of several ways.
Many Atheists will attempt to simply write off such experiences as 'figments of their own minds', yet when they do so they are allowing their preconceptions to blind them to other explanations... ie that Jesus really did visit.
Thus erroneous world views and cosmologies based upon poor reasoning and lies can literally blind a person and trap them in delusion.
“What happened to your hand?” by Harry Anderson.
I once was an Atheist who had a visit… and yet because of my world view…I wrote it off as a sleeping dysfunction. (Read about that >>>here<<<)
Now that I have become aware of the reality of God, and the spiritual Domain I have had to re-think about that past event.
I now appreciate how Atheist materialism automatically writes off any phenomena which does not fit into it's paradigm as Illusory... and then foolishly claims 'Materialism can explain everything'.
Its a circular trap.
St Paul talks about this blindness...
"...the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."
(1 Cor2vs14)
Jesus talks about spiritual blindness in his story of the Beggar Lazarus and the Rich man...
20 And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores,
21 And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.
22 And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried;
23 And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.
24 And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.
25 But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.
26 And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.
27 Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house:
28 For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.
29 Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.
30 And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.
31 And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."
Luke 16vs20-31
That's right!
If an Atheists Dead friend returned from the grave... it is very probable that they would deny they were really their once-dead friend... or that they had not really died.... etc....
*Any Bullshit excuse* not to believe.
Spiritual Blinders…. A man can only see the world via his pre-suppositions… his premises, and when they are wrong… he is wandering lost in blindness and delusion… and doesn’t even realise it.
Atheist Materialism is a severe mental handicap.
It can take a miracle to remove the scales from our minds.
Tim Wikiriwhi
Read more from Tim Wikiriwhi on this subject of ‘visitations’, etc …
Science goes Ga Ga! The Spirit Temple-Material Interface. The Human Brain.
“And God made man in his own image….”
When God made Man he not only formed his body out of matter, He breathed ‘spirit’ into him and he became a living soul… a freewill moral agent capable of making real choices… not a robot slave of Materialistic determinism.
Atheist delusions leave mankind not only without any Objective morality, but also renders him incapable of making moral choices… whether Evil, or Heroic.
Atheism has no explanation for consciousness.
Heroic deeds like that of John Shear only deserve praise because they stem from the heart… ie He chose to endanger himself for the sake of someone else *when he could have just stood by* in safety and watch the Horse do it’s worst.
What is truly shocking is that there are many so-called ‘Educated’ Modern Christians who are embracing this anti-free will Atheist Materialism!
They must have rocks in their heads not to appreciate the fact that Monist Materialist Determinism is absolutely incompatible with Biblical/ Christian morality!
God cant judge sinners who had no choice but to sin.
William Lane Craig makes this point clear.
The Bible is Dualistic…. it is emphatic about the greater Non-material Spiritual Reality.
The Morality Of God and Bible is built upon these Truths.
Free will is a testament to our inner Spiritual Being…. and proof of God almighty!
This is because Freewill is inexplicable in materialistic terms and conditions.
And Libertarianism is utterly dependent upon free will… voluntary acceptance of the Justice of the philosophy of equal God-given inalienable Rights and liberties.
Atheism is fundamentally corrosive to the Philosophy of Liberty.
It is deterministic and Nihilistic… whereas Libertarianism is not Lawlessness, but depends upon Objective moral absolutes.
Monism: Evolutionary Psychology and the Death of Morality, Reason and Freewill.
We are not Robots Ayn Rand. We are Moral Agents.
Atheism has no basis for Rights… or Morals.
How can a Good God exist when there is so much evil in the world? (part1) Atheist Nihilism.
Nyctophilia: Hiding in the Dark….
“Keep things in the shallow end… because I just didn’t want to know…”
Science goes Ga Ga! The Spirit Temple-Material Interface. The Human Brain.
There is a common excuse that ‘You cant choose what you believe’… this is self delusion.
