There are four kinds of tempers: he whom it is easy to provoke and easy to pacify, his loss disappears in his gain; he whom it is hard to provoke and hard to pacify, his gain disappears in his loss; he who is hard to provoke and easy to pacify is a saint; he who is easy to provoke and hard to pacify is a wicked man.—Anonymous
For thou art a holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be His own treasure, out of all peoples that are upon the face of the earth.
—Deuteronomy 7:6
Lotus from the Muck
I began as a Buddhist, formless. In time, shaped as I was by my parents, my sister, even by my sacrificed brother, Jerome, “Jewish” became my identity as a cultural being. But what was this “religion” I belonged to? Was it merely candles flaming me to sleep on Friday eves like two golden rails if you quietly drifted off in your father’s lap, squinting up long enough to distort the twin flames? Was it great, festive meals once or twice a year, the women cooking, seemingly forever, great filling dishes that I now know to be dreadfully unhealthful? Was it a cheap blue suit with other boys in like outfits walking to synagogue on our atonement day, dodging the “goyim” who chased us with nylon stockings filled with powdered chalk, swinging their mother’s discarded skins to defile our once-a-year best and tell us we were Jews?
Defined so by others, I grew up Jewish, or so I thought.
Coming upon myself some forty years into life’s endlessness, approaching my own cherished boy’s initiation into his people, and again reevaluating my life as a Jew, I found religion to be the least important facet of the diamond!
Judaism is both more and less than a religion; both more and less than a people; surely not a land; and certainly not a way of life.
It is more than a religion when mere observance is transcended and seen for the God-binding acts they are, the rituals designed to bind us through the shakras and shekinas. It is less than a religion when dumb unthinkingness refuses to budge from its shelled camouflage.
It is more than a people; it is many peoples, from Yemenites, brown in hue, to Nordic-looking Germans. It is less than a people when the world or inner imbalance drives us to a collective act of madness.
It is more than a land; it is many lands; but beyond a geographical naturalism.
Wondering and worrying, I sat in my car in the rain, parked up a San Francisco hill. Looking back down Grant Avenue through the raindropped mirror, I heard the thought, “Where am I? What am I doing here? I used to be so sure of my place and direction.” Soon after followed this rejoinder: “Didn’t we all!”
The lights of a city, created and creating a sense of place. Today we belong to this place, yesterday to that, and tomorrow to the worlds of the deathless moons.
… from the muck of worldly passions springs the pure enlightenment.—DHARMA
But now, O LORD, Thou art our Father;
We are the clay, and Thou our potter,
And we all are the work of Thy hand.
—Isaiah 64:7
PART IV.
GOD AND COUNTRY
Why would God care about politics?
How does America fit into God’s plan?
How did God help build/raise up America?
How has turning away from God led to national decline?
Halloween Is Bigger than Christmas
This book is being published between Halloween and Christmas for a specific reason. Halloween is now almost bigger than Christmas in the United States of America. That is a further example of the decline of Western civilization, which was built upon Christianity, not paganism.
My desire in publishing this book now is to somewhat counter the overwhelming influence of the atheists and the agnostics upon our culture.
Across the landscape of America at Halloween, whether it be on suburban lawns or in workplaces, we see little skeletons and cobwebs on lawns, on doors, and even in the workplace. Has anyone noticed that the cross and anything else related to Jesus has been driven out of the workplace? “You can’t do that! You can’t have anything religious on your desk at work.”
But you can hang a skeleton from your workplace cubicle? That tells you the anti-God forces are now dictating the terms of our belief system, to believe in nothing but paganism. This section of the book is my attempt to make people aware of the cultural battle being fought and how it affects the souls of people in our nation and around the world. Because I am sure that if God were more present in our daily lives, whether it be the Ten Commandments in a classroom, a Jesus statue on your work desk, a Bible proudly displayed in your cubicle, or a prayer session from time to time at work, there would be less drug use and less insanity overall. That is why this book is being published just after the pagan obsession with cobwebs and skeletons at Halloween.
I can hear people saying, “Oh, don’t make such a big deal about it. Just celebrate Halloween with all the other white suburbanite fools.” Voltaire was an observer of Parisian life and became famous for writing about the foibles of Parisian society. I am not that high up on the totem pole. I write primarily about the foibles of white middle-class suburbanites.
One of the residences I broadcast from is in a white, suburban middle-class community. Don’t get me wrong; the residents are nice people. They don’t want to offend anybody. Their lawns are clean and clipped; their garbage is put out on the right day; their cans are picked up on the correct day. There’s not a leaf left in the driveway because that would be disgraceful. They’re nice enough people.
