I’m now an occasional contributor to Christian Cadre. I’m excited to join them. My first piece, “Yet Another Story About Transformations,” is available now:
Part 1: http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2019/01/yet-another-story-about-transformations.html
Part 2: http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2019/01/yet-another-story-about-transformations_24.html
What you’re reading is the introduction to a book I knew I was supposed about where the U.S. and the world is headed. I’ve know I had to write it since the fall and to say it scared me as an understatement. By December I was at least willing to start telling people around me, including my wife key elements of the book including that the US economy will crash and that Donald Trump will be President of the United States. Neither is a guess: this is what will happen.
On January 3rd, I told my wife the key elements again. The only thing that changed was that the order had reversed and finalized. I told her:
This year, the US Economy will crash and then Donald Trump will be elected President.
The next day, the U.S. markets opened and had their biggest initial drop on an opening day since 1932. That (1932) is the year the U.S. Great Depress began for real. And I finally went out on the line in public by tweeting the news with the hashtag #ThusItBegins.
Tomorrow morning, the markets will open for the third week of the year. The press will continue to fret, wave their hands and mostly say it’s psychological and things will stabilize soon. Unemployment is down. Fundamentals are solid. Blah. Blah. Blah. Just a few things to sort out. But things won’t. We’re past that point.
We’re at the beginning of the Great Stock Market Crash of 2016. The stock market crash is just the opening salvo of a brutal shift in the world that will be much larger, deeper and nastier than just another recession.
And I honestly don’t want to write this book. It’s not because I’m shy about writing about dark subjects or the darkness in subjects. It’s because I’m saying G*d has told me to write it. While I once had a reviewer call me a prophet, he merely meant as someone who warns. He certainly didn’t think G*d was around and sending people out to describe what’s happening.
Why in the world would I do such a crazy stunt? I wasn’t raised in any faith. In my Bachelors (Physics) and Graduate (Humanities) work, G*d was basically ignored other than the occasional ridicule from, usually, another student. The professors for the most part didn’t waste their time on the subject. They assumed the whole faith thing was a left-over from the pre-rational world.
To say that G*d told me to be a prophet is to immediately be regarded by most people I know as, at least, slightly unhinged. Even most of the American Christian world assumes that miracles and prophets stopped a long time ago.
But, here I am. Since this book got dropped in my life, I’ve waited again and again for confirmations because it still sounds crazy to me. And I’ve tested things I’ve gotten again and again and I’ve had confirmations that are unlikely in the extreme.
I’d describe my plans for this book but that assumes I’ve got one. Back to I’m supposed to have been writing this for a while. Beyond a few scribbled notes, this book will appear basically as I write it. This blog entry is the initial “Introduction” and will bundled up shortly as the initial release of the book via PDF on this website. Later I’ll make it available on Amazon.
This document has been saved as a pdf and can be downloaded: http://4til7.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Introduction-v1.pdf
The Trace of God, a book I helped publish, was released about a week ago. I posted this related piece on Facebook a few days ago:
I remember an interview with Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in which he claimed, in essence, to have a hot line to God. The Creator was his personal adviser. My reaction? “He’s a loon. Hot line to God?” When someone says they’ve had “an encounter with God”, “a mystical experience” that’s the common reaction. When it happened to Barbara Ehrenreich, an atheist, she didn’t talk about it for decades out of fear it would get her labelled as crazy. Most Fundamentalists Christians have that reaction. Miracles, holy fire, burning bushes… that stuff ended back, you know, with the Disciples.
Funny thing is, I keep backing into studies about the effectiveness of prayer, stories about meditation changing people’s lives and so on. The assumption I’d picked up didn’t jive with what researchers we’re finding. When Joseph Hinman approached me about publishing his book, The Trace of God, I was definitely of two minds. I’ve never been involved in publishing a book about God, let alone one making a sane, rational argument that mystical experience is real?
But, what I found is someone who took all that research, looked at all the arguments floating around and made a case that needed to be heard. He shows that when someone has one of these experiences, they’re part of a very very large group, probably the vast majority of people, and that they’re not crazy. He pulls together research that shows that these experience, again and again, change people’s lives for the better. You can’t prove God. He says so right up front. Instead, he says that the evidence meets a legal standard: Looking at all the evidence (including your experience) and concluding there is a God is “rationally warranted”.
Do I still think Ahmadinejad is a loon? Yes. And I’m convinced there are a lot of people who’ve had experiences that justify concluding there is a Creator, a God.
