Zone1 My Spiritual Evolution

[g5000]

My spiritual balance has been way out of whack for way too long. I have just made a commitment to myself I am going to avoid the news as much as possible for the next few years, and cut back on my attendance in the Politics and Current Events forums here.

Some people call what I am about to do my Testimony. Whatever.

There are other people who will think what I am about to say is a boatload of horseshit, and that's fine. I totally understand as I have given them good reason to think so.

But stick it out with me if you wish to hear me out. This will necessarily be a long story, but I hope an interesting enough one to keep you engaged.

I am not going to go into the gruesome details, but I was abused in every way possible in my childhood. In some ways which you may never have heard of.

Suffice it to say I spent a significant portion of my childhood in hospital beds.

By the time I was 15 years old, I had come to believe everyone on Earth was put here to fuck with me personally. I thought everyone was a machine, including my brothers whose faces I punched every day and who punched my face every day. We had been reduced to wild animals.

I later learned in my life that thinking problem I had is called paranoid schizophrenia.

I also came to very firmly believe there could not possibly be a God, as He would not have let all this shit happen to me. I became a very angry militant atheist. The really pissed off kind.

So I went into politics as that is a natural fit for paranoid schizophrenics and atheists. I joined an organization founded by the eminent Bill Buckley called Young Americans for Freedom. I met Reagan before he was president, and many other household names.

There I was. 15, 16, 17 years old, making speeches to legislators in their hallowed chambers and halls. I spoke out against the Equal Right Amendment, pissing off a lot of lesbians. (I kid! I kid!)

I spoke in favor of a Right To Work bill. You could not get a job in my state unless you joined a union and that annoyed the hell out me. So when it became obvious to me the Senate committee was bought and owned by the labor unions as indicated by their fawning over unionists and vicious attacks against us Right To Workers, I stood up and made eye contact with the Vice President of the AFL-CIO and gave him the fist.

500 mobsters in three piece suits paid by my dues to be there booed at me. I'll never forget that sound echoing off the walls. Then two thugs followed me out of the room, trying to intimidate me. So I took them on a hike, up and around the Capitol dome as they huffed and puffed and wheezed. My mother was terrified for me. I was laughing my ass off.

We got threatening phone calls for months afterward. How sad is it the mob felt the need to intimidate a 17 year old when they had already won the war?

Anyway.

My younger brother decided the best way to escape our situation was to enter the service. I followed soon after, and then my older brother joined up right after that.

We had a pact with each other despite our mutual hatred of each other. We had a much younger brother and we all vowed that if our parents did even a fraction of what they did to us to him, we would kill them

I explain to people all the time that a lot of veterans come to the service already pre-traumatized, and are trying to get away from their own personal horrors.

But it was too late for my older brother. He was an intravenous drug addict by then, got in a lot of fights in the service, and was dishonorably discharged. He died a few years later as one of the early victims of AIDS.

My other veteran brother now lives on a mountaintop in New Hampshire as he was forced out of the workplace for being a danger to others. He is heavily medicated by the VA and lives contentedly raising chicken and marijuana plants. He does not partake of the pot as that would mess with his medications. He grows it to give to his elderly neighbors for their various old people ailments.

This is a guy I used to beat this shit out of. Now we are as close as two brothers can be. We are surivors.

Some of you will be happy to know he is a huge Trump fan. Before his wife dragged him to the VA to get help, he was more than ready to start shooting homos and Mexicans if Trump lost the 2016 election.

Thank God Trump won, I guess?

My family was dirt poor. A few years ago, I searched for my childhood home. When I found it, I was traumatized all over again at its tiny size. I could not believe that many of us had lived there, and all the horrors came rushing back.

Despite my parents' flaws, they made sure all us boys attended private Catholic schools. I have no idea how they pulled that off. But I well remember it meant eating a lot of hot dogs, drinking nothing but powdered milk, and so forth. You get the picture.

It also meant the financial strain of our education only increased the stress level which rolled downhill onto us.

Nonetheless, every bit of my success in life is due to that education.

Another thing my dad did is he lectured me for hours, days, months, years about the Irish-never-quit thing. Pounded that shit right into me.

That turned out to serve me incredibly well in the service, let me tell you. When I saw other guys whining and crying and failing in boot camp, I was amazed. Boot camp was a cake walk to me!

Damn right never quit. No matter what shitstorm you find yourself in.

So God bless my parents, I guess?

As a result of my Catholic education at the hands of some seriously sadistic nuns, I left home with a strong moral code despite being a rabid atheist.

