8-19-04

[Admin]

Good Evening,

I would have been concerned if the market didn't correct a little today. We however, are ahead of the Bull. The word on the street tonight is telling everyone to get their shopping list ready. We've not only made our list, our basket is full and we're already in the checkout line

Have you ever been to the market in an especially good mood, and let the person behind you, go ahead of you? We may do that for a while, but we're keeping our place in line. We may dash down an aisle or two while we wait, to grab a few last minute bargains, but don't lose your spot. When it's time to check-out, Be Ready!

While everyone else is still chasing the Bull,
we'll be pulling out of the parking lot with a great big cheesy grin. ;D

As I mentioned, I'm wrapping up a big project which will keep me pretty busy through Monday, and then we'll talk about it. Part of the task just to give you a hint, is writing one of those long, boring, 50 page disclaimers.

Life's funny, all my wife and I wanted to do was buy some land and build an orphanage and pretty soon we were running this "ministry machine" which requires waking up every morning and realizing, "I could just sleep in today", or "400 orphans expect to eat today". Which would you choose?

Ministry looks glamorous when you see it on T.V., but in real life, the shiny wears off rather quickly and it's no longer driven by emotion, but hard work and commitment.

All I wanted to do here, was hang out online with some Christian friends and share with others, what God had blessed me with. Here goes the "machine" again. Oh well, "if God called me to it, he'll see me through it" as one member wrote today. And the fact is, if this is going to end up turning 400 orphans into 4000, that makes it even more exciting. Right?

Although we've already "assumed the positions", there were a few out there tonight that I just couldn't resist >

+ CEPH OTVI SLAB TMB ADI MTEX SFL
- NEOM

Don't chase the bull! - Ride it!

As always, Trade Safe!
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Between the Lines



The Devil Never Sleeps

"The following is for mature Christian readers. Without an open mind, you will be insulted, revolted, or both. I am simply sharing this because it will take your thinking and your relationship with God to a deeper level than you'll ever find sitting on a pew. The following is not intended to insult any denomination, race, color or creed. The purpose is to make sure you realize he is real, the he never sleeps, and his mission is to rob, kill and destroy. He is cunning and baffling. Chances are, you probably shouldn't read this. If you do, remember, it is a literary piece designed to make you THINK about who you're up against, and that your only hope, is Jesus Christ"
(Perhaps I can write that disclaimer after all )

The Devil never sleeps because he's got too much to do and the things he's already done keep him awake. So the Devil is no different from your average American with too much to do and too much to think about. If there is a difference between the Devil and the average Joe, it is only that the Devil feels no guilt. On the contrary, what keeps him awake at night is the pleasure of remembering, living his deeds all over again. The Devil uses insomnia to live twice, while the average Joe just breaks into a cold sweat.

People once believed seriously in the Devil, so when bad things happened they knew who was responsible for them. Many bad things happened back then, so many that a whole class of church people existed whose only job was to keep track of all the bad things and their degree of badness. Not all things were equally bad. Some bad things that happened to one personally, such as disease and death, were the work of God because they were part of the pattern of common life. Bigger bad things, such as famines, plague, or earthquakes, could have been God's or the Devil's, depending on how wicked or God-fearing people were. If people were God-fearing and bad things happened to them, then it was Devil's work. And twice vice versa. If the bad things that happened to the community were the Devil's work, then the Devil's agents who had caused these things (the Devil used human "minions" to do his dirty work) had to be found and burned alive. Burning alive the Devil's agents was God's work and it made people happy. The Devil rather enjoyed seeing his minions burn, so nobody was the worse for it, except the people burning. It was a win-win situation for the living.

