Satan Is Winning

ISIL has little to do with Satan's growing power; it is because of the impotent and hypocritical Vatican, the growing relativism of morality, the increasing skepticism and irrelevance of Jesus that Christ's influence is diminishing.

This is not a time for the genuinely faithful to join the herd that is wandering astray, to echo its collective call for blind acceptance of God-free, Satan-centric values, nor is it a time to demand absolutism, for no one can speak of absoluteness without first knowing God's Truth.

God's Truth is absolute.  Perhaps Jesus gave all a glimpse of it, a Truth based on love and forgiveness.  Man is certainly capable of it but with Satan around, he is not, unless he is willing to engage in a constant struggle against Evil, even that does not ensure that he will overcome the forces of Evil, but at least they will be attenuated.

What about God's love and forgiveness that is different from man's?  God's love and forgiveness is pure and unconditional, without guise and self-interest.  What God wants for all mankind is complete and eternal fulfillment; but the first things most people want are those advantageous to them, self-serving, that culminate in fulfillment in their mortal lives.  In a way, that is an acceptance of Satan's third temptation of Christ. [1]

[1] "Again, the devil took [Jesus] to a very high mountain and showed [H]im all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.  'All this I will give you,' he said, 'if you will bow down and worship me.'"  See https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+4%3A1-11  It is interesting to note that Satan never uttered the words "for eternity".  Therefore, no matter how exceptional and desirable anything is in life, it is only temporal, its worth  nil at death.  Such are the promises of Satan, temporal that become worthless at death, and death is certain.

Whose Time Is It Anyway?

Life begins from the moment of conception and ends with its last breath.  The time span in between man believes is his to do whatever and whenever he pleases, limited only by the laws of nature, and anything that may be in his way, thwarting his plans or causing delay, is not welcomed.  Man wants time to be on his schedule, even though the time that is allotted to him seldom meets his expectations.

Man cannot control the timing of events, like landing the right job with the right company at the desired location, to finding an ideal soulmate, to searching for a misplaced item and being caught in traffic.  Time makes no promises to man, when his goals will be reached, if ever.

Man did not create time.  It was given to him: it is limited and advances.  What it cannot do is reverse itself.  What it does best is to delay and to keep the future a secret.

Delay is a concept of man, not of time.  Sometimes man knows only with hindsight that a delay that had caused disappointment had coincidentally avoided a tragedy.  Such fateful events are not in the control of man.

However, man can exercise control and truncate directly or indirectly his own or another's natural time span in this earthly existence.  What will happen to them in eternity only God knows, and time which parallels eternity will not tell.

Easter - A Dream Come True

This blogger is a dreamer, but his reality is far from what can be imagined.  Only Jesus was able to speak of a dream, a place that He called Heaven even though He never was not very specific as to what Heaven was like, but to Heaven He was resurrected from His mortal death.

Heaven, whatever it is like, is the opposite of Hell, and Hell is fully understood here on earth, in a metaphoric sense, but Heaven remains a dream for many sinners. [1]  Jesus by His resurrection merged that dream of Heaven with reality itself.

Keep on dreaming about Heaven.  The more one dreams of it, the closer and more real it is.

Happy Easter!

[1] Many sinners and secularists do not believe in Heaven.  Perhaps they have been in their minds' hell for too long.

A Crucifixion Like No Other

Today is Good Friday.

Jesus was not the only person who was crucified.  "Crucifixion was common in the first century Israel and this fact is well documented in the writings of Josephus." [1]  Indeed, two unidentified and nameless prisoners were crucified on either side of Jesus [2]; however, it was the crucifixion of Jesus that is known around the world.

What is so special about the crucifixion of Jesus that ranks above all the others?  The answer is simple:  Jesus was the sinless  Son of God.

No other person, old or young, who was crucified was free from Original Sin and all the other sins (not that any one of them deserved to be tortured and crucified because of Original Sin and his other sins).  This assertion merely distinguishes Jesus' crucifixion from all others since Jesus was no ordinary man. [3]


[1] http://www.bible-history.com/biblestudy/crucifixion.html
[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+19%3A17-18&version=NIV
[3] Anyone who thinks that there might have been others who were crucified could have been entirely "innocent" or perhaps that Jesus was not completely sin-free is, in this blogger's opinion, destined for Hell unless there is true repentance.

