Tuesday, March 28, 2006

The Actual Gospel of Jesus Christ (Part 1)

as presented by the early church

The gospel is for all people.

Luke 2.9.10 says, “Then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people.”” (N.K.J.V.)

John the baptizer had gone before Jesus with a mission to the children of Israel as stated by the angel Gabriel to Zecheriah, Johns father, in Luke 2.16.17, “Many of the people of Israel will he bring back to the Lord their God…to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” John the baptizer was not sent to the gentiles, only to the house of Israel, to prepare their hearts for the Messiah. However, through the Jews rejection of their Savior, Jesus, the gospel of salvation was passed on to the gentile nations.

It is quite clear from scripture, both Old and New Testaments, that this was not only foreseen by God but actually designed by Him, purposed before time itself.

First, lets look at what Luke, the gentile physician, had found in his research and placed in his gospel account. According to the angel in 2.10, the gospel he brought the shepherds concerning Christ the Lord was for “all people.” That this salvation was not intended strictly for the Jews is confirmed by the story of Simeon in Luke 2.21-35. Simeon was ‘an upright, devout man who was living in expectation of the comforting of Israel…the Lord’s Messiah’.

After his circumcision the parents of Jesus brought him into the temple in Jerusalem to fulfill the law in presenting him to the Lord. Simeon had been led of the Spirit to be there and, taking Jesus in his arms said:

“Now, master, you will let your slave go free in peace, as you promised, for my eyes have seen your salvation which you have set before all the nations, a light of revelation for the heathen, and a glory to your people Israel.” (Verses 29-32 from E.J. Goodspeed)

Cross-referenced with Isaiah 9.2, 42.6 and 49.6 we find a few of the many prophecies concerning Gods promise of ‘a light of revelation for the heathen’. Furthermore, we find, according to Isaiah 60. 1-2 that God expected Israel to be a light to the gentiles (also Isaiah 2.3, 45.22-25 and 49.22,23).

We find no time in history where the Jews actively participated in God’s plan for the gentiles. Rather, we find the Jewish nation becoming increasingly exclusive until finally they wouldn’t even eat with the gentiles.

However, we do find the fulfillment of these prophecies in the gospel of Jesus Christ and the subsequent rejection of the Messiah by the Jews.

Paul, in Acts 13.14-41, was preaching the gospel to the Jews and gentiles in Antioch. Verse 26 states:

“Brothers! Descendants of the house of Abraham, and those others among you who reverence God! It is to us this message of salvation has been sent.” (E.J. Goodspeed) The gentiles present where converts to Judaism (v. 43) as Paul felt strongly that the gospel should be addressed to the Jews first as Gods ‘chosen people’.

But we read in verses 44-47:

“The next Sabbath almost all the town gathered to hear God’s message. But when the Jews saw the crowds, they were very jealous, and they contradicted what Paul said and abused him. Then Paul and Barnabas spoke out plainly, and said, “Gods message had to be told to you first, but since you thrust it off and judge ourselves unworthy of eternal life, we now turn to the heathen. For these are the orders the Lord has given us: “I have made you a light for the heathen, to be the means of salvation to the end of the earth’.” (Goodspeed)

So we find the basic principle of biblical interpretation; the New interprets the Old, the clear interprets the obscure, Paul clearly stating that his proclamation of the promises in the gospel to the gentiles was under direct order of God as stated in the prophetic writings.

As this subject is such a vital part of the gospel and takes up so much thought in the writings of the early church, I will be expounding on this idea in later portions of this work, so rather than repeating the same things over and over, I will leave off here.

(This is a part of a book I was working on in the late 80’s shortly before I became convinced of the intellectual absurdity of the Christian religion in its entirety. This series of articles do accurately portray my final conviction of what the New Testament writings actually portray as the message, purpose and mission of the groups of followers of ‘the way’ that were accepted as the Orthodox Church. They are presented here purely as a catalyst for shaking some fundamentalist minds awake as I believe this to represent the clearest biblically based and verified interpretation of the New Testament. )

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Ten principles of Creation Spirituality:

  1. The universe is basically a blessing, that is, something we experience as good.
  2. We can and do relate to the universe as a whole since we are a microcosm of that macrocosm and that this relationship "intoxicates" us. (Aquinas)
  3. Everyone is a mystic (i.e., born full of wonder and capable of recovering it at any age; of not taking the awe and wonder of existence for granted.)
  4. Everyone is a prophet, i.e., a "mystic in action" (Hocking) who is called to "interfere" (Heschel) with what interrupts authentic life.
  5. That humans have to dig and work at finding their deep self, their true self, their spirit self; thus the role of spiritual praxis and meditation and community confrontation which can itself be a yoga. If we do not undergo such praxis we live superficially out of fear or greed or addiction or someone else's expectations of us. That salvation is best understood as "preserving the good." (Aquinas).
  6. That the journey that marks that digging can be named as a four-fold journey:
    Via Positiva: delight, awe, wonder, revelry
    Via Negativa: darkness, silence, suffering, letting go
    Via Creativa: birthing, creativity
    Via Transformativa: compassion, justice healing, celebration
  7. Everyone is an artist in some way and art as meditation is a primary form of prayer for releasing our images and empowering the community and each of us. Art finds its fulfillment in ritual, the community's art.
  8. We are all sons and daughters of God; therefore, we have divine blood in our vein, the divine breath in our lungs; and the basic work of God is: Compassion.
  9. Divinity is as much Mother as Father, as much Child as Parent, as much Godhead (mystery) as God (history) as much beyond all beings as in all beings.
  10. That we experience that the Divine is in all things and all things are in the Divine (Panentheism) and that this mystical intuition supplants theism (and its child, atheism) as an appropriate way to name our relation to the Divine and experience the Sacred.

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Declaration of Evolution

--- When in the course of organic evolution it becomes obvious that a mutational process is inevitably dissolving the physical and neurological bonds which connect the members of one generation to the past and inevitably directing them to assume among the species of Earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them, a decent concern for the harmony of species requires that the causes of the mutation should be declared.

We hold these truths to be self evident:

  • That all species are created different but equal;
  • That they are endowed, each one, with certain inalienable rights;
  • That among them are Freedom to Live, Freedom to Grow, and Freedom to pursue Happiness in their own style;
  • That to protect these God-given rights, social structures naturally emerge, basing their authority on the principles of love of God and respect for all forms of life;
  • That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and harmony, it is the organic duty of the young members of that species to mutate, to drop out, to initiate a new social structure, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its power in such form as seems likely to produce the safety, happiness, and harmony of all sentient beings.

Genetic wisdom, indeed, suggests that social structures long established should not be discarded for frivolous reasons and transient causes. The ecstasy of mutation is equally balanced by the pain. Accordingly all experience shows that members of a species are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, rather than to discard the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, all pursuing invariably the same destructive goals, threaten the very fabric of organic life and the serene harmony of the planet, it is the right, it is the organic duty to drop out of such morbid covenants and to evolve new loving social structures. Such has been the patient sufferance of the freedom-loving peoples of this earth, and such is now the necessity which constrains us to form new systems of government.

The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the planet earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored.

To prove this, let Facts be submitted to the judgment of generations to come.

· These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of earth.

· They have maintained as well a continual state of war among themselves and against the colored races, the freedom-loving, the gentle, and the young. Genocide is their habit.

· They have instituted artificial scarcities, denying peaceful folk the natural inheritance of earth's abundance and God's endowment.

· They have glorified material values and degraded the spiritual.

· They have claimed private, personal ownership of God's land, driving by force of arms the gentle from passage on the earth.

· In their greed they have erected artificial immigration and customs barriers, preventing the free movement of people.

· In their lust for control they have set up systems of compulsory education to coerce the minds of the children and to destroy the wisdom and innocence of the playful young.

· In their lust for power they have controlled all means of communication to prevent the free flow of ideas and to block loving exchanges among the gentle.

· In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific.

· In their anger they have coerced the peaceful young against their will to join their armies and to wage murderous wars against the young and gentle of other countries.

· In their greed they have made the manufacture and selling of weapons the basis of their economies.

· For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers and the seas.

· In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.

· In their aging greed they have set up an economic system which favors age over youth.

· They have in every way attempted to impose a robot uniformity and to crush variety, individuality, and independence of thought.

· In their greed, they have instituted political systems which perpetuate rule by the aging and force youth to choose between plastic conformity or despairing alienation.

· They have invaded privacy by illegal search, unwarranted arrest, and contemptuous harassment.

· They have enlisted an army of informers.