Here's a thing.

The nuns teach you about mortal sins and venial sins. If you violate one of the Ten Commandments, that's a mortal sin and you are going to hell. If you violate one of the thousands of venial sins, the confessor priest checks his spreadsheet and tells you how many Hail Mary's and Our Fathers you have to say to wipe your slate clean.

So like I said. I left home with a powerful moral code.

Which I immediately set about violating at every opportunity. It was a rebellion against the straightjacket I had been in my whole life.

Here's another thing.

If you violate one of the Ten Commandments, you're going to hell. So what difference does it matter if you do it one hundred times, right?

Atheist Logic, baby!

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!


Here's another thing which was behind my rejection of my moral code.

Because of all the abuse, my filters were all fucked up. They were clogged.

Our parents took us to mass every Sunday. And they read a piece of the Old Testament, then a piece of the New Testament. If you go seven days a week for a year, like some of the old biddies do, you've heard the whole bible.

But as mere Sunday worshippers, we only heard 52 pieces of it. You were supposed to make up the difference in catechism, which we did for a while.

Anyway. My filters.

The only stuff which made it through my filters were the parts where God was smiting and nuking people for being sinners.

i did not hear a word of love or forgiveness. I know for a fact that stuff was read to us. I've read the Bible since my conversion, and it was an entirely different book. My filters were unclogged. But at the time, I didn't hear a word of any of the New Testament.

Weird, right?

God was a real bastard from my point of view. He sets us up to fail and then sends us to hell. That was my view.

God can kiss my ass, I decided.

Here's another thing.

How can you hate Someone you don't believe exists? That snake swallowed its own tail for decades of my life.

At some point, you start desperately hoping there really is no God since you are such a fuckup. He is sending you to hell for sure!

Forever.

A little side track for a second.

After my older brother died from AIDS, my parents took responsibility and repented. They even went so far as to open two halfway houses and took in convicts and such. The named their charity Agape, which is a Greek word for unconditional love.

It took me quite a few years beyond that, though, to finally forgive them.

Let me tell you. Being a forgiving person is the very highest state of being a human can achieve.

It's a real bitch getting there. A real motherfucking bitch.

For a long time, I was obsessed with murdering my parents.

A real motherfucking bitch getting there, folks. And it was only due to my conversion, which I promise I am getting to in the next few thousand words.

After the reconciliation decades later, I asked my very Catholic dad what he thought hell was. He was so Catholic, he quite the corporate world and went to work for a Catholic mission. Who better to ask, right?

Don't say a priest. I'll explain later.

I'm expecting my dad to talk about lakes of fire and demons with pitchforks and all that shit you see in those terrifying religious paintings.

No.

He says hell is, "Eternal separation from God."

Whoa.

Whoa...



I still get chills. Because I have been in hell for most of my life. And it wasn't the abuse which put me there, though I could be forgiven for thinking so.

I put myself in hell. I told God to kiss my ass and turned my back on Him.


Here's another thing.

When you are crazy pissed off and an atheist, you acquire what is known as a Confirmation Bias. It's a kind of logical fallacy.

Let me tell you, when you serve in the military for over 20 years like I did, you are provided limitless evidence to feed that bias.

You are sent to places where you see all the worst things human beings do to each other. Yep, for sure there's no God.

I wasn't satisfied with all this evidence, though. I needed more.

Wherever I went on this planet, I would seek out the local holy men and interrogate them. I would engage them in angry debate and challenge their beliefs.

When I look back now at the nerve I had doing that, I feel deeply ashamed.

If I grilled a priest, and I did many, I had one question which my filters had been unable to process. I would ask the priest du jour, "What does Jesus died for our sins mean?"

I honestly did not get it.

There is no doubt every one of them answered the question straightforwardly. But there's a bit in the Old Testament about Egypt's Pharoah's heart being hardened which made it literally impossible for him to heed Moses and, by extension, God. So God had to really fuck the Pharoah up the ass until he got the point.

That was me. Mr. Hardened Heart. I literally could not understand those priests, I was so far gone down the atheist rabbit hole.

Eternal separation from God. My inability to understand priests is why I went to my dad to find out if I was going to hell and finding out I had been there for a while already.

I won't go into all the gruesome details of my lifestyle while I was in the void. I'll just jump ahead to my conversion process now. There are three phases to my spiritual evolution which means you have about 38 thousand more words to read.

Take a break. I'll wait here.

