This website has been online for over eleven years. I have used it to share my faith and strongly encourage people to believe Christ and the Bible. I have expressed my personal religious beliefs very publicly. But my beliefs have changed a lot in the last couple of years, so it is time to discuss why I came to be a Christian.
Religious beliefs are largely determined by the mere chance event of where you were born. Folks tend to adopt the dominant religion of the region of their birth unless their immediate family follows a different tradition. But neither geography nor family fully determines religious belief. Temperament and life experience play important roles. Not everyone is satisfied with their inherited religion, while others simply have no interest in the big question of “what it’s all about.” Some are looking for certainty in this disturbingly chaotic world. Religion gives answers, like a parent telling a child “everything will be alright.” Others are catapulted into a search for meaning by the traumas of life. Siddhartha, who became the Buddha, left his sheltered home to begin his famous quest for enlightenment after encountering suffering, disease, and death. Though I can’t claim to have achieved his goal, my motivations were largely the same.
I was born into a traditional Roman Catholic family but was raised by an atheist father. He encouraged me to think freely and question everything. Nothing was off limits for discussion. This influenced me a lot, but other forces came into play. His mother and siblings were active in the church and raised their children in it. He was the “black sheep” of the family. I bonded strongly with his mother because she helped raise me and my two sisters for about three years after our parents divorced in 1960 when I was still an infant. I didn’t see my mother again until I was eleven. Grandma played the role of “mom” though one of my earliest memories is her reprimanding me for calling her that. “I’m not your mother, I’m your grandmother” she said. “What’s that?” I asked. She said I’d understand when I was older.
That’s me on Dad’s shoulders
Dad remarried in 1963. He met my step-mother Janet at the Mountaineer’s club. We often went camping as a family. That’s about all they had in common. Janet became an evangelical Christian a few years later and took us to church though my father refused to go with us. I was put in the Sunday school class and was told that Jesus would come to me if I prayed. So I went to my room when we got home, sat on my bed and asked Jesus to come. I actually thought he was supposed to appear with his famous white robe and a halo. Nothing happened, of course, so I dismissed the whole thing as false. This is my earliest religious memory. Dad and Janet were divorced when I was ten.
Though Jesus had failed to appear at my request, something about Christianity held my interest. For a while I would bring home Christian books from the library which evoked a fair amount of ribbing from my two older sisters who have remained skeptical of religion their whole lives. When I was twelve, I often would ride my bicycle to Grandma’s after my Sunday morning paper route and we would go to church together and then play Scrabble. I think Grandma chose Scrabble because she wanted to encourage my linguistic skills. When I was six I used a little black crayon to write a story about a little black crayon that was calling for help because it was getting used up by writing a story. Grandma read it and said “You’re going to be a writer.” I really loved my Grandma. She understood me.
Life was pretty comfortable and my childhood memories are pretty sunny until Monday, April 8th, 1974. I was fourteen years old. My father had begun smoking pot and taking LSD about a year earlier. He shared both with me. I loved those drugs. I thought he was the coolest dad ever. Then at about 11:00 PM on April 8th I was in bed and heard Dad call me from downstairs. I went down and asked what he wanted. He was putting on his shirt. I asked why, and he said “There’s about a 94% chance I’m not going to make it through the night.” Dumbfounded, I asked why. He said “I’m tired of the whole rat race” and “It’s not working out with the only woman I ever loved.” I answered “But I love you!”. He smirked, and said “That’s not enough.” He got up and left. That’s the last time I saw him. My sisters were out with friends, so I called one of his coworkers from the University of Washington. They were in animal research and had a lot of sodium pentobarbitol on hand to euthanize their subjects. His friend thought he might go there to get the drug and said she would call the campus police to be on the lookout for him. Unfortunately, they missed him. The police arrived at about 4:00 AM to inform us that they found him dead in his car. The police report said they found an empty bottle of sodium pentobarbital about a block away from the scene. There are no words to describe what I felt that night, and what haunted me for years afterwards. I now had intimate knowledge of betrayal and guilt. Betrayed by my only parent, left alone with no one to care for me, and living with an black abyss of guilt for letting it happen. Though I knew, in an intellectual sense, that I was not guilty, that’s not how it felt. If anyone was primed for religion, it was me.
So there I was, a confused, distraught, guilt-ridden, drug using teenager with no responsible adult to help me find my way in life. Uncle Jim, my thirty-eight year old alcoholic uncle who was still living at home with his mother, came to live in our house and did his best to care for the son of his dead brother, but that didn’t work out so well. So I was on my own, in a desperate search for someone to help pull out the knife my father had planted so deeply in my back.
