Damnation, Hellfire, and Computer Programming

So, I wanted to discuss damnation and hellfire a little bit more.

What I am thinking is, and I am not an expert an scripture. But, it is about choice. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve used their free will to CHOOSE to disobey God. They did not choose God.

This was a story that is symbolic of something else, and I am not sure exactly what that is. But to overcome it, humans have to CHOOSE God. So by accepting Jesus into your life, that is choosing God, therefore, overcoming the other choice to go against God.

Hell is something that is very rudimentary. On Earth, while alive, you can be close to God, distant from God, or anywhere in between. When dead, you are either with God or completely separated from God.

Hell is kind of like a whole other dimension. When I think of hell, I think of a game you might play on a really old computer, with really basic graphics and stuff. Because I think of hell as kind of related to computers.

One thing I have never had to do before in computer programming is reference counting. If you have a reference to a variable, you have a connection to it so that you can keep using it. The reference counter counts the number of references to the variable, and when it goes to zero, you can't use it anymore, and the memory space can be reused for something else.

So when you die, and you are not saved, the reference counter goes to zero. Except, you will never cease to exist. You go to hell, and God can't reach you because He has no reference to you.

So it's kind of like being trapped in a really miserable computer game.

I don't try to upset people by talking about hell all this time. I am not intolerant of anyone's beliefs I just had an experience where I became convinced that you needed to accept Jesus to avoid hell.

Thinking With the Mind of God

So I recently had another "whatever the fuck that was" experience. It was actually quite pleasant, when I wasn't getting grief from my parents.

So what I have learned is just to take the beliefs as they come. My beliefs about what is going on are changing. All that matters is that I don't lose faith in myself. Everything will be okay as long as I never stop believing in myself. I just have to be open to the fact that I have a lot of beliefs that are most likely not true. When one gets disproven, accept it and don't let that make myself stop believing in myself.

At this point I don't want to get into the details of what happened. But, basically, I imagined a bunch of shit, then I started arguing with my parents.

More and more frequently, I start thinking with the mind of God. At least, this is how I interpret it. The energy kind of goes up and out of my head and I start laughing about something on Earth that doesn't logically make sense.

Back a couple months ago, when I was thinking with the mind of God, I was thinking about how people missed the point with Jesus, they were just in awe of how great he was.

The point was there is really nothing wrong with comparing yourself to Jesus, what's wrong is hatred.

So I started hearing all these thoughts in my head, people saying mean things and people saying nice things. I felt the vibration of each thought. Mean comments had this nasty unharmonious noisy ring. Nice things had nice energy.

So one of the things was, Jesus was a great guy, but even He wouldn't go to hell. And by hell I mean a hell that is eternal. Jesus is willing to suffer but He wouldn't even go to hell.

But a lot of humans do go to hell. So in a way, those humans were a lot better than Jesus was!

No sentient being would willingly knowingly experience that kind of agony.

So in my room, I was whispering to myself over and over and laughing, "those people were a lot better than Jesus was!"

The major theme of this particular episode was people thinking for themselves. At the hospital, I picked up a Rush Limbaugh book, because I realized I don't know anything about him. I started reading, and I wrote down a quote from him because I thought it was so true. It was something like, "I'm convinced that most people don't really think, though they believe they do."

I had a lot of arguments, and I kept running into the fact that we were talking but not really communicating. So I started really making sure we communicated, but people got mad. They got mad at me for asking them what they meant by things. Why they thought things.

I was writing a lot of facebook statuses when I was arguing, trying to illustrate that the way they were thinking was incorrect.

But the thing I was thinking was, only intelligent people appreciate really intelligent things. So I was thinking that some of the stuff I imagined when I was delusional, it only makes sense to intelligent people.

And other people aren't going to understand stuff that comes from the mind of God.

I imagined that a lot of my facebook statuses were this way. They were only funny to people who are intelligent, and stupid to people who are unintelligent.

God created humans with the capability of thinking for themselves. However, most of them don't. Humans were actually, in a way, made way to stupid and not intelligent enough to understand God. But God didn't fully understand humans when he first made them, and when writing the bible.