The Devil started losing friends and influence in the eighteenth century, when people discovered that many bad things had no single author. French philosophers, in particular, took some spirited whacks at both God and the Devil, though most of them -- Voltaire, for instance -- found the Devil a much more personable figure than his counterpart. The Devil shed much of his dreadfulness for the upper classes, mutating into a sympathetic, carnivalesque character, whose job was to suggest titillating possibilities. Sex and food, or lust and gluttony, lost their sinful terror and became delightful pursuits. Casanova's memoir, The Story of My Life, chronicles, with methodical thoroughness and utter lack of regret, his lifelong indulgences. Casanova wrote his memoir in old age, thus reliving his devilish life during long insomniac nights. The Devil's best champion was the Marquis de Sade, who methodically reversed the teachings of the Church to produce pornographic parables curiously devoid of prurience. In De Sade's methodical work of virtue-demolition, the Devil is revealed as a logician and a grammarian. De Sade's works, written mostly in prison, capture the antagonists in balance.

After the eighteenth century, the Devil got more and more ragged around the edges, like a plush toy kicked around too long by rough children. By the end of the nineteenth century he barely had a place to live: most of the world had been discovered, even the scariest forests, and men's souls were being taken apart by psychology. From carnival to operetta to a banal figure of speech, the Devil seemed to be nearly extinct. And then, surprise! Hitler! The sleeping bourgeoisie, safely ensconced in its ideas of reason and progress, gave birth to the Devil. Hitler embodied every repressed aspect of the Devil since the early Middle Ages. All that had been laughed away came back concentrated inside a little man with a tiny mustache who magnetized all the unfocused evil in the world and made the business of hell both serious and modern. Hitler was the classic Devil of the early Church, ignorant, bloody, banal, bureaucratic. He was part gargoyle, part Luther.

In the Christian world, until the Reformation, the Devil was as serious as the political climate. The Church portrayed him as adaptable. He was insidious and ready to take on as much credibility as was required by the Pope. This combination of adaptability and insatiability pointed to two crucial models for the Devil: women and Jews. In his development, the Devil took on women because they were accessible through lust ("weaker vessels") and Jews, because they could spread far and wide the Devil's dispatches. In the Middle Ages, the Devil looked physically like a Jew, a pictorial and psychological resemblance that was invented by Lutherans and carried forward all the way into Hitler's gas ovens. This fate might have befallen women as well if they hadn't been needed to propagate the race. As it was, only a number of women ("witches" and "temptresses") were chosen to pay for their connection with the Devil, standing in symbolically for all womankind. The Christian Devil never ceased acting in the subconscious of Western people, even though he was greatly neutralized after the end of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, when people were actually reasonable for a few minutes, he began receding again.

[Admin]

When the Inquisition, which was the preeminent detector of witches and falsely converted Jews, lost its efficacy in Europe, it attempted to set roots in the New World. It failed resolutely. The Spanish Crown sent an inquisitor to New Orleans, but the locals shipped him back on the same conveyance he arrived in. He returned years later, not an inquisitor any longer, and distinguished himself by good works among Native Americans. Still, the Devil did get a berth on the Mayflower and came here with the Puritans. After the bloodletting at Salem, the Puritan ethos went underground, whence it emerges at regular intervals in American political and cultural life. Two recent examples: Kenneth Starr's sexual witch hunt, and the prohibition against smoking in public places. The Devil is distinguished by his seductiveness and by the smoke that issues perpetually from his nostrils. Crusaders for so-called morality always take a stand against the Devil, though they often end up working in his interests.

In the closing days of the second Christian millennium, many people in the great democracy of America have started believing in the Devil again. Born-again Christians in this technologically advanced country have begun an unholy obsession with old Satan while, ironically, in less advanced parts of the world, superstitious Islamic fundamentalists believe that America is herself the Devil. No question about it, the Devil is back. He hatches and blooms in the bafflement wrought in the faithful by excessive technology.

For all that, the American Devil, a latecomer to these shores, evinces neither the highs nor the lows of the Satanic majesty honed over time in the cauldrons and on the gibbets of Europe. In this country, he neither raged insanely nor decayed properly, which is why he is still taken seriously. The aspect of the Enlightenment that struggled to diminish him had already won in Europe, leaving America free to take only the Enlightenment's most high-minded and reasonable principles to heart.