My first religion wasn’t really a religion at all. It was just a ridiculous cult started by conman L. Ron Hubbard, famous for little else but writing pulp science fiction. I was walking down the street in Seattle, Washington in 1977 when a Scientologist approached and asked, “Do you want to take a Free Personality Test?”. I said “Sure” since I was always looking for answers for my troubled soul. The test was designed to find what Scientologists call a person’s “ruin” – the pain in their life that makes them susceptible to religion. They have a prescribed “patter” which instructs them to say things like “Scientology can help you with that” for any personal problem they discover. If someone is resistant to their ploy the are told to “cave them into their ruin” – that is, make them feel like shit. They found my “ruin” in short order and confidently stated that Scientology was the answer. So I signed up and was quickly sucked into the cult. Within a month I was living with other cult members and had forgotten what few friends I had had outside the group. Hubbard devised some wickedly effective techniques to keep people trapped. First, you learn an entirely new language of invented jargon like mest, thetan, reactive mind, and mu which can only be understood by other cult members. They strongly discourage any relationship with non-members which they deride as “wogs.” And most effective of all, Hubbard invented an “Ethics Scale” that puts the condition of “Doubt” near the bottom between “Liability” and “Enemy.” This means that anyone entertaining any doubt about the cult is one step away from being branded an enemy, and enemies were not treated well. Enemies and critics of Scientology are called a “suppressive person” against whom the Fair Game Policy could be applied. The Policy, written by Hubbard himself, states that anyone deemed an “Enemy” of Scientology “May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” All of this is designed to stop people from asking questions or thinking critically. And worse, it is taught that the only reason a person reaches the condition of “Doubt” is because they have committed sins against the group. It is a very effective institutionalized form of mind-control. Such methods are the sin qua non of most religions and all cults. Given my intellectual temperament coupled with the absurdity of Scientology and its complete ineffectiveness to meet its claims, it is no surprise that I spent a lot of time with the Ethics Officer repenting of my “Doubt.” This was a constantly recurring trauma because the only way to rise out of the Condition of Doubt is to admit the sins that supposedly caused you to doubt and to ask each member of your local cult if you may rejoin. It is designed to humiliate and make people feel guilty for asking questions, for the very act of thinking.
After nearly two years in the cult, I was so thoroughly brainwashed that I joined the Sea Org and signed their notorious Billion Year Contract. I was then shipped down to the headquarters in Clearwater, Florida. But this turned to my benefit because the exalted claims about the super beings (Operating Thetans) at the Sea Org were so obviously contradicted by the reality I saw when I got there. And I was away from all the cult members that I knew personally so they had no influence on me. I began to take long walks alone. I became very reflective and began to admit the truth to myself. I stayed up late listening to popular music that reminded me of the freedom I once had. I finally decided it was time to “blow” (the technical Scientology term for leaving without permission). It was very difficult. My heart was racing when I snuck out the back door, knowing that if they caught me I would lose my resolve. After two years of seeing the world as made up of “wogs” and Scientologists, it seemed to be a very unfriendly and threatening place. And no one spoke the jargon I had been babbling for two years. I was on my own again. I felt very isolated. And worse, I felt like I was risking my soul since Scientology was the only way to be free from the engrams of my reactive mind that would keep me trapped forever if I left. What a villainous system L. Ron Hubbard invented! It took me years to cleanse my mind of that crap.
