Learning from the Past

I've been reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is truly a literary masterpiece. His style of writing is beautiful. He spent twenty years perfecting his language in that book. It takes a while to break through the time barrier posed by the idioms of his eighteenth century day and it is also a good idea to read the foreword so that you may correctly identify this student of Voltaire's cynicism wherever it might pop up, but, like Shakespeare's work, once you've read a few dozen pages, you have no problem understanding the author. This book has some interesting findings to share with modern day Christians. Gibbon blamed the fall of Rome largely on the rise of Christianity, which on first glance suggests the religion as a poor choice for an empire. However, according to him, the Christians of ancient Rome followed the teachings of Christ much more closely than we do now. Even by Gibbon's time the Protestant reformation had introduced the concept of a 'holy' work ethic to enable the rise of the middle class around which our whole modern capitalist society is structured. Christianity will not weaken America the way it weakened Rome because it is not the same Christianity. It has been reformed to fit neatly into our world by the belief that he who works hard and is careful with his money demonstrates virtue by doing so. This is quite a radical departure from the words of the Lord who said give no thought to what you should eat. Isn't the need for food largely why people apply for jobs? And with so much middle class culture dictated as fashion trends, doesn't that clash with the words of the Lord who said give no thought to what you should wear? As for the Roman empire, the Christians of that time rejected it as evil. They avoided the sacrifices to pagan deities and may have also been reluctant to go to war. They rejected the bloody arena games and brutal punishments on which their strong empire had been originally founded. In short, they became a people who were too nice to sustain an empire. I can't argue with the fact that we have made life better for ourselves at least in this world by not following the teachings of Christ too closely. I only pray that we have not compromised our fortunes in the next world by taking this step. April 24: I thought about what Jesus said about giving no thought to what we should eat or wear last night and I hope I don't offend anyone by saying I think he overestimated us. Jesus had so much faith in God that he could make food appear out of nothing and he seemed to think we could do the same. He would often invite his disciples to perform a miracle before he did it himself. It is quite typical for a person to think that his abilities are commonly shared. While the Lord is perfect, he did appear to us as an entirely vulnerable human who was capable of error. So maybe it's okay not to follow this teaching from the Gospel of Luke too closely, as is the case with our popular work ethic.
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What Time Is It?

I need to come back here today to reconcile some of the things I've been saying about our origins with the more traditional beliefs I've been sharing here. I am grateful to my church for giving me the freedom to contemplate the question of our existence to the wildest potential. It has clearly learned its lesson about suppressing such activities. Maybe I should start by asking people not to read my scripts as statements. I have gone to considerable trouble to separate my comedy scripts from my serious statements because comedy scripts are not meant to be taken seriously. Comedy scripts can't be funny when they are taken seriously. For instance, Wyle E. Coyote would be a tragic figure if we burst into tears every time he got crushed by a falling boulder. People who tell you to read my scripts as though they are statements have a problem with the fact that my scripts are funny. A comedy script usually demands that I distort my true thoughts on a subject one way or the other. For instance, it is funnier to say that aliens see us as pets (I Know All About It) than it is to say that they see us as children. And I am not my fictional characters. I am too sulky to be amusing. That's why I must invent fictional characters to populate my comedy scripts. Apparently I must repeat myself over and over about this because others who are not funny spend all their time trying to ruin my comedy behind my back instead of trying to produce their own comedy. And if you subtract my comedy scripts from the TV in the last ten years, there is nothing left but a big empty space to prove it for me. I was not putting down Catholics or implying that they can't work hard by saying that the Catholic contestant in Work Ethic would not have won his competition, I was making a joke around the fact that the work ethic was invented in the early 16th century by a Protestant reformer named John Calvin. That is why it is popularly known as the Protestant work ethic. Calvin believed that if you work hard and save your money, it is a sign that you are saved by God. I'm unimpressed by his findings, though I've not read his paper. It is also of note that Calvin laid the foundation for modern capitalism with his treatise. I can't say I'm very grateful to him for that either at the moment. This punchline was simply a play on words and if I didn't know better I'd say that people who want to be comedians when they're not funny were trying to start a holy war out of it instead of letting you all enjoy it for what it is. Foremost I wish to add more to what I said about the moon. I do not think that the moon is natural, I think it is artificial. I do not think that it fell into an orbit that lies in perfect alignment with the sun by accident. Scientists do. This is one area where they reject their own mathematics. What are the odds of that moon accidentally occupying the one small corner of our vast sky which is occupied by the sun? Have they calculated the probability of such an accident? And they still want to think it's an accident after that? Now who's being unreasonable? From there I think it is reasonable to assume that we may be living in artificial timeline. Any intelligence that can cross the vast distances of the universe would also have command of time. They could go anywhere they like and change the original timeline of each world to suit them. They could come here a mere five or ten thousand years ago, find this planet dead, put the moon in orbit and alter our timeline to give us what we have now. Physicists must admit that this is entirely possible in theory. While the Bible is not a book of science, it does offer some profound comments on our origins. For instance, in the Gospel of John it is written that in the beginning was the Word. This suggests to me that there is an abstract realm that predates the whole physical universe and I think it agrees with my hypothesis about having an artificial moon and living in an artificial timeline. I also think that we are creatures of energy. Energy never dies, it just changes form. [April 23/2017: Our bodies hold two types of energy: a dormant energy which may be released by burning the corpse and an active energy which drives the heart and regulates bodily functions like breathing, etc. Of these two types of energy, the active one departs from the body at the point of death. (End of insertion.)] If we are designed for eternal life, then we must be careful how we live our lives. We must not be seduced by the temptations of this passing world for we may pay a high price for it later on.
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