One of things I was thinking was that God didn't hate Esau. He just meant he didn't like him as much as Jacob.

My Christian Enlightenment

So I had an enlightenment a month or so ago.

One thing you should know about my enlightenment is that I just tagged on some shit to it about all religions being correct to sound more politically correct.

So I used to think that Christians were kind of stupid. Now I actually think that Christians are way smarter than atheists. Actually it's not a matter of one being smarter than the other.

I didn't understand the idea of getting saved. The thing is, it's not really supposed to make sense to us because we're not God. That's the thing about Christianity, or this brand of Christianity I subscribe to. Part of it is accepting that you don't know fucking everything.

Which is something that atheists refuse to do. They think that they are capable of comprehending the universe. They can't accept that the universe follows a logic that they are incapable of comprehending.

Except that when I reached enlightenment, I did comprehend it. And I remembered how, the only way to get around the hell problem, is to have people accept Jesus.

You realize that God IS NOT all powerful. I don't believe in an all powerful God. My dad told me that I wasn't allowed to believe this. That if I believed in God, He had to be all powerful.

But I don't believe in an all-powerful God. My God can't do something like, say, create a rock so big He Himself cannot lift it. My God can't do that! Well, that doesn't logically make any sense! Yeah, because my God cannot do everything. He can't do things that don't logically make any sense. And saving someone who has not accepted Jesus, or bringing someone back from hell, are things that don't logically make sense to God. Because God follows a higher logic.

People think the idea of hell is funny. You realize, once you have properly had the shit scared out of you, that hell is the scariest concept there is. There is nothing fucking scarier than hell. It's this state of horrible horrible agony that goes on for eternity and never gets any better.

Non-Christians get annoyed by Christians trying to convert them. One thing I have learned is, Christians really aren't trying to be mean when they try to convert you. They aren't trying to be intolerant of your belief system. They seriously just want to save you from the fucking most horrible scariest shit ever.

You realize that God hasn't talked for 2000 years. That's not very long for God. The way humans think is different from the way God thinks. You also realize that there is no way in fucking hell the bible is inerrant. You know why? Because language is so fucking shaky and unreliable. Like, today, people don't even agree amongst themselves what words mean. Think about being translated between languages, and several times into modern-day English. They keep translating the bible because the English language keeps changing. There is no fucking way the bible means exactly the same thing now as it did back when it was written.

So these are my ramblings for today.

Jesus and the Crazy Decision Strings

Yeah, Jesus was perfect, he doesn't have FREE WILL.

The way free will works, it is like a gigantic game of tug-of-war. One decision you make, changes someone else's decision. All our decisions are interconnected by strings.

God doesn't know all decisions that are going to be made beforehand. It's just that one Jesus comes, all the strings come together. Jesus is the place where all the strings come together. That's why Jesus knows things about what people are going to do.

When Jesus came, it was a mistake, because people were so in awe of how great he was, they missed his message.

The Misconception About Hell

So I had this revelation, while I was going through my spiritual experience, about what hell is.

There is this major misconception in this world about hell. People think that God intentionally sends people to hell to punish them. So my revelation was, that God is like a computer programmer. He programs this thing called life. Except, this program has a bug. The bug is that after you die, something really horrible happens, for no real reason. You go into a state of horrible misery for all of eternity. God didn't purposely program it that way. It's like a bug.

So God works around the bug, using kind of a flying buttress approach. He sends Jesus down so that people don't have to go to hell. So the thing is, if you don't accept Jesus, there is really nothing God can do.

I don't want to sound preachy or anything. If you know me, you know I have always been this person who isn't at all religious. Actually, I have always secretly had a religious personality, which I have discovered in recent years. But the thing is, I like to think for myself. And I don't like things that tell you what to think, and I always felt like that's what religion did. But you realize that there is truth to be found in religion.

So anyway, hopefully that clears up the question of why a loving God would do something like damn people to hell. It is my personal belief that God does not damn people to hell. People get sent to hell by accident.

Also, hell isn't a physical place. When you are in hell, you are completely alone. At least, you are not in the company of any other benevolent spirits. There may be evil spirits, so basically you would rather be alone. There isn't any real fire or brimstone. God just used the expression "fire and brimstone" to attach concrete ideas to hell, when hell is actually something more abstract. See, a lot of spiritual concepts are more abstract but God thinks you will understand them better if He explains them in concrete terms.