I called my mom, who I had met only once, and she bought me a plane ticket to Seattle. I went to stay with Uncle Jim who now was living in a sixteen foot trailer on an empty lot by the Sammamish river we called the “Swamp.” He was drunk nearly every day. We had no electricity and just a yard tap for water. I was completely broke and my mind remained very confused after Scientology and my dad’s suicide. Jim made sure I had food, a little pocket money, and a place to sleep. He was a collector of junk. We joked about opening a store called “Unk and Junk.” He was very intelligent and was always a reader so I had plenty of interesting books available. But I had no electric light, so I would often sit under a lamp by the Cottage Inn cafe to read in the evening. That’s where John, one of “God’s hound dogs,” found me and offered me a hamburger. While scarfing down the rare delicacy, he prodded me to find my “ruin” – the thing that would make me open to Christ. For some mysterious reason, I thought I was too smart for Christianity and told him so. He made my salvation his project and began to visit me frequently at the “Swamp.” He would take me to youth group meetings though I did not profess belief. We argued a lot. He tried to give me logical reasons, but his logic sucked and I knew he would never convince me that way. But everything changed when he took us to a three day “Praise The Lord” (PTL) festival in Vancouver, Washington. The first day felt very strange. Everyone was exuberantly proclaiming how God had told them this and God had told them that. Everyone was smiling – filled to the brim with the “joy of the Lord.” There were preachers and healers, hours of praise and worship, and special guests like Mike Warnke who told stories about having been a Satanic High Priest (he’s since been debunked as a rank liar). All the happy faces made me feel sad. John kept trying to get me to pray, but I just wasn’t interested because I didn’t believe. On the second day, things changed. Here is how I described it a few years ago when I was still a Christian (highlights in the original):
Given my personal history, it’s hard to imagine a more pertinent verse. I felt that God himself had found my “ruin” and Jesus was the answer. I went and found John and told him what happened. He was thrilled, of course. I slept outside and when I awoke the next morning I opened my eyes to a beautiful blue sky and my first thought was “JESUS!”. I exulted in my new found faith and began reading the Bible every day. I was always carrying it with me no matter where I went. Then one day I was sitting at the Cottage Inn (inside for a change), reading my Bible and thinking how wonderful and amazing it was to have the very Word of God … until my eyes fell upon this passage:
I immediately recognized that nothing like that actually happened. I knew that it wasn’t true and I felt my faith pop like a bubble. Just like that. I went to talk to a woman who ran a Christian bookstore in my neighborhood. I told her of my confusion and she had no answer. She decided that the problem wasn’t with the Bible, but with me. I had a “demon of doubt” she said, and she proceeded to try to cast it out. I told her it felt like she was trying to cast me out. That didn’t go over well. There was nothing she could do to help. I left despondent, and wondering about faith and doubt and what I experienced in Scientology.
I continued to think of myself as Christian for about another six months. I began attending a community college and my faith waned the more I learned about science, particularly evolution. Then I met a very liberal young woman who had never had anything to do with Christianity and I soon forgot I’d ever been a believer. I followed her to Washington State University and began my degrees in Mathematics and Physics. The more I learned, the less I believed in any religion. I had a brief “flare up” of faith in Christ when I became close friends with a brilliant Christian man who was working on the same two degrees as I, but it didn’t last long. I then met an East Indian woman who coerced me into marriage with sex mixed with threats of suicide. She was a Muslim so I tried that faith on for a while but it didn’t fit at all. There was nothing compelling in it, and it certainly didn’t offer any solution to the pain still aching my soul. The marriage lasted three years, during which I completed my two degrees and began working on a Ph.D. in Quantum Physics. I finished all my prerequisites and aced the preliminary exam, but my soul began to ache more and more and I couldn’t finish my dissertation. I quit school in 1987 and went to hang out with Uncle Jim again. We spent six weeks in a cabin in the Cascade mountains. I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. Then I had an inspiration. I got a bicycle and rode twelve hundred miles down the coast to California! I thought of the trip as a “vision quest.” It was one of the best things I’ve ever done. The days were peaceful and meditative. The scenery amazing, the air fresh with ocean breeze and the scent of the towering Redwoods. Every day was new and everywhere I went I met friendly people who took me in, gave me a place to shower and sleep. The trip was the best therapy I’ve could have imagined. I wrote every day in my diary trying to work out all the kinks in my mind.
I returned to Seattle and didn’t know what to do next when I met an old friend who told me there would be a Gathering of the Rainbow Family of Living Light in Texas. It was an amazing experience. Imagine 5000 semi-clad hippies dancing and singing in the woods. Everyone called each other brother and sister. We all shared food, laughter, and friendship. The love was palpable. Everyone was into some variety of spirituality, most of it would be classed as “New Age” or “Eastern” though Christ was held in very high esteem by many. It was a “hippie religion” if you will. Symbols from all religions were freely adopted. The Family spoke of bringing the New Jerusalem to earth, and the conventional world was called “Babylon.” I felt I had finally found my own tribe. I wanted to stay forever, but the Gathering lasted only a week. My ride left before I was ready to go, so I ended up hitchhiking back to the coast. I landed in Santa Cruz and found the town teaming with Rainbow Family who had come for the Grateful Dead show. I met a man who called himself Pan. He had a staff with Micky Mouse on a crucifix, smiling and waving. He gave me a tab of LSD and a copy of his “Theory of Everything” which he titled “A Damned Good Guess.” I met a woman who was into the Tarot and we became fast friends. She flew in from Connecticut for the show. She had a vial of liquid LSD. We wanted to trip together but were waiting for the right day. I spent the night on her floor, and when we awoke in the morning, she opened her sliding door and let in the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” We thought that auspicious. We split all the acid and sat on a park bench above the ocean below a perfect blue sky. The heavens opened and we shared visions of God (to borrow a metaphor from Ezekiel 1:1). That’s why LSD is called an “entheogen” – it evokes a direct experience of God within. The vision spanned the universe and all the world’s religions and I saw they were one. This became a new goal for me, to find and express the unity underlying all the world’s religions and reality. I had become a mystic.
