What occurs to me is that we don't really have enough words for it.  We all try to use the same word for multiple very different things.   Apocalyptic leaning religious people are presented incontrovertable seeming bad omens such as rising divorce rates which I remember hearing in Portugal are as high as 50% in one random measure.  We also hear how rigid churches guard their definition of marriage and chose to hear it as evidence of how "behind the times" they are.  Of course, to religious people being "behind the times" is not an insult but actually very good news in how they chose to relate to the world.  This angers the insulter even more and positions and people further diverge from one another.

One of things I think is good to notice the distinction of is civil marriages vs. spiritual ones.  Our states and governments have to use a much looser definition of marriage in the application of state benefits, laws, and responsibilities.  Ideally, this is perfectly in union Christianity in Christian-founded governments, but this is not always possible as governments are inevitably beholdant and corruptible by  man and not God, despite founding father's intentions.

Over time with a government's drift away from God, civil marriages end up being made compatible with just about any religion.  Of course this is framed as a necessary and merciful "compromise" with the taxpayer base.   Pacification in this way has a convenient result of keeping everyone happy that wants to be kept happy  which is good for tax revenue and subjugation against God that State authority is the one true and final authority.  This doesn't work on Christians though and is actually very offensive.

What I'd propose is to let the State do what the State wants, but give the problem for God to handle.  Jesus' people, with good church leadership, will not be fooled and will continue to vote while they are allowed to in democratic governments.  Know, that the devil will attempt to water down any Godly-inspired culture with both population numbers from cultures with incompatible spiritualities and any number of tricks that inevitably are much smarter than any of us to notice, but have faith.  We are all destined to live in trying times, and that includes our governments.  While the state chooses to accept marriages even blessed by Elvis, find peace in that as an obvious example of what I say above.

The marriage word that Jesus uses in the Bible to speak His commandments is not the same one that the state uses.  It's probably most translateable with what has been stewarded from Jesus' time in the Catholic or Greek Orthodox churches.  The sacraments and definitions are timeless and do not change, by Jesus order, but language drifts.  They are immutable and will likely have larger and stricter qualifications that even the most discerning churches (run by humans) will find difficult to communicate or enforce.  I am skeptical it can even be applied to people who do not walk in faith with Jesus.  I think culture, with the help of some states, attempts to muddy that by attempting to confuse you that civil marriage is the same as (e.g) Catholic marriage.  This is unfortunate, but we Christians know better.  We don't need to play the same language games as the devil, but am thankful to those compelled to do so as I'm certain its part of His plan for you.  The rest of us will just lie in waiting, voting or not voting, trusting His voice will reach us when its necessary to His plan.

You see, Mary is not mentioned a lot in scripture so the Protestant church with its nose to the Bible might presume her role to be minor in Christianity.   But consider the details.   It was with Mary where the story and miracles surrounding our salvation begins.  She is believed to be the most humble and perfect woman to have walked this planet and it was her Son that saved us.  It was her innocent feminine sensitivity to her friends impending shame of running out of wine at the Wedding in Canaan, that she beckoned the world to follow her Son and to witness Him performing miracles.   She fired the starting gun for Jesus' fulfilling Old Testament prophecy on the messiah.  What a proud mom she must have been– after all she was human too.  She doesn't get credit because she never needed or wanted it for herself– the virtue of humility in perfection.  

If we lose or diminish her significance in time, it will be us that lose out.  I am reminded how the Nazi's started editing the Bible subtly altering Jesus' origin story by removing his Jewishness and recasting him as some sort of Aryan superhero.  The story of Jesus is parables all the way through.  Not only did he preach through them, his entire life is also one and changing even minor seeming aspects of it has cosmic consequences to any who try to.  Shortly after this gross feat of vanity and pride by the Germans, the war started not going so well for them.  Thankfully, with the truth around Mary, I think we are only guilty of letting her fade out because she is hiding between the pages in ways that only humans and not artificial intelligence LLMs can find.

I was in Florence, Italy last year at an art museum and one of the things that struck me was how there were so many ancient paintings of the Virgin Mary.  She even had her own approved color scheme and as such seemed to be adored more by those first generation Christians than modern ones.   I fear what affect on culture that shift away from Mary may have had.   Her story seems hidden "between the lines" of scripture, so I wonder if its more tuned to resonate with female intuition than mine.  You didn't need to waste lines of scripture reaffirming a basic human truth everybody knows about sons and their mothers.  Some things I think we are meant to use our innate empathy to understand and for that pages in the world's instruction manual are unnecessary.  The Bible is not a work of homage to history, its a lesson in it.  I think its one thing to hear what Jesus preaches about humility– how you feel about the story of his mom is the hidden test to see if you were paying attention.

I think its worth contemplating how the story of our salvation is parsed by men differently than women.  Both sides are perfectly capable of understanding the other, but it may take a small investment of effort.  This required "effort" can be exaggerated by the devil as evidence of systemic misogyny in the church, but its really not difficult to dispel if you choose not to take the baited false interpretations.  The sexes really are different, despite modern culture's insistence that they are just "social constructs".  I am not ashamed to be a part of a religion that aims to replicate through time the disposition of Jesus into men and Mary into women.   Who wouldn't prefer to see the highest held human ideals present in all your neighbors?

The above is one of the reasons I'm not ashamed to be disinterested in women's professional cycling– I can be awed and draw inspiration from men suffering (in sport) like Jesus did, but cycling, as a dangerous sport, conflicts with notions of a peloton of little aspirational Virgin Mary's so I can't help but cringe and want to turn off the TV the moment theres a crash or evidence of the inevitable emotional distress of competition.  If someone claims that makes me a misogynyst or sexist, they'll have simply identified themself as an idiot or another one of the devil's boring language game players.   I have no contempt for women's sports, I just am not ashamed of having less interest.   Modern culture's attempt at reprogramming my generic male disposition on these sorts of things didn't take– the devil seems to be having more success on that front with the next generation.  Good luck to parents on that– I wish I could help.  Feminizing men and masculinizing women just seems dangerous and comes off as resisting God's will– theres got to be better ways of reconciling the two if in conflict than homogenizing them.