I actually have no idea what it says in the bible in regards to hell. This was just part of my revelation. I think I need to look into this more.

Personality vs. Awareness

One thing I know from my experiences is that your personality and your awareness are two entirely separate things. Because at times I have felt my personality leave and I was just this being with awareness but no personality and there was something very awkward about it. You don't even know that these things are two separate things until you feel your personality leave.

The way psychics contact dead people, and the way hauntings work, is because that imprint of the person's personality is left behind on Earth. When psychics channel dead people, they call upon the imprint. They can do this, but that doesn't mean that person is okay. Their awareness might still be in hell. Hell is complete separation from God. God is good and He does not wish hell upon anyone. But He is NOT all powerful like people think.

You might not believe me, but listen to me when I say this is not something you take chances with. JUST DO IT. YOU ARE PLAYING WITH FIRE. Get baptized in the name of Jesus or whatever. Just do it to cover your bases.

A Facet of the Icosahedron

There are many things that make me abnormal. One of them is that I have a very odd relationship with religion. I'm not talking about my relationship with God, I am talking about my relationship with religion. These are two separate things to me.

I grew up in an atheistic household. The closest thing to religion or God we had in our lives was that we listened to Christmas songs at Christmas time and we had a mini nativity scene in our Christmas decorations for some reason. It was my mom's, she's not a bible believer, I think it just reminded her of her childhood. I wasn't taught by my parents that God didn't exist, God just really wasn't something that was talked about very much. As I got older, there was more of an anti-religious attitude, at least that I picked up on. Not like we should be intolerant of religious people, just that religion was a bit on the wacky side. Something to be made fun of.

The thing that is odd about me is that most people who grew up like this grow up to be majorly turned off by religion. I'm the exact opposite. I absolutely love religion. I get really excited when I encounter Jehovah's witnesses and I take their pamphlets. I'm not about to convert, but I take their pamphlets. I love the idea of being righteous or attempting to be righteous. I love the idea of certain things being holy. I like the idea of praying and humbling yourself before a higher power. Of having faith in a higher power to protect you and help you through times of darkness. I like the idea of being a servant of God and doing God's work. I like the idea of having a sacred text with sacred laws.

Whenever I see positive references to religion in peoples' facebook statuses, I almost always like them.

But I don't think that the bible, or any other single religion on Earth, is true. At least not literally true. I kind of think it's like this - the bible is a single facet of the icosahedron that is truth. For those who don't know, and icosahedron is a twenty sided geometric object.

I don't really believe that Jesus died for our sins. But I like Jesus. I have him as one of my inspirational people on facebook. I will make references to Jesus in conversations. Like the other day, I was talking about how I have done dangerous things in the past and I was protected, perhaps by a higher power, but I wouldn't count on that higher power to protect me again. Because it was like when Jesus was tempted by Satan, and Satan told Jesus to jump off a cliff or something and God would save him and Jesus said, "do not tempt the Lord thy God." Or something like that.

Anyway, so I don't know if this is a result of having delusions of a religious nature or if it was something that was present in me before that.

I may revisit this topic again later.

Edit: So I posted this and I was re-reading it before I shared it on facebook. In one place instead of writing "Jesus" I wrote "me." Interesting.

The Messiah Delusion and Narcissism: They Don't Go Hand in Hand

So, it has recently come to my attention that some people associate believing you are the second coming of Christ with narcissism. I don't know what it's like for other people, but I know for me it wasn't about narcissism. Yes, I believed I was someone extremely important and yes, I believed I was on a divine mission. Big deal. What's wrong with believing you are on a divine mission? What I'm trying to say is I believed these things, but I didn't believe I was infallible or sinless.

I realized when this came to my attention that this would be good topic for an article I submit to magazines, not a blog. So I started writing that. Then, I realized I could both write a blog about it and an article, as long as the two things were different. So that's what I'm doing!

One of the things that made it possible for me to believe that I was Jesus/God but I wasn't perfect because one of the ideas behind my delusions was that God isn't infallible after all. The whole thing about God being infallible was a lie.