 

[Harry Dresden]

how about the cliff notes next time...

 

[The Duke]

My spiritual balance has been way out of whack for way too long. I have just made a commitment to myself I am going to avoid the news as much as possible for the next few years, and cut back on my attendance in the Politics and Current Events forums here.

Some people call what I am about to do my Testimony. Whatever.

There are other people who will think what I am about to say is a boatload of horseshit, and that's fine. I totally understand as I have given them good reason to think so.

But stick it out with me if you wish to hear me out. This will necessarily be a long story, but I hope an interesting enough one to keep you engaged.

I am not going to go into the gruesome details, but I was abused in every way possible in my childhood. In some ways which you may never have heard of.

Suffice it to say I spent a significant portion of my childhood in hospital beds.

By the time I was 15 years old, I had come to believe everyone on Earth was put here to fuck with me personally. I thought everyone was a machine, including my brothers whose faces I punched every day and who punched my face every day. We had been reduced to wild animals.

I later learned in my life that thinking problem I had is called paranoid schizophrenia.

I also came to very firmly believe there could not possibly be a God, as He would not have let all this shit happen to me. I became a very angry militant atheist. The really pissed off kind.

So I went into politics as that is a natural fit for paranoid schizophrenics and atheists. I joined an organization founded by the eminent Bill Buckley called Young Americans for Freedom. I met Reagan before he was president, and many other household names.

There I was. 15, 16, 17 years old, making speeches to legislators in their hallowed chambers and halls. I spoke out against the Equal Right Amendment, pissing off a lot of lesbians. (I kid! I kid!)

I spoke in favor of a Right To Work bill. You could not get a job in my state unless you joined a union and that annoyed the hell out me. So when it became obvious to me the Senate committee was bought and owned by the labor unions as indicated by their fawning over unionists and vicious attacks against us Right To Workers, I stood up and made eye contact with the Vice President of the AFL-CIO and gave him the fist.

500 mobsters in three piece suits paid by my dues to be there booed at me. I'll never forget that sound echoing off the walls. Then two thugs followed me out of the room, trying to intimidate me. So I took them on a hike, up and around the Capitol dome as they huffed and puffed and wheezed. My mother was terrified for me. I was laughing my ass off.

We got threatening phone calls for months afterward. How sad is it the mob felt the need to intimidate a 17 year old when they had already won the war?

Anyway.

My younger brother decided the best way to escape our situation was to enter the service. I followed soon after, and then my older brother joined up right after that.

We had a pact with each other despite our mutual hatred of each other. We had a much younger brother and we all vowed that if our parents did even a fraction of what they did to us to him, we would kill them

I explain to people all the time that a lot of veterans come to the service already pre-traumatized, and are trying to get away from their own personal horrors.

But it was too late for my older brother. He was an intravenous drug addict by then, got in a lot of fights in the service, and was dishonorably discharged. He died a few years later as one of the early victims of AIDS.

My other veteran brother now lives on a mountaintop in New Hampshire as he was forced out of the workplace for being a danger to others. He is heavily medicated by the VA and lives contentedly raising chicken and marijuana plants. He does not partake of the pot as that would mess with his medications. He grows it to give to his elderly neighbors for their various old people ailments.

This is a guy I used to beat this shit out of. Now we are as close as two brothers can be. We are surivors.

Some of you will be happy to know he is a huge Trump fan. Before his wife dragged him to the VA to get help, he was more than ready to start shooting homos and Mexicans if Trump lost the 2016 election.

Thank God Trump won, I guess?

My family was dirt poor. A few years ago, I searched for my childhood home. When I found it, I was traumatized all over again at its tiny size. I could not believe that many of us had lived there, and all the horrors came rushing back.

Despite my parents' flaws, they made sure all us boys attended private Catholic schools. I have no idea how they pulled that off. But I well remember it meant eating a lot of hot dogs, drinking nothing but powdered milk, and so forth. You get the picture.

It also meant the financial strain of our education only increased the stress level which rolled downhill onto us.

Nonetheless, every bit of my success in life is due to that education.

Another thing my dad did is he lectured me for hours, days, months, years about the Irish-never-quit thing. Pounded that shit right into me.

That turned out to serve me incredibly well in the service, let me tell you. When I saw other guys whining and crying and failing in boot camp, I was amazed. Boot camp was a cake walk to me!

Damn right never quit. No matter what shitstorm you find yourself in.

So God bless my parents, I guess?