Mind And Heart

It is common knowledge that intellect resides in the mind and love dwells in the heart.  If a smart man has no love [1] in his heart, he is left with emptiness.  If a man is without intellect but has only love to guide him, he is headed to Heaven.

Man's love cannot be infinite.  His is personal and cannot be assigned and as such (unlike God's) it is limited by his time, his innate vulnerabilities and his inability to be everywhere for everybody.  In contrast, his intellect is not inextricably tied to his body and his soul, so that he is able to share and spread his intellect by all possible means of communication.

This year's Holy Week began on Palm Sunday. [2]  In less than a week, the world can remember Jesus and His death on the cross on Good Friday, how He suffered and died out of unconditional love for God, His Father, and for all sinners. Jesus could not have delegated His sinless love to another so that He could watch the crucifixion instead of going through with it, nor could God have delegated God's love to somebody else besides Jesus (God's Personal incarnation) Who Himself is a part of the Holy Trinity, indivisible from God. [3]


[1] Love is not synonymous with desire.
[2] http://catholicism.about.com/od/2016-Calendar/f/When-Is-Holy-Week-2016.htm
[3] "To be sure, it is Christ who is seen, the visible image of the invisible God, but it is the Spirit who reveals him." http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c3a8.htm, section 689.

Dueling Realities

Realities is a most challenging subject for this blogger precisely because his many thoughts do not originate from any reality unless one considers a certain mental state suspended in a day dream a reality.  Whether his ideas on realities can be substantiated as realities is not a question to be answered; rather, by merely putting his amorphous thoughts into words, they have been collectively transformed by the force of sheer will into some form of reality that only the blogosphere has time and space for, and it is in this non-judgmental dimension that his dream-like realities can almost be real.

In this space, life can be seen as having two principal realities: original and artificial; the third is a hybrid of the two, and the rest are their derivatives which are numerous and continuously changing which do not allow for meaningful itemization and classification.

A reality is original if comes from God and has not been altered.  It is artificial if it is a product of man's imperfect imagination, often made worse by his selfish and ineffective ad hoc organization and inappropriate motives, contents and conduct.  A hybrid reality is an original reality altered by exploitation and contamination, and its resultant existence is nearly impossible to eradicate.  A derivative reality is a complicated inextricable mess.  It is pervasive like an invisible mist that envelopes the world's inhabitants from which there is no escape.

Original realities are beyond man's understanding or his ability to duplicate.  They are from God, and only God can change them.  They range from an ordered universe to an ordered planet, and from natural birth to natural death. These realities are accepted as part of existence.

Existing within God's realities has never been good enough for man.  His first ancestors, Adam and Eve, had rejected God's perfection embodied within the Garden of Eden, a place of plenty and eternal youth without suffering and death.  To this day, man has ambitions that are far beyond his acceptance of God and God's gifts; he wants to continually improve upon what he has been given.  He wants his own artificial realities, and has by his God-given intellect continually come up with inventions and improvements that are tainted by his pride and greed, that would eventually lead to his own demise.

Man's artificial realities range from inventions of primitive weapons needed to hunt for food to having new and advanced weapons of mass destruction. [1]  The hybrid realities include genetically modified crops that are causing the collapse of bee colonies. [2]  Examples of derivative realities are the still unknown long-term effects of consumption of genetically modified foods, the constant undercurrent of stress in living in a corrupt and terror-filled world that is unstable economically and geopolitically.

In the midst of all these noisy and growing man-made realities caused by man's missteps and miscalculations out of greed and pride, God remains at the center, a source of strength and stability, a place of peace.



[1] Does it not amaze anyone that man can go to the moon, explore outer space, destroy the world in minutes but is still unable to rid the world of diseases and disease-carrying vermin?
[2] http://naturalsociety.com/37-million-bees-found-dead-canada-large-gmo-crop-planting/

Duty And Sacrifice

Duty is defined here as the work one is obligated to perform based on contract; sacrifice is defined here as the efforts that one gives in the performance of work beyond the call of duty.

Man pays upon the completion of duties enumerated under a contract; God pays for the work done beyond one's call of duty. [1]  Conversely, when man shirks, he is repaid. [2]


[1] God's graces are immeasurable just as one's sacrifices are unquantifiable.
[2] Repayment is undesirable.  Nobody wants it.