The moment when I was figuring out my delusions and I figured out the thing about Jesus, it really scared me. No, I did not want to be Jesus. But I talk about this in my book. For awhile I was in denial about it, telling myself I wasn't really Jesus, I was just the one who happened to fall at the center of this whole thing.

It's not that there is no narcissistic element at all to it, because when you go around believing you are the messiah for an extended period of time you start to feel pretty special. And the thing that made it believable is that for as long as I can remember, especially when I was really young, I had a sense of being someone exceptional. It's not a feeling I had control over. That's just how I felt. So that's what made the Jesus thing believable.

One of the many conflicts in my book is me trying to figure out why someone not all that great such as myself would be the second coming of Christ.  It was confusing. Then there's also the knowledge that once my messiah-ship (that's probably not a word) is made public, I will never be able to live up to peoples' expectations of how the second coming of Christ is supposed to act. It's a great responsibility, being the second coming of Christ. I didn't tell my parents that I thought I was the messiah because I knew that made me sound crazy, but I would always say to them, "if you knew what it really was, you would wish it was just a mental illness." Because I knew that living a life as the second coming of Christ would be much harder than any mental illness, probably. It could be exciting, it could be thrilling, but it would also be terrible at the same time. Grand but terrible. I couldn't even really imagine what it would be like. I wondered if all this doctor crap even compared to the shit I would experience as the second coming of Christ.

There was never any desire to be worshipped. The thought of people worshipping me scared me and made me feel really uncomfortable.

When my delusions were disproven, I got the idea I could write a book about it. That was a great thing, because I could be famous and not be the second coming of Christ!

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, believing you are Jesus feels kind of cool, but at the same time it's pretty freaking scary.

Bible Study

So yesterday I went to bible study again, as it was Thursday. Sitting there, listening to them talk, I was struck by thoughts of what people I know would think if they were there listening to them. I think the same way my friends do, for the most part, but for some reason I let the weirdness of this situation flow right past me.

So, in case you don't already know, I was raised in a liberal family where God was absent. My parents didn't stress the non-existence of God, it just wasn't really a subject that was discussed. Yet, as I got older, I began to realize the impact of Christianity on this country and conservative Christians. I remember closely following the 2004 election (I remember the 2000 election too and being pro-Gore but not really understanding why Bush was so bad). By the year 2004, it became clear that this president was no good. At least, I thought it was. Yet, during the 2004 election the gay marriage issue was hot, and it got the conservative Christians out to the the poles because boy they didn't want gays to marry, and while they were there they voted for Bush, tipping the election in Bush's favor. That's how I saw it. And it pissed me off.

Then in 2006 I became delusional, with delusions based on Christianity, in particular that I was the second coming. I had to endure the horror of being dragged to doctors and hospitals, while firmly maintaining the belief that I was not delusional. To me, I was like someone who was being persecuted for their religious convictions. That's what it felt like to me.

My beliefs could be shaken but they would not go away. I sat at home and read the bible. The New Testament, which I had never read before. I looked at pictures of Terri Schiavo protesters online, read about the outrage that these conservative Christians felt about Terri's feeding tube being pulled out, and I laughed. These people had it so wrong.

I don't call myself Christian. That would scare the people at my bible study, because even though I sort of incorporate Jesus' teachings into my own life (without even realizing it usually), I'm not "saved." But what I'm trying to say is, Christianity has become huge in my life, for whatever reason. Not because I favor Christianity over all other religions, but because it's the dominant religion in the United States. And it's not that I favor the United States over all other countries, but because it's where I live. And I feel this desire to do something to change the country, because Christianity in the United States isn't working, in my opinion.

There's something I do when I'm at bible study. Most of the time, I don't sit there and think, "I'm undercover as a Christian." I convince myself I actually am Christian, because I accept most of Jesus' teachings. But the thing is, I haven't been "saved." I think for myself. I value thinking for myself. And I don't think that God would put us on Earth, and then either save us or damn us to hell, based on whether or not we accept a particular story, in which the truthiness of this particular story is extremely questionable. We have the God-given gift to think, to question, to decide for ourselves, and we are doing God a disservice by refusing to use this gift and submit to blind faith. And because this is the way I think, if the people I go to bible study knew this, they would be disturbed and pray for me to change, for me to see "the light," for me to be "saved," and accept that this is God's word and everything the bible says is absolutely literally true and not to question anything that God says or does.