As a result of my Catholic education at the hands of some seriously sadistic nuns, I left home with a strong moral code despite being a rabid atheist.

Here's a thing.

The nuns teach you about mortal sins and venial sins. If you violate one of the Ten Commandments, that's a mortal sin and you are going to hell. If you violate one of the thousands of venial sins, the confessor priest checks his spreadsheet and tells you how many Hail Mary's and Our Fathers you have to say to wipe your slate clean.

So like I said. I left home with a powerful moral code.

Which I immediately set about violating at every opportunity. It was a rebellion against the straightjacket I had been in my whole life.

Here's another thing.

If you violate one of the Ten Commandments, you're going to hell. So what difference does it matter if you do it one hundred times, right?

Atheist Logic, baby!

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!


Here's another thing which was behind my rejection of my moral code.

Because of all the abuse, my filters were all fucked up. They were clogged.

Our parents took us to mass every Sunday. And they read a piece of the Old Testament, then a piece of the New Testament. If you go seven days a week for a year, like some of the old biddies do, you've heard the whole bible.

But as mere Sunday worshippers, we only heard 52 pieces of it. You were supposed to make up the difference in catechism, which we did for a while.

Anyway. My filters.

The only stuff which made it through my filters were the parts where God was smiting and nuking people for being sinners.

i did not hear a word of love or forgiveness. I know for a fact that stuff was read to us. I've read the Bible since my conversion, and it was an entirely different book. My filters were unclogged. But at the time, I didn't hear a word of any of the New Testament.

Weird, right?

God was a real bastard from my point of view. He sets us up to fail and then sends us to hell. That was my view.

God can kiss my ass, I decided.

Here's another thing.

How can you hate Someone you don't believe exists? That snake swallowed its own tail for decades of my life.

At some point, you start desperately hoping there really is no God since you are such a fuckup. He is sending you to hell for sure!

Forever.

A little side track for a second.

After my older brother died from AIDS, my parents took responsibility and repented. They even went so far as to open two halfway houses and took in convicts and such. The named their charity Agape, which is a Greek word for unconditional love.

It took me quite a few years beyond that, though, to finally forgive them.

Let me tell you. Being a forgiving person is the very highest state of being a human can achieve.

It's a real bitch getting there. A real motherfucking bitch.

For a long time, I was obsessed with murdering my parents.

A real motherfucking bitch getting there, folks. And it was only due to my conversion, which I promise I am getting to in the next few thousand words.

After the reconciliation decades later, I asked my very Catholic dad what he thought hell was. He was so Catholic, he quite the corporate world and went to work for a Catholic mission. Who better to ask, right?

Don't say a priest. I'll explain later.

I'm expecting my dad to talk about lakes of fire and demons with pitchforks and all that shit you see in those terrifying religious paintings.

No.

He says hell is, "Eternal separation from God."

Whoa.

Whoa...



I still get chills. Because I have been in hell for most of my life. And it wasn't the abuse which put me there, though I could be forgiven for thinking so.

I put myself in hell. I told God to kiss my ass and turned my back on Him.


Here's another thing.

When you are crazy pissed off and an atheist, you acquire what is known as a Confirmation Bias. It's a kind of logical fallacy.

Let me tell you, when you serve in the military for over 20 years like I did, you are provided limitless evidence to feed that bias.

You are sent to places where you see all the worst things human beings do to each other. Yep, for sure there's no God.

I wasn't satisfied with all this evidence, though. I needed more.

Wherever I went on this planet, I would seek out the local holy men and interrogate them. I would engage them in angry debate and challenge their beliefs.

When I look back now at the nerve I had doing that, I feel deeply ashamed.

If I grilled a priest, and I did many, I had one question which my filters had been unable to process. I would ask the priest du jour, "What does Jesus died for our sins mean?"

I honestly did not get it.

There is no doubt every one of them answered the question straightforwardly. But there's a bit in the Old Testament about Egypt's Pharoah's heart being hardened which made it literally impossible for him to heed Moses and, by extension, God. So God had to really fuck the Pharoah up the ass until he got the point.

That was me. Mr. Hardened Heart. I literally could not understand those priests, I was so far gone down the atheist rabbit hole.

Eternal separation from God. My inability to understand priests is why I went to my dad to find out if I was going to hell and finding out I had been there for a while already.

I won't go into all the gruesome details of my lifestyle while I was in the void. I'll just jump ahead to my conversion process now. There are three phases to my spiritual evolution which means you have about 38 thousand more words to read.

Take a break. I'll wait here.

