The spiritual battlefield in this Presidential campaign

[part of an email exchange]

I wrote:

My take on this is when a candidate draws comments from a Pope it's further sign that that candidate is taking on large spiritual forces and fate, if you will. This will sound stupid, but a portion of the lyric of that song I sent goes something like there's good and evil in the air, and we don't see it, or mortals can't see it. 

When that writer said Trump looked like a Soviet wrestler parrying attacks on the debate stage that is the thought I had as well. He is disrupting an established machinery and a lot of self-interest involved in that machinery, but especially with the immigration/invasion issue he is disrupting the principalities and powers and the rulers of the darkness of this world...spiritual wickedness in high places.

Think of this: the victims of Isis are Muslims and Christians, but it's the Christians who are being eradicated by rape and wholesale slaughter. Yet the powers that be here won't allow Christians to migrate here, only Muslims. If you need proof it's a Satanic invasion there it is. - C.


Simon of Australia responded:

Yeah im REALLY starting to see all this now with my eyes, like they have been opened. The side that is againat Trump is always doing a form of 'smart lying' in the media, i can actually see them be ding the truth.

Youre dead right thpugh - drawing fire from a pope is a sure sign of treading on toes on the spiritual battlefield. 

I mean to actually say hes not a Christian really was an example of the pope coming put of his hole like a big old spider...

i think the establishment is really worried that Trump stands a fair chance of getting in. As Fox news said "Trump is mesmerizing" - he really is. He takes all this abuse really well and it looks like it just deflects off him. 

He rants back but theres no sense that it actually hurt him or deflected him. 

Trump is conservative, but still: why calling him leftist doesn't work

[from an email]

Big picture it looks like things can be put as globalism vs. nationalism. Spiritually, God wanted everyone in nations with borders. Read Genesis after the Tower of Babel scattering. Satan, though, has interest in there being no borders and lowest common denominator cultures of a sort of chaotic, violent, poor nature. This enables tyranny, and now world tyranny. - C.

Churchians, once again, worthless in Christ's army

Two questions come to mind when reading posts like this one in the Christian blogosphere (without even mentioning the dishonesty of implying Trump wasn't being humorously self-critical):

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2016/02/trump-talks-about-his-bravery-as.html

1. Who taught these Christians that central to the definition of Christian is perfection by the standard of a pajama boy seminary graduate, or anybody else's notion of perfection?

2. Do male churchians wear bonnets?

This guy gets Trump

Here is analysis showing the second level thinking that has the usual commentariat flailing in angry idiocy:

http://theweek.com/articles/606035/why-donald-trumps-vicious-attack-george-w-bush-brutally-effective--brilliant

Good Charles Murray article on the Trump phenomenon

[an email]

So many good comments under this article:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trumps-america-1455290458?mod=trending_now_2

Like this one:
"A largely unmentioned advantage of Trump being nominated is that if he loses, it will send a clear signal to the type of Americans that America MUST have that elections are no longer the way to take their country back.  Tens of millions of Americans have already effectuated a "secession of the heart" from what passes for America today.  History proves that Socialists ALWAYS run out of OPM, just as it proves that were our founders alive, they'd already be shooting.  If America falls (and it IS falling), there will be NO place to go - and tens of millions of U.S. citizens won't let that happen.  Trump may well be America's last chance to get things right, via an election.  That's because one way or another, the USA will be righted.  JFK said, "those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."  Which way do the Liberals want it?"

- C

If I was a Bible teacher

[an email]

If I was a Bible teacher and a caller in to my show started accusing or complaining or going off on tangents...I'd say: "Hey, come back to reality."

"What is reality?" they would say.

"Evil, alienation, and death. This is reality here and now after the fall. All three are abnormal. We escape their grasp only one way..."

- C.

The walking of the soul

[an email]

I've sent this before, but it's so valuable to see the connection between the Work teaching [i.e. Fourth Way, Ouspensky] and the Calvinist, Puritan, Reformed school of doctrine. This is a passage from Thomas Boston's Human Nature In its Fourfold State. See, at the end, where he basically describes the state of identification, and ties it to being a feature of our fallen nature:

---
(6.) Is not everyone by nature discontented with his present lot in the world, or with some one thing or other in it? This also was Adam's case, Gen. 3:5, 6. Some one thing is always lacking; so that man is a creature given to changes. If any doubt this, let them look over all their enjoyment; and, after a review of them, listen to their own hearts, and they will hear a secret murmuring for lack of something—though perhaps, if they considered the matter aright, they would see that it is better for them to lack, than to have that something. Since the hearts of our first parents flew out at their eyes, on the forbidden fruit, and a night of darkness was thereby brought on the world, their posterity have a natural disease which Solomon calls, "The wandering of the desire," or, as the word is, "The walking of your soul," Eccl. 6:9. This is a sort of diabolical trance, wherein the soul traverses the world; feeds itself with a thousand airy nothings; snatches at this and the other created excellency, in imagination and desire; goes here, and there, and everywhere, except where it should go. And the soul is never cured of this disease, until conquering grace brings it back to take up its everlasting rest in God through Christ—but until this be, if man were set again in paradise, the garden of the Lord, all the pleasures there would not keep him from looking, yes, and leaping over the hedge a second time.
---
The entire book is Shakespearian due both to Boston's writing skill and the fact that his material is the most foundational truths. You see this in the first main section describing the fall of Adam. And you see echoes of Work teaching throughout. You also see how entire novels have been written on individual ideas presented in such biblical doctrine. I.e. that is the foundational power of what is presented. - C.