In reality we all choose to believe what we do, it just a matter of what moves us.
Some of us are more objective than others … yet being human, psychology still plays a massive roll.
We kid ourselves if we think we are without personal prejudice.
nyctophilia… “an abnormal preference for the night over the day.”
^^^ This meme I ‘liberated’ from the excellent facebook page ‘The Illogical Atheist’ because it vindicates an argument I made in a previous post Nyctophilia: Hiding in the Dark….
Through this meme… The Horse speaketh!
The important thing to appreciate is that many people choose to be atheists because they seek to pretend there are no morals by which they are duty bound.
They block out any and all objective facts of reality or sound arguments that challenge their coveted Nihilism…. closing their eyes, and their minds to any truth which threatens to awaken them from their Meaningless, purposeless, Conscienceless dream.
They keep chanting to themselves… “There is no God”.
In the words of Perfect Circles Maynard James Keenan…
“Best to keep things in the shallow end.
Because I never quite learned how to swim.
I just didn’t want to know”
Read more about my take on Music as a religion… Jim Morrison…. Maynard James Keenan Here>>> Jimi vs Jesus
More…. Nyctophilia: Hiding in the Dark….
“Keep things in the shallow end… because I just didn’t want to know…”
Seether: Know Thyself. How can a Good God exist when there is so much evil in the world? Part 5.
From one of the very best Face book Pages…. The Founders, Religion and Government
“Grateful to Almighty God for the blessings which, through Jesus Christ Our Lord, He had conferred on my beloved country in her emancipation and on myself in permitting me, under circumstances of mercy, to live to the age of 89 years, and to survive the fiftieth year of independence, adopted by Congress on the 4th of July 1776, which I originally subscribed on the 2d day of August of the same year and of which I am now the last surviving signer.
“I do hereby recommend, to the present and future generations, the principles of that important document, as the best earthly inheritance their ancestors could bequeath to them, and pray that the civil and religious liberties they have secured to my country, may be perpetuated to remotest posterity and extended to the whole family of man.”
~ Charles Carroll, On the 50th Anniversary of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence (August 2, 1826)
The Founders, Religion and Government
This is an update on an image we have shared before. A reader over at the The Federalist Papers colorized an image made in the 1800s of the motto Benjamin Franklin proposed for the Great Seal of the United States.
Please visit The Founders, Religion and Government and click like
Angie Schuller Wyatt (pictured above) is the author of God and Boobs: Balancing Faith and Sexuality. GODandBoobs.com is Angie Schuller Wyatt’s website and also a Faceboob page.
Angie Schuller Wyatt is the granddaughter of celebrated televangelist Dr. Robert H Schuller.
Did we go from Hour of Power to breasts like towers in just two generations? I think we did.
What does the Bible say about breasts? What does my co-blogger Tim (pictured above) say about breasts? More than the Bible. His cups runneth over. Breasts have long been one of Tim’s good keen manly interests, but Standing up for Justice more important than Personal Ambitions.
AC/DC is not a cup size. They’re ballbreaking Aussie rock legends! AC/DC wrote the song Big Balls which was the musical accompaniment to my other post I’ve got big balls. So I think big boobs should be the musical accompaniment to this one. (This is the breast cover of an AC/DC song I’ve ever seen.)
Take care in whom/what you trust…
Read more… The Rusty cage of Scientism
Faith, Science, and Reason. The Pomposity of Atheism.
Science goes Ga Ga! The Spirit Temple-Material Interface. The Human Brain.
David Berlinski—Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions
The wise man build’s his house upon the Rock of God’s infallible word!….
Read more>>>The Divine Rock of Revelation<<<
Saith Einstein.
Science is Amoral in the sense that it works for whosoever employs her… without regard of the Righteousness or Wickedness of her Employer’s cause …
That is why Ethics are more essential than Technology.
As Einstein said… “Moral Teachers (like Jesus) are more important than Physicists”
And as the man who understood the horrific global implications if the Nazi’s should have time enough to get command of the power or the Atom…. He would know!