 

[g5000]

The sicker and crazier I got, the sicker and crazier the girlfriends I acquired.

After all, no normal sane woman is going to want to have anything to do with a maniac.

I finally encountered the Queen of the Crazies and promptly fell madly in love with her.

She was a bartender living in a trailer in Mississippi, with two kids she had before the age of 18 by two different fathers. Even better, she had gone through four husbands by the age of 26.

I saw absolutely no red flags whatsoever about this relationship. That's just how besotted I was with her amazing good looks. My god, I can't even tell you how amazing she was in the looks department.

Here's a thing.

Crazy women are really, really good in bed. We're talking demon sex. A good looking woman who is a demon in bed will clog your red flag filters, folks. Voice of experience over here.

But there is a heavy price which comes with this. A very heavy price.

Two crazy people have crazy arguments. For example, she was smoking pot one night with a girlfriend when I came home to the trailer. For reasons I don't want to go into, it was imperative I grab that shit and threw it out into the weeds behind her trailer.

You know what she did?

She called the cops!

Queen of the Crazies.

A cop shows up. I explain the situation. He laughs and helps me look for the pot to back up my story, but it's fruitless. He then suggests I haul ass away from the Queen for a while.

I pack a bag and decide I'll go to another base three hours away where I have some friends. My intention is to have a Lost Weekend with them.

I get there two hours later (three hours is for pussies) and for reasons I have been unable to recall, I end up in a woman's apartment who I had picked up in a bar. I did not know her and never met up with my friends.

A amusing part of this story is she had locked her keys in her apartment. It took me literally half a second to jimmy her door with my military ID, which freaked her right the fuck out.

So I'm drinking one of her beers. I hate beer. I'm a Jack Daniels man. YEE-HAW!

But beer is all she has. And they are fricking pony beers. WTF?!?

For the uninitiated, a pony beer is a bottle about the size of your fist. Fucking faggot shit, is what I'm thinking. This woman is NOT impressing me.

By the way, I had a visceral hatred of homosexuals back then. You can probably figure out why. But it is also a fact that everyone of my generation hated them.

Some people still do.

My conversion about gays began when my brother was dying from AIDS. Most AIDS victims were gays, so my brother was in hospital with all gays.

He used to hate gays more than I did.

But I saw how those gay men treated my brother. They treated him better than I ever had. It wasn't even close. They were his brothers in death.

Hatred is chipped away a piece at a time. I still had a ways to go in that department,, but the process had begun.

Now there I am, holding a faggot beer. I've only drunk less than half of it when this inexplainable thing happens.

The desire to drink leaves me. Not just leaves me for that moment, but when I set that thing down on an end table, I knew with all certainty that was going to be the last alcoholic beverage I ever consumed.

And so it has been.

I stared at that thing. I stared at it some more. Then some more. Then I said out loud, "HUH!"

Then I excused myself, left the baffled babe behind, and sought out a friend and stayed at her place for the evening.

No, there was no sex. She really was just a friend. A very good and kind friend. A normal sane woman who allowed herself one indulgence by allowing this maniac in her house.

Okay, here comes Phase One.

The next day, I'm hauling ass back to my Queen. I'm driving at Warp Factor 3.

And then there's a voice. Right next to me and slightly behind me. I'm not going to tell you what that voice said, but it was biblical.

Freaked me right the fuck out, but I only had about ten milliseconds to react when I was surrounded by a white light.

Whammo.

Have you ever been in a completely dark space. No light leaks whatsoever?

It was exactly the opposite of that. Pure, depthless, white light.

At the same time, I felt the physical presence of God in that spot where the voice originated from.

Go ahead and consider me batshit insane. I was a paranoid schizo at one point in my life, so I understand if you think this.

For this reason, my fear of what people would think, I did not utter a word to anyone about it for half a decade, with the exception of my psycho queen. And that was only because the second she opened her trailer door and laid eyes on me, she looked stunned and said, "You've found God."

This is all true. I will swear on a stack of Bibles this is all true.

I don't know how long I was hanging with God inside that light. Time simply stopped. But this salvation, that's the only thing I can call it, washed over me for some length and brought me the peace of mind I had been seeking my entire life.

I don't know why I took so long, but I picked up a Bible a few years later and it was not the same book. My heart was no longer hardened. I no longer felt God hated me. My filters were gone. My bias was gone.

That book was so profoundly different, I laughed my ass off several times as I read it.

Joy, joy, joy.