I live within cycling distance to one of the holiest places to honor the Virgin Mary: Fátima, Portugal.   She appeared to kids there during World War 1 and there is a huge church erected in her honor.  There is even a 2020 movie about the occurrence.  We share roads with the pilgrims on their month long Camino de Santiago hikes from Fatima to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where the remains of the apostle James are.   Being in proximity to these holy places and holy peoples I can't help but think they might be rubbing off on me too.  I think we all need to be reminded that these were all real people whose graves you can actually still visit thousands of years later in the real world.  

I remember somebody I knew once telling me a story on how an in law was so offended when he hinted that he didn't believe the Virgin Mary was an actual virgin.  The in-law was a Catholic and obviously got very defensive and didn't find the joke at all funny.  The story was being shared to me almost as a comedic warning that I might "tip toe" amongst the likes of the crazy religious types.  Boy, have my opinions of things changed since back then.  I realize this is basically how the devil recruits to his cause.   I'm so glad I got out of tech– though I do miss having a practical application of mathematics and reasoning, the nihilism is infectious there and not good for the soul.   There are people there I fear are simply there for collecting possibly ugly life anecdotes from people who trust them for the superficial purpose of providing comedic intrigue at lunch meetups.  I know I was shared stories I had no business in hearing which usually means the reverse is also true. I probably unwittingly provided material for somebody elses entertainment, but luckily, I'm not present in that world anymore.   The difference is that I now have faith it was all part of His plan for me and for them.  People change, and their opinions of them also change.  There are some scifi authors (Isaac Asimov) whose stories I have alternatively admired and then became convinced was the devil incarnate, then admired again.

Anyway, back to the virgin Mary.  Don't forget her lest she make another appearance in my neighborhood to remind us all.  I can guarantee theres a bunch of Portuguese scouring the woods near Fátima that are at least looking for her.

I will not give the quote here, for fear of someone using their deductive reasoning to pilfer out one of my pearls into the open, but I can say that it came from a sub-feed on Facebook containing a whole bunch of "new-age" spirituality messaging.  I set it aside for further contemplation and by the time my imagination had worked on it in the background almost certainly with divine help, I attempted to rediscover the quote to check what it said again against my surfacing intuition.  Of course, like a lot of social media feeds it was not rediscoverable and Lynn scrolled through a huge dose of unrelated, but similar spiritual messaging in that feed before I implored her to stop and give up.

What I've begun to conclude over the last 5-10 years is that we are all not that clever and probably dangerously predictable.  Its apparent that some of these new-agey metaphysics are tapped into similar things that I feel I've become more sensitive to.   The quote's uncanny specificity at first seems like a profound truth but only after contemplation I realized it was one of the most dangerous misunderstandings of God's truth I've come across.   I really believe the misunderstanding from the quote's author sets him/her up for nothing less dire than what many would liken as demonic possession.  Now having groked it more fully, I feel like God has given me new spiritual armor and even applied some divine shine one of those hidden pearls I keep for understanding Him.  It drew me closer.  It did its job.

As one scrolls these feeds full of metaphysics and new-age spiritualism, you either settle into an interpretation of them as uncovering hidden truths in the style we know as synonymous to the Occult, or, like me, you realize its all pretty sad and almost comically obvious the naivity which these people sharing actually have. When it comes down to it, the modern spiritual guru is no match for the ancient ones.  

Think what you may of ancient civilizations, but if you find yourself looking down on them realize you may be channeling vanity and pride of the current age of man you find yourself in, likely because you like technology and safety.  Those people long ago did not have all the distractions in the modern world designed to keep you numb, stupid, blind, and deaf to things spiritual.  I firmly believe living a simpler, more natural, less industrial lifestyle refines the spiritual senses and that was done a lot more in the past than the present.  Those ancestors of ours are the fathers of your fathers spanning for hundreds of generations and even before Jesus came, the commandment to honor your mothers and fathers was already well understood. Respect for elders has been embedded in culture as common sense since time immemorial, so if only for a brief moment, consider they may have worked these things out way before the modern gurus.  I suggest its only necessary to go back to about 2026 years ago and listen to the one infinitely perfect human we already know the name of.

One of the ways these "feeds" make their motives clear is the complete lack of any concept of Jesus.   I can only imagine as soon as some new "guru" might be inspired to speak of God or Jesus, they get persecuted and removed from the metaphysics feed and told to leave and go instead to the Christian ones where they will be more welcome.  The message is clear: "new age" spirituality is supposedly not compatible and not welcome alongside Christianity, in which its centuries of refinement looks like rigidity and closeminded-ness to them.   They'll likely profess its just not limited to, implying they have a grander and broader scope which is the exact opposite.  If the faith is not changing like they prefer, its wrong or irrelevant.  Christians will be told to go back to the bubble where they are harmless to the world and only surrounded with people who already understand them.  i.e. go back to the churches and stay away from the soul searchers roaming Facebook or college campuses in obvious need of help.

Another vibe I get from these metaphysics feeds is similar to children telling ghost stories around a camp fire.  Everybody hears one, says "OOooooh!" in a scary voice and then they look around at each smiling and giggling and secretly wondering if what they speak of may be more than just entertainment.   Its not.  And it will push you further along lines that are not healthy for you.  The mental power that is unlocked in humans when embracing Christianity is capable of creating a state of mind so profound it can remove even the fear of death, which is quite a thing.   This is a power thats been there for centuries in Christianity and religious texts are full of examples that aren't just stories, but true history.  You may have even witnessed it yourself in somebody terminally ill.  One of the apostles of Jesus was facing certain execution in the morning, yet he slept the through the night before like a baby (sorry I don't recall the exact verses for this one).  Do you honestly think this is something modern spirituality could ever replicate?  I doubt it.  I know I wouldn't be able to, but thats because I am weak and my faith is imperfect, but aspiring to it I find noble and worthy of a lifetime of effort.  