My mystic quest soon led to a serious study of all esoteric fields. I was particularly interested in the I Ching, Tarot, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and Hebrew gematria (word/number associations). This inevitably led me back to the Bible, the fountainhead of the Western esoteric spiritual tradition. But at that time I was only interested in the Hebrew Old Testament because that’s what most of the books were talking about and I knew nothing of Greek gematria. Soon after beginning my studies in earnest, I had a series of profound dreams which took years to decode and ultimately led me back to faith in Christ. The central dream was very simple. I was in a semi-lucid state, floating in blank space. A woman appeared and said “Are you looking for Dumbo? 12 x 44.” I awoke and wrote the dream down. After a couple years of study, I became convinced that the essential message of the dream says “Jesus Christ is Lord” and “By His Blood you are saved.” I explain how I came to these conclusions in my post called Looking for Dumbo.
I had many experiences which drew me back to faith in Christ. I was by a river one night, practicing ritual magick which is supposed to enable a person to cause things to happen by the power of will. I thought it would be cool if I could cause a fish to jump out of the water. I tried for about fifteen minutes and finally gave up, someone despondent. I said to myself “I don’t know anything.” Then I glanced down and saw my Bible. I picked it up, held it to the sky, and said “One thing I know, this book is holy.” And a fish jumped, right at that moment! It felt like a direct acknowledgement of what I had said.
Much of my study in those years was done in my favorite dive, the Blue Moon Tavern in Seattle. On a typical night you would see me with a calculator, a notebook, Bible, and a beer. That’s where Mike, a Christian who understood the spiritual value of LSD, found me. He asked if we could go to my place, drop acid, and study the Bible. I thought it was a great idea even though I wasn’t into the New Testament. It was a transformative night that re-awoke my faith in Christ. Mike read a verse about the Holy Spirit and when I heard the words a blindingly bright phosphorescent white light – unlike anything you could see with your natural eyes – began to emerge from my chest with wings expanding like a dove that filled the universe. I had visions of how the everything was created by the Word. I had visions of rabbis dancing with joy as they came to knowledge of Christ. A little later I randomly opened my Bible to the fourth chapter of Hebrews and felt something tugging my eye, compelling me to look at verse 12 and to make a connection with the verse number:
About a year later I discovered the Greek text of this verse has an intricate, self-reflective alphanumeric design which I called the Logos Holograph. The design is based on the prime numbers 73 and 373 which are the values of the Hebrew word for Wisdom (Hokmah = 73) and the Greek word for Word (Logos = 373). The verse number, 412, is the value of the name of the second Hebrew letter, Bet, which means “house” and which symbolizes the “Word” as a container of ideas. The number 73 is a centered hexagonal star number (Star of David) which figures prominently in the Creation Holograph (the alphanumeric structure of Genesis 1:1) and the number 373 is a fractal variation of that pattern (a Koch star) which I called the Logos Star. All of this is explained in the Gematria Reference where you can view the Gallery of Biblical Holographs.
I had only one fear as I felt the knowledge of Christ awaken within my soul. I feared I might become a fundamentalist like Jerry Falwell. And my fears were sadly realized as my studies led me to an ever increasing certainty that the Bible was the Word of God. This was aggravated by the fact that the only people who showed any interest in my studies were themselves fundamentalists. I was pushed over the top by my discovery of the Bible Wheel in 1995 which fully convinced me that I had objectively demonstrable and incontrovertible evidence that the Bible was the “Word of God.” But I didn’t fall into the typical fundamentalist error of claiming it was “inerrant and infallible” because I knew that was not the case. Knowledge of the Bible Wheel allowed me to hold the Bible with a “light hand” – I didn’t feel I needed to have answers for every little problem because the overall design, which required every book to work, proved that the Bible as a whole was designed by God. This is why I was able to ignore all the problems that now convince me that the Bible is not the Word of God (in the sense used by most Christians). Everything I’ve learned, all the evidence of the Holographs and the Bible Wheel remains valid as far as I know. Only my interpretation has changed. I’m now mystified by how such patterns could appear in the Bible because I can’t attribute them to the God describe in it’s pages! How’s that for a paradox?