And I like the people at bible study, because what I value is acceptance of all different sorts of people, even though I think some of the things they say are sort of strange. I like the pastor there a lot. So this realization disturbs me.

Lost in the Details

So one day awhile ago I was watching The Big Bang Theory with my dad. In the episode we were watching, Sheldon feels betrayed by Leonard and retaliates by giving him 50 pieces of silverware. I was confused. I asked my dad what was significant about 50 pieces of silverware. My dad, who is an atheist but was forced to attend Sunday School as a kid, told me that Judas received 50 pieces of silver for betraying Jesus. I said, "I read the bible and I didn't get that. How did you know that? Why is the 50 pieces of silver so important?" My dad said that's just the sort of thing they drill into you in Sunday School, the pointless random details.

So anyway, earlier I was thinking about my previous delusions, because I was editing my book. It seems like no one who reads my book understands it. Sure a lot of people like my book, but they say things that imply they don't understand it. So I was going back and clarifying, revising the part where I explain my delusions and trying to make everything as clear as possible, explaining both the important meanings behind things and the more subtle meanings.

Some people might wonder why I am still so focused on my delusions. What I came up with when I was delusional was actually kind of amazing. It's very clever and it's an extremely powerful story, with good underlying themes and messages. My theory is that people don't understand because they get caught up in the details. I'd like to say that it's just over their heads and they don't understand because they aren't smart enough, but really I haven't done a good enough job explaining. But I am done with explaining my delusions anywhere apart from in my book.

It's kind of similar to how people are about Jesus. It's not about the miracles and supernatural details. Jesus wasn't a great man because he performed miracles. I'm not sure he did perform miracles, but I'm not debating that now, people can believe what they want to believe. People get lost in the details and forget that Jesus preached love, forgiveness, not judging others, and living a spiritual life as opposed to a material life. These are the things that are important. These are the only things that are important.

They're Called Drugs

Sometimes I wonder what it's like to be other people. What it's like to NOT turn 19 and become delusional. I mean, it would be wrong to assume that other people haven't had events happen to them that rocked their world. I wonder what it would be like if it were something normal like a loved one dying or something. I don't even know what that's like. I've never had someone I was really close to die.

So, for the most part, I don't even care anymore that other people don't understand. Because, whatever, the future is coming. I've never even explained certain things to them, because there are certain things I don't like saying out loud.

People come up with the most asinine examples of why there is something wrong with me. My sister mentioned that when I was a teenager I didn't want to leave the house. They're called drugs, Kristen. You take Adderall and you aren't that hard to entertain. You can just sit there and think about things and be marvelously entertained. The drugs used to make me so high. Now they only change my mood slightly.

And then my mom talks about how when I was a teenager I had an eating disorder. They're called drugs, Beev. Mostly anyone who has ever taken Adderall knows that at least when you first start taking it, not only does it suppress any feelings of hunger, but your desire for food completely vanishes, and the idea of food is disgusting. And it raises your metabolism, so the pounds start coming off. I don't have the personality type to be anorexic. Hunger drives me crazy.

But I've realized that I can't be a hypocrite and not practice what I preach, which is love and forgiveness. Yes, I'm like Jesus in a way. Is it okay to compare yourself to Jesus? Someone told me it was once so I believe that person. Of course, I used to believe I was Jesus.

Jesus and Victimization

I love that moment when I’m struck by inspiration.

Today I would like to talk about Jesus. One time my roommate told me that since she grew up Catholic, she had Christianity ingrained in her, or something along those lines. I told her that I had Christianity ingrained in me too. No, I wasn’t raised Christian, or any other religion fof that matter. But because the story of Jesus is a timeless tale that enjoys ingraining itself in people.

The story of Jesus’ death and rise back to life is the timeless part. So here we have this guy who is completely innocent in every respect of the word. He is ridiculed and murdered gruesomely. Then he rises again, and boy does he show those fuckers.