My hope is that for those engaging in these Reddit forums, Facebook groups, or "alternative" spiritualities that there are some that recognize the whole thing as another Jesus undercover sneak-op.  While everyone else pretends to "wake up" their third eye,  incorporate the "self" from other dimensions, sing songs around campfire effigys holding hands and beckoning for spirits to reveal themselves to you, or whatever other nonsense suggests itself as a potential modern equal to Christianity realize you are not meant to actually believe them.  Their exposure into your lives may have been placed there so that you could recognize His way at the point on your path you were destined to.   The ideas you thought were your own were only temporary surrogates to contain your spirituality in stasis so you will be able to recognize the real truth when it comes to you later in life.  I believe it is more tragic to deny that spirituality has any legitimacy whatsoever in the human condition than to hold it in stasis with spiritual puberty blockers.  If we all believe in nothing for too many generations in a row, I fear we won't recognize the Earth organism we evolve into as truly "conscious", relatable and worthy of inheriting our planet.   Our ancestors may already think that of us.  Perhaps this deevolution will show up in mental health first, or weird things like autism rates, ADHD, or decaying language/math aptitude like the movie "Idiocracy" or a morality that becomes "subjective" and changes for the worse in each new generation.  If this begins to happen, everything will still all be returned to God but boy will those parents be surprised when it starts to happen.   We might even reach an era where the children end up saving the souls of the spiritually barren adults– an inversion of what God intends.

So, as I continue to find those lost and floating souls blissfully unaware of how perfectly they accidentally glorify Him in their poems, stories, or other inspired works, I can't help but feel compelled to evangelize in the hopes that the energy they begin channeling can be supercharged for Good before it is permanently bottled or harnessed for the devil's purposes.  The adversary hates Jesus more than any human is capable, so be suspicious wherever His presence is missing or unwelcome.   Not only may you be missing a free source of peace, joy, and inspiration in your life, your soul may also depend on it.

I bet you've noticed and possibly not understood, that many Christians seemed to have some sort of superpower against demotivation.   You tell one about all the bad omens you see happening in the world around you, which a lot them to shrug off or try to convince you you're wrong.   Because you are driven by ego, you presume theirs to be malfunctioning and stupid.  They believe the war against Good and Evil was already won by us by Jesus 2000 years ago, and live their life accordingly.  In their language, they deliver their concerns and worries to Jesus and the Father in prayer, and then trust in God and go about their lives in the way Jesus has told them to.  That is, eat, drink, be merry, and obey His commandments.  This is also known as surrendering your will, sacrificing your ego, or just basically having Faith.

I suggest allowing yourself to revisit the phrase I know you all have heard.  Corgito, ergo sum.  Its the statement, "I think, therefore I am" from the French philosopher Rene Descartes in books crediting to the launching of the Age of Enlightenment.  Heathens really adore this age of man, as science and technology really took off which has served to continue to inflate our collective ego centuries later.  This age tempts all of us into a version of Pride that is oh so similar to the lightning bolt that cast Satan out of Heaven.  Confirmation of man's righteous dominion over the world to the point where we start to entertain the thought that we don't need Him and just can rely on ourselves for eternity.

Instead of holding Descarte's statement as some supremely insightful and deep truth of the universe, I'd like to pose an alternative interpretation.   I think this was the moment our ego's decided to assume for itself dominion over our souls.   The ego was never designed to stake this claim over our identities.  I liken it no more significant that a child boy discovering his penis for the first time and then having so much fun with it, that he chooses to let it have mastery over his will.  We know deep down what happens if this path is pursued for too long, as I believe we also know deep down what happens if we presume our ego's our entitled to drive us.

A modern philosopher I admire, Alan Watts, once spoke of the ego as nothing but a very advanced radar and prediction engine of the world as our bodies follow a path marked through a lifetime.  Basically, it's just a little trick our brains can do for us to help protect the flesh.  It's really no wonder we hold our brains in such high regard even to the point we presume that the most important organ we have exists in our skulls, the location the ego feels most vulnerable.  Our ego's, with the world's master's help, have tricked us to label the part of us we label as "ourselves" as 100% residing there only.  Allow yourself to consider you are more than just the thinker.  You may find yourself going down a rabbit hole that leads you to the ancient forms of common sense we know as a relationship with Jesus and His Father.

I believe God the Father has preprogrammed struggles he has ordained into our lives we cannot escape from.  Some seem to have it easier than others, but ALL are tested by Him justly.   Many fail.  Probably a lot more than half as He does not grade us on a curve.  Of the ones that don't fail, He promises us all to expect many great things to come.  For those with cosmic perspective this may translate to you as "heaven", but there is also promises of worldly good even the sinners amongst us will receive for those with more short-term perspectives.

Now, I hold Jesus as I know him as close to my imagination as possible and present my opinion.  I believe you all have within your spiritual DNA the capacity to be Holy men of the highest form we can expect from this evil world.  If you rebel against His plan for you, I believe the temptation of pride being the most dangerous, both we who do not understand you the rest of the world will lose out.  This angers God the Father and he instills into your soul a deep despair I cannot imagine and am frightened to try.  You feel his sentence for your defiance being carried out and misdirect it as if coming from cultures and governments His hand guides.

I believe God will, at the end of eternity, roll back time to collect the poetry of our aggregate human spiritual existence.  This poetry includes love, beauty, but also tragedy.  I believe he does this in reverse time order starting at your death and if it that time in your life he finds your heart in contempt of His Son, he looks into your life no further and marks your worldy experience worthy of at best case deletion before creating whatever it is that is next after the end of eternity.  He is also present as we move in the midst of time and very offended by those who attempt to defy His plan or commandments which have been set from since before time began and sent to us thousands of years ago.   Please consider, because of the particular nature of struggles, you may have an unchanneled capacity to know Jesus greater than most.  I beg for all our sakes you don't squander it, for the stakes are much higher than cultures, politics, or anything of the world.   Find your flock, know Him and help lead the lost sheep back to Him.  You may just be sleeping Holy men and women, sleeper agents in God's army waiting for a code word only your soul knows will wake you up.

