Transformation of the Soul

August 13, 2010 in Jesus Christ, religion | No comments

    Monarch Butterfly

    Transformation of the Soul
    By Gary Amirault

    Recently, I was doing some studying into the various processes in nature that are useful in describing the processes God uses to transform the carnal, fleshy person that we are born as into becoming spiritual children of God. I came across a good description of how a caterpillar is transformed into a butterfly. As you study the process, see if you can find similarities between this process and some of the events in your life.

    Building the Cocoon

  1. A caterpillar, when it is fully grown, secretes a long stream of liquid from its glands, called the spinneret, located below its mouth. The liquid stiffens forming a silk like thread which is used to attach its hind end to a twig or leaf. The caterpillar spins the silky thread around its body to form a covering. This outside layer hardens to form a shell called a chrysalis.

    The Transformation Process

  2. Inside the cocoon the caterpillar changes into a pupa. In a process called histolysis, the caterpillar digests itself from the inside out, causing its body to die. During this partial death, some of the caterpillar’s old tissues are salvaged to form new. This remnant of cells are called the histoblasts and are used to create a new body. Using its digestive juices, the caterpillar turns his old larval body into food which he uses to rebuild its new body.

    Breaking Out of the Shell

  3. Once the pupa has fully grown inside the cocoon, and the butterfly is ready to emerge, the insect releases a fluid which softens the shell. The butterfly pushes on the walls of the shell until it breaks open. The process of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly can take anywhere from 10 days to several months. — Lacy Enderson

As you ponder the process of transformation of the butterfly, ask the Lord of All, to shed some light on YOUR change — it, too, is mysterious and wonderful. GA

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Were You Scared Into Loving God?

August 8, 2010 in religion | No comments

Were You Scared Into Loving God?

By Gary Amirault

I am presently reading "A Gentler God" by Doug Frank. I haven’t finished the book, but it appears to be teaching Universal Salvation, what I have coined "The Victorious Gospel of Jesus Christ." I plan to write a review of the book. However, this morning on page 40 I came across a few paragraphs that caught my attention enough to want to post the thought they expressed.

Replying to a very zealous traditional evangelist, someone said, "Are you trying to scare me into loving God?" And the evangelist answered, "Yes!" How ironic. How strange — that the most successful tool evangelists have come up with to getting people to confess Jesus as Lord is to scare them into doing so.

Doug Frank, in "A Gentler God" notes that the thousands of evangelists around the world who have used this tactic of fear say they use it because it works. Doug Frank writes, "It may be true that they increase the number of adherents to their movement. But they do not work to enhance a trusting relationship with a loving God."

Have you been "scared into loving God?" Would you like to have a deep lasting loving relationship with your heavenly Father? Would you like to be able to compleletey abandon yourself to your Creator? Would you like to be able to live in trust? Email us and we’ll try to help you be freed from the fear that has enslaved you to a lower fallen image of God. "Perfect love casts out fear." (1 John 4:18)

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Four Sorrows Visiting America

May 5, 2010 in religion/politics/corpocrasy | No comments

Four Sorrows are Certain to be Visited on the United States

"Four sorrows … are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. 

 
First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut.
 
Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal ‘executive branch’ of government into a military junta.
 
Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions.
 
Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens.": Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire

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Ethics

April 14, 2010 in Jesus Christ, religion, religion/politics/corpocrasy | No comments

Ethics

Sometimes in the name of country, flag, pride, nationalism, duty, we don’t think through our values. Often we find ourselves filled with contradictions, because our convictions come from other men/women and their institutions, not from our inner convictions or from God. We can actually become or produce blind killers never realizing in our conscience what we have become. But our subconscience knows. America’s drug and alcohol addictions are a sympton of what we dare not look at — that our "ethics" are that of cavemen and what we call "civilized" is nothing more than barbarism.

"The lowest standards of ethics of which a right-thinking man can possibly conceive is taught to the common soldier whose trade is to shoot his fellow men. In youth he may have learned the command, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but the ruler takes the boy just as he enters manhood and teaches him that his highest duty is to shoot a bullet through his neighbor’s heart – and this, unmoved by passion or feeling or hatred, and without the least regard to right or wrong, but simply because his ruler gives the word." Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil

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Why Do Evangelicals Dislike Me So Much? By Brian McLaren

April 8, 2010 in religion, religion/politics/corpocrasy | No comments

Brian McLaren and I (Gary Amirault) have some differences regarding the Bible, alternative lifestyles, etc. Nevertheless, I believe he is hitting a nail on its head regarding why we so often tolerate intolerant boggiemen and allow them to diminish our influence in the world through intimidation whether in politics, religion or other fields. Take back your right to speak for yourself. Overcoming this "Milgram" monkey on our backs begins by acknowledging our cowardice and determining to take a stand against it. It’s that simple. Gary Amirault

Why Do Evangelicals

Dislike Me So Much?

 By Brian McLaren

 
It’s not hard to fall out of the good graces of the most conservative elements of any religious community. And those authority figures often become even more testy under stress. One doesn’t have to go far to see some of the sources of that stress, whether we’re looking among Evangelical Christians (as Carol Howard Merritt recently described) or among Roman Catholic Christians (as Ian Masters recently summarized).

The impact of conservative or fundamentalist displeasure extends far beyond fundamentalism’s borders into moderate religious territory. As some of the New Atheists have pointed out, highly conservative authority figures multiply their power by keeping moderate elements afraid of becoming the objects of conservative ire. Read the rest of this entry »

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Obama on Hell

April 2, 2010 in Jesus Christ, religion, religion/politics/corpocrasy | No comments

Barak Obama Doesn’t Believe In Hell?

