This is a really good 9 minute video showing his Technicolor Mountain, also called Salvation Mountain. He's been working on it all his life, alone in the desert, just for God! How amazing is that?
"Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord; for He shall pluck my feet out of the net." Psalms 25:15
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
THE MAN WHO LOVES GOD!
This is a really good 9 minute video showing his Technicolor Mountain, also called Salvation Mountain. He's been working on it all his life, alone in the desert, just for God! How amazing is that?
Sunday, April 28, 2013
JUST A RANT ABOUT COLLEGE
I'm a little disenchanted these days. I'm beginning to notice things in my world that just ought not be. Not just my world, the world.
As some of my readers know, I'm a college student. I'm a 44 year old college student, so having been around a few years, it's easier for me to identify with things when they're out of place or don't feel right. College, or should I say the way it's run, doesn't feel right. I feel right for being there but I feel that there isn't right to be. How to explain? Well, seems like students these days aren't just being challenged in the academic sense but in the psychological sense.
There's an attitude among educators, bless them every one, which makes them come across as some kind of army against their students instead of educators for them. That sounds rough I know but here's why, education is something we're supposed to get, receive, soak up, acquire and that's supposed to be a relatively simple process by which the educator simply imparts his/her knowledge to the student and then there's a testing period for checking the level of competence in the field of study (that's how it's done here in the U.S.).
It's test time, finals are coming up. Instead of teaching us the material and giving us simple tests which perform the basic function of seeing what we know, they present us with these questions that are purely designed to trip the student up. "Who's buried in Grant's tomb" type of questions. What value does it have to teach a subject but then set up stumbling blocks for the tests they give? There's no valuable reason for it that I've found yet. Out of the thousands of tests I've taken, I have yet to see in myself the value I got from that. I can say with 100% conviction that our educators are doing nothing more than creating more of a problem than a solution to educating effectively. It shows too. Over the past 50 years our country has declined in educational excellence and I feel that it's due to ignorant and paranoid methods of educating. Ignorant because they seem to fail at understanding how to impart knowledge. Paranoid because the measures they go to in order to stop one cheater is outrageous! We're not there to be treated like 5 year old.
When you're 44 years old and paying someone to educate you but they spend more time tripping you up, overloading you with unreasonable amounts of work, and telling you that "if you have time to sleep then you have time to study," you start to wonder what you're paying them for. The power they hold goes to their heads. This is not feeling like education to me. It's feeling like them against us. I have a Humanities course and I swear that man can't ask a simple question on a test. It has to be in words nobody has ever heard before and worded in such a ridiculously unrealistic way that answering it correctly is a crap shoot. You've got a 50/50 chance of guessing the correct answer based on how well you do at figuring out what the hell he's talking about.
I was going to go into how I see our country becoming a police state as people from the highest seats of our government become more and more paranoid and it trickles down into our everyday lives, but I think this rant about school is enough. It's not a complete rant for I feel like I left something out but I had to speak about it.
I'm the one paying for this education and instead of sitting here feeling more knowledgeable about the things I've been studying, I feel years older because of the stress these educators have put me through to get this far. I'm no smarter than I was when I started school. I can't sit here before you and tell you all the things I know now. Why? Because I'm not being educated I'm being shown how the educators got their degree as they work the problems on the board but it's a whole different animal than actually imparting that knowledge. I guess that's why they're called instructors. They don't teach, they instruct.
If you read this, my gratitude to you and my apologies because I'm really quite happy in my spirit and I could have wrote other things but that's not where I felt led.
I'll close with this, I'm going to finish school because I started and I always finish what I start. I'm going to respect all the efforts made on my dad's part to help me with my computer set up. His one request was that I finish school and I will. But the one valuable lesson I'll be taking from this won't be the material I've studied. I'll find a deeper value to this whole experience and I'll make that my education.
I love Jesus...I still love Jesus. What else do we really need, eh? :)
As some of my readers know, I'm a college student. I'm a 44 year old college student, so having been around a few years, it's easier for me to identify with things when they're out of place or don't feel right. College, or should I say the way it's run, doesn't feel right. I feel right for being there but I feel that there isn't right to be. How to explain? Well, seems like students these days aren't just being challenged in the academic sense but in the psychological sense.
There's an attitude among educators, bless them every one, which makes them come across as some kind of army against their students instead of educators for them. That sounds rough I know but here's why, education is something we're supposed to get, receive, soak up, acquire and that's supposed to be a relatively simple process by which the educator simply imparts his/her knowledge to the student and then there's a testing period for checking the level of competence in the field of study (that's how it's done here in the U.S.).