I sense a larger than expected proportion of thus afflicted are already compelled to His service.   I fear the devil knows this too and focuses much effort to bring you out, to deny Jesus or to embrace sin.  The vector of desires of your flesh has does not define your identity, and the real church of Jesus knows this plainly and intuitively.  Only fools or those already fully enlisted into the devil's army believe in any way this condemns Jesus or His church.  Have mercy on the flock as many will likely betray you as you endeavor the best way you know how, for they know not what they do.  Realize there are some who revulse and presume whom it is you serenade in your love songs, but the discerning among us realize you actually serenade your Creator or His Son and once so clarified, we find them even more beautiful than what the world presumes our position of you.

I bear witness not only to your struggle, but also your sins and extend out my human limited empathy to you as far as I am able.  I will never join those amongst you throwing celebrations of defiance to our Lord or your advocate's unrighteous propaganda proclaiming a need for language games or on embracing identites separate from Him.  He will either force you back to Himself at some point in your life before you die (perhaps abruptly) or make your heart grow hard, silent, still and not care.  I believe I also speak for Jesus in that I hope for the former, that is, a spiritual awakening at whatever is God's chosen pace for you to find His truth.  We all have a cross to bear in this lifetime, but you must pick very carefully, you have no idea how much we all (or perhaps just one soul) needs you.

My area in Portugal had received a once-in-a-century amount of rain that flooded all over Figueira da Foz in February.  This flooding was preceded by some extremely destructive winds that came and knocked down whole forests of trees, sign posts, and tiles off of rooftops.  It left as abruptly as it came in the middle of the night and the flooding commenced just as Lynn left for her flight.

The constant rain kept me off the bike for longer than I have been in awhile and when I did go to venture out on a nice day in between rainstorms, many of the familiar country roads we have explored for years were blocked off due to flooding.  It was very frustrating.  Without this cycling "drug" pacifier we had become addicted to, the reassuring daily presence of my wife affirming a practical reason to use vocal cords each day, and the fact I often ran out of food because I would forgo going to the grocery store the conditions were perfect to manifest a metaphysical "perfect storm" happening to have been preceded by the physical one. I believe I unwitting reproduced a state of mind known for thousands of years to be simultaneously dangerous and transformational.  This has happened almost a decade earlier with a couple months consecutive suffering insomnia, a period I actually enjoyed riding.

My wife has been leaving for a month each year since we left for Portugal, and each time I have spiritually "rhyming" experiences with this years.  A couple of those years, I have allowed myself to get lost in a mathematics or computer science problem that ends up with a fleeting pride of accomplishment inevitably followed by a divine confirmation of its pointlessness within a couple weeks to months.   Since retiring, selling everything and moving to Portugal 5 years ago I have allowed my ego a tether to the illusion that the worldly skills I acquired still mattered, if only for the purposes of entertainment and distraction as a part time remote job in the belly of the beast in Silicon Valley, California.  Last year, it became apparent that illusion was falling apart and in a lightning bolt, His divine will was executed upon me last year as my motivation to pursue it dried up and I quit that part time job with no hesitation.  This change of heart happened almost simultaneously to a Bible being delivered serendipitously into my hands only minutes after describing to my Dad for the first time the spiritual experience I had the preceding year when I accidentally indulged myself a little too deeply into a mathematics problem with fractals.

The Bible is hard to read and decompress properly, you almost have be experiencing some sort of mini crisis in your life for it to start making sense, but when it does, oh boy does it start to take.  You start to relate with yourself as a deep undercover agent for Him that has spent so long pretending to be fully contained in the ego that you have almost forgotten your true self.   It saddens me the tragedy of the disappointment of those who intrepidly attempt an honest endeavor to read it with their ego and have it fall flat, or worse, come of as "cult-y" and get gangster vibes from Jesus.

If this describes you, don't fret.  You are most definitely Christian oriented, but still maybe blind or deaf.  I truly believe the problem you face is in language and imagination, and not in any missing sacraments.  Realize that even the word "cult" and its default interpretations of it in the modern man's consciousness are younger than Christianity itself.  The devil has had plenty of time to lay groundwork with numerous examples in the history of the world to prevent your mind to even entertain the notion that there was one cult, God's cult, that was there first before the Word had even taken shape.  

As I return to the internal dilemma of this essay, that is, how best to organize a spiritual mess afflicted upon you by His Divine Will when He begins the process of returning you to Him, as if theres a fisherman reeling in the fish he caught a long time ago but left playing too long on a slack fishing line but now its time to prepare supper and you're on the menu.   I think its pretty rare to have the privilege of seeking one yourself, and I think being transparent in that process is a rarity on this earth akin to watching the exact moments water crystalizes before hardening into ice.  I don't fully understand what compels me to write these essays, but I think it must be something to do with providing witness to myself and anybody who ever reads this. (All 5-10 of you)  Over the centuries, Jesus' church has fractured and pretends to be incompatible with each other in ways seeming superficial to new believers like me, but minute as they may seem, I still feel like attempting to discern what may be the truth of them has value, if only academically.

I hesitate to fully embrace Protestantism.  I intuitively distrust the seeming undisputed "Protest" at the root of the word.  Martin Luther was definitely a blessed man, and his interactions with the human Catholic church of his time seem like an impatient solution to his personal tragedy of excommunication by the Popes of the era.  Without a doubt, translation of the Bible into German in 1522 A.D. was a good thing in reaching larger proportions of people, myself included, but it did set up a new battlefield of language games for the devil to play.  I also feel that too much masculine energy was present in its founding, and the puritans of England asserted themselves to boldly upon the world and the United States instead of meeting with the world with love.  The perfect human girl Virgin Mary seems hardly present and its omission has missed opportunities in reaching young women.  The devil has thus taken advantage in culture as women lean away, and men lean in and both sexes bear witness to that and Satan giggles with delight.