· In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishment of the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids.

· They never admit a mistake.

· They unceasingly trumpet the virtue of greed and war.

· In their advertising and in their manipulation of information they make a fetish out of blatant falsity and pious self-enhancement.

· Their obvious errors only stimulate them to greater error and noisier self-approval.

· They are bores.

· They hate beauty.

· They hate sex.

· They hate life.

We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness. We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness. We have tried to make them laugh. We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshipping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues. We must therefore acquiesce to genetic necessity, detach ourselves from their uncaring madness and hold them henceforth as we hold the rest of God's creatures - in harmony, life brothers, in their excess, menaces to life.

We, therefore, God-loving, peace-loving, life-loving, fun-loving men and women, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the Authority of all sentient beings who seek gently to evolve on this planet, solemnly publish and declare that we are free and independent, and that we are absolved from all Allegiance to the United States Government and all governments controlled by the menopausal, and that grouping ourselves into tribes of like-minded fellows, we claim full power to live and move on the land, obtain sustenance with our own hands and minds in the style which seems sacred and holy to us, and to do all Acts and Things which independent Freemen and Freewomen may of right do without infringing on the same rights of other species and groups to do their own thing.

And for the support of this Declaration of Evolution with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, and serenely confident of the approval of generations to come, in whose name we speak, do we now mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor." --- Author: Dr. Timothy Leary, Ph.D. Courtesy: Hyperdimension

Thursday, March 16, 2006

A Beginner's Guide to RSS

Written by Eileen Parzek, © 2004

A few months ago, I quietly launched an RSS feed for my business newsletter, Increase Your Reach: Infuse Your Marketing with Technology. RSS is a relatively new, alternative format for publishing information online. With RSS, the reader has all of the control over when, how and where they read your content. The language of RSS, called XML, creates a "feed" which someone with an RSS reader can tune in to by subscribing from an RSS reader. You may have seen a little orange XML icon on Web sites - that is the standard link to a RSS feed. Click this one and you'll see what the guts of a feed looks like: This kind of link is what you would subscribe to, as I will explain in a moment.

It is really quite simple - think of the feed as a like a Web page, and the reader as like a browser. What makes it different is that whenever the RSS subscriber wants to read they can go into their reader and quickly see what is new, scan headlines, and read only what interests them. So, unlike the Web, where you have to go looking for a site, and can never be sure what is updated and when; or email newsletters, which are hindered by spam, RSS provides information that is targeted, filtered, and by completely by choice.

There are a number of different reader options - some integrate with the mail software like Outlook, some stand alone, and others are Web based. Likewise, there are a number of formats and paths to creating a feed. One Web site which compiles all of these options is 2RSS.com.

Basically, RSS format is similar to HTML in that it can actually be edited in a simple text editor like Notepad, but as with Web page design, there are many tools cropping up to make it easier for someone to create and publish a feed. In your RSS file, you simply would add a title or headline, a short description, and a link to the item on your site, and publish the feed (upload it). This can be either a manual or automated process, depending on how you go about it.

I use an RSS reader based on the Web called Bloglines.com. Within my account, I can search for and subscribe to feeds from sources which I value. Likewise, if I see a site with an RSS feed, I can copy the address and paste it into Bloglines, and instantly be subscribed. I have set up a folder system to organize the feeds and could set up alerts if I wanted to.

By having my feed subscriptions based out on the Web, I can access them either on my desktop, laptop, or on my smart phone. By scanning headlines, I can very quickly plow through more incoming information than ever. I catch up on reading while waiting for appointments or standing in line, during TV commercials and riding in the car - which allows me to absorb even more information each day (in my mind, this is a good thing).

Many RSS feeds are generated from blogs, where business owners, publishers and industry experts share their thoughts, articles, and observations and then automatically publish to a RSS feed, alerting the audience to a new entry. I probably will not ever go see what is new on a particular blog each week, but if my RSS reader flags me that something interesting has appeared, I would, so by offering this service, they have gained another reader.

From the business owner's side, there are a number of ways RSS can be used to publish information and reach customers. You could use an RSS feed to announce "what's new" on your Web site, highlight new products, or stir up hot topics in a discussion forums you moderate. If you keep a blog, you can use RSS to push your new entries to interested parties, instead of waiting for them to come. Subscribers to your feed will see in their reader that you have done something new, read the summary and come check it out if it matters to them.