It's test time, finals are coming up. Instead of teaching us the material and giving us simple tests which perform the basic function of seeing what we know, they present us with these questions that are purely designed to trip the student up. "Who's buried in Grant's tomb" type of questions. What value does it have to teach a subject but then set up stumbling blocks for the tests they give? There's no valuable reason for it that I've found yet. Out of the thousands of tests I've taken, I have yet to see in myself the value I got from that. I can say with 100% conviction that our educators are doing nothing more than creating more of a problem than a solution to educating effectively. It shows too. Over the past 50 years our country has declined in educational excellence and I feel that it's due to ignorant and paranoid methods of educating. Ignorant because they seem to fail at understanding how to impart knowledge. Paranoid because the measures they go to in order to stop one cheater is outrageous! We're not there to be treated like 5 year old.
When you're 44 years old and paying someone to educate you but they spend more time tripping you up, overloading you with unreasonable amounts of work, and telling you that "if you have time to sleep then you have time to study," you start to wonder what you're paying them for. The power they hold goes to their heads. This is not feeling like education to me. It's feeling like them against us. I have a Humanities course and I swear that man can't ask a simple question on a test. It has to be in words nobody has ever heard before and worded in such a ridiculously unrealistic way that answering it correctly is a crap shoot. You've got a 50/50 chance of guessing the correct answer based on how well you do at figuring out what the hell he's talking about.
I was going to go into how I see our country becoming a police state as people from the highest seats of our government become more and more paranoid and it trickles down into our everyday lives, but I think this rant about school is enough. It's not a complete rant for I feel like I left something out but I had to speak about it.
I'm the one paying for this education and instead of sitting here feeling more knowledgeable about the things I've been studying, I feel years older because of the stress these educators have put me through to get this far. I'm no smarter than I was when I started school. I can't sit here before you and tell you all the things I know now. Why? Because I'm not being educated I'm being shown how the educators got their degree as they work the problems on the board but it's a whole different animal than actually imparting that knowledge. I guess that's why they're called instructors. They don't teach, they instruct.
If you read this, my gratitude to you and my apologies because I'm really quite happy in my spirit and I could have wrote other things but that's not where I felt led.
I'll close with this, I'm going to finish school because I started and I always finish what I start. I'm going to respect all the efforts made on my dad's part to help me with my computer set up. His one request was that I finish school and I will. But the one valuable lesson I'll be taking from this won't be the material I've studied. I'll find a deeper value to this whole experience and I'll make that my education.
I love Jesus...I still love Jesus. What else do we really need, eh? :)
Monday, March 25, 2013
THE DEATH OF FAITH
So, I have a dilemma so I decided I would search a place on my social site called "communities" for a community of Christians and find someone to discuss my dilemma with. What I found was so sad. I found community after community with the word "Christian" in the title but the member count for each was mostly between 1-6. I did find some with 26 and one or two communities with more than that number but I don't believe I found one community created by a Christian that had 100 members in it. It's worthy to note that the headings were things such as "Fundamental Christians", and "Christians Following God", and "Country Christians," "Compassionate Believers", things like that, but none of which had more than a few members at any given time.
It's fair to point out that the people who create those communities are usually men in the social network who have very few people following them in their circle count so that means invitations usually don't reach too many people and most people ignore them when they get an invitation to join a community. But if you look through the communities on cat lovers, techies, or LGBT, they're 1000s strong. But do you know what community I found with the highest number of members? Islam. 10,000 members.
The second thing disturbing to me were the subtitles of those Christian communities wherein the moderator or creator of the community would announce that his/her community was a "place to connect" or "a place to share ideas" or "be one in the Lord." But guess what I found in each and every community I opened to look around in? Comments were ALL disabled. Every single person who posted something had disabled their comments. How's that connecting? How do Christians expect to connect with one another that way?
It's also worthy to note that we're talking about millions of people from around the world so somewhere in there the Christian faith is turning into something that nobody wants anything to do with and those who still are a part of it don't really want to connect.
I'll now weigh in on that and give my personal opinion based on what I feel myself and what I see. Religion is destroying the faith. The faith is not a heart thing anymore, it's a Bible thing, a church thing, a religion thing. Christianity is no longer the faith in God it was initially meant to be and taught to us by Christ himself, but rather something people practice in their flesh and if you practice God in your flesh and not in your heart, then you're not a Christian, you're a religious zealot who has no Spirit of God in them. Religion will not save you. Bible thumping won't save anyone. All the church services in the world are doing nothing for people. They're using the religion to grow further into their own "good deeds" and further away from simple service to God in the form of love and truth and benevolence. We're not to act in the flesh as Christians. Quoting scripture does little more than show the world you've memorized some words. Even I am turned off by the quoting of scripture. One or two verses that you know have meaning and when you say them it's because the Spirit compels you, is one thing. Quoting scripture to every thing that happens around you and using it as a shield to hide your true self behind isn't what it's meant for.
Religion has all but destroyed the faith. It's clear to me that the devil has gotten into the church and he's working diligently at destroying Christians from the outside in. They see and believe, they hear and believe, but they don't know and believe based on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who comes at the moment of salvation and makes us to know the truth, which immediately should set us free from the practice of religion. Remember the scribes and pharisees folks, remember what Jesus said about them and you'll know.