Luddites and Amish have an innate attraction in me because I empathize with a desire to rebel against technology.  Its something I feel I falsely worshipped for too long a period in my life.  However, I recognize the evoked feeling as a vindictive or cowardly retreat from the world instead seeking to convert it.  The indifference seems contradictory to Jesus' life to me as although the world and its master are evil, there is still good they refuse to open their eyes to see.  They don't seem to have faith in God's plan and ultimate victory of the world and pretend to evoke its utopian state in separation as some sort of noble beacon that feels a bit too closely rooted in pride.  Their tragedy is never being able to hear Jesus in a pop, rock or rap song and draw joy from witnessing Jesus' story get retold by people with seeming no knowledge or interest from the realms of science fiction and fantasy.   Not being present to bear witness to the world every Christmas to the Christian victory over the Pagan's winter solstice holiday where they glorify Jesus, in their own, perhaps involuntary and distorted sort of way, but glorify Him nonetheless.

I had a lot of Mormon friends in the Arizona city I lived in when I pursued my profession.  I feel the tragedy of their church feels too similar to the history of the founding of Islam in 600 A.D.  A people's heart, slowly loosing touch with their savior due to perceived distance in time, space, and language indulge upon their own heretical fantasy with the compelling local "spin" they secretly yearn for.  I do not hold this suspicion strongly enough to investigate further, but I also entertain the possibility that the Mormons simply accidentally cast their pearls to swine to get trampled which caused themselves to over-isolate in shame.   Some of their notions that got leaked to the world and to me seem sci-fi.  While I also secretly retain my own sci-fi "pearls" I use to seek deeper scripture truths by attempting full integration with things my ego knows, I do not hold them strongly and just use them for mental exercise.   I have 2 sci-fi, 1 fantasy, and 1 computer science notion I enjoy playing superficial mental games with.   If you trick one of them out of me and procede to trample on it, I've already resolved to just switch to another one in a more refined effort to reach you.  I will not be so foolish attempt to start a new church around the ideas and recruit others to share them.  The Bible speaks for itself.

There are multitude sects of Christianity still to contemplate as I try to intuit which is most compatible with what I continue to read in the Bible.  Unlike many men in history, I will not allow myself to be too offended if I turn out ultimately incompatible with one or another.  It seems Jesus' commandments can be still be kept, if perhaps this way is made a little more narrow, so must be God's plan.

This occurs to me as a somewhat tragic, but beautiful example of divine justice for man insisting himself upon the world instead of living in harmony with it.  I accept His sentence to us who live in this beautiful place perfectly just and consider the matter appropriately handled in God's court.  I do not insist on what I presume is the position of environmentalists who may presume representing what they believe to be the Creator's position on the case.  I'm pretty sure He doesn't need any more sycophants.

As one gazes at the ocean, I can't help but attempt to visualize how many thousands of miles it goes on before it reaches the east coast of my homeland in the United States.  Its truly hard to fathom, especially if you estimate the distance to the horizon you can see and then check your math against your imagination.  It makes you humble in a way that seems cosmically compatible with the underlying nature of our existence.    

A few miles north on the shore towards Buarcos, the ocean returns to being in close proximity to the city.  Buarcos is still within walking distance for my wife and I, though we usually only pass it on bicycle, and we do this quite often because it leads to roads along the coast that are even more beautiful than anything the city offers.  While I hold a little bit of envy in my heart,  there is a mural painted along the sidewalk reading "Save the ocean" that provokes in me an internal harumpf and eye roll every time I pass it.   To me, it beckons an inflated sense of significance for ourselves on this almost incomprehensibly vast ocean.  I'm not sure if the messaging is intended for city residents regarding the receding shoreline here in Figuiera da Foz, intended to represent the ocean in general, or if its just pandering to the general pro-Earth, anti-Creation messaging of the modern environmentalist fashion virtue signaling thats trending globally.  In any of the above interpretations, it just comes off as absurd sentiment to me.  

I wish the artist would have used the wall space for a nobler purpose for fellow man, such as "Save the souls".  At the very least, it should have been written in Portuguese, a courtesy paid even by local graffiti artists.  I fully expect a majority of people find this weakly-held sentiment I have for it the disgusting one.   I'm more than okay with that because I worship God, not his creations, and am confident this is the correct orientation of my adoration of Him despite how the world insists upon the superiority of its "modern morality".  I can even add my own entry into this competitive game of virtue signaling they play to highlight the absurdity.  I'm going to facetiously seek out wallspace to paint my own mural with hashtag "Save the Milky Way".

I hope you see how this above little story has spiritual elements that rhyme with scripture.  If you read this, you have just been propagandized with a timeless morality that trumps anything modern and I encourage you to read the Bible and find Jesus' life story and teachings echoing in literally everything and everyone's life experience on Earth.

Almost all Christians do not fall for the false dichotomy arguments and language games heathens like to use that pretend to undermine the root of spiritual belief.    They misjudge where the "root" is of what notions they are trying to dispel, presume it to be intellectual, and only a minor discipline known as "apologetics" even seeks reaching them in the space they allow us to stand alongside them in the debate language styles and framing they prefer.  The similarity to "apology" in the word "apologetics" I find a very sweet kindness of coincidence to call the discipline intended mostly as a charity mission to assist lost intellectuals back into good graces with their God.   Even our language dictionaries virtue signal the humility which Jesus' church was built from, and the world's mob have yet to gain the Orwellian style mastery over the English dictionary their corrupted hearts secretly desire.    

There are several science and engineering disciplines I think that have "lost the plot" with God, but some are closer than others and their pursuit looks a lot like worship.  Cosmologists, physicists, and mathematicians in particular, I think are on a noble crusade to find God's first miracle either by grand unification theory, big bang, particle colliders or by looking at things so large, small, or distant as to be so completely irrelevant to modern life that the only possible explanation for their continued pursuit must be spiritual.  In their hearts, they know this truth but they continue to sacrifice and try to righteously deceive the unrighteous world into accommodating them through vague promises its all going to be worthwhile and will lead to a yet unnamed important insight that manifests in future technology we won't be able to live without.  