The light eventually left and I was back behind the wheel of a speeding motor vehicle on a Mississippi country highway.

"HUH!" What!!! Who was driving during all this?


There's an expression which goes, "If you sober up a horse thief, all you have is a sober horse thief."

This is totally true.

My needle swung from one extreme to the other. I went instantly from a militant atheist to one of those really obnoxious assholes who knows God's Will not just for himself, but for EVERYONE.

That's a really embarrassing part of my life, and I am not going to delve into it. Suffice it to say I had to suffer extreme emotional and spiritual pain to snap out of it.

I was an idiot who believed God's Will and my will were the same thing. Just imagine where that egomaniacal idiocy will lead you.

You cannot imagine.


This is the thing.

I had been angry at God for not doing his job protecting me and cancer kids and all the war dead and boy I had a laundry list let me tell you.

In other words, I wrote God's job description and gave him a really bad annual eval for his substandard performance.

So the thing is, when you are trying to boss God around, you are making yourself bigger than the biggest thing in the Universe.

The word ego doesn't even begin to touch that bullshit.

 

[g5000]

how about the cliff notes next time...

I know. I'm sorry. It's verbose.

I just released the brakes and engaged my stream of consciousness.

Sorry.

 

[g5000]

My wife keeps telling me to write my biography.

Meh.

But she laughs like crazy when I go into the details. Like the time I accidentally set my face on fire with Bacardi 151.

Every time I reveal a small piece, she and the kids go, "That's going in the book!"

I don't take notes, though, so it ain't happening.

I guess this is my beta test.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

See, this is the best part about the forum!

Pre Obama on the other Board we had meet ups in NYC and it was a hoot to meet people in person. I have met one or two member here since then. Might be fun to have a USMB meet up.

We all made a Spiritual Contract before we came here, ALL OF US.

Each made our unique contract: these are the challenges I want to see if I can overcome to find my way back home to you!

I was Roman Catholic, read the Bible and many of the Torah stories felt as if there should have been footnotes because they didn't make sense -- then I found Kabbalah, or Kabbalah found me. Life is an onion skin of so many layers.

I had a childhood trauma that had me in "therapy" for 2 decades. Ridiculous, but it seemed the most logical fix. In one of the early Kabbalah classes the teacher gave us an assignment: when you were 8 or 9 you had a profound experience that shaped who you are today. Write it out. Once that was done. The Teacher told us, "now instead of the opponent who hurt you or shaped you, change it to The Light and reread it." Mine made no fucking sense even after that and I went up to the teacher after and explained it to her.

She said, "No it's correct. Think of how you are today, how you handle things, it all stems from that incident. That is your Tikkun, your mission. To be aware, acknowledge when you feel URGE to act that you have to take action, then take a moment and ask The Creator for help and guidance" Floored me. 20 years of therapy solved in a 5 minute conversation

I realized that the teacher must have heard a thousand different stories or more of every individual childhood incident, each one as unique as the individual. That helped me realize that my issues weren't anything to carry or be proud of like look at the cross I'm bearing, but they were the obstacles I needed to help me grow and find my way back home

We all have our obstacles and our ways of handling them.

Wish you success in dealing with yours

 

[CrusaderFrank]

My wife keeps telling me to write my biography.

Meh.

But she laughs like crazy when I go into the details. Like the time I accidentally set my face on fire with Bacardi 151.

Every time I reveal a small piece, she and the kids go, "That's going in the book!"

I don't take notes, though, so it ain't happening.

I guess this is my beta test.

Do it!

Do it!!

Talk it into your smart phone

 

[kyzr]

G5000
You're a democrat?
don't go to church?
don't have kids?
believe in abortion?
you're a lapsed Catholic?
God talks directly to you?
you're very patriotic?

From reading your posts in other threads I'm calling TOTAL BULLSHIT.

 

[g5000]

Do it!

Do it!!

Talk it into your smart phone

That has occurred to me. Just this evening, too.

My wife had said, "That goes in the book!' for the millionth time, and yet something keeps stopping me.

 

[luiza]

g5000
I have just made a commitment to myself I am going to avoid the news as much as possible for the next few years, and cut back on my attendance in the Politics and Current Events forums

Very sensible move . Do it .
Based on what I believe I know, the next two years in particular are going to be exponentially more difficult and chaotic .
Anybody who is over sensitive , prone to stress and worry should do the same .
We will see Violence and Mayhem on an unprecedented scale with America the most affected .

It bothers me zero and I am more than capable of looking after myself .