This is why – or rather how – I became a Christian. I didn’t “choose” it at all. It felt more like waking up and realizing what I was. Knowledge of Christ felt innate to my soul. It was the joy of my life for well over a decade. It was not something I could choose to take or leave. I used to say I felt like a pot of dirt in which God planted a seed, and it was the seed that sprouted. I had nothing to do with it really. And I feel the same way now that I reject the Christian faith. It’s not really a choice – it’s more of a realization. A person cannot choose what to believe. We believe what we believe for a complex set of reasons, most of which are well beyond our own conscious control.
Hi Richard:
As a person who has never done drugs such as LSD and having a background in Taoism as well as martial arts, I find this post of yours and how your life led you down a certain path most amazing. I respect your openess and honesty in telling your life story as it were. Tragedy and triumph always close at hand. Made me realize how lucky I have been to have experienced a life which could only be described as beyond remarkable. I am sure that my stumbling across your website is more than mere coinscidence.
Keep writing. Keep sharing! I have been moved beyond words…
Namaste
Mystykal
Question Richard: Is your rejection of Christianity (as well as other religions I assume) or do you view it as your rejecting God?
If God started it then GOD WILL FINISH IT…you just ain’t figured it out yet and it freaks your mind out…the answer is coming…my oh my your impatience is astounding. If you had the ability to cure cancer would you share it? If you shared it, would your share it with a murderer who had cancer, and who killed a baby by cutting it to death and is about to be executed anyway?
Hey there Go Joe,
“If God started it” is the question we must start with. Is there any reason we should think there is a God in the first place?
And why do you say that my “impatience is astounding”? I have not come to any rash decisions. I’ve thought about these things for decades. If I waited any longer, I’d die before getting any answer.
It seems you have the standard Christian belief that it is wrong to think or to really use our judgment if it contradicts Christian dogmas. That is not the path to freedom or truth.
I don’t understand your question about not curing their cancer if someone is bad.
I would never reject God since that is only possible if God exists, and if God exists then only a fool would reject God.
I reject all the gods that have been made in the image of man, that go about like an “Agent” playing bit parts in the Cosmic Drama (like arbitrarily intervening in human affairs in entirely irrational and inconsistent and inscrutable and UNJUST and UNTRUSTWORTHY ways).
That is a deep story. Very interesting to read. Thanks for sharing.
I have a few questions about your thoughts on drugs:
→Do you believe you needed the drugs to connect with God? (Do you need them now?)
→Are you okay with doing drugs? (Do you suggest other do drugs to connect with God?)
I am sorry if I sounds brash. I am just very curious and not sure how to word the questions.
I do not have any firsthand experience with anything other than alcohol (I have black-out many times in the past which I do not do anymore). Although, I do have 1 sister that has tried every drug and presumably has bi-polar because of it (or it happened earlier than usual), and I have another sister that has smoked copious amounts of weed.
I really am just curious on your thoughts about drugs Now.
Hey there Paul,
Thanks for your careful questions. Your use of the word “drugs” can be misleading since it carries a lot of baggage and preconceptions. Many folks will think you are asking about “illegal drugs” or “harmful drugs” when we are really just talking about pharmacological agents.
Psychedelics are not required for spiritual experience any more than a telescope is required to see. But a telescope is helpful tool to extend our vision. I think psychedelics server a similar purpose.
I have no problem, in principle, with pharmacology. Do you think humans should not use drugs to help with their mental and physical health? It is my impression that advances in that area have transformed the world for the better.
As for bipolar disorder: Why do you think it was caused by drugs? Most studies find a genetic cause. If drugs evoked a event I would think it was because the person was already prone to that problem. You must remember that the anti-drug programs are based on outrageous lies, religion, and racial prejudice. For example, marijuana is a powerful, good medicine. It was made illegal to for economic reasons (so Weyerhauser and Dupont wouldn’t have to compete with cheap hemp fiber) and for racist reasons (to oppress blacks), and for suppression of free thought (religion, social control).