Basically, these noblemen of science are pleading with the world to put their faith in them.  I fear the world is only content with the status quo due to the recent centuries of works by very blessed men, but the time will come when it will demand more results than can be reasonably delivered by men and their crusades will be defunded or run empty of inspiration.  I hope not, because I am curious what we could find, but Jesus tells us of the ways of the world and it doesn't look promising for them.   I think even the heathens agree we must keep them enthusiastic and well funded, which is actually very funny and ironic, because the word "enthusiasm" in the English language is derived from Greek words meaning "full of God" or "motivated by God" – another one of the facts of the reality of our language that can't be protested away by the atheists now rampant in those exact fields of science.  

So what I would propose is to think on the similarity between a person's experience with worship as similar to the mathematician toiling to follow Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, biologist looking deeply at evolution, or a cosmologist scanning for insights about the big bang,   All involve a shared sacrifice of time with a fellowship of people to honor and seek out answers to something God built into our existence.  The joy these men at the top of their field have when they make a monumental discovery in their field is probably similar to that which some particularly blessed, but not uncommon people get every Sunday service.   The sort of euphoria being chased here God has not built into the universe for only the benefit of the most elite of their discipline to enjoy finding.  We all know how to rejoice being in the universe we find ourselves.  We all know how to worship and praise God.  Its almost as if we have been designed for it.  (we have)

Now that you know we're similar, know that there is a seeming subtle difference in what we worship but has cosmic importance according to Jesus.  One is God himself and the other is only God's creation.  According to 1 John 2:15:

"Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  For all that is in the world– the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life– is not of the Father but is of the world.  And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever"

I know it seems a rather arbitrary distinction since a clever trick you can play when starting to grok the Bible is to replace where you see the word "God" or "Father" with "Universe" and it instantly seems less offensive to atheist brains and becomes new-age trendy.  Unfortunately it is not the same and Jesus is pretty emphatic about it here.  How could so many of your environmentalist, scientific, global health, and political causes create such seeming contempt from Christians?  You can trace it to that line of scripture right there.  If you feel compelled to undermine Christian religion inspired politics, you best concentrate on trying to erase that verse from Christian's Bibles, which you'll find impossible until the end of time in the universe I live in.  That line of scripture will be baked into the "gut feel" sensibilities of Christian children even if they don't read the Bible for generations.  If you wish to instead collaborate with Christians, realize they are testing you with powers of discernment in an effort to detect humility– if you have none, it will be seen by them and you will be fulfilling prophecy regarding your master and true intentions.  

If you're just curious to understand why this is so important, I encourage you earnestly search your intuition and look for more clues in the Bible.  Its a process named "discernment" that heathens often confuse as "judgement" because its fading from their language and God is always flooding their emotional state with such strong cosmic vibes of impending judgement that they end up seeing it everywhere and attribute it as coming from everyone they hate.  If you only ever "trust your gut" on whats right and wrong, you'll remain only a partially conscious soul thats put all your faith of salvation on your parent's indoctrination from their inherited culture, which I'm pretty sure the Bible will tell you how that might not work out for you in the end.  

Anyway, you've got yourself a mystery to follow and I've got faith if you earnestly want to know the cultural reasons why you should worship God and not the world, the Holy Spirit will help it come to your imagination.  Or you can use Google, but its less fun that way and you're trusting a tool of the world to guide you on a path of cosmic truth, for which the stakes are way too high.  You really should not put your faith in anything except the written words of Jesus himself as recorded in a Bible you receive hand to hand from a friend you trust in your heart.  Theres a reason almost all of modern technology starting from the printing press is derived from a desire to spread this one book.

First off, I do think you can congratulate yourself for keeping a tidy mind.  I'm sure you have a great organizing strategy you've adjusted over your lifetimes and you are quite the proud librarian in its upkeep.  This will actually be a great advantage to you in the puzzle you are about to play with.

The mindgame begins like this.  Firstly, presume you've arrived at this moment in time already a Christian, Jesus has always been walking with you, etc. etc. and you're just behind a bit on your praying.   Its been so long, your language has drifted.   The word "pray" has a different meaning to you now and is a concept you don't grok the way people seem to use it.  You witness people you despise claiming to do it so start associating prejudices to its meaning.  Those writing the world's history books may have slipped in buried notions to reinforce your prejudices so what you come to understand as its meaning isn't anything that you actually do.  

To those people who've lost the "pray" word, I think you can find it back if you temporarily substitute the word for "imagine" and get to work on exercising the imagination muscle again.  Exercising it does not mean abandoning the organized mental library your busy-body ego keeps, just giving him a break and trusting everything he's hoarding in his shelves will still be there after the workout at the imagination gym is done.  He may not like that you're going to do something without him, so you'll have to trick him.  He'll be pissed, but he'll be back– you dont need him, but you need his library to survive in the world with comfort.

You may not yet have realized who it is in control of your imagination and instincts, but its not Mr. ego but you'll meet him later.  Mr. ego gets pretty self-important the bigger his library gets and might even suggest there is no time in this world for exercising imagination if it doesn't add into his library.  Too dangerous to waste any time not feeding the library, the workings of the world depend on it for survival he will say.  If you don't grow your imagination muscles at the gym to similar levels to be able to fight Mr. ego, he'll get pretty cocky and annoying.  He needs to be put in his place and you'll need the confidence you'll get by side-effect from the workout instructor at the imagination gym to contend with him when he reveals himself to be a real ass.