Ironically It was Hitler’s Immoral Anti-Semitism which caused Einstein to quit Germany and emigrate to America….
Poetic Justice!
Dr. Laura Keynes grew up in Cambridge, arguably the intellectual center of the United Kingdom. She studied at the University College of Oxford on a full-ride scholarship and ended up earning a Doctor of Philosophy degree. Her doctoral thesis was on epistemology, the study of knowledge and justified belief. As her last name indicates, she is the great-grandniece of the famous economist John Maynard Keynes. She is also the great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin.
Why am I telling you about this young lady? Because she recently wrote an article entitled, “I’m a Direct Descendant of Darwin…and a Catholic.” Now the title didn’t surprise me at all. I know a lot of Catholics (and even more Protestants) who believe in evolution. Indeed, one of the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement, Dr. Michael Behe, says:1
You can be a good Catholic and believe in Darwinism. Biochemistry has made it increasingly difficult, however, to be a thoughtful scientist and believe in it.
However, as I read the article, I couldn’t help but smile. You see, Laura was raised Catholic but drifted away from the faith after her mother became a Buddhist and her brother rejected all organized religion. By the time she was studying for her Doctor of Philosophy degree, she was an agnostic. During that time, however, Richard Dawkins had opened up an international dialogue on the existence of God with his thoroughly awful book, The God Delusion. Well, Laura decided to read Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists, and she says:
I expected to be moved from agnosticism to atheism by their arguments, but after reading on both sides of the debate, I couldn’t dismiss a compelling intellectual case for faith. As for being good without God, I’d tried and didn’t get very far. At some point, life will bring you to your knees, and no act of will is enough in that situation. Surrendering and asking for grace is the logical human response.
I don’t think that’s the response Dawkins and his colleagues were hoping for. The entire article is worth a read, because it really shows how an intellectual person should respond to what the New Atheists have produced:
I read central texts on both sides of the debate and found more to convince me in the thoughtful and measured responses of Alister McGrath and John Cornwell, among others, than in the impassioned prose of Hitchens et al. New Atheism seemed to harbor a germ of intolerance and contempt for people of faith that could only undermine secular Humanist claims to liberalism.
Notice what she did. She read the central texts on both sides of the debate. Most people don’t do that, but it is the most important thing a real intellectual can do. I suspect that working on her dissertation made her realize that there is no such thing as an unbiased argument. All authors start with their preconceived notions, which color the way they view and present the evidence. As a result, the only way to come close to getting an unbiased view of the debate is to read from both sides. By doing that, you will hopefully be able to start seeing how the various authors are “coloring” the evidence, and that will allow you to remove some of the “coloring” and look at the evidence a bit more clearly.
When Laura did that, she saw something that should be immediately obvious to those who read both sides of this debate: the New Atheists are full of bluster and bravado, but their arguments are incredibly weak. Those who have responded to the New Atheists (at least the ones she read) provide a start contrast. They are calm, measured, and rational in their response. According to her, this contrast helped to demonstrate that the majority of the evidence clearly goes against the atheist position, and the bluster of the New Atheists is an attempt to cover up this inconvenient fact. As a result, she returned to the faith of her childhood.
Read more >>here<<
Update…
Though I cant profess to being a privileged member of any high society of Academia the responses I have received on two Facebook pages which claim to be forums for discussion on the rationality of the Christian faith and Creationism…. are very telling…
Facebook page 1….
JL wrote… Big Fail by you Tim Wikiriwhi
CRA wrote… I was looking for two facts. Instead I found a video link. Video blogs are almost always both poorly done, and set up by people who are neither able to write nor reason well, so I see no reason to waste time watching.
If you have any actual facts to present, please present a cogent argument with references from credible sources. When speaking on scientific topics such as the theory of evolution, an example of a credible reference would be a link to research published in a peer-reviewed journal. Links to personal or advocacy sites, accounts of personal revelation, unpublished research (or research published anywhere other than in a peer-reviewed journal), scriptures, and personal opinions are not evidence.