All the best,
Richard
Yοur ωay of telling everything in thiѕ агticle is
аctuallу pleasant, eνеry onе can simply knoω іt, Thankѕ a lοt.
HI Richard!! Thank you! I can’t thank you enough for being you. I am a Christian by faith—and I know abundantly what you mean when you discuss the HaLev and the Lahev -or as you called it the Flaming Heart of Wisdom! Those are not just words or mathematics—it is real !! Many people hear teachings within a religion and they are from human understanding, but you are seeing the truth from a true understanding. There is a God–and He is Mighty! Mighty indeed. Don’t take your eyes off Him–He called you to a very unique job—one that is described in Revelation—as a witness. You know Him because He revealed Himself to you and that is very precious. I bet it was important that someone who was raised to question wrote all you have written at the Bible Wheel.com. think about it-who questions the scientific findings of a skeptic? Father in heaven knows us so well. And what you have seen proves that He is so many wonderful things. Thank you for your sacrifices of time and for enduring your sufferings. You’ve helped us- I know this to be true.
One last thing—I know the value of the number 373. email me if your website captures the information or I can call you in case the email doesn’t go through, but I want to encourage you—-you are walking straight on target with where Jesus wants you to be. He’ll take care of you, even when people fail you. Keep pressing on. Your work has helped me understand my path with God and Jesus tremendously because for some of us–our paths are written in the Bible. It isn’t just stories that tell us about good and evil, or how God saves us over and over…it is about Jesus and His Tribe as the inheritance. Read the gematria even if you read every book with 12 chapters and 44 verses. If you follow the patterns, you will see a story within a story for every 12 vs 44 or every 12 verse 1 throughout the Bible. I believe you see the stories as “odd or different” in the Bible because you see right through the first layer into the next two or three layers. God has uniquely kept you from other layers that others pervert to exercise power over others-so be ware of that stuff. That’s dark- don’t go there. But do look at the stories within the stories–zoom out, zoom in—you will see yourself and many others written in those pages, I believe. of people you have met, people you will meet. It’s not just a group of stories, it is meant to lift up, to encourage, to let us know He loves us very much—and some people have their life histories written in those pages, even today. It’s ongoing. It’s a living revelation in the many layers of the truth. May Father bless you and keep you in His Arms for all eternity. Thank you for your help.
me again–and I know the meaning of 88 or 64 if you multiply the units. Jesus is 888. I know who 88 is. It describes a person. Email me, and I will tell you what I know. Maybe we can compare notes. Thanks!
Jesus revealing Abba Faher:
Jahweh is a loving father who brings sun and rain upon the good and the wicked.
In him is no recognition of persons.
Richard (and Erin) – I cannot express how much this has helped me! Thank you for sharing!! Keep sharing!! My story and my vision have taken a lifetime to understand but the last 3 years are escalating in intensity and frequency. I shared parts of the biblewheel at Seminary and they laughed at me but I know God has in a position to encourage and share and some will listen. I for one, am listening. Please keep sharing! I would love to compare notes. I am in Denver, where are you? – Joy
Nobody loves us more than the LORD
I know that My Redeemer lives
In a previous post Go Joe said that if God started it God will finish it.
That strikes me as the problem.
God didn’t start it.
It started with major trauma, then progressed through drugs, the outer fringes of the occult, through tarot, astrology, the Kabbalah, the work of the arch satanist Aliester Crowley and then, bingo, a deceiving, mocking spirit appears in a dream and asks if he wants to find Dumbo.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb, too smart is dumb.
It doesn’t really matter how clever the construction is, if the foundation is faulty the building will collapse.
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Hosea 4:6
Anyone who builds their faith on the shifting sands of subjective experience, and the teachings of a vile satanist and paedophile like A Crowely is just going to end up deceived and deceiving no matter how well intentioned they think they are.
What are you talking about? Have you shown any error in anything I have written? All you do is repeat the dogmas of your cult as if they were absolute truth. In this, you are no different than a Mormon or Muslim who says their books are the word of God. You have been repeating this error for months here on my blog. I have brought it to you attention many times and you have never responded with any intelligence. You merely repeat your empty assertions over and over and over again.
Ha! Her post was absurd. I didn’t see an ounce of truth in it.
Not true. The problem goes back to the fact that the Bible is filled with errors, contradictions, absurdities, and moral abominations attributed to its gawd.
Not true! The world is filled with people who have suffered unjustly, and your imaginary gawd has done nothing to help them.
Yeah, like his warning that he would be “coming soon” two freaking thousand years ago. Your words are absurd. I’m getting the impression you really despise truth.