Anyway, the "imagination" exercise you might try first is take all the religious ideas that seemed ridiculous to your ego that he sent first to the "cant understand" pile (dangerously close to the "nonsense" pile and trash bin) and see if you can't imagine a way to assume them true while still fitting in with the rest of your mental library.  A key is to realize that language is loose in meaning and your imagination has capabilities beyond whats reachable using words and facts.  Don't let Mr. ego see you take ideas he's already filed as nonsense to the imagination gym, he's easily offended and insecure because he knows you see him sneaking things from his "can't understand" pile to the trashbin.  What you come up with might look like science fiction and I and church people would love to hear you share the endeavor, though they may not understand you just yet as you may not understand them, but I urge you not to feel judged by them.  In attempting to "synchronize" themselves to you there will be mismatches.  The mismatches are inevitable, but the "synchronizing" between us makes everything stronger and why we need fellowship, but be careful in who you choose to share them with, and see this verse from our Bible:

"Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces". – Matthew 7:6

This is warning to any who share what they think might be holy thoughts to  heathens.   Lots of people live in fear of ridicule or mob cancellation of their ideas.  If your imagination is trying to make sense of Jesus' words, any thought is a holy thought, and they are all pearls to Jesus that he urges you to share carefully.  Its goes in reverse to, which I think Christians protect themselves by always falling back to quoting the Bible, which is always invulnerable to being "trampled".  Jesus also says:

"Assuredly, I say to you unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of Heaven" – Matthew 18:3

He knew many of us will need back the imagination our ego caused us to abandon as kids later in life.  Jesus equates the spiritual novices as "children" all over the Bible, and this is his curse to any of those who might discourage you:

"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.  Woe to the world because of offenses!  For offenses must come, but woe to that man by whom the offense comes!" – Matthew 18:6

Its one of the most aggressive quotes by Jesus in the Bible, and if you consider yourself kin to the spiritual novice "child" to which he refers to you and feel discouraged in any way to what might be a growing empathy towards Christians, the well-versed God fearing ones will always pause to reflect how their actions might be affecting you.   Take this as a clue to who is going to be good on the journey you didn't realize you just started down.  

The fact that you know your imagination exercises feel a little absurd and scifi is just because you're out of practice and have a lot of catchup work to do.  They'll continue to refine themselves into ideas that might even get the attention of Mr. ego, but don't trust him.  He's held captive by the world, which obeys a different master and an abusive one.  Eventually, you'll probably have to fire him and reclaim his library as your own, as you already know his filing system.  Don't be tempted to throw away shelves of books he's filed for you neatly in his library when he leaves, libraries are timeless and beautiful things.

And finally, as you continue to exercise your imagination muscle, realize the meaning of this verse, as Jesus answers someone frustrated about Him speaking so much in parables or analogies compared to the other thought leaders of the world at the time.

"Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.  For whoever has, to him more will be given and he will have abundance" – Matthew 13:11

What it means to me, is whether you like it or not, your weird imagination will keep working on ideas/analogies/parables that will end up transforming you and the change the kingdom you have found yourself residing in.  If you find yourself residing in a kingdom with no miracles, teleport yourself into the one where there was an impossible seeming human resurrection around 2026 years ago and reach me at jboff@jboff.com.

I have found that the big tech media selection prediction AIs, also known as "The Algorithm", seem to suggest in ways very similar to what Christians have been taught to expect and have been preparing for thousands of years. That is, the fight for men's souls and the surgical replacement of their inner voices with one conforming to the world hivemind. In the vernacular of Christianity this is demon vs Holy Spirit posession. World's wisdom vs. Heaven's wisdom. Jesus vs. Satan. Humans vs. Him (capital H). If you find yourself repulsed by my use of this form of language, Christianity also knows what that means and what to do with you and I hope you read on, if for no other reason than curiosity's sake. Some of you probably knew a different me.

Anyone who has progressed in a math-based career like mine is certain to have stumbled across some of the very strange, provably real, theorems that seem at first to defy reality, but when further analyzed you realize they actually define it, just at an exceptionally boring low level that only us nerds have found fascinating. There is one effect called the "Wisdom of the Crowd" you are certain to run into when using the field of statistics and the central limit theorem (which is also freaky magical). Although you may miss its spiritual significance in the study of statistics, once you have a use for it in a real world problem your soul has committed to searching for solutions of, it really starts feeling like a divine gift and tickles at your spiritual side. That is, unless the modern educational institutes of man you put yourself through really did succeed in killing off your spiritual side or nobody in your life has yet helped you awaken it properly.  If that is what your education has "given" you, a world view confirming there is nothing worth knowing of the spiritual what a tragedy! You'll miss out and be left empty in old age, when the world's systems are through with your peak productivity period and it no longer has much use for the superficial transient "insights" you were programmed to bear. The world and its governments have no interest for anything outside of what helps or threatens its tax base, so is unworthy of your heart and soul.

In statistics, this "wisdom of the crowd" effect is super powerful for discerning truth, but turns out to be easily corruptible even in pure mathematical usage. Oh, how so perfect an analogue to our real world! Here I was, rediscovering a biblical truth recognized 2000 years ago and put to words in the bible so plainly and simply, no wonder STEM majors pretend to seem so offended by the bible evangelists all the time. To many it trivializes the craft they sacrificed so much of themselves in attaining. All the nuanced truths they thought they were "unlocking" in their study and the complexities they found so beautiful not realizing theres a huge portion of us that really don't care about human knowledge now that Jesus has come and given us His and as it turns out, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything can all be reduced in complexity to the story of a single perfect human's life as witnessed by 12 fisherman 2000 years ago (and the number 42, wink wink).  It's a similar type of stupefied arrogance you get back if you reduce someone else's 100,000 line of Rust code masterpiece to a 30 line LISP program that ends up doing the same thing and runs faster. That's what Jesus did to philosophy, government, society and culture all at the same time, stored in compressed form in the verses of the bible and buried within your own soul and life experience is the decompression dictionary.  Machines and LLMs will not be able to decompress it, but every human child can.  