But even I will have my mouth buttoned in public , and however difficult, I shall walk away from any signs of public disagreements .

Check out the Kali Yugas .
There is an amazing era ahead but a very high number of people presently alive will not be there to be part of it .
IMHO .

 

[g5000]

G5000
You're a democrat?

Nope. From 1980, when I was a Reagan/Buckley Republican right up to 2017, I was a Republican.

I changed my voter registration to Independent right after Trump was sworn in the first time.

From 2006 to the present, with two exceptions, I have either left every federal office blank, or written in joke names.

In 2016, I wrote in Ted Cruz for President. My mother was a big Ted Cruz fan, and she passed just before the election. So I threw Cruz my vote in honor of my mother.

In 2020, I voted for the Libertarian candidate because the two major parties have become so batshit insane and antithetical to their claimed beliefs, they had finally succeeded in making Libertarians look like the adults in the room.

That took some doing!

I did not vote at all in the 2024 election.

don't go to church?

I have been a regular church goer for decades now. I currently attend what I call a Pentecostal Lite church.

don't have kids?

I have four beautiful kids. In fact, Phase Three of my testimony revolves around them. It may be the most important phase.

believe in abortion?

Dude. How did you not notice the giant PRO LIFE license plate I had in my signature for YEARS?

Weird.

How have you not noticed my unceasing pro-life posts?

you're a lapsed Catholic?

It's funny you ask. I have been dipping my toes back in the Catholic waters. The priest gave me a fascinating book to read, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

It's called the Life and Times of Jesus by Alfred Edersheim. At least I think that's the one he gave me. I might have gotten that one somewhere else. I have a big stack to work through.

God talks directly to you?

Nope. He inspires me.

you're very patriotic?

I am a retired veteran. What do you think?

I'm just not jingoistic. That isn't really patriotism.

From reading your posts in other threads I'm calling TOTAL BULLSHIT.

You clearly have some blocked filters.

I stated at the get-go some of you are already predetermined to not believe a word I say here.

I'm completely okay with that. You are not the reason I am writing this. I'm just sharing it.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

That has occurred to me. Just this evening, too.

My wife had said, "That goes in the book!' for the millionth time, and yet something keeps stopping me.

Even if it's only for yourself, just do it! Write it out, talk it out

Writing > Talking > Keeping it stuffed inside

 

[g5000]

g5000
I have just made a commitment to myself I am going to avoid the news as much as possible for the next few years, and cut back on my attendance in the Politics and Current Events forums

Very sensible move . Do it .

Thank you. I am doing my best to get to the person I want to be. It's going to be uphill all the way.

Based on what I believe I know, the next two years in particular are going to be exponentially more difficult and chaotic .
Anybody who is over sensitive , prone to stress and worry should do the same .
We will see Violence and Mayhem on an unprecedented scale with America the most affected .

I have a dear friend who lives on a much higher plane than I do. He says the same thing you just did.

But to be honest with you, I've been hearing that sort of thing all my life.

Let's hope you and my friend are wrong.

And I'd like to remind you of the hazards I took and suffered for when I thought I knew God's will.

It bothers me zero and I am more than capable of looking after myself .

But even I will have my mouth buttoned in public , and however difficult, I shall walk away from any signs of public disagreements .

I mentioned by brother above. A real Trump fan club member.

Our whole family has learned that when he goes on a political tear to ask about his chickens.

He looooves his chickens and loves talking about them.

Works every time.

Check out the Kali Yugas .

Age of Darkness. Yeah. This goes back to what I said in my second part of this reply.

 

[g5000]

The very last thing I said to my older brother before he died was, "I love you." I was on deployment, so it was over the phone. He died five days later.

I had never said that to him before in his entire 33 years of life.

Man, that was close!

 

[Care4all]

Never give up! That's really God's plan, not your dad's. You were His, decades before you came to know it! Your story brought a few tears to my eyes, how patient God really is with us...including with me! I am forever grateful, for the patience He has shown a wretch like me, and you and so many others!

 

[g5000]

Oh, here's another thing about that call to my brother.

It was his 33rd birthday, and that is very significant.

My brother was in full blown AIDS before he found out he had it. He got very sick and went to a free clinic and they tested him. It was what they did for everyone who came by.

Let me paint you a picture of just what a total fucking asshole I was.

I had driven him to the clinic. He came out with a yellow piece of paper.

He got in the car and said, "I got the AIDS, (my name).

My brother was a junkie. We had punched each other in the face for years.