It’s a nice story for people who feel like the victim, especially those who are the target of ridicule. They see themselves as innocent. The innocent one is the one who has to suffer. This is a theme that is powerful to people. That’s why the story of Jesus ingrains itself in people. Not because it’s a true story. But because it has literary power.

Feeling victimized is a sign of immaturity. People haven’t reached maturity unless they can see the faults in themselves. Jesus had no faults. Jesus could not see the faults in himself. Therefore, Jesus was immature.

Thank you for your time.

Faith: I Figured it Out

So I go to a bible study every Tuesday. I find these people at this bible study very interesting. I go every single Tuesday, and because of this I am praised by them for my "great faith." Of course, they don't know that I actually don't believe in faith. Though, I'm pretty sure I know what would happen if I told them what I really believe. They would still welcome me there, but the whole bible study would take on an exceptionally preachy tone, because they would be trying to "save" me.

The whole idea of faith is something I never really thought about until certain delusional things happened to me. I realized there is nothing really good about having faith. But I think I may have figured it out yesterday. In order to be Christian, you have to believe that your thinking processes, logic, and judgment is worth absolutely nothing, compared to that of God. There is no way us mere humans can understand God.

Take the whole idea of Jesus dying for our sins. Why did that have to happen? I mean God created us, didn't He know we were going to sin? It seems like it sort of caught Him off guard. I think He set Adam and Eve up. But anyway, my understanding is, that act in the Garden of Eden set humans up for a tendency towards sin.

But why? Why did God design it that way? It seems to me that if God were truly the only god, He would have designed all the rules of the universe. Are there some things that are out of His control? Is there some other god above him? No, the bible says that this god is the only god. It seems to me that God doesn't have as much power as He claims to have. Someone is lying here.

And then for some reason, you have to be sinless to get into heaven. Unless, of course, someone sinless dies for your sins, and then you believe in that person. Same thing I said before, if God truly makes the rules, He could have designed it any way He wanted to.

It seems to me that is foolish to believe everything you hear. Especially when you hear stuff that doesn't make any sense, like the stuff I just mentioned. But if you don't believe this particular far-out crazy story, you are damned for all eternity because you don't have faith. This makes no sense to me. But, I am merely human. All this, of course, makes sense to God. And I should just accept that my own thoughts are worth nothing, any conclusion I come to using my own judgment is probably wrong, and that my brain isn't worth a damn thing. So that's where faith comes in.

The End.

Stupid Western Culture

Sometimes if I think too much about the culture we live in, the inconsistencies drive me crazy.

So I live in conservative Christian north Idaho. I own a bible. I read my bible, usually nightly. I attend a two and a half hour bible study on Tuesday nights, and church most Sundays. According to facebook I'm a born-again deist. I change my beliefs from time to time, and whenever I change them I'm a "born again" something or other.

I don't know if that's even relevant, but the point is I listen. I see value in acquiring information and then using my power of reason to reason my way through it, to decide what I believe and what I don't believe.

Trouble is, I'm not allowed to come to my own conclusions about things, unless they are consistent with other peoples' conclusions. If they don't match up, I am labeled unfit to make my own decisions.

It's because of the culture we live in, stupid materialistic western culture, that thinks that everything is physical and chemical.

Anyway, what got me started on this was that the night before last I had a bad dream about malls. It may have been about malls because I died in a mall in a previous life. This is a subject I won't get into. Anyway, it felt as if my mind were under attack. I was wondering about this, and looked up "psychic attacks" on the internet. I came across some interesting pages. I can relate to the symptoms of being influenced by a spirit. I can relate to the feeling of being "drained." It's not a feeling of being hungry, tired, or even depressed, but just like the life is sucked out of you. It's not like you're coming off a drug either, I know what that feels like. When I was feeling "drained," I felt this other person inside of me and I was worried that they were going to take me over completely. I was scared.

It's culturally accepted to believe in the bible. In the bible, Jesus drives demons out of people. But today, that kind of stuff doesn't happen. Or maybe I'm getting two different cultures mixed up. There's Christian culture and then there's atheistic culture.