It's fair to point out that the people who create those communities are usually men in the social network who have very few people following them in their circle count so that means invitations usually don't reach too many people and most people ignore them when they get an invitation to join a community. But if you look through the communities on cat lovers, techies, or LGBT, they're 1000s strong. But do you know what community I found with the highest number of members? Islam. 10,000 members.
The second thing disturbing to me were the subtitles of those Christian communities wherein the moderator or creator of the community would announce that his/her community was a "place to connect" or "a place to share ideas" or "be one in the Lord." But guess what I found in each and every community I opened to look around in? Comments were ALL disabled. Every single person who posted something had disabled their comments. How's that connecting? How do Christians expect to connect with one another that way?
It's also worthy to note that we're talking about millions of people from around the world so somewhere in there the Christian faith is turning into something that nobody wants anything to do with and those who still are a part of it don't really want to connect.
I'll now weigh in on that and give my personal opinion based on what I feel myself and what I see. Religion is destroying the faith. The faith is not a heart thing anymore, it's a Bible thing, a church thing, a religion thing. Christianity is no longer the faith in God it was initially meant to be and taught to us by Christ himself, but rather something people practice in their flesh and if you practice God in your flesh and not in your heart, then you're not a Christian, you're a religious zealot who has no Spirit of God in them. Religion will not save you. Bible thumping won't save anyone. All the church services in the world are doing nothing for people. They're using the religion to grow further into their own "good deeds" and further away from simple service to God in the form of love and truth and benevolence. We're not to act in the flesh as Christians. Quoting scripture does little more than show the world you've memorized some words. Even I am turned off by the quoting of scripture. One or two verses that you know have meaning and when you say them it's because the Spirit compels you, is one thing. Quoting scripture to every thing that happens around you and using it as a shield to hide your true self behind isn't what it's meant for.
Religion has all but destroyed the faith. It's clear to me that the devil has gotten into the church and he's working diligently at destroying Christians from the outside in. They see and believe, they hear and believe, but they don't know and believe based on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who comes at the moment of salvation and makes us to know the truth, which immediately should set us free from the practice of religion. Remember the scribes and pharisees folks, remember what Jesus said about them and you'll know.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Friday, February 22, 2013
THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS...
Religion finds people acting on their flesh when they allow themselves to read a passage and then act it out without the moving of the Holy Spirit.
I give you this example: A man is lying in the gutters. You see him there and know that the Lord expects benevolence of you as well as it is in your heart to do. You've read the scriptures to love thy neighbor as thy self and not to send your neighbor away empty if you have it to give, and so you think on those verses. You decide you're going to give the man some money but something is tugging at you and you second guess the gesture. Without a whisper to the Lord or an inquiry to Him as to why you feel like you shouldn't give the man the money, you begin to reach for the $5 you have but then decide, "no..I'm giving him the $20." The tugging gets stronger and now you're sure there's something telling you not to give him that $20, just the $5. Nobody would ever second guess such a thing unless they're selfish or greedy, right? Only a good person would choose to give more instead of less, right? Did you ask God to just give you some clarity and guide you to what the right thing to do is?
Let us hear the conclusion of the matter: You've decided to give the man the $20, despite the tugging at your heart and the strong feeling that you should only give him the $5. For a brief second you contemplate why you've brushed aside the feelings and you quickly rationalize it with these 3 words, "The Bible says..." and that's all the explanation you feel you need to give yourself. You then hand the man the $20, which he happily accepts, and you part ways. You continue on your journey feeling 50% right and somehow 50% wrong but you shrug it off. Within a span of time you have to return via the direction you came in and in so doing, hope to see the man gone because you happen to know that he can get a bed at the mission on the corner for $5. Instead, you approach the area where you left him to see an ambulance and officers and a crowd of people forming. You walk up to a bystander and inquire as to what the commotion is all about. "Some homeless man stumbled out of the bar across the street and fell into the path of a big truck," he says. Instantly your heart sinks. Without another word, you make your way closer to the accident scene and sure enough, it's him, the man you gave the $20 to.
Here's the lesson God taught me using this exact same story and scenario, which He wrote on my heart years ago. He has never allowed me to lose it's meaning: When the man chose the $20 over the $5 while snubbing the Holy Spirit's urging not to, he sealed the man's fate. What He didn't know about the man were the things God knew, and what God knew was that he would take the money given to him and drink it up. But if the man only had $5, he wouldn't have had enough to get as drunk as he prefers and so would have chosen to take the $5 and go find a bed for the night. Also, at the mission they serve a message of Christ with breakfast so the man would have heard a salvation message the next morning. All God needed from His servant here was that his act of benevolence not be based on scripture alone nor what the man's flesh wanted to do, but rather on a willing heart combined with the knowledge of scripture. Most importantly however is that the Holy Spirit was the power behind it all. He was the guiding force but the man shrugged Him off because his flesh and his belief in the scriptures assured him in his mind (not his heart) that he was doing the right thing. He had read it and he thought it and therefore, he did it.
What's the moral of this story my friends?
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