Confessions of a Prodigal Son
Free prequel before the confession:
Wile E. Coyote demonstrates graphically the typical Darwinist trying to explain the formation of life from non-life...or existence from non-existence:
Wile E. Coyote demonstrates graphically the typical Darwinist trying to explain the formation of life from non-life...or existence from non-existence:
One of my favorite things is to post evidence for Creationism and then listen to the Darwinists scramble to naysay with various means and methods, very few of which involve actual evidence but generally involve derision, ad hominem attacks, Darwinist just-so stories not supported by evidence and the myths of evolution that require the geological column that doesn't exist, transitional forms that are not transitional, sequential fossils which don't actually manage to be truly sequential and so on and so forth. Where Darwinists fail most miserably is when they try to explain existence, life and information. For instance, the idea of life forming by chance is preposterous from a scientific point of view:
But actually Darwinism is an odd construct anyway. It was a belief in the Logical Creator that caused the early great scientists (believers in God almost always) to expect to be able to observe the Universe and identify processes and causes and rules and laws. No one doubted that God had made man unlike any other animal, as we have the ability to think abstractly and also comprehend morality and know right and wrong. You can teach animals what gets rewarded or punished but only mankind demonstrates an understanding and an innate sense of right and wrong.
This has been something of a curse as, when we were innocent, we couldn't actually DO anything wrong since we were unaware. I wonder how long Adam and Eve were alive before the Fall? A week? A year? Decades? Genesis does not tell us this. I have learned that the Bible is accurate about the things it addresses in terms of science and yet it is not primarily a textbook for science. It is accurate concerning history but it is not a complete history of mankind because it focuses primarily on the predecessors and ancestors of the occupants of the Ark and, after that, mostly on the family of Shem and specifically the descendents of Israel on down to the time of Jesus Christ. At that point it gives an overview of the history of the early church and instructions for Christian living for those who are born again.
In any event, if we truly were just accidents and the result of a series of lucky, fluke accidents (the odds of this are so incomprehensibly small that statistically it is quite impossible, so never let a Darwinist tell you they do not believe in miracles, as their hypothesis requires billions of miracles to happen quite by chance) then what we think and do is the result of electrical impulses that have evolved so that we actually do not have a choice, we simply do what we have evolved to do and thinking is all a matter of blind obedience to the tyranny of our ancestry. We have evolved to do and think or seemingly think without understanding that we actually have no free will at all, what we do is what we have evolved to do. In fact, how does a Darwinist actually determine that he exists at all? He thinks everything came from nothing by no means, so how does he know that he is anything more than a dream himself? What absolutes can a Darwinist stand upon?
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How and why are we here? (The Confessions of a Prodigal Son)
One way of looking at my life before becoming a Christian is this; that I could not find real purpose and meaning in life so I decided that until (or if) that changed, I was going to party my butt off and live for myself and let the chips fall where they may. I had investigated various Protestant churches and gone to the Catholic and Greek Orthodox church. Lots of incomprehensible traditions but nothing tangible or compelling. Eastern religions required a reboot of the brain to grok what they taught, but what they taught did not answer the questions. How and why are we here?
I got into mysticism, into witchcraft and devil worship. I tried chanting and martial arts. I tried finding God or self-actualization or just inspiration from a wide variety of hallucinogenic drugs. Considered the possibilities of magic or the development of an inner self into a person of power and worked quite hard at being able to do parlor tricks with my mind. Telekinesis, in other words. I even had the Boo-Hoo Bible and tried to use it as directed, which involves lots of LSD, the BHB itself and a television station turned to a random channel. Books like Journey to Ixtlan and A Separate Reality by Carlos Castaneda and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig were among the stuff I poured into my head along with more "classic" works by Rand and Nietzsche and Skinner and Huxley and Kafka and the ancient Greeks Plato and Aristotle and so on and so forth. Was there a God? Was God the sum of all things? Was God a power within me? Were there aliens, or were there demons, for there had to be one of the other! There was power or powers out there, could I find it/them/Him?
My good fortune was that, no matter what hallucinogen I ingested I never lost complete control of the steering wheel of my mind. Never did I not realize I was on a trip and experiencing visions and other senses that were either quite warped or totally nonexistent. I could drive while on LSD. I went to work in the Pentagon one day while tripping on LSD. Mushrooms, various kinds of Peyote, pot, hash, coke, heroin, speed, downers, alcohol, horse tranquilizer, it didn't matter. I was testing limits and exploring, trying to obey the urges of the Amboy Dukes to journey to the center of my mind and seek truth there. I wound up being a junkie living on the street about to either starve to death or die of exposure. I volunteered to go get off the speed cold turkey, lived through a few days of hell on Earth and came out vowing never to stick a needle in my body again.