 Excerpt from Barack Obama: The 2004 "God Factor" Interview Transcript:

OBAMA:

…This is something that I’m sure I’d have serious debates with my fellow Christians about. I think that the difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and proselytize. There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people who haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior, that they’re going to hell.
GG
You don’t believe that?
 OBAMA:
I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell. I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity. That’s just not part of my religious makeup.

 Part of the reason I think it’s always difficult for public figures to talk about this is that the nature of politics is that you want to have everybody like you and project the best possible traits onto you. Oftentimes that’s by being as vague as possible, or appealing to the lowest common denominators. The more specific and detailed you are on issues as personal and fundamental as your faith, the more potentially dangerous it is.

Read the rest of this entry »

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America, Wake Up or Face the Consequences

February 24, 2010 in General | No comments

Tradition by T. Austin-Sparks

February 17, 2010 in religion | No comments

Tradition
T. Austin-Sparks
From the latter days of the Apostles till now, the history of Christianity is a history of prisons. This history is not of literal or material prisons, though there have been not a few of these. It is a history of prisons, which are the result of man’s long established habit of bringing the Spirit into bondage.

How many times has the Spirit broken loose and moved in a new and free way only to have that way brought under man’s control and crystallized into another form, creed, organization, denomination, sect, order, community, or the like! The invariable result has been that the Spirit’s free movement and life has been cramped or even killed by the prison of the framework into which He has been drawn or forced.

Every time we seek to express something divine in word or form, we at once limit it. When that expression or form becomes the established and recognized formula, we have, in effect, put fetters on the Spirit. God gives a vision, and every God-given vision has unlimited potential and possibilities. But all too soon the vision is laid hold of by men who never received it by the Spirit. Then the grapes of Eschol turn to raisins in their hands. So very many of the living fruits of the heavenly country have suffered in this way and become dried, shrunken, and unctionless shadows of their early glory.

Successors, sponsors, or adherents build an earthly organization on a living movement of the Spirit, born with fire in the heart of some prophet. They imprison the vision in a tradition. A message becomes a creed; a heavenly vision becomes an earthly institution; a movement of the Spirit becomes a work, which must be kept going by the steam of human energy and maintained by man’s resourcefulness.

Any real (or seeming) departure or diversion from the recognized and traditional order of creed or practice will sooner or later become heresy, to be violently suspected, repressed, and cast out. What was, at its beginning, a spiritual energy-producing living organism, expressing something that God really wanted and to which He gave birth has too often become something which the next generation has to sustain and struggle hard at to keep going. The thing has developed a self-interest, and it will go hard with anyone or anything interfering or seeming to interfere with it. The Spirit has become the prisoner of the institution or system, and as a result the people become limited spiritually.

All along the way the Spirit must be referred to and deferred to. In anything in which the Spirit may have His liberties limited, the Spirit will be a rebel. And if He is in us, He will make us to rebel against unspiritual restrictions.

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Faith, Trust and Patience

October 16, 2009 in Jesus Christ | No comments

Faith, Trust and Patience
 
Faith Is……
 
Faith Is……reliance on the certainty that God has a pattern for my life when everything else seems meaningless.
Faith Is……remembering I am God’s priceless treasure when I feel utterly useless.
Faith Is……depending on the fact that God is love – not on my ability to figure out "why?" in the midst of smashed hopes, and tragedy. 
 Faith Is……keeping on when I’m dog tired, discouraged, disillusioned, deserted, dusty, and dry and I’m cast on His strength alone. 
 Faith Is……realizing that I am useful to God, not in spite of my scars, but because of them. 
Faith Is……confidence that God is acting for my highest good when He answers "No" to my prayers. 
 Faith Is……accepting the truth that, in spite of the wreckage and grief I’ve caused, God has wiped the slate clean & delights in me! 
 Faith Is……recognizing that God is the Lord of time when my idea of timing doesn’t agree with His. 
 Faith Is……not a vague hope of a happy hereafter but an assurance of eternal life based on Christ’s Cross on which He took away the sin of the world. 
 Faith Is……remembering that, though my way is as dark as night to me, God can see and is guiding me unerringly. 
 Faith Is……doing the right thing regardless of the consequences knowing God will turn the ultimate result into good.
Faith is……a miraculous gift from Jesus Christ that allows us to cry “Abba Father!”
Faith Is……the conviction that The Promisor keeps His promises!
Author Unknown

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Capitalism: A Love Affair

October 6, 2009 in Reviews, religion/politics/corpocrasy | No comments

 

Capitalism: A Love Affair

Last night my wife and I went to see the movie "Capitalism: A Love Affair" by Michael Moore. There was a time in my life many years ago when I would have hated a movie like this. Today, especially, after seeing the tip of the iceberg of corruption that plagues America’s institutions, I think every American should see this film. It’s an eye-opener even though it just scratches the surface of the depth of corruption in America’s institutions, especially in its larger corporations. For the sake of your children and grandchildren, go see this movie and then join the fight.

"You trample on the poor and force him to give you grain. Therefore, though you have built stone mansions, you will not live in them; though you have planted lush vineyards, you will not drink their wine.

For I know how many are your offenses and how great your sins. You oppress the righteous and take bribes and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts. - Amos 5:11,12

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