My opinion of this latest publishing format is mixed, maybe because it parallels the 1994-1996 period of the Web, when people first started publishing online. Even text based Web sites were cool then, and rare enough that there were only limited of sources of information to choose from. But the industry grew and became commercialized, the Internet changed. Legitimate email is now buried in spam, and without a good search engine (and sometimes even with!), you can't find things easily or quickly. So I do like how RSS pushes the information to me based on my desire to see it, and organizes it so I can quickly scan it and pick out the chunks that matter. But eventually, if RSS becomes popular, this could change. For example, a popular RSS publisher could certainly decide to allow paid sponsorship of his or her feed, opening the door similarly to the first banner ads and spam. Likewise, there could ultimately be so many RSS feeds that it becomes hard to choose and find what matters. But again, the beauty of it is that you can fine tune and filter what you want to be fed, as you go. This is why some people believe RSS might be a major component of the Web experience of the future.

RSS is not yet widely adopted - it is popular with geeks, bloggers, and more recently, media and businesses, but many excellent information sources do not provide an RSS feed yet. I get a number of email newsletters (when they are not caught in the spam filter) which never are read because I file them for "later." If they published headlines in RSS, I would be likely to return to their site more often. I'd like to see more news outlets publish in RSS. In these situations, they would increase readership by being more accessible and providing this alternative delivery format.

From a publisher's perspective, there are other considerations. You never know who is subscribed to your feed, the way you do an email newsletter, because it is done outside of email, which identifies the reader to some extent. However, if your goal is to reach as many people as possible, without caring about statistics like "click through rates," you can potentially reach many more interested people through a feed than a newsletter. An unknown reader can turn into an interested prospect just as easily as one whose name you have in a database.

Anonymity is part of the allure to the consumer - the readers subscribe when they want, leave when they want, and contact you when they want, without leaving tracks. From a marketer's perspective, this might appear to be a bad thing but for a business whose goal it is to reach a broad, willing audience, it could be a solution. Other positive marketing scenarios to consider would be using RSS as a way to attract more people back to your site regularly (where you sell to them), create a broader recognition of your brand, products and services, and develop yet another communication channel with your customers.

As with the Web, RSS still has a lot of evolving and growing to do, and standards to shake out in how to implement and receive feeds. But I believe it is definitely something to be aware of, and explore depending on the type of business or organization you have. If nothing else, as a busy business owner, it might be a way to filter the information you receive online so you can keep up on things more efficiently!

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Eileen Parzek is an award winning graphic designer and writer providing digital and print graphic design and web design services. Always found at the intersection of information, creativity and technology, her business, SOHO It Goes! Business Design Studio (www.sohoitgoes.com) helps small businesses make a big impression.

Friday, March 10, 2006

Just to get this new blog off to a good start I thought I would dive right in and look at why I am in Network Marketing. Many think we are the equivalent of a used car salesman. Fortunately we are gaining in reputability thanks to facts and figures such as these:

Did you know?

  • Over the past 10 years Fortune 500 companies have laid off 4.4 million workers! This workforce reduction has caused a record number of people to seek home-based careers.
  • Market research shows that 24 million people currently operate either part-time or full-time businesses from their home and home-based entrepreneur numbers are expected to grow at unprecedented levels over the next 10 years.
  • Vast technological improvements within the past 5 years in computers, internet, fax and telephone technologies, as well as downsizing within the traditional job market have lead to this explosive trend.

What's it take to be happy? Here are some facts most people don’t know about working at home.

  • 86% of home-based business owners are happier running their own business instead of working for someone else.
  • 84% recommend working from home to others.
  • 84% plan to still be running their own business in five years.
  • 29% work at home with other family members.
  • 60% think their businesses are doing as well or better than they expected.
  • 76% expect their home-based business’ revenues to grow this year.

Can you earn any money with a home based business?

  • 20% of home entrepreneurs reported that their businesses grossed between $100,000 and $500,000 last year. (Remember the 80/20 rule?)
  • 14% paid themselves annual salaries of $50,000 to $250,000.
  • Did you know that less than 20% of Americans are self-employed, but they control over 66% of all the wealth in American?
  • Did you know that self-employed people are four times more likely to become millionaires than those who work for others?
Also check out this article by Paul Zane Pilzer.
this is an audio post - click to play