But it didn't change much. I kept a steady job but at work I was always high and always drinking. I smoked pot on every break while guzzling beer and snuck vodka or gin into my can of pop while on the factory floor. I would roll a joint and smoke it upon awaking every day. I would almost certainly do a doobie before I went to sleep. I went out to bars and got very drunk to the point of often blanking out many hours at one time. I would wake up on a cold bathroom floor in a pool of my own vomit. One time I woke up while at the steering wheel actually driving down a sidewalk right before I was about to go smack into a telephone pole. On the other side of the road was a river. I came to just in time to swerve and miss the pole and drive right back on the road. Did that bring me to my senses? No.
I didn't realize what I was doing, but I was being the Prodigal Son. In Luke, Jesus uses stories to explain to the Pharisees and Sadducees as well as all the other listeners about the concept of seeking to find and restore the lost. He talks about a lost sheep and a lost coin. Then he begins a story about a man who had two sons, in Luke 15 starting with verse 11:
11 Then He said: “A certain man had two sons. 12 And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me.’ So he divided to them his livelihood. 13 And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with prodigal living.
I had all sorts of inheritance from my parents. Both of them were smart and talented. My father went to college on an art scholarship and had been a basketball and football star in high school, but he left college to fight in the Korean War. My mother was also an artist and a gifted singer who might have been expected to go to Hollywood to become a star or perhaps New York, cutting her teeth as a band singer before getting a shot at fame. But she chose to be a housewife and a mother. She still sang professionally for 50 years and appeared on television and radio in Chicago and South Bend, Indiana. She spent time teaching me to read and write before I made it to kindergarten. When I was going into fourth grade I was sent to a school with an "enriched curriculum" for gifted kids. I had inherited the ability to sing and also to write and had the brainpower to make straight A's without really working too hard.
Little to win, but nothing to lose?
Jesus was telling this story to a culture in which perceived standing in the community was dependent upon several factors. For a man's son to abandon his father and run off was a shame to the son but also a great shame upon the father. It gets worse:
14 But when he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in that land, and he began to be in want. 15 Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. 16 And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything.
Jews had dietary laws given them by God via Moses and some animals were considered unclean to eat. In retrospect we can see that the creatures that God forbade his people to eat were sometimes dangerous to eat without modern pasteurization and refrigeration and thorough cooking and many of them were scavengers subsisting primarily on carrion. Because they were forbidden and because they were customarily kept by heathens, there was no more disgusting animal to a Jew than a pig! The Prodigal Son was living amongst pigs and trying to subsist on the scraps of scraps they left behind. He could not have been more disgraced in the eyes of the Jewish culture than this. He had truly hit rock bottom. I could understand this, because when I made the decision to leave my wife and child to be a rock singer and get back into womanizing I was about to disgrace myself terribly. What kind of man dumps his wife and child to go wild with sex and drugs and rock and roll? I'd made up my mind to do just that. They called me The Caveman. Well, I was going to live up to that name and then some!!!
17 “But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! 18 I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, 19 and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”’
My wife had been a friend and one night, stoned, we wound up going to bed. She was supposed to be on the pill. She was either forgetful or lying. She got pregnant. I was defnitely NOT looking to get married, heck, I had two other girlfriends at the same time. I was a dog. But if I was going to be a father, grudgingly, I decided to marry her. She treated me like a king until after the baby was born, at which point she turned into a shrieking harpy approximately half the time. Child or no child, I was not going to take it anymore. By dint of will I had not committed adultery yet. But she wound up going to a church and getting "saved" and suddenly she was trying to be a good wife. She was actually asking me what she could do to make me happy? Well, I figured it was too late and her sudden change of attitude was probably not going to last. After all, she had been pretty great before the baby came...I was just beginning to plot the best way to get away clean when...
When I was awakened after a night of working four hours overtime and hitting a bar after work only to be told a PREACHER was here to talk to me, actually, I would have preferred the police (I was pretty good at hiding my drugs) instead. I lit a cigarette and grabbed a beer and came out to listen to whatever line of baloney he had to feed me and then I would usher him out the door. It was March 13th, 1979. I was not yet 27 years old. He didn't come to preach to me, he came to ask me questions about what I believed. Pretty soon he had me so relaxed I decided to tell him the truth about what I believed in (not much) and how I had studied the Bible in college and understood it was written by itinerant priests and shepherds and that there was no way to know what was actual TRUTH. He got my mind turned towards my own actions rather than philosophy. We left theology and philosophy behind and he got me thinking about what I had done and what I intended to do. I remembered all the guys I had laughed at or pushed around. I remembered all the girls I had treated badly and used. I came to myself and realized I was a selfish and sinful wastrel. I realized that I was a sinner. The guy who used to confidently try to march right into the throne room of the unknown God suddenly knew better. I was not worthy to know God. I was a disaster of a human being.