The Rolling Stones met with disaster in the U.S. in 1969, at Altamont, when they performed "Sympathy for the Devil." This had never happened in England. Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger's girlfriend at the time, explained that for the English the devil is a literary and comic figure, but that Americans take the devil seriously, which explains why the concert at Altamont appeared to many people to be the end of the peace-loving sixties, letting loose a decade of evil.

I am both European and American, so the Devil is for me both comic and serious. While the Devil remains, for Christian fundamentalists, a unique generator of evil, he has by no means stayed still. He has evolved, technologically if not psychologically, to keep up with the times. The same cannot be said, alas, about God, who is behind the times. God's repertoire has been limited basically to the Ten Commandments and to permission (I hope!) for the use of his Son by televangelicals in pitches for money, and by politicals in pitches for power. God's granting of licenses on his Son is seemingly limitless, which somewhat dilutes the message.

The Devil has moved way ahead in both direct appearances and the streamlining of his vast operation. The Internet has been the Devil's greatest invention since television. There was a time, in the heyday of the Church in the fourteenth century, when God and the Devil were poised in a balance of powers resembling the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) policy of the Cold War. In those days, just like God, whose universe he mirrored, the Devil had scores of angels to produce the multitude of evils in the world. Like any bureaucracy, the Devil's production office had branches in charge of major activities, and these offices were efficient or inefficient depending on the angels who ran them. Evil angels, just like the good angels, had personalities: They were modest or profligate, expansive or uptight, cold or hot, sweet or sour, bitter or tart, sported a full suit of feathers, were nearly bald, etc, etc. In other words, they were as close to humans as they could be. Everything was closer in those days: the sky, the stars, God, heaven, and hell. All you had to do back then was to stretch out your hand to brush it against something winged, furry, and uncanny.

Things are not so cozy for God anymore, but we are really tight with the Devil. Thanks to the movies, television, and the Internet, we can now view devils who look more familiar to us than the strange people sharing our couch. Thanks to the film director John Waters, we now know that the Devil can be a "serial mom," which is to say an ordinary, family-loving human being who lets out a bit of murderous steam when her chores are done. John Waters has illustrated remarkably the quality of evil in our time. As Hannah Arendt said, speaking of Nazis, evil is banal. "The banality of evil" is why many of us have no idea that it exists. The machinelike efficiency of Nazi Germany was just a modern bureaucracy.

There is a difference between the grim Devil of fundamentalist Christians and the ubiquitous Devil of our secular culture, as seen on television and movies. Of course, fundamentalists aren't fooled for a second: they can see his glowing paws in the dark, whether he wears gloves or silk stockings. The modern Devil operates both nakedly and in disguise. Nakedly, he speaks through secular humanists, one-world orderers (agents of ZOG -- Zionist Occupation Government), Democrats, urban dwellers, clubbers of Rome, rock 'n' roll, lab-coated scientists (both above and under the earth's crust), number crunchers, education boards, fetus killers, sexual deviants, media mavens, idolaters, image makers, evolutionists, and ironists. In disguise, he tries not to look or sound like any of the above to the extent that he sometimes sounds like a man of God. The Devil, as seen on television, at the movies, and on the Internet, is a multi-tentacled organism continually propagating its evil essences unto an innocent and corruptible body politic. Good Christians are not fooled by the multitude of the secular Devil's guises, whether he pops up in the news or masquerades as entertainment. But the poor secular Devil barely knows that he's the Devil. He's just ... secular. He depends on the Christian Coalition and its kin to recognize and identify him. His self-image depends on it.

It's our job as born-again Christians, to spot him and nail him, with the Word of God and the Blood of the Lamb. We're the only ones equipped for the job. A lost and dying world depends on us. Are you ready?
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"Andrei Codrescu, I blaming this on you." Or as Flip Wilson never said, "Jesus made me do it"