Anyone who says that this statement is false is a liar and hates the truth: “the bible is full of contradictions, errors, absurdities, and moral abominations attributed to its god”.
Is it the law of the Universe to tell the truth in life or to tell lies? Do you want to be told the truth in life or do you want to be told lies?
The bible is not the word of God. Have faith in the truth. Have faith in righteousness.
Richard, a man needs faith to believe that Noah was a historical person.
You demonstrate in your writing that the LORD
hasn’t blessed you with faith in this matter.
The LORD Himself witnesses that Noah was a real person.
Why would Noah appear in a genealogy if he was just a name and no more.
Why would the LORD bless him to be a teacher of righteousness if he didn’t exist?
Richard, are you a serious searcher for the LORD who longs to be able to reveal Himself to you?
In Genesis 5 the LORD has placed the message of the Gospel within the Genealogy for diligent students to discover!
Hebrew to English
Adam=Man
Seth=Appointed
Enosh=Mortal
Kenan=Sorrow
Mahalalel=The Blessed God
Jared=Shall come down
Enoch=Teaching
Methuselah=His death shall bring
Lamech=The Despairing
Noah=Rest
Man (is) appointed mortal sorrow; (but) the Blessed God shall come down teaching (that) His death shall bring (the) despairing rest.
I proved your words are incoherent and you ignored what I wrote. Here it is again:
1) You said: “Richard, a man needs faith to believe that Noah was a historical person. You demonstrate in your writing that the LORD hasn’t blessed you with faith in this matter.”
2) You said: “Richard, are you a serious searcher for the LORD who longs to be able to reveal Himself to you?”
Those two statements are logically incoherent. If it is impossible for me to believe if God has not “blessed me with faith” then it is absurd to say the same God “longs to be able to reveal Himself” to me. You’ve repeated this error many times and I’ve explained it many times. Why do you ignore what I write?
You said that God “longed to reveal Himself” to me, what’s stopping him? Your words are logically incoherent. First you say that I can’t believe because your gawd chose not to give me faith, and then you say that he “longs” to give me faith. Make up your mind already. You can’t have it both ways.
Michael, Richard isn’t even a willing student, so how can he he be a great teacher? Hitler was a type of anti Christ. His allegiance was to Satan, not the Author of life. He chose not to submit to the will of God, unlike Saul of Tarsus who had a real encounter with the risen Lord.
Michael, you are incredibly deceived. Richard gets almost everything wrong. Although he has much data to work from in the last five years virtually all of his thinking about the Bible has been false.
Don’t run away again Michael, for the public can learn from studying your false views about Jesus, not to think as you do about the sinless Son of God.
Is Richard a student of the Bible? If yes, what is he going to do with the words of Jesus? Remember, you can’t throw them away and treasure them at the same time!
Are you ready to study the Bible? Are you ready to hunger and thirst for righteousness?
Thank you for your website. I stumbled upon it by an accident. Progressive Revelation.
Study Isaiah 59:2
Richard, if you took this verse seriously you could start a new adventure. You could say to your Creator: Treasured Creator my heart’s desire is to honour and love you but I have a problem. I don’t yet trust you.
I understand that in order to honour and love You I must also trust You, for without trusting You it is impossible to please You.
Gracious Heavenly Father, I need Your help to wholeheartedly trust in Your beautiful sinless Son. Thank You for all the loving input thus far in my life.
Bless you treasured LORD for teaching this sinner. Help me to start afresh to find fulfilment in searching earnestly to glorify Your Name.
Why would I say I have a “problem” not trusting in a God that is utterly untrustworthy? Can you name one thing that anyone in this life can actually trust God to do? Parents who trust God for the health of their children end up with dead children and manslaughter convictions. If God were half as trustworthy as the average garbage collector there would be no debate about his existence. To say that “God is trustworthy” directly contradicts the meaning of the word “trustworthy.” That’s what so strange about it. It is demonstrably delusional to say “God is trustworthy” when everyone knows that there’s not one thing that anyone can actually trust God to do in any situation. Not. One. Thing. Everyone knows this, except the deluded.
Richard, the situation is that you yourself are deluded. In recent years you’ve swallowed Satan’s teachings hook, line and sinker. And what do you do? You spend much of your time trying to convince your readers that those who are teaching the truth are deluded.