My mom talks to and trusts psychics. The same psychic she trusts told me that my "mental illness" wasn't just a mental illness, it was a psychic thing, but that my brain was adding to it too. She also said that it's not just in my head that a spirit is messing with me, there is (or was) one pestering me. But my mom likes to talk to psychics to contact the dead relatives. I read on the website yesterday that dead people aren't really a good source of information because they don't necessarily have any more information than they did while they were alive.

At any rate, I don't even know why I'm posting this, as it may make certain people think that I am unfit to make my own decisions.

The Inexplicable Need to Study the Bible

I don't even know where to start because there have been so many things on my mind lately: family-wise, relationship-wise, and book-wise. I listed those in order of heaviness, starting with least heavy to most heavy. So first and foremost comes my book, and what comes with it. And right now, with it comes an inexplicable need to study the bible.

So I got in a discussion with an unnamed person the other day. This unnamed person told me that she doesn't vote or follow politics because it is part of her philosophy that goes back to when she was a kid, and her parents raised her on Jesus' teachings, one of them being "be no part of the world." So apparently, they interpreted this to mean be no part of politics and stay completely out of all of those matters. Now I'm no expert on Jesus' message but I have a fair amount of knowledge on the subject, and I was pretty sure that Jesus wouldn't say that. So I got out my handy-dandy bible and told her to show me where he said that. She couldn't find it, and ended up looking it up online. The passage was in John, and she gave me the line number so I could read it, and it said something like "they are not part of the world, as I am not part of this world." Looking at this line in context, I told her that what Jesus was probably trying to say was that he is not a part of this world because he is God. This unnamed person looked at it, and agreed that that was probably what Jesus meant after all. So that settled that.

But anyway, the feeling that I needed to study the bible actually started before that, and it came out of nowhere. So right now I have a New International Version, which is an easy to understand translation. I've decided that I will read and re-read and re-read it, focusing on the New Testament, mainly the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Then I will get as many other translations as I can find, and read them, focusing on those same four books, comparing and contrasting differences, until I know what Jesus said backwards and forwards. This is what I will do.

At least, this is what I think I might do, between working on getting published, doing classwork, maintaining a social life, watching the O'Reilly factor (if I get cable), and whatever other obligations I might have.

Adventures in Dreamland

My sleep was strange last night.

In my first dream, I was deciphering something someone wrote about me on a message board (this so reminds me of high school, those days seem so far away now). They mentioned me, referring to me by my last name. It was a person I know in real life, but I won't say who. I was trying to figure out why they mentioned me, when without me really noticing, my last name changed into the word "right," like that was suddenly my name. Right, as in the opposite of wrong. Then I woke up, and thought about the dream, and fell back asleep.

This part was bad. I was naked in my room at home, and there was something in front of the door but the door was still open. I was trying to close the door. I turned on my computer but when I did it automatically loaded Starcraft, and I didn't want to play Starcraft. Actually, what I wanted to do was decipher the comment the person left on the message board some more. But this was supposed to be back in the day before everything was wireless, and when I looked at the wires hooked into the wall I noticed that the internet wasn't even plugged in, and the cords were all messed up and the wrong things were plugged into the wrong places. Other stuff was happening, that's all I remember though, and it formed a vicious cycle until I decided I wanted to exit this dream, so I held my breath. I woke up as I inhaled.

I fell back asleep again, but this time I didn't know it was a dream. There was a psychic fair going on. I was thinking about how the spirits were causing this madness and I wanted to ask the psychics about my issues. Talking to the psychics was free. I walked up to a psychic, it was a man. I didn't tell him what my issues were, I just asked about my problems, trying to be very vague. He told me they were caused by spirits. In the dream I was impressed that he knew this. The spirits were using me, creating issues in my life and feeding off the emotional energy they created in me. I asked how to stop this madness. He said I needed to accept Jesus Christ as my savior. Actually, at this point I think there were a bunch of psychics surrounding me all telling me this. I asked if there was any other way, this is where my memory fails me but I think the answer was no.

Anyway, I'm not sure about this dream. I'm not sure what the problems in the one part of my dream were supposed to represent in my waking life.