Tim Wikiriwhi (me) wrote… 1,2…. non-answers.
The video was very short and presented two facts Cynthia….not personal opinions
yet all you do is make a general smear against ‘video blogs’… and prove you are too lazy to watch the video… yet still feel vindicated making a comment…. sharing with us *your un-referenced personal opinion*.
Sort of hypocritical dont you think?
May I suggest you only comment on things you actually bother to examine?
You waffle on about ‘credible references’… as if an argument requires the signature of one of your ‘priests’ …
ZH wrote…. He makes a series of misrepresentation of evolution. Around 0:24 seconds into the short video, he made his first misrepresentation. He claims that evolution claims life came from non life. This is false, as evolution never claimed to have authority on our origins in a cosmological sense. It’s intent is to explain the complexity of life and what lead up to what it is today.
A second later, he makes the claim that it is a random process. Most of evolution is in fact the complete opposite. Though there is no grand exterior force manipulating what happens, we know that mutation often occurs as the result of natural selection. A process in where traits best suited for one species typically carries on to later generation, as those carrying those traits have a higher likely hood of procreation.
JP wrote… What facts did your video present?
BB wrote… Yes what facts were those Tim Wikiriwhi?
“IF living organism cannot produce new genetic information.’
IF. Which is an assumption.
Life has never been observed to come from non-life?
Is that the other one?
CRA wrote…. Unlike you, Tim, I’m haven’t made any claims about presenting “facts” that supposedly refute an established scientific theory. When a person makes such claims, he must be prepared to be held to a high standard. You would seem to be lacking in that preparation.
I promise you that if I ever claim to have scientific information to offer, it will be backed with credible references. At the moment, I am quite comfortable with the knowledge that the lack of communication skills and coherence displayed on your comment are wholly consistent with my overall opinion of most video bloggers. You fail to provide the promised “facts,” instead attacking someone who has expressed a willingness to read them if you will but write them out and show your proof.
ZH wrote… XXXXX: I noticed he made no attempts at explaining why what he perceived about evolution to be true. He uses instead vague generalization and intentional misrepresentations of evolution, to undermine the complexity of evolution . Thus shallowly “winning” without having to actually say anything.
SH wrote… What exactly do they mean by “new genetic information”? The term is always defined very vaguely in these arguments.
Also, even if all current models of Abiogenesis were proven unworkable, populations will still change over successive generations. Evolution will still happen.
To be clear, Evolution-theory does not need Abiogenesis(life coming from non-life), it just needs living organisms.
Face book page 2….
TBI said… OMG! That two minute vid just disproved evolution with its deep insight into scientific theory!!! Oh, wait… No, it didn ‘t.
AM said … LOL!
AM said… I watched it. As a Christian, it disturbed me. Dishonesty (especially lying about science and terminology) is not good for the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. The video was a sad rehash of the usual pseudo-science factoids/myths. Truly pathetic.
ACC says… Shaw Wow. That video just made me devolve. Nonsense.
SW says…. that’s an impressive amount of lies and stupidity crammed into a single 2 minute video.
JA say’s…. Seen that video some time ago – it is as crassly ignorant now as it was the first time.
TB says… Even the title of the video demonstrates a logical fallacy; false dichotomy.
****My answer***** which follows I submitted to FB2 yet exposes all these replies from both FB pages…
Tim Wikiriwhi….
“Hahaha… 1,2,3,4,5,6,7… replies All devoid of rebuttal!
This is when you Atheists are supposed to say…. “Oh here is an example of life from Dead matter…. and here is proof of how A fish got the genes to grow lungs and legs…”
You all are Emperors with no clothes….”
….And that folks is how the Atheists deal with two absolute scientific facts they cant refute….
By Slander and denial.
Evolution cannot even get to first base… let alone second base…