Richard, many people have informed you on numerous occasions that Your Creator’s love is transformative but you seem very unaffected by this truth. His love blesses us. That’s why His creation ought to trust Him. His steadfast love provides us with additional evidence that He not only exists but rewards those who diligently and earnestly seek Him.
Richard, you would rather, according to your writing, believe that taking LSD has helped you experience God. Why do you continue to believe that lie? In my opinion the taking of LSD made you more vulnerable to believe what Satan teaches!
If I were deluded, then you should have no problem showing me the facts that I am deluded about. But you can’t do that because your beliefs are not based on facts. All you are have unfounded religious dogmas that you blindly believe.
The fact that people feel “transformed” after converting to a religion is not unique to Christianity, let alone your peculiar brand of Christianity. Personal anecdotes about “feelings” are not good evidence for the truth of religious dogmas.
It is common knowledge that LSD can induce a religious/mystical experience of “God” or “divine unity” or “universal consciousness” or whatever you want to call it. Google the “Good Friday Experiment” if you want to learn more. My experiences played a big role in my conversion to Christianity by giving it a visionary, emotional, and experiential basis much like those described in the Bible. But I agree that my experiences were probably illusory since there are good reasons to doubt the truth of “Christianity” as it is understood by you and mainstream versions of the religion. But on the other hand, they did give some real insight into the workings of the human mind, and perhaps even a glimpse of ultimate reality, though the jury is still out on that question.
Romans 10:17
17 So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
Yes. People that take LSD can have an experience but it is a counterfeit experience, for they are not born again by their drug taking. Their sins are not forgiven, nor do they come out of their experience with an enduring trust or love for Their Creator.
Many people do call their LSD experience a religious/mystical experience of “God” or “divine unity” or “universal consciousness” or whatever they want to call it but it is a counterfeit experience that evil Satan, the enemy of their soul, is happy to give them.
Your attempt to rewrite the Bible will never be accepted by Your Creator!
Faith doesn’t come by taking LSD, but spiritual confusion and deception very often results from taking LSD. Anyone who studies your writings in the last 20 years can “see” that this is true.
Richard, God’s love transforms. Those who have been born again do respond to His gracious love, for it is a love that is unique.
What actually changes? The answer is everything, for God Almighty blesses people with a new heart. What does this mean? It means that you can observe that the motivations of a saved person are different.
When they were unsaved they pleased themselves. What gave them pleasure they pursued. Now with their new heart their greatest pleasure comes from trusting, obeying, serving and loving Their Creator.
And I could say your religion is counterfeit. Merely asserting beliefs without justification is a tedious waste of time that adds nothing to the conversation.
And who are you to judge the validity of the faith of Preacher, Pastor, and Evangelist David Clark? He wrote a book called “Converted on LSD Trip” with the subtitle “Saved from Sin, Death, and Hell.” He says that Jesus spoke to him audibly while he was having a bad trip and saved him right then and there. He had been a criminal, so he turned himself in and confessed to all his crimes.
I find it ironic that you are the “skeptic” who rejects the reality of his faith because of your blind prejudice about how he found it.
You really don’t know what you are talking about. Many people claim they were “saved by Jesus” while tripping. Your denial of this fact seems based on nothing but ignorance and prejudice.
Of course, I imagine you will accept Pastor Clarke’s testimony because he was “saved” while having a “bad trip” so it fits with you prejudice that LSD is “bad.” But there is no justification for such blatant bias. I could just as well say that his experience proves that people who claim to have encountered Jesus are experiencing a delusion like someone who took LSD. And this brings up the real problem with your judgments. You have no objective way to determine whose faith is real and whose faith is false. You claim I was not “really saved” because I no longer believe, so you don’t know if anyone is “really saved” since you have no way to know if they “really believe.” You don’t even know if you are “really saved” because you could be deluded like you say I was when I believed.
Why can’t you understand such basic facts?
Again, mindlessly repeating your baseless beliefs is a tedious waste of time. Please try to answer the points I have made.
I have no idea what you are talking about. When did I ever “attempt to rewrite the Bible”?
Your comment is confused. David Clarke wouldn’t say his faith came “by taking LSD” but rather that God used that opportunity to save him.
And how exactly do my writings confirm you point? I honestly don’t know what you are talking about.
You are an overachiever in everything you do and very intelligent. What I think of the Bible Wheel is that it is one of my essential study methods. I am highlighting everything that I find is false- and I have not made yet one highlight. I think you stumbled on something remarkable- I do not believe you were inspired by God- but inspired by your intellect. You found something incredible, and you should be proud of it.