He was a goddam junkie. That was his coping strategy.

I was a judgmental asshole. That was my coping strategy.

When I visited him some years before, I had watched as he came into his apartment with several friends and inject his entire paycheck into his arm in one night.

The next day, he's crawling around on the floor, inspecting the carpet for any missed particles.

I was thoroughly disgusted.

Now there we are in my car. He tells me, "I got the AIDS."

You know what the words that came out of my mouth were?

"Jesus, (brother's name), you weren't fucking stupid enough to share needles were you?"

I said that. To my brother who was just handed his death warrant.

My brother very loudly said, "NO!" to my query.

We all have a T-cell count of about 1,000.

At the time my brother was discovered to have AIDS, his T-cell count was 30. He shouldn't have been expected to live past dinner.

He was 29 years old


Here's the thing.

I told you my parents were ultra-Catholic.

My mother believed the notion that Jesus was crucified at the age of 33. That may be apocryphal, but she believed it all the way.

I told you my last conversation with my brother was on his 33rd birthday.

He made it. For his mother.

Then died five days later.

 

[g5000]

Now let me tell you about shame.

I mean gutter shame. Shame that stains you for life.

When my brother denied sharing needles, I took him at his junkie word.

So I assumed he got it from sex with an infected woman. I told people this because it was a convenient way to avoid mentioning he was a junkie. Just a normal guy who hit some really bad luck.

Before he died, the local public broadcasting network was putting together a video to show schoolchildren about the danger of AIDS and how to avoid it.

They interviewed my brother and they aired it.

On the day of my brother's funeral, I was sitting on the floor in a daze. My mother reached over my shoulder and put a VHS tape into the VCR and hit Play.

It was my brother's interview.

At one point, the interviewer asked him how he got infected.

"I shared needles." Inches from my face.

He couldn't admit it to the fucktard who questioned him from a high judgmental bench..

I could not get off the floor for a very long time.

I said those gay men treated him like a brother more than I did, didn't I.

 

[luiza]

Thank you. I am doing my best to get to the person I want to be. It's going to be uphill all the way.

Keep asking probing questions but don't get hung up about getting every answer .
There are many more incarnations available

I mentioned by brother above. A real Trump fan club member.

I would keep well clear of any Cult and most certainly Mr Trumpf .
He has some good to offer in specific areas and is a useful stop gap . But his main agenda lies elsewhere, imo .

Having read your later post re your brother's passing .

We all leak the future though 97%(?) do not realise or accept even when told .
The secret obviously is to "grow ears" . Undeveloped it is often referred to as "gut instinct" or" back of my mind ", even "inner voice".

There are Meditative ways of tuning in , with the right help .
All imho .

 

[g5000]

I actually saw my brother share his needle that night he injected his paycheck in his arm. Right in front of me. With all his friends passing that hypodermic around.

I saw it.

Then blanked it out. The AIDS given to him by a woman narrative was a delusion I weaved to comfort me, and to hide my embarrassment about my junkie brother.

It all came back with that damned VHS tape.

Every single one of those men died from AIDS. My brother was the first.

One of those men, named Jimmy Page of all things, lept into my brother's coffin at the wake and screamed at him. He knew his time was almost up, too.
.

His death would have come a lot sooner had I been in the room when he did that. I was told about it later.


Now here's a really, really cool thing in the middle of all that shit.

My brother had joined the American Legion. He spent a lot of time at the bar there.

Every 4th of July, he was always at the front of the parade, his chest out to here, as he carried the flag through town.

My junkie brother was a patriot.

That's cool, but not the coolest part.


I spent all of my leave from the service visiting my brother as he was dying. If he caught a cold, he would nearly die and have to be hospitalized, thus prompting me to take leave to see him "in case this is it."

The last time I physically saw him, guys, he looked like a badly drawn stick figure. I could have picked him up with one hand.

No one, not even a junkie, not even a faggot, should die like that.

After all that, you think you're ready for his death. You think you're ready.

When I got the call, I was ready.

I took leave. I go to the wake. I walk into the room where my brother is laid out.

I wasn't ready.

I lasted 83 milliseconds, then bolted from the room.

Here's the thing.

My junkie brother had incessantly bragged about me. His successful active duty brother.

The American Legion was at the wake in force. In uniform. They saw me blanche and leave the room.

They all grabbed me and frog-marched me into a private room and circled up around me. Then they began to pray for me as I wept in the center of the circle.


My junkie brother sent them to me to literally hold me up.