But there’s a big “but” attached to that. I’ve made a certain observation: the larger the number of Halloween displays on a lawn or a house, the more ghosts, the more eerie things that they put up for their children and the neighborhood children, the more liberal the inhabitants are. It’s just an observation. I don’t have any ghosts hanging from my house. So if you’re trying to find my house, it’s the one without ghosts hanging from the trees and eerie spiderwebs across the hedge.
How is the faithful city
Become a harlot!
She that was full of justice,
Righteousness lodged in her,
But now murderers.
—Isaiah 1:21
Thy silver is become dross,
Thy wine mixed with water.
Thy princes are rebellious,
And companions of thieves;
Every one loveth bribes,
And followeth after rewards;
They judge not the fatherless,
Neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them.
—Isaiah 1:22–23
The vile person shall be no more called liberal,
Nor the churl said to be noble.
For the vile person will speak villainy,
And his heart will work iniquity,
To practise ungodliness, and to utter wickedness against the LORD,
To make empty the soul of the hungry,
And to cause the drink of the thirsty to fail.
—Isaiah 32:5–6
The American people have given up their religion and their civilization and replaced them with a sort of death worship. I know a lot of people would say, “Come on. It’s Halloween. The kids just eat candy corn and have fun.”
But it’s more than that. It’s symbolic. This obscure pagan holiday has become bigger than the July Fourth celebration of independence from Great Britain, bigger than almost any other American holiday, bigger than any religious holiday. People who don’t go to church, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a church, drape fake spiderwebs on their hedges, celebrating what? The day of the dead? These are symptoms of a dying civilization.
The instruments also of the churl are evil;
He deviseth wicked devices
To destroy the poor with lying words,
And the needy when he speaketh right.
But the liberal deviseth liberal things;
And by liberal things shall he stand.
—Isaiah 32:7–8
Burning Man
But every year, I have to look at the paper and read about celebrities and tech execs with luxury camps flocking to Burning Man.
What is the value in going to an event where people walk around stoned out of their minds? Why does anyone go to the desert to an event where everyone gets stoned and drugged, with tattoos on their noses, tattoos on their eyeballs? What is this? Is there something wrong with me because I don’t go to an event like this or find it revolting?
What is Burning Man? Idiots in the desert, wearing idiotic costumes while stoned? And what are they doing burning an effigy? If this isn’t biblical, I don’t know what is. This is what the Bible wrote about.
Burning Man is exactly what the Bible warned us about, the worship of false gods. It’s the epitome of paganism. And why do people go to it? Because they don’t believe in religion; they don’t believe in God. This has replaced it. And they go to have a good time, you might say. But what is the good time about?
They call it a “festival.” What is a festival about? This past year, they sold 30,000 tickets in less than thirty-five minutes, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal. And then we read about the celebrities who attend. Katy Perry, Paris Hilton, and others were among them.
Paris Hilton is so “yesterday.” Of course she’d be at Burning Man. She can’t get a job anywhere else; where else would she be? She flew coach into Reno and appeared half naked on a float. And personally, I don’t even know who Katy Perry is. I’ve heard she’s a celebrity. And of course, she wouldn’t miss Burning Man for the world.
And nowadays you can find Silicon Valley there in force. Do you know how much tickets to this fiasco cost? It’s $425 per person plus an $80 vehicle pass.
The classic East Coast liberal thinks anyone who believes in God is crazy, a fantasist, a lunatic, out of touch with reality, etc. Only they know reality because they live in Manhattan or Brooklyn. But if I said to you that Burning Man is directly related to biblical teachings, you’d have to understand that Exodus 24:4 in the original, Jewish Bible, says, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.”
They are making wooden effigies and burning them. That’s what the Bible warned against. That these are the end of days—that’s what people who are religious believe, when you see things like this. So the degenerate cities like San Francisco, where Nancy Pelosi says a leather parade is part of her value system, where men whip each other with whips in public and she calls it wholesome, are the antithesis of biblical teachings.
This is why there is a split in America between those of us who see what this is and those of us who don’t see what this is. It is between those of us who say, as George Orwell said, “The more people chant about their freedom and how free they are, the more loudly I hear their chains rattling.” That’s what I see in San Francisco. The larger the number of nose rings, the more chains I hear rattling. The more they scream about how free they are, the more I know they’re enslaved.
And the more I see people flocking to Burning Man, the more I know America is degenerating into the house of bondage. Because that is absolutely an example of bondage. Deuteronomy 32:17 says, “They sacrificed unto demons, no-gods, Gods that they knew not, New gods that came up of late, Which your fathers dreaded not.” All of you who are going into the desert, realize where you are going. You are going into Hell itself.