20 “And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. 21 And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
I was not worthy. I knew I was sinful. This stranger, this older man sitting in my living room had managed to allow me to lead myself to the knowledge of my own shortcomings and selfishness. He never told me one thing I had done wrong, he simply asked me questions and I talked myself right into Hell. If there was a Hell, I was going there. What had I done to myself?!
22 “But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring[b] out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. 23 And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; 24 for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to be merry.
I believed in Jesus Christ and His atonement for me. Suddenly a peace washed all the way through me, a flood of healing to a wound I didn't know existed. Before I even prayed with this pastor to accept Christ as my Savior my heart had already yielded to God and He had already transformed me. I had been dead inside and now I was alive in a way I had never known.
I went to church on the 18th of March with long hair and a full beard, wearing a t-shirt and jeans and sneakers. I began reading the New Testament through with a joint in one hand and a beer in the other. Seriously. The second time I went to church I wore nice clothes. One of the men of the church gave me a brand new expensive leather-bound Bible. They all had short hair and no one had a beard. I asked Pastor Wood why no one had long hair or a beard. Didn't Jesus have long hair and a beard? He told me it was a tradition of the church and I would be a Christian whether I cut my hair or not. Since I didn't have to do it, I did it, I cut my hair and shaved my beard like all the other guys. On April 1st of 1979 I got baptized.
John 3:16 - 21 - For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
“He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.”
I was a bad man. I corrupted innocents, I sold illegal drugs, I betrayed people, I drove drunk, I did whatever I could get away with to please myself. I made a lame attempt to be a respectable man with a wife and child but had decided to forget that stuff and go back to just having fun and partying hearty. Then Jesus Christ became real to me and God's Spirit was born within me and I was actually a new creature.
Not that I have been perfect since I became a Christian. But my wants and desires changed. I still had the desires of the flesh, but there was a longing on the inside to do right and serve God. I was not comfortable doing wrong anymore. I preferred doing right. I wanted to be a servant of God. The thing I had always feared about becoming a Christian was that I would become a robot with God having some hypnotic control over me. Instead I was never so free and full of joy than the moment I was saved. I suddenly had peace that I didn't know I was missing and I finally knew that life had purpose and meaning. God made me and now I belonged to Him, I was an accepted Son in the family of God!
Everybody is NOT a child of God. Everybody was given life from God. But we are born into sin and are naturally sinners. Anyone who has been a parent knows you don't have to teach kids to disobey and get into trouble, you have to teach them to obey and watch them to keep them out of trouble! Even though I was a bad man, I was also that inquisitive child who wanted to know Truth. I had given up searching, but God had not given up on me. He wasn't going to let me get away with breaking my family to pieces without giving me a chance to understand and repent. I did understand and I did repent!
Most of the top Darwinists are atheopaths who hate God. They hate God because of the words I quoted earlier, above, from John chapter 3. Although the evidence doesn't support Darwinism, the majority of those in charge of various organizations are either thoroughly brainwashed to not even question it, or they detest the concept of God and will believe anything, no matter how ludicrous, rather than acknowledge the Creator.
“He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed."
I used to say that it made no sense to me that you could just say a prayer and suddenly you would belong to God. But saying a prayer means nothing. When in the Garden of Eden man made a decision to disobey God, that decision ruined the relationship between God and man. When I understood that Jesus was the Christ, I made a decision to trust Him and I was born again before I could even utter a prayer. It isn't a prayer, it isn't a magic formula, it is a decision. One decision is the fulcrum upon which your entire life is balanced. God or Self?
Let The Kingdom Come- White Heart
I'm layin' down my crown
Yes, I'm layin' down my crown
Lord, I'm layin' it down
And praying let Your will be done
Lord, I'm layin' down my crown
To let the Kingdom come
'Cause I'm so tired and weary
Yes, I'm so tired and weary
Lord, I'm weary and hurtin'
From the back breakin' burden of my crown
My soul is born weary
Oh, let the Kingdom come
Well, I crowned myself king
Yeah, I crowned myself king
But I didn't see the trouble
The heartache and the sorrow it would bring, oh
Now I'm broken and weary
And lookin' for my King
King of Glory, enter in
And sear my heart with love's burning flame
Oh, let Your will be done
O Lord, let the Kingdom come
O Lord, I'm layin' down my crown
Let the Kingdom come
Oh, oh, let the Kingdom come
Oh, oh, let the Kingdom come
Oh, oh, let the Kingdom come
Oh, oh, let the Kingdom come
Oh, oh, let the Kingdom come