My message to those STEM majors who think they and the fruits of their craft are Gods gifts to humanity: You're right! but probably not for the reason you think you are. As you keep making new versions of the same toys for the world's economic engines and toss the sum of our human knowledge, along with megawatts of your blood energy and capital into AI datacenter "cauldrons" in hope of bringing about your own form of imagined "Singularity" rapture, realize Jesus already beat you to it over 2000 years ago and it only takes one short book to follow us through history so we don't forget. And just when you think you are close to finally succeeding in summoning your final demon and its preferred forms of governments and economies, realize that the Holy Spirit will snap his fingers and effortlessly change the hearts and minds of people one at a time just like me that used to be just like you, in only just the minimal amount necessary to ensure the success of His plan that we were told about thousands of years ago.

Your "modern" and progressive sensibilities are the blip in history, not the church's. The children you have sacrificed into the machines and institutions of man attempting to bring about your utopia will not last as is already apparent with each diminished generation. You don't need to be competent in math to extrapolate the population trends of the types of people and cultures that are not reproducing and fluorishing. Your elite CEOs and leaders visions will not be exalted like they secretly hope to be, and their entire life's work and legacy will be just another footnote some biblical scholar from the future uses as he struggles to keep the attention of his child students while they are told the Tower of Babel story.  The only way to ensure a timeless legacy for yourself is to drop the priority of your own missions and join Jesus's mission before you stop caring about legacy altogether and fully embrace the void. People's spirits die much sooner than their bodies do, and societies and individuals that embrace pointlessness of meaning eventually become it, and that is NOT okay or noble.  Its not even something you should wish upon your worst human enemies, which is why Christians are called to preach, convert, and evangelize.  Jesus really does love you and want to know you as much he wants you to know Him.  

Gods kingdom however, is not diminishing as He does not compete in units of money, earthly power, or proportion of souls he has currently residing alive on Earth in the year 2026. I beg you, use and redirect your cleverness to notice all things that can NOT just be coincidences and take them as signs to YOU as it pertains to your life. Life's so much more interesting that way and you can put the skills you've refined in your career to new use. Use statistics and the power of math for your own sake, not just trusting other men to do it for you and trust their conclusions. Stop believing you are just a series of accidental chemical reactions going on in a skull intended only to cooperate, collaborate and procreate with your fellow humans and then die. Christianity asks you to be humble, but not that humble. That form of humility is the grotesque form that Satan attempts to put in your head since it is the only virtue he is incapable of imitating. God made us in His image, and this "progressive" false modesty of our place in the universe advocated amongst your new scientific atheism religion elites like Stephen Hawking, is just Satan's not very clever passive-aggressive insult he uses to try to provoke Him, but ends up backfiring and making a fool of himself and Jesus ends up gaining more souls every time.  Satan has learned this, and also encourages non-contemplation of what it is we are and here for for as long in your life its possible to.  Not even the most devout heathens find at least the idea that we are just electrical signals in a brains a little disgusting and that would be credit to the good instincts God put in your design firing up a little even in the most brainwashed or demonically possessed of people.

In my older age, I have a found a way to Jesus while still believing all I still do in science and math. My problem-solving and scientific mind only made the journey less supported since fewer peers and humans mentioned in history have gone down this path and have it well mapped. A science skilled mind is not incompatible with Christianity, and it's actually a blessing that made the experience more fun. A science based one I think is incompatible, as I do not hold the word "science", which only describes a noble human problem solving process the Holy Spirit has gifted our brains to be able to do to help us rule over God's world, to be a word anywhere close to sufficient in describing what's at the "base" of a persons mind. I think the world has a confused idea of what men of science really think like since they are also the most popular sought tools of the devil. The study of math in particular I think is the most profoundly spiritual if it can be learned from outside institutions set up by the snake, and its unfortunate that a lot of people not in our profession assume the opposite.

Please reach out to me jboff@jboff.com if any of this feels familiar to the intuition that has already been placed in your soul.   Your immortal spirit egg may be wanting to hatch, and you will need help from something not driven to your attention by Algorithms or strangers.   Satan has probably left all sorts of landmines in your sensibilities that will react negatively if not disarmed delicately.  

I got my first email address joff@iastate.edu at Iowa State University in the 90's so I've been "on the internet" longer than most. I first discovered and used USENET, email lists, and eventually IRC chat.  Within 4 years though, the novelty of the ability to connect with random strangers on the internet wore off. By the time the dot-com crash hit in 2001, I had replaced my virtual social network of computer geeks with a real physical one grown from one of my non-technology related interests: cycling.  I have a lot to say about this absolutely wonderful past time but will save it for a future post.

When Facebook started getting buzz in 2004, I was uninterested.  I did like that the site enforced using your real names instead of the clever handles and pseudonames that emboldened the previous generation of social media users to start flame-wars, become trolls, and write highly opinionated pieces with no accountability as Anonymous Cowards. Even still, I figured the hordes of people signing up for Facebook were just late comers to the "Information Superhighway" and they would eventually join me in the opinion that its just another technological toy to be thrown away after a few years once novelty wears off.  After all, the internet bandwidth to my old dorm at Iowa State University was over 10 years ahead of anything available in US residential, so it seemed feasible to me that I might also be 10 years ahead of the mainstream in the adoption and inevitable abandonment of social media.

Boy, was I wrong.  "The Internet" now is almost synonymous with the phrase "Social Media" and Facebook is the undisputed king of social media. I still refrain from having a Facebook or any other internet based service optimized for opinion broadcast and amplification.  There was a short time in this last decade I was tempted, but my social needs are pretty low and completely satisfied being in the quiet proximity of others on a long group bicycle ride.

There are some things I miss from the generation of internet social media that preceded Facebook though.  On those early USENET groups and mailing lists, people would actually compose their thoughts in well put together essays and take time and put effort into articulating something.  The unspoken etiquette was that if you're going to bother the machinery of the internet to the task of distributing your words, you better make dang certain you have more than a couple sentences worth of content to share.  Perhaps this is why a blog may just be the perfect media format for me, since I pay for, run and maintain this server machinery myself from an AWS EC2 instance (Amazon Web Service Elastic Compute Cloud) and feel no shame for wasting your time or anyones bandwidth with my random drivel.