The New Marrano Jews
I want you to understand how so many Americans were shaped by the entertainment business in the 1950s. And then if I jump cut to what the degenerates are doing to your children’s minds today, you will see that the Devil the Bible warns us about is very much alive. He’s behind every camera in Hollywood. They are all used to pervert your child, to lead your child astray. I’ll stand by those words.
When did you last see a movie, other than one produced by a Christian, that told you something other than to follow the path of sex, drugs, and rock and roll? All cops are bad; all minorities are good. All white men are secretly evil. Corporate executives are crooks. Every corporation is thieving. And who is producing these films? Corporations. It’s a very sad time in American history.
I’m a great lover of blues music, especially the older blues music, because almost all of it derived from gospel music. All the great music by black people at that time came out of the gospel music tradition. Most of them began in church choirs. Some of the great jazzmen of all time came out of church choirs. You wouldn’t know that listening to the media. They don’t want you to see the connection between divinity and creativity. But there is a direct connection between divinity and creativity in more artists than you can imagine.
In Hollywood, they have to hide it. There are some great actors around who are true believers, but they’ll never show it. They’d never get another job in Hollywood because of the degenerates who run it. If the degenerates floating around on their four-hundred-foot yachts ever knew that some of the greatest actors of our time pray to God or believe in Jesus, those actors would never work in that town again.
So they keep it to themselves like the Marrano Jews in Spain. The Marrano Jews lived during the Inquisition, when the Catholics were killing anyone who didn’t follow their way. They were very much like the radical Muslims today. Yes, there is precedent for what the radical Muslims are doing today. Either you believed in what the Catholics believed in, or they killed you. They’d let you convert, but if you didn’t, they burned you at the stake or had you drawn and quartered. They were very similar to ISIS.
So the Marranos converted to Christianity outwardly, to avoid being killed. But secretly they practiced their Judaism in the basements of their houses. That is why, to this day, there are many Catholics who look Jewish. You’ll find the same thing in Sicily. Why do so many Jews eat Italian food? That’s an old joke, but it’s because a lot of Italians have Jewish ancestry. It’s well known here in San Francisco that different regions of Italy have people with different origins. And there is a region of Italy where the people are very well known for their financial intelligence. Many Genovese Italians descend from Jewish people who converted to Christianity.
A while back, I visited a synagogue in Saint Thomas, in the Virgin Islands. I had heard there was a sand floor, but I didn’t know why until I went there. The woman there told me they had sand on the floor to remind them that they couldn’t practice their Judaism in Spain, from whence they’d fled. So they put sand on the floor to absorb the sound of their chanting in Hebrew. When I walked onto that sand floor, I was in communion with people who had been oppressed, tortured, or murdered for their beliefs. It made me feel something I hadn’t felt before.
So the devoutly religious actors in Hollywood are like the Marrano Jews. They hide their faith to keep their jobs, to keep from being banished from Hollywood society. If they said they believed in God, the degenerates would call them KKK members, Nazis, deplorables, and run them out of town. And of course the good, tolerant liberals would gang up on those Christians.
Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem,
And see now, and know,
And seek in the broad places thereof,
If ye can find a man,
If there be any that doeth justly, that seeketh truth;
And I will pardon her.
And though they say: ‘As the LORD liveth’,
Surely they swear falsely.
—Jeremiah 5:1–2
Guilt in Religion—Hillary’s Sins Washed Away
It’s a depressing thing, all the guilt. Religion is so full of guilt. You walk around, and it’s like everything you do is wrong. You look wrong, you think wrong, your mind does this, your mind does that. Y
ou open your mouth, you’re wrong; you breathe, you’re wrong. That’s religion. Original religion was based on guilt.
How that came about, I’ll never know. Why did anyone go along with the idea that you’re no good no matter what you do? How did anyone ever come to believe this? But it’s still there. You suffer for everything you do. You look at someone wrong, your intention is wrong, you’re a rebel; that’s wrong. You’re brusque; that’s wrong. You have a confused heart; that’s wrong. You must bring a burnt offering because you did this or that.
I burnt my toast this morning. That was my burnt offering.
You committed a sin because you were deceitful, had improper thoughts, used coercion, desecrated.… That’s why I walked away from religion. I didn’t like the guilt. Maybe it works for some people.
You commit a sin in business dealings by eating and drinking? Just by eating and drinking you commit a sin? By taking interest and usury? I don’t do that. I don’t own a bank. I’m not Wells Fargo. You commit a sin by having a haughty demeanor. Okay, that’s all of Hollywood. Commit a sin by the prattle of your lips, by a glance of the eye, with proud looks? Should you walk around like a schmuck? What does that mean, proud looks? Is it a sin to put on a nice outfit? Or are you required to look like a loser?
God, Faith, and Reason Page 8